village. Well, so the village said. The local baron disagreed but was too lazy to go to court over scrub and marsh and thorn. Had it been forest he’d have asserted his rights years ago. Tonight’s moon lights the bridge’s weathered handrails and glitters on the shallow stream, revealing gravel at the bottom and a single stickleback hanging in the water like a miniature pike.
Jeanne-Marie is there before me. ‘You’re late.’
‘How did you get out?’
‘Through the back door from our quarters.’
That part of the school has doors at ground level so all she had to do was keep to the shadows as she headed for the gardens and across the inner field towards the bridge. ‘I left through my dorm window,’ I tell her. ‘Walked the ledge around that side of the tower and climbed down the guttering.’
She agrees this is more difficult. ‘Where are the kittens?’
I take her hand, and though she doesn’t fold her fingers in mine, she doesn’t pull away either, as I lead her across the bridge and along a bank that separates two water meadows that have returned to marsh. We walk in the shadows of willow trees along the way and cut across a patch of drier ground towards the ruined village. No one knows when it was ruined or why. Maybe plague passed this way. Maybe soldiers. Most of the walls are broken at hip height, and the highest only rises to my shoulder. There’s a rotten door leaning drunkenly from a broken frame, and we slip into the ruins of a house and out through the back into a field beyond. I want to stop in the ruins, kiss Jeanne-Marie and feel the new ampleness inside her blouse but common sense stops me. The kittens are the key. Without the kittens we can’t go back to where we were.
‘Up here,’ I say. ‘We’re almost there.’
She takes my word for it and doesn’t complain when up there turns out to be another half mile of scrub and hedge. Silhouetted in the darkness, a dead oak separates its trunk into branches and spreads those branches into twigs. Like veins in the flesh of the sky. I marvel at my thought. The thought of any twelve-year-old who considers himself a thinker. But to me it feels original. ‘In here,’ I say, pointing at a bank of thorns. ‘I heard them yesterday.’
Jeanne-Marie stops and stares at a woven mass of twisting tendrils, each one studded with nail-length thorns. ‘How do we . . . ?’
‘Under there.’ The entrance is low and worn to grit by the feet of animals forcing a trail through the bushes. I doubt anything larger than a badger has tried to come this way before. ‘I’ll go ahead.’
She nods doubtfully.
Thorns snag my shirt and I crouch lower, realising I’ll have to crawl on my belly if I’m to reach the cat. It’s a slow process that sees a thorn scrape my temple. Blood slithers on my cheek and drips like slow tears on the broken leaves in front of my face. I can hear Jeanne-Marie’s sour muttering behind me and hope we find kittens. This seemed such a good idea when I suggested it, but with my face in the dirt and thorns tugging at my back and Jeanne-Marie’s sudden ouches behind me I’m close to deciding it was really stupid. And then, somehow, I see moonlight ahead and crawl out into a tramped circle set in the middle of the thorns. A slab of fallen wall stops their growth. And though they reach in it’s too large to let the thorns close over the top. Jeanne-Marie looks around her.
‘Heavens,’ she says. ‘How did you find this?’
I didn’t, I almost tell her. I simply heard the kittens mewling from outside. But she’s looking round with a grin on her face and I can see why. We’re protected from the world by a razor-sharp circle of thorns. This is a place where magic happens – and we’re the contents of the magic basket. ‘Hush,’ I say, putting my finger to her lips.
We listen for the kittens and I hear squeaking, slightly back the way we’ve come. So I turn until I face the other way and crawl into the tunnel, stopping to listen again. They’re to the side and sound loud enough to be within reach. I push my hand between branches and feel fur, the kitten tiny and noisy. I expect the mother to savage me but am allowed to remove a kitten without being attacked. There are five, six if you count a dead one. All thin and mewling and too weak to stand. My fingers reach again and I touch the mother’s side, ribs thin as bare bones. Dead, I think . . . She stirs, however, and tries to snap but something stops her reaching me. It’s dark inside the thorn tunnel, the moon slivers of yellow lighting brief lengths of brutal branch. I have the kittens; I have the key back into Jeanne-Marie’s heart. All I have to do is take them.
Jeanne-Marie’s voice calls me.
‘Wait,’ I whisper, reaching again. The cat’s front leg is trapped between strands of thorn that have hooked their claws into her. She could be snagged in a snare given the mess they’ve made of her. She explodes into hisses as I touch the wound and tries to fight free. ‘I’m trying to help,’ I say. Thorns scratch my wrists as I push one strand away, freeing her leg. Breaking off the sticky spikes smooths the branch, and then I pull the other branch towards me, breaking its spikes in turn. Very slowly her leg comes free.
‘Follow me,’ I say to Jeanne-Marie, and tuck the kittens into my shirt and crawl down the dirt tunnel until I’m out in the moonlight and the thorn bank is behind me. Jeanne-Marie struggles to her feet a moment later, her face furious.
‘Why did you . . . ?’ She stops at the sight of the injured cat, her eyes widening as I pull the five kittens from inside my shirt.
‘Take your pick.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She trapped herself on thorns.’
‘And so did you.’ Jeanne-Marie wipes blood from my chin.
My face is a mess where I stretched for the twisting branches that trapped the cat; a long thorn dips under the skin of my wrist and reappears half an inch later. She watches intently as I pull it free and check for others. There’s a stream a hundred yards behind us and I wash myself there, splashing water on my face and rinsing my hands until blood stops welling from a dozen different cuts. I wash the cat’s back leg and she barely protests. All the flesh is gone from her sides and her hips are hollow, her teats sucked sore by starving kittens. As I lift her free, a single drop of milk spills onto my finger. It tastes of sadness and despair.
‘Food,’ I say. ‘She needs feeding.’
Jeanne-Marie’s eyes are alight with an expression I don’t recognise. An inner light that makes her face glow and her expression soften. ‘Give me the kittens.’ She folds a mixed bundle of mewling fur into the front of her blouse, exposing the softness of her stomach, a softness missing the last time my hands passed that way. I put the cat over my shoulder and hold the creature in place with one hand. As is always the way, the return trip seems to pass more quickly than the trip out. The solid mass of the school rising in front of us.
‘What does she need?’
‘Eggs. Six raw eggs and chicken if you can find any.’
Jeanne-Marie leaves me with the cat and the kittens and returns within two minutes, clutching a chicken leg, and with the eggs folded into her blouse where the kittens had been. She drops to a crouch and watches while I break an egg and feed the cat, which licks overflowing white and yolk from the bottom half of the shell. A second egg vanishes as quickly. Water, I think. I should give her water. I fill two half shells with water from a butt against the school wall and she drinks those down while Jeanne-Marie peers closer.
‘Which kitten do you
