Swift by R. J. Anderson
Cicely hid her face against Ivy and burst into tears. Mica stood awkwardly for a moment, then put out a hand and patted his little sister’s hair.
‘You’ll look out for them, won’t you?’ Ivy asked him. ‘Mattock and Jenny and the others.’ Even if he was too disgusted with Ivy to even look at her any more, even if he was determined to stay in the Delve at any cost, he must know that their mother hadn’t been lying about the poison in the mine. He was the only one who could help the piskeys now.
But Mica didn’t reply. He walked to the door and held it open. ‘You’d better get moving,’ he said gruffly. ‘You’ve got a long way to go.’
epilogue
Sunlight warmed the treetops, and the sky was untroubled by cloud. Ivy glided over the countryside, swift-wings outstretched on the breeze. She and Cicely had been staying with Marigold for three days now, and though Ivy hadn’t minded looking after her sister and showing her the sights of Truro, she’d been longing all the while to fly again.
She hadn’t told either of them about her shape-changing. Male faeries might be accustomed to transforming themselves into birds or animals, but it seemed that females had a different approach to magic, and she feared that even Marigold wouldn’t be comfortable with the revelation that her daughter could become a swift.
So what was Ivy now – a piskey, or a faery, or neither? Would she ever find a place where she belonged? Ivy didn’t know, and it pained her. Especially since it had already become clear that a one-bedroom flat was too small for three, and that feeding two growing daughters was straining Marigold’s resources to the limit.
But Ivy was still too young to live and work on her own, even if she’d felt confident enough posing as a human to try. And she couldn’t ask Molly for help, not when she and her father were still grieving…
The shadow of a crow flashed over Ivy, and with a flick of her wingtips she increased speed, leaving the bigger bird behind. It offered no threat to her, but part of her would scarcely have minded if it had. At least that would have given her a challenge to surmount, an enemy that she could defeat. At least that might have made her feel not quite so useless.
Soon another bird rose up on her left side – only a small one, but Ivy had no desire for company. She angled away, catching an updraught so she could be alone again. But the newcomer followed, easily matching her speed. She was about to put the other bird in its place with an angry shriek, when it chirruped at her, rolled over and tagged her with one outstretched foot in a very un-birdlike way. Then it dived towards the riverbank, came to a fluttering stop – and transformed into a slim, angular faery with blond hair falling into his eyes.
Ivy’s heart swelled with incredulous delight. So she and Molly had been right to use their blood on him, back in Gillian’s workshop – though why it had worked, she couldn’t imagine. She veered through the air and skimmed to land in front of him in her own shape. ‘Richard! I thought you were trapped forever!’
‘So did I, for a while,’ he replied. ‘But it appears that all the magic I put into healing you makes us kinfolk of a sort after all. There’s a precedent, but I won’t embarrass you with the details.’ He gave his sly smile. ‘So you got my message, then?’
‘What? Oh.’ He must mean the dream-message he’d sent her while he was trapped. She didn’t have the heart to tell him how fragmented and misleading those words had been, or how little difference they had made in the end. ‘Yes. I’m sorry it took us so long to set you free.’
‘I didn’t think anyone could.’ He was serious now, his grey eyes sober as she had ever seen them. ‘It appears that I owe you my life. Again.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Ivy, blushing a little. ‘I never repaid you properly for saving me from Mica, and you only got trapped in the Claybane because you were trying to find Cicely for me. If anything I’m in your debt, not the other way around.’
‘Tell me the rest of your story, then, and we’ll call it even.’ He motioned to the grassy bank beside him, inviting her to sit. ‘I had part of it from Molly, but she told me you’d gone back to the Delve. What brings you here?’
She sat down cross-legged by the river’s edge and told him everything, her restless fingers tearing up the long grass around her until her hands were sticky with its sap. She told Richard how she’d defeated Gillian and rescued the piskeys she’d trapped, about going with her sister into exile, and all that had happened since.
