Decayed, he wanted to say, but didn’t know how to say it without speaking in cold, bald words.
“It was impossible to determine who was who,” he finished. “Most were buried in a mass grave, including whatever was left of Matilda, Ecub and Erith.”
“Oh, Jack…”
He took a deep breath. “Matilda and I…she…”
“She loved you, and you her.”
“Oh, gods…” Jack wiped away his tears. “I wish she’d never been caught up in this damned…damned…”
“Ah, no you don’t,” Grace said. “Where would you have been all these years without Matilda?”
Jack laughed. “You’re right. Thank you for making me smile.” He wanted to ask Grace how Matilda had died, but he realised he didn’t want to know, and he knew also that Matilda wouldn’t have wanted him to know. “I’m glad you were there with her,” he said.
“Well, she’s probably chatting up Aeneas as we speak.”
Jack blinked away the last of his tears. “Aye, she probably is. Grace, please talk to me of what has happened.”
She sighed, and for a moment her eyes wandered away from his. Then, hesitantly, she told Jack of how Catling had tormented her in the rubble, and then sent her into the hell of memory.
“I saw too much, Jack. Experienced too much. Far too much. Catling hoped it would send me mad.”
Jack felt cold. He could imagine what Catling had showed Grace. Oh, gods, the terrible things he had done as Brutus…and yet still Grace could smile at him. “But she didn’t drive you mad.” Nor did she drive you to hate me, and I have no idea what I have done to deserve such a gift.
“No. Almost, but before I succumbed someone came to me. Someone who called herself the White Queen. She tormented me with possibilities until I finally figured out how to save myself.” Grace looked carefully at Jack’s face. “You remember, don’t you? The White Queen Cafe where we met, and where the woman’s voice spoke to us?”
“Oh, aye. I remember that. But I, via Noah, have also heard the name elsewhere. The night you and Eaving’s Sisters were trapped in Coronation Avenue, the Sidlesaghes told your mother the shadow belonged to a woman called the White Queen. Later that night, not knowing what to do, only desperately seeking some means by which to save you, I went around to the cafe. It was boarded up, had been for a year or so. This White Queen has been playing with us, Grace.”
“That she has. She has been the one to come sit by my side at night, all these years. Not Catling. They just look so much alike.”
“The White Queen has been sitting with you?”
“Yes. Oh, and she called herself something else. The druid’s sword. This is something about which I think we need to talk to Malcolm.”
Jack grunted. “That doesn’t guarantee any answers from him.” He thought Grace was holding something back from him about the White Queen, but before he could ask her about it, she hurried on.
“I also discovered the true nature of the labyrinthine shadow.”
Jack held his breath, waiting.
Grace sat up a little straighter, the effort bringing a flush to her cheeks. “The shadow is a new Game. Rather, it is the potential for a new Game. It has been laid down by the White Queen for you and me to use, as Kingman and Mistress of the Labyrinth. That is why it only appeared when you and I were in London together, why it vanished when I ‘died’, and why no one else, save my mother who can glimpse it, could sense it.”
Jack was aware his mouth had slowly dropped open, but he didn’t care. A new Game? Should he be terrified or intrigued? And how? Who was this White Queen that she had the potential to build a new Game? A new Game?
“Why?” he whispered, barely able to speak. “How?”
“To use against the Troy Game,” Grace said.
“But how hasn’t Catling sensed it? Surely…”
“She hasn’t sensed it for the same reason no one else has. This Game—or its potential, rather—was built exclusively for you and me. We are the only ones it cares about. We are the only ones it reveals itself to. I’m not even sure that Catling will know once the Game is opened…it shadows her so perfectly, is so close to a mirror image of the Troy Game, that Catling may simply not see it. Ah, at the moment the only thing I know for sure is that the shadow is a new Game waiting for us to open it, and to use it, somehow, against the Troy Game.”
