Druid's Sword Read online

  “She loathes pity.”

  “I don’t know what to do any more, Jack.”

  He wasn’t sure what she meant those words to apply to—Grace or the wider disaster they were all involved in—then he decided it didn’t matter. The statement held true enough for whatever subject.

  “Do you think this looming war is Catling’s doing?” Jack asked, wanting to change the subject.

  “Who knows? Whether Catling is responsible for the war or not, I am sure she will grow in power from it. We are all sure she will use what is coming to force us to her will. Jack, there is a frightful despair winging its way towards us, and none of us know what to do about it.”

  “I don’t have a magical answer for you.”

  Noah looked down at her hands.

  Jack sighed. “I am not Catling’s tool, Noah, but I am not yours either. All I know is that I want to be free of this debacle we have created for ourselves and of you. But I don’t know how to do that.”

  At Faerie Hill Manor, Grace stood at the window of her room and looked towards London.

  She went white, and a hand flew to her mouth.

  “By the gods,” she whispered. “What is that?”

  SIX

  Copt Hall and Faerie Hill Manor

  Sunday, 3rd September 1939

  As Jack and Noah talked, Malcolm cleaned the kitchen and laid the table for breakfast. Just as he set out the plates, he heard a scratching at the door which led outside.

  Malcolm’s eyes flew to the door leading into the hall, as if he thought to find Jack standing there. Then, reassured that Jack and Noah were still deep in conversation, he opened the door and slipped outside.

  Two dark, overcoated figures stood in the shadow of the porch, jittering from foot to foot in excitement.

  “Malcolm! Malcolm! Malcolm!”

  “Shush!” Malcolm hissed at the imps. “What are you doing here? Why? Don’t you realise how dangerous it would be for Jack to see—”

  “We saw it! We saw it! It’s alive!”

  “You shouldn’t be here!”

  “You’re our friend,” one of the imps said, “and hers. We thought you’d like to hear the news.”

  “Then I am excited for you. Now go.”

  “It was hungry, Malcolm.”

  Malcolm froze in horror.

  “We fed it, Malcolm.”

  “Then that’s between you and your dark mistress,” Malcolm said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. “I want no part of it. Don’t come back.”

  As one the imps shook their heads slowly. “It is too late, Malcolm. You have been a part of this a long, long time now. Would you like to hear how we—”

  But Malcolm had stepped back inside, and the kitchen door shut firmly in their faces.

  “—prepared the meal?” whispered the imps.

  At Faerie Hill Manor Silvius sat by the dying fire in the drawing room, sipping a last glass of whisky, staring unseeing at the coals.

  Jack. It was so good to have him home.

  Silvius’ mouth gave a quirk of amusement. And so unsettling. He wondered, idly, how long it would take for the oh-so-carefully-constructed veneer of harmony which existed between all the players of the Troy Game to crack apart under the strain of Jack’s presence.

  Almost in answer to his thought Silvius heard the door open. He tipped his head slightly, to see who it was.

  Weyland, in dressing gown and slippers, and looking as if he’d discovered Catling in his bed by the glower on his face.

  He poured himself a whisky then sat in the chair opposite Silvius. “She’s gone to him,” he said, then swallowed the whisky down.

  “You couldn’t have expected anything less,” Silvius said, earning himself a further glower from Weyland.

  Silvius got up and refilled both their glasses, making a note to himself to bring a couple of good bottles of whisky next time he came to Faerie Hill Manor to replace what he and Weyland were undoubtedly going to get through tonight.

  “But surely you trust her,” Silvius said, handing Weyland his whisky and sitting back down. “Weyland…she loves you.”

  Weyland gave a shrug.

  Silvius didn’t respond for a while, spending the time studying Weyland. Over the past several decades they’d gradually become good friends—apart from Noah, Silvius was Weyland’s only real friend.

  “Weyland, she does love you.”

  Weyland sighed. “Once I would not have worried. She turned her back on Jack three hundred years ago. But now…”

  Now Weyland and Noah had drifted apart. Not much, just a little, but Silvius knew that that “little” ate at Weyland’s confidence.

  “What will you do?” Silvius said.

  “I don’t know,” Weyland said, but there was something in his face, something in the edge to his voice, that made Silvius wonder if Weyland knew very well what he was going to do.

  Upstairs, Grace lay in her bed. She was not asleep, nor had she slept all night.

  She could not sleep.

  This was not merely due to the shock of what she’d seen earlier, hovering over London, but because of the young woman—Catling—who sat in a chair in the shadows of the room, staring unblinkingly at Grace in her bed, her hands clasped softly in her lap.

  Catling had come to sit by Grace’s bed at night a long time ago, ever since Grace was a toddler.

  And, as Grace had grown, so also had Catling grown, so that now Catling resembled a young, beautiful woman with long black hair framing her porcelain skin and dark blue eyes.

  Beautiful as it might have been, that face radiated nothing but coldness.

  “Leave me be,” Grace whispered as, somewhere deep within the Faerie, the Caroller sang in the dawn. “Have you not made me suffer enough this past night? Why sit here now, and torment me?”

