Druids Sword (4 page)

“
D
o you know where we are?” Silvius asked after they’d been driving through the forest for a few minutes. The car’s dimmed headlamps illuminated a small patch of the road ahead and enough of the encircling forest to show the closely packed trees and the occasional branch that dipped down from nowhere to scrape the top of the car.

Most humans found driving through Epping Forest at night an eerie experience. Jack found it unbelievably painful. He was overwhelmed with nerves; (only partly caused by the confrontation he knew lay directly ahead); with guilt (he should have been back so much earlier than this); with an extraordinary excitement and with such an overwhelming sense of love and companionship that he instantly hated himself for having so long been alienated from this land and this forest.

This was his home now. He should have remembered that.

He had a cigarette in his hand, drawn from the pack before they’d passed the Robin Hood Inn, and still unlit, but now it lay unnoticed, crushed and broken between his clenched fingers.

Do you know where we are?

Jack blinked, and his chest jerked in a long, shuddery breath. Epping Forest, yes, but…

“We’re approaching Great Monk Wood to our right,” he said.

“Indeed,” said Silvius. “Great Monk Wood is where Harry built Faerie Hill Manor.” As he spoke he turned the car right, off the A11, onto a dirt lane that led to the higher-ridged ground to the east, and a few minutes after that—long, terrifyingly nervous minutes for Jack—they entered a cleared space at the top of a ridge that sat deep within Great Monk Wood.

Silvius pulled the car to a halt as soon as they’d left the trees and turned off the engine.

They sat there, all three men, listening as the cooling engine ticked in the night, and stared ahead.

Faerie Hill Manor appeared as in the dreams and visions Jack had experienced over the past months: a sprawling, fanciful nineteenth-century over-the-top Gothic citadel, all turrets and spires and soaring windows set amid grey stonework. Again, as it had appeared in his dreams, the building sat atop a small grassy knoll, both house and knoll apart from and yet integral to the encircling forest.

Though it was a cloudy night, the house and knoll were bathed in a faint silvery luminescence.

Golden light shone from every window, and as Jack, Silvius and Walter watched, the double front doors opened and two figures walked out.

Jack blinked, and everything changed.

Faerie Hill Manor and the knoll still shimmered within that unearthly luminescence, but whereas the grass slopes leading up to the house had previously been bare, now there were a score of cars and a lorry all parked at varying angles to one side of the house.

There came a rap at Jack’s window, and he jumped.

A policeman stood there. “Your papers, if you please, sir,” he said as Jack rolled down the glass.

Jack sighed, and withdrew a thick sheaf of papers from the breast pocket of his greatcoat, handing them to the policeman who studied them for a few long moments by the light of a small torch and then handed them back.

“Very good, Major,” he said. Then he nodded to Walter in the back, “A good evening to you, Reverend,” and smiled at Silvius, “and to you, Mr Makris.”

“The children well, Tony?” Silvius said.

“Very well, Mr Makris, thank you for enquiring. You may drive on. Forgive the extra security, but—”

“I know who is here, Tony. A good night to you.” Silvius started up the car and drove the fifty or so yards to the gravelled drive directly in front of a set of sweeping steps that led to the front terrace.

As the car pulled to a halt, Jack took a deep breath, then opened his door, and stood on the drive looking up the steps to the terrace.

Brigadier Sir Harry Cole and Stella Wentworth stood there.

The Lord of the Faerie and his Faerie Queen, the Caroller.

“Welcome home, Jack,” Harry whispered, and it did not surprise Jack in the least that his whisper reached all the way down the steps and into his heart.

Welcome home.

Jack gave a small nod, acknowledging Harry’s welcome, then, without waiting for either his father or Walter, took the steps two at a time until he stood before Harry and Stella.

There he paused, just a step away, and studied them.

Harry was much as Jack remembered from his dreams. Early fifties, greying fair hair, a face somewhat lined with care and faded blue eyes. He
was dressed in a combination of military and civilian: khaki trousers and a military button-down shirt and tie underneath a hand-knitted ribbed pullover.

