Druids Sword (24 page)

T
he Great Marriage took place atop The Naked on the first day in May 1940. All of the Faerie were invited, and some from the mortal world: Eaving’s Sisters, Walter (an invitation he did not accept, although his wife, Anne, did come), and Weyland, among others. Ariadne was not invited.

But Grace had been. That had not been certain at first, but Jack insisted she be invited, and finally the Lord of the Faerie had bowed to his request. Jack did not know if Grace
would
actually come and was pleased when, finally, she turned up with the last group of guests to arrive.

The Naked was thronged with guests, but, as always when a court or convocation was held here, even the tens of thousands of attendees did not make the summit feel crowded. The Lord of the Faerie and the Caroller—Stella as she was in the mortal world—mingled with the assembly, their presence easily marked by the glossy blue and black magpie that hovered over the Caroller’s head.

Weyland and Grace stood to one side of the gathering. Grace was patently uncomfortable, while Weyland had assumed an air of boredom. He was dressed, not in a modern, dapper suit, but in a very old-worldly style that was highly reminiscent of his seventeenth-century attire; his daughter had dressed
herself in a simple white dress that clung to her slim figure and drifted softly about her calves. She stood very close to her father, her face grave, her eyes troubled, as she watched the crowds before her.

From time to time she would twist a little, and allow her eyes to roam over the magical landscape of hills and valleys.

Jack and Noah attended in their magical godforms of Ringwalker and Eaving. As with the Lord of the Faerie and the Caroller, they mingled freely among the crowd—if separately—laughing with this friend, embracing another, giving the appearance of a joyful couple about to be united in marriage.

No one saw, or even intuited, the woman with long black curls hiding on a hill that rose two distant from The Naked. She crouched behind a tree, her white face occasionally peeping out from behind it, her dark blue eyes following either Ringwalker or Eaving, although sometimes she glanced towards Grace.

“Are you all right?” Grace whispered, leaning even closer to her father.

Weyland put an arm about her shoulders, wondering that she felt so cold. “It has to be done, Grace. There is nothing I can do about it. Besides, I have grown used to your mother’s lovers.”

“Liar,” she whispered, and he hugged her a little tighter.

“Your mother is so beautiful,” he said. “It is difficult.”

At that moment Eaving passed close by, and she looked around and saw them. She came over and kissed Weyland on the mouth and then Grace on the cheek.

She looked stunning. When she walked as Eaving, Noah generally wore a sleeveless loose-fitting robe of
ecru, cream and silver that drifted about her like a cloud.

On this day, she wore a gown of deep emerald shot through with flashes of grey and black: she wore the water, of which she was goddess, and which she would take into her marriage.

Her eyes, too, were different from her normal dark blue. Now they were a sage green, with lightning flashes of gold.

Eaving smiled at Grace. “I am still your mother,” she said.

Grace managed a smile, but it was obviously forced.

Eaving laid her hand against Grace’s cheek, and shot Weyland an anxious look, but he gave a brief shake of his head, and Eaving sighed. “I love your father, Grace,” she said. “More than anything in this world.”

“Save Jack?” said Grace.

Eaving did not mind the question, understanding the anxiety behind it. “Oh, I love him, too, but not as I do your father.” She looked at Weyland. “Ringwalker has never given me candied fruits to eat out of a human skull, nor has he presented me with a wraith from the Halls of the Dead on Christmas Eve. Only your father could ever think of that.”

Weyland smiled, remembering their midnight feast in the bone house of St Dunstan’s-in-the-East when he had arranged for long-dead wraiths to serve them. That had been the night she’d told him she was pregnant with Grace.

Grace frowned, not understanding, and Eaving once again laid a soft hand briefly against her cheek. “Your father can share that memory with you tonight, while I am gone. Maybe it will give you comfort.”

Then she turned, and vanished into the crowd.

It was not the Lord of the Faerie who opened and conducted the ceremony, as may have been expected, but the Caroller. At some point the crowds had formed a gigantic circle about a central table, and it was at this simple oak table that the Caroller stood.

