Druid''s Sword

  “It makes a terrible kind of sense,” Noah said.

  “Any added comments, Silvius?” Jack said.

  “I defer to Ariadne’s knowledge,” he said. “After all, what was I but a straight-down-the-line Kingman who never put a foot wrong?”

  Jack noted there was some interaction between Silvius and Ariadne at this point, a faint frisson of amusement that passed between them. If their current conversation hadn’t been so important Jack would have been hard-pressed not to drag his father outside to ask him privately what was happening between him and Ariadne.

  There was another long silence. Stella walked over to the drinks cabinet, thought better of it, and sat down in a chair with a thump. Noah just stood, a shaking hand to her face.

  “But think of this,” said Silvius. “If Catling has been this invulnerable, all this time, then why hex Grace? Why tie Grace’s fate to hers? If all this is true, then Catling didn’t need a backup.”

  Noah dropped her hand away from her face, her eyes suddenly bright. “Do you think she was lying?”

  Jack shared a look with Ariadne and Silvius, then shrugged. “I don’t know, Noah. We all,” he waved a hand, taking in Stella, Ariadne, Silvius and Noah, “need to think about it. Games can be unwound. Look at Troy, and Jericho, and all the cities you destroyed, Ariadne.”

  Ariadne had the grace to drop her eyes.

  “But none of those cities, none of them,” said Silvius, “had Games that were incarnate. We just don’t know. I don’t necessarily believe anything Catling says, but there is a grain of sense in her assertion.”

  “Nonetheless,” said Ariadne, “I feel that Catling hexed Grace because Catling is still vulnerable. There is no other reason to do it.”

  “Not because Catling has a malevolent and spiteful character and it may have given her joy to see Grace, and the rest of us, suffer?” said Noah.

  “No,” said Ariadne. “Remember, Catling’s fate is Grace’s fate, but Grace’s fate is also Catling’s fate. The hex works both ways, and Catling would not have left herself exposed in this manner if there wasn’t a damn good reason to do it. She needed a backup, Grace was it, and that means she must be vulnerable elsewhere. Maybe she can’t be unwound or destroyed. But maybe there’s another chink in her armour somewhere.”

  “Hope,” said Noah. “Thank the gods.”

  “May I ask something?” said Silvius.

  Jack gave his father a small smile. “Sure. So long as I have an answer for it.”

  “If the Troy Game can be destroyed…what happens to the majority of people in this room who have been caught up in its machinations, reborn life after life? Will you be gone as well?”

  “No,” said Jack. “We all exist independently of the Troy Game, and we’re all tied either to the land or to each other now. Only if the land is destroyed will we cease to exist.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” said Silvius with a grin. “I was just starting to enjoy everyone’s company.”

  Harry had been silent while the Mistresses of the Labyrinth and the two Kingmen talked, but now he put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Jack, I take it from this conversation that you are prepared to commit to the Troy Game’s undoing?”

  “Yes,” Jack said. “Not that it does you any good, but yes. The Troy Game needs to be destroyed, unwound, undone, put away…whatever. It is a vileness, and…oh, gods, I wish I had never created the damned thing!”

  “And I wish the land had never conducted its vile alliance with the Game,” said Harry, “but wishes will do us no good at all.”

  “Catling knew what choice I would make,” Jack said. “She had her threats all to hand.”

  “I still can’t come to grips with the idea that the daughter we conceived was, in fact, Catling,” said Stella. “All these years I have thought of her, and of what she could have been…and here she was, before us all the time. Catling.”

  “I wish my daughter had been born,” said Noah softly. “Who knows what she may have been.”

  Stella dropped her eyes.

  “Enough,” said Harry. “There are no recriminations, no guilt. What has happened has happened, and we need to move forward.”

  “Straight over the cliff?” muttered Ariadne, inspecting her scarlet fingernails.

