Amber and Willem Read online

  Arrelestravandias was the best horse in the whole world; that was the simple truth. He was the most beautiful with his shining dark brown coat and his long black mane, and the most powerful too. Amber had been riding him for years now, secretly. It was easy enough to ride out into the world away from the horse-makers, who were always so busy and didn’t seem to care. Anyway, she hadn’t done the horse any harm. She had worked hard to train him so he went light and balanced. He was quick and clever but he had a mind of his own and that was what Amber liked about him the most.

  ​“Where are we going?” Amber asked him.

  ​“Mountains,” the horse replied. “I want to get up high and look down.”

  ​Amber laughed. “We can’t, it’s too far,” she said. “You’ll have to make do with Pole hill.”

  ​Arrelestravandias shook his head and his neck wildly. “All right,” he said. He threw himself into the air, kicking out with his hind legs and Amber could not help but shiver with pure joy.

  ​They galloped all the way up the hill and then stood still as a pair of rocks looking down, like the horse had wanted. Amber looked for Willem and the mare, but she could not see them. She could see the village, miles away; they would have to go back soon. Arrelestravandias would not want to go back, but he would if Amber told him to.

  ​She sighed. “I wish you would be kinder to Willem,” she said.

  ​“I am not unkind,” Arrelestravandias said, and Amber had to concede that it was true. The horse was the same age as she was, eleven years old, but he seemed much older and wiser somehow. That was the way with horses. They grew up quicker and lived shorter lives than people did. Arrelestravandias was not unkind to Willem, he simply did not notice him. He was a difficult horse, the most difficult of all horses perhaps. It was not fair that he should be Willem’s horse. Willem could ride most horses fine enough, even if he didn’t like to.

  ​“You should be my horse,” Amber said, to herself really.

  ​But Arrelestravandias heard her nonetheless. “I am,” he said.

  The rooks laughed at Willem as he climbed, but they did not fly away. It was a long way up and by the time the boy reached the birds he was out of breath and had to sit down on a swaying branch to recover.

  ​“I know who you are,” one of the rooks said.

  ​Willem looked up, surprised. He knew the moors and the hills around the village well, and he knew this place, this very tree, but he hadn’t seen this family of rooks before.

  ​“You are the boy who can talk to birds,” the rook said. The other birds sat silent. This was the way of many birds, and rooks especially. Their talk was not all made with sounds and signs; some of it was surely a way of speaking directly mind to mind within families. One rook would speak, but it would seem that all of them had caused him to do so. This rook was elderly, greying and somewhat battered. He might be as much as fifty years old, some rooks lived that long.

  ​“I have heard of you from my cousins in Dormaig,” the rook said.

  ​“I know those birds,” Willem said. “They are wise.” It was well to be polite to old birds about their family, to anyone really.

  ​“You might be interested in why we came here,” the rook said, and then he fell silent.

  ​Willem was hopelessly entranced by the old bird’s words and so desperate to find out what he was talking about as to not be able easily to sit still on his branch. He willed himself to, as the bird stood in silent thought. Willem looked away from him, out at the world in the direction he was facing, towards home. And he saw a horse and rider there, travelling out at great speed.

  ​It was not Arrelestravandias and Amber, for they had gone the other way. This horse was not a dark bay; it was a dun coloured horse. It looked live Stevia, one of his father’s best mares, but Willem couldn’t be certain.

  ​“We came down from the mountains to find a new place to live,” the rook cawed.

  ​“The mountains?” Willem’s attention was hooked back from that horse for a moment.

  ​“Aye. We could no longer live in the mountains because the Great Eagles arrived to reclaim their eyries after all those years they’d been away. They turned us out!”