As with so many others, she, too, was clothed in magical raiment of a rosy light that barely hid her figure. She was the one who carolled in the dawn and the dusk, and she stood, the centre of all attention, as lovely as the sun as it crested the horizon.

“My lord,” the Caroller inclined her head to the Lord of the Faerie, who stood at the crowd’s edge some distance away, “asked me to conduct this ceremony, and it pleased me to accept. It also amused me—” her eyes did, indeed, dance with merriment “—because I spent so many thousands of years trying to keep these two apart.” She gave an expressive shrug. “We can all make mistakes occasionally.

“I stand here because I know this pair so well. I have known them for almost four thousand years—a mere blink in the lives of some of those present, but significant enough for our story. Ringwalker, once Brutus, once William, once Louis, now Jack when he walks the mortal land, has been my partner in dance and ambition and power. He has been my husband, my lover, my enemy, the focus of all my lives save in the latter years of my last when—” the Caroller turned and looked at the Lord of the Faerie, her face so alive with love, so radiant, that Grace, who with Weyland had come to stand within the inner ranks of the encircling crowd, blinked away tears “—I discovered that the greatest love of my life had been with me all the time.”

The Lord of the Faerie smiled, and put his right hand on his heart.

“Eaving,” the Caroller continued, “I knew first as Cornelia, who I hated.” She paused, as if needing time to remember the depth of that hate. “Then I knew her as Caela, and I despised and ridiculed her. Then she came to me as Noah, and I discovered a friend.”

Again the Caroller paused, her face deeply reflective. “I had never had a friend, before.” She sighed, and shook herself slightly, as if rousing herself from her memories. “And, finally, I came to know her as my sister, and as Eaving, the goddess of the waters. It has been a long journey.

“A journey that ends tonight. Ends for me, but starts anew for this land and for Eaving and Ringwalker. My friends, will you stand forward?”

The crowd parted at the eastern and western edges of its inner circle and Ringwalker and Eaving stepped out. Ringwalker, who walked forth from the western section of the summit, wore nothing more than a white linen hipwrap, much as he had when Brutus. Otherwise his flesh was bare—save for the inky, raised lines of black which writhed across his shoulders, back and upper chest.

Eaving, who came from the eastern section of the crowd, still wore the gown that appeared to have been woven from water.

They met at the table, and Ringwalker gave the Caroller an affectionate glance. “Fine words,” he whispered, “but how do I know you do not secrete a knife amid all your rosy prettiness, ready to finally plunge it into my, or Eaving’s, back?”

She smiled. “There has been too much death between us, all three of us. No more death. Life only ever after.”

She turned to the table, and indicated a shallow wooden bowl of water, and an identical bowl filled
with leaves and fruit of the forest. “This is not a marriage that I can make,” she said, “but only facilitate. Ringwalker? Eaving?”

And she stepped back.

Ringwalker and Eaving stood for a long moment, looking at each other, then Ringwalker spoke.

“We made a marriage a long time ago,” he said, his voice quiet but nonetheless reaching to everyone atop The Naked, “and we made it very badly. This time, we need to do it properly, and with love and understanding, rather than with hatred and suspicion.”

He smiled, and it was so gentle, and so full of love, that hands reached surreptitiously to brush at eyes all through the watching crowd. “Hades’ daughter, Cornelia, I should have treated you as a jewel from the moment I first met you, and yet failed. Will you forgive me?”

Eaving reached out, and touched his cheek as she had so recently touched her daughter’s. “And I should have kissed you, and failed to. Will you forgive me?”

“Will you kiss me now?” Ringwalker said.

“And will you love me now?” Eaving said, taking Ringwalker’s hands in hers.

Then, not responding in words, both leaned forward and kissed, deeply and passionately, as if they had been lovers parted for aeons.

And Ringwalker’s markings, the blue-inked scars over his upper body, flowed down his arms to where Noah held his hands. They touched her flesh once, twice, as if probing, and then retreated up his arms to once more writhe about his shoulders and chest.

On her hill, the black-haired woman saw, and smiled.

Deep within the crowd, Malcolm saw also, and he looked over to Grace and gave a little nod, as if something had just been confirmed in his mind.

