Druids Sword (32 page)

At that my breathing gave out completely.

Jack gave a funny little smile, and squeezed my hand very slightly. “And because you have something I want, badly. And of all these things, Grace, even I don’t know which is the most important to me. I suspect it might be the third thing I mentioned, but I need to be sure. All right?”

“All right.” I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to agree to, but I seemed to say what he wanted.

“Good.” He gave my hand one more squeeze, then let it go. He slid his arm through mine, and again we resumed walking along Lambeth Embankment.

Everything was taking on a slightly surreal quality. I was aware that it was misting rain, and that it was very cold. I was aware of the occasional barge that puttered up the river, and of the birds that lifted off the Embankment walls as we passed.

But none of it seemed real.

I wanted to believe that Jack had just said those words to me, but I couldn’t quite manage it.

“Silvius made one other suggestion to me,” Jack said as we walked past Lambeth Palace.

“Yes?”

I saw him smile from the corner of my eye.

“He suggested I hand you the sky, Grace.”

After that strange statement there was nothing said for a while. At the end of Lambeth Palace we turned east away from the river towards the little church of St Mary-at-Lambeth that crowded against the palace’s southern wall.

I thought we were to go inside the church, but Jack led me towards the gate in the dilapidated paling fence that encircled the churchyard.

“Why—” I began.

“Wait,” he said, leading me into the graveyard.

The wind continued to blow icy and uncomfortable, but the rain had dissipated. Even so, the graveyard of St Mary’s was a singularly cheerless place. It was unkempt: roses and weeds competed for space between dirty, leaning headstones, while broken shards of headstones past had been used to make an uneven path which wound through the graves and around the church.

“Jack?” I murmured.

He didn’t answer, merely leading me further along the path until we had come to the back of the church. Here there were several large tombs, and we wandered past them.

I pulled Jack to a halt at one.

“Captain William Bligh,” I said. “This seems such a sedate home for him.”

“Far from the wind-tossed mutinous seas,” Jack murmured, and led me to the next tomb.

This one made me shiver, for it was decorated in part with verdant trees and acorns, and in part with a multi-snake-headed monster writhing triumphantly over a skull.

“It is the tomb of the two John Tradescants,” Jack said.

“And they were…?”

“Famed gardeners of the late-sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries,” Jack said. “Many of the plants now so beloved of English cottage gardeners were originally imported by the Tradescants.”

“Why are you showing me this, Jack?”

He didn’t immediately respond, reaching out with one hand to touch the carved flowers on the Tradescant men’s tomb. “Look at this,” he said, his fingers now running over the snake-headed monster. “Amid the flowers, the monster.”

I was feeling more unsettled than ever. “Jack?”

“It reminds me of the Flower Gate,” he said, glancing at me. “You know what that is?”

“Of course. Catling needs you and Noah to dance the Flower Gate enchantment which will finally complete the Troy Game.”

He grimaced, lifting his hand away from the tomb. “Amid the flowers, the monster,” he repeated.

It was now starting to grow dark, and colder with every passing moment.
What in the gods was Jack up to?

He looked at me directly. “Could you dance the Flower Gate into existence, if I asked, Grace?”

The world stopped about me. I don’t think I even breathed for a very long minute. “I can’t do that.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

“Can’t and won’t, Jack. I’m just not good enough. And, for gods’ sakes, you have my mother. She’s the powerful one! I can’t do it! I can’t. I’m bound to Catling, and I can’t—”

He pressed his hand against my mouth, stopping the flow of my fear.

“If I handed you the sky, Grace, would you dare to fly?”

What was he suggesting?

“Grace, if I asked you to deepen your training and experience of the labyrinth, would you do it for me?”

He finally removed his hand, and I could speak. “Why? I mean, why would you want me to do that? I can’t—”

He made an exasperated sound. “Grace, you could dance both Ariadne and Stella into the dust, if you so desired, and I suspect your mother also. I want you to fly, just for the sheer beauty of it, and because I think you’re going to be so damned, cursed useful that…”

He stopped, looking away, a muscle moving slightly in his jaw.

Then he turned back to me, took my hands in his, and slid his hands up my arms, rucking up my coat sleeves.

“Grace, there is something I suspect you are not truly aware of.” His fingers were running up and down each of my forearms, and now they halted just above my elbows. “Don’t you know what you have? Don’t you know what you hide?”

