The Witch Queen (27 page)

“Actually, we haven’t. Fern’s got some sort of plan—I know her—but it evidently doesn’t include us. We can take the rest of the evening off.” While they talked they were standing at the entrance to the alleyway, where reception was better: Selena Place tended to inhibit mobile phones. Possibly it was the magical leakage from Moonspittle’s basement.

Ragginbone said: “I trust you’re right. At any rate, there’s very little we can do until Fern requests help. I shall stay with Moonspittle. He has been deeply shaken by the events of this night. He is not comfortable dealing with friends, let alone enemies.”

“
Are
we his friends?” Will inquired dryly.

“We used his home for various sorcerous activities before staging an extremely dangerous diversion there in which we—and he—could easily have been killed. After that, I think the least we can offer him is friendship, don’t you?”

Will said: “When you put it like that . . .”

“Should we come back with you?” asked Gaynor.

“Not now. He finds too much company rather overwhelming. Leave it a little while—a century or two—and he may almost be pleased to see you.”

Gaynor was not entirely convinced this was intended for a joke, but Will flicked him a quick grin. “A century or two will be just fine,” he said, and, seizing her by the hand, he steered her up the road and turned off in the direction of a club that would be open into the small hours. Although he was not a member, a friend of his was located in the noisiest of the bars and signed both of them in as guests.

“Very smooth,” said Gaynor, trying for disapproval. “Do people always succumb to your blarney?”

“I’m not Irish,” Will pointed out. “It ain’t blarney, it’s charm.”

“Funny how I missed that,” said Gaynor.

“Yes, you did, didn’t you?” She was disconcerted to see him looking suddenly serious. “Shame.”

He got their drinks and led her through the relative quiet of a long sitting room with a piano (fortunately, no one was playing), down a couple of steps, and into a side room with two or three tables, assorted chairs, and a pair of actors, plainly oblivious to all else, who were deep in theatrical scandal. “Privacy,” Will said. “Good. Now you can tell me exactly why you were so careful to miss my charm.”

Gaynor fiddled with a strand of her hair. “I don’t think we should be talking about that now,” she said. “Not with everything so . . . unfinished. Fern’s in awful danger, and we’re—”

“Doing nothing? Fiddling while Rome burns—in your case with your hair? You did something earlier on and it nearly got you killed. You deserve a break. As for Fern—well, she trusted us, and now we have to trust her. It wasn’t easy for her: she has the power, so she feels she should take the risk. But she trusted us, and somehow, through luck or fate, we didn’t fail. You obviously have a Gift of some kind, though it’s not like hers. Maybe it’s a sort of supernatural understanding. After all, unhappy men always turn to you for a shoulder to cry on, don’t they?”

“This isn’t about me,” Gaynor said hastily. “Look, it’s not that I don’t
trust
Fern, it’s just—”

“You doubt her ability to win. Yes, you do. God help us, we both do. We love her, and fear for her, but . . . in the last few weeks, I’ve come to realize something. Her Gift—the conflict with Morgus—all this stuff—this is more important to her than anything else in life. I’m an aspiring producer who dabbles on the dark side. You’re a manuscript restorer dabbling with the same. But Fern is a witch who dabbles in PR. The magic is in her blood and her bones. Morcadis is her true self. We can’t deny her that. When I saw her drawing the circle—when I saw her confidence and her certainty—I knew in some ways she is more akin to Ragginbone, even to Alimond, than to me.”

“Do you mind?” Gaynor asked. She did not question his conclusions.

“Not yet. If she hadn’t trusted us—if her trust ever failed—
then
I would mind. If she ever came to look on us as less than her, merely human, in need of protection . . . That’s the true danger of the Gift, I’m sure. People like Morgus, like Alimond, they see themselves as above ordinary mortals, isolated,
special
. So they lose touch with reality altogether and go insane.”

“Like Stalin and Hitler,” Gaynor recalled. “So you said.”

