The test island was chosen by the school's first headmaster almost three hundred years ago. No one knows why he chose that particular island. When he was asked, he said only: It chose me. He never said any more about it, and no one asked again.

The History of Déynáir, third edition

Chapter 9

The Island

The cold hit me first.

Not the cold you feel in November by the fjord, raw and salty and familiar. This was a different cold. Damp and heavy, soaked with the smell of pine forest and wet earth and something older, something that smelt of moss and rot and things that had grown and died and grown again for hundreds of years without any human being ever touching them.

My feet sank into something soft. Leaves, earth, roots. The darkness was total. Not the darkness of a town, where there is always a street lamp or a window or a car's headlight somewhere at the edge of your vision. Not even the darkness of the fjord, where there are always lights from the houses on the other side. This was the darkness of a forest, the dense, living darkness that has its own weight and its own smell and its own sound.

And the sound was everywhere. Dripping from leaves. Wind in the treetops. Something moving in the undergrowth, small and quick. And further off, deep in the forest, a bird that screamed once and fell silent.

I was alone.

"Ahra?" I said. My voice sounded wrong out here. Too loud. Too human.

Nobody answered.

"Retia?"

Nothing.

Alôpex's claws tightened on my shoulder. Her nose was cold against my neck, and her breathing was quick and alert.

"They're here somewhere," she said in my head. "I can't feel them yet."

The house lay to the north, up on the mountain. If the others were anywhere, they were heading for it. But where was north? I stood still and let my eyes get used to the dark. Slowly the shapes began to emerge. Tree trunks. Branches. And on the trunks, in the faint remains of moonlight seeping down through the canopy, I could see the moss. It grew thickest on one side of every tree, the north side, the side that got the least sun. It was something Mogens had said in one of his rare useful moments, with his puffer jacket zipped up to his chin and a stopwatch in his hand, while we stood freezing by the stream: "Moss grows on the north side, boys. Remember that. One day it might save your lives."

I had never thought that day would come. But here it was.

I started walking. My hands found tree trunks in the dark, rough bark under my fingers, and I followed them from tree to tree with the moss as my compass. The bark was different under my fingers from one tree to the next. Some was smooth and cold, birch perhaps. Some was deeply furrowed and dry, old oak that had stood here for hundreds of years. Some was soft and damp with moss, and my fingers sank into it and came up with a smell of earth and rain and a whole miniature ecosystem living its life in the dark without anyone ever looking at it.

The branches hung low and scratched my cheeks with light cuts you don't feel until afterwards. My feet stumbled over roots I couldn't see, and twice I fell and landed with my hands in something cold and wet and alive, leaves and earth and fungi that crushed under my weight with a soft, poisonous smell.

Then Alôpex lifted her nose and broke into a run. "Lynx," she said in my head. "There." She ran ahead of me and stopped and waited and ran on again, and I followed her white fur through the dark like a star you steer by.

It took ten minutes to find them. Or it felt like ten minutes. It might have been an hour. Time in the forest followed its own rules.

Ahra was standing by a large, flat slab of rock, holding Lynx close to him. His face was white in the dark, and his hands were shaking, and when he saw me a sound came out of him that was half relief and half something like a sob he was trying to stop.

"Thank goodness," he said. "I thought... I didn't know..."

"I'm here," I said.

Retia was sitting on the rock with Fulmen on her shoulder. She didn't look frightened. She looked like someone who had decided not to be frightened, whatever it cost. Her scent reached me through the forest air, salt wind and wild roses, and it was sharper than usual. Fear, I thought. Fear makes the scent sharper.

"Is everyone all right?" she said.

"Yes," I said.

"Good. The map."

I took the map out of my inside pocket. It was crumpled and damp, but when I unfolded it, the island rose up out of the paper and hung floating in the air between us, glowing faintly green in the dark. The red dot that showed our position was blinking in the southern part of the forest, close to the coast. The house at the top of the mountain lay far to the north, a small symbol blinking faintly white.

"We're here," said Retia, pointing. "The mountain's there. We've got three days. It's a long way, but it's possible."

"If we don't die first," said Ahra.

"We're not going to die," said Retia. And the way she said it almost made me believe it.

