The Blood Binding

Also By Helen Stringer

Spellbinder

The Midnight Gate

No Better Thing Under The Sun

H E L E N  S T R I N G
ER

Copyright © 2012 Helen
Stringer

All Rights Reserved

For my father

It was raining again.
Belladonna hunkered down in her seat and watched the buildings slide by through
the greasy, rain-spattered windows. The windows on school trip buses were
always greasy, from sticky fingers and foreheads and heaven knew what else.

Belladonna didn’t want to
speculate. It was too icky.

They were on another one of
Mr. Watson’s history trips. This time it was some Roman ruin near the coast.
The jagged remains of a fort near what had been a port, but had long since
silted up into one of those endless beaches where you couldn’t even see the
ocean at low tide.

There had been a time when
Belladonna had loved trips to the seaside, even when it rained. Sometimes,
those were the best trips of all. Her dad would park the car as close to the
roaring waves as possible and they’d sit and eat cold sausages and hard-boiled
eggs and drink tea from a thermos while the seagulls circled over the grey,
roiling water.

But the prospect of a
freezing plod around some low stone walls and a makeshift museum didn’t excite
quite the same feelings.

The bus slowed and turned
into a small gravel parking lot.

“Right!” said Watson. “You’ve
all got your worksheets. I know it’s a bit wet, but we’ll see what we can do.”

He glanced at his watch.

“A
bit
wet,” said
Steve, suddenly appearing next to Belladonna’s seat. “We don’t need a bus, we
need a bleeding ark.”

Belladonna couldn’t help
smiling, but Mr. Watson was already herding everyone off.

“Half an hour to look around
the fort! Then everyone into the museum for lunch and a talk from the museum
director! Got that?”

There were a few mumbled “yes
sirs,” but most of his charges just pushed their way off the bus and scattered
across the landscape.

Belladonna zipped up her
jacket, pulled the hood up, hoisted her pink backpack onto one shoulder and
stepped off the bus.

The place looked utterly
miserable. The sky was the color of lead and the clouds were so low, they
seemed to push down on her already dismal spirits. For some reason, her mum and
dad had hardly been around. They were there when she got up in the morning and
came home at night, but her mum hadn’t cooked anything for weeks and her
grandmother had brought dinner every evening instead, which meant buying things
in boxes from the local supermarket and microwaving them when she got there, so
that even the beef vindaloo they’d had the night before had tasted vaguely of
cardboard.

She trudged to the far side
of the parking lot and started with what had been the parade ground, a flat
expanse of earth that the Romans had used for training. She half expected to
see a phantom cohort marching up and down, but there was nothing – just muddy
grass and a small raised area where the commanders had stood and watched their
men.

She strolled across the
parade ground and up onto the platform. What must it have been like for the soldiers,
she wondered. Mr. Watson had explained that many of the Roman legions were made
up of men from the far reaches of the empire, not necessarily those from Italy. But she couldn’t help thinking that when you looked at maps of the Empire, most of
it seemed to be in fairly warm places, like the Mediterranean, the middle east
and north Africa. Getting posted to the north of England really must have felt
like getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

She turned to leave the
mound, but slipped on the wet grass and skidded down the side, landing with a
thump.

“Great,”
she thought.
“Typical!”

She scrambled to her feet,
brushed herself off, and was just thinking that at least no one had seen her,
when the unmistakable sound of giggling skittered across the grass.

She spun around, hoping
against hope that it wasn’t Sophie Warren or any of her minions, but it wasn’t
anyone she recognized.

It was a girl with reddish
hair, sitting on the railway ties that bounded the parking lot. Belladonna
glowered at her, then stopped. This wasn’t one of her classmates. She wasn’t
wearing a jacket, for one thing, and she wasn’t clutching a copy of Mr.
Watson’s worksheets, for another.

Belladonna hesitated for a
moment, then walked toward her. As she got closer, she could see that the girl
was the same age as her, or maybe a little younger. She was very thin and
completely sodden. Her reddish hair was plastered to her head and hung in dank
rattails down her back, half sticking to the sides of her face, and the worn
garland that crowned her head seemed sad, rather than festive. Her dress was
little more than a simple shift, and had probably been white at one time, but
was now the color of mud.

Belladonna glanced around to
make sure no one was near.

“Hello,” she said, softly.

The girl looked surprised,
and instinctively turned around, as if she thought there must be someone
standing behind her.

“No,” said Belladonna. “I
said hello to you.”

“You can see me?” whispered
the girl.

“Yes. You laughed at me.”

The girl stared at her for a
moment before a smile spread across her grubby face.

“You looked funny. Your legs
and arms all went in different directions.”

“I’m Belladonna.”

“Branwyn,” whispered the
girl.

She fingered at her leather
necklace and smiled.

“That looks tight,” said
Belladonna. “Why don’t you take it off?”

Branwyn looked confused.

“What?”

“Your necklace. It looks
uncomfortable.”

“Johnson! What the devil are
you doing over there?”

Mr. Watson stomped across the
parking lot.

“The fort is over there,” he
said, pointing to the walls.

“Yes, but this is the parade
ground,” said Belladonna, turning to the page on the worksheet. “We’re supposed
to mark it off, see?”