I frowned at him. The wind was frigid now, and the churchyard dark, and all I wanted was to get back to the Savoy and think over everything he had said, search out every hidden meaning, discover what he might have—

“Grace, within the flesh of your upper arms and your forearms, you carry four of the golden kingship bands of Troy. Did you not know that?”

I shook my head slowly, not believing, not even understanding, what he had just said. “Those bands are in the Faerie.”

“No. Those bands are in you.”

“No.”

“Yes,” said another voice.

I gave a low cry, and spun around—or as far as Jack’s grip would allow me.

Ariadne stepped into view. She was closely bundled in a fur coat, with a silk scarf over her carefully coiffured hair. “You wore the bands as ribbons into the Faerie,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “but then…”

But then
what?
I couldn’t remember. I was a very aware baby, and I remember when my parents met with the Lord of the Faerie on London Bridge, and my mother handed over to the Lord of the Faerie the four kingship bands of Troy that she possessed. The Lord of the Faerie, I think, had turned them into ribbons about my limbs, and had taken me into the Faerie…but then everything had collapsed: Catling had caught my parents during the Great Fire and pulled them into the dark heart of the labyrinth, tortured them, tortured me when I went to save them…

What had become of the bands?

“They never left you, Grace,” Jack said gently. “Don’t you feel them?”

For the moment the idea that I held four of the golden kingship bands of Troy within my flesh was too
much to even begin to comprehend, so I concentrated instead on Jack’s request for me to deepen my training in the arts of the labyrinth. “So that’s why you want me to learn greater skills with the labyrinth,” I said. “You need the bands back.”

I want a great deal more from you than those four bands, Grace.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Ariadne said. “Stop doubting yourself. The bands didn’t just forget to leave; they picked you to hand them back to Jack. They’ve been matchmaking. None of this is a mistake, or an error, or something we’ll all regret horribly in the morning. Just say you’ll come train with me, Grace, and let me get out of this godforsaken graveyard before I freeze to death.”

I gave a little smile. “Does Catling know about the bands? Is that why she’s been sitting with me all these years?”

“Catling thinks they are in the Faerie,” Jack said. “I don’t think she has any idea that they never left you.” He gave a slow smile. “Imagine, something she doesn’t know.”

I laughed. Just a little bit, but I laughed. He was teasing me gently, knowing that I would think that he would use Catling’s misconception as a further indication of her weakness.

“All right,” I said. I looked at Ariadne, and, for the first time in centuries, remembered what it had felt like as she talked me through what I needed to do when St Paul’s burned down in 1666. The power, the strength, and the sense that, both literally and metaphorically, I did not walk alone. “If Ariadne agrees to deepen my training, then I’m willing.”

Jack grinned and Ariadne laughed, clapping her hands.

“Come with me tonight, then,” she said, “and let me drag you down into darkness!”

“You have such a way with words, Granny Ariadne,” I said, “but I’d prefer to leave it until tomorrow when I’ve had time to have a bath and warm up.”

So there it was. Jack wanted to “get to know me better”, having declared he found my mother “not quite what he was after”, and Ariadne was going to deepen my training in the arts of the labyrinth.

I went back to the Savoy that night very, very happy. Overall I felt useful, but I also felt wanted.

I felt
valued.
Not just by Jack, but by the kingship bands as well.

I sat in the bath that night, and ran my hands slowly up and down my arms. Jack had told me that the ribbons had appeared on all my limbs, but the four bands Noah handed over to the Lord of the Faerie had been the four armbands, and these had buried themselves in the flesh of my arms, above and below my elbows.

I pressed against the flesh, and imagined I could feel them.

I was the one to hand them back to Jack.

Once I would have worried about that. Worried that somehow I’d mess it up, or worried that somehow I’d corrupt the ritual because of my ties to Catling.

But I didn’t worry about any of it. All I felt was a growing excitement.

And all I saw, as I sat there in the warm water, running my hands slowly up and down my arms, was Jack’s face as he said to me,
You are
…
so
…
damn…beautiful.

J
ack had leapt far out into the dark unknown that afternoon and evening, risking much of himself and all he hoped to achieve. Despite this, all he could feel on his return to Copt Hall that night was relief and a growing kernel of excitement deep within his being. What he was doing was a massive risk, affecting not merely himself, but the entire land and all who lived in it, but at least he had a direction and, for once, it felt as if he’d made a good decision.