Then he moved his head very slightly in the direction of the hill where the black-haired woman hid, and his eyes crinkled in delight.

Eaving drew back, smiled, and reached for the bowl of water. She balanced it carefully in her hands, then raised it up to Ringwalker’s face that he might drink.

He took a long draught, then, as Eaving replaced the bowl on the table, he reached for a strand of leaves and loosely twisted it within her hair.

They kissed again, and as they did, so the crowd erupted in a great cry of jubilation.

Ringwalker and Eaving had drawn away from the crowd now, making their departure, and Grace turned to realise, with a start, that her father was gone.

Already feeling empty and desolate at the sight of her mother and Ringwalker embracing, Grace looked about, her heart beating fast.

What had happened to Weyland?

She saw him, finally, standing on the very far side of The Naked, as far away from Eaving and Ringwalker as he could get. Grace walked over slowly, coming to a silent halt by his side. She followed his eyes, looking out over the Faerie, then very quietly slipped her hand into his.

“I wish…” Weyland finally said.

Grace blinked away tears. “I know,” she whispered, and leaned against her father.

Ringwalker and Eaving went to a place very private and very secretive, a cave that existed at the borderlands of water and forest.

There they kissed again.

“We have made love in such a variety of places,” Ringwalker said as Eaving turned away from him slightly, and slid the gown from her shoulders, “and over so many thousands of years.”

“And as so many different people,” Eaving said. Naked now, she turned back to Ringwalker, running her hands over his body, untying the wrap about his hips.

“I was glad to see Grace at the ceremony,” Ringwalker said, then wished he could have dragged the words back. He supposed that the last thing Eaving wanted to chat about now was her daughter.

“Mmmmm,” Eaving said distractedly, her attention on everything but her daughter.

Ringwalker opened his mouth to say something else, and then realised, with a jolt, that he was using words to delay that moment when he would need to
act
on this consummation.

Somewhat clumsily, he put his hands on her shoulders, then caressed her upper arms.

I wonder,
he thought,
why I don’t feel more joy.

“Ringwalker,” she breathed, pressing her warm body the full length of his, her hands about his lower back, then running up to his shoulders.

“These marks are so wondrous,” she said, and kissed them. “So…seductive.”

Then her hands ran down his arms, pausing at those spots where the kingship bands of Troy would eventually rest.

“I can’t wait for the moment that I slide the bands on your limbs,” Eaving said, and her voice was so sensuous and the promise so imbued with deep sexual overtones, Ringwalker
should
have responded.

But he didn’t, not in the way he thought Eaving may have hoped. Everything felt…not wrong…but faded and pale. Muted. There was desire, yes, but it was a faint ghost of what he’d once felt for this woman.

She looked up at him questioningly, wondering why he took so long to respond, and Ringwalker bent his head to kiss her so that she could not see the hesitation in his eyes.

As their mouths touched, then clung, he understood very suddenly that what he had said to Weyland was true. He
was
tired of loving Noah.

“Ringwalker?” Eaving said. “Is anything the matter?”

“Nothing,” Ringwalker said, and picked her up in his arms and carried her to the bed that rested between two lighted braziers.

All night, as he lay with Eaving, the marks on his shoulders remained quiescent, as if sleeping, and whenever Eaving moved her hands over them, Ringwalker shifted them away again, very gently.

Noah returned to her apartment within the Savoy the next morning at ten o’clock.

Weyland was sitting on the sofa, not even pretending to read his newspaper, his fingers drumming lightly on the arm of the seat. He stood as Noah entered, and tried to smile.

“So what did you do all night, my lovely?” he said.

Noah shrugged off her coat and kissed him softly on the mouth. She was very relaxed, very calm, very confident. “We spent all night laughing at how stupid we had been as Brutus and Cornelia, and admitted that we preferred a friendship to the constant strife of loving.”

She said it so guilelessly that Weyland was tempted to believe her, but he wished before anything else that she had told him the truth.

At Copt Hall Malcolm was setting out the breakfast things when Jack walked in the kitchen door.