Jack gave his head a little shake. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything. The imps could sense this Shadow Game. They were feeding it through their murders.”
“I don’t know why the imps are involved, Jack.” Grace paused. “Have there been any more murders since I was injured?”
Jack shook his head. “They stopped completely after early September. Perhaps the Blitz…ah, I don’t know. Grace, what do we make of a Game that requires murder to feed?”
“We don’t know they were working on behalf of the new Game, Jack. They just may have been worshipping it.”
Jack shrugged his shoulders in frustration. There were too many things left unknown. “Who is this White Queen that she should care…and that she should be able to build this massive ‘potential’ Game?”
“A friend of the druids, obviously.”
“Even so, the druids could not ever construct a Game, or show someone how to do it. So how could this White Queen do it? How? And you say that it should reveal itself only to you and me, but Noah can also sense it, if not as strongly. I don’t understand that. Grace, I’m sorry, but none of this makes sense.”
Grace’s hands tightened very slightly around his hand. “Jack, the only reason my mother can sense the shadow is that she has a close connection to the White Queen. She cannot sense the shadow because she has any connection to the new Game as such, but because she has an ancient bond with the White Queen.”
“Look, I’m sorry. Grace, I am not following a word of this.”
Grace’s eyes filled with tears. “Jack, Noah is the White Queen’s mother.”
Jack stared blankly at Grace, his mind refusing to accept the logical implication of that.
“Please, please understand the rest before I am forced to tell it to you,” Grace whispered.
“No…no…it can’t be possible.”
“The White Queen is she who has never lived, Jack. She is your and Cornelia’s daughter, conceived in the magic of Mag’s Pond, and forced stillborn from Cornelia’s body by Genvissa’s ill will.”
Jack stared at Grace.
“Jack, Jack, please, just say something…”
“I…” There wasn’t anything to say. Jack felt as though someone had snatched his mind and made away with it.
His daughter? His and Cornelia’s? A faint memory came back of something Noah had said on his return to England. I wish my daughter had been born. Who knows what she may have been.
Prophetic words, indeed.
Jack tried to order his thoughts, to think this through logically. A daughter of himself and Noah would have the ability to construct this “potential” Game. Also, the White Queen was born of Noah, born of the line of Ariadne, which meant she was both Mistress of the Labyrinth and Darkwitch bred. She would naturally have the talent to construct a shadow labyrinthine Game.
And she would have built it of Darkcraft.
No wonder it required murder to feed.
Then Jack’s heart skipped a beat as he thought of something else. The White Queen and Catling looked almost identical—they shared identical parents—and Grace had mistaken the White Queen for Catling when she’d come to sit at her side at night. Did that mean that the woman Jack had spoken to had sometimes been the White Queen, not Catling? It all made so much sense now!
“Jack?”
He blinked, refocussing on Grace’s face. She looked distraught, and more than anything else it was that look which cleared Jack’s mind. “Grace, I’m sorry.” He put his free hand about the back of her head, cradling it, and drew her closer until he could kiss the top of her forehead and then her mouth. ?
??I’m sorry. I…I just can’t believe…I can’t fathom this.”
“I know so little, Jack. I don’t know her reasons, or her motive—save that I am sure she wants us to destroy the Troy Game—I don’t even know how this new Game works…it looks so different to what I learned as a Mistress of the Labyrinth, or what I understand of the Troy Game. I don’t even know if I completely trust the White Queen.” Grace took a deep breath. “I remember once she asked me if I was prepared to die for you, and I said yes, if only to get rid of her.”
Jack went cold all over again. “Jesus, Grace.” He remembered how he had felt watching her sleep, wondering if she was to be snatched away from him again, and foreboding overwhelmed him.
Jack forced the presentiment away and kissed Grace’s forehead once more. “I kept hoping that you’d come back with answers, Grace, but this?”
“The White Queen has the bands, Jack.”
