Druid's Sword Page 3

  When he was behind the wheel, Silvius took a moment to draw on his leather gloves. “It’s been bad without you, Jack,” he said, looking ahead at the road rather than at his son. “None of us know what we can do against the Troy—”

  “I don’t want to talk about that now,” Jack said quietly, his own eyes fixed ahead. His hand fumbled about in the pocket of his greatcoat and he drew out his cigarettes and matches. “Smoke?”

  Silvius shook his head. “Jack—”

  “Not now, Silvius, please,” Jack said, then struck a match and drew deeply on his cigarette. “Not yet.”

  Silvius sighed, started up the car, and drove off.

  Within moments they were on Blackfriars Bridge, and moments after that Silvius turned the car right, up Ludgate Hill.

  “Silvius?” Jack straightened in his seat. “Where are we going?”

  “To pick someone up,” Silvius said. “Another reason neither Harry or I wanted a civilian driver tonight.”

  Jack tensed, his cigarette forgotten in his hand. They were driving directly towards St Paul’s Cathedral.

  TWO

  London

  Saturday, 2nd September 1939

  Silvius pulled the car to a stop half on the pavement, half on the road, just outside the quire at the eastern end of St Paul’s Cathedral. Jack didn’t believe this was quite legal, but the last thing he wanted to do right now was argue parking etiquette with his father. His heart was thumping and his breath felt tight in his chest.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to get this close, this quickly.

  “What are we doing here, Silvius?” His cigarette suddenly burned at his fingers, and Jack gave a exclamation and stubbed it out in the car’s ashtray.

  Silvius glanced at his son. “I told you. We’re here to pick someone up. Who do you think, Jack?”

  Catling? No, not her. Neither Silvius, nor anyone associated with him or the Lord of the Faerie, would want Catling. The land, as represented by the Faerie, loathed the Troy Game, believing it more likely to destroy the land than protect it.

  Jack glared at his father, then wrenched open the car door and climbed out, slamming the door behind him.

  Silvius had the sense to stay where he was.

  Jack looked over the roof of the car in the direction of Cheapside as it branched off to run eastward towards the Tower. Traffic was heavy around St Paul’s, both vehicular and pedestrian, and Jack wondered that no one complained about Silvius’ big saloon parked partway on the pavement.

  But both people and vehicles flowed around the car without a second glance, and Jack supposed Silvius must be using a little of the Faerie to smooth out whatever blockage he caused to traffic.

  Jack took a deep breath, and turned around.

  St Paul’s loomed above him. Gods, it was massive. He’d seen photos of Wren’s masterpiece, but nothing prepared him for the sheer enormity of the structure.

  Cornelia’s stone hall. This was it. The last battlefield. Finally.

  Jack thrust his hands inside the deep pockets of his greatcoat, then clenched them. He thought of all the times he had met Cornelia—and later, Caela, as she had been reborn, and now Noah—inside her visionary stone hall. All that rancour and bitterness and misunderstanding they had shared within it. The vision of her lying with Asterion. His murdering her.

  Asterion had torn her to pieces, but he hadn’t quite murdered Noah, had he? And she still loved him? After all the agony he’d put her through?

  Jack fought down the anger which, after so many hundreds of years, still threatened to overwhelm him. Did he still love and want her? He didn’t know.

  He was terrified of meeting her.

  A movement caught his eye. There were a score of people moving through St Paul’s churchyard at that particular moment, all bustling into or from the cathedral, or taking a short cut through the gardens, but this one movement grabbed at Jack’s attention.

  A man, disguised by the gloom. Coming slowly towards Jack and the car.

  Moving slowly, dragging a leg.

  Jack let his breath out on a ragged sigh. Walter Herne. Loth-reborn.

  Walter had walked under the low light of a nearby lamp now, and Jack could see him clearly. A short and neat man, fair-haired with a chubby-cheeked face. He was in what Jack called “civvies”: a white shirt under a faded Fair Isle hand-knitted pullover, topped with a tweed jacket. Somewhat threadbare trousers. A dog collar. He was using a walking stick, putting his left foot gingerly to the ground.

