Greenwild, page 23
As before, Napoleon raced ahead down the path. But this time Daisy had Acorn beside her, and she squeezed the younger girl’s hand as they hurried through the wood. The scent of roses surged up on every side, and Daisy saw the lanterns glowing along the path and the window of the guardhouse twinkling like a little white star. Daisy felt all around her the unmistakable atmosphere of Mallowmarsh on the breeze: of cool water and silver birches and plum trees, the tang of rich and concentrated green magic that had built up in one place for centuries. She was almost dizzy with it. How could she have not sensed it before?
There was a strange murmuring amidst the branches, an uneasy shiver and stirring, as if the ancient oaks were tossed by an unearthly wind that made them whisper, Hurry, hurry. Faster.
Daisy began to run, pulling Acorn behind her. She had a terrible feeling of foreboding and her heart beat in relentless double-time inside her ears.
Boom-boom, boom-boom.
Too-late, too-late.
Then they heard a scream, and a smash of exploding glass. The guard hut was abandoned. A figure in red overalls was lying utterly still on the ground outside it. Daisy didn’t have to go closer to know that it was Captain Malarky. She stifled a cry and sprinted toward the great lawn with Napoleon racing ahead and Acorn’s hand clutched in her own. The air smelled of fire and burning, with sparks streaming upward into the night sky like swarming, fiery hornets, strangely beautiful against the dark.
Mallowmarsh was on fire.
Craven was already here.
They were too late.
The fire was racing across the great lawn, gaining force and scale like a great, ravenous mouth that consumed everything in its path and left only ashes in its wake. Gardeners and under-gardeners were running around in panic, sprinting with buckets of water from the lake toward the source of the flames, and shouts filled the air as the priceless aerial tulips around the Great Glasshouse became fiery torches, flaring up against the night. The lower panes began to buckle and warp in the heat that gathered from all sides.
As they came closer to the Great Glasshouse, Daisy saw the Prof at the edge of the woods, directing a squadron of apprentices with slingshots of stones and pebbles. The Prof’s aim was unerring. The stones made contact with one of the attackers, who staggered and fell unconscious to the ground.
She spotted Indigo at the edge of the lake, helping frantic gardeners who were pulling buckets of water from the lake and splashing it over the fire. But it was hopeless, like spitting into a furnace. The water sputtered and steamed before it even reached the flames.
Finally, Daisy saw the man standing at the center of the inferno. It was Craven, tall and smiling his charming lopsided smile. Daisy watched as he sloshed a bucket of gasoline across the grass and dropped a lighted match onto the ground.
WHUMPH.
The figure opposite him went staggering back, and Daisy recognized the slight form of Artemis. She righted herself, weaving giant vines in her hands, calling snaking roots out of the ground at Craven’s feet so that they erupted and tangled around his legs, and he was forced to slice at them with the knife in his belt.
“Enough, Cardew,” she called, her voice steady. “It’s not too late to make peace.”
“Make peace?” Craven jeered. “You weren’t so keen on making peace eight years ago, when they took my magic.” He dropped another match, and a wall of flame shot up into the sky. Daisy held her breath, but Craven was staring at something beyond the fire.
There was a terrible splintering noise like a howl of pain. Daisy turned to see the Heart Oak sway in the air, as ten figures wielding axes finished cutting through its massive trunk. She looked on in horror as the noble, ancient tree, the guardian of Mallowmarsh, pitched through the dark, ribbons streaming, and its great branches crashed down across the lake like the death of everything good in the world.
There was a great ringing stillness.
Daisy could feel the loss like a black hole in the air.
Mallowmarshers stood paralyzed, despairing, leaving their positions undefended as a ghastly figure climbed on top of the trunk and began to laugh: a mad and empty sound.
It was Matron.
Daisy felt a rage such as she had never known before, as if an axe had sliced through her own chest and released a flare of magma. She was sprinting toward Matron. She was going to kill her. She was going to—
Then she heard a cry from behind her and turned to see Artemis crumple and fall to the earth, a sob of pain tumbling from her open mouth.