We found the first depot after half an hour's walking north. A small circle of stones with a bag in the middle, marked with the symbol we had seen on the map. The bag held dried meat, two water bottles, a blanket that was thinner than paper but warmer than wool when I put it over my shoulders, and a floating compass that turned slowly in the air above my hand.

"Food for a day, maybe a day and a half," said Retia, sizing up the portions with a look that said she had tried rationing before.

We sat down with our backs against a big rock and ate. The dried meat was salty and tough, and I bit pieces off it and chewed slowly while Ahra drank from the water bottle and passed it to Retia, who wiped the mouthpiece with her sleeve before she drank. We didn't say much. We ate and drank and looked up at the treetops, and then we got up and walked on. The forest changed as we went deeper in. The trees grew taller, the trunks thicker, and the air grew colder and stiller. The smell of pine grew stronger, mixed with something sweeter, something that reminded me of the flowers I had smelt in the meadow with Surain but darker, heavier, like flowers that grow in shade instead of sun.

Alôpex was running on the ground in front of me now, her white fur almost glowing in the dark, and she kept stopping to sniff the air with her black nose.

"What can you smell?" I asked her in my thoughts.

"Everything," she said. "Earth. Water. Animals sleeping. And something old. Something that has been here a long time."

"Dangerous?"

"Not yet."

We went on. And it was Alôpex who found the first scroll.

She stopped in mid-stride and started digging. Her paws worked fast in the soft forest floor, and clods of earth flew out backwards between her legs, and after twenty seconds of digging she pulled a small roll of parchment out of the ground with her teeth and laid it at my feet.

"It was under the root," she said. "It smelt of old magic."

I picked it up. It was sealed with red wax, and when I broke the seal and unrolled it, the writing lit up in a brief, bluish flash and went out again. I couldn't read what it said. But it was there.

Retia looked at me with an expression that did something interesting to her face: one eyebrow went up, one corner of her mouth went down, and the result was a mixture of impressed and annoyed so particular to her that I had already started to recognise it. It was the face she made when someone did something she couldn't explain.

"You weren't even looking for it."

"No," I said. "It was Alôpex."

"It's still you," she said. "Your Amícûs is part of you."

Ahra looked from the scroll to me to Alôpex and back again. "One down, two to go. Shall we find somewhere to spend the night?"

We found a clearing with an overhanging rock that gave shelter from the wind. The ground here was softer, covered in a thick layer of pine needles that crunched under our feet and smelt of resin and something sweet, the smell pine has when it has lain for years, slowly giving up its oils. The rock face behind us was rough and cold, covered in lichen and moss, and it gave a sense of protection just by being there.

Retia held her hand out over the heap of dry branches we had gathered. Closed her eyes. A small furrow appeared between her eyebrows, a furrow that said something was demanding a lot of her.

"Ignis."

The flame that came was blue. Not orange, not yellow. Blue, with a core of white, and it cast a light over the clearing that transformed everything. The shadows of the trees became long and sharp, and the moss on the stones glinted, and our faces were lit from below with a glow that made us all look older. The fire warmed our faces but not our backs, and it smelt the way electricity smells just after lightning, clean and sharp and alive.

"My mother taught me," said Retia. "Blue fire burns longer than orange."

We sat down round the fire, and the warmth slowly crept into my fingers, my cheeks, my eyelids. My back was still cold, pressed against the rock face, and the contrast between the warm front and the cold back of my body was strange and intimate, a reminder that I was a physical person in a physical place.

Alôpex lay down in my lap, warm and heavy, and her heart beat against my leg. Lynx lay at Ahra's side with his head on Ahra's thigh. Fulmen sat on a branch above Retia's head, looking out into the dark with its golden eyes.

And that was when it came.

Not a sound. A feeling. A sense that something in the forest had changed. Alôpex raised her head and pointed her ears at the dark. Lynx got up with a low growl. Fulmen flew up and circled above the clearing with quick, nervous wingbeats.

"What..." Ahra began.

"Quiet," whispered Retia.

