He was right. Time was running out.
Out across the fields, a hovering kestrel caught her eye. It tilted and fluttered in the air above a hedgerow, and she could almost imagine some small, oblivious creature below it. Then, instead of a straight swoop, it sped off in a long, low slant, as if its little quarry had suddenly raced away. At the same moment, she saw two small birds flit from the same patch of hedge in the opposite direction.
‘There’s something out there,’ she said under her breath.
‘What?’ Symond sounded sceptical. ‘What are you talking about?’
There was an angry thunder of steps and Makepeace was swung round to face the interrogator.
‘Mistress, we have bared this cottage’s very bones—’
‘There’s something out there,’ Makepeace said again, louder this time. ‘Behind that far hedge, near the meadowsweet.’
‘Ignore the crafty little baggage,’ Symond said with contempt. ‘She’s lying again.’
‘What did you see?’ The interrogator frowned.
‘Nothing,’ said Makepeace. ‘But the birds did. Something scared them.’ She saw his caution wrestling with his doubt and annoyance.
‘Make sure your muskets are ready,’ he muttered to his comrades, ‘and let’s get those matches lit!’
One of the men busied himself with flint and steel. When the match cords were smouldering, they were handed out to the musketeers in readiness.
‘I see something!’ called the man in the tree outside. ‘There, by the elm—’
There was a thud, and a thump as he fell from the tree, a gash in the back of his head. A heavy rock tumbled down beside him.
‘That came from behind the house!’ shouted someone, and then somebody else yelled, ‘There!’
There was a loud crack as one of the musketeers fired, and the room filled with smoke. Just before the gunshot, however, Bear had smelt something else. A familiar scent, from above . . .
‘Roof!’ was all Makepeace had time to shout. Half her companions heard her and looked up. Half did not. The latter had no chance when the Elder in James’s body crashed through the ragged thatch and landed in the middle of the room, sword drawn.
He was snake-fast, kestrel-fast. He lunged to impale the musketeer that had not fired, slashed across the throat of another soldier, and carved into the face of one of the men in black. Three men fell. They leaked thin, shimmering ghosts that rippled and faded.
But Makepeace’s warning had marred James’s perfect attack. The interrogator tumbled backwards, and the cut that would have blinded him knocked his hat off instead. His other colleague managed a desperate parry. The surviving musketeer dropped his ramming rod mid-reload and leaped backwards, reversing his weapon to use it as a club. Meanwhile, Symond swiftly stepped behind Makepeace. Reaching an arm over her shoulder, he fired his pistol at James’s head from close range.
James was darting to one side even as the trigger pulled. The bullet missed him, cracking the brickwork behind him, but he gave a snarl, clutching at a red powder-burn on the skin around his right eye. The smoke from the pistol blinded him for a fatal instant. Makepeace flung herself forward and lunged for his sword hand, jolting the hilt from his grasp. The musketeer struck him in the face with the butt of his gun, knocking him to the floor.
‘Kill him!’ shouted Symond, taking a step back.
‘No!’ cried Makepeace. Now for a gamble of all gambles. She looked appealingly at the interrogator. ‘We need him alive, so his men will surrender! And . . . I know this man! He’s not a witch, just demon-cursed, like me! He needs Lord Fellmotte to exorcise him!’
‘Don’t listen to her!’ bellowed Symond.
‘Lord Fellmotte!’ erupted the interrogator, losing patience. ‘Exorcise the prisoner!’
Symond gave Makepeace a fleeting glance of pure hatred. He put away his sword, and drew his dirk instead. He ventured closer, making sure that at all times the blade was pointed firmly at the prisoner. Slowly and carefully, he dropped to a crouch, and laid a hand on the prisoner’s shoulder.
And then, to everyone’s surprise including his, his right hand gave an odd little spasm, and tossed his dirk away across the room.
Elder James promptly grabbed Symond by the shoulders to stop him pulling away, and let his jaw drop wide. He breathed out with a sound like a broken bellows, and only Makepeace saw the smoky forms of ghosts surge from his throat towards Symond’s face.
