Page 52 of The Neverfear

Her eyes were closed and her lips were blue. He chewed the apple, as he had seen her do for Koo. He took her face in his hands and forced the pulp between her teeth.

‘It’s pretty disgusting,’ he said, trying to keep his voice light. ‘Your dad did warn us.’ He held her upright and spoke to her as he had to the unicorn foal, a whole world ago. ‘That’s good. You just keep breathing.’

She suddenly began to shake, to vibrate and convulse.

‘No!’ He knelt over her, his eyes fixed on her face. ‘Please, Anya.’ He put his mouth on hers and tried to force breath into her lungs.

She took a sudden heaving gasp. ‘The apple!’ she croaked. ‘Get the golden apple!’

He turned, and his heart gave a terrible lurch. The tree was a fireball.

‘Go, Christopher!’

He ran to it, but six feet away he had to halt: it was a furnace, like trying to touch the sun.

‘No,’ said Anya. ‘No, no.’ She struggled to her feet. Together they stared.

It took some time for the fire to burn down. The trunk was a charred stump. All that was left of the apples was a puddle of molten gold singeing the grass.

Christopher dropped down to search feverishly, hands sweeping half blindly at the ground, but there was nothing to find: every apple had been destroyed.

‘We failed,’ said Jacques. His voice was small and harsh.

Anya put her head in her hands and cried out, a cry so passionate that it shook the air between them. ‘Irian,’ she said.

It was Ratwin who led them back to the boat. It was Ratwin whose small voice guided them through the dusk and up the gangplank, murmuring, coaxing. ‘We wills find a way. Just get backs to the ship.’

On the boat a note awaited them, weighted with a stone.

Christopher bent to read it. He couldn’t hold it still; the paper shook in his hand.

You failed. Now Irian Guinne dies.

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.