  Catling stared at her, her eyes wide, as if she thought to affect innocence.

  Grace began to cry, silently. Go away, she mouthed and, eventually, as the inhabitants of Faerie Hill Manor started to rise for the day, Catling rose then vanished.

  SEVEN

  Faerie Hill Manor

  Sunday, 3rd September 1939

  “Look,” said Jack as he spooned some scrambled egg onto his plate, then moved along the buffet to the toast and slid four slices next to the egg, “I can’t say or do anything until I’ve looked about London. I need to know for myself what is happening with the Troy Game.”

  He hesitated over the bacon, then forked several slices of that onto the plate as well. Then he looked back to the table. Everyone he’d met the previous night, except George VI, was already seated and pretending some interest in their breakfast. Jack left the buffet and took the spare seat between Walter Herne and his father, Silvius.

  Of them all, only Silvius looked as though he was actually enjoying the food.

  Jack took a forkful of egg and chewed on it, studying his companions. Noah was dressed very smartly in a tailored suit with a soft blouse beneath, and Jack managed, only barely, to repress a wince when he saw the diamond band on the ring finger of her left hand.

  Weyland, next to her, was studiously ignoring Jack.

  Harry and Stella, at the head of the table, were trying their best to look relaxed. Stella had managed it reasonably effortlessly, although she barely picked at her food, but Harry looked almost as tense as Weyland.

  Walter simply looked out of place, and as if he could barely wait until he thought it was time enough to ask permission to leave the table.

  Grace sat at the far end of the table. She didn’t even pretend to be interested in food, but sat staring at her wrists in her lap. Jack noticed she had on a very long-sleeved blouse.

  “I need someone to drive me down to London,” he said, “so I can wander about. And, if it is possible, can I ask for someone to arrange a car for me?” That shouldn’t be too difficult, he thought, given the talent sitting about this table.

  “Weyland?” Harry said.

  “I’ll be driving Noah and Gr
ace back home this afternoon,” Weyland said, not looking up from the tablecloth. “You can come with us, if you like.”

  “You don’t live here?” Jack said.

  “No,” Noah answered, probably feeling that Weyland may have exhausted his store of politeness for the day. “We visit often, but we live in a private suite at the Savoy. I didn’t want to move too far from central London.”

  Jack pursed his lips in a silent whistle. The Savoy? It was one of London’s grandest and most expensive hotels, built on the Strand on the site of a medieval palace, from which it had taken its name. His lips twitched. “Only the best for Eaving?”

  Weyland looked up. “It was my choice, not Noah’s. I had grown sick of living in squalor.”

  “But which is more fitting for you, eh?” Jack said, holding Weyland’s gaze.

  “Jack,” Harry said, “we can’t afford to—”

  Jack’s head whipped about to Harry. “I can afford a little bitterness now and again, surely.”

  “You have just used up your allowance, Jack,” Harry said. The tone of his voice was deceptively mild, and no one in the breakfast room missed the reprimand. As Lord of the Faerie, Harry commanded everyone in the room.

  Jack’s jaw tightened, but he dropped his eyes, and began to fork his eggs about his plate.

  “I also have a car I can give you,” Weyland said, sounding as if he had to force out each word. “I have three garaged at the Savoy. Can’t use them all now. You can take one.”

  Jack looked back at Weyland. “Thank you,” he said. He hesitated, and then realised horribly that the pause was growing too long. “It was a bitter pill for me to lose Noah,” he said, “and my tongue has become too used to that bitterness. My remark was uncalled for, Weyland. I apologise.”

  Weyland nodded, accepting the apology, but his face didn’t lose any of its hostility.

  Stella blinked, then looked at Noah, raising her eyebrows.

  Noah caught the look, smiled, and then gave a short laugh of genuine amusement. “I find it amazing that we can all sit here at breakfast, and that the worst thing we can do to each other is exchange a few snide comments. Once, we would have hurled assorted knives, daggers, arrows and murderous promises.” She looked at Jack. “Jack, thank you for coming back. We have been longing for you for so many years…yes, even Weyland—”

  “Absolutely desperately, old chap,” Weyland said, and the mood about the table lightened even further as everyone managed varying levels of grins.

  Noah shot him a grateful look, then returned her gaze to Jack: “—that to have you here now…well…it is relief beyond measure.”

  “Don’t expect too much of me, Noah,” Jack said.

  There was a small silence, broken by Harry. “The PM is to make a radio broadcast this morning at eleven-fifteen,” he said. “I’m sure we all know what he has to say.”

  Of course. War.

  “None of us can prevent it,” Harry said. “Nothing we have done has caused it.” He gave a slight shrug. “Greed. Ambition. Brutality. It is all part of life.”

  Stella rose from the table and lifted the coffee pot from the hot-plate on the buffet table. She walked around the breakfast table, refilling cups as people wanted.

  “Jack,” she said, “tell us where you have been. What have you been doing for so long? Founding empires? Destroying hopes and ambitions? Breaking hearts?”

  “Learning to live with myself, mostly,” Jack said quietly. “Learning about myself.” He pushed his plate away, the food only half-eaten. “For the past two hundred years I’ve been living in America. Mostly alone, inhabiting the vast forests, roaming the mountains.”

