Druids Sword (19 page)

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.

N
oah 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.

There was nothing else. Not a book, not a scatter rug, not a cushion.

Not a scarf or a frippery to be seen.

Nothing save functionality.

Why hadn’t she seen
this
before now, as well?

Grace was sitting on the end of her bed, watching her mother carefully. She was dressed in a plain blouse and skirt, and Noah almost wept at the sight.

Grace was so lovely…she
should
be dressed in silks and velvets and brocades.

She
should
live in a palace, and have emperors sprawl at her feet.

She should live free, not a slave to terror.

“Hello, Grace,” Noah said, and, walking over to the bed, sat down next to her daughter and gave her a kiss on her cheek.

“Jack told you,” Grace said, and Noah realised she looked nervous.

Noah looked down at her hands, which had begun to fidget in her lap.
What should she say?

After a long moment—a long moment in which Noah could feel Grace physically tensing—Noah looked up, smiled as naturally as she could, and said, “I am so proud of you.”

Then, as Grace stared, Noah lifted a hand, placed it against Grace’s cheek, and leaned forward once more, this time planting a lingering kiss on Grace’s mouth.

“What a fool I am for not realising,” Noah said.

Then she rose, and left the room.

Weyland stood as Noah walked back into the room. “Noah?”

She sat down, but did not speak.

Weyland hesitated, then sank down beside her.

“
Noah?
”

“Jack spoke to Catling last night…and then he spoke to us.”

“You and Harry.”

Noah drew in a breath. “And Stella, Silvius and Ariadne.”

Weyland, if possible, stilled even more. Ariadne had betrayed him, had arranged his murder, in Weyland’s first life as Asterion. His loathing of her was monumental, and even though the ancient witch had been living in London for the past three hundred years, Weyland had avoided her as carefully as Ariadne had avoided him.

“Weyland, just listen to me for a few minutes, and then we can talk.” In a hushed terse tone, Noah told Weyland what had transpired at the meeting at Faerie Hill Manor (keeping silent, for the moment, about the discussion of the Great Marriage). Weyland was shocked by what Jack had to say about Catling
(surely
she could be destroyed), but when Noah revealed that Grace had trained as a Mistress of the Labyrinth, and that Catling appeared often to
her at night, Weyland looked so ill Noah thought he might actually faint.

“Why didn’t we know?” Weyland said.

“We were blind, Weyland. We were too busy trying to protect her, when what we should have been doing was encouraging her to fly.”

“But—”

“I know,” Noah said, taking both of Weyland’s hands in hers. “I tried to shelter her, it is largely what I lived for, and yet I think that ‘shelter’ was the last thing Grace needed.”

Weyland did not reply as he tried to make sense of what he had just heard. They had spent so many years, and so much of themselves, trying to keep Grace from further harm, and trying to protect her, and believing that she was so fragile that she needed to be wrapped in as much parental security as possible, that to consider allowing Grace “to fly” was almost incomprehensible. Even more than Noah, Weyland’s every breath had been devoted to safeguarding Grace. He had lost one daughter; to lose this one as well was unthinkable.

“She is trained as a Mistress of the Labyrinth?” he said, eventually.

Noah nodded.

“And we didn’t know.” Weyland paused. “She’s either very powerful or we are very weak.”

Noah tried a small smile. “I prefer to think that she is very powerful.”

“Who trained her?”

“Stella.”

Weyland gave a soft snort of laughter. “All that time I tried to persuade Stella to teach you, and she wouldn’t. Then, just for the fun of it, she trains our daughter. At least it wasn’t Ariadne. I do not think I could have borne that.”

“There are a couple of other things I should tell you.”

Weyland’s eyes, which had been lightening up, suddenly went cold and hard again, and Noah bemoaned the fact that even now, after so much time together, he found it so difficult to trust her love for him.

“Grace and Harry have been lovers,” Noah said, and watched Weyland digest the information.

“Thank the gods Stella didn’t murder her,” he said, and Noah laughed, squeezing his hands, glad he had accepted it so readily.

“Talking of Harry…” she said.

“Yes?”

“He has asked Jack and me to make the Great Marriage. Unite and strengthen the land as much as possible to face whatever Catling decides to throw at it.”

“Of course you agreed,” Weyland said, and now both his voice and face were flat.

“Yes, we did,” said Noah. “Weyland, it will be a single night. It won’t mean—”

He shot her such a terrible look, composed of equal parts of fear and hatred and despair, that Noah quailed.

“I know,” she whispered, and Weyland pulled his hands away from hers.

All in all, Noah thought later as she sat back on the sofa, a whisky and soda in her hand, alone in the room, it had been a frightful day.

