Silent Night by Clifford Riley

Author:Clifford Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2012-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

In the middle of the night, Rupert awoke in the hay, covered in a clammy, cold sweat. He scrambled to his feet, breathing heavily and spinning around. He was dizzy and dazed and he knew, he knew, that someone had just been there. He could feel the sudden absence, like a shadow hanging in the air. He looked at the hay, but he was rubbish at tracking and so he had no idea if there were any footprints there. The door was still shut and the lantern was still where they had left it, turned down to a low haze in the center of the barn floor. But someone had been there, Rupert could feel it.

Or maybe he had dreamed it.

His dream. Black shadows everywhere — over the forest, the trenches, the barn. They had crept up over the horizon and sucked up everything, leaving the entire countryside in darkness. Madrigals.

It had been a dream. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that they had been here.

He looked around. Everything seemed normal. Marie was curled in the hay like a cat, and the major was snoring. In the distance, church bells were ringing, and for the life of him, Rupert couldn’t figure out why.

He stepped outside. The air was cold and crisp; heavy gray clouds laden with snow had moved in while they slept, and the tingle of expectation lingered in the air. Rupert felt it, too, crawling over his skin and making his hair bristle.

He had, in that moment, never felt more alive, or more aware of the world around him. The cold had stripped everything down to its most basic stuff; he thought he could feel each piece of the air as it blew past his cheeks. The church bells stopped, and there was a loud silence. There was no gunfire, no sound of canons or artillery. Just quiet.

Rupert wondered if everyone could hear the silence. He imagined that the whole of the battlefield came to a halt, that the ships in the Channel hung in the water, that Mother and Father back in England even paused in their dreaming. It was just for a moment; the church bells began to ring again. Even so, Rupert had felt it.

It wasn’t about Clues and Lucians anymore. Not wholly, anyway. It wasn’t even about Rupert and Albert. The moment of quiet was gone, but he craved it again. He craved that peace, and he wanted it not just for himself, but for the battlefield and for the ships and for Mother and Father and the rest of them. War, he thought, was not good for a person. And if the Madrigals were going to try and wage war, then the Cahills would have to stop fighting amongst themselves long enough to wage peace. And they’d start by rescuing the Ekat.

They’d go again tonight. They’d risk their lives again to try and prevent catastrophe.

It was funny, he thought, this family of his. They were capable of such great, beautiful things. His cousins

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