Symond gave a short gargle of shock as spirits seethed in through his eyes, ears, nostrils and mouth. Then his face, usually so mask-like, jittered helplessly between different paroxysms of terror.
Makepeace quietly backed against a wall, her skin crawling. Given the choice between a half-blinded, captured bastard, and a well-trained heir with a blade in his hand, the ghosts had seized a golden chance to trade up. She had hoped for this, but the sight of it still made her feel sick.
James released Symond and fell backwards, looking shocked and stunned. Symond stood shakily, then staggered across the room, his arms jerking and twitching.
‘My lord?’ The interrogator’s free hand was fumbling at his pocket, and Makepeace wondered if he was looking for his bible. ‘My lord . . . are you well?’
Symond stooped to pick up his dirk, then straightened. He wobbled on his feet for a moment, so that the interrogator reached out to steady him. Then Symond drove his dirk into the interrogator’s stomach with shocking force.
He drew his sword with unnatural speed, and hacked swiftly into the side of the remaining musketeer’s neck. The last soldier had just time to scream as he was run through.
There was a ragged sound of steps outside, and the front door was flung open. White Crowe burst in, with a young soldier in Fellmotte colours by his side. Both immediately pointed their weapons at Symond.
‘Oh, put those away!’ snapped the Elder in Symond’s body. ‘Can you not see who I—’
There was a crack, and he stiffened as if listening intently. A round, dark hole was suddenly visible in his forehead. Makepeace could smell smoke, that same metallic hellfire gunsmoke.
‘Oh, I know who you are,’ said the young Royalist soldier, ‘you toad-licking traitor.’ A wreath of smoke surrounded his pistol. Symond collapsed to the ground, still wearing an expression of intense concentration.
‘You fool!’ shouted White Crowe. ‘We were supposed to capture Master Symond alive!’
‘I’ll hang before I regret it,’ said the young soldier with feeling. ‘My brother died at that battle, thanks to him.’ Other soldiers piled in behind him, took in the scene at a glance, and pointed their weapons at Makepeace.
‘Are you badly hurt, my lord?’ White Crowe stooped beside James.
James gave Makepeace a dazed, haggard glance. And yes, it was James at last, the real James. When she saw his hand start to move towards hers, she gave him a tiny, urgent shake of the head, willing him to understand. To her relief, she saw realization dawn across his face.
Groggily James glanced at White Crowe instead, and shook his head.
‘A powder burn, nothing more,’ he rasped. ‘A minor inconvenience.’ It was not a perfect impression of the voice he had used as an Elder, but close enough. ‘One of them was lucky . . . briefly.’
‘My lord, let me help you to the carriage,’ said White Crowe, wrapping one of James’s arms over his shoulder. He helped James to his feet and guided him out through the door. ‘Bring the girl,’ he said over his shoulder.
Nobody but Makepeace paid any attention to Symond’s body. White Crowe’s men were not gifted. They heard no faint, spectral screams, like fingernails against the mind. And they saw nothing when ghosts swirled out of Symond like dirty water.
But Makepeace saw them as she was manhandled towards the door. They rose and mingled, writhing, thrashing and smokily bleeding into the air. These were the ‘wolves’ for which Mother had prepared her. Soon they would sense her, and the haven at her core. Then they would come for her.
But s
he could not leave without Morgan.
The two closest ghosts were locked in battle, tearing vaporous strands from each other. The larger was already badly tattered, perhaps savaged by Symond’s predatory mind. The smaller one looked different from the other ghosts, and moved more quickly and sinuously.
Morgan.
Makepeace feigned a stumble, and fell from her captors’ arms to the floor. Steeling her will, she threw out one arm, with her fingers almost touching the Infiltrator’s ghost. It broke from its fight, and spiralled swiftly up her arm. She breathed deeply to draw in air and one spymistress-ghost, repressing a shudder as she did so.
As the soldiers picked Makepeace up and dragged her out of the cottage, the other ghost streaked towards her head. She had a brief glimpse of a hazy, misshapen face. Then for a fearful moment everything was twilit, as the phantom tried to pour in through her eyes.