  ​“The Great Eagles?” Willem was lost. The Great Eagles had lived in the mountains before he was born, but they had left. They were said to be magical creatures, hardly birds at all really, and Willem had longed for them all his life. But the horse had come nearer. It was definitely Stevia and its rider was Willem’s mother. He turned cold. His mother had never cared to ride out after him before, not ever. She had always trusted him, and why would that have changed? Now here he was up a tree with the wrong horse at the bottom of it. “I have to go, I’m sorry,” he said to the bird and he scrambled down as quick as ever he could.

  Arrelestravandias stopped on the way down Pole hill and would not move for a moment.

  ​“What is it?” Amber asked.

  ​“Stevia.” Stevia was Arrelestravandias’ daughter and the love he felt for her was like a real thing you could touch. He quivered with it.

  ​“Who is riding her?” Amber was alarmed.

  ​“How would I know that?” Arrelestravandias asked, and he set off like a dart, without a thought for his rider’s will.

  ​“We need to go to Theoline and Willem, you idiot!” Amber pulled in her elbows and gound her teeth. It was not usually a good idea to call a horse an idiot, particularly a horse like Arrelestravandias, but Amber had never been afraid to use her power with anyone, not even when she was a young girl.

  ​“Where do you think Stevia is going?” Arrelestravandias asked with a horse’s laugh. “I’m not the idiot!”

  ​“God save us,” Amber whispered. She sat up in the saddle, enough to make the stallion check his pace.

  ​“I don’t understand what you are afraid of,” he said. There was nothing to be afraid of for him; there was only the excitement of galloping so fast and the anticipation of being with his beloved daughter. Perhaps he is right, Amber thought.

  ​She could see Willem by then, coming down from a tree where a family of rooks circled and spiralled away. She could tell by the way he moved that he was terrified, and ashamed too. And why should he be ashamed? He hadn’t done anything wrong, not really.

  ​“Get down from Willem’s horse,” Jessa said as soon as Amber was near enough to hear her. Jessa stood on the ground, rigid with anger, holding onto Willem by his shoulder, and Willem just stared at his feet and said nothing.

  ​Amber swung down slowly. “It’s not Willem’s fault,” she said. “It’s mine. I wanted to ride Arrelestravandias. I made him let me.”

  ​Jessa smiled, but she had tears in her eyes at the same time. “I don’t blame you Amber. You took advantage of an opportunity and that’s a credit to you I’d say.” She took hold of Arrelestravandias’ bridle so that Amber had to let go of him. And Amber felt her heart cry out as her fingers left the reins, for she realised, in that moment, that she was never going to be able to ride Arrelestravandias again.

  ​“This horse is everything I have worked for all my life,” Jessa said. “I could not expect you to understand that; you are not my child. I expect Willem to understand it, but it seems he would rather spend his time sitting in trees cawing with crows. He will learn. He will have to.”

  ​“They’re not crows,” Willem said, “they’re rooks.”

  ​Amber wondered how he dared, but Jessa ignored his words as if he had never spoken at all. “Ride your horse Willem,” she said.

  Willem found himself split in two. Half alert to every move or sound from his mother as they rode home, the other half lost in the mountains with the Great Eagles. He had to imagine those birds, since he had never seen them in real life; he had never seen even an ordinary eagle. How soon would he be able to go and look for them? How long would it take to get to the mountains? Would it take more than a day?

  ​“So I was right then,” Kastie said when they returned to the yard.


  ​Willem looked at her in honest surprise, at her righteous expression. He had always liked Kastie, but he never would again, not now she had guessed about Amber and Arrelestravandias and had gone and told. But Jessa took no notice of her. She sent Amber home and told Willem to look after his horse, as if he wouldn’t have done that anyway. He looked after Arrelestravandias and he looked after Theoline too. He’d never minded that part of his life; it was only the riding he didn’t care for.

  ​His mother came to find him when he was done. “Your father and I need to talk to you,” she said. And Willem felt his heart freeze once again.

