by Holly Race
‘What did you see?’ Lord Allenby says.
Ollie looks up at him from the floor, tears in his eyes. ‘Everything. Everything that Medraut wants to do to us, to Annwn and Ithr.’
I sink back into the chair. That vision – was it what Ollie was seeing? Does our Immral allow me access to Ollie’s thoughts when we’re touching? I feel numb.
‘Tell me then,’ Lord Allenby says.
‘I don’t think I have the words. I wish there was a way I could show you,’ Ollie says.
‘Maybe there is,’ I say, although I feel exhausted just thinking about it. I offer Ollie my hand. ‘Just trust me for once,’ I tell him.
I tuck one hand inside the crook of his elbow, steeling myself for another bolt of lightning. On my command, Ollie takes a deep breath, then grasps the box. I only get a fraction of the pain he’s experiencing, but that’s enough. I don’t dwell on the images I’m seeing. I channel them instead, out through my shoulder and my arm, out through my fingertips, into ghosts that march across the wood-panelled walls of Lord Allenby’s office.
We see millions of people dressed in identical uniforms, marching beneath Medraut’s banner. Sound is banished across the country, and then the world. The only noise permitted is that which cannot be avoided. Why do people need voices when Medraut tells them what to think?
The shapes on the walls take on new forms as the puzzle box tells Ollie and me of its master’s intentions. They form magnificent structures – Buckingham Palace, Edinburgh Castle, the Angel of the North – and tear them down, replacing them with huge factories where workers march mindlessly to the only job they know how to do. The inspyre forms children, then rips them away from their parents, whisking them into training camps where they learn only the job they have been assigned to do for life. Then the inspyre shows rows upon rows of laboratory jars, each one growing a baby. Love is outlawed in Medraut’s world. It is not needed. It is not efficient.
We see anyone who looks or acts unusually dragged from their homes. Some of them are forced to change, their souls warped into Medraut’s idea of normality. If they cannot be made to conform, they are put to death. The streets run scarlet with the blood of outsiders.
Huge bonfires erupt on the walls. Books, paintings, musical scores are thrown upon them. The only art needed in Medraut’s world is sculptures of himself, sitting in austere, soulless temples and shrines. This is all that humanity knows.
The inspyre changes colour, from reds and coppers to cool blues and aquamarines, and somehow we all understand that it is now showing us Annwn. Here the colourful and joyous world we know has been transformed into a desert landscape. The little inspyre that remains drifts mournfully, unable to find any dreamer with the imagination left to use it. The Fay – Andraste, Merlin, Nimue, all of them – lie broken and breathless, before disintegrating into the inspyre they came from long, long ago. Then, as one, the dreamers in that blank landscape come into focus. In Annwn none of them have mouths, simply smooth skin where a mouth once was. In Ithr they are not allowed to speak; in Annwn they cannot.
The inspyre on the walls splits now, between Annwn and Ithr. An image of Medraut fills both parts – in Ithr as statues and paintings, in Annwn as an immortal Fay. The only Fay. In Ithr, the real Medraut lies in opulence – an old, dying man. Yet as he takes his final breath, life in Ithr continues as he decreed it. A mortal leader is no longer needed, when the only leader, the only thought, anyone now knows is Medraut. He alone is the controller of Annwn, and so he no longer needs a body in Ithr. This is now human existence; subjected to the rule of a man who has made himself into the one true God.
Ollie lets go of the box, and we both stagger back. The inspyre on the walls disintegrates.
The four of us sit in silence. My heart aches at the vision of Medraut’s empty majesty. I cannot understand how anyone could wish for a future so grey, so single-minded. I think of this world that I love, that is my only solace and source of joy, reduced to the same soulless vessel as that underground lair beneath Royal Arsenal. I think of Andraste, my guardian angel. Her scars were cracking open when I saw her last, and when I first met her she was in pain. I cannot bear the thought of both my mothers being eradicated by that man; the man who sees the torture of innocents as his right.
Eventually, Ollie speaks. ‘We’ve found this early, though, haven’t we? Early enough to stop it? I mean, it hasn’t started in Ithr yet, has it?’