“Of course.” She had them in her dark heart. She’d told him that day she’d appeared before him with the bands in her hands. And he’d thought her Catling, and cursed her. “Aeneas said my daughter came and asked for them. I’d assumed Catling.”
“What else were you supposed to assume?”
“Where are they?”
“On an altar somewhere. I have no idea where. They’re waiting for you. I think the White Queen took them so that you wouldn’t be able to finish the Troy Game. She had no idea you’d try without them.”
“My daughter…” He drifted into silence, thinking, then spoke. “But Noah couldn’t sense the shadow at first. It was only later that she could. Why?”
“It was after the Great Marriage, yes?”
Jack nodded.
“Her parents had made the Great Marriage, maybe that made my…our…mother a ‘part of the team’ in a casual way. Or perhaps it made the White Queen happy, to see her parents at peace.”
Grace leaned in against Jack’s body. He still had no shirt on, and she lifted her hands to his shoulders, and played with the markings. She slid her fingers underneath them, lifting them slightly away from his skin, then allowed them to snap back into place.
“Grace,” Jack said very softly, wondering if she were trying to distract him away from his worries, “unless you want to take this a great deal further, right now, then please don’t do that.”
“Sorry.” She leaned back, the mischievous expression on her face anything but apologetic.
“You’ve changed,” he said.
“I’ve grown up.”
“And…?”
“And at the moment I am all skin and bone,” she said, “and I couldn’t manage much more than I have just done. I need more of Malcolm’s soup, I think.”
Jack knew what she was saying—I still don’t want to rush—and wondered at the sense of pleasant anticipation that gave him. He had spent almost four thousand years taking what he wanted, generally at a great rush, and the thought of drawing closer to Grace only at a pace best measured in inches rather than leaps and bounds should have frustrated him beyond measure. But it didn’t.
“We’ve both grown up, I think,” he said, “and you’ve deflected the conversation very nicely away from my daughter.”
“I think she, and this Game she has made for us, is something which needs to be taken at leisure as well. I don’t know whether to trust either the White Queen or her Game.”
With that Jack thoroughly agreed. He ran a hand over Grace’s shoulder, and down one arm. She was so thin. She literally did need more of Malcolm’s soup, and as much other nourishment and rest as she could manage. The months spent in a coma would need months of recuperation. If what she said was true, that a new Game awaited them, then Grace would need to be very strong in order to be able to manage it.
A new Game. How could it be used?
“We need time, Jack,” Grace said.
He sighed. “And is Catling going to give it to us? She has threatened to destroy every creature in the Faerie—”
Grace interrupted him with a finger over his mouth. She told him what had happened on her way to Copt Hall.
“She will not touch the Faerie creatures,” she concluded, “and she cannot use me as an effective threat any more, but what else she can do…” She shuddered.
“But we won’t rush,” he said.
She smiled. “No, we won’t rush.”
“Grace, what of the Sidlesaghes? What happened? We knew that Catling had attacked them, murdered them, but it did not feel to me as if they had passed completely. Grace, are they the reason why you were able to stop Catling from touching any other Faerie creature?”
“Yes. Catling forced me to watch their deaths. I think she hoped that it would drive me insane when her previous attempt had failed. Or perhaps she thought I would go mad from guilt. But I didn’t. There is no blame to me or you or anyone else save Catling over the Sidlesaghes’ deaths. And, yes, they are dead, and yet you are right to say they have not passed completely.”
She paused, and Jack gave her the time she needed to continue.
“As Long Tom was dying, he crawled towards me, and gave me his hand. With his dying breath, and that of every other Sidlesaghe, their knowledge and their ‘oneness’ with the land passed into me.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned her backwards a little so he could look at her full in the face. He studied her for a long moment. “So now you are of the land.”
“Oh, aye. A bad mistake for Catling to make. She worries that if she kills any other Faerie creature then their knowledge and oneness with the land would pass to me. She won’t take that risk.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Jack paused, suddenly thinking of something. “And the reason the Luftwaffe didn’t come back last night?”