Stella…Jack looked at her. She was no different from his visions of her, either. Beautiful (far more so than when she had been Jane, and as much as she had been as Swanne) with dark wavy hair carefully caught in a clip at the nape of her neck, pale skin, dark eyes, and a slim, elegantly clothed figure. Everything about her exuded sophistication.

There was a faint air of distance and haughtiness about her, but Jack decided that was nothing new. That was Genvissa-reborn all over.

His eyes slid to Harry, then he smiled and moved forward and both men embraced fiercely.

“Have I stepped into a maelstrom?” Jack asked softly as he finally moved back.

Harry gave a small, humourless smile. “When have you not, Jack?”

“Stella.” Jack gave her a small nod. It wasn’t much, considering their past (lovers, enemies, allies), but Stella didn’t look approachable enough for a hug, nor even a quick peck on the cheek.

Her eyes crinkled in amusement, and Jack instantly regretted his initial assessment of her.

“A singularly low-key entrance for you, Jack,” she said. “Where the invasion fleet? Where the pageantry, the triumphal entrance into London?”

“Burned in the ashes of all our ambitions,” Jack said, but he said it with an answering glint of humour in his own eyes, and was rewarded with a small smile from Stella.

“There are people waiting for you inside,” she said as Silvius and Walter joined them on the terrace, and when Jack took a deep breath no one could mistake the nerves behind it.

“Well, let us inside,” Jack said, taking his cap off and sliding it under his left arm, and with that, Harry beckoned Stella to go ahead of them and they walked through the magnificent cedar and cut-glass doors into the entrance hall of Faerie Hill Manor.

A man walked down the sweeping staircase to meet them.

Jack stepped forward and shook the man’s hand with a slight bow of his head.

“Your majesty,” he said.

George VI gave a small smile. “I think we can dispense with the formalities, Jack. But, by gods, I am glad you are here. I cannot stay much longer, a few minutes only, and I had feared to miss you.”

Jack nodded. That the king was here to greet him was amazing in itself, considering that Britain stood on the brink of war.

“Are you a happy man, John Thornton?” he asked softly, finally letting the king’s hand go. “When last we met we were both somewhat upset.”

Images of the Broken Bough, a tavern on the Strand in seventeenth-century London, filled both men’s minds. They’d met there the night Noah had gone to Asterion. Jack, as Louis, had been distraught at losing Noah to the horrors of Asterion; Thornton had been despondent at knowing she would never love him. Two men, desperate for a love they’d both lost.

“Careworn at the present,” George VI replied, “for these are difficult times, but I am loved, and love, and I never had thought to find that. So, yes, I am a happy and most contented man.”

There were steps behind the king on the staircase, and Jack looked up. Several men were running lightly down the stairs—two military attachés, a policeman, and a well-dressed man with a decidedly aristocratic air.

The aristocrat glanced at Jack, dismissed him in that glance, and spoke to George VI. “Sir, we must leave. Mr Chamberlain has requested that he meet with you tonight, and we face a long drive back to the palace.”

“Ah, yes, the Prime Minister.” George VI’s face suddenly looked even more careworn and tired than it had a moment earlier. He reached forward and put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Finish it this time, Jack.
Finish it.
”

Then he was gone, surrounded and hurried by his entourage. A moment later Jack heard car doors slam and the sound of engines starting up.

“So now we have the house to ourselves,” said Stella.

“There’s no one else here?” Jack said, turning to look at her.
Noah wasn’t here?
He didn’t know whether to feel an overwhelming sense of relief or a gut-wrenchingly vast disappointment.

“Oh yes,” Stella said, “there are others here. Noah, too. But they’re all ‘ours’. George’s entourage were outsiders.”

“Come this way, Jack,” Harry said, and he led the group to a set of double doors to the right of the entrance hall. He opened one of them and gestured Jack inside.

Jack walked through into the large, panelled drawing room, then halted, transfixed by what he saw against the far wall, even though he should have expected it.

Weyland Orr, Asterion-reborn, standing by a wing-backed chair set by a great fireplace in which flickered a small fire. He looked just as he had when Jack had last seen him in the seventeenth century, fair hair slicked back over a strong handsome face, but clothed in a modern suave man-about-town style.

