Free Prisoner of Fate by Tony Shillitoe Page B

burst into tears, sobbing as she stroked the rat’s sleek fur. She smeared the tears across her cheek with the back of her hand and looked around furtively, checking that no one had seen the rat. Then she rose, cradling the rat, saying, ‘We can’t stay here,’ but as she took a stepforward Whisper wriggled free and dropped into the ash. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, bewildered by the animal’s rejection. The rat, a shadow in the grey light, shuffled through the ash to a point where she started digging frantically. Meg joined her, asking, ‘What are you doing?’ but Whisper kept efficiently and purposefully shovelling ash aside with her tiny paws until she revealed a soot-blackened jar, and nudged it with her snout as if she was trying to release it from the ash’s grip. Meg bent, and as she touched the object a tingle thrilled along her finger and wrist. She wrapped her hand around the jar and pulled it from the ash. Checking again to see if she was being watched, heart racing with fear and anticipation, she scooped up the rat and walked towards the hills as the rising sun washed the town rooftops.
    She sat on the flat rock on the hill crest, her gaze fixed on the soot-stained green jar, her world focussed inward. Through the trees, the distant town continued its new military existence as its people repaired what damage they could and dwelt in common grief at what they had lost, surrounded by the Ranu victors. She had stared at the town for much of the morning, memories of her life there with Emma vividly forming and fragmenting in tears. At first, Whisper endured her desperate embrace, then was content to curl in her lap, and now she was stalking insects through the thick grass around the clutter of boulders below Meg’s vantage point. The town was her past. She understood that. Whatever life she had hoped to build there was as real as the cloud shadows flitting across the hills. It was as distant now as Summerbrook. There came an image of her daughter sitting before the cottage hearth, cheeks rosy with knowing she was entering motherhood, petting Whisper and smiling, and she curled up on the rock, clutching her stomach, and sobbed again, as she had throughout the morning, confused as to whyher daughter had to die when so much happiness was awaiting her.
    When the crippling grief eased, she sat up, cross-legged, and contemplated the jar. That is also the past , she considered. There is only pain and death in the jar. A shadow passed over the rock and she looked up at a white Ranu dragon egg drifting overhead, flying eastwards, tiny windwheels driving it. ‘The future is stranger,’ she murmured. ‘Where do I go now?’ She reached for the jar and felt the tingle of magic, the sensation that had brought her so much woe. I can’t go back , she decided. But the dreams — I can’t escape the dreams. The dreams were as familiar as the tingling of the magic trapped in the jar. In one, she would travel east to a strange place, to a hidden place in the midst of ruins. In another, she would be standing on a wall with people she knew, watching a strange storm of blue light sweeping towards her. She was older in those dreams, much older, so they were not meant to happen yet, not for a long time, but she knew they would happen, just as every other dream had taken shape in her life. She was a prisoner of her dreams, fated to see them come into being, never quite as she imagined, but always true. All she could be certain of was that Andrak no longer was a haven. She had to go somewhere else, perhaps even back to Western Shess—somewhere to escape the growing pain inside, the pain she knew too well from the past, losing her children, one by one, to war and hatred. The tears rose again and she trembled as she lay back down on the rock.
    The Ranu paid no attention to the ragged creature shuffling through the checkpoint into Port River. The tall, stooped woman, patchy dark and red-tinged hair matted and filthy, lean face