‘But I don’t know what to do,’ she finished. ‘I can’t keep living with my mum – there’s not enough room, and Cicely needs her more than I do. And I can’t return to the Delve, not while Betony’s still in control.’
With an expert flick of the wrist Richard sent a stone skipping across the water; it bounced three times before it sank. ‘Why not try the other half of your ancestry?’ he said. ‘There must be a wyld somewhere that would take you in, if you made yourself useful.’
Ivy had considered that idea, but the thought of walking into a group of strange faeries and asking to join them, especially now that she knew what her piskey ancestors had done to their kind, made her uneasy. ‘If I did,’ she asked, ‘would you come with me?’
‘Not an option.’ He picked up another stone, turning it slowly in his fingers. ‘You see, I’m a fugitive from justice at the moment.’
Ivy was startled. ‘What for?’
‘Murder. Or actually, two murders.’ With another flick, the pebble became a silver dagger; he stabbed it point-down into the grass. ‘Last April I killed the Empress and her would-be successor in front of about five hundred other faeries. And I’ve been running ever since.’
‘You killed the Empress? But how? I mean – why?’ No, that wasn’t the right question either; both those answers were obvious already. ‘What happened?’
‘Ask Marigold. She saw me do it. And she was glad.’
And were you? Ivy almost asked, but she knew the answer to that question as well. If he’d taken any pleasure in killing the Empress, it hadn’t lasted long. Is there a murderer here? No. I am…
‘Are you afraid of me?’ asked Richard. He spoke lightly, as though he were indifferent to the answer. Only a slight twitch in his cheek said otherwise.
Ivy considered this. ‘No.’
‘You might want to think a little longer about that,’ he said. ‘The Claybane worked on me, remember…and whoever my parents were, I very much doubt that either one of them was a piskey. I’m no good with horses, but I admit to being quite interested in treasure, and I seem to have a way of influencing air currents, not to mention probabilities…’
That startled a laugh out of Ivy. ‘You mean that after all this, you really are a spriggan?’
‘Part spriggan, anyway. I don’t see what else I could be.’ He pulled the dagger out of the bank, flipped it back into a pebble, and let it drop. ‘I always knew I wasn’t quite like other faeries, but I never knew why. Now I wonder where I came from, and if there’s anything – or anyone – left to go back to.’
‘We could try and find out,’ said Ivy.
Richard gave her a sidelong look. ‘Are you offering to come with me?’
Ivy picked a few more blades of grass and let them flutter away on the wind. At last she said, ‘I want to help my people. But I don’t know how, not yet. I need to learn. I need to travel. I need to find something that will make Aunt Betony listen to me – or convince the others that they ought to listen even if she won’t.’ She turned back to him. ‘So yes, I would like to come. If that’s all right.’
One corner of his mouth turned up. ‘If it’s what you want, I know better than to try and stop you. But it won’t be comfortable. Or safe. And I can’t tell you where we’ll be going.’
‘That’s all right. I don’t have anywhere particular in mind.’ She gave him a tentative smile and added, ‘And you can teach me more about birds on the way.’
He rose slowly, dusting off his trousers, and looked down at her a moment. Then he said, ‘We can start with the house martin. T
‘Good,’ said Ivy, taking the hand he offered and letting him pull her to her feet. ‘Richard didn’t really suit you, anyway.’
acknowledgements
Heartfelt thanks to my smart, insightful and always encouraging editor, Sarah Lilly, and the rest of the Orchard Books team; to my ever-supportive American agent Josh Adams and my savvy and hardworking UK agent Caroline Walsh; and to illustrator Rory Kurtz, who did such a wonderful job of bringing Ivy’s character to life on the cover.
I’m also grateful to Fritha Lindqvist and Jessica Smith at Orchard for their hard work and delightful company on my UK tour in early 2011 – and to all the schoolchildren, teachers and librarians who showed such a keen interest in my books and made every school visit during the tour a pleasure.