  Stella sat down. “As Ringwalker?” Jack had only barely come into his responsibilities as Ringwalker, the ancient Stag God of the forests, when he had left England in the seventeenth century.

  “For a greater portion of the time, yes. It was part of the journey into myself I needed to make. Other times I walked as a man—I took the identity Jack Skelton during the Civil War—and lived within a more human society.”

  “Aha,” said Silvius, “and did you break hearts then?”

  Jack gave a rueful smile, and slid a glance Noah’s way. “A few, no doubt. It is, after all, what I’ve been good at.”

  “And the uniform, Jack?” Stella said. She’d lit a cigarette, and was leaning back in her chair, studying him.

  “I use it much as Harry uses his ‘boffin’ status. It is useful, and it gets me entry to places and people I otherwise would not. It is a useful glamour—no one questions it. My papers are all in order.” Jack paused, his fingers toying with a fork. “Besides, I’ve always been more comfortable in uniform than out of it.”

  “Jack the Conqueror,” Harry said with a smile, referring to Jack’s previous life as William of Normandy.

  “Speaking of whom,” said Jack, “where is Matilda? And Ecub and Erith?”

  “They live in London,” said Noah.

  “Highbury?” Jack said. “I had a vision that they lived there.”

  Noah shook her head. “Hampstead. They’re all waiting to meet you—Matilda especially.” When Jack had been William, Matilda had been his much-loved and -respected wife. “But they thought it might be a bit too much having everyone gathered here last night.”

  “What else can we do for you, Jack?” said Harry. “What else do you need?”

  Jack felt a little resentful at the prompt, knowing Harry referred to their conversation on the terrace the previous night. “A long talk with you, Harry. Perhaps you can walk about London with me this afternoon?”

  “A pleasure. What else?”

  Jack decided he might as well give Harry what he’d been waiting for. “Something Walter can do for me.” He swivelled in his chair so he could look Walter in the face.

  Jack did not speak more, but as soon as Walter lifted his eyes to Jack’s, power rippled out of Jack making the others about the table gasp or sit up a little straighter.

  “There is one last task you need to perform for me and for this land,” Jack said, “and when you have done this task, then perhaps both I and the land will let you go to your Christ and we will never make any demands upon you again. A bargain, Walter Herne?”

  “And this task?” Walter said. He was noticeably shaken, but his voice was strong.

  “Do you truly not know what it might be?” Jack said. The power was now almost visibly dancing out of him, and there was not a person in that room who was not fixated by it.

  “You need to be marked,” said Walter. “You need your crown.”

  “Aye. Do you dare the crowning, Walter?”

  “Do you?” Walter whispered, and Jack smiled, and the power abated.

  “Will you do it, Walter?”

  He nodded. “If you will let me go.”

  Jack looked at Harry. “Well, my Lord of the Faerie? Is that possible? Can Walter be given his freedom from all demands of this land, freedom to go to Christ, if he does this for me?”

  Harry had been looking at Jack, a little awed by the power he’d just displayed and thinking he had used his time running the forests of the New World very effectively indeed, but now he switched his gaze to Walter.

  “Yes,” he said, and his appearance shifted subtly, so that for a moment it was not Harry Cole who sat at the head of the breakfast table, but the Lord of the Faerie wearing his crown of twigs and red berries. “Yes, I agree. If that is what you want, Walter, then do this one last thing for both Jack and the land, and you have your freedom to walk away. If you can.”

  Walter breathed out, patently relieved. “Thank you. Jack, when?”

  Jack gave a grin and it was almost feral in its nature. “Not just yet. But soon. At a time and place of my choosing.”

  At the far end of the table Grace looked between Jack and Harry, then dropped her eyes before any noted the look.

  EIGHT

  Faerie Hill Manor and London

  Sunday, 3rd September 1939

  Walter left a
fter breakfast, using one of Harry’s cars to return to London. Late in the morning,

  the others gathered in the drawing room around a small side table, on which sat a large wireless. Harry sat closest to it, fiddling with the knobs to finetune the signal coming through.

  Then, just as everyone’s nerves could barely stand the scratchy static one more moment, the voice of a broadcaster filled the room with last-minute news before the Prime Minister’s announcement: a lorry had turned over in Highgate, spilling “food too good to be wasted” over half the road; the American Ambassador had been seen leaving the residence of the Prime Minister at No. 10 Downing Street late the previous night. A woman had been murdered, quite vilely (although the broadcaster gave no details), and her corpse left sprawled under the porch of St Magnus the Martyr.

  The broadcaster paused, then announced the PM, and the voice of Neville Chamberlain sounded.

  I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

  I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, this country is now at war with Germany.

  There was little reaction at the words. No one had expected anything else.

  You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more, or anything different that I could have done that would have been more successful.

  “There never is, really, is there?” Silvius said softly.

  Chamberlain continued speaking about Britain’s obligations to the Polish people, and how he expected the British would bear the burden of war with their usual fortitude.

  Now may God bless you all and may He defend the right. For it is evil things we shall be fighting against—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution—and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.