Darkwitch Rising

  “When is this?” Louis asked softly. He remembered the time Genvissa brought him to this hill and showed him the land, and what he saw now was different even to that. Far, far older.

  “Many millennia ago,” the Lord of the Faerie said.

  “Is this when you first walked?”

  The Lord of the Faerie turned his strange-lit eyes to de Silva. “There has never been a first time in my walking,” he said. “I have always been. If there has been land, then there was also me. I have taken many forms, not just this man shape. I have imitated the shape of the great toothed birds that once nested in the cliffs of a far more primordial time. I have taken the form of the tiniest of moles and vetches. Now this man form appeals to me, for it mirrors the shape of those who play the Troy Game.”

  Louis shivered. “You do not play the Game, do you?”

  “No. I am one of the very few who has not been caught within its twists and turns.”

  “And thus you can see what others cannot?”

  The Lord of the Faerie’s teeth gleamed. “Do not ask me what I can see,” said the Lord of the Faerie, “for it shall do you no good.”

  Louis studied the face of the Lord of the Faerie. He could see Coel in there, but only just, and he wondered if Coel would ever survive in—

  “What if Coel was always me?” said the Lord of the Faerie. “I rarely walk, only when needed. But I always live. Somewhere. In someone. Besides, would you begrudge Coel a death in me?”

  The Lord of the Faerie paused, then laughed softly at the expression on Louis’ face.

  “You would,” the Lord of the Faerie said. “That surprises me…and comforts me. Fear not, Louis-William-Brutus. Coel shall always laugh during the day. But on some nights…or on some desperate faerie concern…then I step forth in my true form. What better for a King of England, eh?”

  “None better,” said Louis. “Lord of the Faerie, what happens tonight? What do I do?”

  “You step forth on the Ringwalk, my friend.”

  “What is this Ringwalk?”

  “It is the path the Stag God takes over the land and through the souls of its inhabitants.” Once more the faerie lord extended his hand over the landscape. “See.”

  The previously random scattering of lights over the landscape had resolved themselves into a pathway of twinkling lights. It stretched from the foot of the Llandin, from the Holy Oak, east and then northwards, leading deep into the forests.

  “What happens when I set foot on the Ringwalk?” Louis said.

  “That, my friend, is up to you,” and the Lord of the Faerie’s hand gave Louis a very gentle push towards the hill as it sloped down towards the Holy Oak.

  Louis hesitated, then he turned his back and set off down the hill.

  The Lord of the Faerie smiled, cold and feral. “Die well, my friend,” he whispered. “Die well…or die not at all.”

  Two

  Idol Lane, London

  Later that night Weyland asked Jane once again to leave Noah and himself alone in the kitchen. Weyland had been fiddling about by the hearth, and as Jane left the room he moved back to the table where Noah sat, sitting opposite her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?” Noah said.

  “For whatever happened with Catling. She has done something to hurt you,” he said.

  “What care you if I hurt or not?” she said.

  “I find I care very much, Noah.”

  She stared at him. Slowly, his eyes not leaving hers, Weyland gently took one of her hands in his.

  Noah tensed, but did not withdraw her hand.

  “I am glad Jane will teach you the craft of the Mistress of the Labyrinth,” he said.

  “You shall be able to use me splendidly, then.”

  He gave a short laugh. “Learning the ways of the Mistress will make you more beautiful, more desirable. Any woman would be enhanced by learning the craft of the Mistress of the Labyrinth. You will be graced. I find I look forward to that very much.”

  “I will never love you, Minotaur. Do not think to trick me into love!”

  “Then I shall harbour no expectation of your love.” His mouth quirked again. “Although I still find myself confused by what you said atop the hill.”

  “Then forget it, I pray you!”

  Weyland let go her hand and looked about the kitchen, as if seeing it for the first time.

  “This is a poor room,” he said finally. “A poor place to sleep.” He glanced at Noah, and saw panic light her eyes.