‘You’re lucky if you think that,’ Samson says. ‘Haven’t you noticed what’s happening? I know I have.’
Lord Allenby nods. ‘Fear. That’s how these things always start. Making people fear others. It’s already begun.’
My journeys to school – the commuters who take steps to avoid being near me – take on a new significance. I am other and therefore must be feared. How long until they drag me from my home and put me to death in the streets, brainwashed by the new master of their minds?
‘Why is he doing this?’ I burst out. ‘I just don’t understand why …’
I feel so, so useless.
‘You were in the knights with him, weren’t you, sir?’ Samson says. ‘Do you think he was always like this?’
Lord Allenby considers this sombrely. ‘I can’t answer that. He was always a quiet man, but confident with it. I think … I think it must be intoxicating to know that you can control someone’s mind. I think he started small – testing the limits of his power, so to speak. Then when that worked he thought, What’s the harm? and tried a little more.’
‘Small steps,’ Samson says.
‘That’s right. Until before you know it you believe you have a God-given right to control anyone you want to.’
I shift uncomfortably. Before I knew that I had Immral, I had daydreamed about making people hate Ollie.
‘And can you really blame him?’ Lord Allenby says with a grim smile. ‘I can’t tell you the number of times I have argued with the other lords and ladies over protocol or what we should be teaching our squires. It’s exhausting, defending your opinion over and over again. Sometimes you just want people to accept that you know what you’re talking about.’
‘But you’d never make them do what you wanted if you did have Immral, sir,’ Ollie says.
‘Maybe not, Mr King,’ Lord Allenby replies, ‘but I thought I knew what was best for someone once before, and I was proven wrong. Perhaps if that hadn’t happened when I was a young man, I might take a different view now.’
I gesture to the puzzle box sitting innocently on Lord Allenby’s desk. ‘What do you think he needs this for?’
Lord Allenby frowns. ‘It’s hard to say. Maybe it’s no more than a way for him to refine his vision. But I’d be surprised if he didn’t have some other use for it.’
‘So what do we do now?’ Samson says.
‘First I tell the other thaneships,’ Lord Allenby says, ‘then we prepare for the backlash. Medraut will be furious that you’ve stolen this. You’ve got past defences that he thought only he could manage. He might not realise that you two have Immral yet, but it won’t be long before he works it out.’
Lord Allenby leaves the next part unsaid, but I feel it with a dread that runs from my toes up to the nape of my neck. The box didn’t just tell us what Medraut wants for the future of Ithr and Annwn, it told us what kind of man he is and what kind of man he isn’t. He isn’t a man who shares. He is a man who wants to be all-powerful. He won’t take kindly to Ollie and I existing at all, and I can imagine exactly what he’ll do about that.
34
When I wake up, the headache from the events of last night is worse than ever before; even worse than the night I raised the Thames. I can’t really remember getting to school. The first thing I register is sitting at my desk in biology, when Lottie Medraut taps me on the shoulder and tells me in a sing-song-sorry voice that I’ve got congealed blood protruding from my nose like a giant, red slug.
That’s the nicest thing anyone does for me all day. For months people have been gi
ving me a wide berth on the tube, but now there’s a sea change. In Annwn, the mythical monsters that usually haunt London’s streets are being rapidly replaced by nightmares not so different from me: people who don’t follow the crowd, who don’t fit in. In Annwn, dreamers run from them, but in Ithr they cover their fear with hate. They stare at me with open hostility instead of avoiding my gaze. I’m used to people moving away from me as I pass them, but now some of them deliberately walk close to me, knowing that encroaching on my personal space will intimidate me. Knowing that if I confront them they can start something more physical.
By the time the bell rings at the end of the day, I am more on edge than I ever was at St Stephen’s. Jenny’s bullying was overt. This is more insidious. Desperate for some air, I decide to walk home, so at least I can escape anyone who might start a fight. As I stand on Bosco’s front porch, pulling my hoodie over my face, Lottie and her friends push past me on their way home.