But this ghost was panicky and already fraying. It was not ready for her defences, battle-hardened by her graveyard vigils. It was not ready for her angels of the mind. And most of all, it was not ready for Bear. When Makepeace’s vision cleared again, the shreds of her attacker were floating on the air like dark gossamer.
Are you hurt? Makepeace asked quickly, trying to get a sense of Morgan’s presence in her head, while her captors hurried her down the path after White Crowe and James.
A minor inconvenience, came the wry response in Morgan’s familiar hard-edged voice. And that is not a question I have been asked in a very long time.
Makepeace cast an anxious glance back towards the cottage, looking for more spectral pursuers.
They will seek us, but they are wounded, murmured Morgan. And they have just lost their Infiltrator.
‘If we hurry,’ White Crowe was saying, ‘we can reach Grizehayes before the enemy’s reinforcements, and slip past the siege in darkness. With luck Lord Fellmotte is still alive – we still have a chance of getting the girl to him in time!’
James and Makepeace exchanged a fleeting, panicky glance, but what could they do?
‘Lead on,’ James said huskily.
After all Makepeace’s plans, struggles and escapes, it seemed that she was going back to Grizehayes after all. For a moment she felt as though it had been biding her time and watching her efforts, before putting out one long, lazy cat paw, and pinning her like a wounded bird.
CHAPTER 37
Only when she was tucked inside the Fellmotte carriage alongside James did Makepeace dare to speak.
‘Is anyone listening to us?’ she murmured.
‘I don’t think so,’ James whispered back. ‘The driver won’t hear us, and everybody else is on horses.’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ said Makepeace, meeting his eye and raising an eyebrow.
It took a moment for her meaning to sink in. James looked rueful and shook his head.
‘Just me in here now,’ he said.
‘Let’s look at your eye, then,’ Makepeace whispered. James showed his face, and she noticed the singed spatter pattern on the skin of his cheek, and the painful redness of his eyeball.
‘I can’t see properly out of it,’ murmured James, with commendable composure. ‘Everything is blurry . . .’
Makepeace spent a few moments in silent consultation with the doctor.
‘Your eye should mend,’ she said, ‘in a day or two. A friend of mine says he’s seen the like before. And he says that if we wash out that burn and dress it you’ll lose that leper-look in a few weeks.’
‘Friend?’ James’s brows rose in consternation. ‘Makepeace – what have you done?’
‘Me? What did you do?’ Makepeace could not resist giving him a small, fierce punch in the arm. ‘You used me to hide that charter! Then you ran away without me! I waited at those stocks for ages! I thought you’d been caught and hanged!’
‘I always meant to come back! But everything happened so fast. Symond had a plan – he said he’d use the charter to threaten the family, and get some of his estates ahead of time. Then he’d set up his own manor, with no Inheritance or ghosts, and he’d bring us there to join his household. And nobody would trouble us while we had that charter.’
‘You should have told me!’
‘He made me promise silence,’ James said simply. ‘A man who breaks his word is better dead.’
‘Well, you broke your word to me when you threw yourself face-first on a pile of Fellmotte ghosts!’ Makepeace gave him a sharp little pinch, as if they were much younger children. There was an angry joy in voicing her frustration.
‘I’m sorry!’ hissed James, and seemed to mean it. ‘If I could take it back I would! If you had been there that day, you would understand. When I found Sir Anthony bleeding on the ground, and he beckoned me over . . . it felt like Providence. As if some star of my birth had shaped me for that moment! That one chance to become something . . . great.
‘And it was greatness, Makepeace! You don’t know the things I could do when I’d Inherited. The languages that sprang into my head, the sword moves I suddenly knew, and all the dealings of the court laid out for me like a web on a loom! And to give orders and see things done, to watch doors open, to have everything possible—’
‘To chase your own kin across two and a half counties,’ Makepeace interjected sharply.
James put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her tightly for a few seconds, then kissed the top of her head.
‘I know,’ he muttered into her cap. ‘I was the Lord of Fools. I thought I would still be myself, and change everything. But I was just a puppet. The bean in the cake – that’s what you said, wasn’t it? Giving up my freedom for a game of lordship.’