  “I find it warm enough, and pleasant,” she said.

  He grinned. “Nevertheless, I would prefer that you spend your nights with me from now on.”

  “No.”

  “I said I would ask a terrible price of you, Noah, for leaving the bands to lie undisturbed until you learn the art and craft of the labyrinth. This is it. Your choice. Spend your nights with me, or I will force you to fetch the kingship bands.”

  She stared at him, clearly appalled.

  “This price is not so terrible as you may fear, Noah. Let me deal plainly with you. Spend your nights with me—I am demanding no sexual favours or comforts from you—and I will agree that the bands can stay where they are until you have completed your training, and I will give you and Jane the complete freedom you need so you can learn from her teaching. See what a good humour I am in. I have even given you a bonus.”

  “You think I should believe you?”

  “I do not play with words. I will not force you to any sexual play that you do not want—that you do not ask for—but we will lie together side by side, and talk, and share sleep. For this you receive your freedom to do what you must, and you receive my word that I will not force you to take the bands until you have finished your training. It is a bargain, Noah.”

  “Why?”

  Because I want you. “Because I want to know you better, and I want you to know me.”

  Noah frowned, and Weyland could see her trying to fathom the trap.

  “No trap,” he whispered.

  “With you there is always a trap.”

  “No trap.” Not for her, maybe.

  She was silent, still thinking, then, with some obvious reluctance, she nodded. “Very well.”

  “We must seal the bargain with a kiss.”

  “You said no sexual play I did not ask for!”

  “It is but the conclusion of a pact, Noah, and common enough. Come now, a kiss.”

  He leaned across the table, and laid his mouth very gently against hers. He let it go at that, waiting, and was rewarded when she sighed, and moved her mouth more firmly under his.

  He increased the depth of his kiss, but still kept it undemanding, and, very, very slowly, he felt her relax under his mouth.

  Oh, gods, he had not felt this way since Ariadne first offered herself to him. All these thousands of years, all the women he had taken, and raped, and forced, and squandered, and he had never kissed nor been kissed with this sweetness, until now. Until Noah…

  “Dear heavens, Noah! What are you doing!”

  Noah sprang back from Weyland’s mouth as he forced down a curse, sat back in his chair, and turned around.

  Jane stood in the doorway, looking at Noah with such an expression of astonishment on her face that Weyland thought she looked like a little girl who had caught her parents in frenzied sexual congress.

  “I had not thought that you…with him…!” Jane said. “No wonder he asked me to leave the room.”

  “It was not what you think,” Noah said.

  “Noah shall be spending her nights with me from now on,” said Weyland casually, enjoying the renewed expression of astonishment, tempered with horror, on Jane’s face. “A platonic agreement, naturally. Noah agrees to this because it will please me so much that I will allow both you and she as much freedom as you need to teach and learn the ways of the labyrinth.”

  If possible, Jane gaped all the more at Noah. “You told him—”

  “I told Weyland tha
t you had agreed to teach me the craft of Mistress of the Labyrinth,” Noah said quickly.

  Jane managed to close her mouth. “Oh.”

  “And I am most pleased,” Weyland said. “Most pleased.”

  Jane shot him a dark look.

  “He would know anyway,” said Noah, still looking hard at Jane. “Why not tell him?”

  “Precisely,” said Weyland. “And now, I see that it is late, and I am tired. Noah, we should go to bed, I think.”

  Weyland looked back to Noah. Her face had closed over, and Weyland knew that she wondered what lay ahead of her, in that unknown den above them.

  “It shall not be as you fear,” he said softly. Three

  Three

  The Ringwalk

  Louis walked down the hill. He was unsettled and nervous, more by the glimpse of the potency of the ancient power of this land as it emanated from the Lord of the Faerie than by what might happen to him this night.

  The Holy Oak loomed before him, and Louis stopped beneath its ancient spreading branches and looked to the small pool formed by the spring that bubbled forth from the rocks at the foot of the tree.