To one side of him, and slightly distanced from the chair, stood Noah, also wearing the same face that Jack remembered. She stared at Jack with a clearly recognisable tension, her beautiful features strained and pale. She was also elegantly dressed, in a wellcut suit of pale green with matching high-heeled pumps, her dark hair carefully waved and set into a bun at the back of her neck.

Jack realised he was staring, and tore his eyes away from Noah to the chair by which Weyland stood.

A girl, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, sat there. As Jack looked the girl turned her face towards him, then as quickly looked away.

Her face was tear-stained and contorted in agony. Some part of Jack’s brain registered that she was lovely, and that she reminded him of Cornelia when first he’d seen her, but his eyes were drawn immediately to her hands and wrists.

They were held out before her as if tied, and to Jack’s startled gaze it appeared as if they had been bound with red-hot wire.

“This is Grace,” said Harry quietly, “and we love her dearly, even though she is our doom.”

J
ack had been looking at Grace as Harry spoke, but within the instant he was staring back at Harry.
He couldn’t believe Harry had actually said that!
Did he introduce Grace in that manner to everyone?
Meet Grace, why don’t you? She’s such a sweet girl, but, oh, she’s our doom.

“Jack?”

It was Noah, and Jack forced himself to look at her. Jesus Christ, it was even more painful than he’d thought, to see her standing there with Weyland.

“Jack,” she said. “Welcome home. It’s good to see you.”

Jack wondered if the atmosphere could possibly get any more strained…or more surreal. Here was Noah trying to carry on a social conversation while not two paces away her daughter suffered horribly.

He looked back at Grace, appalled by her suffering and by everyone else’s apparent disinterest, and Weyland spoke.

“Do you know about…?” Weyland gestured down to Grace’s wrists.

“Yes.” Jack had heard from the Lord of the Faerie how Catling—the Troy Game incarnate—had cursed Grace. These terrible fiery bracelets bound Grace to Catling. Whatever was done to Catling (to the Troy Game), would be done to Grace. Complete
the Troy Game, and Grace would live (although she, as everyone else, would be under the Game’s total dominion). Destroy the Game, and Grace, and everything Grace had touched—the Faerie, London, Weyland’s Idyll, everyone who had ever held her, or cared for her—would be destroyed as well.

An impossible and terrible situation, and one that no one—not Noah, not Weyland, not the Lord of the Faerie or all the might of the Faerie—could do anything to fix.

“This is Catling’s welcome to you, Jack,” said Grace, and Jack’s eyes jerked back to her face, surprised that Grace had managed to speak through her pain.

“Grace…” Noah said. She took a half step towards her daughter, and then stopped.

There was a tension there, and Jack wondered at it. Suddenly tired of all this standing about, Jack shrugged off his greatcoat, tossed it and his cap on a nearby chair, and walked over to Grace.

Gods, he could smell Noah’s perfume from here, could feel her warmth, could feel her every breath…

He sank down on his haunches before the girl, concentrating on her, trying to set his awareness of Noah, and his enmity of Weyland, to one side.

She still had her face partly averted towards her father, but Jack could now see her far more clearly. His initial impression that she looked like Cornelia was wrong. Her dark hair—worn in a cap of short, loose curls—was her mother’s, as were her dark blue eyes and pale skin, but her strong, angular bone structure, and the very look of her face, was all Weyland. Now that he was closer, Jack could see that although she wore the form of a young girl, teetering on the brink of womanhood, faint lines about her eyes and mouth bespoke years
(hundreds of years)
of torment.

He looked at her wrists, and had to use all the selfcontrol he’d learned over all his lives not to flinch back in horror.

Glowing red lines cut so deep into her wrists that, as they writhed and twisted back and forth, Jack could see glimpses of bone. Intuitively he understood that Grace felt every particle of pain that such injury caused, but that once the fiery bracelets faded then her wrists would be left with nothing but faint scars.

Catling’s intent was to cause agony, and to do it in such a manner that she could revisit the agony time after time.

“Grace…” he said, unable for the moment to come to grips with the enormity of Catling’s cruelty.

She finally turned her face directly to him. “Do not pity me,” she said.

“I am not pitying you,” Jack said, holding the girl’s eyes. “I am admiring you. Tell me, is there anything I can do to help?”