For the moment Noah was not thinking about Grace or Weyland. Two other subjects consumed her: the Great Marriage, and the revelation that the daughter Brutus and Genvissa had conceived had been Catling.

Noah felt a little sick at the idea of the Great Marriage. Seeing Jack again, after all these years, had confused her deeply. She was so sure of Weyland, so sure she loved him, so happy in her choice, and yet when Jack smiled, or slid his eyes her way, or, damn it, kissed her, then doubts assailed her. It made Noah realise that no matter how much she loved Weyland, she could not simply set to one side what she had once felt for Jack. As Cornelia and Caela, and in her early years as Noah, she had loved Jack with an all-consuming passion.

Then had come Weyland, and Noah thought she’d left her love for Jack far in the past.

Now Noah wondered if it was as far behind her as she’d thought.

She loved Weyland. She truly did, and was happy with him, and didn’t want their marriage to fall apart, but, oh, that moment when Harry had mentioned the Great Marriage, and she and Jack had exchanged glances, everything almost
had
fallen apart.

“Gods,” muttered Noah, putting her drink down so she could rummage about the room looking for a cigarette. She didn’t smoke, or only rarely, and right now she felt a cigarette might just save her life.

Five minutes and no cigarette later, Noah slumped back on the sofa and drained her drink. She forced her mind away from Jack, and thought about the child he, as Brutus, had conceived with Genvissa.

Catling!
Noah wasn’t too sure whether to be glad she’d murdered Genvissa when she had, delaying the Troy Game’s emergence into flesh, or to wonder if she’d only increased Catling’s malevolence in the doing.
Did I make things worse?

For hours Noah sat there, drinking too many whisky and sodas, thinking about Jack and Catling and, eventually, the daughter Noah had lost in her
first life. Genvissa and she had both lost daughters. Genvissa’s had been Catling…but what had Cornelia been carrying? Just an innocent baby, the victim of Genvissa’s (Catling’s, more like) hatred, or something
else?

Noah remembered how her daughter had been conceived using the power of Mag’s Pond.

“Surely nothing bad could have come of that,” she whispered, eventually, when the apartment was cold and dark. “Surely.”

Then she sighed, set the empty glass to one side, and went to look for Grace.

Weyland had gone to find the imps. He discovered them wandering the Embankment, not too far from the Savoy, as if they knew he would be needing them.

“Well?” said Weyland, leaning over the stone wall and looking at the Thames.

“My, we’re in a fierce mood today,” said Jim.

“I am in
no
mood for your witticisms,” snapped Weyland. “
What
have you learned?”

“Jack has been doing what anyone who knew him, and you, and Noah, could have expected,” said Bill, instantly professional. He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a small notebook, flipping through the pages. “He has established himself at Copt Hall. Spends many nights running the forests. Has an eccentric manservant.”

At that Bill looked up from his notebook and both he and Jim intoned as one, “We don’t like Malcolm.”

“Why is that?”

“He is unreadable,” said Bill.

Weyland gave a slight shrug. “He’s working for Jack. Isn’t that enough reason to dislike him?”

The imps grinned, and Bill went back to his notebook. “Your wife has been out to see Jack. Twice.”

“I know that.”

“She went for a walk in the woods with him.”

“So?”

“We could have taken photographs, if you had asked.”

Weyland felt like reaching out and strangling the damned imp. “Photographs of
what?
”

“They kissed,” said Jim.

Weyland closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. “And?” he said, opening his eyes again.

“That’s it,” said Jim. “Just a kiss.”

“But she
clung
to him,” said Bill.

Then he fell silent, and both imps looked steadily at Weyland. For his part, Weyland suddenly wished he’d never set the cursed creatures on Jack’s trail. He realised he didn’t want to know what Jack and Noah got up to.

“And this wrongness that Jack has been carrying on about?” said Weyland.

“Don’t know what he’s talking about,” said Jim.

“But it sounds scary,” said Bill.

Weyland narrowed his eyes. “You’re hiding something.”

“Never,” said Jim.

“You’re looking way too pleased with yourselves,” Weyland said.

The imps looked steadily, brightly, at him, but didn’t say anything.

“What about these murders?” said Weyland. “What do you know about them?”

“Why ask us?” said Jim.

“Lucky guess,” said Weyland. “Look at you, all bright confidence one moment and shifty-eyed discomfort the next. If there is one thing, lads, that you should have learned over the past three hundred years it would be a greater knowledge of the art of dissembling.”

“We don’t know anything,” said Bill. “Nothing.”

This time his voice was surer, and both imps were back to regarding Weyland as if they had never been guilty of anything more foul than stealing a pie left to cool on a windowsill, but Weyland knew, with every piece of intuition available to him, that they were involved
somehow.