Spring (24 page)

The right place at the right time, that was Jack from the first and it will be so to the very last. Always where he needs to be
.

‘What are you thinking, Mum?’

‘Good things, my darling – just good things.’

Always trust him to watch over you, my love. I feel it’s what he was sent to do and that somehow he’s loved you from the beginning of time, as you have him.
‘I can’t hear the chimes any more,’ Clare repeated, as if it was the last thing she had to cling on to.

She opened her eyes a final time to look into Katherine’s.

The air fell still, as did the trees and the grass and the plants, and for a moment they heard the chimes again, until they too faded to nothing and silence fell, but for the dripping of the rain as the squalls passed on, taking with them the spirit of Clare Shore.

Katherine raised her mother’s hand and, with tears running down her face, put her arm gently around her mother’s shoulders and held her close, until the body that had carried her brave soul through so many courageous years lay still at last.

‘I
mbolc’s a strange name,’ Jack said.

The worst of the rainstorm was now over and he was sitting talking with the Peace-Weaver up on White Horse Hill. The sun had broken through racing clouds and shone for the moment across the Vale below where Katherine lived.

‘Maybe, but it’s my given name and I like it. Do you know what it means?’

He shook his head.

‘Spring,’ she said, ‘in the old language. That was from when I was mortal.’

‘You seem real enough to me.’

She laughed. ‘Now, there you’re very much mistaken. What you see is an illusion and not real at all, and maybe you’ll just remember it as vague shadows and wraiths. But that’s all you need to remember in order to do the right thing.’

He looked at her appraisingly. She was tall, elegant, about forty-five, with chestnut hair that the rain had darkened. Her cloak looked unlike any garment he had seen before, and fell to her shoes.

‘This is my favourite guise here in the human world, but in the Hyddenworld—’

‘It’s a real place, isn’t it?’

‘So real you’re as good as in it already. You’ll soon be learning how to go back and forth. It’s one of the great gifts that giants like you possess.’

‘Giants?’

‘As Arthur Foale told you, yes.’

‘You know him?’

‘Of course.’

‘Is he still alive?’

‘Yes,’ she said, turning serious. ‘And it’s one of several things we have to talk about.’

They fell silent for a moment.

‘You knew what would happen this afternoon, didn’t you, Jack?’ she said eventually.

‘That Clare would . . .’

He didn’t like to say the word.

Imbolc didn’t use the word either, because in actuality nobody dies; they simply move on to other planes.

‘Yes, that her journey through life would be over. But I was thinking of something more specific than that.’

‘That it would happen while I was climbing White Horse Hill? Yes, I think I did.’

‘It’s Katherine I had in mind. You need to be prepared for the fact she’ll suffer extreme grief, which will make her vulnerable to the forces that she needs your protection against, whatever she herself may claim.’

Jack considered her words.

‘Don’t underestimate the power of such a loss,’ she warned him. ‘Grief takes you over, clawing at your heart and mind, forcing you to think of nothing else but the person you’ve lost, and what an endless black void their absence seems to create . . . And with that comes anger, too, because you’ve been left behind to continue on the stony road alone. Anger at everything and everyone.’

Imbolc had produced a black plastic bin-liner to keep their bottoms dry on the wet grass, off which Jack had since begun to slip. He pulled himself back next to her.

‘Clever idea that,’ Jack had said with a grin, indicating the bin-bag.

‘I wish I could claim it was my invention, but someone called Bedwyn Stort gave me the idea a long time ago. I’ve carried one ever since, and very useful it’s often been.’

‘Bedwyn Stort sounds a funny sort of name as well.’

‘He’s a strange sort of person, or at least seems to be when you first meet him. But you find you get used to him and, as you do, that you can’t do without him. That applies to you especially, because he saved your life the same day you saved Katherine’s. You’re all bound together in a common wyrd, on which a very great deal now depends.’

‘He sounds like someone to meet. Where does he live?’

‘In a place called Brum, but I don’t think he’s there right now. In fact, I think he’s on his way here.’

‘You seem to know a lot of things.’

‘Hmm, I know next to nothing really. He’s coming here simply because he’s worked out that the time’s right and that you’re ready and, most important, that you’re now needed,’ she smiled. ‘That’s what giants are for.’

Jack ignored that remark.

Below them the Vale shone crystal-clear in the afternoon sun, the air thoroughly cleansed by the rain. Jack was beginning to feel warmer and now he felt good.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asked him.

‘I was just looking at the view.’

‘Can you see Katherine’s house?’

He searched the landscape briefly and pointed.

‘How did you locate it so fast?’ she asked.

‘From the two tall conifers – they’re darker and taller than the others.’

‘And what else do you notice?’

‘I . . . well,
lots
of things.’

‘About the garden, I mean.’

He stared but saw nothing out of the ordinary, just trees and a patch of lawn.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said finally. ‘Maybe you’ll see it in time. But you’ll need to see it soon or you’ll not know where to go.’

‘I’ll keep looking for it until I see it then.’

Imbolc returned to the subject of Katherine. ‘Grief makes people do strange things, including stupid things. It thus makes people vulnerable. Just when you think they’ve conquered it, it comes back. Two years, three years later . . . that’s what it can take to regain stability after a parent dies. But you and Katherine don’t have the luxury of that sort of time. A few weeks at the most now, and then you’ll be needed.’

