Druids Sword (8 page)

“Had Noah said anything to you? Stella? Ariadne, if you’ve had any contact with her?
Weyland?
”

“No.
What is it?
”

Jack took a deep breath. “From this brief walk, Harry, I can tell you that Catling—the Troy Game
—appears healthy and vibrant and, yes, dark and dismal and so strong I don’t think all the gods in their heavens could ever dislodge her. But there’s something else hanging over and about and through London. Something
other.
Shadowy. Insubstantial. Whether or not it relates to Catling, and the labyrinth that Genvissa and I built…I don’t know. If it did relate to Catling then I would have thought that Noah or Weyland, or any one of the others trained in the arts of the labyrinth, would have picked it up. Maybe I
have
been away too long. Something has happened here, Harry. Something I can’t even comprehend, let alone explain.”

“Jack—”

“There’s only one thing I do know, Harry, and that is that whatever
this
is, it is huge. What we’ve covered today is only a fraction of it. Tell me, what is happening in the Faerie? Is there any intimation of something ‘different’ reflected into the Faerie?”

“No. Only the growing presence of the Troy Game, bad enough as that is. Nothing else.”

“None of the creatures of the Faerie have mentioned anything to you?”

Harry shook his head. All the lines had deepened in his face, making him look so physically weary, and so emotionally exhausted, that Jack reached out a hand and rested it on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” he said softly, “but there is something very, very wrong with this city.”

O
h, how terrifying, how incredible, how nerveracking, how
relieving
to have him back.

How wonderful.

I don’t think I can possibly put into words all the emotions that surged through me when first we realised Jack—as he called himself now—was coming home. Guilt—oh yes. Excitement—yes, I’ll confess to that also. Terror, at what he would say to me, and what he would
think
of me.

During the seventeenth century I’d destroyed his world. He’d wanted me, had loved me, had thought to build a life together with me.

Believed he and I would complete the Troy Game together.

Instead I had abandoned him and the life together I’d promised him to love Weyland Orr, the Minotaur and Brutus-Jack’s hated enemy, and I had abandoned the Troy Game, claiming it would be our destroyer, not our saviour.

He’d walked away, hurt beyond knowing, and bitter, and I am not the one to blame him for that.

Meanwhile, Weyland’s and my own little paradise, so briefly enjoyed, fell apart about us. We’d had a beautiful daughter, Grace, who healed so many
wounds: Weyland’s at losing the daughter Ariadne had given him so many thousands of years ago, and mine, at losing my own tiny daughter to Genvissa’s malevolence.

Then Catling snatched, twisting her red wool hex about baby-Grace’s wrists, and our daughter, our beloved, so-much-wanted daughter, became an open wound of her own.

These few hundred years between the terrible events of 1666 and 1939 had been…difficult.

Ah, let me be frank. They’d been a waking nightmare. Grace suffered so terribly, and we could do nothing. Our daughter twisted in upon herself, losing all warmth and gaiety and love, until no one could reach her. Gods alone know I tried, but I was too emotional I think, too desperate, and eventually she pushed me away. The closest anyone came was Stella. I don’t know why—what was it about Stella that I didn’t have?—but I did not tax either Grace or Stella with it. If Grace found a little more companionship with Stella than with me, then so be it.

Yet even that friendship had waned over the past fifty years or so as Grace isolated herself more deeply than ever. She talked, she breathed, she occasionally came out with a sentence or two (her “almost conversation” with Jack in the car outside the Savoy had stunned me. I hadn’t heard her say so many words at one time in years), and she washed and dressed herself.

She suffered whenever Catling chose to visit her with agony.

She didn’t live. Not really.

Weyland and I were at our wits’ end. We loved her so much, we wanted so much for her,
we wanted to help her so badly.

And in the end we couldn’t do a thing for her.

Now Jack was back. And he’d said he would look at Grace’s hex! I tried not to think that somehow tonight Jack would make it all right, that he would find what everyone else had singularly failed to do—the means of removing the hex. After all, he was a Kingman, and he created the Troy Game, and maybe he
did
have the skill and knowledge to help Grace.

I tried not to hope too much, but I am afraid that after we dropped off Jack and Harry, and all through the day as we waited within the Savoy for them to arrive for dinner, I went about with a silly smile on my face.

Weyland commented on it as soon as we’d arrived back in our suite and Grace had gone to her room.

“Noah?” He didn’t have to say any more. There was an infinite weight of questions in that single word.

“What do you think, Weyland?” I went to him, and slid my hands about his waist, leaning in against him. “Do you think Jack
can
do something for Grace?”

