Chapter 1

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Sill cursed quietly as she pricked her finger on the needle she had been using to sew the quilt. Then she glanced over her shoulder, fearful that her father had heard. She knew he was lurking about out there somewhere, waiting for her to make a mistake, waiting for her to fail so he could justify another beating. I won’t fail. Not this time. I’m going to make the best quilt they’ve ever seen. To her relief, there was no sound from outside, no heavy footsteps nearing, so she turned back to her work.

The material was old and tough, and in truth well past its prime for sewing. Sill, however, had little choice in the matter as the quilt was intended to celebrate the birth-sun of Fallor, Hillock’s wisest Elder and village Leader. Nobody was sure exactly how many winters Fallor had seen – and nobody dared ask – but although it was never very cold in the village of Hillock, Fallor’s bones were beginning to feel the chill of old age. Now, with the winter sun once again looming, a warm quilt seemed the ideal gift. Ideal in gesture at least; production was another matter, as Sill had the misfortune of finding out.

The idea had not been Sill’s. She was only to make the damned thing. But the various furs of growler, grunter, bear and the occasional feathered patch of phail she had been given were proving an awkward combination.

Sill resented this task. She knew her father had only volunteered her for the job because he thought it would keep her out of trouble. That was typical of him. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done anything to warrant being labelled trouble. But how he saw her and who she really was were two different things. Nobody really knows me, not even Raffin. I don’t belong here. I want to see things. There was a whole world out there to see and, right now, Sill wasn’t even able to leave the hut. I have to get away. I just have to. But in truth, the thought scared her almost more than her father did. She was too young for such a journey and she didn’t know the first thing about looking after herself. What she did know was that these were not the thoughts of a normal twelve-year-old, but nothing about Sill was normal.

Two suns had come and gone since she began her current task, and yet it was far from completion. Her back ached from leaning over the quilt, and her buttocks were so numb it was as though they had become a part of the wooden floor. Her fingers and forearms hurt, too, from trying to force the needle through the tough growler-hide. Even more aggravating was that Sill knew this particular fur was only being used due to its worth and rarity, rather than practicality. Growlers seldom intruded upon Hillock’s borders these days and Sill suspected this growler had met its end some time ago. At least it’ll be strong, she mused, and she urged herself to concentrate harder on the task in hand.

The room she was in – her room – was hot. Swelteringly hot. A bead of sweat dripped from her long, brown hair and slid slowly down her forehead, threatening to sting her eyes. Sill sighed and wiped a slim wrist across her brow, mopping up some of the moisture. She closed her eyes for a moment and focussed her mind. Gradually the air around her began to stir. Particles buzzed excitedly as they grew in speed, gently accelerating until the air became a light breeze. Sill concentrated on the breeze, forcing it to swirl around the room until she had dispelled some of the hot air and reduced the room’s humidity. This was a trick she usually refrained from doing around the village but in this instance there was really no choice. Besides, she was all alone and her father had told her she was not allowed to leave the hut until she had finished her work, and she could not finish her work in such stifling conditions. I’m so bored, she thought and she sighed again and set her mind upon not calculating how much longer it would take to complete this tiresome chore.

The village did not own enough growler skin for a whole quilt and could not spare enough grunters – whose texture would have provided a far more suitable fabric – to finish the job. Instead, Sill was faced with the tedious task of sewing all the various parts together in a manner that alluded to intentional design, and not mere extravagance. As fatigue and dizziness began to cloud her young mind, she felt as though the quilt was getting further and further from completion. There was no arrangement of furs that would avoid making the phail-feathers stand out horrifically against the other fabrics, and the thread she had been given kept falling apart as she tried to work it through the thick growler-hide. When the needle once again slipped, scratching painfully along her finger, she cursed and dropped both fabric and needle as the scratch turned from white to red. Frustrated tears began to well in her eyes but she forced them back. Crying would only blur her vision and make the task harder. She did not want to give her father the satisfaction of failure. Nor would she give him another reason to beat her.

