Failure
The night was black with anguish. The wind rose and the boat pitched, and waves six feet high sent spray up over the sides of the Neverfear. It was as if the world itself were raging.
The hours passed like tar. Time became a battlefield.
Anya and Christopher lay together on the deck of the anchored boat. Ratwin and Jacques were two miserable huddles of fur and scales nearby, barely identifiable. Anya’s breath was still harsh and rasping. None spoke.
Christopher curled on his side with his knees up to his chest. It hurt to breathe. His heart felt lacerated. It was far deeper and far more terrible, this pain, than any he had known since Mal’s death.
Questions rose in Christopher’s mind, and he did not have the strength to push them back. Where was Irian? Was she still alive? Would the bandits tell her how he – whom she had loved and cared for – had failed her?
‘Koo is with her,’ Anya whispered. It was not clear if she meant it as comfort or added misery that Koo too would be lost.
He must eventually have slept, because Christopher dreamed, and in his dream, Fidens Nighthand stood at the edge of a great abyss, weeping.
Christopher woke before dawn. Anya was asleep, pale in the shadows of not-yet-morning.
The skin under her eyes was purple. Ratwin lay next to her, curled against her cheek, and in her sleep Anya had reached out for Jacques.
The dragon, who had so steadfastly refused to be touched, stood now on the girl’s upturned palm, upright, unblinking, standing sentinel over her uneasy sleep.
Jacques spoke very low. ‘You’re awake,’ he said to Christopher.
‘Yes.’ It came out in a harsh croak.
‘Go back to sleep.’
He shook his head. Jacques flew up off Anya’s hand to land on the deck beside Christopher.
‘I know what Irian meant to you,’ said Jacques. ‘To you, and to Anya. Motherless cubs. I know that you would have given everything you have for her – that you would have given your lives, all the treasure in the world, every golden apple in Glimouria.’
‘I would.’ Irian had the rare gift of making people feel they were cherished whenever they entered a room.
And then very slowly, as slowly as if his mind were moving through ice, a thought rose in Christopher. ‘Jacques?’
‘Yes?’
‘Did you just say – I would have given every golden apple in Glimouria?’
‘I did.’
And then not slowly at all but in a sudden volcano of molten thought – ‘Jacques! Wait! Are there other golden apples? Not in the garden, I mean – in the rest of the Archipelago?’
Jacques’s eyes began to widen. ‘You’re thinking—’
‘Hercules stole three apples! They’re not in the garden. What happened to them?’
‘Young man! Yes! There must be other apples!’
Christopher turned to Anya, curled in a ball next to him. ‘Wake up!’ He shook her, hard. ‘Anya! Wake up and listen!’
She sat bolt upright like a soldier at war. ‘What? Tell me.’
‘They didn’t say we had to pick the apple! The note just said “Bring”! It’s not over! We can still get a golden apple! We find out where the apples are that Hercules picked, we steal them, we bring them to the Astorians!’
Anya was scrambling to her feet, sudden hope flushing her white cheeks. ‘But we need time!’ She turned and shouted to the sky, desperate. ‘We demand more time!’
Christopher stared around the boat. ‘We need a mirror!’ He sprinted down to the bedroom, snatched the mirror from inside the cupboard, brought it out to the open air and unwrapped it so that all four of them could be seen in it.
He roared at it: ‘I know you’re listening!
Listen then! We will get you an apple! Just give us time! ’
The Tiger came stalking into the mirror, orange and black in the dawn light. It pressed its face close to the glass. And then it spoke with a human voice, a voice that was not its own.
‘You have one last chance. But there is a cost. If you fail, not only Irian Guinne will die. You will all die together.’