“Just a theory,” said Will. “Under the action-man exterior, I have the soul of a thinker.”

“Hang on to it,” Gaynor said. “Isn’t Morgus meant to be the stealer of souls?”

“Morgus again. This conversation wasn’t supposed to be about her. Somewhere back along the line, it was supposed to be about us.”

“Is there an ‘us’?” Gaynor asked, half in hope, half in doubt.

“I don’t know,” Will said. She tried to avoid his gaze, but somehow there was nowhere else to look. It struck her that these days he always seemed to have a suntan, summer streaks in his hair, the slight roughness of designer stubble on his jaw. He was nearly four years her junior, but he appeared to be catching up fast. He had always had more self-assurance, even when he was a larky sixteen and she a college girl visiting Fern’s family; now, she suspected, he was rapidly acquiring more experience of life. He would sample everything the world had to offer, snatch an extra slice of the universal cake and then give it away to a friend in need, fly off into the sunset because it was quicker than sailing and come back two months later expecting a hero’s welcome. He had no money, but he managed to patronize the latest bars and ignore the celebrity drinkers with the most successful of his peers. He apparently found the business of living exciting, effortless, a game, a gamble, a romp.

While Gaynor was a quiet girl, too sympathetic for her own good, who liked losing herself in the past and whose life consisted of stumbling from one minor disaster to the next. All we have in common, she thought, is Fern, and the adventures we’ve shared with her. And most of those weren’t much fun.

“Is there an us?” Will repeated. “I’d say my balls are in your court—so to speak.”

She accorded the pun a perfunctory smile. “I’m not your type. It wouldn’t last. What’s the point of a casual quickie? Isn’t it better just to stay friends?”

“I don’t want to be friends,” Will said bluntly. “I want more. And I decide who’s my type. As for casual . . .”

“You only want me because I’m the one that got away,” Gaynor found herself saying, and instantly regretted it.

“If you think I’m as juvenile as that,” Will snapped, “I’m not surprised at your reluctance.”

“Not—not juvenile, exactly,” Gaynor stammered. “Just a man.”

“Sexist.”

“I’m making such a mess of this . . .”

“All you have to tell me,” Will said with deceptive gentleness, “is that, although you like me, you don’t find me remotely attractive, and then I won’t bother you anymore. Of course you could hedge, and say
I’m
not
your
type, but that’s a plus because your type is usually some creep who complains his wife doesn’t understand him, and you don’t need another one of those.”

“Has any woman ever told you she didn’t find you attractive?” Gaynor inquired innocently.

“No, of course not. Your sex, unlike mine, is far too considerate.”

“What happens if I say yes? I mean, yes, I find you attractive, not yes to anything else.”

“Sooner or later, we go back to my flat. Tonight, or tomorrow night, or whenever. If it’s tonight, we can just talk, open a bottle of wine. I’ll sleep on the sofa. No hurry.”

“You’re lying,” said Gaynor.

“Yes.”

“I think I’d like another drink.”

By the time they got back to Will’s flat, the hour was so late it was beginning to be early. He was sharing with his business partner and friend Roger Hoyt, who had acquired what should have been a loft conversion in South London, only no one had troubled to convert it. The floorboards were unvarnished, the beams splintered. Large unframed canvases, some of them bearing Will’s moniker, hung on the walls or were propped against them; blown-up photos peeled from the sloping ceiling. The bathroom and kitchen facilities were rudimentary. Opened bottles of both red and white wine stood on the table, and after a quick search Will found clean glasses. Gaynor, staring up through a naked skylight, saw a darkness bleared with the glow of the city, or possibly the advent of dawn. There were no visible stars.

“Why does it always happen this way?” Gaynor wondered, accepting a glass of red. “Here we are in the middle of trouble and danger, falling in—“ she checked herself “—in lust. And when the danger is over . . .”

“I won’t run away. Will you?”

“I’m scared,” she admitted.

