Druids Sword (14 page)

What he
did
understand was her fright at the idea that he, Jack, would tear her mother and father apart. They must be one of her few constants; perhaps the only certainty she had.

Not to mention that any drama between Jack, Noah and Weyland, if it affected the Troy Game, had the distinct possibility of destroying any hope Grace had for freedom from Catling’s hex.

I’m sorry, Grace.
This he said both with his power and with pure emotion.
I’m sorry, Grace. That was a vicious thing to say, and I
am
sorry for it.

“You’ll destroy us,” she whispered. “You’ll destroy
me.
”

He tightened his fingers about her arm. “I don’t want to. I won’t, Grace.”

He could see that she didn’t believe him, but he felt her arm relax very slightly under his hand, and the terrible withdrawing in her eyes had stopped.

“You must love your father very much,” Jack said, releasing Grace’s coat sleeve and suddenly remembering his cigarette. He drew deeply on it.

“I don’t want to hurt him,” Grace said.

That response told him a great deal about Grace. Did she think everything her fault? Did she shoulder the responsibility for all the world’s ills?

“He and I go back a long way,” he said. “Many lives. I hadn’t ever imagined Asterion could be a good father.”

Grace had relaxed, at least enough that one of her hands crept out from beneath the coat sleeve, fingers idly drawing invisible patterns on the tabletop.

“Fatherhood is his redemption,” she said. “He thinks he dare not fail at it.”

Jack was watching the patterns her fingers made on the table, fascinated by their movement. “I’m surprised he and Noah have not had more children.”

“After their tragedy with me?” Grace said. “I’m surprised they even dare still make love.”

That remark should have been bitter, but instead Jack found himself smiling at the rich layer of amusement behind it.
Who
are
you,
he thought,
behind that mask of fear?

Grace’s mouth lifted in a small smile as well, and for a brief instant they shared the moment of
humour. Then her eyes dropped back to her fingers, and Jack’s followed them.

And he went cold as he realised what she’d been so idly doing, tracing out those patterns on the tabletop.

She had been tracing out harmonies. Meaningless, idle harmonies, but harmonies nonetheless, drawing together the strands of existence in the night air about them, in the tabletop, in the threads that made up her coat, in the smoke dribbling out the end of his cigarette…

Grace could have sat there and done that before almost any man save Jack, and they would have had no idea what she was doing.

But Jack was a Kingman, and he knew
precisely
what she was doing.

And what she was.

“Who taught you the arts of Mistress of the Labyrinth?” he asked.

Grace snatched her hand back from the table, and it vanished up the overlong sleeve of her coat.

“Ariadne?” said Jack, hating it that his voice had now hardened, but so surprised and unnerved by what he’d just realised—
and by what he knew hovered beneath the flesh of her arms
—that he was unable to stop it. “Your mother?”

“Stella.”

“
Stella?
”

“Why not?”

“
Why?
”

“She said I should learn, and so she taught me.”

“Not your mother?”

Grace’s tongue slid about her upper lip again. “I don’t think she knows I’ve been trained.”

Jack’s mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding me! How could she
not
know?”

“She doesn’t ever see
me,
Jack. She only sees a tragedy. She just sees her mistake.”

“Sweet mother of God, Grace.” He paused. Noah didn’t know? How blind
was
she when it came to her daughter? “Where did Stella teach you?”

“Where she was taught by her mother. On Tot Hill. There was a—”

Jack remembered back all those thousands of years. “There was a stone building on the hill. A meeting hall. Genvissa—Stella—took me there.”

Grace nodded. “That stone building was transformed into the Great Founding Labyrinth by her mother.”

As a Kingman, Jack knew the process by which all Mistresses of the Labyrinth were trained. They were taken by the one who taught them to a building which, through the arts of the labyrinth, was transformed into a mirror of the Great Founding Labyrinth that had once stood on Knossos. There they learned to manipulate the harmonies of life, and to control the labyrinth itself.

So Stella taught Grace on Tot Hill. “Which House of Parliament did you use?” Jack said, referring to the fact that the British Houses of Parliament stood on the exact site that Genvissa’s stone hall had once occupied. Now that his initial shock was over at the discovery Grace was a trained Mistress, he was vaguely amused at the thought that either Commons or Lords had been transformed, without any mortal realising it, into the Great Founding Labyrinth.

Grace looked him in the eye, and he saw for the first time a flash of confidence in their depths.

“Not the Houses of Parliament,” she said. “Westminster Abbey. The altar.”

Jack’s unease returned. When he was William, Asterion had crowned him at the altar of the abbey. That thought reminded Jack that Grace was not only a Mistress of the Labyrinth, she was also a
Darkwitch, bred twice by the father of Darkcraft himself, Asterion.