Swift would not be what it is if not for the unfailing support, shrewd insights, and generous assistance of the following individuals, who gave me feedback on the early drafts: Peter Anderson, Erin Bow, Deva Fagan, Meg Burden, Brittany Harrison, Saundra Mitchell, Kate Johnson and Nick Jessee. I also greatly appreciated the help of Brittany Landgrebe, who suggested the title two years ago and started the whole process; Thu Ya Win, whose photos and insights about Truro were invaluable in helping me develop that section of the book; and of Michelle Minniss, who graciously read over the whole manuscript to make sure I’d got various Cornish details right.
And finally, thanks to all the enthusiastic fans, faithful readers and thoughtful reviewers who’ve e-mailed, tweeted and contacted me on Facebook to let me know they’ve enjoyed my other books and were looking forward to Swift. Here it is at last, and may you find it worth the wait!
Read on for a thrilling
extra short story by R J Anderson…
He’d lost track of how long he’d been flying. One day blurring feverishly into another, hour after hour of hurtling through the air without direction or destination, a flash of black and white feathers by daylight and a whisper of barn owl wings in the dark. Collapsing at last into ermine-form when he was too exhausted to fly any more, then sleeping a few fitful minutes in some abandoned burrow before dread or hunger woke him and the cycle began again.
Were the Blackwings still hunting him, or had they given up? He didn’t know, but he had no intention of staying still long enough to find out.
A few weeks ago he couldn’t have dreamed of living like this. He’d been idle, cynical, indifferent to anything but his own amusement – goodness knew there’d been little enough of that in the life he’d been born to. A nameless orphan with no past, restless as a young bird, sure of nothing except that he wasn’t human. He’d found his magic early and used it without mercy, like his fists and his teeth and his cunning, because it was the only way he could survive.
But then she’d found him, the faery Empress. His voice had hardly broken when she’d plucked him from his hardscrabble life on the streets and given him his first role, the jaded courtier with the quick knife and whiplash tongue, willing to scheme and betray and kill at her command. She’d told him, laughing, that he had no heart, and he hadn’t denied it. Because there was no other way he knew how to live, and he had nowhere else to go.
He’d made mistakes at first, some merely humiliating and others near-fatal, but the Empress had been patient. Within two years she’d remade every part of him, turning him from a wild thing into a sleek and pampered pet, a dirty imp with a gutter mouth to a haughty young buck who talked like the Prince of Denmark…not that he’d known anything about Shakespeare at the time, ignorant fool that he was. He’d been nothing but a performing animal, a slave to the Empress’s treats and threats, and he’d quickly learned that nothing displeased her more than to hear her subjects sounding too modern, too human…
A black shadow passed over him and his heart fluttered, fear’s cold talons gripping him once more. He’d been a fool to think he could outfly the Empress’s hunters, or throw them off his trail for long. They’d cut him off any second now, trapping him in the circle of their raven wings, binding him with spells too strong for even his unruly magic to break, and then they’d drag him back to her.
He’d never cared much for fighting, but that didn’t mean he’d forgotten how to do it. With a shriek of defiance he wheeled in mid-air, ready to hurl himself into battle—
But it was only a crow, alone and indifferent to his challenge. With a mocking caw and a few lazy wingstrokes, it flapped away.
The relief was so great he couldn’t even feel embarrassed. He flitted onto an updraught, soaring high above the treetops and the flight paths of his fellow birds, so he wouldn’t be caught off-guard again. But his wing muscles trembled and his head felt light with hunger, and he knew that he’d nearly reached his limit. Soon his strength would give out altogether…and the higher he flew, the further he’d have to fall.
What madness had made him believe he could escape the Empress, that she would give in and let him go? He’d followed her direction so long, played so diligently the parts she’d written for him, that he’d made himself indispensable to her schemes. She had neither time nor inclination to replace him as her court spy and sometime assassin, and her pride was too great to accept that she’d been wrong to give him that role in the first place. He must come back to her, or die.