  Harry shot her a black look, but did not otherwise respond to her. “The Troy Game is the greatest threat this land has ever faced,” he said, “and the land needs to be as strong as it can be to face the Game. Jack, Noah, for three and a half thousand years you have been antagonists, one way or the other. Jealousies and ambitions have driven you apart. It is time, finally, to put a stop to it, because, damn it, you are causing this land almost as much damage as Catling!”

  Harry paused, looking between them. “It is time to make the Great Marriage. Time to give the land the strength it needs to fight back. You will do this.”

  It was a directive, not a request, and it created an interesting undercurrent of emotion in the room. Jack and Noah looked at each other, and then as quickly away again. Silvius studied his son carefully; Ariadne grinned somewhat lasciviously and Stella sent her a glance of irritation.

  Jack finally gave a tired little smile. “Noah?” he said. “Can we put our past behind us?”

  “Of course,” she said, her response quick, but her face and words underscored with a little nervousness.

  “Will Weyland accept this?” Jack said.

  Now it was she who gave the tired smile. “I will talk to him.”

  “He will not stand in its way,” Harry said, and, again, it was not a request.

  “I will talk to him,” Noah repeated.

  “Noah—” Harry began.

  “I will talk to him, Harry, and he will agree. Okay?”

  “Make sure that he does,” Harry said quietly. “Now, as to the when. The sooner the—”

  “No,” said Jack. “Sooner is not necessarily better. The Great Marriage is best done on May Day, Harry. That’s eight months away. We could do it sooner, yes, but if we do it on the strength of the rising spring, then it will achieve its greatest power.”

  “He’s right, Harry,” Noah said.

  “But that’s so far away,” Harry said.

  “Harry, I know,” Jack said. “But we can’t rush into this. We need to deal with the Troy Game, and we will do it, I promise you.”

  To one side Ariadne gave a soft snort of laughter, then reached into her purse for a cigarette, which Silvius lit for her.

  “We will do it,” Jack said, glancing at Ariadne, “but we’re only going to get one chance at this. If we delay the Great Marriage until May Day then we’ll ensure the land, as well as Noah and myself, are at our strongest before we attempt—”

  “The impossible,” Ariadne muttered, and drew down deeply on her cigarette.

  “Goddamn you!” Jack spun about, and marched over until he was standing directly in front of Ariadne.

  She didn’t flinch, merely regarded him calmly through the drifting smoke of her cigarette.

  “You had your part to play in this mess,” said Jack, “and you will damn well have your part to play in its fixing. Yes?”

  Ariadne gave a tilt of her head, which was as close as she could come to an apology. “I will help, yes. So, what do you have planned, great god of the forests?”

  Jack caught his father’s twinkling eye, and barely managed to repress a smile. Ariadne was taunting him, but she was doing it in good humour, and he was suddenly very glad she was here.

  “Jack needs to get the kingship bands,” Harry said.

  “Of course,” said Noah. “Whenever he wants them, I will fetch them.”

  Jack slid Noah a quick look, then just as quickly looked away.

  Ariadne was watching him, and smiled to herself.

  “We need to work out how we can get around what Catling has told Jack,” Stella said. “Whatever she says, surely there is a way to unwind the Game.”

  “So what do we do first?” Harry said. “Jack? Do you want
your bands?”

  How the world has changed, Jack reflected. For two lifetimes Noah, as Caela and then Noah, and Harry, in his earlier incarnation as Harold, had spent much of their time trying to keep him away from the bands. Now they were his for the asking.

  “Not until Noah and I have made the Great Marriage,” he said. “I really do want to delay making any move for as long as I can—sudden action is only going to murder us all. If I have the bands then Catling will want Noah and me to weave the final binding enchantment, completing the Game, immediately. Not having the bands will buy us time.”

  “Catling will get impatient,” Ariadne said. “And once Catling gets impatient,” she blew out a plume of smoke, “Catling will get nasty.”

  “And thus we need to do some war planning,” Silvius said. “What are we going to do?”

  “I need to discover just what it is that appears out of place about London,” said Jack. “I have no idea at all what this damned shadowy difference is, save for the fact that it clearly derives from the labyrinthine arts. Given that Noah and Stella have not detected anything, or Silvius or Weyland, and given that all of you with your knowledge of the Troy Game and the labyrinthine arts should be able to do so, I have no idea what it could be.”

