The Bone Quill Read online

  As he was about to push through the heavy oak door behind the altar and head inside the monastery, Solon heard raised voices. He ducked behind the altar.

  Tam and Rab came through the door, rags tied around their faces to mask the sickly sweet stench of embalming fluid. Solon recognized the village embalmers and was about to reveal himself when Tam spoke.

  ‘If ye ask me, we shouldn’t be worrying about the dead so much, Rab. Not after what I’ve heard.’

  Rab’s shaved head and pocked skin made him look like a troll. ‘What have you heard?’

  Tam dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘I think the Vikings left a spy. Some of the monks saw a stranger wandering the hillside not long after the attack.’ He glanced over his shoulder at the bodies before yanking Rab off to the side as if the dead were eavesdropping. ‘And that’s not all. The relic the Vikings were looking for? They were forced away without it. They’ll be back worse than before once the stranger has spied out our weaknesses. Mark my words.’

  A gust of wind blew open the door. Solon saw the two men jump with fright.

  ‘If a spy is in our midst,’ said Rab, recovering first and hiking his trousers up over his soft paunch, ‘it would explain the strange goings on since the attack. Food’s been getting pinched, and more than the usual—’

  ‘Aye,’ interrupted Tam, ‘and my lad who empties the slop pails has seen more than one monk recently forgetting where he was and what he’s supposed to be doing, as if he were under some kind of spell. I’m thinking the Viking gods cursed our island.’ He pulled a pouch stuffed with smashed roots and herbs from under his shirt. ‘This’ll ward away the devil himself.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Rab, quickly touching the edge of the pouch before Tam settled it back under his tunic. ‘But aren’t we better prepared than we were? We’ve erected beacons along the coastline, and the Abbot has put his best archers on the wall.’

  Tam scanned the chapel. ‘Fat lot of good all that’ll do us if a spy betrays our defences.’

  Solon shifted his position, making his boots squeak on the stone flags behind the altar. Instantly, Rab lifted his hammer from his belt, and Tam slipped his knife from its sheath. They inched slowly towards where Solon was hiding. Tam was about to lean over the wooden altar table when one of the kitchen cats darted out from under a front pew.

  Both men laughed and relaxed. Then they attended to the job at hand, nailing the lids on to the coffins and carrying the dead to the crypt.

  Solon stopped holding his breath when the door swung shut behind them. Until the attack, he had found the monastery of Era Mina to be a place of solace and protection. Now it was becoming a bubbling cauldron of secrets and suspicions. A cauldron that was about to boil over.

  THREE

  The Abbey

  Auchinmurn Isle

  Present Day

  On the massive corkboard near the sitting-room door, there was a photograph of Matt, Em and their mother taken in front of a fountain in London a year ago, before their lives had changed. They all looked so happy, ignorant of what was about to happen. Matt stared at the photograph for a long time, trying hard to separate his longing for his missing mum from his anger at what she had done to his dad.

  He felt his sister’s thoughts in his head.

  Mum’s okay, Matt. Wherever she is, I feel that she’s okay.

  You don’t really know that, Em.

  You’re right. But I trust that Mum left us for a reason. When we figure out exactly what that was, then we’ll find her. I know we will.

  ‘I’d like to be anywhere but here, in this room, in this Abbey,’ said Matt aloud.

  Em was finishing a panel of sketches at the drafting table that sat in front of the sitting room’s tall windows. She was creating a comic book about their recent adventures. ‘How about bikes?’ she offered, her eyes on her work. ‘We could make a motocross track in the woods again. You and Zach are getting pretty good.’

  ‘Maybe,’ answered Matt, ‘but the track’s beyond the wall.’

  He glanced irritably at the swirling ribbons of white fog seeping like dry ice in and around the high medieval wall that enclosed the Abbey compound. The fog was an animated force-field powerful enough to trap any intruding animation and reduce it to its base elements of light and colour.

