The Runaway Read online

  Adam shakes his head in utter disbelief. “Why did you have to say that?” he demands.

  Callum shrugs. “The truth hurts, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know how much of that you made up, and how much is true, but either way she didn’t need to hear it all now.”

  “Took her down a few pegs though. You can’t deny she needed that.”

  “You’re very quick to decide what other people need.”

  “I’ve known her my whole life. She’s always thought she was too good for Llandymna and the rest of us.”

  “You know how angry you were at Diana for only seeing the immature teenager she thinks you still are? That’s exactly what you’re doing right now to Rhiannon.”

  Callum gives a snort and pulls a face at Adam to show he thinks he is overreacting. Grace joins in on a different note.

  “Look, if you aren’t going home today, do you really expect us to stay here and keep bringing you food every day? We’ll be going back to our own lives sooner or later, but Rhiannon is the one staying. She’s your best chance of surviving out here.”

  “I don’t need her help.”

  To Callum’s annoyance and surprise, Grace laughs at him. “And you accuse her of pride!”

  “What do you want from me?” he asks angrily, aware that in earning the disapproval of these two he has crossed the only people likely to help him survive or return home on his own terms.

  “Apologize to her,” says Adam.

  Callum searches his face hopefully for some sign that this is a joke, but he is disappointed.

  Rhiannon

  I think I kept running until I fell into the stream, but I don’t remember very clearly. I know my hair was blowing in front of my face, and that is why I didn’t see the bank in time. By the time I realized I had lost my footing and was sliding downward, it was too late to stop, so I accepted that I was already falling and waited for my arms and legs to collide with the muddy ground and freezing water. I know I sat there for some time before I could make myself get up. The water ran around my ankles and knees, soaking through my clothes. When I eventually clambered up, the wet material clung to my legs and made walking slower.

  Now I stand in the clearing, an open space in the forest that feels so dense and suffocating today. I turn around slowly. The trees encircling me seem further away than before. I take a few deep breaths to calm myself, and try to think clearly. Though Callum only said a few words, there is so much meaning for me to make sense of now, to compound in my mind and understand how my view of the world and my birthplace has changed, and will be different forever. I hold the wooden stick I used to beat down brambles earlier: it is now a staff in my hands.

  I start at the beginning of this new information. Diana has forgotten me. I swing the staff to the right and then in a loop over my head. The weight of it in my hands is something real to hold on to while my mind races in these mad directions.

  Maebh no longer thinks of me. I can hear the rush of air as the wood sweeps past. It is swifter than the silent wingbeat of any hawk. I might be holding the staff too tightly now: my palms will probably be red raw and marked later.

  They are all glad that I left. I am spinning around, faster and faster, and the wild speed lends something to the way I feel, a kind of mad rage perhaps. The trees are a brown blur, with some green clinging on into autumn, but mostly now the world is copper and crimson. As I spin, the bright burning colours merge so that it is as if I am surrounded by a circle of fire. I see at once when this space is invaded. I know a shape that should not be there stands before the trees. I stop abruptly, my eyes blazing in anger at this trespass. Callum doesn’t take the glare as a hint to leave.

  “Go away,” I say simply and coldly. Still he doesn’t move. Is he really so wooden-skulled? Has he come to taunt me some more?

  “I’ve been told to speak to you,” he says uncomfortably. He looks down at his feet.

  “Well, I don’t want to listen.”

  His sullenness turns quickly to a pointed jibe. “Still running away, then?”

  “No,” I snap. “I’m warning you, go away.”

  He feigns fear and looks at me condescendingly. Why won’t he go? Fed up with not being taken seriously in my demand that he leave, angry at the mocking smirk on his stupid face, I bring the staff around and hit him heavily on the shoulder. He jumps back and clutches the top of his arm.

  “You hit me!” he exclaims indignantly.

  “And yet it seems I really don’t care,” I reply coolly, coming to my senses a little more now. Callum, on the other hand, looks shocked and furious. He takes out a knife, presumably the one he used on Ifan.

  “Seriously?” I say, trying to look unimpressed rather than afraid. “Is that your answer to everything? You’ve taken out your temper on me and now, rather than back down, you’re going to stab me. Is that it?”

  As I say it I realize that if Callum really did want to attack me right now, there is no one to stop him but me. If I shouted loudly enough, perhaps Adam and Grace would come running this way, but would they get here in time to stop him killing me? Not that I believe that is really what he plans to do, but it’s frightening to think how easy it would be if he did.

  “Nah,” says Callum, throwing down the knife. “I don’t fight girls.”

  I am relieved and insulted all at once. As fear gives way to indignation, I find myself sweeping the staff around a second time, and knocking him sharply in the stomach. Why did I do that? A moment ago I was worried he was going to kill me; now I am trying to goad him into a fight. I think I want him to stop seeing me as the old Rhiannon, the angry teenager with a grudge against everyone.

  “What was that for?” he cries, and tries to grab the staff from me. He fails, as I jump back out of the way, so he reaches for another fallen branch about the same size, which he holds up defensively, to block any further hits I might try.