  “Not permanently crippled, Jack,” Walter said as he came close and held out a hand. “Fell off the damn bicycle on the weekend and sprained my ankle. Be right as rain in a couple of days.”

  Jack hesitated, then took Walter’s hand. “You preach here?” He flicked a glance at the cathedral.

  Walter stared at him a long moment, a small amused smile on his face. “I’m not that brave, Jack. I’ve just been spending the afternoon in the cathedral library. I don’t have a regular parish. Just fill in when and where needed. Now…well, at the moment I appear to be on sick leave. I’m sure I’ll find enough to keep me busy, what with the war and all.”

  What war are you referring to, Walter? “And are you sure you want to participate in this war?” Jack asked, nodding at the cathedral.

  Three hundred years ago, as James Duke of York, Walter had done everything he could to deny his ancient past and heritage, including a fanatical devotion to Christianity—a total contradiction to his life as a powerful pagan priest when he’d lived as Loth. Jack didn’t hold out much hope Walter had improved in this life, not from the evidence of that dog collar, but why else would he be here tonight?

  “I am sick to death of it, Jack,” Walter said, all humour draining from his face. “I want it to end so that I might be at peace.”

  “Amen to that,” said Silvius, who had opened his door and was now standing looking over the roof of the car towards Jack and Walter. “Unless you want to do some sightseeing, Jack, would you two like to get inside so that we can hasten with all possible speed towards the nice reception that I know awaits us?”

  That last earned him yet another cynical glance from Jack, but both he and Walter moved towards the car. Walter opened the back door and got inside, stretching his bad leg along the bench seat, but just before Jack slid down into the front seat he stopped and looked skyward.

  For a moment he thought he saw something hanging in the sky. A shadow…He frowned, trying to concentrate. Whatever it was, it made his Kingman blood tingle, as if he were being summoned. Without thinking, Jack half raised his hand to reach out…

  And then it was gone. Jack thought it must just have been a shadow only of his nerves, and nothing more.

  “Jack?” Silvius said, and Jack gave a tiny shake of his head and slid into the car seat, closing the door after him.

  A moment later Silvius pulled out into Aldersgate and headed north, turning in a more easterly direction once he was past London’s wall.

  As the car vanished around a corner, two dark figures stepped out from the shadow of St Paul’s southern face. Dressed almost identically in belted overcoats and with broad-brimmed felt hats pulled low over their foreheads, the men stared for a moment after the car, then both looked upwards.

  One of the men hissed urgently, “D’you see? D’you see?”, one hand clutching at the other man’s shoulder.

  “Aye,” said the other, softly, “it’s alive.”

  “Our mistress has done well.”

  “He’s back. She said it would appear when he came back. When he and she were together in London.”

  His brother giggled. “It’s a pretty thing, isn’t it? A pretty dancing.”

  “Shush!” the other hissed. “Careful what you say!”

  They fell into silence, now looking furtively about the streets, their shoulders hunched, hands thrust into the deep pockets of their overcoats.

  “It’ll want to feed, then,” said one, eventually.

  The other took his time
in replying, but when he did his voice was rigid with excitement. “It’ll want to feed tonight!”

  Both men grinned, their teeth sharply white.

  Then they were gone, and the streets of London were suddenly far more dangerous than a moment earlier.

  They had been driving for more than fifteen minutes, slowly wending their way through the eastern and northern suburbs of London, when Silvius finally broke the silence.

  “You know where we’re going?” he said quietly.

  Jack took a moment to respond. “Yeah. Epping Forest.” He lit a cigarette, using it as an excuse to pause. “And Faerie Hill Manor. I’ve been dreaming of it for months now.”

  And of who will be there to meet me.

  “You’ll find the forest somewhat depleted since last you were there,” said Walter from the back seat.

  Jack pulled heavily on the cigarette. “I know.” Epping Forest was one of the few remaining stands of what had once been woodlands stretching for hundreds of square miles above north-eastern London. When he had been Brutus, almost four thousand years ago, the great primeval woodlands had connected with all the other forests of the island. Even when he’d walked under its branches as Louis de Silva (and then as Ringwalker), Epping Forest had still been extensive.

