“The people who died here? They’re all still here?”
The flickers that had started a while back were more frequent now. Was that what they were? Ghosts manifesting and flickering in the veil as they struggled to get out? Flies in a web, caught for all these centuries.
“I’m not too sensitive,” Fidelma said, “but I worked with a druid who spent many years at Glastonbury Tor before me. He would sing to them, for hours and hours until his voice gave out. We all tried to get him to stop. He was a young man but he wore himself out in only a few years. Couldn’t bear to listen to them, he said. He said that they called to him in their agony and that his songs soothed them. He wouldn’t abandon them, and then he joined them all too soon.”
“He died?” Marina asked from the other side of Fidelma.
“Yes, he poured every part of himself into helping them.” Fidelma looked out across the countryside. “They are all still here.”
“It’s their cries.” I gasped. “That’s the note, that’s the wrongness. It’s not the ley line itself, it’s their calls of pain, their screams. That’s what’s wrapping itself about the line here; that’s what’s corrupting it.”
As I said it, I could feel the rightness of what I was saying, the truth of it.
“Where are the power nodes?” I asked. There must be stone circles like at Keswick where it was easier, or more effective to treat the corruption.
“Half a day’s ride west, there’s a stone circle at Avebury,” she said.
Gideon swung his head, all pretence of being oblivious to our conversation abandoned. He knew where I was going with this, what I was offering.
“You can’t do this,” he said.
“I have no choice.” I didn’t. There was no way I could pass through the borderlands and not do something to help the twisted souls bound in pain and torment here.
“You want to stop and treat the May line?” Fidelma asked.
I shook my head, my skin prickling in excitement, the power fizzing underneath, effervescent inside me.
“I’m going to free the spirits.”
Fidelma looked at me in astonishment. “The spirit line… You think that the ley line has held them and that you can convince it to set them free?”
“I’m sure of it,” I said, the excitement bubbling in my voice.
“It would take a mighty amount of power to do this,” she said, concerned.
“I’ve got to try.”
“Our priority is to restore the Strand line,” she reminded me.
“And get to Féile,” Gideon said. The warrior cared less about the failing ley lines; his sole purpose in attending the Treaty Renewal was the opportunity to get behind the walls and locate Féile. His entire being was focussed on the small chance of recovering her before we resorted to waging war on the very city she lived in.
“We can do both,” I assured him.
“Avebury has the largest circle on the line; if you are to succeed it will have to be there,” she said thoughtfully.
“Gideon, tell Rion we need to go west.” Rion was up at the front and due to the protocol and protections I was forced to ride in the centre of our caravan of thirty odd delegates. Fidelma was smiling in amusement as her son bristled at the command in my voice. We needed to go – why hadn’t he told Rion already?
“Please,” I added belatedly. Was that what was wrong with him? I hadn’t asked nicely enough? I looked to the right and saw a path winding into the forest. I pulled out of the train; there was no point continuing if there was a path right here.
Gideon ground his teeth then nudged his heels into his horse and rode off to the front of the train. Riders passed us as Fidelma and I waited on the side of the road for them to come back.
They weren’t all that far in front – maybe twenty riders and a couple of vans. I could see Gideon’s dark cloak and three more riders coming off the path, talking urgently.
What were they talking about?
I could see them now, the flickers in the forest, gathering, waiting. Glitches in the shadows, keening, calling for help. It wasn’t a hum here like in the north, but a croon, their melancholy entreaties that they not be left here, trapped for eternity.
Hoofbeats indicated that the others had arrived, but I was transfixed by the calling, twisting shadows. How could I have ignored them before? They had played games with Devyn and Gideon tricked them and taunted them, but they hadn’t done anything to me really. Because I had the power to help them? The last time I was here, I’d had some of the praetor’s drug in my system and so I hadn’t heard them. The hell hounds had tracked me, had followed me far beyond their territory… was this why? Had I run in fear because I didn’t understand?
I could hear Fidelma explaining. Could hear them argue.
“We can’t delay. We are due in Londinium.”
“It will take too long. There is no good road west; nobody ever goes that way.”
“Nobody ever goes this way.”
“We can’t waste power here, we must save every advantage for the war to come.”
“It’s too late for them, we have to save hundreds of living men.”
I pulled the hood of my cloak up. If I was going to ride the road through the flickers I could see milling in the shadows, I needed to do this now. There were more and more of them gathering every minute we delayed.
They could feel me – or maybe what they could feel was the power that Nimue had given me. This had to be done.
Gideon listened to the argument; I knew his instinct was to preserve the power running in my veins for the battles ahead.
“Will living men fight for us knowing we abandon their souls to this fate?” he asked, surprising me.
“We need all the power we have to attack Londinium,” the steward objected.
Gideon levelled his dark gaze at his father, then looked to Rion and whatever he saw there confirmed it.
“We ride for Avebury.”
“What about the Treaty Renewal? What about your daughter?” Richard demanded.