Just how vulnerable was Grace really? Was this a reality which sat before him, or an act? He couldn’t read her, and it made him distrust everything she said.

“It seems I am surrounded by Mistresses of the Labyrinth,” he said, lighting up a fresh cigarette. “Stella, your mother, Ariadne—who I believe is still about—and now you. Is there anyone else I should know about?”

Grace shook her head.

“And just one Kingman. All of you, to fight over me.”

She didn’t reply to that, and eventually Jack sighed, wishing he was anywhere but here and that Noah and Weyland had never conceived this complication of a child. “Grace Orr, Mistress of the Labyrinth, what
do
you know of this ‘wrongness’ that I have felt over London? You know something, I can feel it. What, for Christ’s sake?”

She took her time in answering. “Catling comes and sits with me at night.”

Jack was torn between irritation at her evasiveness and horror at her revelation. “
What?
Do your parents know?”

Grace shook her head. “I can’t tell them. They already have enough of a burden to carry.”

Jack wasn’t sure whether to regard her as a supreme manipulator
(look how pitiful my life is)
or a truly tragic figure. Or was there something else lurking there?
Who
was
Grace, truly?
“How long has Catling been ‘sitting with you at night’?”

“Ever since I was a toddler.”

“And? What does she say? What does this have to do with what I felt?”

Grace made a helpless gesture. “She just…watches. But she smiles at me, and, oh gods, I know
she has something planned. I can
feel
it! What you have felt, your ‘wrongness’…it must be her. A trap. Please, please, Jack, please don’t fall into it!”

Jack again drew deeply on his cigarette, watching Grace’s face through the drifting smoke, and said nothing.

There were traps everywhere, and Jack was sure he was staring at one of the biggest and most dangerous of them.

A
t midnight, Jack left Faerie Hill Manor. He’d come here earlier, already unsettled at the thought of what this night held; after his conversation with Grace, he was so nervy that he found himself jumping at every noise.

The house was quiet when Jack walked out the front door. Harry had not reappeared, but Jack was not worried. He could feel the Lord of the Faerie watching, and knew he would be there to witness. Neither had Walter appeared, but Jack had felt him drawing closer, driving along the forest road north.

He, too, would be at the appointed place.

Grace had earlier gone up the stairs to the first floor of the house, saying she was going to bed.

But Jack didn’t believe her.
What was her real purpose in talking to him? Why this night of all nights? And what was he supposed to make of her words
…
and of
her?

He stood on the front terrace in the dark night, remembering her fingers idly twisting those harmonies out across the tabletop. Those harmonies had been compelling and he’d felt them thrumming through his blood. But he shouldn’t forget she was also a Darkwitch.
Ringwalker had only one enemy, and that was the Darkwitch.

That’s what he had once thought, but Jack had
made his peace with Noah, and with Stella. Should Grace then be feared?

“Why not,” he whispered, “until I know different?” Then, suddenly making up his mind, he ran lightly down the steps to where his Austin sat. Jack stood, stared at it, then he lifted his head, and looked northwards.

The night encircled him, very still and dark.

There was no moon.

Jack took a step away from the car. His hands clenched, then released as he forced himself to relax. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and walked away from the car towards the edge of the forest.

Epping Forest had existed since the land that was now Britain had first risen from the misty swamps of creation. It had once been much larger and much mightier, spreading eastwards and northwards across the land. Between its trees had roamed bears and wolves, hares and badgers, mammoth and aurochs, and stranger, wilder beasts that sometimes strayed out of the Faerie. By the mid-twentieth century, after thousands of years of depredation by the axe and plough, the forest covered only some five thousand acres.

Yet the forest’s power remained, as much power as when the forest had covered so much more of the land. Only now it was…concentrated.

Epping Forest was riddled with walkways and bridle paths, roads and forestry tracks, and the trails worn down by the tens of thousands of years of foxes hunting dormice and ghosts hunting resolution, but Jack walked none of these. He walked a strange causeway that had not been trodden since Og, the being who had walked formerly as the Stag God, had taken it over a hundred thousand years previously.

It was an easy path to follow, however, despite the dark of the moonless night.

The leaf litter marking the trail was speckled with drops of glistening blood. Og’s blood.

When tonight was done, the path would be laid anew for the next resurgent Stag God to walk down in perhaps another hundred thousand years’ time.

This time, it would be laid down in Jack’s blood.

The blood, and what it implied, settled Jack’s nerves. He was glad to be doing this finally. It was the ultimate step—or the ultimate plummet, whichever way you preferred to view it—into his life as Ringwalker, god of the forests.