He tilted her face to the light, seeing the exotic eye makeup, now slightly smudged, and the vulnerability of the eyes underneath. “Ah.” He didn’t offer easy reassurance. “You’re afraid of being hurt. So am I. Who ain’t? If you care, you get hurt. But if you don’t care, you get nothing. I can’t promise not to lie to you, though I’ll try. I can’t promise anything, except that I care. Seeing you again, just lately, I’ve come to realize how much you matter to me, how much you’ve always mattered, only my poor punctured ego wouldn’t let me face it. I don’t know why: you just do. Chemistry. Fate.”

Love, thought Gaynor. Oh, bugger.

She said: “I don’t want this to go wrong.”

“Relationships don’t come with a guarantee.” He grinned at her. “All I can say is, if it does fail, it won’t be my fault.”

“Yes, it will,” Gaynor said indignantly.

“No, it won’t.” He took her glass and put it on the table, and then his arms were around her, and he was kissing her, and she was kissing him, and it wasn’t difficult at all. Her hesitation crumbled, her doubts and fears retreated to the back of her mind. They wouldn’t go away, not for a long time, but for the moment at least they no longer had a voice. She was young and healthy, and desire took over, a desire fueled by long waiting and vain suppression, sharpened by the horrors of the preceding evening. Eventually, they stumbled to his bed—a double mattress on the floor—and rolled on top of the duvet because it would slow them down to get under it, and sometime later the stealthy predawn twilight showed her sprawled limbs pale against his, her makeup kissed off, her dark hair puddled across the tumbled pillows. He stroked her shoulder, bird’s-egg freckled from a brief stint in the sun, and the smoothness of her back, and the curve of her bottom, and when he thought she was asleep he tugged the duvet out from under her and covered her with it. She was awake, but she kept her eyes closed, faking slumber, because the attention was so dear to her. In the end it was Will who slept while Gaynor lay wakeful, unable to relax in the strange bed, and, like Elizabeth in
Pride and Prejudice
, knowing rather than feeling that she was happy. As a lover, he had been skilled though not yet blasé, which hadn’t surprised her, but he had seemed startled when she responded in kind, gasping with pleasure and saying, only half-teasing: “My God, it’s true! Older women really
are
best . . .” She worried for a minute that the age gap bothered him, though she knew she was being foolish, but the memory of his pleasure warmed her, right down between her legs, and presently she forgot to worry, and touched herself very gently, finishing the stimulus that he had begun, climaxing beside her sleeping lover, something she had never been able to do in bed with any man. She thought she would tell him when he woke, and the next time, or the next, it would happen with him. On that thought she slipped into a doze, and the daylight forced an entry around the pinned-down curtain on the bedroom window, only to find there was no one awake to object.

It was Roger Hoyt who roused them, banging on the wall because the door couldn’t take it, reminding Will they were due for an informal drink with a contact from the BBC. “Get rid of Annabel—“ Gaynor had left female apparel scattered across the main room “—and get moving.”

“It isn’t Annabel,” Will said through teeth that were both gritted and gritty.

“Sophie—”

“Wrong again.”

“Sinead—Lucia—Véronique . . .”

“I don’t know a Véronique.” To his relief, he saw Gaynor was giggling. He got up and opened the door, disposing of his friend with a few well-chosen words, mostly four-lettered. Then he reached for his jeans and offered tea or coffee. “There’s probably no milk, but I’ll get some. D’you want any breakfast? I could buy some croissants . . .”

He’s making an effort, she realized, astonished and pleased; but she declined. “Just tea. I was wondering about Fern. Has she phoned?”

Will checked his messages, without result. Then he tried Dale House and her mobile. The former did not answer; the latter was switched off. “Or out of range,” he said. “She could have crossed into a dimension beyond the ken of mobile phones. Maybe just Yorkshire.” His lighthearted irritation with Roger had darkened; a frown cut double lines between his brows. “I don’t like it.”