  During the day, the shield continually animated itself into any number of logical and obvious things that might be found on the high stone wall of an historic Celtic abbey. Yesterday, the postman had seen thick vines of ivy, and commented to Jeannie, the Abbey’s housekeeper, on the beautiful white flowers that had somehow managed to blossom between the stones despite the thickness of the wall. The day before, a school group visiting the island had bicycled past, cheering in appreciation at the festive flags and colourful streamers threaded between the stones.

  At night, the white mist oozing from the walls took on an eerie bluish tint. Anyone looking closely assumed that the vapour was the phosphorescent glow generated by spotlights anchored next to the hellhound gargoyles on the wall’s perimeter.

  Of course, the smoky animation was also designed to interfere with any animations the twins might try to create in order to get outside the Abbey grounds themselves. They were not so much in prison as protective custody, but the distinction made little difference to Matt. Either way, he was trapped; and when he felt trapped, he felt powerless; and when he felt powerless, he felt hostile.

  ‘I can’t stand being cooped up any longer,’ he said, flipping through a stack of video games sitting next to the flat-screen TV. He discarded them one at a time without any concentrated consideration of the titles.

  ‘Oh, would you please stop fidgeting!’ said Em. She was applying a tint to a panel of a beautiful flying stag – a peryton. ‘You know we can’t go anywhere.’

  Even on the paper, Em’s peryton pulsed with energy. She had shaded its body in a pure white and was smudging a light grey charcoal crayon across the surface to ‘pop’ its massive wings.

  Matt turned the pad so he could examine the image. ‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll animate that? Simon would not be happy if he had to repair another set of stained-glass windows.’

  When the peryton had last appeared on Auchinmurn, it had crashed through a massive stained-glass window in one of the converted cloisters of the medieval monastery that had once stood on the site of the Abbey.

  An expression of annoyance crossed Em’s face. ‘You may not have been paying attention in our lessons recently, but I have. If we want to continue to develop as artists, we have to learn to control our Animare abilities when we draw, so that every drawing we create doesn’t come alive. The First Rule, remember? Never animate in public.’

  She turned the pad back round. ‘I’m practising so that I can draw without unintentionally bringing something to life. You should be practising, too.’

  ‘I don’t need to,’ snapped Matt.

  Em wasn’t about to admit this aloud, but her brother’s assessment of his abilities was true. Matt’s Animare powers were developing more quickly than hers, and although her Guardian abilities were stronger than Matt’s, Em was not fully in control of her imagination all of the time. Matt, on the other hand, was much more able to disconnect, to turn his powers on and off.

  You’ll equal his abilities someday, Em. I know you will.

  Em smiled at Zach. It was comforting to have him in her head – most of the time – and to know he was aware of how she felt, especially when sadness gripped her and she fretted for hours about her mum.

  FOUR

  A large picture on the opposite wall of the sitting room caught Matt’s eye. ‘Let’s go back to London,’ he said, waving at the painting. ‘Just for a few minutes. I miss it. Don’t you?’

  Lip-reading from the couch, Zach jumped up. ‘Oh, no! You’re not going anywhere, and you’re certainly not going into a painting.’

  ‘Zach’s right,’ said Em nervously. ‘We promised. No animating without supervision.’

  ‘Forget that,’ said
Matt, standing the painting on the empty easel in the corner. He flipped to a clean sheet of paper on his sketchpad. ‘No one will ever know.’

  ‘I will,’ signed Zach, stepping in front of the easel.

  ‘You’d tell on us?’ Matt challenged.

  Em prepared to separate the boys if this escalated into a fight. ‘I’m not helping you go into the picture, Matt,’ she warned.

  ‘I may not need you to.’

  ‘You may be getting stronger, but you’re not Leonardo da Vinci yet.’

  ‘You can’t stop me if I want to do it.’

  ‘If you’re so smart,’ said Em, her annoyance building, ‘then you should be able to tell I don’t want to do this.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Matt. He grinned at his sister. ‘I know you’d like to go back to London, even if it’s only for a few minutes.’

  His green eyes were filled with more excitement than Em had seen in weeks.

  You’re not seriously considering doing this, Em.

  No, Zach ... okay, maybe ... I can’t let him do it alone. That’s not ... that’s not me. That’s not us. We help each other. We always have, and especially now with Mum gone.