And so much of it depended on Grace.

Jack sat in the kitchen of Copt Hall finishing a plateful of food. He couldn’t get the image of the temple bell on the dark snowy night out of his head. It was an image which combined terrible fragility and stunning strength, and Jack thought it probably described Grace as well as anything.

But which would dominate? The fragility, or the strength?

“Major?”

Jack looked up. Malcolm was standing before the table, holding a delicate plate filled with sponge cakes.

“No, thank you,” Jack said, and stood up. “I’ll turn in for the night, I think.”

He left the room, Malcolm grinning at his departing back.

That night Jack dreamed. He dreamed he stood in the middle of London Bridge, Catling standing before him.

The Great Marriage was well done,
said Catling,
but you need to know that the greatest marriage you can ever make is in my dark heart.

And then she was gone.

When Jack woke the next morning it was to find himself in a state of painful arousal coupled with a deep, bitter anger that Catling should have so spoiled his memory of the previous day.

That day Grace moved out of her parents’ apartment in the Savoy.

“Ariadne has asked me to come live with her for a little while,” she explained to her dumbfounded parents.

“I’m sorry,” she added.

Noah and Weyland exchanged a glance, and Grace could see a world of anxiety in that look.

Noah looked back at her daughter. “Why?” she asked.

“Ariadne has offered to teach me a little more of what she knows about the art and craft of the labyrinth,” Grace said.

“I could teach you that,” said Noah.

Grace looked deeply uncomfortable. “I know. It’s just that Ariadne asked me last night, and I—”

“Don’t apologise,” said Noah. “I could have offered myself and didn’t.” She smiled. “Ariadne is a taxing teacher, Grace, but she will teach you well.”

Weyland grunted. “All the art and craft
she
knows is that of murder,” he said. Then he sighed, and apologised. “I just don’t understand why you’d want to leave us.”

Grace gave a quirky smile. “It is time I left home. Three hundred years is too long.”

Noah laughed. “Aye, that it is,” she said. “Will we still see you on the canteen run, Grace?”

“I don’t see why not. Some nights, anyway.”

“Then from where shall we pick you up? Does Ariadne still reside in the Tower?”

“No. She has a flat in Kensington, off Cromwell Road.” Grace gave Noah the address. “Mother—”

Suddenly Noah wanted to stop whatever Grace might be about to say. She leaned forward and hugged Grace to her. “And when you tire of Ariadne’s archness, my darling, remember there’s a home for you here.”

“What’s happening, Noah?” Weyland asked as Grace retired to her room to pack.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t know.” She shivered, and wrapped her arms about herself.

Weyland drove Grace to Ariadne’s apartment later that afternoon. He felt he had to face Ariadne, to impress on her that Grace was everything to him and that if she harmed her, or allowed harm to touch her…

He’d also been ruminating on what Silvius had said: that he needed to put his animosity to Ariadne aside. Until recently, Weyland had not set eyes on Ariadne for over three and a half thousand years, not since that day she’d inveigled his return from the halls of the dead in order to bargain for her share of the Darkcraft. In his mind she’d assumed almost mythical proportions—the black witch committed always, totally, to his destruction.

And now she was taking his daughter.

“Grace,” he muttered as they rang the doorbell to her apartment, “be careful.”

Grace turned to him, tears in her eyes, and gave him a brief hug. She started to speak, but just then the door opened.

Ariadne stood there, dressed in her usual scarlet, a cigarette in one hand, and an expression of, unusually for her, some trepidation on her face.

She and Weyland stared at each other for a moment.

“It’s been a long time,” she said.

“It’s been a hellish time,” Weyland said, and Ariadne’s mouth twitched.

“I’ll take care of her, Asterion.”

“Be sure that you do.”

Silence. They didn’t look away from each other, nor did they blink.

Then Weyland gave a funny little laugh. “I can’t believe I’m allowing you to take my daughter,” he said, then he turned and walked back down the stairs to the building’s foyer.

“So much wasted,” Ariadne said softly, watching him.

“What do you mean?” Grace said.

“He and I…everything. So much hatred, so much ambition. So much wasted time when we could have had…” She broke off, then shrugged. “I’m getting maudlin in my old age, my dear. Now, come in why don’t you.”

As Ariadne stepped back, Grace lifted her suitcase and walked in the door.

Straight into the swirling maelstrom of the Great Founding Labyrinth.