“A sudden fog on the Channel coast, Jack. Most unfortunate.”
“And that…”
“And that I could not have done without the Sidlesaghes’ knowledge, their oneness with the land, at my back.”
“Ah, Grace…”
They sat in silence for a while, holding hands, taking comfort in each other’s presence.
Finally Jack spoke. “One of the first things we may be able to clarify is what connection the White Queen has to Malcolm.”
Grace raised an eyebrow.
“Malcolm—Prasutagus—and Boudicca want to meet with us tonight. Do you feel well enough?”
Grace took a breath, then nodded.
FOURTEEN
Copt Hall
Tuesday, 31st December, 1940 New Year’s Eve
Later that night Jack wrapped Grace in a thick blanket over her dressing gown, picked her up, and carried her down to the front door of Copt Hall.
Malcolm was waiting there, but not in his usual guise. He’d lost his gentleman’s clothes, and was instead dressed in leather trousers with a thickly woven tartan woollen cape thrown over his bare chest. His feet were likewise bare, and he had painted his face—a bland mask of austerity—with lines of blue woad.
“Prasutagus,” Jack said.
Prasutagus nodded, then looked at Grace, staring curiously at him from the safety of Jack’s arms.
“You are not afraid?” Prasutagus said.
She smiled. “No. I have grown sick of fear.”
“And thus you are here,” Prasutagus said. “We have waited a long time for this night.”
“We?” said Grace.
“My wife and I,” said Prasutagus. “Britain has waited a long time for this night. You are sick of fear, and we of the invader.”
His eyes slipped to Jack as he said that, and Jack grinned.
“The barb no longer sticks, Prasutagus. I am now as much of this land as you.”
Prasutagus’ face relaxed from its sternness. “Naturally. If not I would have taken the opportunity to slip nightshade into your evening cocoa long before this.”
That earned Prasutagus a sharp glance from Jack, but he chose not to respond to the remark. “Grace is not strong, Prasutagus. I can’t think why we can’t do
this indoors.”
“My wife does not want to move far from the trees,” said Prasutagus, and tipped his head towards the door. “If you please.”
Outside, the night was cold, and so still that it seemed as if life had stopped. There was a light sprinkling of snow on the ground which had frozen into a crackling crispness. While he had wrapped Grace well, Jack was himself dressed only in trousers and a pair of leather slip-on shoes, leaving his upper body bare. Now, standing on the threshold of the door, Jack shivered, and hugged Grace a little tighter to him.
There was silence to the south from London. For the past two nights, ever since the terrible raid of the twenty-ninth, the Luftwaffe had stayed away.
Jack walked slowly onto the driveway. To his left was a stand of trees, the remnant of Epping Forest’s once-close embrace, which sheltered his Austin convertible. Before him were low shrubs separating the driveway from a field. To his right another stand of trees, but at a greater distance than those to his left.
It was from these trees that the deer emerged.
Jack turned slightly to watch them, balancing Grace more firmly in his arms. She was no weight at all, but he worried that the pressure from his arms would discomfort her almost fleshless frame.
There were five of them, three fallow deer and three roe, all cautious, if not nervous.
Prasutagus came to stand at Jack’s side, his eyes fixed on the trees just behind the deer.
A woman emerged from underneath the trees, and Jack heard Prasutagus draw in a sharp breath.
She was in her early thirties, tall and lithe with the muscular arms of a warrior, and long dark, silverlaced hair twisted in a loose rope that hung over her left shoulder. Her face had a wide and high forehead, and was marked with lines of woad.
Her eyes were a lively hazel, and Jack could distinguish their sharp intelligence even at this distance.
She wore a tartan wool sleeveless robe, sashed about her waist with a belt of blue leather, and splashed about its hem with blood.
The woman reached the deer, paused long enough to lay a hand on the shoulder of one, then stepped forward.