  ‘Stop talking about me in your heads,’ begged Matt, pulling his fingers through his long, dark hair in agitation. ‘I can tell when you do that. I’m not completely clueless about you two.’

  Em stared at the picture that Matt had placed on the easel. It was a study for Claude Monet’s The Thames below Westminster: a beautiful, richly textured painting of the River Thames. The National Gallery in London had the final painting.

  She had to admit, she did miss London.

  ‘Em. No,’ signed Zach in warning. He was aware that he couldn’t stop the twins on his own if they decided to act together. Their combined powers as Animare were far too strong for his fledgling Guardian abilities. If they got into trouble, he doubted he could help them.

  Picking up a crayon, Matt began to copy the painting, his nimble fingers whipping across the paper. First, he sketched the outline of Westminster and the impressive gabled arches of St Stephen’s Tower, then the distinctive spire of Big Ben in the painting’s soft but luminous background.

  Keeping the image firmly in his imagination, Matt passed the impressive outline to Em, who glanced at Zach regretfully before grabbing a couple of pastels from the table and filling in the drawing.

  ‘Well,’ said Matt, looking at the wooden pier standing on stilts over the Thames. ‘Are you going to tell on us or not, Zach?’

  Zach gave a sigh of resignation. ‘Not. But only if I can come into the painting with you.’

  FIVE

  The Monastery of Era Mina

  Middle Ages

  Solon sat in Brother Renard’s isolated chamber, watching the old monk as he slept in his birch-branch rocking chair beside the roaring hearth. Brother Renard’s skin had turned the colour of a ripe turnip, his hair had begun to fall out in clumps, and bursts of agitated zeal were followed by periods of exhaustion. All these changes saddened Solon more than he could say. Since the Abbot had made the agonizing decision to lock away Brother Renard and his fracturing imagination, the local stonemason had started work on a tower for the old monk on the northern tip of Era Mina, where he would be safe from the world and the world safe from him. Until its completion, Brother Renard was isolated here in the furthest corner of the darkest wing of the monastery, under Solon’s watchful eye.

  The only window in the room was barred with wooden shutters, the sunlight slipping in through the narrow slats. From the fire, a log spat and snapped like an angry hound. Two tall, carved candelabra lit the tiny room, their wax dripping on to the mantel in honey-scented drops. The air in the room was pleasant, if a bit stifling, the smells of the wax blending with the scent of heather from inside the bedrolls. For centuries, the women of the village had been stuffing bedding with heather and grass, believing the perfume warded off nightmares. It would take more than heather to ward off poor Brother Renard’s. When an Animare lost control of his imagination, the loss caused far more damage inside the mind than out.

  A knock at the door startled Solon to his feet. Visitors to the room were few. He lifted a brass key tied to a strip of leather under his tunic and unlocked the door to admit the visitor.

  ‘Brother Cornelius!’

  Solon liked the monastery’s herbalist and healer, a short, stout monk with rosy cheeks, a wide, hooked nose and a clerical crown of tonsured red hair. Waddling into the room in his black robes, Brother Cornelius looked like the birds that nested on the island’s cliffs. He had taught Solon which plants produced the brightest inks, which trees oozed the best resins, and which seeds could be ground for inks but never eaten.

  Cornelius noted the dishevelled state of Brother Renard. ‘I have a dangerous request, Solon,’ he said. ‘It’s perilous, but a task the Abbot and I know you are more than capable of fulfilling.’

  Solon sensed an odd stillness from Cornelius. The herbalist was exhausted, Solon decided, returning to his three-legged stool. It had been only three days since the Vikings had attacked the monastery, and Cornelius had been hard at work tending to the sick and injured.

  The herbalist sat on the wider of the two bedrolls spread on wooden bunks, beside an embroidered quilt folded neatly at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Has Brother Renard said much since the attack?’ asked Cornelius.

  ‘He speaks a little. He asks about the wounded. He prays for the dead. I’m able to distract him with reading, but his mind rests more peacefully, of course, when his Guardian, the Abbot, is here.’