He sighed.
‘I felt . . . sorry for him too,’ he admitted, sounding embarrassed. ‘Sir Anthony. He was still one of those devils, but when he was lying there in his own blood he looked frightened, like any dying man. It was hard to say no. I know, ’tis a stupid reason.’
‘Yes.’ Makepeace remembered her own helpless desire to save Livewell’s disintegrating ghost. ‘A stupid reason. But not the worst kind of stupid reason.’
She hugged him back, and sighed.
‘You’ll have another game of lordship to play when we reach Grizehayes,’ she said under her breath. ‘You must play Lord of Misrule in good earnest, and play it well, or we’re both for the pot.’
‘What about you?’ James studied her face with a concerned frown. ‘What have you done to yourself, Makepeace?’
‘Don’t worry.’ Makepeace squeezed his hand, and searched for the right words. ‘I’m not haunted against my will. I just made some new friends.’
‘So there are ghosts inside you?’ James seemed to be struggling with the idea.
‘James.’ It was Makepeace’s turn to admit to a betrayal. ‘I have always been haunted, for as long as you have known me. I brought a ghost with me to Grizehayes, and nobody guessed. I should have told you. I wanted to tell you. But you were right, I am a coward sometimes. Trust frightens me more than pain.
‘He is my friend, and my battle-brother. We are woven into each other. I want you to understand him, so you can understand me. Let me tell you about him.’
During the long and wearying ride, the carriage stopped now and then for a change of horses, but not to break the journey. Occasionally there would be sounds of challenges outside and muffled voices. Sometimes passwords were exchanged, sometimes coins or papers, sometimes gunshots.
With a sense of inevitability, Makepeace saw the countryside change and revert. Lush fields yielded to moorland. Damp lambs followed the black-faced sheep down the paths between the gorse mounds. Everything was so familiar it hurt. The sights and colours locked around Makepeace’s mind like a familiar shackle.
The convoy halted in a little copse, just after sunset. The driver and one soldier stayed to look after the carriage and horses. White Crowe, Makepeace and James continued on foot, accompanied by five other soldiers wearing Fellmotte colours. Makepeace recognized a few of them from
the neighbouring villages, and was sure she had once bought ladles from one of them. But war had recast them all. They had new costumes, and new roles to play.
White Crowe had found an eye-patch of black cloth for James. Thankfully nobody expected James to lead the troop while he was injured and half blind. If he had, the others might soon have guessed that he no longer wielded the skills and knowledge of an Elder.
Grizehayes they saw from a distance, its distinctive towers silhouetted against the last violet glimmer of the fading day. However, it was no longer alone.
On the darkling expanse around it, where once there had been flat, unbroken ground, a straggling, ramshackle town seemed to have risen up from the very earth. Clusters of dun-coloured canvas tents had sprouted, and among them campfires glowed like scattered embers. The camp was a crescent shape, curling its tapering arms to embrace Grizehayes. However, it did not encircle the great house completely, and there was still a wide, wary distance between the nearest tents and the ancient grey walls.
It was true, then. Grizehayes was under siege.
One soldier vanished into the darkness to scout ahead, and soon returned.
‘Our guards on Widow’s Tower have seen our lantern signal and returned it,’ he said. ‘They know we’re here, so they’ll be ready to let us in through the sally gate.’
‘If the enemy saw the signal in the tower, they’ll know the household is signalling to someone in the dark,’ said White Crowe. ‘They’ll be watching for us. Quiet as death, everyone. They’ll have scouts of their own outside the camp, far away from the fires so that their eyes can adjust to the dark.’
Gingerly they crept through the darkness skirting the edge of the camp, following White Crowe’s lead. They nearly blundered into a clutch of enemy musketeers, but noticed them in time, thanks to the quiet rattle of their bandoliers, and the pinpoint glow of their slow matches.
Makepeace briefly wondered about grabbing James’s hand, running towards these strangers and surrendering. It would save her from Grizehayes, but seemed like an excellent recipe for getting shot.