“What do we do?” asked Gaynor. The intermission was forgotten or set aside: they were back where they had left off last night.

Will’s mouth set; he looked at his unresponsive mobile as if it had committed a personal offense.

He didn’t try to answer her.

Part Three

Honor

X

I had forgotten what it was like to feel ill. For time outside Time I had dwelt beneath the Eternal Tree, out of reach of the diseases that afflict lesser mortals. In the spellfire, I saw people sicken and die, I saw plague and pox and cancer and AIDS, I saw microbes wriggling under a lens and doctors fighting to cure the incurable; but I could never recall being ill myself, save for the minor maladies of childhood. The nausea that came over me, the deadly faintness, was so terrible that I believed I was dying. My driver had to carry me to the car; Nehemet followed, mewing in sympathy. I lay back against the seats, but their softness galled me, and the smell of the leather turned my stomach, and I sat up and heaved—heaved like a drunken peasant or a pregnant whore—and the stuff that came out was greenish, and tasted of acid, and stank like rotting vegetation. I knew I could not be poisoned: the River had made me invulnerable to both weapon and venom. Yet I
felt
poisoned, though I had ingested nothing harmful. When the vomiting ceased my stomach drew, and I curled on the seat, trying not to moan, with my cheek on the cold bare flank of Nehemet (goblin cats are creatures of the Underworld: they are never warm), while Hodgekiss sped me home. He was a reliable servant; I had dosed his coffee, often and often, with the juice of the Tree. “Go swift,” I told him, “and smooth.” Above all, smooth. Whatever had happened to me, it must be some magic of Morcadis, some evil that she had encompassed when she had sneaked into Wrokeby in my absence. Fool that I was, to fall into such a trap! Yet I had not even the strength to summon the elementals, and send them to detain her. When the nausea was past my rage still sickened in me, and that did not go away.

Somewhere in the very core of me, in the sap of my heart, I knew what was wrong, but my brain refused to think and the knowledge lurked just out of bounds, over the borderland of the subconscious. I did not reach for it; I think I dared not, though I have dared much in my time. The spider has eaten her, I told myself. I will find nothing left but her bones. There are spells in the house that could fry her to ash . . . She was a mere novice, a stumbling pupil who has forgotten the little she ever learned. She has neither the skill nor the will to injure
me
. . .

When we reached Wrokeby, I knew she had gone. I could sense the wake of her departure like a violent eddy in the still hollowness of the entrance hall. I felt where she had been as if she had left a spoor. The conservatory.

I remember I ordered the driver to wait. I had forgotten his name, so dreadful was the tension of that moment, but it did not matter. I was stronger now, but it was a damaged strength, as if I had had a limb amputated, or a vital organ removed, and there was an aching vacancy in my being I did not try to comprehend. I walked through the house, Nehemet at my heels. The hag, I assumed, must have been slain. I switched on the lights as I went—the lights of the modern age, which need no flame and work from the same power that makes the lightning in the storm and the crackle on the hair of a cat. Normally I prefer the dark, but something else affected me, beyond weakness, beyond fury, something rare and strange and familiar, draining me more than any physical infirmity. It was a while before I remembered what it was. Fear.

There were no lights in the conservatory: I had never needed them. In the overspill from the house I saw crushed foliage, snapped stems; I heard the silence where once there would have been the soft leaf-murmur of recognition. And I saw the guardian, his great body scrunched like that of any common spider, swatted, stabbed through the head with a single thrust. It had not even taken sorcery: only a pin. My creature, my pet, whom I had nursed and nurtured, skewered through its tiny brain as if by an idle collector! There was contempt in that. I felt my fury grow, reviving my force, but the fear nudged it, and would not go away. When I reached the Tree, I thought I was prepared. It would be uprooted, its bark torn—leaves scattered—branches smashed. It might take me days, weeks, years to restore it to life.

But there was no Tree.