We listened. And now I felt it, but not with my ears. Not footsteps. Not branches snapping. Out among the trees there was a place where the forest stopped smelling of anything, a hole in the air, and the hole was moving closer, slowly and deliberately. It grew colder around us, a dry, still cold that didn't come from the weather. The fire shrank, and Retia looked down at it with an expression that said it wasn't her fault.

"Something's drawing Dherak out of the fire," she whispered.

And then the smells disappeared.

It began with the resin. The sweet, heavy smell of the needles under us, which had been in my nostrils since we sat down, simply wasn't there any more. Then the moss. Then the wet stone behind my back. Then the sharp, electric smell of Retia's blue fire, even though I could see the flames right in front of me. It was as if someone were walking through a house switching off the lamps one by one, and I was sitting in the last room hearing the switches click.

I turned my head towards Retia. Salt wind. Cold stone. Wild roses from a cliff coast. I had had that scent in my nose all day, so clearly that I could have found her in the dark.

There was nothing.

I turned towards Ahra. Warm bark, freshly cut grass, honey that was greener than honey. Nothing. He was sitting half a metre from me, and I could see his shoulders shaking, and he wasn't there. Not to my nose. He was a shape in blue light. He could have been anybody.

Alôpex's fur against my hands. Ice and earth and clean air. Nothing.

My hands began to shake, and not from the cold. I had never known how much I held on to the smells until they were gone. It was like standing in my room at Fjordly looking at the empty wall, except that now the wall was everywhere. In the air. In my friends. In me. I couldn't even smell my own sweat.

"Chris," said Alôpex in my head. Her voice was tense. "It's old. Very old. It belongs to the island."

"I can't smell you," I said. I don't know if I said it out loud.

"I'm here anyway."

Ahra's face had gone white. His hands were shaking, and he looked from me to Retia to the dark, and his whole body was vibrating with a panic that wasn't dramatic but total, filling everything from his fingertips to his teeth.

Then he screamed. Something low and fast had shot out of the dark and sunk its teeth into his calf, and I only caught a glimpse of something grey before it was gone between the trees again. I could see the blood. I couldn't smell it.

"Scutum!" he said.

The word came out of him half choked, but it came, and the moment he said it something flashed in the air around us. An invisible shield, a bubble in reality, and for a split second it glowed with a faint golden-white tone. The cold drew back a step.

But only a step.

Whatever was out there pressed against the shield. I could feel it, a pressure that wasn't physical but that my body registered anyway, a weight against my shoulders and my chest. Alôpex growled low, a sound I had never heard from her, deep and old and instinctive.

Then it drew back. Slowly. Deliberately. Not because it was afraid of us. Because it had seen enough.

The first thing to come back was the resin. I breathed in so hard that it hurt my chest. Then the iron in Ahra's blood, warm and sharp. Then Retia, salt wind and wild roses, and I could have cried over it, and I didn't, because then I would have had to explain why.

Ahra slumped. His face was ash-grey, sweat stood on his forehead, and his hands were shaking so violently that he had to press them against the ground to stop them.

"Has it gone?" he said.

"For now," said Retia.

She drew her knife, cut a strip from Ahra's blanket and tied it tightly around his calf. The cloth darkened at once and stuck to her fingers.

Ahra looked down at his hands. They were still shaking, but more slowly now, like the aftershocks of something that had run through him and taken something with it on the way out.

"I'm exhausted," he said quietly. "Scutum took something out of me. From inside my chest. It feels as if someone's taken a bucket and scooped some of me out."

"Dherak," said Retia. "Magic costs."

Ahra laughed. A dry, half-choked laugh. "My grandmother said it would feel like this. She was understating it."

Far away to the east, between the trunks, another fire had been burning all evening. A small orange dot that I had seen without thinking about it. Now it went out. Not slowly, like a fire burning down. Suddenly, as if someone had smothered it. I looked at the place where it had been, and there was only darkness, and then I looked at Ahra's leg again and forgot about it.

The fire slowly began to grow again, now that whatever had been drawing on it was gone. The warmth came back. My shoulders loosened. My jaw loosened.

We sat closer round the fire than we had before. Closer than strangers sit. Closer than friends who are just friends. As close as people who have just stood together against something they didn't understand.