‘Guys, please don’t,’ Lottie’s saying.
‘We just want to support our friend’s dad,’ one of them teases.
‘It’s just a speech. It’ll be really boring …’
The thought of Medraut merrily garnering support for his cause, fawned over by the likes of Lottie’s friends, induces the kind of rage I haven’t felt for a long time. I look him up when I get home and see that he’s speaking at an event in Trafalgar Square next week. I mention it to Samson that night, and he nods. ‘We’d better be on the lookout for a spike in nightmares then.’
Samson has taken back his mantle of Knight Captain and Commander of Bedevere without breaking his stride. I thought Emory and Rafe might be rattled by their demotions, but they are both genuinely happy to have him back. He smiles with his friends, he gives orders to his regiment, he encourages his squires. He is everything that the Knight Captain should be. Sometimes, though, I catch him gazing into the fire in the knights’ chamber, and I know that he must be thinking about what he saw in Medraut’s fortress and in that puzzle box. I want to be able to say something comforting to him at those times, but despite what we went through together it doesn’t feel like my place. Now that we’re back in Tintagel, I’m just a squire and he is my leader.
Thaneships around the country have thrown their efforts into the hunt for Medraut too. It’s a delegation from Cardiff who discover that he’s moved his stronghold from Royal Arsenal to a more central location, inside Madame Tussaud’s. A waxwork museum might seem like a strange choice for a military base until you remember who’s chosen it. A huge warehouse full of empty human vessels? Row upon row of silent mannequins, waiting for his command to give them life? Yeah, that actually sounds right up Medraut’s street. I hear rumours that knights from Yorkshire and Belfast have tried to infiltrate the new fortress, but were all returned to their castles within days, their tongues, eyes and ears hacked off, the words Try harder carved so deep into their chests that the apothecaries could do little to heal them. Medraut won’t allow another spy to infiltrate his ranks.
Maybe my sense of powerlessness is why I make the leap; because I have to do something. A reeve has asked me to drop off a parchment at the guardhouse on my way to the stables. I’m knocking on the guardhouse door when I notice the wax seal holding the paper in its tight roll. The impression on the stamp is the thanes’ emblem.
I hand the paper to the harker manning the guardhouse without a word, then turn and run back into the castle, along the cloisters and past the entrance to the knights’ chamber. I knock on Lord Allenby’s door and barely wait for him to call out, ‘Enter!’
‘Sir,’ I begin, then have to catch my breath, ‘the note from my mum – the one that made you accept me into the thanes.’
‘Ah, yes.’ He smiles ruefully. ‘I often think about where I’d be if Lady Andraste hadn’t given me that note.’
‘Sir, the seal on it. Was it the thanes’ seal?’
Lord Allenby frowns, then opens the top drawer of his desk and picks out the note. He examines the broken wax, his eyes widening in understanding.
‘No,’ he says. ‘She didn’t use a seal. But look – there’s something set into the wax.’
He hands me the paper and I stop myself from lingering on my mother’s handwriting. At first the seal looks blank, but then I spot it. A tiny piece of fabric pressed deep in the wax, barely visible. I prise away the fabric with a nail.
‘Do you think Una left it there for us?’ Lord Allenby says.
‘For me,’ I reply, lifting the fabric up to the light of the window.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because this is from the curtains in my bedroom when I was born.’
‘You’re certain?’
‘There’s a photo at home of Dad holding me and Ollie when we were babies. He was holding us in front of the window and it had this exact pattern.’
‘Well,’ Lord Allenby says, ‘what are you waiting for? Go. Take Ollie, and go home.’
The ride to our house in Annwn has a different flavour to the last time we left Tintagel with only each other for company. Then we thought we were on a kamikaze mission to rescue Samson. This time we have the promise of our mother’s secrets.