My darksight was returning, and I stared about me in bewilderment and horror, thinking I knew not what. There was the stone pot, cracked when the radix had forced its way through and penetrated deep into the soil beneath. But beside that there was nothing save a spill of blackened earth, a few leaf-shaped cinders, a long resinous smear on the paving stones. And ash powder, finer than dust, sifting through my scrabbling fingers. My nostrils caught the faint, acrid afterscent of something I recognized, a potion I had made myself, distilled from the stolen waters of Azmodel, deadlier than fire. My potion had destroyed my Tree! Now I began to understand both the seeds of my malady and the source of my fear. It was as if a part of my self had been torn away and brutally cauterized, leaving me limping, crippled from within. I may have cried out; I can’t recall. My rage grew from a creeping surge to a great flood, overwhelming fear, restraint, pain. This was a loss that would be too long in the mending. I would have to go back to the parent Tree, take another cutting, trading power for power—and there are some places to which there should be no returning. I have never gone back, always forward, forward to a new conquest . . .

Morcadis had done this. The lost soul I had fostered, the viper I had nested. In that moment, I swore that I would eat her heart.

But what of the fruit—the fruit I had charged my guardian to protect? The first fruit, trembling on the verge of ripeness: the thought of it gnawed my spirit. Surely there would be some trace—a charred lump, a hunk of hair that had escaped the burning. But I found no sign, and I knew now what I feared most.
She
had taken it, the thief in the night, to learn its secrets and use them against me. And then I felt it, reaching out to me from somewhere far off, with a summons as insistent as a child’s cry to its mother. It was the head, not
her
, whose trail I had sensed screaming through the house—the clamor of a voice unheard, an echo of my own. I almost forgot that Morgun had betrayed me, remembering only that she was my twin. I had to take back what was mine, to exact revenge for this ultimate violation—

I went through the house like a gale, Nehemet hissing in my swath. In the kitchen, she sprang onto the chest freezer, and there was a hammering from within. I swept off the pots that weighed down the lid and Grodda clambered out, scattering peas like grapeshot, her garments crackling with frost, her face the color of bile. In the basement, I found flasks rifled, one bottle gone, my little menagerie liberated. The jar that had held the whimpering spirit of the girl was already smashed, but I crushed the remaining pieces and stamped on the eyeballs of the blasphemer. But there in the cupboard was the head of Sysselore, intact, eyes closed as if mocking me with its slumber. I wrenched it out by the hair, pinched it into wakefulness. “She was here!” I cried. “Here in
my
place—my storeroom—breaking spells, stealing bottles, releasing
my
phantoms into the ether. May that sniveling girl never find her way home! Did you see her?”

“What girl?”

“Don’t dare to taunt me. She was here—Morcadis—she would have seen you, you must have seen her. Feign ignorance again, and I will squeeze you into pulp.”

“I feign nothing,” the head whined. “You confuse me, with your shes and hers, your this girl, which girl. Morcadis came, she saw me, but she wasn’t interested. No doubt she had other objects in view.”

“What did she say?”

“To me? Nothing. I was locked in a cupboard, in the dark, with preserving fluid filling my mouth; I was blind, deaf, dumb, as you ordered me.”

“You are my coven sister, my—“ I fumbled for the word “—my
friend
. You must have seen something, learned something.”

“She was with a man.”

“A
man
  ?” I was taken aback. I had thought better of her—even her. “What kind of a man?”

“Not handsome, as you or I would have it, but who is? What can I say? I saw him briefly, through my lashes. If he were a knight, his armor would be black. He would win in the joust because he could not endure to lose. If he had come to my island, I would have snared him with a will. I would have turned him into a black boar, but he would have kept the mind of a man, even to the moment when I set him on the spit for roasting. He had power, of a kind. The Gift, or something else.”

“This is nonsense.” She was rambling; she had often rambled. “Death has done nothing to sharpen your wits. Forget your brain-soft fantasies. As for his Gift, how could you know?”