  The pool, the place where he’d rescued Cornelia from Loth and Erith and from where he’d carried her back to their home and conceived with her their daughter.

  There was a movement in front of him, and Louis looked up. A fox had emerged from the undergrowth and was standing directly before him, staring into his eyes with his own unblinking yellow orbs.

  Then the fox turned, and walked down a pathway which led from the pool into a small grove of trees.

  The gravel and earthen floor of the path glowed with a faint luminescence.

  The Ringwalk.

  Louis took a deep breath, and stepped forward to follow the fox.

  Everything changed.

  The first thing Louis noticed was that his clothes and shoes had vanished, leaving him naked.

  The second thing he noticed was that the forest had changed. The trees seemed different. Foreign.

  Louis frowned, puzzling it over as he walked deeper into the forest.

  The third thing he noticed was that it was now daylight rather than night.

  And warm. Hot, even, as if this was a foreign land rather than—

  “Oh, sweet gods!” he muttered, coming to a stop, staring almost frantically about him.

  The fox had vanished, and there was only the forest, and the warm scented air, and the soft touch of a breeze across his naked and now goosebumped flesh.

  Louis knew where he was, and that knowledge terrified him.

  He was in the forests outside his Italian birthplace of Alba on the River Tiber.

  Where he had hunted and killed his father, Silvius.

  Louis circled around on the path, his heart pounding. What trickery this?

  What meaning this?

  Louis felt the first stirrings of true fear, something he’d not felt since he’d been Brutus, and faced with a life of (as he’d thought then) mediocrity.

  “And would I take that mediocrity now, in preference to what awaits me down this trail?” he asked himself, still circling slowly, his eyes wary.

  No, he thought. Never.

  Louis turned back to the path, and strode down the Ringwalk.

  To either side of him reared huge trees, thick with leafy branches and trailing ivy, the way between their trunks obscured with shrubbery and nettles. Apart from the sounds he made, there came little evidence of other inhabitants of the forest, whether bird or animal or other watching eyes.

  It was very calm.

  Very still.

  Very…waiting.

  It irritated Louis, this silence, this emptiness.

  “Come, take me if you will,” he said, then repeated it louder, shouting it into the forest. “Come, take me if you will!”

  “Is that what you wish?” came a soft, lilting voice, and Louis started, for that was the voice of his mother when he had lived as Brutus. She had died in his birth, and by rights Louis should not recognise it at all, but the instant he heard that voice, he knew.

  Is that what you wish?

  “Yes,” he whispered. “That is what I wish.”

  The instant the words had fallen from Louis’ mouth, there came from a far distance a sound that sent a chill down Louis’ spine.

  The haunting call of the hunting horn, echoing through the trees.

  The horn was so far remote, and so distorted by echoes, Louis had no means of knowing how far and in what direction it lay. But this he did know: that horn signalled the start of the hunt, and the quarry was himself.

  Louis grimaced. Yes, he had said. That is what I wish.

  He recommenced his progress down the Ringwalk.

  For a time all seemed peaceful, although the forest almost literally quivered with tension.

  And then, almost apologetically, came a sound from behind Louis.

  A single footfall.

  A single hunter.

  Silvius.

  Four

  The Idyll, Idol Lane, London

  NOAH SPEAKS

  He took me by the hand and led me up those damned stairs into the loft of the building.

  Once we attained the top landing, we stood before a plain wooden door.

  Weyland glanced at me with amused eyes, knowing full well my lack of enthusiasm, then he opened the door and, still holding my hand, pulled me inside.

  The door closed softly behind us. For a moment there was blackness, and it disturbed me so much that I actually moved closer to Weyland, needing the reassurance of his warmth and presence.

  “Light,” he said, very low, and within a heartbeat soft lights glowed in a score of places.

  They did not flare suddenly into life, but gently pervaded the dark, as dawn lightens the land towards the end of night.