  Now, most of the forest was gone, murdered by urban sprawl and hungry tractors, and all that was left of the dappled, moody shadows where the Stag God had once roamed was this pitiful remnant. Eight or nine minutes in a car—providing you didn’t stop for a beer at one of the quaint pubs secreted within the trees—was all you’d need to drive straight through it.

  “How long has…Harry…been living in Faerie Hill Manor?” Jack said after a few more minutes of silence. They were well on their way now, traversing the A11 as it proceeded north, and Jack needed the solace of conversation to calm his nerves.

  “Permanently, about eight years,” said Silvius. “But he’s been using the house for, oh, probably close to ninety years, off and on.”

  “And no one comments on the fact that Sir Harry appears so long-lived?”

  Silvius grinned. “Faerie Hill Manor and its master fade away into the Faerie from time to time, Jack. As do we all. Half of the doors in Faerie Hill Manor open directly into the Faerie, half into bedrooms and closets. It fades away and people forget about it, and then it is back again and it is as if both house and master are new. There are people alive today, their homes close by the forest, who have never noticed when Faerie Hill Manor has faded back into the Faerie, and then, thirty years later, when it reappears once more, they do not realise that they knew it previously. Faerie magic.”

  Jack opened his window an inch and tossed out the stub of his cigarette. “You’re mighty acquainted with the Faerie, it seems.”

  “It has been a good home to me, Jack.” Better than the dark heart of the labyrinth.

  Jack went very still for a moment, then swivelled about so he could look at Walter Herne in the back seat. “And you, Walter? Are you more comfortable with the Faerie than you were last life?”

  “As I said earlier,” Walter said quietly, holding Jack’s steady gaze, “all I want is to see this through. We finish it this life, Jack. Once and for all.”

  “And then…what? You can be Christ’s man, once and for all?” Don’t forget who and what I am, Walter. I’m everything your damned Christ doesn’t want to know about.

  They stared at each other a long moment, then Walter leaned forward a little and shifted his gaze to focus on something over Jack’s shoulder.

  “Look,” said Walter. “Look.”

  Jack turned forward, and his stomach clenched. Somehow they’d left suburbia behind and now approached a roundabout with a small congregation of cattle standing half asleep on the central grassy island. On the right side of the roundabout stood a somewhat ugly tavern, the Robin Hood Inn, and several cottages crowded in close to its whitewashed walls.

  Beyond the roundabout and the inn, the A11 continued for perhaps fifty yards before it vanished into trees.

  “We’re home,” whispered Jack, and Silvius glanced sharply at him.

  THREE

  Faerie Hill Manor

  Saturday, 2nd September 1939

  “Do you know where we are?” Silvius asked after they’d been driving through the forest for a few minutes. The car’s dimmed headlamps illuminated a small patch of the road ahead and enough of the encircling forest to show the closely packed trees and the occasional branch that dipped down from nowhere to scrape the top of the car.

  Most humans found driving through Epping Forest at night an eerie experience. Jack found it unbelievably painful. He was overwhelmed with nerves; (only partly caused by the confrontation he knew lay directly ahead); with guilt (he should have been back so much earlier than this); with an extraordinary excitement and with such an overwhelming sense of love and companionship that he instantly hated himself for having so long been alienated from this land and this forest.

  This was his home now. He should have remembered that.

  He had a cigarette in his hand, drawn from the pack before they’d passed the Robin Hood Inn, and still unlit, but now it lay unnoticed, crushed and broken between his clenched fingers.

  Do you know where we are?

  Jack blinked, and his chest jerked in a long, shuddery breath. Epping Forest, yes, but…

  “We’re approaching Great Monk Wood to our right,” he said.

  “Indeed,” said Silvius. “Great Monk Wood is where Harry built Faerie Hill Manor.” As he spoke he turned the car right, off the A11, onto a dirt lane that led to the higher-ridged ground to the east, and a few minutes after that—long, terrifyingly nervous minutes for Jack—they entered a cleared space at the top of a ridge that sat deep within Great Monk Wood.

