“Yes. But he’s got a universe to save. And he’s also tried to protect me. We disagreed—he told me not to get involved when I was in otherworlds—he didn’t want me running into danger. Just like a real father … Only I did get involved—I broke the—the link between our minds—I sort of took control of the portal—and now I can’t find him. He must be waiting for me, trying to contact me … There are so many things I want to ask him.”
“He’ll be in touch,” Hazel said in a strangely flat voice.
She was sure of it.
ANNIE AND Pobjoy continued to date, but infrequently. He was sent away to Lancashire over a case of people-smuggling that had ramifications in both areas, and when they did meet he found her preoccupied and unwilling to discuss her troubles. How could she tell him what she had told Nathan, when he was still so reluctant to believe in magic, and otherworlds, and their possible incursion on everyday existence? They kissed, and in kissing the barriers almost came down, and their doubts and differences started to melt away—but Annie always drew back, thinking of Nathan, though he was not thinking of her, feeling that now was not the time to risk widening the gulf between mother and son. And in consequence Pobjoy began to wonder if she truly liked him, and whether it was worth persisting, and—as usual—what was really going on in Eade. He read The Wind in the Willows, which he found unexpectedly gripping, though he was torn between his approval of Badger as a character and his disapproval of vigilante action by civilians, as advocated in the retaking of Toad Hall. Annie then gave him John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk, because it had highwaymen and stolen treasure and many other ingredients guaranteed to appeal to the small boy in every grown man, and Guards! Guards!, because it was about policemen.
Pobjoy found himself thinking that surely dating never used to require quite so much intellectual effort. When he was in his teens and twenties, preparation had generally consisted of brushing his teeth, changing his shirt, and checking he’d remembered to pack the condoms. Reading hadn’t gotten a look-in. But then his marriage had been short-lived, and he realized, looking back, that he didn’t actually know if his wife liked to read, since he had never found the time to ask. Maybe, in the New Age, with its New Men, and its New Women—an age when you filled out a form on the Internet to assess compatibility, and chatting up a colleague could land you with a lawsuit for harassment—maybe this was how things were done.
He consulted the inspector with whom he was liaising in Lancashire, a man some fifteen years his senior.
“I dunno, lad,” the man said. “Been married nearly thirty years. Easiest way. I’d be lost if I had to start again. My daughter’s got a boyfriend in Tibet whom she met online—they’ve never seen each other but she says they bond spiritually. My son has a girlfriend with pink hair who’s studying psychology and claims he’s an interesting case. In my day a couple of pints and a grope in the cinema always did the trick. But you know what the French say: Ortra temps, ortra mouse. They do it with computers nowadays.”
Which didn’t help much.
Meanwhile, his sense of humor, carefully cultivated, grew like a bulb that thrives in the dark, ready to reach out into the daylight at some future stage.
MARCH ARRIVED, and the winter still hung on, like an unwanted guest who stays and stays, ignoring all hints that it’s time to depart. It dug itself in with icy claws, turning the ground to permafrost, splitting the pipes, sharpening the wind till it seemed to cut to the bone. Puddles cracked underfoot, noses reddened, lips chapped, everyone got colds. Hazel decided she was warmer at Thornyhill, with Bartlemy’s broth inside her and Hoover snuggled against her leg and a fire burning merrily on the hearth. Redoing her schoolwork was a small price to pay, and it meant she could talk to Bartlemy about her worries over Nathan, though careful not to cross the line into generation disloyalty. But Bartlemy had been around so long he didn’t belong to any generation, so perhaps he didn’t count.
“It’s time to try and help,” Bartlemy said, “though there’s little we can do. Other universes are outside the province of regular magic. Still, we can ask a few questions and see if the answers have changed. You never know what we may learn.”
“Do we light the spellfire?” Hazel said, happily abandoning her math.
“Not tonight. It is customary to burn fire crystals when you draw the circle, but in this weather I think warmth wins over atmosphere.” He closed the curtains, rolled back the rug. Hazel, obedient to instructions, drizzled spellpowder around the perimeter, where the blackened scar of other circles showed clearly on the bare floorboards.
“Have you done this before?” Bartlemy said, with an absentmindedness unusual for him.
“N-no, but—”
“Very well. Just do as I say. I will initiate the magic, but you may summon the spirits and question them, as and when I tell you. However, this is a hazardous proceeding, so don’t deviate from my orders, no matter what may occur. This is not the time for getting—as they say nowadays—creative. Do you understand?”