“NO!” Daisy turned and ran back. Artemis lay still and unmoving, cut off by a channel of flames. It was true: Artemis’s life was bound to the Heart Oak. And now they were both gone.
Daisy looked at Craven through the flames, her face slick with tears that evaporated in the burning air. His eyes were flat and emotionless, like a shark’s. She could see him lighting another match.
Then Sheldrake was running from the woods, dodging streams of fire and shouting in fury. He wove vines from his hands as he ran, and they erupted viciously around Matron’s feet on the Heart Oak stump so that she toppled like a statue from a plinth and lay still. Sheldrake didn’t even pause. He ran until he was standing in front of Artemis’s body, shielding it from the flames.
“No need to look so upset, Sheldrake,” said Craven. “I’ve barely started.” His eyes glittered, reflecting the firelight. “Stand aside. Or I’ll let this place burn until I can pick your beloved commander’s bones from the ashes.”
“Over my dead body,” growled Sheldrake.
“With pleasure.” Craven dropped a match into another slick of gasoline. Daisy could see lines of flame snaking out into the darkness, all the way to the edges of the Mallow Woods.
Sheldrake staggered back from another wall of fire. The smell of sulfur filled the air.
Daisy and Acorn edged forward, unseen, picking their way across a break in the flames. At last, they crouched behind Artemis’s fallen body, hidden by billows of smoke. Napoleon was by her side, licking and licking Artemis’s cheek.
Craven was still smiling. Daisy could see the bulge of the dandelight in his coat pocket. “You forget, Sheldrake, that I have two hostages: children of Mallowmarsh. If you don’t do as I say, they will die.”
What happened next had the unreality of a dream.
Daisy saw Artemis’s chest move: the slightest rise, like the wing of a moth.
She bundled Napoleon into Acorn’s arms. “Keep each other safe,” she said.
And she stepped forward to face Craven.
Chapter 48
“You’re wrong, Craven.” Daisy’s voice rang out over the roar of flames.
He turned furiously, his face a mask of anger and disbelief.
“You!”
Daisy moved so fast that Craven didn’t have time to react. She hissed as she brushed past him and pulled the dandelight from his coat with the lightness of a pickpocket. It was heavy and cool in her hands, like a crystal ball.
Craven gave a great yell of fury and snatched at her. But she was already beyond him, sprinting for the Great Glasshouse.
She saw his eyes widen. Then she placed one foot on the first rung of the ladder that climbed up the side of the glasshouse to its towering roof.
“Bring it back, girl. Bring it here now, or everything will burn.”
“Everything’s already burning,” said Daisy, surprised at the steadiness of her voice. She took another step farther up the ladder. “If you want it, come and get it.” And then she climbed up hand over fist, not thinking of the ground beneath her, thinking only of going higher, of drawing Craven away from her friends, away from Artemis, away from the gardens.
She had a few seconds’ head start, and then she heard a shout of rage as Craven dropped the gasoline and sprinted after her, felt the ladder shift and tremble below her with his weight. Up and up she climbed, higher and higher, breathing fast at the effort, the dandelight tucked inside her jacket in the spot where Napoleon usually curled himself against her chest.
The ground dropped away and the air became cooler as she reached the level of the roof. All around her the night was lit up by a terrible red-white glow, spreading its desolation in an ever-widening circle across the grounds. She felt dizzy with vertigo and terror.
She pulled herself up onto the glass roof of the Great Glasshouse, where the ladder flattened out and became a horizontal track across its curving top. She glanced down through the glass and saw the highest palm trees swaying centimeters below her feet and the solid stone floor forty meters below. She looked up quickly, staggered and almost fell. Her fear was thick enough to bite down on.
“Don’t look down, Daisy,” she whispered. She breathed. In, out.
Courage, joonam.
She stood unsteadily and backed away as Craven’s head cleared the roof and he clambered up to stand opposite her, breathing hard.