As we ride I fill Ollie in on the note Mum left Lord Allenby. Make sure my little girl takes the Tournament. The strangest emotions flit across Ollie’s face. Disbelief, confusion, hurt and … yes, it’s jealousy, but not the kind that makes me feel smug. With a jolt, I realise that this is the kind of jealousy I’ve been feeling towards Ollie for the longest time. It isn’t some petty grudge; it’s the kind that takes root in the foundations of your soul and, like ivy, creeps up until it becomes difficult to see who you really are underneath. It’s only in the last few weeks that I’ve started trying to tear mine down – to find the Fern who doesn’t automatically assume the worst of others, who doesn’t always leap to be a victim.
‘I’m sure she had a note for you too,’ I tell Ollie, ‘except Andraste didn’t need to use it, did she? You were always meant to be a knight.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Ollie shrugs, but he doesn’t meet my eyes. ‘Let’s hope she left you something juicy.’
A quick ride across a park or two and a swoop through Stratford later, and we’re standing outside our own front door. Much to my disappointment, it’s exactly the same as in Ithr. When we open the door, everything’s as I remember it, right down to the half-eaten toast I left next to the sink this morning. We go straight up to my bedroom – the room we shared when we were younger. But it’s identical to my bedroom now, the carpet covered in piles of abandoned clothes and art supplies.
‘Where do we start looking then?’ Ollie says, flicking one of my drawings off the desk.
I shrug. ‘Well, the fabric was from the curtains, so …’ I look at the curtains, hoping they might be embroidered with a message. Something like A Comprehensive Guide to Destroying Sebastien Medraut would be handy. But the curtains here are the ones I chose eight years ago, when Ollie moved downstairs and this became my bedroom.
‘Do you think we need to match the fabric somehow?’ Ollie says. ‘Can you change them into the curtains that were here before?’
‘Maybe.’ But as soon as I take hold of the material I can tell that I’m onto a losing battle. The inspyre doesn’t want to shift at all, just like it didn’t in Medraut’s stronghold. It was so in thrall to his Immral that it couldn’t see any other way of being. Suddenly, I realise why.
‘We’re idiots.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Ollie says.
‘The inspyre’s reacting to our Immral. It means everything here is the way we remember it. We’ve got the strongest power over inspyre here, so any leftover memories of Mum or Dad’s aren’t going to stand a chance.’
‘So you think Mum’s version is underneath ours?’
‘Yeah, but we need to find a way of overriding our own power.’
Ollie presses his hands against the wall, trying to get a sense of whether the inspyre is hiding other memories beneath it.
He frowns, pressing the wallpaper in different places, working his way out of my bedroom and onto the landing. Then, without opening his eyes, he reaches one hand out to me and says, ‘See what you can do with this.’
I take his hand and am immediately assaulted, not by Mum’s memories, but by things the inspyre here has witnessed. Dad running through every room in the house, calling for Mum. Dad kissing a dream version of Mum, before she disintegrates into ashes in his arms. Again and again, Dad sitting up in bed and finding Mum dead – shaking her, pleading with her, clinging to her body. So this is what Dad dreams about. I feel a stab of pity. He really did adore her.
Then the visions change. These aren’t Dad’s dreams any more. Mum runs up the stairs and into my bedroom. She pins things to the walls in the hallway and peers out of the windows as though paranoid that someone is following her. Yes, these are what I need. I place my own free hand against the wall and try to push away everything I know about the house. In fact, I try to bypass my brain altogether. I channel the inspyre flowing from Ollie’s hand across my chest, across my heart, and out the other side, pulsing it into the drab wallpaper. I can feel it sparking and changing. The whole house creaks and sighs as it morphs into another version of itself, one that hasn’t been seen for fifteen years.
When I open my eyes, the house is transformed. The wallpaper is a deep teal decorated with blush-pink hummingbirds. We stand on oak floorboards, not carpet. Every piece of furniture is covered in trinkets. The walls are a collage of drawings and notes.
‘Was Mum a hoarder, do you think?’ I whisper. Something about the place – the feeling of stepping into a stranger’s territory – makes me lower my voice.
‘If she was she had good taste,’ Ollie says, picking up one of the trinkets. ‘Look.’
He passes me an antique box. Inside is a set of silver spoons, each one with a tiny mermaid carved into the handle. I turn the spoons over. There’s writing carved into the back too.