  ‘Of course,’ nodded Cornelius.

  ‘How may I help you, Brother?’ asked Solon.

  The monk sighed. ‘As you may have heard, many of the wounded from the Viking raid are not healing as quickly or as well as I had hoped. Many who are suffering are children, much younger than you. In the past, Brother Renard was wary of sending you to Skinner’s Bog to gather plants, but I must ask you to go.’

  Solon frowned. ‘Why has Brother Renard not wanted me to go to Skinner’s Bog?’

  ‘Because the bog is the lair of the Grendel.’

  SIX

  Whether the ancient stories called it the mud-monster, the spirit-stalker or the Grendel, every peasant on Auchinmurn knew of the beast of Skinner’s Bog. Solon had heard accounts of the Grendel since he was old enough to sit at the fire and listen to his elders. He doubted that such a creature could ever be as grisly and as foul a force as the storytellers claimed.

  But before Solon could ask Cornelius anything more, Brother Renard woke. He slowly lifted his head and acknowledged his visitor with a nod. A clump of hair floated to the plank floor like a fuzzy insect.

  ‘Cornelius, dear friend.’

  Cornelius smiled fondly. ‘I’ve come with a task for Solon.’

  ‘Ah, the boy is certainly capable.’

  ‘My apologies, master,’ interrupted Solon, ‘but why is it critical that I go to Skinner’s Bog, Brother Cornelius?’

  ‘Skinner’s Bog?’ said Brother Renard, suddenly glaring at Cornelius.

  Solon felt the old monk’s anxiety thumping behind his eyes.

  ‘Because,’ said Cornelius, ‘it’s the only place on the island with a rowan tree. I have no choice. I must have its berries to heal the wounded from the Viking attack before infection sets in.’

  Brother Renard’s eyes narrowed on Cornelius, his rocking increasing in speed. ‘Not possible alone,’ he muttered. ‘Not possible with someone. Not possible at all.’

  ‘The boy has proven himself to be valiant,’ pointed out Cornelius.

  ‘The boy has much still to learn,’ said Renard, his agitation mounting.

  ‘But because of your animation – because you used Solon, Brother – he is now the one connected to the peryton,’ said Brother Cornelius. ‘And you know as well as I do that the peryton can help him find the rowan tree.’

  Solon was stoking the fire, listening carefully to the two monks as the
y argued.

  ‘Some day very soon,’ the Abbot had told him, ‘when your master is able and ready, he will tell you the story of the islands and of our Order. It may well be his final lesson to you, but until then, know that you and your descendants are forever bound to the peryton and to the island of Era Mina.’

  Solon had done his best to encourage, even cajole his master into teaching him this lesson, but his master had always ducked into his own dreams and silences, just when Solon thought he’d caught him at the right moment.

  ‘The boy would be in mortal danger, even with the peryton,’ snapped Renard at Cornelius.

  The old monk’s rocking was becoming more frenzied, and he was scratching his fingers across his lap as if writing on an invisible page. Leaping from his stool, Solon pressed his hands on Brother Renard’s chair, trying to stop its frantic rocking, afraid of the old monk’s rage and what might happen if he lost control.

  ‘But Renard, he must go,’ continued Cornelius pleadingly. ‘Too many will suffer and die if he does not.’

  ‘I won’t allow it!’

  ‘Renard, dear, dear friend,’ said Cornelius. He leaned forward on the edge of the bunk, causing the quilt to slither to the floor. ‘This is not your decision to make. It is Solon’s.’

  Suddenly, Brother Renard’s chin dropped to his chest, and the chair settled. For a fleeting moment, Cornelius thought he had passed away, gone for ever. Then the old monk’s hands started to move at lightning speed across his lap again.

  ‘Look out!’ yelled Solon.

  A royal jester in full court regalia was rising out of one of the quilt squares, flopping his arms and twisting his legs as if they were made of soft clay. But where the jester’s head should have been, there was nothing, only his tri-pointed cap resting on empty shoulders, a wide, gap-toothed grin leering from its centre.