“I did not know. I
felt
.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. How could I be sure? I kept my eyes closed—”

“Venture further with your impudence,” I whispered, “and I will lance your core with an auger, and watch the mold ooze out.”

“I am dead. You cannot harm me.”

“I can hurt you.”

“Then hurt me. I will tell you this much: Morcadis has grown. Not in inches, but within. Her power, her spirit waxes to a new fullness. I saw her face, and it was as cold and implacable as the moon. She will find a way to defeat you: it is her fate, and yours.”

“There is no way!” My grasp tightened on the severed stem and gossamer hair.

“There is always a way. Don’t you remember the stories? The door that cannot be opened, the task that cannot be completed, the battle that cannot be won, and yet there is always a key, completion, victory. Your doom was in her face, Morgus: I saw it as if it were written. Do you believe in stories, my coven sister, my friend? Do you—”

“Go to hell,” I screamed, “the quick way!” and I hurled the head against the wall with all my strength.

Maybe that was what she wanted. I have wondered.

Half her face was squashed into a red mess; the debris dropped to the floor; blood-bright juice ran down the wall. The remaining eye rolled, and was still. “That was swifter than your deserts,” I said, but she was silent now, and I had no means to retrieve her voice. She had been my sole companion for endless ages under the Eternal Tree, but Morcadis had slain her, and now she was gone indeed. (Morcadis, always Morcadis. There was too much to add to the reckoning.) I did not miss her. There had been love between us once, when our exile was still fresh, but it had worn out long, long ago. I would not miss my Sysselore.

Nehemet waited, her tail twitching, her feline features impassive. What goes on behind her unchanging expression I will never know.

“I must find Morgun,” I said. There were secrets to be whispered, tales to be told. Somehow, I sensed that with my twin I would learn the answer to the final question, the question I could not frame. I must have forgotten she, too, was only a fruit.

I went to the spellchamber, but it was undisturbed, though they had been there. Who the man might be with Fernanda I did not pause to speculate; some henchman presumably, a servant or an admirer she had enspelled whose potential for power Sysselore had undoubtedly overestimated. He was not important; I had other concerns. The trail led to the attic, to the prisoner whom I had not visited for weeks. The stench made my senses reel. The spell barrier was undamaged as I had been sure it would be; none other could unravel the complexities of that pattern, nor would have the power to counter my Commands. But she had been there, with Morgun: she had stood by the door, staring into the barred gloom, seeing the downfall of the creature she had used and discarded. She might have considered him her ally, but I doubted it. She had learned that much from me: accord no man respect that he cannot compel, give no man gratitude that he cannot demand. My prisoner had always been less than a man; now he was less than a beast. He cowered in the corner, below the single window casement. Outside, no moon sailed, no star peeped. Within, the darkness was yet darker, but he still skulked behind dirt-clogged hair, arms wrapped around his torso, tail hiding his feet. His eyes were mere slits between puffball lids.

“Morcadis was here,” I said. “Your little witch. Was she pleased to see you?” And, when he remained silent: “I asked you a question. Answer it, or I will send the nightmares to plague you again! Was—she—pleased—to—see—you?”

“She didn’t say.” The response came as if wrung from his lips.

“What
did
she say?”

“Hail and farewell. What was there to say? She tried to let me out.”

“And she failed! She will always fail. Hope if you will: it prolongs your suffering. Despair is the more terrible when it succeeds a period of hope.”

“I will remember that.”

“Only my will can release you—”

“Or your death.”

“My death! I snapped her charms like cobwebs, yet she could not penetrate mine. I am the greatest of witchkind, twice-born, once into life, once out of death; my body was anointed in Stygian magic and the sap of the Great Tree runs in my veins. I cannot be slain, nor conquered. There is no power in the world that could engender my death.”

“Then why are you afraid?”

I would have boiled his meager brain inside his skull, but I had made the spell wall too strong, and it would take time to bypass it. He was right, of course. That was unforgivable.