Sadie Madison and the Boy in the Crimson Scarf

9 | The Fire Wolves

The two friends stared into the imposing forest. The jet black bark of the Sandarac trees looked as though it had been burnt in an unearthly fire. Sadie ran her fingers down the crust of the closest one. They came back smudged with a charcoal-like soot.

She sniffed the substance. It smelt of fire and ash.

Beneath the vast canopy of branches and evergreen leaves, sat a sea of grey shrubs with bright red leaves, edged with a bloom of sulphuric yellow. The strange shrubs surrounded the base of every Sandarac tree, like children clinging to a mother's leg.

And then she noticed the noise.

A distant murmuring. Like a steam engine, throbbing away somewhere in the depths. A ghostly breeze, carrying the whispered words of every bird and beast. A yawning of bark and branches, bending and straining. A muffled rhythm, a heartbeat far beneath the earth, at the edge of hearing.

"This is a magical place, Oliver. Don't you think?" she asked, the sights and sounds of Darachna Forest playing together in the moonlight.

"It is definitely not what I expected," he replied. "But what do we do? Where do we go? It is just trees...everywhere!"

Sadie wasn't sure. Looking around, she hoped she'd feel something, or see something—the way she'd seen the door—to tell her what to do next. "The door!" she exclaimed, turning and pressing her hands against the sandstone wall. "Where's the door?"

"It is gone," Oliver moaned. "You shut the door and now it is gone!"

Sadie's heart pounded with excitement, not fear. The call to adventure and the threat of danger registering in equal measures. "There's no way back," she smiled. "So, we go forward."

"Into the weird and terrifying forest?" Oliver sighed. "With no guide and no idea where we are going—?"

"The white fox," Sadie said, mostly to herself.

Oliver carried on regardless. "Honestly, this is crazy."

"You can go home anytime you like," Sadie told him. "Just do that zip-zap, tele-transporting thing and you're golden."

Oliver faltered, his eyes turning from Sadie to the wall and back again. Was he seriously considering it?

"I cannot leave you out here on your own to freeze to death," he said in the end.

He had a point. Sadie's teeth were chattering and it wouldn't be getting warmer for hours.

"We should keep moving. I'm far more likely to freeze if I stand here all night. If we keep the wall on our right, we'll eventually come to The Glade of Remembrance. There's an entrance in the North Wall we can use if nothing else. At least, there is on all the maps."

"The Glade of Remembrance?"

"It's an enormous graveyard, Oliver," Sadie told him, setting off through the trees. "Biggest in Norland."

They hiked through the deepening snow, leaving the Madison house behind. Sadie kept the sandstone wall within touching distance at all times. She could see blue-grey tendrils of smoke spouting into the night from chimneys beyond the wall, reminding her Iron Bridge was close at hand.

The wall curved to the left, away from the houses, deeper into the forest. "We must be heading around the playing fields of the school," she said, reassuringly.

The wall meandered over the uneven terrain. Sadie stumbled several times, using the wall and the soot coated trees for balance. At the top of a steep mound, Sadie fell as she negotiated a black root crossing their path. The snow cushioned her fall, but her knee and chin stung from the landing.