Read Online The Wolf in the Attic by Paul Kearney - Free Book Online Page B

close by in the briars, a rustle, and I turn.
    And right beside me the thin dark boy with the wedge-shaped face is crouched, the firelight playing on his long nose and lighting up his eyes.
    I start to leap away with a sharp cry that I cannot hold in, and once more, I feel the hard grip of his hand as he seizes my arm, harder even than before.
    ‘No, no no!’ I hear myself scream, though I am barely aware of anything except his face, and the eyes.
    The singing stops. There is a spatter of exclamation around the fire, words I do not understand. With my free hand I reach into my pocket for my knife, but it takes two hands to open it, and he is holding my other arm fast.
    ‘Leave me alone!’ And I punch him with my free fist, my knuckles lighting with pain as I strike his cheek. He growls, and grabs my other arm, pinioning me, throwing me on my back in the bracken and the snow. I try to kick him, but he sets his weight atop me and crushes me down. I struggle harder than I ever have in life before, but he is far too strong. Our faces are mere inches apart and I raise my head to try and bite him, but he butts me back with his hard skull, and lights go off in my head and I taste blood at the back of my throat.
    ‘Luca,’ a voice says, ‘Let her up.’
    It is the young woman who was singing. I blink away the tears and see that they are all standing around us now, silent. The dark boy looks at me, and all of a sudden he gives a grin and lets go my wrists and springs up, and I am lying there in a circle of strangers on the edge of the firelight, and overhead the moon is bright and fat and the trees are black as veined coal beneath it.

6
     
    T HEY LOOK AT me as though I am some insect which is set upon a pin, like those I have seen in the glass cases of the Pitt Rivers in Oxford.
    A quick gabble between them in a language I don’t understand, and then the older woman, with the coins on her forehead, says;
    ‘What you doing spying on us, girl?’ Quick and sharp. There is more authority in her tone than I have ever heard in Miss Hawcross’s, and I answer at once.
    ‘I wasn’t spying.’
    ‘I calls it spying,’ she snaps, and to the dark boy she says, ‘Bring her to the fire Luca. Gentle, mind.’
    Luca holds out his hand to me with his head cocked on one side. I slap it away. ‘I can get up by myself.’
    No knives at least. They stand around studying me again.
    ‘Just a child,’ a young woman says in English. ‘No harm here, Queenie.’
    And to me she says, ‘Come to the fire me dear. No-one will hurt you.’
    I rub my throbbing head where Luca’s skull clipped it, and decide that I have nothing to lose. It would be just too absurd to turn around and run away now. It would be childish. And I am not a child, whatever they say.
    ‘All right.’
    The warmth of the fire is very welcome, as I have begun to shiver; and the smell of the food in the pot is something to relish, whatever it is.
    ‘Sit by me,’ the young woman says with her bright, white-toothed smile. She is really rather beautiful, and her black hair falls in long curls down her back. I sit beside her on a lumpy bedroll of canvas and old carpet, and about the fire the others resume their seats, except for Luca and one of the older men, who talk quietly in their unknown language. Luca looks at me, then nods to his elder, and without another word he sidles off into the dark woods as quietly as a fox, to disappear in a twinkling.
    What a sneak, I think, and I rub the bump on my head again.
    ‘Is you alone?’ the older woman, Queenie asks me, hands on hips. Her eyes are dark as sloes and she has a strong face, as broad as any man’s. The coins glint on her forehead. She looks like a figure from some strange faraway past.
    ‘Yes.’
    She studies me a second, and then grunts, and leans down by the fire. She ladles some of the stuff out of the cooking pot into a battered pewter bowl and it is passed around the fire to me. The young woman retrieves a