Hootcat Hill
A Novel

Extract from Hootcat Hill

CHAPTER ONE
A MAIDEN IS BORN
‘Behind her ear a triple mole
and hair of white doth show.
By these and eyes of blue and green
The Maiden ye shall know,’
from ‘The Prophecies of the Seven’

The young badger was curled in his bracken bed, dreaming of a dragon—a black wyrm with red eyes which wove its nightmare coils around and about the heart of the world—when the cry of a newborn baby girl woke him suddenly from sleep. Startled, he opened his eyes to see a bright silhouette blazing out from among seven runes carved deep into the rock wall at the back of his cave. He looked up at the shining three-leaved shape and listened intently for a minute or so as the baby’s crying continued. Then another sound joined the crying—twining round it in a faraway owl chorus of screeching, hooting noise. The badger nodded his head, strangely marked with a golden sunburst in the centre of his muzzle.

“Hootcat Hill has spoken,” he said. “ She is here.”

Outside, in a cottage on the eastern edge of the town of Wyrmesbury a mother stared deep into her newborn daughter’s eyes as the earth shivered and shrugged beneath her feet.

“One blue eye, one green,” she said to her husband, rocking the baby to calm her.
“And a mole like a trefoil behind her right ear,” said the proud father. “What shall we call her?”

“I had a dream two nights ago,” said Nyneve Perry, looking up at him. “You know I don’t have dreams—ever—unless it’s really important. But two nights ago I saw a little girl riding on the back of a white horse made of clouds. Three birds were flying round her head singing ‘Linnet, Linnet, Linnet.’ I can’t get the name out of my mind.”

“Hmmn,” said Merrilin Perry doubtfully, listening to his daughter’s furious cries. “She sounds more like those hootcat owls squalling outside than a Linnet at the moment, but I am sure she will get better at it. And it’s wise to follow your dreams, particularly in Wyrmesbury.” He took the baby from her mother’s arms and regarded her gravely. She fell silent and stared back into her father’s eyes.

“Welcome to this world, Linnet Perry,” he said.

Sunstar the Badger waddled over to the seven runes and ran his paws over them, tracing their shapes gently. “First the Maiden’s trefoil,” he muttered, as the blazing light faded from it, “then my badger’s claw.” Leaving these two alone, he briskly tapped the five remaining runes.

“Stagman, awake!” he said, rapping an antler shape.
“Daughter of Mares, awake!” rapping a horseshoe.
“Wyccan, awake!” rapping a cauldron.
“Smith, awake!” rapping an anvil.
“Owlman, awake!” rapping a flying hootcat owl. “The Maiden is born into the world again, and the worldwyrm stirs in my dreams and in his bed.”
“Let her not be needed in our time of Guarding,” came the ritual reply from five voices inside his head.

“Let her not be needed,” he said gravely, before breaking the link. He sighed heavily and settled down on his bracken bed to remember the lore of the Guardians once more. Would the worldwyrm be woken in this Maiden’s time? Would this baby girl be the first to be needed for nearly five hundred turnings of the seasons in the world outside?
“Claws crossed, I do hope not,” he muttered, as the hootcat screeches died away outside.

There were to be no more girl babies born in Wyrmesbury for seven years, only boys. The Maiden had come into the world alone as always.

Linnet Perry woke gasping from a nightmare to find her room full of morning. She shivered. What had she dreamed? Something about Young Tom Bickerspike being swallowed by a dragon. Or was it a great yellow technomachine? Surely she had nearly been shaken out of her bed by the shuddering as they sank deep into the earth? Warm sun-dapples chased across her face, even though the sun had not yet risen, touching her with friendly fingers that wiped away the darkness of the wyrm’s belly and Young Tom’s screaming, terrified face from her mind. But Linnet did not notice. She set her feet onto the bare boards beside her bed, and wriggled them into warm slippers. It was early. Much too early to be getting dressed for school, so she went over to the low window that faced the garden and knelt down to look out at the day.