Perhaps it would have been better if he’d never walked into that little theatre in Cardiff, never seen that first motley performance of Hamlet. Never known that the words of some long-dead human playwright could speak to his heart more eloquently than the Empress ever had; never taken the Bard’s lines into his own mouth and felt their weight, their grandeur, their fluid shape; never guessed that he could find greater pleasure sharing in the humans’ gift of theatre than he ever had in merely exploiting it.
He’d thought the humans could teach him to lie rather than merely rearranging the truth; he’d thought they could show him how to become a different person. Instead, they’d taught him the only truths he’d ever found worth having, and on their stage he’d learned, for the first time, what it meant to be himself.
But there was a cost for that self-knowledge, a higher price than he’d ever expected to pay. Because when he returned to the Empress, he’d found that nothing she said to him, nothing she offered him, seemed to matter any more. She could force his obedience, but his heart and soul were no longer hers to command.
‘I want you to infiltrate the rebels,’ the Empress had told him with cold decisiveness, a few days or a lifetime ago. ‘I want you to find my wayward heir, win his trust…and kill him.’
He’d almost done it. He’d come so close, out of habit if nothing else. But the moment he was out of her presence his mind had begun working in other directions. So many of the Empress’s servants had turned against her already, including her own adopted son – would it really trouble her to lose one slave more?
The answer, as he’d learned all too quickly, was yes.
He was so tired now, he could barely flap his wings. His stomach gnawed itself with hunger, but the insects that sustained his bird-body were too scarce at this altitude for him to make a proper meal of them, even if he’d had the energy to chase them down. He had to descend, even at the risk of being spotted. He needed to slow down, take a few hours to rest and recover in his own rightful shape.
But where could he go? The hillsides and scattered woods below him were unfamiliar, and he could see no place where a fugitive might be safe. Especially not with the Empress’s most skilled and ruthless hunters on his trail…
‘You are mine now,’ her voice whispered in his memory. ‘By blood and bond, by debt and until death. Do you understand?’
‘No,’ he gasped, but it came out as a high-pitched twitter, an alarm cry that only his fellow house martins would understand. His wingbeats faltered, his body went slack, and before he could recover he slipped off the updraught, tumbling into the wild air currents below. He fought for control, but his head reeled and he could no longer
With the last of his strength he pulled himself out of the dive a few feet above ground-level, but he no longer had the power to hold any shape but his own. He was a dead weight, a flopping scarecrow of limbs and sinews, pale hair blinding his eyes as he collapsed onto the turf, rolled over a few times, and lay still.
It was the end: he had no doubt of that now. He would lie here, too weak to even get up, until they found him…if his ravaged body even lasted that long. He had ignored all the rules and all the warnings in his desperation, pushed his magical strength far beyond its natural bounds, and now there was nothing left to do but pay the price…
He heard a low thudding and the ground beneath him vibrated, rocks and dirt shivering against his spine. A rippling footfall, four-legged – hounds? No, it was far too heavy for that. Too drained to lift his head, he squinted down the length of his body and made out the blurred shape of a horse cantering towards him, with a small person on its back.
‘Are you all right?’ asked a breathless girl’s voice, as she reined in her mount and leaped out of the saddle to land beside him. A round, sun-freckled face, a pert nose and wide brown eyes – she couldn’t have been more than twelve, or more ridiculously human. ‘Is anything broken?’
‘M’fine,’ he managed to mumble, though his lips were cracked with dehydration and his voice was barely more than a croak. ‘Just resting.’
‘I don’t think so.’ She gave a little laugh, half nerves and half delight. ‘I saw you fall out of the sky just now. You were a bird, and then…’ She caught her breath. ‘You’re a faery, aren’t you? Don’t deny it, I know you are.’