“Oh, Jack,” Noah said, and there was a world of hurt and need and pain in those two short words.

“It’s all we want of you, Jack,” Weyland said. “To damn well help her.”

“You want me to help your daughter,” Jack said, “after all you have taken from me?”

“Jack—” Noah said.

“Hate me all you want,” Weyland said, “but spare my daughter. Jack, please, she needs your help.”

Jack wondered what it must have cost Weyland to ask him for help. He stared at Weyland, all the illfeeling he felt for the man burning in his eyes, but was prevented from speaking further by Grace.

“No one can help,” Grace ground out as Jack looked back at her.

“Is it like this always?” Jack said, making a small gesture to her wrists.

“No,” Weyland replied. “Catling can leave her
alone for weeks and months on end. Then, when Catling needs to make a point, remind us all of her power, she…” He couldn’t finish.

Jack didn’t need Weyland to finish in order to understand. Catling was using Grace to punish everyone who she thought stood in the way of her completion. She would tease, making people think that perhaps she’d relented, and then, just as everyone was crawling back towards a state resembling happiness, Grace would again be dragged into such torment that peace of mind and contentment flew out the door.

He realised that his initial impression of disinterest in Grace was very wrong.
Everyone
here was tormented by Grace’s agony.

“I am very sorry that my arrival has caused this,” Jack said to Grace. He reached out a hand, thinking to lay it on one of her upper arms, but she flinched away from him, and Jack let his hand drop back to his side.

He stood up. “When the fire has faded,” he said to Noah and Weyland, “then I’ll examine Catling’s hex. Maybe I can help, maybe not, but it won’t hurt to look.”

Noah’s face relaxed in relief. “Thank you, Jack.”

There was another one of those tense, awkward silences. Jack wanted to look away from Noah, but couldn’t, and hated that weakness. He knew Weyland was staring at him,
everyone
was staring at him, but he just couldn’t tear his eyes away from Noah.

In her turn, Noah was regarding him with unusual intensity. He could see words forming in her mind, and then being discarded as useless for the occasion.

“Why,” Jack said very softly, “have we always found it so damned hard to talk to each other, Noah?”

Noah’s dark blue eyes went absolutely brilliant with emotion, but before she could speak there was a clink of glass behind him. Immensely relieved at the distraction, Jack turned around. Silvius had poured out several glasses of whisky. He handed one to Jack, offered one to Noah, who refused, then gave a glass to Weyland before turning back to a side table and picking up another for himself.

Harry, Stella and Walter already had drinks.

“To your return, Jack,” Silvius said, and raised his glass.

Weyland grunted, set his glass aside, and turned away.

Jack downed his whisky in a single draught. “It’s no cause for celebration,” he said. Suddenly all he wanted to do was to get away from this room, and all the tension it contained. “Look, it’s late, and I—”

“We need to know where you stand,” Stella said. “George was right. We need to finish this. Soon. No one,” she glanced at Grace as she said this, “can survive another hundred or so years of this agony of indecision and reprisal by the Troy Game. It is destroying us all, piece by piece. So tell us, Jack, where
do
you stand? Are you going to complete the Troy Game and condemn us all to hell? Or will you destroy it, and destroy us as well?”

“Stella,” Jack said, “I walked away all those hundreds of years ago because Noah destroyed the very ground on which I walked.”

Out of the corner of his eye Jack saw Noah wince, but he didn’t care. He was too tired to hide behind diplomacy.

“She shifted everything when she chose to take Weyland as her lover,” Jack continued, “give him a child, and decide she didn’t want to like the Troy Game after all. I don’t know where I am, or who
I want to be. I don’t
know
where I stand, and I don’t know what choices are open to me, damn it!”

“Stella,” Harry said, walking over to Jack and taking his glass to put on the tray on the side table with his own, “Jack is tired. He has only just arrived and he needs to rest and find his balance. And we will all need to decide what to do. It is not up to a single one among us, but
all
of us, to find a way out of the disaster that threatens. Jack, what do you want to do tonight? You can have a room here, or…”

Thank the gods, Jack thought, that Harry had so adroitly salvaged this conversation. “Did you manage to obtain the lease I sent word to you about?”