  “Jack?” said Ariadne.

  “Yes?”

  “Would you mind filling me in? I’m not sure that Silvius knows anything about this, either.”

  “Oh,” said Jack. “Sorry.” He paused, trying to gather his thoughts. “When I arrived in London a week or so past, I felt something, um, different…about the city. Harry and I spent an afternoon walking about the City. There is something hanging over London. A shadow—that’s the only way I can think of it. Whatever the shadow is, it involves labyrinthine power, although there is a ‘disassociation’ with the Troy Game. I’m sorry, I can’t explain it better than that, Ariadne, and I have no idea if it works against us or for us. But we do need to know precisely what it is and it worries me that Noah and Stella can’t sense it. You, Ariadne? Silvius?”

  Both shook their heads. “But you can be sure we’ll send our senses scrying the instant we get back to London,” Silvius said.

  Ariadne frowned. “Catling said nothing about it?”

  “No,” Jack said, “but then we didn’t have the longest of conversations.”

  “Have you asked Grace?”

  “Grace called it a ‘wrongness’,” Jack said, “but I can’t help thinking that she knows what it is.”

  “Grace wouldn’t hide anything from you,” said Noah.

  Jack stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray. “Grace hides many things.”

  “Grace is an innocent in all of this,” Noah said.

  “There are no innocents in any of this,” Jack said, “and certainly not Grace. She should, for instance, have mentioned she has undergone her training as a Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

  “What?” Noah said.

  “You didn’t know?” said Jack. “Grace is your daughter, and you a trained Mistress of the Labyrinth yourself, and you didn’t know?”

  “But…how? Who trained her?”

  Jack looked pointedly at Stella, who was looking decidedly uncomfortable.

  “She wanted to learn,” Stella said, “so I taught her. She said she didn’t want to ask you, Noah.”

  Noah could do nothing but stare at Stella.

  “Did you know, Ariadne?” Jack said.

  “She asked me if I thought Stella would train her,” Ariadne said, “and I told her just to ask.”

  “I can’t believe you would have done this, Stella,” Noah said, her voice low.

  “Oh, come now, Noah,” Jack said. “Why shouldn’t Grace have been trained? She was bred for it, after all. She had the potential inside her. Did you ever offer?”

  “But why not ask me?” Noah said.

  “Ask her that yourself,” Jack said. “Look, I appreciate that Grace is your daughter, but she’s no child. She’s been Harry’s lover, she is a Darkwitch, she is a trained Mistress of the Labyrinth, she’s had to contend with years and years of having Catling visit her at night, she knew about the marking tonight and came to watch, and I am sure she knows what this shadow hanging over London really is. Gods know what other secrets she has tucked away.”

  Now everyone was staring at Jack.

  “Harry?” said Noah. “You were Grace’s lover?”

  “Catling has been appearing to Grace?” said Stella—and Jack noted that as she didn’t seem to be in the least perturbed about Grace’s affair with Harry, then she obviously knew about it.

  “Grace is at the centre of the puzzle,” Jack said, “and not only because of Catling’s hex. Grace is a powerful force in her own right, and—”

  “To get to the centre of the puzzle—how to destroy the Troy Game—you will need to get to the centre of Grace,” finished Ariadne. She and Silvius had been exchanging amused glances throughout this series of revelations, and the pair of them were by far the most relaxed in the room.

  “Grace means no harm!” Noah said, and at that moment Jack admired her more than he’d ever done. She’d just heard a series of startling secrets about her daughter, all of which Grace had kept from Noah, and Noah’s first instinct was still to protect her daughter.

  “I don’t mean to intimate that she did,” Jack said, “but Grace is central to our cause. I think she holds a key that will either hand us the means by which to destroy Catling…or she will fracture us apart completely.”

  “Jack—” Noah began.

