Chapter 15 #2
‘I mean, it’s not like he could eat it or anything,’ Sophie splutters. ‘Though I’d like to watch him try. Licking that melted cheese off his lips, brushing crumbs off his muscular chest. Might have to offer to help him with that.’
‘Stop, stop.’ I can barely breathe from laughing.
‘As if he doesn’t know how hot he is, walking around in those silks with his arms out.’
We both fall about laughing again, the sound echoing off the huge uprights.
Something about laughing here feels right, as though it’s a place of joy.
I’ll remember this for ever, I think, as I watch the sky change colour, light chasing shadows across the grass.
As I laugh and breathe in the wild beauty of the stones, of this once sacred place.
Things feel possible here, like the light of a new day.
Maybe it’s a good sign that my Raven rollout tour begins here, even if there’s no one to see me.
‘We should go back,’ Sophie says, once we’ve both calmed down. ‘The next stop tonight isn’t far, but I need to check the route and radio ahead, so they’re ready for us.’
‘Okay.’ Neither of us moves, though. We sit in silence for a while longer, the stones like grey guardians around us.
We’re still quiet when we get back on the coach, as though the place cast a spell on us.
‘I’ve never seen anything like that,’ Sophie says eventually, as she guides the coach along a curving road. ‘It reminded me…
‘Of what we once were?’
‘Yeah.’
I swallow. Shadows lengthen, the day turning towards night. As we enter the outskirts of a city built from honey-coloured stone, I wonder what it was like when humans walked these streets. And how they could walk them again.
The feeling grows as we continue north, through a countryside just turning towards spring, our route taking us through England, dipping into Wales, then further north again, the land becoming wilder, granite mountains like humped beasts surrounding rippling lakes.
As we lounge in heated pools flanked by crumbling statues, as we wander around the soaring moonlit ruins of an ancient abbey, or dance in the vaulted halls of a walled castle by a river, a place where once kings were made.
As we stop on a lonely road, Sophie and I transfixed by the majesty of two giant rusting horseheads rising above the trees, and weep at the futility of it all.
As I’m bowed to by vampires, courted and hand-fed as though I’m a creature to be tamed, all the while aware they use my kind as food, living among the beauty humans have created as though we never existed for anything else.
Receptions where I’m received with everything from reverence to ignorance, where I insist my humanity be acknowledged, rather than brushed aside.
As I’m shown paintings and beautiful buildings and porcelain so fine I can see my fingers through it, each item adding to the ache in my chest, the feeling of something wonderful, irrevocably lost.
As I shake hands with vampires who could kill me in seconds and wonder whether they’re humouring me simply because of who my parents are, or whether they truly believe I’m capable of ruling Raven.
As I walk along crowded streets lined with Raven guards, waving, as my image fills the news feeds.
As I realise why my mother had me do this, analysing each meeting with me afterwards to make sure I understood what I’d done right, and what I’d done wrong.
As I see more of what it means to be Raven and understand what it is I’m fighting to defend.
As I sit with Sophie during the days and watch the landscape slide past. As we pass several Safe Zones. Dark brown towns like scars on the green and rolling landscape, all guarded, all kept apart from the wonder and beauty of the world around them.
And as I spot the red flower symbol here and there. On a crumbling stone wall next to a small bakery in a Safe Zone. Etched into a stone at yet another stone circle. On a rusting shipping container at a dark dock.
It represents something. Whether it’s a human or vampire symbol, I don’t know. But the fact I’m seeing it in human places, rather than vampire ones, suggests it’s somehow connected to them. But what does it mean?
Illegal hunts are one option; they’re a way to make money, organisers selling spots to both hunters and humans.
Perhaps they’re a symbol of a hunt organisation, or a meeting point.
Or maybe it’s another rebellion, though things seem quiet on that front.
The rebellion I’m currently dealing with comes from vampires, not humans.
Which is why I can’t really focus my energy on this right now.
It just feels like too many scattered pieces, that together might mean nothing at all.
But there’s a sense of something eluding me, of a whole world out there I don’t yet fully see.
I’m trying to understand my realm, but it seems that the more I learn, the less I actually know.
So, I tuck each sighting away, like a piece of jigsaw where I don’t have the picture on the box to guide me. I’ll claim my crown, then come back to it.
Because I want to figure it out.