Harry smiled, just slightly, the movement enough to crinkle the skin about his eyes. “Yes. Copt Hall is yours.”

Jack nodded, and would have said something, but Walter exclaimed first.

“Copt Hall? But that is a ruin!”

Harry’s smile broadened a little, and he walked over to a desk and opened a drawer. He drew out a vellum indenture, rolled up and bound with a soft pink light, and handed it to Jack.

“The lease agreement is between yourself and the Faerie,” he said. “It has no binding on the hall as it stands within this mortal realm, but only how it stands within the Faerie. It was a good choice, Jack, and I was pleased to execute the arrangements for you.”

“Thank you,” Jack said as he took the indenture and slid it inside one of the pockets of his greatcoat, which he shrugged on.

He stood a moment, looking about the room, meeting the eyes of everyone there (save Grace, who still had her face averted). “I don’t know what I am going to do,” Jack said softly. “I don’t know where to go and to whom to turn. I don’t know what
awaits any of us. All I know,” he stepped back a pace, “is that I need some solace, and I have no idea where I can ever find it.”

With that, he walked over to the door leading to the terrace, and let himself out.

“Jack! Wait!”

Jack stopped just as he’d been about to walk down the steps leading to the lawn. He turned around.

Harry was hurrying towards him.

“Jack, we need to talk about—”

“For gods’ sakes, Harry, I’m as tired as hell. Can’t it wait?”

“I’m sorry. We can leave it until tomorrow, but I thought that as Walter will be leaving after breakfast, and we’d need to talk to him before then, I’d—”

“Okay. Okay. Let’s talk now then, if you insist.”

“Jack, you still need to take one more step to assume your full powers as Ringwalker—you need to be marked. Damn it, the forests—the
land
—need you. Don’t snarl about it.”

All Jack wanted to do was to fall into bed and sleep, and hope that tomorrow would be a better day. But no, here was Harry fretting at him. Still, that gave Jack a chance to voice something that had been worrying him.

“Harry,” he said, “I understand this needs to be done, but I also have concerns about it.”

“In what way?”

Jack managed to keep the stunned surprise off his face.
In what way?
Coel had truly been subsumed in the Lord of the Faerie if he needed to ask that. “I like who I am, Harry. I don’t particularly want to become a bloody deer full-time.” Jack had assumed the role of the Stag God, who watched over the forests and who was closely associated with the health of the
land, from Og, a magnificent white deer with bloodred antlers.

Harry burst out laughing, and Jack imagined he could hear the faint rumble of conversation within the drawing room stop at the sound.

“You can be who you like,” Harry said. “Og
was
a deer to begin with, so that is the form he assumed as god of the forests. You can keep your far prettier form, if you want.”

Now it was Jack who gave the wry smile. “Am I the first man to hold the job?”

“Actually, you are. The forests shall have to get used to the idea. Jack, I hadn’t realised you were worried about it.”

Jack gave a slight shrug. “Do you think Walter will be willing to help in the marking?”

“Walter will do whatever he needs to in order to escape his past. Is there a place you have in mind?”

Jack thought of the times he had roamed Epping Forest when he’d lived as Louis. “Yes,” he said. “Ambersbury Banks.”

Harry nodded. “It is a good site, if a little stained by blood. This needs to be done fairly soon, Jack.”

He’d been such good friends with this man, Jack thought, Brothers, almost. But now he realised that much of that friendship had vanished. Coel—Harry—was now far more the Lord of the Faerie than anything else.

Jack felt a great sadness overwhelm him. “I’ll speak to Walter about it.”

Harry nodded. “Good.” He put a hand on Jack’s shoulder briefly. “Sleep well in your new home, Jack. Oh, and Jack? Join us for breakfast in the morning. The table is laid from eight.”

At that he turned, and went back into the house.

Inside the drawing room, Noah carefully avoided everyone’s eyes as she walked over to the drinks table, poured herself a whisky, and drank it straight down.

Just then, as they heard Harry’s steps coming across the terrace towards the door and Jack’s steps retreating towards the lawn, Grace gave a gasp of sheer relief.

The fiery bracelets had vanished with Jack.

Catling’s little lesson for the night had ended.