‘For what?’

‘I’m coming to that. First it’s important you realize how Clare’s passing means that Katherine will be in very great danger. Death of a loved one always leave the bereaved vulnerable and weak to dark influence. Clare’s determination to live has been Katherine’s protection, and her faith in the chimes as well.’

This made sense to Jack, but he still did not understand the nature of the danger.

‘Arthur Foale seemed to warn me that whatever this dark force is it might try to get at me through Katherine. But there’s something it fears about Katherine in her own right, isn’t there? What’s the danger exactly?’

‘You should be asking me
who
. The Sinistral, that’s who. Stort and the others will explain, so I don’t need to.’

He looked puzzled and she immediately reassured him.

‘Don’t worry, it will become clear soon enough. But mention of the Sinistral reminds me of how you came to get badly hurt when you were six.’

‘You mean the car accident?’

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ she said coolly.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It was deliberate.’

‘That’s ridiculous. I was there, and I saw it was an accident.’

‘So was I, Jack, and I can tell you it was not. The Fyrd were sent by the Sinistral to deliberately cause it.’

Jack shook his head in disbelief.

‘But who would want to kill Katherine?’

‘It wasn’t her they were trying to kill.’

‘But . . .’ He couldn’t continue for a moment.

‘Jack, they were trying to kill
you
.’

Grief is far worse
, she had told him minutes before.
It takes you over, clawing at your heart and mind.

Grief had taken him over, after that accident – grief for what he himself had lost.

‘I think they partly succeeded,’ he said suddenly, at last acknowledging his own suffering.

The Peace-Weaver reached both her hands to his face and then to his damaged neck, as Clare had done when he first met her, in a gesture of understanding and acceptance.

He tried to pull away then, but she was stronger than him, and suddenly bigger by far, as big as the Earth herself and the sky above. When he stood up and struggled and fought and tried to fight and hurt her, she was stronger even then.

Until time passed and his anger subsided.

‘They succeeded,’ he said again.

‘That’s the miracle, Jack, because they didn’t and, in failing, they made you stronger. That’s the way wyrd works: it achieves the opposite of the ill that others try to inflict. But, make no mistake, now Clare’s protection has gone from you both, they’ll soon be back.’

None of what she was saying made sense, but then quite suddenly something quite different did.

Looking across the Vale again, he finally saw what it was about the far-off garden of Woolstone House that was odd and which Imbolc had been hoping he might eventually see. The sun had dropped lower in the sky, its soft red rays catching the tops of the trees. In particular it caught the tops of the two conifers, and others too, about ten of them, which were shorter but distinctive by their dark foliage, and suddenly became noticeable in a way they were not in the garden itself, there getting lost among all the other trees.

He leaned forward, staring hard, following the top of one tree to the next, and then round to the next, until he had worked out their simple pattern. He had of course noticed these other conifers before, but down on the ground it was next to impossible to make out the pattern they formed.

‘What is it?’ he asked, puzzled.

‘It’s a living wood henge, created by Arthur Foale very many years ago. There were conifers already there so he just thinned them out to make the pattern plainer.’

The sunlight faded from the trees for a moment, and then became brighter and stronger on them until he saw they formed an almost perfect hidden circle, its symmetry flawed only by the fact that the two biggest conifers, standing directly opposite the house, had a wider gap between them than the others.

‘That’s the entrance,’ explained Imbolc, ‘and if you work it out from the sun, you’ll realize that it’s on the north-east side of the henge – where such entrances always are. It took Arthur a long time to work that out, and after that he needed to do a lot of research in order to learn how to use it for its most important purpose.’

‘Aren’t henges astronomical calendars or something?’

She shook her head. ‘The trouble with humans is they find it hard to think outside what they already know or believe in, so, because they no longer believe in the hydden, it has proved rather difficult for them to see what’s so obvious, namely that the most important function of henges – many of which were built by the hydden, by the way – is to serve as portals between the hydden and human worlds. Of course you need to know how to use them, but that’s not so hard. Just remember it’s all about illusion, which explains why, being a shape-changer, I’m such an expert.’

‘You were going to tell me where Arthur Foale now is.’

‘No, I wasn’t, and anyway I don’t know exactly. But I can tell you what he’s doing, which may still be of some help.’

‘Which is?’

‘He’s looking for Spring.’

‘That’s weird,’ said Jack. ‘Spring’s not a place, it’s a season. All he has to do is wait until Spring comes round again.’

Imbolc laughed once more. ‘Spring can be many things and is. It’s a person, it’s a state of being, it’s also a gem, or represents one. That is what Arthur’s in search of. The trouble is that getting into the Hyddenworld is one thing, getting back out quite another. For that he may need help. Then again, there’s legends and prophecies that seem to suggest a giant-born will be needed to find the gem, so Arthur needs help from him.’

‘Not me I hope?’ said Jack doubtfully.

Imbolc smiled at his bewilderment. The sun faded and the air turned cold again, as mist drifted across the hill. The view below was gone too and, when the mist cleared eventually, the sun had disappeared and he could make out Woolstone no more.

‘I can’t see the house,’ he began, turning towards her.

But she had gone as well.

The storm had finally moved on, and all that was left was the distant thud-thud-thud sound of distant thunder, like a great horse’s hoofs galloping across the sky.