He studied me a moment, his hazel eyes clouded with something I couldn’t quite read. “Is that hope all that’s fuelling the light in your face, Noah?”

Ah, gods, when would Weyland realise how much I loved him? “No,” I said, and leaned closer and kissed him. “I’m thinking also of how we might entertain ourselves once our guests have gone for the night.”

He smiled, but it wasn’t convincing. He extricated himself from my embrace and walked over to the sideboard in our sitting room and poured himself a drink.

“Weyland—”

He turned about. “Noah, I have been both dreading and hoping for this day for so long. We all need Jack if we’re going to have a hope of destroying the Troy Game…if we’re going to have a hope of
saving
Grace.
But he’s such a wild card. He can both save us or destroy us. He could take you from me with a single word—”

“Weyland, don’t be ridiculous—”

“—with a single look. Gods, he is so much more
powerful
now than he was as Louis de Silva. Did you not feel the power rippling out from him when he spoke to Walter? And that was but a fraction of what I think he’s capable of commanding.”

“He’s not Theseus, Weyland.” In his first life as the loathed Minotaur, Weyland had been murdered by Theseus, who had been given the power to destroy him by Weyland’s then-lover, Ariadne.

“Really, Noah? Everything rides on him. Everything. Us. Grace. This land. The Faerie. He has the power to either save us or doom us.”

I tried to joke. “But you must trust him if you’re going to give him one of your cars!” Weyland loved his motor cars, and had allowed no one else but me to drive them.

He grunted, and drained the contents of his glass. “Do you think he will help us?”

“What choice does he have?”

I got nothing but a cynical look for that, so I gave up on the conversation and went to the windows to look down on the Thames. We’d been living at the Savoy for about six years. Because none of us—Weyland, myself or Grace—died or aged (Grace had taken about eighteen mortal years to grow to her present height and maturity, and hadn’t aged from that point on) we tended to move from house to house, and neighbourhood to neighbourhood, on a fairly regular basis, generally about every ten years. Every so often we moved into a village in the countryside surrounding London for a period of twenty years or so, so that people in the city would forget our faces.

The Savoy was proving to be one of our favourite homes. The grand hotel had been built in the late nineteenth century, with no expense spared, and had been modernised several times since. Although the majority of guests were short-term, there were many like ourselves who took one of the larger suites and turned it into a home, staying for many years at a time. Our suite consisted of a large sitting room, a dining room (with a small kitchenette off it, although we mostly had our meals provided from the Savoy’s kitchens), three bedrooms, a box room, a luxurious bathroom, and a powder room, all, save for the box room, appointed and furnished with the utmost sumptuousness and elegance. The luxury of the hotel, and its convenience to central London, were attractions, to be sure, but so also was the sense of “family” among the staff, and most certainly also was the fact that our suite, on the floor beneath the attic level, had windows that overlooked the Thames.

I could stand there for hours, watching the water sprites at mischief among the pleasure boats.

We had no entrance to the Idyll from the Savoy. Hundreds of years ago, when Weyland had purchased the house in Idol Lane, he’d constructed a stunningly beautiful, magical, faerie world on the top floor of the house. He called it his Idyll, and used it to retreat from the world. The Idyll had shown me a side of Weyland I’d never suspected—the creative, faerie aspect of him—and it was in the Idyll that Weyland and I had come to love each other. The Idyll still existed, but we could only access it from the Faerie, or from the steps inside the rebuilt spire of St Dunstan’s-in-the-East.

We rarely visited the Idyll. The intrusion of Catling’s imps into the Idyll in order to place that hex on Grace had destroyed some of its magic for us.
As for Grace…I don’t think she ever went back into the Idyll after the Great Fire.

Catling had caused a great blight on this land. She would prove its death if she could not be destroyed.

I had to believe that Jack would aid us, and would
succeed
in aiding us. I had to.

We spent a desultory afternoon waiting for Jack and Harry. I telephoned Matilda, and spoke to her for a while about Jack’s arrival, and all that he had said and done thus far (I left out the fact Jack had kissed me; that was irrelevant, surely). She asked me to give him her best wishes, and the hope they could meet soon. Then I spent my time alternately flipping through magazines, watching the river from the windows, and walking as silently as I could to Grace’s room, standing outside her closed door with my hand raised to knock, then walking away again, too dispirited to risk a rejection. Weyland went down to one of the bars for a while, where, fortunately, he did not drink too much, then to the garage, where I suppose he spent an hour or so both farewelling one of the cars and instructing one of the mechanics to get it ready for transfer to its new owner.