My heart pulsed in pain at the unnecessary reminder that my daughter lay south, not west. But I had no choice I could not reach her any sooner, or make her any safer, by not doing what was needed here.
“If just a small group goes, we’ll catch you up before morning,” Rion suggested.
“You’re surely not intending to go with them?” Richard Mortimer blustered, knowing he had lost the fight but not quite ready to concede.
Rion smiled wryly at me. “It appears I am.”
Fidelma came back up to the group, accompanied by an older woman who doled out bags with supplies to keep us going until we rejoined everyone in the morning. I almost whimpered in my impatience to be off.
And then we were, and the flickering spirits followed us, were ahead and to the side of us, more and more of them. The shadows grew longer. I gripped the reins, my eyes darting from one movement to the next.
Gideon snatched the reins out of my hand.
“What are you doing?” his eyebrow rose, his lips thinned. I blinked at his odd appearance, the spectre of something other hovering over his features.
By this stage, I was twitching at every flicker, the cries and offness making me jittery in my very skin.
“I can’t,” I started, and flinched as a grey burst went off over his head. “I can’t… they’re everywhere.”
“You can see them?” Gideon asked, surveying the forest, his amber eyes predatory, that odd impression of otherness increased as he pulled closer as if to shield me bodily.
I nodded, averting my eyes from a flicker that floated around my knee.
“This is why you’ve been riding like a…” The otherness faded as he sighed aggravatedly. I was pretty good at identifying the noises he put on particular things that annoyed him about me and this one seemed unfairly high on his scale. He reached an arm out to me.
I looked down at it, then back up at him. I couldn’t see his face in the shadows.
“Ride with
me.”
I hesitated. It felt like that would be closer contact than we had shared in a while. In York he had arrived late and left early, preferring the chair to the bed for the few hours we shared his room at night.
“I won’t touch you,” he reassured me, reading me all too easily.
I hadn’t meant to imply that I hadn’t wanted to touch him… I had just been surprised, that was all.
The others had stopped up ahead to wait for us. I took his arm, and he swung me across, tethering my horse to his saddle. The horses were almost as jumpy as me, and we couldn’t be sure that she would stay with us, as well trained as Rion’s horses undoubtedly were.
I held myself tightly as I sat in front of Gideon, but I eventually relaxed, turning my face into his chest. Sitting stiffly on a cantering horse with your eyes closed is not something I would recommend. But given the alternative, this was a significant improvement.
As the sky turned red with the setting sun, an avenue of standing stones appeared to the south, heading west into the sun, until we came to Avebury circle.
“It’s enormous.”
There were possibly one hundred stones in a circle at least three times wider than I was used to. We halted at the wide ditch that surrounded it.
There was a nervous energy all through the clearing where the spirits swelled and called. A tremor ran through me as a familiar howl ripped through the night. Avalon’s power rippling through my veins had drawn them. I saw Gideon tilt his head, that predatory aura surfacing again. We were too small a group if the hounds attacked. I shook it off; I needed to focus.
I had to do this. I could do this.
I let myself float out a little, to get a sense of the ley line beneath me. And quickly pulled back into myself.
My breath got shorter. I wasn’t ready. It was so deep. If the ley line that ran through Keswick was a river below the surface, then this was a river at the bottom of a gorge, a gorge whose depths I could barely sense, but it was deep, so deep. What if I couldn’t find my way back? I wasn’t sure.
A hard warmth settled behind me. With the hounds so close he would not like being too far from me.
“My presence won’t interfere?” he asked his mother. To my knowledge, it was the first time since her unveiling that he had spoken directly to her.
Fidelma looked over, her eyes lighting at the mere fact of him addressing her, despite our dire situation. She nodded. “It is not the custom, but I don’t suppose it will interfere.”
I was surprised that she permitted a civilian to remain in the circle for such an important rite, and wondered briefly if she would have permitted anyone else. But I felt better having him there. Marina and Fidelma took their positions further away than usual to accommodate the size of the circle.
A hand appeared at each side of my waist. Palm up, calloused, strong. I entwined my fingers in his, all too happy to accept his offer.
“I’ve got you,” came a gravelly whisper in my ear. He barely spoke to me for days on end, but when he did, he sure knew how to make it count. Some of the tension inside me eased.
I closed my eyes and leaned back into that strength and let myself push out and over.
Down, down, the energy wafted through and around me, drifting past. So deep, deep to pull away from the pain above it, snagging at the tune, twisting it off key. It needed to be righted. I sang, freeing some of the energy from the Lakes, the calm, throbbing warmth of it slipping into the ether, spreading, pulling me deeper, deeper.
I felt loose, calm, and I smiled into the energy. My song encouraged it to move up above us, to go to the pain, to free the souls tied to the ruined land, land that had lost its connection with the ley line that ran so far and deep beneath it. The power pulsed out of me, a comfort, a light spreading out wider and wider high up above me.
