This is an extract from the first chapter of Silent Skies.
CHAPTER ONE
CANDLE AND MOON
What does ‘Tuthervarr’ mean?
‘Well, a Tuthervarr is a hero,’ you might answer. ‘A fierce warrior, the bane of all that is wicked.’ And you would not be wrong, though you would not be wholly right either. You see, it was a clan, a family, before it became anything else.
Let me take you back nearly three months to tell you how Boden, the son of a Tuthervarr traveller and a Taranor orphan, came to be sitting with the company by that campfire and what he was remembering when his imagination turned that orange juice into blood, and the wind into a whetstone.
Twelve nights had passed since his father’s departure.
Boden held the whetstone to his sword, moving it in tight circles that gradually looped their way down the grey edge, emitting a high, gravelly sound in a ceaseless whine. He sat in a wooden chair pushed slightly away from the living room table, his blade flat across his knees. Every now and then as he worked, he glanced up at the candle on the table to check the approximate time—drawing on midnight. Burning slowly down the black wick, the flame cast a flickering spell over the inner walls of the cottage.
Through a window, the round moon cast its own pale spell. The calm, steadfast glow met the dancing, desperate candlelight on the soft surface of a heavy tapestry across the room. In this strange mixture of light, the colours and forms of the tapestry were obscured, though the golden bordering of tiny capital Ts still stood bold. T for Tuthervarr. Boden found himself staring at the tapestry, as he often did when thinking of his father and heroes and quests—his ancestors’ legacy.
Absorbed by the tapestry, he did not notice his mother enter the living room from the hallway. Not until she passed before him and took a seat across the table did his pondering cease. When their eyes met, the whetstone stilled. Mother and son looked at each other in silence for a few minutes, candle and moon making battlefields of their solemn faces.
‘What are you thinking, Boden?’ Sapphire asked.
Boden took a breath, assembling his thoughts. ‘I know three of the methods,’ he began, lifting his sword and whetstone to the table. ‘I can defend myself in the Wolfwood. I know the path he takes to the northern thickets where he hunts. I know the signs of the Mountainwood—the snow gum and alpine ash—and I will not venture there unless his tracks clearly lead me.’
Sapphire nodded slowly as Boden trailed off. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Your father has taught you three of the Seven Sword Methods, though you know as well as I do that you have not mastered the third. And you know as well as I do that your father can defend himself—’
‘Two is safer than one,’ Boden broke in.
‘Two is louder than one,’ Sapphire said.
They went quiet again for a breath. Distant howling and the calls of screech owls forced their way through cracks in the windowpane and the door.
‘What is he doing?’ Boden whispered. ‘This is the thirteenth night since he left.’ The boy’s eyes flicked briefly to the tapestry. ‘Does this have anything to do with the heirloom?’ he asked.
Sapphire tensed, the blue rings around her pupils going hard as crystal. Boden had never understood why she did not speak of the Tuthervarr heirlooms.
Forcing herself to relax again, Sapphire said, ‘When he returns, you may ask him. You should get some more sleep. We’re going to shift the cattle further south to better feed tomorrow morning.’
Boden thought that if their heirloom was at all involved in this, it made the situation all the more dire.
Sapphire stood and headed back into the hallway. On the way past, she bent and hugged him where he sat. ‘He’ll be back,’ she whispered.
Boden lingered, brown-and-orange-ringed pupils staring for a while at the sword before him, at the flickering candlelight that chased the pale glow of the moon across the steel. Sitting, wondering, waiting, Boden found himself swiftly sinking again into that horrid nightmare that had plagued him for the last few nights. Being half-awake, he mostly remembered and only partly fell back in.
The blade of his sword was a magnificent ruby red. He stood by a small campfire, drawing the sword by the dancing light. There were enemies—shapeless shadows—watching from the outer darkness.
His weapon was then ripped from his grasp by some invisible wind. It went flying into the gloom of the woods. He left the circle of the campfire’s light to search the woods for it. He knew that his father was ahead of him, somewhere, as he was following the man’s tracks. As he wandered in the dark, his father’s trail steadily became fainter and fainter. Eventually, the tracks disappeared in a swift red river, swept away by the water rushing past like blood from the neck of a slaughtered beast. Kneeling on the banks of the river, Boden felt a frozenness growing in his bones.
