“Coel?” Jack said. It was still very early, and he’d only just risen. He was dressed, but his jaw was still unshaven, and he gratefully took the cup of tea that Malcolm offered.
The Lord of the Faerie shook his head when Malcolm asked him if he wanted tea, then waited until the valet had left the drawing room before speaking.
“Jack, we have a problem in the Faerie.”
Jack drained his cup of tea and set it aside. “Yes?”
“It is better if you come. You have barely set foot in the Faerie since your return, and this you need to see.”
Jack gave the Lord of the Faerie a long look, then nodded, fetched his coat, and led the Lord of the Faerie to the front door.
From the front door they walked straight into the Faerie.
The Lord of the Faerie was right, Jack thought, as he gazed over the misted wooded hills rolling away into infinity. He should come here more often. The instant his foot stepped onto the magical soil, Jack felt a sense of wellness, almost of nurturing, envelop his being.
And something else. Something…not quite right.
His marks moved slightly, drawing icy trails across his shoulders. “Coel?” he said.
In response the Lord of the Faerie led him towards the edge of the woodlands that led into the first of the forested hills. At first glance the trees and plants seemed healthy enough, but the Lord of the Faerie pointed to a shrub, and then the lower branches of a tree.
“See…here, and here,” he said.
Jack stepped closer. There were patches of blackness on the lower leaves of the tree, and many of the leaves over the top of the shrub were similarly dead. “What is it?” he said.
“Frost,” said the Lord of the Faerie. “The iciness which grips the land has started to penetrate into the Faerie.”
Jack picked one of the blackened leaves of the shrub. It crumbled into dust between his fingers. His marks moved again, and Jack’s uneasiness increased.
The Faerie was cut off from the mortal world. The infections of the mortal world simply should not touch the Faerie.
“Catling,” Jack said. What else could explain it? “Why?” he said. Catling already knew that Jack would do nothing until the Great Marriage on May Day, so why send these tendrils of attack into the Faerie now?
“Why not?” said the Lord of the Faerie, then he sighed, and pinched at the bridge of his nose. “It might be Catling, or it may be an indication of how sick and weak the land has become. Either possibility terrifies me, Jack.”
“I’d lean towards the latter,” said Jack. He touched another leaf, watching it crumble. “I just don’t think Catling would move this early.”
“If it is the latter, Jack, we need the Great Marriage sooner rather than—”
“It should wait until May, Coel.”
“Why?”
“Damn it, you know why! Done that day, during spring resurgent, it will have the greatest effectiveness possible!” Jack sighed, and moderated his tone. “My friend, I am not delaying, only wanting to wait until the marriage will be its most potent.”
“I know, I know. It is just that when one of the Sidlesaghes pointed this out to me this morning…” The Lord of the Faerie looked up towards the summit of The Naked. “Noah tells me that Weyland is not…happy.”
“Ah. I should have spoken to him sooner. I will, Harry. I will.”
The Lord of the Faerie nodded. “Do that. Jack, there is something else.”
Jack raised his eyebrows.
The Lord of the Faerie nodded to something over Jack’s shoulder. “Look.”
Jack turned.
When he’d come into the Faerie previously, he’d remarked to himself on the Idyll which stood at the borders of the Faerie. Now he could still see the Idyll, but it appeared to have retreated. Between it and the Faerie was a blue haze, almost like a mystic ocean.
“The Idyll is retreating,” the Lord of the Faerie said, very softly. “It no longer wants to touch the Faerie. Something is very, very badly wrong, Jack.”
Weyland had put his name down for warden duty within the ARP as soon as they had called for volunteers when war loomed. He wasn’t able to say why he had done it—the last thing that the Minotaur Asterion was likely to do was to volunteer his services in defence of something he had spent thousands of years trying to destroy—but Weyland found a curious kind of peace when he was on the roof of the Savoy watching for enemy aircraft.
It felt almost like making amends, but that notion was so alien to him that Weyland tended to shy away from it.
Weyland stood duty one or two nights a week, as needed. As usual, on this night he was alone. Initially, the Savoy had posted two or three men (either employees who had volunteered, or similarly minded permanent residents), but as the early months of the war had dragged on, and London had suffered nothing more than a scare or two, the manager of the hotel had decided that only one man need sit up each night.