  ​“You were given a great gift,” his mother began. “That horse was the most wonderful thing I have ever had to give to anyone, and you did not care enough to keep him.” There were tears once again in her eyes. “Perhaps I made a mistake. Perhaps you were too young. There is nothing we can do about that now, but you have to learn this Willem. You cannot let others take things from you and you cannot give up trying when something is hard. Your father and I know this; it is how we are strong enough to survive. But you need to know it, to really know, or you will not be strong and you will not survive in this world. Do you understand?”

  ​She cared so much, Willem understood that part. The rest was unfathomable. But he nodded.

  ​“You are going to take Arrelestravandias back and make him your horse again,” his mother said. “You will ride him every day, every single day.”

  ​Willem’s heart sank.

  ​“You will learn to ride him well and you will not let Amber ride him again, ever, or anyone else.”

  ​And Willem’s heart sank further, this time for Amber. He knew how much Amber cared about riding Arrelestravandias; he was the only person who knew. Amber and Willem had been born on the same day, and besides that they were the only two people in the village could do magic. There was a link between them that had always been there. And Willem loved Amber. He loved his mother and his father and all of his family, and he knew they loved him. But those horse-makers were practical, busy people, always so serious. Amber was the one human person in his life he could laugh with, and besides, she was so pretty. He had always expected, without ever exactly thinking about it, that he and Amber would grow up and be married some day.

  ​But then his father took hold of him and beat him.

  ​Willem’s mother was a small woman, but she had worked all her life with huge powerful animals and she was strong. Willem’s father was far stronger. He beat his son with all his strength and Willem fell into the darkest place he had ever known. He fought and shouted out, but that did no good, and afterwards he crawled off to cringe and cry in the darkness, thinking about no-one but himself.

  Chapter Three: The Great Eagles

  Willem was woken by birdsong. He had been dreaming about the Great Eagles, though his dreams were vague and as soon as he was awake his memory of them began to fall away. He inched himself up and his body reminded him of the night before, of being beaten, but this was a new day; the birds said so.

  ​He climbed out of the window and swung down to the ground outside easily enough. It was early and no-one was about. Willem went to find Theoline, out on the moor. He would go to the mountains to look for the Great Eagles and perhaps he would not come back. But before he got halfway to the place Theoline liked to graze he had to stop because there stood Arrelestravandias, head up and looking right at him, as if he knew.

  ​And Willem found he was unable to walk past for he felt something stir inside him that was nothing to do with birds. “All right, I’ll take you,” he said angrily.

  ​By the time he was ready to go, the first of the yard people had arrived to begin work.

  ​“Where are you going?” Kastie asked.

  ​“Why would I tell you? You got us in trouble yesterday. I’m not speaking to you!”

  ​Kastie laughed. “You just did, stupid. And you don’t need me to get you into trouble; you can manage that all by yourself. Jessa said I was to watch you, so you have to tell me.”

  ​“No I don’t,” Willem said. He booted Arrelestravandias in the ribs and they set off faster than he had meant to, a bounding, ridiculous gallop filled with palpable joy on the part of the horse at least. Willem found he didn’t mind it for once, since they were heading in the right direction by some strange trick of chance. And Kastie was lying about his mother. He wondered why for a moment and then forgot to think about it at all or ever again.

  ​Amber said that galloping on a horse was like flying. Willem had seen her often enough, racing over the heather, coming back out of breath and glowing with delight. “We flew down the hillside, did you see us?” she would ask.

  ​Willem had only ever flown in his imagination, but he could not imagine it was anything like this; this bumping, pushing, bouncing, flapping and falling, this rhythmic hammering on the earth and on his body. And he had to hold on too, else he would tumble off and be killed.

  ​It was fast at least, he had to admit that. He could see the beginnings of the mountains now, a formidable distance away still, and he knew that if he had ridden Theoline it would have taken two days just to get there. But he could not hold on forever. The muscles in his legs gave out first, leaving him to cling on helplessly to reins and mane. Arrelestravandias did not care or even seem to notice him, and the horse would not stop.