The energy here had receded from the surface, twisting away from the pain, but the mellifluous wave washed across it, harmonising, soothing, the gift of the Lakes spread wider and wider. I let myself drift along. The May line here had little of the pollution from the ley that intersected with Londinium further west. But Mabon was coming and the autumn equinox would change the direction of the flow.
All of me felt incandescent, like I was the light, but my hands, I could see my hands. I looked at them. My hands were holding something… a thread, a connection. I couldn’t be here. Everything was all right, but I had to surface, I should not go any further. Enough. Enough now. It was all right. The lake’s gift was given. I had to surface.
I felt pressure on my hands, I felt touch.
Gideon. I needed to go back now. Everything was light. I floated back up and up, and the ley line was with me, around me.
I was warm and safe. Strong arms were wrapped around me.
My eyes opened.
The moon had risen, and the clearing was bathed in silver light.
Fidelma’s eyes were open and rounded and Marina’s shimmered with unshed tears. We were all back. They had held the door open, and Gideon had called me through. A sense of wellbeing filled me, filled the circle.
The atmosphere was changed. The flickers were no more. They had coalesced into tiny bubbles, pinpricks of light. There were hundreds of them, thousands, floating up into the moonlit beams of light. And all with a miraculous sigh of release. They filled the sky, all the pain, all the misery gone.
A hound stalked at the edge of the forest, but as I watched the great white beast transformed and it too was light, another of those tiny brilliant lights floating into the sky.
The horror and pain of being tied here to the battlefields where they had fallen was over. And they were gone upwards, melting into the moonlight above. The last thing I saw as my eyelids drooped was Rion and Fidelma watching the sky in wonder.
I woke to find myself in a caravan trundling along, the sound of the wheels on the rough road unmistakeable. There was a lightness to the outside, the sound of birds calling, and a smell of warm earth after a rain. And the cedar and leather that was Gideon’s own particular smell wrapped around me.
Fidelma looked down and beamed into my no doubt sleep-creased face.
“Good morning, lady.” She inclined her head in a way that communicated her honour to serve.
I blinked, uncomfortable.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said hoarsely. “I just carried what was needed.”
“If you say so.”
She looked over at her son who rested on the other side of me, but I could feel the solidifying and flexing of hard muscle which indicated that he was awake.
“That was one of the most singular moments of my life and I am honoured to have witnessed it.” She took my hand in hers. “Now, you look well. Do you feel all right?”
I ran through my body, checking for the usual signs that my emotions, my will, had been thinned out by such intense contact with the energy at a node. I made a small moue.
“I feel fine.” Actually, I felt unbelievably fine – tired, but nothing like I had felt in the past.
Gideon shifted behind me and with his finger tipped my chin round to look at him. His intense scrutiny surveyed me up and down and then he nodded back at his mother in confirmation of my assessment.
“And the power?” he asked.
I hid my eyes from his. How could I tell him that I was not as strong as I had been. He had paid such a price for this power, months stuck waiting for me when he had wanted to find Féile.
Was giving up some of that power a betrayal of the price he had paid?
There was a rustle as Fidelma exited the caravan and jumped down, leaving the two of us alone. She already knew my power was less. How could she not, when yesterday I had been bursting with it?
My mouth felt dry as I confessed. “It’s not what it was.”
I tested it, felt around it. There was still more than what was my natural gift, much more, but would it be enough?
“It was well done, Cat.” My startled eyes flashed up in time to catch the end of a nod not dissim
ilar to the one his mother had given – a bow of the head that said way more than I was ready to receive.
“I… don’t…” I stammered but he was already levering himself up.
At the entrance of the caravan he reached for me, his cavalier smirk back in place. He picked up my hand and placed a kiss on the back of it before he swung out into the beautiful borderlands day.
Part Three
The Days of Golden Dreams
But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.
* * *
Then did I check the tears of useless passion—
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.
— Remembrance, Emily Brontë
Chapter Twenty
We had agreed that while Gideon could attend as Rion’s senior attendant, I would pose, ironically, as Gideon’s wife. Given that we didn’t yet know what impact the proximity to the dying ley would have, Rion and Gideon had insisted that we continue to assume I needed Gideon. And if the ley line was as dire as had been reported, I could not take the risk of being here without him.
The walls of Londinium were far higher than any of the castle and town walls I had experienced across Briton. I had never truly seen them before, I realised, as from within the city you never really saw the wall, not as such. You caught pieces of it where a building wasn’t pressed against it, and as you passed through you could appreciate the width of it, given it took over a dozen steps to pass through a gate. But from outside, approaching underneath from the borderlands, it was beyond credulity that man could have built something so vast, and above it like a twinkling jewelled crown were the towers of the city itself.
My stomach had been heavy with dread when we had fled that night from the White Tower, and I had never thought to be behind the walls again, never planned that far ahead. That I was back and Devyn was not with me was a jag through my heart that would never heal. However, I realised its existence caught me by surprise now, it was no longer a pillar of pain around which I existed as if tethered.
Legend of the Lakes Page 24