  We face each other, and I size up whether I could win in a fight now. He will be stronger than me, without a doubt, but I am probably faster and more agile. Could that be enough?

  “Did you mean it all?” Since we are here and currently not fighting one another, I may as well ask the burning question.

  “What if I did?” He gives a retort rather than an actual answer. “Bothers you, does it, knowing your plan to make everyone miss you failed?”

  “You don’t know anything about my plans.”

  “I know by the state of you that they aren’t working out so well,” he says. So now he’s resorting to insulting the way I look. I should not be surprised.

  “When you’ve lasted more than a month on your own, then you can talk to me,” I say, “but I reckon you’ll have used up your last breath whining about how you miss takeaway pizza long before then.”

  He looks put out by this, and I use the distraction to try to knock his staff out of his hands. But he spots it just in time, tightens his hold and blocks it. As I guessed, he is stronger than me, and I leap to one side before I can be pushed back.

  Now he has had the same idea of disarming me, and he aims for my arms. I block and jump out of the way again.

  “Why don’t you get that pet bird of yours to rip my eyes out?” he jeers.

  “I think he’s happier just watching from that tree behind you.”

  Callum doesn’t fight the impulse to look around quickly enough. While his head is turned, I whirl the staff around and knock his feet out from under him. He hits the ground with a heavy thud.

  “Look,” I say, standing over him, with the end of the staff jabbing at his throat, “you may have strength on your side, but I will always be quicker, and I know these woods better. If you ever try anything against me, even something like stealing food from me, I will have a hundred ways of getting you back. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” he says, holding his hands up. “Truce?”
>
  I nod. “Truce.”

  I take a step back and he scrambles to his feet. We have reached an impasse. No one is hurt, or likely to be.

  “Is it true, then?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Are they glad I left?”

  Now that he is obliged to live and let live, he thinks more carefully about how to answer, and reluctantly mumbles, “Not as much as I said.”

  “And Maebh?”

  “I don’t know, to be honest. I haven’t seen her in a long time. But she was the one who suggested you might come here when we were first searching for you.”

  “So you were part of the search party?”

  He begrudgingly allows me this truth rather than deny it. I suspect this is as close as Callum can ever get to apologizing to someone. I want to laugh – not out of scorn, but at the sight of his face: he looks as if he would have preferred to lose a real fight than be put through this. It occurs to me that he can’t possibly have volunteered to back down. So someone else must have told him to apologize. Either Adam or Grace stood up for me. For me!

  “I was probably a bit harsh in saying you were guaranteed to die out here, too,” I say, looking away as I make this admission.

  “Not overly though,” says Callum. “I’m not really cut out for this kind of thing. If there was anywhere else I could hide out, I would. But at least with you I know you aren’t going back into Llandymna any time soon to tell them where I am.”

  “Believe me, it would take a lot more than the thought of getting you in trouble to make me want to ever go back there. And it’s not so bad, looking after yourself out here. It’s a good time of year for finding food. You’ll survive.”

  “Of course I will,” he snaps, determined suddenly that he will not have my sympathy. “I can look after myself.”

  “Then you’d better get back and make sure that roof is secure. Those clouds are coming in fast, and that means we’ll have rain before it gets dark.”

  He is glad to be given an excuse to leave after the awkwardness of being civil to me, and hurries away in approximately the right direction.

  It looks as though we have agreed not to be enemies, for the sake of convenience if nothing else. I doubt we will ever be friends, but it’s something at least. I have no friends here, unless Lleu can be counted, and I seem to see him less and less all the time. He has flown down from his perch to sit on my shoulder, and is trying to rip my hair out with his beak right now. But Adam and Grace must have taken my side instead of Callum’s! Even as I think of this, a smile grows on my face. Lleu flies away, flustered, when I start walking too fast for him to keep his balance.

  They took my side, they took my side; they agree with me; they think I am not in the wrong. They told Callum to do something about it!

  I pass the boundary and see that it is broken again, despite all my work this morning. I should be annoyed, but I don’t care. I walk straight past it and head for my house. In the doorway is the pile of firewood where I left it earlier. I had almost forgotten that today is my last day of being seventeen: of being counted as a child. From tomorrow I am anyone’s equal.

  Chapter nine

  Rhiannon

  I have been awake for what feels like hours. It’s cold even wrapped up inside the sleeping bag, and my back aches. Every time I turn to try to get comfortable, there seems to be a stone or knot of hard ground digging into my shoulder blades. I curl up with the blanket drawn around me and through the doorway watch the sky slowly lighten beyond the tops of the trees. As it turns first grey and then gold with the slow sunrise, I find myself humming “Happy birthday to me”.

  I am eighteen, but this is not the start to my adult life I ever imagined. It prompts me to think further ahead than I have done for a while. I’ve been so focused on what I will need to survive the coming winter, I’ve barely considered what I will do after that, with all the years that will follow. I find that I can’t imagine them at all. Long is the day and long is the night, and long is the waiting of Arawn.

  I get up and wash my hair in the stream, then wring out as much of the water as I can, twisting it tightly so that drops rain back down. I have no brush, so I scrape my fingers through the worst of the tangles and then plait it as tightly as possible to keep it away from my face. That will have to do. It’s not as if I was ever going to have a big party today with lots of friends: I am not Diana. It will soon be her birthday too, and I was supposed to be helping set up for that. She will have to find someone else to make centrepieces for the tables.