“Yes, mark it off, not set up
camp. You know students aren’t supposed to wander off alone.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Right, well. Get on with it,
then.”

He marched off. Belladonna
glanced at Branwyn and was surprised to see that she had shrunken back, an
expression of fear on her face.

“Is he your Seer?” she
whispered, her voice shaking slightly.

“Our…? No, he’s just Mr.
Watson, our teacher. I’d better do as he says, though.”

Branwyn smiled uncertainly.

“It was nice meeting you,”
said Belladonna, a little awkwardly. It was always a bit hard to end
conversations with ghosts, as if you were abandoning them, somehow.

Branwyn smiled briefly, brushing
her hair away from her face, which didn’t help her general appearance one bit.

“I haven’t spoken to anyone
in a long time,” she whispered. “It was nice. I’m always here if you’d like to
talk again.”

Belladonna couldn’t tell her
that the bus trip had taken over an hour and that it was very unlikely she’d be
able to return, but she just nodded, turned, and made her way across the
parking lot to the maze of low stone walls, roughly sculpted horse troughs and stacks
of tiles from the ancient hypocausts.

She finished her worksheet
and joined everyone else as they headed toward the small museum for lunch,
though she couldn’t help glancing back to see if Branwyn was still sitting on
the edge of the parade ground.

She was.

“What is it?” asked Steve,
his voice low and his attitude nonchalant, so that no one would think he was
actually talking to the weird girl. “A ghost?”

“Yeah, but…”

“But what?”

“There’s something odd.”

“Is it a soldier?”

“No. A girl.”

Steve grunted and melted away
into the crush of kids trying to get through the single narrow door into the
museum.

Mr. Watson led the way to a
small cafeteria, where everyone sat down and got out whatever sandwiches and
drinks they had brought for lunch. Belladonna usually had some strange
concoction assembled by her mother, but this time it was just a store-bought
ham sandwich in a plastic wrapper with a bottle of fizzy orange instead of
Tizer.

Toward the end of lunch the
museum director arrived and introduced herself as Dr. Hartley. She was short
and rather round, with cropped grey hair, green wellington boots, and a pair of
glasses on a string around her neck. She told them the history of the fort and
how the land where it was built had once been marshland and peat bog and that
the Romans had built the ground up so it was solid enough to hold the stone
fort.

Mr. Watson had covered most
of this in class and Belladonna’s mind began to wander to the girl outside. She
looked out of the window and could just make her out through the rain, still
sitting in the same place.

Then it came to her.

The girl was soaked through.

But she was a ghost. The rain
shouldn’t touch her. Not here in the Land of the Living.

“…it was thought that the
body dated from this period. A theory that was confirmed by an examination of
the seeds and plants found with it.”

“What?”
thought Belladonna.
“Why
do people only say interesting things when I’m not listening?”

“Thank you, Dr. Hartley, that
was very informative,” said Mr. Watson, standing. “I’m sure everyone is very
grateful to you for taking the time to describe the museum’s work.”

He glanced sharply at the
class, who had been on enough trips by now to know that what was expected at
this point was applause.

“Good,” said Watson, clearly
pleased. “You’ve got an hour and a half to spend in the museum. Don’t forget to
identify something that interests you the most, draw a picture of it, make
notes and be prepared to talk about it in class next week.”

There was the usual murmured
assent as lunches were packed away and clumps of kids meandered off into the
maze of small rooms that made up the museum.

Belladonna caught up with
Lucy Fisher, who was dropping her egg salad sandwiches into the bin. Lucy’s mum
always made her egg salad sandwiches for school trips, but Lucy never ate them.
She wolfed down the regular school dinners, so Belladonna could only guess that
it was the egg salad she didn’t like. Once, she’d mentioned that Lucy should
perhaps tell her mum, an idea that Lucy had greeted with a look of total
incredulity, as if Belladonna had suggested sticking her hand down the waste
disposal, which only confirmed what Belladonna had always thought:  other
people’s families were weird. Which was quite something when she considered
that her family consisted of two ghosts, a psychic grandma (who wasn’t really
psychic), and an aunt who was off somewhere chasing down the Wild Hunt.

“Lucy,” she said. “What was
that stuff about a body?”

“Weren’t you listening?”
asked Lucy.

“Of course I wasn’t
listening,” thought Belladonna. “Why else would I ask?”

She didn’t say it out loud,
though. Lucy was so timid she made Belladonna look like the class clown.

“No…I was sort of
daydreaming. Was it a Roman soldier?”

“It was a girl,” said Lucy,
her voice low as if it were some big secret, rather than something the entire
class had been told only minutes before. “Isn’t that creepy? They found her in
the peat bog and it turned out she was over two thousand years old!”

Belladonna and Lucy made
their way through the museum. Some things were boring, but others were
fascinating. There were the remains of sandals worn by soldiers and delicate
shoes worn by the camp commander’s wife. They’d even found some letters in
which she had invited the wife of another camp commander over for a birthday
celebration.

As they walked into the last
room, there was a buzz of excitement. Most of the kids seemed to be lingering
there, leaning over a glass case, mesmerized.

Belladonna eased her way
through the crowd, Lucy following in her wake. When they got to the case, Lucy
winced.