Hazel nodded and sat down again, no longer slouching in comfort but straight-backed and wary. Hoover came to attention, cocking an ear and opening both eyes. Bartlemy switched off the electric lights and the fire glow pooled in the center of the room, chasing the shadows into the corners. When the powder sputtered into a ring of flame Hazel had the impression the walls retreated, and the darkness drew in, and there was nothing beyond the firelight at all. Only the three of them existed in a dimension of their own, huddled around the perimeter of the spell.
“Call Eriost,” Bartlemy said, meaning the Child.
Hazel spoke the words of summoning—words he had taught her some time ago—but even before she had finished he was there. He—or she—or it. The choirboy face, the pale gold curls, the eyes as old as sin.
“Whence the haste?” Bartlemy asked, forgetting he had agreed that Hazel would be the Questioner.
The spirit did not seem to hear him.
“Well, well,” it said, peering out of the circle as if trying to see through a thick mist, “a new friend—a hagling—young, so young. We will be playmates. I will dance with you on the sands of eternity until the tide comes in. Do you dance? Do you sing?”
“I dance a little,” Hazel said, diverted, “but I don’t sing, unless I want to scare people.”
The Child laughed its silvery laugh. “I like that. We will have fun together. We will walk along the sands gathering seashells, and mermaid’s finger bones, and drowned men’s eyes. They turn into pearls, if you keep them long enough—did you know that? The poets say so. Those are pearls that were his eyes … But you must find the eyes first, and pluck them while they’re fresh, or the spell won’t work. Come with me—come away with me—”
“Ask questions, don’t answer them,” Bartlemy murmured. “Or it will spout nonsense all night.”
“Who is there?” the Child demanded in an altered voice. “Is there a big fat wizard lurking in the shadows, whispering in your ear? Whisper whisper whisper—spin the coin, roll the dice—fiddlefeet and twiddlestrings …”
“Ask him how he responded so quickly,” Bartlemy said. “It may not be important, but I think we should know.”
“What does he say, the fat old wizard? Is he angry with me? Does he curse and spit?”
“No, he—how did you get here so fast?” Hazel asked. “I hadn’t even finished the summons.”
“I felt your call,” the Child answered with rare coherence. “The wall between the mortal world and the place of the spirits grows thin. Soon it will fail, and then the circle will not bind me, and there will be no more questioning. Beware the Ides of March!”
“When is that?” Hazel said. “The fifteenth,” said Bartlemy. “Ask him—” “Who knows?” the spirit mocked. “Who cares? The hour draws near at last, an hour long foretold.
Hickory dickory dock
It’s time to break the clock
But heed the warning in the rhyme—
Breaking the clock won’t stop
the Time.
A night of magic approaches when all doors will open, even the Last Door that never opens for us at all…”
“Which night?” Hazel said, needing no prompt to hazard the question.
“The night,” said the Child. “Is he still there, the Whisperer? Tell him we will come for him, him and all witchkind—we will make him dance with us until he grows thin, dance until his feet wear out—dance and dance—over the hills and far away … The fairies are coming back, out of the old stories, carrying their little green candles, lighting the way to Scarbarrow Fayr … Will you come with us, hagling? Will you take my hand and dance down the road to Faerie?”
“Dismiss him,” Bartlemy said, evidently averse to even the wisp of a threat. “We have heard enough.”
Hazel obeyed, a little grudgingly, and the Child faded in his usual haphazard fashion, leaving his eyes behind. Hazel got rid of them with a final Command and realized she felt trembly from tension, though nothing very frightening had occurred.
“Were there really fairies once?” she inquired skeptically. “With wings and sparkly hair?”
“Oh yes,” Bartlemy said. “But you must remember, werefolk take many forms—often the forms we give them. They borrow our imagination, having little of their own. But what they borrow is not always what we wish to lend. There are goblins, piskeys, imps, gremlins, grin-nocks, pugwidgies … I have seen some with wings, though they probably pulled them off a bird first. They might even sparkle—all that sparkles is not diamond, after all. But few would look good on the top of a Christmas tree.”
“Who do we summon next?”
“No more spirits,” Bartlemy decided. “I do not like that part about walls thinning. The old safeguards are slipping away …”
“But,” Hazel said, frowning, “the spirits live in our world, don’t they? They can’t pass the Gate.”
“Our world has many dimensions,” Bartlemy said. “Some are more real than others. There are realms of folklore and superstition, which may linger on long after the original stories are forgotten. It is best to avoid such places. They hold many dangers for mortals, even the Gifted—especially the Gifted—but normally they are not easy to enter and are hidden from us by the very magics that made them. Few have ever trod the dark path to Tartarus or sailed to Tir na nog; the guardians may be sleeping, but the invisible doors are shut, and only a handful remain who could open them. However, the Spring Solstice is always perilous, and I fear—”
“The Solstice?”