  Silvius pulled the car to a halt as soon as they’d left the trees and turned off the engine.

  They sat there, all three men, listening as the cooling engine ticked in the night, and stared ahead.

  Faerie Hill Manor appeared as in the dreams and visions Jack had experienced over the past months: a sprawling, fanciful nineteenth-century over-the-top Gothic citadel, all turrets and spires and soaring windows set amid grey stonework. Again, as it had appeared in his dreams, the building sat atop a small grassy knoll, both house and knoll apart from and yet integral to the encircling forest.

  Though it was a cloudy night, the house and knoll were bathed in a faint silvery luminescence.

  Golden light shone from every window, and as Jack, Silvius and Walter watched, the double front doors opened and two figures walked out.

  Jack blinked, and everything changed.

  Faerie Hill Manor and the knoll still shimmered within that unearthly luminescence, but whereas the grass slopes leading up to the house had previously been bare, now there were a score of cars and a lorry all parked at varying angles to one side of the house.

  There came a rap at Jack’s window, and he jumped.

  A policeman stood there. “Your papers, if you please, sir,” he said as Jack rolled down the glass.

  Jack sighed, and withdrew a thick sheaf of papers from the breast pocket of his greatcoat, handing them to the policeman who studied them for a few long moments by the light of a small torch and then handed them back.

  “Very good, Major,” he said. Then he nodded to Walter in the back, “A good evening to you, Reverend,” and smiled at Silvius, “and to you, Mr Makris.”

  “The children well, Tony?” Silvius said.

  “Very well, Mr Makris, thank you for enquiring. You may drive on. Forgive the extra security, but—”

  “I know who is here, Tony. A good night to you.” Silvius started up the car and drove the fifty or so yards to the gravelled drive directly in front of a set of sweeping steps that led to the front terrace.

  As the car pulled to a halt, Jack took a deep breath, then opened his door, and stood on the drive looking up the steps to the terrace.

  Brigadier Sir Harry Cole and Stella Wentworth
stood there.

  The Lord of the Faerie and his Faerie Queen, the Caroller.

  “Welcome home, Jack,” Harry whispered, and it did not surprise Jack in the least that his whisper reached all the way down the steps and into his heart.

  Welcome home.

  Jack gave a small nod, acknowledging Harry’s welcome, then, without waiting for either his father or Walter, took the steps two at a time until he stood before Harry and Stella.

  There he paused, just a step away, and studied them.

  Harry was much as Jack remembered from his dreams. Early fifties, greying fair hair, a face somewhat lined with care and faded blue eyes. He was dressed in a combination of military and civilian: khaki trousers and a military button-down shirt and tie underneath a hand-knitted ribbed pullover.

  Stella…Jack looked at her. She was no different from his visions of her, either. Beautiful (far more so than when she had been Jane, and as much as she had been as Swanne) with dark wavy hair carefully caught in a clip at the nape of her neck, pale skin, dark eyes, and a slim, elegantly clothed figure. Everything about her exuded sophistication.

  There was a faint air of distance and haughtiness about her, but Jack decided that was nothing new. That was Genvissa-reborn all over.

  His eyes slid to Harry, then he smiled and moved forward and both men embraced fiercely.

  “Have I stepped into a maelstrom?” Jack asked softly as he finally moved back.

  Harry gave a small, humourless smile. “When have you not, Jack?”

  “Stella.” Jack gave her a small nod. It wasn’t much, considering their past (lovers, enemies, allies), but Stella didn’t look approachable enough for a hug, nor even a quick peck on the cheek.

  Her eyes crinkled in amusement, and Jack instantly regretted his initial assessment of her.

  “A singularly low-key entrance for you, Jack,” she said. “Where the invasion fleet? Where the pageantry, the triumphal entrance into London?”

  “Burned in the ashes of all our ambitions,” Jack said, but he said it with an answering glint of humour in his own eyes, and was rewarded with a small smile from Stella.