And, being the Savoy, that man was well supplied with thermoses of the best coffee, thick sandwiches, and the lightest of sponge cakes.
Weyland enjoyed his nights alone atop the Savoy.
He’d settled himself down in a small canvas shelter, almost like a game blind, that the hotel manager had caused to be erected. Canvas it might be, but it was triple-layered canvas, and there was a small kerosene heater inside that kept the occupant cosy, and an armchair to keep him comfortable. There were small windows cut at eye level in its four walls and door, and the warden on duty need only scan the sky with his binoculars through these cutout windows, rather than actually venture out in the cold to wander the roof.
The shelter was also quite roomy (having been built originally to house two or three men), but even so, Weyland had nowhere to go when the door suddenly lifted up and Jack stepped in.
“May I sit down?” Jack said, indicating a stool set to one side.
“What are you doing here?”
Jack sat down on the stool. “I thought you might like some company.”
Weyland grunted.
“And I wanted to talk to you. About the Great Marriage.”
Now Weyland shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t really want to—”
“When I leapt into the Idyll, when Grace was just a baby, and said that Noah would betray you—that betrayal was in her very blood—I was wrong, Weyland.”
Weyland remained silent. He was staring out one of the windows in the canvas, carefully not looking at Jack.
“It was a stupid thing to say, and I was angry beyond belief,” Jack said. “You know I was wrong.”
Weyland sighed, and moved his head so that he was almost—but not yet quite—looking at Jack. “You had every right to be angry. And you had picked your moment too well. I was livid with fury as well, and when you appeared…”
When Jack—in his form as Ringwalker—had appeared, Weyland had leapt for his throat, and both men had engaged in a bitter, hateful, brutal struggle.
“We engaged with disaster, Weyland,” Jack said. “While we battled and Noah watched us, Catling placed her hex on Grace. We can’t afford to have that happen again.”
“What do you mean?”
“If we are at odds, if we wallow in misunderstandings and jealousies, then we are fractured and vulnerable. Weyland, you were right when we met on the night Noah set the Great Fire. She and I never had a chance. Whatever we might have had was doomed from the start.”
“But you still love Noah.”
Jack gave a wry smile. “Oh, yes. I do. I will never stop loving her. But I am tired of loving her, Weyland. It has only ever hurt, and I know full well that I could never keep her.” He gave a short, humourless laugh. “Do you remember the day that Noah first came to you in your house in Idol Lane?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t know what happened in your house that night, Weyland, but John Thornton and I met in a tavern called the Broken Bough on the Strand. There I drank myself into almost-oblivion, and Thornton sat there and pitied
me. We agreed on one thing, Weyland, and that was that we were both lovesmitten fools who would never, ever have the woman we both craved so much. I hadn’t come close to accepting it at that point, but that was, I think, the start of it.”
Weyland finally looked Jack full in the face. “And you have accepted it now?”
Jack hesitated fractionally before replying. “Yes.”
“Of course you have. Nonetheless, you will happily engage in the Great Marriage with her.”
“Certainly. But, Weyland, the Great Marriage doesn’t have to involve sex.”
“Don’t feed me lies. What kind of fool do you think I am?”
“I was just trying to make it easier for you,” Jack snapped.
Weyland sighed, looking away. For a long minute there was silence.
“I don’t want to lose her,” Weyland murmured eventually.
“And you won’t,” said Jack, and surprised himself by sounding as if he meant it. He made a move then, as if to rise, but Weyland forestalled him.
“Don’t leave just yet,” Weyland said. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Jack sank back onto his stool.
“The murders,” Weyland said.
Something cold and black coiled about Jack’s stomach.
“The imps are doing them,” Weyland said.
““What?”
“I had suspected them, but Silvius came to see me a week or so back, and mentioned something to me.”
“And that was…?”
“Remember how the imps tore themselves out of Jane and Noah?”
Suddenly what had been worrying at Jack’s mind about the murders fell into place. “They’re re-creating their own births!”
Weyland inclined his head in agreement.
“Why?” said Jack. “What are they about?”
“I don’t know,” said Weyland, “but I intend to discover it.”
TWO
The Faerie
Wednesday, May 1st 1940
The 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?”