Now he was coming toward her, reaching into his belt and pulling out something that gleamed sleekly in the firelight, alien and horribly out of place.
A knife: glittering with the blue electricity of a lightning seed embedded in the hilt.
“A toy from Darkmarket,” said Craven, grinning.
Daisy backed away farther, panicking now, knowing that in seconds she’d run out of roof.
“Hand it over,” said Craven.
His voice was cool, fearless: he looked invincible. Daisy remembered, suddenly, that this was the man who had killed Hal.
There were frantic shouts and cries from below as people spotted the drama playing itself out above. Daisy could see the Prof’s horrified face, Acorn running forward as if to help and Sheldrake, upright once more, pushing them both roughly aside and sprinting toward the ladder.
The knife shone coolly in the fiery night as Craven came forward and lifted it to Daisy’s throat. It was very sharp, and she saw the play of electricity around it, just millimeters from her skin. There was sudden silence all around, broken only by the dull crackling of the flames.
“Nobody move,” he roared from the rooftop. “Or she dies.” He gestured around him with his free hand, pointing it for a moment at Sheldrake, whose head was almost level with the roof.
He turned back to Daisy and stared at her with his flat eyes.
“I see you’re wearing the necklace you stole,” he said. “You worthless little thief.”
“It was never yours,” hissed Daisy furiously. “It belongs to my mother.”
“Finders, keepers.” He smiled an unlovely smile. “My men took that necklace from your mother’s dead body. Just like I’ll take it from yours.”
Daisy swayed, unanchored by rage and grief.
“You’re nothing but a murderer.”
He laughed. “I’m much more than that, my dear. The Grim Reapers are hunting down your kind across the world. We’re unstoppable.”
So it’s true, thought Daisy. Grim Reapers. All the nightmares are real.
But Craven was still speaking. “Hunting down Botanists is only the beginning. We’re going to conquer the Greenwild, one pocket at a time. Thanks to your bauble”—he waved his knife at the dandelight—“nowhere will be safe. And when I hand over Mallowmarsh to the Great Reaper, why then”—he smiled—“I’ll be rewarded. The Great Reaper will return the magic that was stolen from me.” His eyes were almost black in the darkness. “Leila Thistledown was nothing, and she died like a nobody. Like you all will.” He spat the words, and Daisy’s fear was replaced by a terrible heat that blazed from her bones and out through her throat.
“Ma was better than you’ll ever be,” she said, her voice hoarse.
She was aware of the lake below her, and beyond it the dandelion meadow shimmering against the night. Somewhere down there was a hidden garden, and inside it a sapling.
The plan arrived in her mind as if it had always been there.
Slowly, each move deliberate, she reached into her jacket and pulled out the shining dandelight. She saw Craven follow it with his eyes as she lifted it. Silently, with the fingertips of her mind, she began to gather a hundred threads of magic.
“Here,” she said, and she tossed the dandelight high into the air.
Several things happened very quickly. Craven fumbled as he tried to free his hands to catch the soaring globe. The glittering knife dropped from his grasp and the lightning seed in the hilt exploded on contact, shattering the glass beneath their feet with a noise like a thousand chandeliers exploding. And the roof began to fall inward like sheets of ice collapsing into a dark lake.
Craven leaped as the dandelight rose and spun and hung suspended in the air above them.
Daisy felt the darkness reach out its arms for her, and with the last of her energy, she called out to every leaf and branch and vine in the glasshouse below and felt them surge upward at her command, smashing the remains of the roof and rising around her like a giant cat’s cradle. She sent out a vine to lasso the dandelight from the air and flick it toward her like a toy. And then she fell, as if in slow motion, backward into the darkness, and into the green arms of a living rainforest.
The last thing she saw was Craven as he teetered, cried out—and then plummeted through the heart of the broken roof and toward the solid stone floor forty meters below.
Chapter 49
There was an instant of silence, and then a savage roar as Craven’s Grim Reapers began to fight with redoubled fury, splashing gasoline and sending up new arcs of flame into the blazing sky.