And then it was quiet. Not the uncomfortable quiet you have with strangers. The kind of quiet you have with people you have been through something with. It was a quiet that was waiting for someone to fill it with something that mattered.

It was Ahra who started. Of course it was Ahra.

"I told you on the ship that I'd never had a friend," he said. He said it to the fire, not to us. His fingers were picking at a small twig, breaking it into little pieces, systematically, as if his hands needed something to do while his mouth said something his hands would rather have kept in. "That wasn't the whole of it." He stopped. "My grandmother is the cleverest person I know. She can do things with Dherak I'll never learn. But clever people aren't always warm people, and she taught me everything except how to talk to people my own age." He took a deep breath. "I talk too much. I know I do. It's because silence reminds me of all the rooms I sat in on my own."

None of us said anything. The fire crackled.

"I told you he was good once," said Retia. She looked at me, not at Ahra, and her voice was low. "I've never told anyone what I meant by it. There was an evening when I was seven. He came home late. He sat on my bed and told me a story about a princess who lived in a castle by the sea. He stroked my hair and said goodnight." She looked down at her hands. "He smelt of something I didn't recognise. Something sharp and bitter under his shaving soap. I didn't know what it was then. Now I know it was the smell that clings to your clothes when you've been places you shouldn't have been."

She looked up. Her eyes were shining in the blue light, wet but not running, held back by a will that was stronger than gravity. Retia didn't cry. Retia had decided a long time ago that she didn't cry in front of people, and that decision held, even though everything behind it was shaking.

"It was the best evening I remember. And the last evening I remember him happy."

The silence lasted. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the forest a bird screamed.

And then I said it. Not because I had meant to say it. But because it was there, and it wanted out.

"Hanne made me porridge every morning for thirteen years," I said. "Every single morning. It was on the table when I came in from the fjord with wet hair, and it was always the right temperature, and there was always a knob of butter in the middle. And every time I asked her who my parents were, she put her hand on my cheek and said, 'Your family wanted it that way, love.' And pushed the bowl a little closer, as if the porridge were the answer."

I looked at Alôpex in my lap. She looked up at me with her black eyes.

"She loved me enough to feed me," I said. "But not enough to give me the truth. And the worst part is that I don't know if it was her choice, or if someone told her to keep her mouth shut."

I took a twig and put it on the fire and watched it turn blue.

"And when I left, she stood at the window and let me go."

The fire burned on. Nobody said anything more. And it was the best silence I had ever felt. Not empty. Full. Full of three people who had just given each other something they couldn't take back.

I couldn't sleep.

The others had fallen asleep, Ahra with Lynx curled up against his stomach, Retia with Fulmen on a branch just above her head. Retia's Ignis was still burning, lower now, a blue glow that cast long shadows across the clearing.

I lay on my back looking up through the treetops. The stars were different here. Not the same as over the fjord. Different patterns, different colours, as if the sky over Anglia were a different sky from the one I had grown up under.

Out at the edge of the light, on a stone the glow of the fire barely reached, something was sitting. Small and white and completely still, with a black tip to its tail. It was looking at me. Or at Alôpex. I blinked, and the stone was empty, and there was no sound, and I wasn't even sure I had seen it.

Alôpex lay on my chest with her nose against my neck, and I felt her breathing, warm and steady, and her heart beating against my ribs. She smelt of ice and earth and clean air. I lay for a long time just breathing it in.

And I thought that this, this island, this fire, these two people, might be the closest I had ever come to something that felt like a home. And it was strange that it should happen in a forest I didn't know, on an island that wasn't on any ordinary map, in the middle of a test I might not pass.

But it was there. I lay very still, so as not to scare it away.

And just before I fell asleep, I heard it. Far out in the forest. A sound that wasn't an animal and wasn't the wind and wasn't anything I could put a name to. A low, deep hum that vibrated in the ground beneath me, as if the island itself had woken up for a moment and was listening to us.

Alôpex raised her head. Her ears turned.

"What was that?" I said.

"The island," she said. "It knows we're here."

I closed my eyes and felt the ground vibrating under my back. And fell asleep with the smell of blue fire and pine forest and something very, very old waiting beneath it all.