  This morning I will go and pick elderberries for my breakfast. Later, I will treat myself to one of the tins of soup I took from Diana’s house. It is my birthday, after all.

  Lleu swoops into the clearing just in front of my house and alights in front of me. He gives me his usual expectant stare.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve come to wish me penblwydd hapus, have you?” I say. The hawk starts towards me, expecting me to offer my arm as a perch, but I shake my head and stay put.

  “Not today,” I tell Lleu. I am probably imagining the indignant look in his eyes as he alights in a nearby tree instead.

  I might try to avoid Callum for a day or two, after our fight. I know we reached a kind of agreement in the end, but I still feel like keeping some distance between us, in case he is still angry with me. I will quickly go to say hello to Adam and Grace when they come to the woods today, but then I will come back to my house.

  It is late morning when I hear voices in the distance to tell me that they must be here. I go to the road, followed at a distance by Lleu, where I find Grace and Callum talking, but there is no sign of Adam. Grace is holding a shoebox. I hesitate, seeing that Callum is there, but Grace has already spotted me.

  “Morning,” she says. “This is for you.” She hands me the box, but I do not understand.

  “What is it?”

  “A birthday present,” she says. Has she bought me shoes for my birthday? My current pair may be caked in mud, but they are still in one piece and it had not occurred to me to replace them. I was planning to go barefoot next summer when the ground is dry. Grace continues, “It isn’t the most conventional of gifts, but I hope you’ll find everything in there useful.”

  I lift the lid. The box is crammed full: I can see plasters and bandages, dried food packets, a ball of string, a box of matches, and that is just the top layer. Further down, a brand new pair of socks sits half hidden under a bar of chocolate.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Adam is on his way. He had some things to pick up. Oh, there he is.” Grace points as Adam comes marching up the path. Over his shoulder he carries a piece of timber a little less than a metre long, and a length of rope coiled around his arm.

  “Right,” he says, not stopping as he reaches us, “come on. This way!”

  “What’s happening?” Callum asks, but Grace does not explain. My plan of returning to the mill evaporates as curiosity takes over. I glance over my shoulder to where the hawk sits watching. Lleu makes no move towards us, and somehow I know he will not come wherever we are going. With a last look back to the sparrowhawk, I turn my attention to the group. Bewildered, we all follow Adam further into the woods, until he stops at Owl’s Ledge. This is where the stream becomes a waterfall, pouring over the drop in the land. I am always afraid of coming this way at night, in case I lose my way and tumble down over the edge. But in daylight this place is incredible. The water is so clear, and after it has hurtled over the rocks, it becomes tranquil again so that you can see the trees reflected in the stream.

  “Come and give me a hand here, Callum,” says Adam. He picks a beech tree near the water and starts to climb up it.

  “I still don’t get what’s going on,” Callum protests as he stands at the foot of the tree. I glance over to Grace to see if she looks concerned. She seems to be the one who keeps Adam in check. She is smilin
g, so I think that means everything is under control. When she starts to look worried, I will know there’s a problem. I try to guess what they are planning: something useful for Callum, no doubt. Perhaps a pulley system for collecting water, or a trap for hunting small animals.

  “Simple,” says Adam, pulling himself up onto a higher branch. “While we’ve been helping you out here, we’ve sorted out the essentials – food, shelter, water, warmth – but we forgot one very important thing. Throw me that rope, would you?”

  He is sitting on a branch hanging over the stream, his legs dangling in the air above us. Callum tries to throw the rope up to him, but it falls far too short. The second time, he throws it higher and Adam catches it. He ties one end of the rope around the branch.

  “This here’s a bowline knot,” he says. “Should be strong enough to hold.”

  “So what did you forget?” Callum asks.

  Adam slides back down to the ground and takes up the piece of wood. It has a piece chipped out of the middle, so that when he ties the rope around it, it does not slide to either end, but holds. He pulls sharply on it to test its strength.

  “That even when things are bad, there’s still room for some fun,” he says. “So, who wants the first turn?”

  He has built a tree swing. My first thought on seeing it is that we will have to take the whole thing down before the end of the day, otherwise someone might see it and it could lead to further search parties in the woods. I’m always so careful not to leave anything behind when I’m outside of my little portion of land, in case it gives away my location.

  “Go on then,” says Grace, seeing that Callum and I have not moved. To my surprise, she takes a run up to the swing seat and launches over the water. It’s strange to see her behaving like this when I always think of her as the sensible one next to her brother.

  Callum seems to accept the idea of the tree swing very quickly, and as soon as Grace jumps down, he declares it is his turn. I am becoming more and more uneasy though. What if I fall off? What if I am not even tall enough to reach the swing seat in the first place? The trouble with situations that are supposed to be fun is that there is a high risk of everyone laughing at you. I think of all the practical things I need to be doing today: gathering food and firewood, washing and drying out some clothes, repairing the boundary to my land where it is starting to fall in on the north side.