Needing to keep up our strength, we bought bread and cheese from a cottage. It was then that Adriana offered to try her powers again. The Spook didn’t like it, but he had no better suggestion to offer.
She cupped her hands and gave a high whistling cry. Within minutes, in answer to her summons, a pair of sparrowhawks dropped out of the sky to land on her shoulders. She stroked them gently with the tip of each forefinger and whispered to them, her voice so low that, even though I was standing close, I couldn’t catch what she said.
They flew off but returned within the hour. This time they circled overhead before flying off in a different direction. When they repeated the manoeuvre exactly, Adriana pointed in the direction they’d taken.
‘They’ve found her,’ she said. ‘That’s the way. She’s making for Port Erin.’
Adriana was a bird witch all right – her magic had succeeded in tracking down Bony Lizzie.
Not long after, the Spook discovered another pointy footprint in the mud. We were hot on the witch’s trail again. And then Alice confirmed it: she could now sniff her mother’s presence. Finally, at twilight, we saw Lizzie in the distance, and despite our exhaustion, increased our pace.
She was somewhere ahead of us in the gathering dusk: we glimpsed her once more, little more than half a mile away, but it was now almost dark, and a sudden shower exploded from the heavens, soaking us to the skin in the five minutes it took to blow itself out.
Adriana and Simon were sprinting alongside me and Alice, the Spook just behind us, and we were closing in on the bone witch with every stride. Soon I heard the angry roar of the sea in the distance, and the rhythmical pounding of waves against the rocky shore. At last the moon came out from behind a cloud, bathing the scene in silver light, and I saw Lizzie less than a hundred yards ahead of us. Then Simon noticed something on the ground: a pair of pointy shoes lying in the grass. Lizzie had kicked them off in a desperate attempt to gain more speed.
‘She’s running straight for the headland. We’ve cut her off from the port. She’s nowhere to go now but the salty sea!’ shouted the Spook.
He was right. Lizzie was running directly towards the cliffs. Very soon we would face the last of her power. How strong was she still? Would the five of us be able to overcome her? It was far from certain, but we had to try.
It was then that disaster struck. Alice slipped on the wet grass and went down hard. I stopped and helped her up, but when she tried to put weight on her left foot, it buckled under her and she fell to her knees. As the Spook raced past us, he turned to shout at me: ‘Leave the girl, lad! We’ll come back for her later. I need you with me! Now!’ He ran on towards the cliffs, his footsteps fading into the distance.
‘Yes, leave me, Tom! My ankle’s sprained. He’s right – he’ll need all the help he can get to beat Lizzie. She’s still strong.’
‘No, Alice, we stick together,’ I told her, putting my arm under her left shoulder and lifting her back onto her feet. ‘You know why we can’t risk being separated…’
Alice could only limp forward slowly, grunting with pain.
The witch had nowhere left to run. She turned her back on the sea to face the Spook, Adriana and Simon. They’d slowed to a walking pace but continued to advance along a narrow spur of grass that jutted out above the sea. The waves crashed onto the rocks below before drawing back to surge forward once more.
At first nothing happened; then, very suddenly, like a blow to my solar plexus, I felt Lizzie’s power again. It took my breath away, almost stopped my heart. But it wasn’t dread or any other spell designed to immobilize us while she took our lives with her blade. It was a spell of compulsion. I was consumed by a strong urge to run forward and throw myself off the cliff. I wanted to fall onto the rocks and break into little pieces; to become nothing – as if I’d never been born.
I fought back but she was too strong. I saw the waves far below. I had never wanted anything so much.
Far ahead, the Spook had fallen into a crouching position, his staff still in his left hand. With his right he was clutching a tussock of grass as if that would somehow anchor him to the cliff-top. But then, to my dismay, Simon suddenly sprinted directly towards the cliff edge. I realized that he was going to throw himself over!
I heard Adriana scream, a long wail of anguish and loss. Simon had jumped out into nothingness, and was gone. Under the compulsion of Lizzie’s dark magic he’d hurled himself over the edge to his death.
Ahead, Adriana was stretching her arms above her head and pointing towards the sky, arching her back just as Lizzie had earlier. Then she began to chant, hurling her words up into the firmament. She was speaking in the Old Tongue, gabbling far too quickly for me to understand.
In answer came a peal of thunder and a flash of sheet lightning, and suddenly, far above us, the heavens were filled with birds. There were crows, ravens, black-birds, finches and swallows – and a single magpie…one for sorrow.
Alice and I had almost reached the cliff, and I heard Adriana utter four more words very slowly and clearly. Even with my poor command of the Old Tongue, these were easy to translate. It was a command: ‘Peck out her eyes!’
From the smallest to the largest the birds obeyed, swooping down in unison to attack the witch. For a moment Lizzie was hidden from our sight, buffeted to and fro by the frenzied, screeching birds.
But she was not to be defeated so easily. There was an intense flash of light and a blast of hot air that made me close my eyes. When I opened them again, the birds were screaming, falling out of the sky, wings aflame. Some dropped, blackened, burned and twitching, onto the cliff-top; others fell down towards the sea, trailing smoke. Lizzie had blasted them out of the sky.
Adriana let out a great sob and rushed towards her, but the bone witch seized her by the throat and lifted her off her feet.
I knew what was going to happen: I let go of Alice and stumbled forward to try and help her, but the world was still spinning about me and I was forced to my knees, hard pressed just to stay on the cliff-top, still consumed by the desire to throw myself onto the rocks.
As I watched, horrified, Lizzie hurled Adriana over the cliff. As she fell towards the rocks, she gave a shrill cry like a bird. Then she was gone.
Agloating smile settled over Lizzie’s face.
‘Do you know why the boy stayed behind with the girl instead of coming to help you?’ she asked the Spook. ‘Do you know why he disobeyed you? He needs her more than anything else in the world, and she’s just as soft on him. Your apprentice sold his soul to the Fiend, and now the only thing that’s keeping him and the girl safe is a blood jar. That’s why they have to stay together. He’s using dark magic to save the both of them. That’s just one step short of belonging to the dark!’
The Spook staggered to his feet and looked at me, and as our eyes met, I saw on his face a mixture of sadness and disappointment. I’d let him down. I wasn’t the apprentice he thought I was.
Lizzie laughed long and loud, and the ugly sound was filled with triumph, with the knowledge that the dark had won.
But the battle wasn’t over yet. Adriana was dead, but her final cry hadn’t merely been one of pain and shock; it had been a command. Fresh raucous caws sounded overhead, and I saw a large flock of circling seagulls – the fierce aggressive birds that Alice had once called ‘rats with wings’.
Suddenly they swooped towards the witch, their harsh piercing screams filling the air. Bony Lizzie waved her arms to scare them off, whirling them about like a windmill in a gale. Perhaps she’d exhausted her power, or maybe there were just too many of them and she never had time to gather herself to with-stand the attack. The gulls dived straight for her, eager talons outstretched. Soon all I could see was birds, a chaotic turmoil of beating wings and stabbing beaks.