The Girl and the Guardian

  ‘The Arcra must be found and returned to the Tree,’ she said, and a wave of power surged through her as she saw herself becoming the One who would, somehow, do this thing.

  Then the vision was gone, and she was Shelley again. Shaking, she took one last look at Korman, her true friend, and the Lady, whose presence she had felt so often in the darkest times. Behind them the thorns creaked as they grew, even by night. The roses had all been plucked out by Hithrax, but new buds were already appearing. She turned to go, and if she had looked down, she would have seen a constellation of tiny white flowers opening out of the stony ground where she had been standing, and in their midst the pale blue diamond Rilke had given her. It had fallen out of the hole Bootnip had chewed in her pack.

  Thornfoot glided up and she sat astride his lithe black body, letting him take her whichever way he would. It seemed to her, in that mad world where the best people were hung in thorn thickets or locked in Labyrinths, the only comfort was to be found in a madness like his, the kind that can laugh at any horror that proclaims itself solemnly as truth, and by laughing, overcome it. She shook her fist at the whole pack of them and all their warped teachings as she slipped out onto the Avenue astride the serpent, nestled behind the short wings which sheltered her on either side. And on the wings, she now noticed, was the same pattern as on the wings of the dragon-snake: the mark of the Lady.

  Then Hithrax awoke as if from a trance, and raised the alarm in great wrath. His hunting troops emerged from the secret thorn-cave, and the Dagraath bayed for blood as they sniffed the ground to pick up the scent of the intruders.

  But Shelley was already speeding away on Thornfoot’s back, up the Avenue of Despair, out of the Valley of Thorns toward the foothills of the Tor Enyása. Now she was seeking her destiny with a fierce passion. Now she was truly a rebel, like Quickblade and the Boy Raiders, and the Evergirls. For love, for vengeance, she would become the Kortana and find the lost Heartsone.

  Volume Two at Amazon: The Rebels of Aeden