Aurora by Julie Bertagna Read Free Book Online Page B

as a place of constant loss.
    ‘Help me, Scar,’ she pleads. ‘You want Wing back. I want Lily. Tell me where they’ve gone.’
    The dread Mara has been keeping at arm’s length wraps around her now, cold as a ghost.
    ‘To find Fox,’ Scarwell hisses. ‘Gone to sea!’

PHANTOMS AND LEGENDS
     

     
    Mara gusts cold air into the burrow as she bounds down the steps. Rowan stares as she grabs her old backpack from the bottom of a large store cupboard dug deep into the curving wall of the burrow.
    ‘Didn’t you find her? Mara, where have you been? It’s been dark for hours. The kids have been wanting you . . . wait, what are you doing?’
    Rowan prises the backpack from Mara’s freezing fingers and holds her close until he feels her shuddering panic soothe.
    ‘Pollock and I will search Wolf Mountain the second it’s light,’ he says.
    ‘I’ve already been.’
    ‘To Wolf Mountain? Alone?’ Rowan breaks his embrace, exasperated. ‘Mara—’
    ‘I had to. But she’s not there.’
    Mara sees the scrap of wood-pulp parchment on the table covered in Lily’s angry charcoal scrawl and seizes it.
    ‘I found it on her bed,’ says Rowan. ‘Can’t make much sense of it, but at least she’s with Wing.’ Yet his doubts about the wolf boy are clear on his face. ‘There’s nothing we can do tonight.’
    ‘Wing is wild and she’s still a child and—’
    ‘I know, Mara, but think of what you did at Lily’s age.’
    ‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking of! Lily’s just as headstrong as I was.’
    ‘Still,’ Rowan retorts, as Mara takes up her backpack once again and begins to stuff it with provisions: a leather water flask, a pack of dried fish, a chunk of nut loaf.
    ‘Some pine spirit for wounds,’ she murmurs. ‘She could be lost in the mountains, injured . . .’
    ‘Stop panicking .’
    Mara isn’t listening. She digs deep into the bag, unzipping its inner compartment. Rowan watches her rummaging, his face darkening.
    ‘What is it you’re looking for? That cyber-whatsit?’
    ‘It’s gone,’ Mara cries. ‘Granny Mary’s wooden box – it’s where I keep the halo from the cyberwizz. They’re both gone. Lily must have taken them. But the halo is useless without the globe.’
    ‘What does it matter?’ Rowan slumps down in a chair.
    The cyberwizz always annoyed him when they were young because it took Mara to a place he couldn’t follow: into the Weave, a mysterious virtual world she never let him see. There were too many secrets to do with the wizz that she always kept to herself. Mara knows Rowan was secretly relieved once the globe was lost.
    ‘Wait a while,’ Rowan urges in a gentler tone. ‘Give her time.’ He pulls Mara towards him. ‘Let her have her own adventure, Mara. Let her be . We don’t know where she is, anyway. She’ll come back.’
    ‘Her own adventure?’ Mara’s smooth brow crinkles in bewilderment.
    ‘Have you never thought,’ Rowan challenges her, ‘what it’s like for her, growing up surrounded by tales of the legendary Mara? It’s bad enough for me.’ He breaks into a grin that softens his face into the boy Mara grew up with on their drowned island. ‘Maybe she just needs to escape your shadow for a while.’
    ‘She’s not in my shadow. She’s far too bright for that.’ Mara pauses. ‘Though I remember Mum felt like that about Granny Mary.’ She rakes her long, dark hair back from her face in a fretful gesture of old. ‘But that’s not why she’s gone.’ She falters, swallows hard, ‘Scarwell told Lily about . . . about . . .’
    Mara stops, the name freezing on her lips. She has barely spoken it in all the years Lily has been alive. She’s not quite sure why, although she knows something in Rowan flinches from the very thought of that other presence, the one who is part of Lily and flutters like a tree-ghost at the edges of their lives.
    ‘The legendary Fox.’
    Rowan finishes the hanging sentence in a flat voice.
    Mara wants to escape his