The Blood Binding by Helen Stringer

 
     
    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