Sill froze as the room suddenly darkened. She turned her head just enough to make out her father’s thin, tense frame silhouetted in the doorway. She turned quickly back to her work, clenching her teeth against tears and pain, and sewing with feigned enthusiasm until light once again spilled into the room, and she knew he was gone. At his departure, she paused briefly to let a single tear slide down her young cheek and hang from her chin. She watched it fall. Then, as quick as the tear blotched the wooden floor, she regained her self-control, working with renewed vigour as though that single release was enough to heal the bruises of today’s pain.

Sill’s father was the village cook. Hillock may have been a comparatively small settlement compared to some, but the workload was still too much for him and his poor helpers. The recent shortage of food in the village meant that her father often had to improvise with the meals in order to make the food stretch. This in turn meant that meals were often plain and with little substance. It also meant that Sill’s father was almost always angry. The disappointed looks that greeted most of his meals left the man vexed and frustrated. If Sill’s mother had been alive she may still have been able to soothe his volatile temper, but since she had died giving birth to Sill some twelve winters ago, Sill would find, more often than not, that she would bear the brunt of her father’s bad moods.

Food shortages aside, the men of Hillock were naturally strong and hardy. They had come to be this way through generations working with wood, the main resource supplied by Hillock’s forest and also the village’s major source of trade. The serethen wood was of a quality not found anywhere else in the Inner Lands. It was both light in weight and dense in grain, making it ideal for building homes, furniture, canoes and other such structures. Serethen sap was also of value as it cast a bright, long-lasting glow when burned. The villagers used it to create light in the evenings when the sun had exhausted its own daily supply and dropped below the shoulders of the high, neighbouring mountains. Due to the tree’s many uses, traders would come from relatively far afield, and in this way the village kept abreast of news from other quarters of the Inner Lands. Sill remembered hearing that a large proportion of Rydan Fort, the Inner Lands’s one defensive stronghold, was made up of serethen wood, shipped down centuries ago when their ancestors had fled the Grinth to finally establish a home here. Nobody from Rydan had visited for many seasons, though, since the Inner Lands had proved itself to be the sanctity their ancestors had hoped for.

As much as it was a virtue, the forest was also the reason the villagers were reluctant to leave Hillock, and hence they tolerated their plain diet. But the recent shortage of wildlife was beginning to cause great tension, even if nobody wished to speak of it. This tension was compounded when men like Kallem refused to aid the rest of the villagers in their daily duties.

Kallem had been pitied at first. He was only a child when his father and younger sister had been horribly slain by a bear. Kallem had witnessed the event and apparently convinced himself it was the work of a Grinth, the very race that humans fled to the Inner Lands to be rid of. But everybody knew that the Grinth were not built to scale the protective heights of the mountains and none had ever been seen in all the history of the Inner Lands. So, with many winters passed, people had lost patience with Kallem’s solitary wanderings in the forest and his cold, detached manner. Most believed him deranged and only now tolerated him as his mother, Artell, was a respected member of Hillock’s council of Elders. She rarely spoke of her son and seeing as she had already lost a husband and daughter, nobody had the heart to ask her about her remaining child’s unsettling behaviour or lack of responsibility.

Sill’s current task, however, could not be shirked. As the quilt was intended for Fallor, Leader of the council of Elders, Sill knew that the eyes of the village would be on her until it was completed. Her father knew this, too. It was not the first time he had set her up to fail. Except I won’t fail this time. Savouring this thought, she took a deep breath and once again set herself to the task at hand with renewed and stubborn vigour.

Over the next few days, Sill did little but sew. At one time, when she was giddy from heat and concentration, she finally risked stepping outside for a break only to receive a whack from her father for shirking off which sent her running back to the hut, angry and hurt.

She felt like tearing the quilt up and running away, but she knew that would only lead to a more severe punishment. So, instead, she worked harder to get it finished, even turning away her only friend, Raffin, when he came to share his latest stories. Other children visited, too, but only to tease and call her names from the doorway. Sill had never understood why they hated her so much; at least her father had a reason. Once, one of the Elders had said she was smart for her age, which seemed to annoy them, but Sill suspected the bullying arose more from the fact she often looked a bit scruffy and unclean. The other girls have mothers to brush their hair, she thought glumly. I don’t even have a comb.

At last, by the fall of the fifth sun, the quilt was finished.

Pale with fatigue, Sill sat and stared dumbly at it for a while, too tired to trouble herself to tell anybody.

