The Shadow Order by Rebecca John

Author:Rebecca John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Firefly Press Limited
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Vagabonds

Twenty-five miles north of Copperwell, in a dense belt of forest undisturbed by any inhabitant of any city in the Britannic Isles, the land scoops into a natural hollow. This hollow, edged as it is by ancient wych elms, is well protected from wind and rain and sleet. At its deepest point, the ground levels into a plain, perhaps half a mile wide. At the exact central point of this plain a huge fire blazes day and night, its crackles echoing into the surrounding woodland with the insistence of a drum beat, its flames turning the nearby snow to honey.

Arranged around the fire in concentric circles are rows of wooden yurts, their pointed roofs draped with tan, pine green, ochre, plum and deep cherry canvases. Smoke drifts from holes at the peaks of the roofs in thick, white plumes.

People, dressed in leathers and wools in all the colours of autumn, mill quietly around, or sit over cooking pots, or wring out clothes over steaming barrels and hang them from ropes suspended between yurts to drip into the snow below. A hum of activity warms the little community and soothes the beasts they have penned between and behind the yurts. The animals are at once calm and magnificent. They move slowly around their enclosures, pausing here and there to crop up mouthfuls of grass. As they chew, they glance about themselves, their soft triangular ears twitching this way and that, their every movement elegant despite their hulking size. The bucks’ antlers cast long, branch-like shadows.

Effie would know immediately that they are red deer, and name them as such, if she could see them. But neither she, nor Betsy, nor Teddy can see anything of this place yet. They lie, deeply asleep, inside one of the yurts, blanketed and comfortable and rendered completely unaware of their surroundings by the soporific effect of the valerian garlands looped around their necks. As they sleep, they dream vivid dreams: Betsy, of being carried through trees on the back of an enormous clockwork wolf, her hair and clothes whipping about her, the seamless rhythm of her galloping mount persuading her that she is safe; Effie, of rushing through the unlit rooms and hallways of number eight, Berliner’s Square, pursued at every turn by a faceless figure she cannot identify; and Teddy, of those evenings he spent with his father, brushing down the cab horses, and holding apple cores out on his flattened palm for Jim, and listening to stories of the Aur hastening over the empty plains of the world for the sheer joy of it.

‘I will look at it,’ Edward had insisted, ‘and I will see it. And then I will return home and never tell a single soul about it.’

When Teddy gasps into waking, he does so with those words weighty on his tongue. He struggles to push up into a sitting position, grappling with a thick wool blanket, and glances about, attempting to orientate himself. A spray of wooden ceiling beams; a

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