  ​Willem wrapped the reins round his arm and let himself slide towards the unwelcoming blur of the ground, balking at the last minute, but by then committed. He landed hard, breath knocked away, and was ruthlessly dragged, ripped through heather and bushes by an arm pulled almost out of its socket until Arrelestravandias finally slowed and came to an uncertain halt, breathing fiercely through his nose and then settling to graze as if the whole thing had been his own idea.

  ​Willem lay in the soft heather unable to do anything else and suddenly there above him was a true miracle, a bird so huge it was like a continent, wheeling slow and solemn. Its wings went on for miles and its face curved in a menacing hook. Willem wondered if it could see him, like a rabbit on the earth; its prey. And he didn’t care. It would be something to be eaten by a bird like that wouldn’t it? He could feel the magic in it, even though it was so far away.

  ​He sat up to watch it fly for the mountains, until it eventually dwindled and disappeared and then he stood, all his weariness and hurt completely forgotten. He had planned to rest, eat some of the food he had brought and recover his strength, but none of that seemed necessary any more. Instead he pulled himself into Arrelestravandias’ saddle and set off once again, galloping across the moor.

  Amber did not bother to get up that morning. If she couldn’t ride Arrelestravandias, couldn’t even hope she might ride him, there was nothing to get up for. She ought to be out minding the geese; her mother was away in town so there was no-one else to do it, but what harm ever came to those geese? Even if they had wandered away, they were too lazy to go far and they were fierce enough to fight off a fox on their own if they needed to.

  ​But she could not just lie there for the rest of her life. She sat up and looked around her. There was nothing really to look at; just the little house and the squalid necessities of everyday life, as clean and organised as they ever were. And so Amber burst out into the world, for that, at least, was filled with life and beautiful. But it was still ordinary, the same as every day.

  ​The geese were right there too, as if they had been waiting for her.

  ​“Oh, all right!” she said to them, and she took up a stick and set off marching towards the moor, driving them before her.

  Willem had seen more Eagles as he rode and each one lightened his heart further until he felt as if he was already flying. He could see where they were coming from and going to, a place so high, so impossibly inaccessible it made his head spin, but he would not stop.

  ​Arrelestravandias surged on and up tirelessly, finding paths that Willem knew he would never have found himself. But the horse had his own object
ive, or he seemed to.

  ​“We need to go this way,” Willem said to him, tugging on the reins and pushing with his worn-out legs. Arrelestravandias snatched back and shook his whole body, so that Willem had to let go the reins entirely and hang on to the saddle instead. And then the horse set off again in the wrong direction, though a stand of thorn bushes.

  ​Willem leaned down over his horse’s neck miserably and peered ahead. Arrelestravandias seemed to be heading along a steep, green corridor towards the very highest part of the mountain, but that was not where the Great Eagles were, and how could a horse care where he went? Willem took a firm hold of the rein in both hands and pulled as hard as he could, kicking at the same time. One minute he was clinging on tight to his horse’s back, the next, landing on hard rocks and rolling back down the mountainside, pitched off by an effortless twist of Arrelestravandias’ formidable body. And the horse was gone.

  ​It did not matter to Willem much, not in that moment. He picked himself up and made off the way he wanted to go, soon clambering over rocks, sliding up scree and before long scrabbling for footholds on a sheer face of rock.

  ​Willem did not know how long he climbed, but it began to grow dark around him, so that it was harder to find foot and hand holds and he had to reach blindly and search by feel. There was a wind blowing too, in gusts and spirals; a cold wind. But Willem had lost all feeling by then anyway, he simply edged and inched his way up, expecting nothing. He did not see any more of the Eagles because he could only look in front and up, anything else was too frightening, but he could feel that they were there, watching him, and that was frightening too.

  ​It was not completely dark when he hauled himself over another ledge and lifted his head to meet the enormous eye of the most enormous bird he had ever seen, or ever would.