Cade did not want to think about ‘energies’, about how he had destroyed those unbreakable gates. All he wanted was as much distance as he could muster between himself and that which had hunted them through the metal catacombs beneath the Tor.
From the north, those storm clouds had now conquered the sky, blotting out the stars and reaching for the pale green moon. He hungered for dawn to arrive and chase them away, give him time to think, to make sense of his shattered world. The destruction of the Cradle, the Nothings, lightning conjured out of the air. The cornfield began to whirl sickeningly, forcing him to look away.
Abi paced about, oblivious to his disquiet as she jabbered on. ‘Our folks brought us to the Cradle as babes, brought us there for our protection. They must have known what we are.’
‘Our parents are dead, Abi. We were brought to the Cradle because tradition demands every foundling be raised there.’
‘Perhaps our parents still live,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we were told they were dead to keep us from leaving. We cannot trust anything we’ve been told, Cade. The world is bigger than we knew. This morning, did you think the Tor could have been anything other than what you have been told it was?’
Cade recalled those iron halls wrought by some unimaginable race, the ancient frieze of that laurel-horned monarch, a mocking echo of the world he once knew. The thought that his parents may still live felt yet more fantastical. His mother and father had been so complete an absence in his life, they may as well have never existed.
Cade groaned, his fists bunching the grass.
‘Don’t hide from this, Cade. Don’t hide from what you know you are.’
‘No, Abi.’
‘We’re witches.’
The words seemed to vibrate as Cade heard them, blurring the world and its few remaining certainties.
‘And not just us,’ said Abi, relentless. ‘Everyone in the village, every orphan in the Cradle. Mother Alder. Even Barrion. Everyone!’
‘How could that be, Abi? They would have known. Wouldn’t they?’
‘How could they have known when none of them ever set foot outside the boundary? Not even the Matriarchs.’ Her eyes flashed with mounting excitement as she hounded her thoughts, chasing a grand revelation. ‘It’s why we were told never to leave, never to think. It’s why I was forbidden from questioning the scriptures. Everything we did, everything we were taught, everything we worshipped was to keep us hidden from those that might harm us, from superstitious folk, from creatures like the Nothings. All was done to preserve the lie.’
Cade wished he could fault her logic.
‘If it was done as you say, Abi, then it was done to keep us safe. The Father, the Matriarchs, they sought to protect us.’
Abi smiled darkly. ‘Well, I no longer need protection.’
The certainty in her voice unnerved him. ‘Even if you’re right, Abi. We still must be cautious.’
Cade’s head throbbed. The Nothings were near. He imagined them scrabbling below ground, perhaps even burrowing like worms through the barricade of rubble that had descended beneath the tree. Abi muttered to herself, absorbed in her own epiphanies. Cade stared at the hole between the roots of that great tree, half-expecting pale faces to emerge. They were definitely near. He could feel them like a precipice at the rim of his senses, an absence waiting to engulf him.
‘I’ll be a slave to guilt no longer,’ said Abi. ‘Not for the crime of knowing the truth.’
Cade stared at the hole, realising that his eyes could linger there without pain. There was nothing there. Nothing. Surely nothing, though he could feel something’s gaze upon him from somewhere. Stubble bristled on the back of his neck.
He turned to look out across the corn.
The rumbling storm clouds obscured the moon. Gloom was descending.
Abi was nodding to herself. ‘And if that power be bought in blood, then I swear to honour its cost.’
‘Abi?’ Cade pointed into the distance.
Things were moving through the corn, steadily ruffling the leafy avenues. Though it burned his eyes to do so, Cade counted at least six of them, still far away but steadily advancing. Cade felt the icy cloak of terror settle upon his shoulders once again. Those that had pursued them through the Tor had been left buried to the south, while the ones that attacked the village must still be within the Cradle. These were approaching from the north, shadowed by the storm. Were the Lands Beyond infested with Nothings?
‘The scrolls,’ said Cade, his mouth dry. ‘Did they tell you where next we might run?’
‘Why would we run now?’ she said.
Cade felt a fresh ripple of terror, thinking she may have gone mad.
‘Remember what you did to those gates?’ she said, eager and excited. ‘Think what destruction we could summon together. We could blast these things back to the realm that spawned them.’
‘We don’t know that,’ said Cade, his voice quivering.
‘There is nowhere we can run that the Nothings cannot follow,’ she said. ‘We need to stand and fight them.’
The thought of facing such darkness again stole his voice away. He tugged at her arms, whimpering like an impatient child. She shook him steady.
‘I may not be able to destroy them alone,’ she said. Her voice was firm, though bubbled with fear. Her eyes were bright in the darkness, expectant. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said.
Those words steadied him like magic, recalling his shame before the gates of the Tor, a memory he longed to obliterate. He stiffened, making ardent promises in his head to stand by her, protect her, tear apart with bare hands any horror that threatened her if it would but prove himself a man in her eyes.
His hand found hers and something shivered in the air between them. The clouds devoured the last of the moon, obscuring the cornfield and all that lurked there as they ran down the hill and plunged into crackling blackness.
Cade dashed as stealthily as he could between the ragged walls of corn, shielding his eyes from the deluge of leaves. He gripped Abi’s hand as she followed, as sightless as he. The soil underfoot felt soft and treacherous, keen to twist an ankle as they ran.
Cade halted. Abi bumped into him, breathing hard. He heard a steady crackle nearby, leaves disturbed by the passage of something other than the wind. He tugged Abi and they moved on. His hand was numb from squeezing hers. Something throbbed between them like a heartbeat. Together they would banish the thing back to the netherworld with a rush of lightning, perhaps set the corn ablaze in doing so, then flee as the conflagration consumed the others. He blundered through another wall of stalks, pain beginning to knuckle at his temples, announcing the presence of the Nothings.
What was he doing? This was folly, glorious insanity. Cade welcomed the waves of fear he felt crashing through him. Abi groaned beside him, their grip now squirming with sweat. He hurried on, the blackness settling into a jungle of dark shapes as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The pain in his temples burrowed into the backs of his eyes.
He paused again to listen. Something crunched nearby. The sound was blurred somehow, as if his ears fought to reject it, though the creature’s tread was unmistakably heavy. Cade did not welcome the sudden conjecture that these things might once have been spirits, but by now had passed fully into this world as things of muscle and fang. Perhaps they had been nourished by his fear, gorging themselves until their forms congealed into some kind of unholy flesh.