He walked north, his feet scrunching down firmly on the blood-stained leaf litter as if he drew comfort from the blood leaching up through the soles of his shoes. His path took him roughly parallel—but sometimes he diverged, and wandered briefly into the Faerie, where Sidlesaghes and water sprites shadowed him—with New Epping Road, although Jack swung a little deeper into the forest when he passed the Wake Arms and the Fox and Hounds taverns. Within fifteen minutes of leaving Faerie Hill Manor, Jack entered the section of the forest called the Long Running. The forest drew back at this point, and Jack strode through long, coarse rush grass. Here he took a deep breath, and quickened his pace slightly.

He didn’t have far to go.

Another fifteen minutes, and Jack approached the ancient fort of Ambersbury Banks on the north-western edge of Epping Forest. He wasn’t far from Copt Hall, and for a moment his pace slowed, and his head turned westwards to where he felt the hall rising, but then he focussed forward once more.

Ambersbury Banks was a raised circular fortress, defended by earthen banks and ditches that had,
over the centuries, crumbled and decayed under the onslaught of the forest. Historians and foresters had long argued over whether it was an ancient British camp, or one thrown up by the Romans, but in reality no human hand had built Ambersbury Banks. It was a part of the Faerie, one of The Naked’s children which had lost its way and slipped into the mortal world, never to find its way home. It had a twin, Loughton Camp to the south, but Ambersbury was the older and more powerful of the two hills.

And with a far bloodier history. Ambersbury was a place of blood, and it attracted blood to it. Boudicca’s army had been slaughtered here, but there had been lesser murders on Ambersbury, although no less tragic, as when Sulemaic, an Anglo-Saxon warrior, had raped then murdered twin thirteen-year-old sisters on the primeval Faerie hill one dark, moonless night in the eighth century. During the fourteenth century two young boys had been found at Ambersbury, with their throats cut and every drop of blood drained from their body into the ancient earth. In the eighteenth century a toddler had met a similar fate. Twice during the nineteenth century, in incidents separated by twenty-four years, two cuckolded husbands had slit their wives’ throats within the fort’s boundaries.

It was not a particularly pleasant place for the vulnerable to linger.

There had also been blood spilled on Ambersbury Banks that was not associated with either battles or tragedies. Almost four thousand years ago a young man, known as the Gormagog, had come here to be marked as Og’s living representative. Thirty years after that, Gormagog had brought his son Loth to be similarly marked.

They had been tattooed with the mark of the former Stag God.

Jack was coming here to be marked with something far darker. He had come to absorb into his flesh the remnants of Og’s being.

Most of Ambersbury Banks was speckled with ancient, gnarled trees which had, over thousands of years, twisted the lines of earthworks until it appeared that a gigantic plough had run amok over the hill, riding it into parallel lines of agony that mirrored its bloody history. On the summit, however, there was a clear space of perhaps a quarter of an acre.

In the centre of this almost circular patch of grassland stood the stump of a tree which had been felled in a storm eight hundred years earlier. Over the centuries its top had been worn smooth by the rubbing of countless hands. It was known as the wooden stone, because when you looked down to its base, you saw that the stump’s twisting, knotted roots were wrapped about and over a broad smoothfaced stone.

This stone was the heart of Ambersbury Banks; its causeway, if you like, back into the Faerie. It was an altar, as old as the hill itself, and it had served almost as many religions and priests and druids as it had weathered storms.

Although the night was moonless, the cleared space on the summit of the hill was nonetheless lit with an unearthly silvery light. A man stood by the stump, carefully laying out instruments atop its smooth surface.

It was Walter Herne, now without his stick and standing full square on both feet.

He had removed both his dog collar and his shirt, and stood bare-chested, his skin goosebumped in the cold night air. There was a shadowy tracery over his shoulders and chest; the memory of a mark that had lingered through several lives.

Loth, and all he had once been, and all he once could have been, was not quite dead, although Walter hoped to murder him once and for all this night.

Just this one thing, Walter, and then you’ll be free.

Just this one thing.

There was a movement to the eastern quarter of the summit, and Walter froze and looked over.

Then he relaxed, if only a little. It was the Lord of the Faerie, stepping forth from under a tree. Like Walter he was bare-chested, although rather than Walter’s woollen trousers and shoes he wore wellfitted leather trousers, and his feet were bare.

On his head sat a crown of red berries set amid twisted twigs.

The Lord of the Faerie walked to a point halfway between the encircling trees and the stump where stood Walter, then he stopped.

“We are glad you have come, Loth,” he said, and Walter twitched.

“My name is not Loth,” he said.