  My first impression as the lights slowly intensified was one of space. We stood in a great sandstone-columned vestibule, with fan vaulting, and with a flooring of vivid blue, gold and scarlet tessellated tiles. The vestibule’s outer walls were pierced with graceful, arched open doorways leading to balconies, walkways, bridges and long elegant arcades and cloisters. Beyond the doorways and balconies I could just make out a jungle of domed and spired buildings, their gilded tiles glinting under some enchanted sun.

  It was a city in this tiny upstairs chamber of Weyland’s house in Idol Lane, and the vestibule its central hub.

  My eyes were, I think, impossibly wide. I looked to Weyland, and he smiled very gently at the expression on my face.

  “What did you expect? A stinking, dismal cave, full of the musk of Minotaur?”

  My face flamed. It was precisely what I had expected.

  He laughed, and squeezed my hand before letting it go and walking further into the vestibule.

  “I call this,” he said, swinging back to look at me, “my Idyll. It is my retreat from everything that people expect of me, or fear from me, or consider me.”

  What people feared of him, or considered him? For that, surely, he had no one to blame but himself. I stared at him, and he made a face.

  “You think all of this is a trap, don’t you?”

  “Is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied.

  No other answer could have unsettled me more.

  I distracted myself by paying more attention to my surroundings. The air was strange—warm, slightly humid, and sweetly spiced.

  It was not English air.

  “Where is this?” I asked.

  “The tiny chamber above the kitchen in—”

  I made a noise of exasperation, and he smiled. “It is an amalgamation of the best of all that I have seen over the past three thousand years. I have taken the best and most beautiful from cities in Egypt and Persia and faraway China.”

  “This is the heart of the labyrinth,” I said, indicating the central hub in which we stood (I experienced a moment of renewed unease as I said this, for as I turned about I could not see which door it was that led
back into the house below). “You have merely recreated your own home, your original home, Weyland, if perhaps slightly more salubrious.”

  “Ah, Noah,” he said, walking close now. “You are perceptive, are you not? Aye, this echoes the heart of the labyrinth, but with one crucial difference.”

  “Yes?”

  “I know the way out. And you don’t.” Paradoxically, at last I felt on firmer ground. This was the Minotaur I understood.

  Five

  The Forest

  Silvius!

  Louis stopped dead.

  Who else but the father he’d murdered when he was but fifteen for the golden bands of Troy about Silvius’ limbs?

  This is no way to found a Game, Silvius had said to Brutus when he’d founded the Troy Game with Genvissa. You cannot found a Game on the corruption of my murder.

  So what was this, then? Silvius come to exact retribution? Was this what the Stag God demanded?

  Louis ran lightly forward. He was not scared so much as angry, and not running away so much as finding time and space in which to think. His father Silvius, trapped in the heart of the Game all these thousands of years, was coming to murder him, to set the Game to rights, to enable Louis, as Brutus-reborn, rebirth as the Stag God.

  Why run from it, then?

  Why this anger?

  Louis’ footsteps slowed. Throughout his lives as Brutus and then William, the Troy Game had been steeped in murder. Asterion’s, to start with, and then Ariadne’s murder of so many in the name of revenge. Silvius’ murder, by his son’s hand. Genvissa’s death. The death of his and Cornelia’s daughter. Coel’s murder. Caela’s. Swanne’s. Harold’s.

  Blangan.

  Blangan. Gods, how many years was it since Louis had given her a single thought? She had been the reviled mother of Loth, elder sister of Genvissa, exiled from Llangarlia, brought back to the land by Brutus, only to have her heart torn out in the centre of Mag’s Dance by her son.

  What was it about that death? Louis frowned, trying to remember what it was Genvissa had told him about it. She’d manipulated Loth into murdering Blangan, not so much to rid herself of Blangan (although that was a true bonus for Genvissa), but because she’d wrapped this murder within so much dark magic that Blangan’s murder effectively caused the Stag God Og’s murder.