Boden shivered himself awake again. His heart was beating faster in the memory of that dreadful feeling. His eyes went from the grey sword to the burning wick to the twilit tapestry to the door of the cottage.
He would not leave his mother to tend the cattle alone, but he could not leave his father to face the dangers of the woods alone, either. Sitting, wondering, waiting, the boy had a sudden urge to act on a half-formed plan that had been hovering at the edges of his mind for a few nights.
Boden reached slowly up and bound his hair in a knot behind his head. He took his belt and scabbard off the backrest of the chair beside him. Quietly he stood and put the belt on. Quietly he picked up his sword and slowly sheathed it, allowing only a muffled echo of the whine that the whetstone had created to escape. Quietly he lifted the latch, opened the door and left the cottage. He did not even bother to put shoes on—he rarely did when traversing the familiar terrain about his parent’s cottage.
In the yard, the poddy calf that Boden had adopted the responsibility of feeding, Belle, was resting with her back against the garden gatepost. She looked up at him with a glossy black eye that reflected the spell of the candle flickering in the window behind him. He reached out to scratch her neck. Half-asleep, the calf caught one of his fingers in her mouth and sucked it absently, some part of the animal knowing that the sight of the boy meant bottled milk warmed by the fire. This brought a weak smile to Boden’s moonlit face.
‘In a few hours,’ he murmured to her, and he moved on through the garden gate to the stretch of patchy grass that reached towards the woods.
Between the cottage and the Wolfwood, there was a mound of three smooth stones, all stark white in the moonlight. The stones were oblong, taller than a man and wider than a cow carrying twins. From the heart of the jumble of ancient stone, there grew an ebony tree older than the Wolfwood itself.
These were the prayer stones. For countless generations, citizens of Iantal had come to this hill to stand on the stones, face the ocean beyond the woods and ask.
And Boden was climbing onto one of the stones, which lay on its side.
Exhausted of options—and terribly afraid—the boy had come here to pray. He had not been taught how to pray. He did not even know the name of the god the Iantalian people had prayed to here. He knew the names of the violent gods of the sea—and these Taranor deities, his parents had warned him, should not be worshipped. Boden suspected, though, that they did not even worship Oldone, the god of the Old Way.
Yet here he was, standing on the prayer stone barefoot with the quiet wind ruffling his shirt. The spell of candlelight was behind him, peeking through the window of the cottage, and only the steadfast enchantment of the moon remained on his features, turning him pallid and indistinct.
As he searched for something to say, he heard some beast in the woods howl—quite close. A look of consternation made its way across his face as the call was answered, closer still. Then he heard something racing through the woods, crushing sticks and breaking thin branches as it ran.
No wolf would be so bold.
The wind gusted through the trees towards him, carrying the complicated mark of the Wolfwood in late spring—the pollen of ancient red gums, ironbarks and pine needles—and that strange sound of a desperate or foolhardy creature.
Boden knew what it was like to walk the Wolfwood with his father at night.
The tall, gnarled trees loomed overhead like black roses, open wide even though it was dark. A canopy of murky leaves blocked out the moon and the stars, and his eyes strained in the gloom. He felt littler than he was amongst the imposing giants and the menacing sounds of the woods—boughs creaking and groaning as he cast his gaze about, unknown animals scratching fretfully at the forest floor in close shadows.
His steps broke twigs and crushed leaves, masking, in those moments, the sounds of the other occupants of the woods. Knotted trunks, unkempt bushes, and fallen tree limbs made odd shapes that his imagination turned into ugly, spiny monsters.
Nothing raced in the Wolfwood. Everything was sneaking and sinister and lethal. What is this thing bold enough to crash through the woods like a bull?
The howling, and the rushing creature, grew louder and closer still as Boden strained to see what was happening. Heart pounding in his chest, Boden squeezed his eyes shut in sudden, sorrowful, terrified exhaustion. A tear fell trembling down his cheek, and a plea fled from his mouth like a rabbit pursued by an arrow.
‘Please,’ he said softly, ‘bring my father safely home.’
(END OF EXTRACT)