The Lord of the Faerie ignored his rebuttal. “I have brought the pestle and mortar,” he said, and lifted his right hand.

That hand had been empty a bare moment ago, but now the Lord of the Faerie carried a crudely chiselled stone pestle and mortar in his hand. As Walter watched, the Lord of the Faerie squatted down and, with his left hand, grabbed a handful of dirt and blown leaves from between his feet. As he rose, he crumbled the mixture of dirt and leaves into the bowl of the mortar.

Then he lifted his hand to his crown, and plucked from it three or four of the red berries.

These, too, he crumbled into the bowl.

Once this was done, the Lord of the Faerie walked over to Walter, looked him in the eye for a long
moment, then put the pestle and mortar on the top of the stump.

Before Walter could speak, or even move, the Lord of the Faerie leaned very close to him, placing a hand on Walter’s chest.

“How could you walk away from this?” he whispered, his mouth almost touching Walter’s ear. The Lord of the Faerie ran his hand softly over Walter’s chest, and then up and over his right shoulder. “How could you leave? We were such friends, once, you and I.”

Walter didn’t know if the Lord of the Faerie referred to the friendship they had once shared when he had been Loth and the Faerie Lord had been Coel, or if he talked of the more distant friendship between Faerie Lord and earthly servant. Whichever one the Faerie Lord meant, Walter had no idea how to answer.

His mouth opened, but he could find no words to speak.

The Lord of the Faerie’s hand tightened fractionally on Walter’s shoulder, and he leaned even closer to the man, his mouth now touching Walter’s flesh.
How could you leave?

Tears sprang to Walter’s eyes, but he was saved from the need to answer by the appearance of a man emerging from under the trees on the western verge of the clearing.

Both the Lord of the Faerie’s and Walter’s eyes slid towards him.

The man bowed from the waist in deference to the Lord of the Faerie, then stepped forward.

It was Malcolm, Jack Skelton’s valet, but he no longer wore servant’s clothes. Instead he’d come dressed as an ancient druid in a robe of tartan wool, and with woad marking out his face, his forearms and the backs of his hands.

“It is a wakeful night,” Malcolm said as he came to a halt a few steps away from where Walter and the Lord of the Faerie stood so close together. “The forest is restless, waiting for its lord.”

The Lord of the Faerie regarded him with unblinking eyes. “Well met, Druid. I did not know you lingered within Malcolm’s flesh. And at Copt Hall, no less. What role do you play in this?”

“I am bound to the land,” said Malcolm, “as surely you must know, and I work in its interests. I am bound to Copt Hall by death, and similarly bound to Ambersbury Banks. I have come tonight to serve, if I may.”

The Lord of the Faerie regarded him steadily, then abruptly stepped back from Walter and gave Malcolm a nod.

Then all three men turned their eyes to the south.

Jack Skelton had walked into the clearing.

His nerves kicked in again the instant he saw the group—Malcolm included, as he’d expected—about the stump. It wasn’t the forthcoming pain that troubled him so much as the realisation that there would be no going back from this night. The Lord of the Faerie had reassured him that this would
confirm
his humanity, rather than assimilate it, but Jack still could not help having qualms.

So he hesitated on the edge of the clearing. He thought he’d been sure, but now knew he wasn’t.

Then the Lord of the Faerie walked forward. Very slowly, very surely.

“Jack,” the Lord of the Faerie said, coming to a halt before him.

He said nothing else, just held Jack’s gaze with such tranquillity that Jack felt himself relax.

The Lord of the Faerie’s mouth moved in a small smile. “You can be who and what you want,” he
said. “Whenever you want. That is what tonight is about. You will be woven entirely, forest to man. You choose the face you wear, you choose the power you wield. As Louis de Silva you gained the power and the knowledge. Tonight you gain the familiarity, and you will gain everything that Og once commanded, but you will lose nothing at all.”

It was what Jack needed to hear, and he relaxed even further. The Lord of the Faerie stepped up to him, one hand running behind Jack’s neck to cradle his head in its palm, and kissed softly first Jack’s forehead, then both cheeks, and finally his mouth.

“Welcome to the strangeness of completion, Jack,” the Lord of the Faerie said.

Then he was gone, back to the central ancient altar of Ambersbury Banks, and Jack, still at the edge of the clearing, began slowly to strip away his jacket and shirt.

Malcolm came to Jack’s side, and took from him the jacket and shirt, folding them neatly, unhurriedly, and placed them, together with Jack’s shoes and socks, behind a tree, out of sight.

Then he walked away to the western edge of the clearing, and stood, watching, hands folded before him, eyes shining.

Jack took a deep breath, and walked forward. He could feel the cold air upon the naked flesh of his chest, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.