The real sun was just climbing up over Hootcat Hill, making the dark trees that crowned it look even more mysterious than usual. The hootcats that gave the hill its name were silent this morning, but Linnet had heard them last night. In her dream. She shivered briefly, then squinted her eyes and tried to see the Owlstones through the thickets of trees, but they were wreathed in the heavy mist which always surrounded them, and she couldn’t distinguish them at all. Then her eyes and her mind drifted away, as everyone’s in Wyrmesbury always did if they looked at or thought about Hootcat Hill for too long.

The primroses and early honeysuckles were blossoming in the cottage garden below, and she opened the window and leaned out to take a long breath of their sweet scent. As she looked, a large badger waddled out of the hedge that divided the garden from the fields below the eastern edge of the town and sniffed the air suspiciously. He was a huge boar, with deep black flanks, and a brilliant white stripe down the middle of his head. He had a strange golden marking in the centre of his forehead, just above his eyes, which looked like a starry sunburst.

The badger had a sett in the old mound far down in the field on the other side of the hedge, and Linnet saw him so often that she sometimes thought he was keeping an eye on her. Perhaps seeing him today was a good omen, she thought. She was dreading her Frankish test, but she was dreading what They might do to her at school even more. Her best friend Petroc Suleymann would not be there today because he had had to go and visit his sick grandmother for a few days.

Linnet felt a surge of sudden anger at the thought of Them. Why did They have to make school life so difficult for her? She thumped an angry fist on the windowsill. She was so tired of being called the weirdo of Wyrmesbury and pinched and kicked by the Vesterton kids, just because she had a funny white streak in her hair, different coloured eyes, and lived in a place with a reputation for oddness, not to mention the difficulties she had with reading and spelling. And They didn’t even know about the other stuff—the dream stuff and the secret stuff that made her really and truly weird. Only Petroc knew about that, and she didn’t even tell him all of it.

She clenched her jaw, remembering last week when They’d caught her away from Petroc and stuffed her head down a toilet, but as usual she couldn’t think of any way to change things. Whatever she tried—ignoring Them, trying to suck up to Them, hitting Them back, running away—none of it made any difference. She still came out of school either black and blue or with her books ripped and torn at least twice a week. Her friend Magret, Young Tom’s sister, generally helped her to mend any really bad book tears on the bus journey home—and she always wore trousers and long sleeves to cover up the bruises so her parents wouldn’t notice.

Linnet was too ashamed to tell her parents about any of it, though Magret and Petroc were forever nagging her to. Her Wyrmesbury-born father just might understand—he’d had to go to school in Vesterton himself and deal with his own problems—but her outsider-bred mother would either make a huge fuss with the school (which didn’t bear thinking about), or, more likely, not listen properly as usual, because she was too busy. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of explaining it all, anyway. She’d manage, like she always had, and school wouldn’t be forever.

Then the badger snorted, recalling her to the present. Linnet smiled and waved at him.
“Good morning, badger,” she whispered, feeling better just at the sight of him. The badger looked up at her.

“Hail and good morrow, Linnet the Maiden,” he said gravely, just inside her head. “Come and visit me in the mound tonight.” Linnet blinked and shook her head wildly to clear her ears. The secret stuff meant that she sometimes saw strange colours round other people, and flickering lights in the corner of her eye that she was too scared to look at properly because it might be magic—but she’d never had an animal speak to her before, let alone being asked to visit one.

“Did you really say that?” she asked him. But the badger only grunted contemptuously and waddled off back through the hedge. Linnet shrugged. “Must have imagined it. Animals don’t talk—even in Wyrmesbury.” But in her heart she knew it had been real. She felt scared again, the nightmare images of Young Tom’s screams flooding back into her head. Suddenly, beside her bed the alarm clock began to shrill and shake, ruining the morning quietness, and she rushed to turn it off.