  “Harry has given us our lecture about unity and strengthening the land,” Jack said, addressing the entire group, “but think of this. What I have just told you about Grace represents all the fractures running through our group. Noah, you should have realised that she’d been trained as a Mistress of the Labyrinth, just as you should have realised she wasn’t at home tonight, but you didn’t. Harry, Grace is integral to our cause, but for hundreds of years you have chosen to keep her out of the Faerie, and have not shown her your face as the Lord of the Faerie, even when you were her lover. No one realised Catling has been shadowing Grace’s every footstep for the past three hundred years and, damn it, every one of you should have realised or at least intuited it.”

  Jack paused. “I don’t know whether to regard Grace as a threat, or to sympathise with her. She kept secrets…but were they secrets meant to deceive, or were they defensive strategies?”

  “And yet, Jack,” said Ariadne, “all this you learn within a week. You must be quite the charmer.”

  Jack gave Ariadne a steady look. “I have open eyes,” he said.

  TEN

  The Savoy

  Sunday, 10th September 1939

  Noah walked slowly into the foyer of the residents’ private entrance of the Savoy, nodding at Robert Stacey, the concierge, as she passed his office.

  As always, he gave a slight bow.

  Noah felt irritated and more than a little humiliated. But overwhelmingly, she felt chastened. How had she not realised Grace had become a Mistress of the Labyrinth? How could she not have felt it?

  Moreover, Catling had been spending her time making Grace’s nights a living hell.

  Catling had been in their apartment, night after night?

  Not only had Noah not known (and she should have done, damn it!), Grace hadn’t felt she could speak to Noah about it.

  Noah felt sick to her stomach. She knew there had been distances in her relationship with Grace, but hadn’t realised their extent and strength.

  She’s not a child, Jack had said to her, and Noah wondered if it was so bloody obvious that “a child” is how she’d thought of Grace all these years.

  Noah stood before the lifts, slowly taking off her gloves and unbuttoning her coat, trying to put off the moment when she would have to enter the lift and face both Grace and Weyland. (And, oh, Weyland…how would he feel, knowing that the Great Marriage had been agreed?)

  The fact that Grace had been Harry’s lover for a
while had been, in the end, the least of Jack’s revelations. Noah could understand why a daughter might keep that from a mother who had also been the man’s lover in a previous life. She couldn’t, however, understand why Harry had so carefully kept it from her (but not from Stella, obviously).

  And she hadn’t once thought, until Jack had mentioned it, why it was that Harry had never shown himself to Grace as the Lord of the Faerie.

  “Perhaps we are fractured, after all,” Noah murmured, finally summoning her courage and stepping into the lift.

  Three minutes later, she stood before her front door. Without hesitation, she used her key to let herself in.

  Weyland was sitting on the sofa, reading Saturday’s Times. He looked tired and drawn, and Noah remembered that he’d been on warden duty all night.

  She bent and kissed him, and knew instantly that anxiety and tension hovered just behind the tiredness.

  “You’ve been…?” he said as Noah lifted her mouth from his.

  “To Faerie Hill Manor,” she said. She tossed her coat and gloves over the back of the sofa. “I will tell you about it, for, oh, there is much to say, but I need to see Grace first. Is she in?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you mind?” Noah said.

  “Will you come back?” he said, softly, and Noah’s heart almost broke.

  “I will always come back,” she said, then bent and kissed him once more. “I won’t be long.”

  “Grace?” Noah hesitated before the closed door to her daughter’s bedroom, then decided to take the slight sound she heard within as an assent to her entry.

  Noah opened the door, walked inside, then closed it behind her, taking a moment to survey the bedroom, as if she was seeing it for the first time.

  The room was large, as were all the rooms in the Orr apartment. When Grace had first moved in here, it had been beautifully decorated with drapes, and scatter rugs over the wooden floor, and with deep armchairs and cushions in the alcove by the window.

  But now…Noah realised that over time Grace had stripped the bedroom clean of everything save that which had a purely functional nature: a bed, a single wooden chair, a wardrobe, a dressing table.