Daisy had asked the vines to fling her as far as they could from the battle, and she landed with an almighty smack on the grass beside the lake. The shock of the impact was immense. Napoleon leaped into her arms and she lurched to her feet, watching as the Mallowmarshers staggered back from a fresh attack. She didn’t have much time.
Pain radiated from her wrist, and she wondered if the bone had cracked as she’d fallen. But there was no time to think of that now.
There was only time to run.
Around the lake, past the Roost, into the dandelion meadow she ran, the dandelight clutched in her hand, until she was tumbling through the old wooden door and into a warm summer night where the world was peaceful and Mallowmarsh was still safe. There were white climbing roses, and lavender and cherry trees in the moonlight. The sky swarmed with stars. And there, in the apple tree, was Hal.
He took one look at her face and leaped down to meet her.
“Is everything all right?” His voice was worried, urgent. He peered at her through his glasses and came to crouch next to her on the grass.
Daisy shook her head, thinking of Mallowmarsh burning, the Heart Oak falling and the still form of Artemis lying pale on the ground.
Wordlessly, Hal placed an arm around her, and Daisy felt a wave of comfort like being tucked inside a warm, bright house on a cold, rainy night. The temptation to stay was almost overwhelming.
She took a deep breath. “I—I don’t have much time.” She forced herself to remember that, outside the garden, a battle was raging, and every second counted. She got up and walked toward the knobbly little sapling they’d uncovered and which she had barely paid attention to, overshadowed as it was by the luster of the silver apples. It had grown in exactly the spot where she’d tossed down her coat that first night.
The spot where Ma’s shriveled old seed had fallen out.
Now, growing from the rough, twisted little branch, was a single, perfect pomegranate. Not big and scarlet like the ones at Moonmarket, but small and the color of sunrise and coral and watermelon, streaked with veins of silver like ore lines of moonlight.
She had staked everything on this guess, but now she felt the truth like a zigzag of lightning through her bones. It was the pomegranate she’d read about in The Compleat Botanist.
Ma had brought the seed with her from Iran, and it had grown here in the garden that Daisy and Hal had worked to make together.
A tree said to take root only where a true friendship exists.
Hal was standing beside her. “I can’t believe it,” he said, and his face was wonder-struck. “A real, live whishogg.”
“I know,” said Daisy. She understood, at last, that this tree was the heart of the hidden garden. Its power pulsed outward like the blood through her veins, and she knew that if she picked the fruit, she’d never be able to come back.
“But … it’s incredible!” Hal gave a sort of leap, as if he had pins and needles in his legs. “My first discovery. Yours too. And in our own garden!” He jigged up and down on the spot, and then—“Ow!” He cursed. He’d collided with the lowest branch of the apple tree, and it had sliced across his left eyebrow. A trickle of blood was falling from the cut. “It’s nothing,” he said, dancing up and down. “Ow!”
Daisy laughed despite herself; he looked so comical that she couldn’t help it. “Here,” she said, handing him a dock-leaf to mop the blood. “You’ll probably have a nice dashing scar, like a pirate captain.”
Then suddenly it hit her.
She looked at his white-blond hair, his dark eyes, the cut across his eyebrow and at last she knew why he seemed so familiar; like someone she had always known. It was the face she had examined a thousand times, slightly blurred, standing beside Ma and laughing out at her from a faded photograph.
It was the face of her father.
Dizzily she sat down in the crook of the apple tree, which curled a steadying branch around her waist.
Hal was staring at her, looking concerned. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes. Fine.” Daisy stared at his sharp profile in the moonlight, all her urgency forgotten.
She remembered playing on the sun-flooded wooden floors of an old house, rolling a paperweight back and forth between them. She remembered flying a kite, his hands steady over hers as they guided it across the sky. She remembered him swinging her round and round in a blur until she screamed. She remembered the rumble of his voice reading her a story and the quirk of his eyebrow when he was amused, with that funny white scar running through it.