Just after six in the late afternoon the internal telephone rang, and Robert Stacey, the concierge who ran the residential guests’ lobby (we did not enter through the main, glittering lobby of the hotel, but a smaller one just around the corner from the Savoy Court), said that two gentlemen were on their way to see us. He already knew Harry, and would have allowed Jack through on Harry’s recommendation, but I wondered what Stacey had thought of him.

Stacey was a Sidlesaghe. He always appeared in some form or other at whatever front door we kept, as our doorkeeper and watcher.

I don’t know who he watched more: me or Grace.

I put down the telephone, then realised I’d been standing there staring at it too long, and that Weyland was watching me.

I smiled wanly. “They’re on their way up.”

Weyland looked at me a heartbeat longer, then gave a tight little nod, and left the sitting room. I heard him knock softly on Grace’s door, then enter her bedroom.

I wish I’d had the courage to do that earlier.

Oh, gods, the nerves were fluttering in my stomach. Please,
please
let Jack be able to help Grace.

I took a deep breath, walked slowly to the front door of the suite, and, by the time the knock on the door came, hoped that the smile on my face was steady.

“Harry,” I said as I opened the door. “Jack.” I kissed Harry on the cheek, as I always did, hesitated awkwardly, then greeted Jack in the same manner.

Both men appeared tense and tired, and I wondered what had happened while they’d been out walking the City.
Had Catling appeared to them?
I hadn’t seen her since that terrible day she had dragged Weyland and me down to the heart of the labyrinth, but she would surely approach Jack at some time, now that he was home.

Harry had led Jack through into the sitting room, and I followed.

Weyland and Grace were already there, sitting on the sofa, and I was glad to see Grace had changed into something a little less inhibited than her earlier blouse and skirt. She wore a flowered linen dress I had given her some months past, but which I always had to badger her to wear. I wondered whether Weyland had urged her to change, or if she’d shown some initiative herself.

Weyland stood up from the sofa to shake both Harry’s and Jack’s hands. Harry nodded a welcome at Grace, but Jack leaned over to shake her hand, which I thought a trifle too formal. But Grace looked him in the eye as they shook, so I was grateful for that small mercy at least.

“Well?” said Weyland, not pausing for any verbal niceties, although he’d gone to the drinks cabinet to pour everyone a drink.

Harry and Jack glanced at each other, and I felt a premonition of dread.

“Sit down,” I said, then sat myself as Weyland brought me my glass.

Harry and Jack took two of the armchairs, but Weyland sat back next to Grace on the sofa.

“There’s something different,” Jack said without any preamble.

I didn’t know what he meant. Yes, London had changed…but surely he would have expected that? “Catling has grown,” I said. “She is stronger than ever.”

Jack stared searchingly at me as I spoke, as if he expected me to say something different, or as if I might be hiding something. Then he turned his head towards the sofa. “Weyland?”

“What do you mean, Jack?” Weyland said. “What do you want us to say?
What
is different?”

Jack moved a hand, delaying his response to Weyland for a moment. “Grace?” he said.

She’d been staring at her lap, but now she raised her face to him.

“Different?” she said. “Do you mean wrong?”

Harry glanced sharply at Jack at that question, and Jack himself leaned forward in his chair. “Is there something wrong, Grace?”

She didn’t answer immediately, but held Jack’s gaze for a long moment, then looked back to her lap where
one of her hands was wrapped about her other wrist. “Everything has been wrong for a very long time.”

It was no answer and it didn’t satisfy Jack, but he let it go. On my part, I was amazed at how much Jack seemed to get out of Grace. Jack got sentences. The rest of us got little more than monosyllables.

“There’s something different, or ‘wrong’, about London,” Jack said, passing a hand over his face as if very, very tired. “I can’t define it, I can’t describe it, I don’t know what it pertains to…save that it touches in
some
way upon the Troy Game. Noah…you are a Mistress of the Labyrinth, a powerful one, have you felt
nothing?
”

“No. Jack, what can you mean?”

He gave a confused shake of his head, and so I turned to Harry. “Harry?”

“I can’t add anything more to what Jack has said.
He
can feel this, I can’t.”

Harry was frustrated, but I could tell he didn’t disbelieve Jack.

“We walked all over central London,” Harry continued, “from the Tower where you dropped us, around the northern line of old London Wall, to St Paul’s, to Southwark. Jack says that whatever the wrongness is, it is huge.”