Eventually, she stood and wobbled to her bed where she collapsed messily on the leaf-filled mattress. The leaves had recently been changed and the mattress felt satisfyingly soft and comfortable under Sill’s light body. Outside, the sun had long since withdrawn its aid, dropping earlier each day as though it, too, were suffering a sense of overwhelming tiredness.

Earlier, whilst the sun slowly fell towards its bed behind the mountains, Sill had been forced to work in the saplight. The three small, bright glows, which sat in three corners of the room – the fourth corner being occupied by Sill’s bed – now burned quietly towards their own ends, and Sill did not bother rising to put them out. Instead she lay still, gently massaging her aching wrists and wondering what the villagers would make of the quilt. She knew she had done a good job. In fact, she had far exceeded her own expectations. Before she began, she had not thought it possible to sew the different materials together firmly enough to stop them falling to pieces again a few days later. But she had tested and tugged at the quilt upon completion and knew the bonds to be good. She had spread out the skins so that the various browns, blacks, whites and greys mixed successfully and no part stood out too much against another. She’d used the phail-feathers for the rim, which now appeared elegant and decorative alongside the other fabrics, and she had even managed to hide the stitch fairly well within the natural hairs of the different materials.

‘Sill.’ Her father’s gruff voice startled her awake and she automatically sat up and swung her legs around until they dangled freely from the side of the bed. ‘Is it finished yet?’

‘I think so,’ she said, tiredness making her voice weaker and quieter than she had intended.

‘What?’ he asked angrily. ‘Speak up girl for peaks sake!’

Sill cleared her throat. ‘I think so,’ she said again, louder.

‘You think so?’ She could already tell by his tone that she’d said the wrong thing. ‘You do realise that this quilt is going to be the main gift for Fallor’s birth-sun, don’t you? And you do know who Fallor is?’

‘Yes,’ Sill said. And everyone’s going to know I made it. And after that I won’t need you anymore.

‘Yes, to which?’

‘Both,’ she said quickly. Her fatigue must have made her bold because, as she met with her father’s cruel eyes, she failed to mask the anger that was lurking deep in the pit of her stomach.

He must have seen it, too, as his teeth suddenly clenched.

Sill swiftly shifted her gaze to the floor instead.

Too late. He marched straight forward and, before she could react, delivered a quick slap across her nearest, exposed thigh.

Sill shrank backwards on the bed, flattening herself against the wall and hugging her legs to her chest. ‘What did I do?’ she asked, panicking, even though she already knew the answer.

He leaned over her, his muscles tensing, and raised his hand as though to strike her again. ‘You know what!’ he rasped, his hand curling into a fist. But instead of hitting her he grabbed her wrist and dragged her to the floor, taking care to avoid the space occupied by the quilt.

Struggling against him in fear, Sill failed to control her landing and her right-knee hit painfully into the wood. Rolling over and curling into a defensive ball, she bit her tongue and refused to acknowledge the pain, not wanting him to see she was hurt. It would only make him madder.

He growled and she heard him take a step backwards. ‘Why do you make me act like this?’ he asked. He always sounded guilty straight after.

I don’t know, she thought, hiding her face and the tears streaming down it. You’re my father. We should love each other, shouldn’t we? She missed her mother most at times like this, even though she had never met her. I know you miss her too.

‘That anger of yours,’ he said. ‘There’s evil in you girl.’

Maybe he was right. What she could do with the wind wasn’t normal, she knew that. I know I killed her. Somehow.

She heard him leave and finally let herself cry properly, sobbing softly into the tangled hair that lay between her face and the cracks in the floor. Every now and then her body twitched slightly, and she lay there, staring pointlessly at her reddened knee, until the twitching stopped. As soon as she felt able, Sill picked herself up and moved back to the bed. She lay down and let tiredness engulf her.

As she drifted into sleep, various animals began to take shape in her mind. They scuttled this way and that, playing games with her amongst the trees and undergrowth of the forest. Then a great bear appeared and the animals fled, slipping into bushes and through hollowed tree trunks, until they were gone. The bear raised itself tall, standing huge on its hindquarters, and roared out its authority over the quiet forest.