“I suspect that’s the night the Child was referring to. March twenty-first. It’s not far off.”
“But it’s still winter!” Hazel objected.
“Spring is coming,” Bartlemy said. “And maybe other things are coming as well…”
There was silence. Hazel wanted to try another summons, but she sensed a deeper unease in Bartlemy than the doubts he had expressed, and it disturbed her. Bartlemy was never uneasy.
The circle made a faint hissing noise, like the breath of a sleeping dragon. A log shifted in the fire with a swish of cinders. There was no sound from the night outside, no traffic murmur from distant roads. The rest of the world might have moved on, leaving them trapped in a single grain of being. The three of them around the circle, and the sinking fire, and the shadows creeping inward.
“We’ll try one more thing,” Bartlemy said. “But it may not work.”
“Which spirit—”
“No spirit. This is a woman, or it was once. She may be dead. She may be incapable of responding. We will see.”
“What’s her name?”
Bartlemy told her.
Hazel recited the summons, but the circle remained empty. The fire was definitely dying; soon the only light to endure would be from the perimeter, a thin line of glimmer that barely kept back the dark. Within the spellring, there was a suggestion of… shapes, phantom forms too dim to be clearly seen, which might yet begin to solidify if the space stayed unoccupied for too long, or the shadows from which they came encroached farther, or Hazel spoke a wrong word, lost concentration, lost control.
She said: “There’s something … trying to get through.”
“This is magic,” Bartlemy responded, unperturbed. “There’s always something trying to get through. Perhaps … the name I gave you is too widely used. There could be a million of them. We will essay another.”
“How many names does this woman have?”
“She may have several. What matters, for the Gifted, is the one she uses for spellcasting, for the self she wants to be. As I said, this is magic.”
Hazel reran the incantation, this time with another name. In the circle, the phantoms faded. There was a long, dark moment when nothing was happening but she sensed the imminence of something, a prickle in the air, a teetering on the edge of things. Shadows gathered at the hub— grew denser—thickened into substance. And then there was someone there. At least Hazel assumed it was someone, since she had called a person by name, but it was so small—smaller than the Child—so hunched and twisted and shrunken, so bundled in dark shapeless clothing that for a minute she wasn’t sure.
She said to Bartlemy, in a sort of stage whisper: “Is that her?”
“She is old,” the wizard said. “Old beyond her Gift. It is not well to outlive your time.”
If her face had been disfigured once, it no longer showed. It was brown and spotted and shriveled, like an ancient tea bag, jaws clamped grimly under knobbled cheekbones, huge yellow eyes, webbed with veins, peering from beneath papery lids. She was sitting in what appeared to be a wheelchair, not an efficient piece of modern machinery but something carved crudely from wood that, when she tried to turn it, emitted a creak like a scream of pain. Her hands were warped out of all recognizable handness, but they clutched the wheels of the chair like talons, as if, somewhere in the tiny mummified body, there was still an unnatural strength, a hungry, desperate spirit, a will to live out of all proportion to life. Her voice, when it emerged, was thin and hoarse, hissing through her toothless jaws like the wind through a keyhole.
“Connard! Connard de merde! Qu’est-ce qui se passe? Hein? Hein? Qui se passe?”
“Doesn’t she speak English?” Hazel said, panicking.
“She should. She lived here once.”
“Maybe you should talk to her—”
“Go ahead.”
Hazel did her best to pull herself together. “Margolaine!”
“Qui est là? Qui parle? Putain—putain de merde!”
“Can you speak English?” Hazel asked doubtfully.
“Whore!” said the old woman, answering the question. “Whore and child of a whore! I speak English, Italian, Arabic … Who are you, to play zese games wiz me? Who are you?”
“No names,” Bartlemy said.
“I am a witch,” Hazel said. “I have—I have the power to call you. That’s all you need to know.”
“No manners,” croaked Margolaine. “Ze witch should introduce herself. Zere is nopolitesse anymore.”
“She’s clever,” Bartlemy said judiciously. “Be careful. She will trap you if she can. Your identity would not help her much, but it’s safest to remain anonymous.”
“My name isn’t important,” Hazel declared. “Answer my questions, and I will release you.”
“Putain! I will not be questioned by you!”
“Then we’ll stay here all night,” Hazel said, glancing at Bartlemy for confirmation. He smiled. “And the next day.”
“I piss on your circle!”
“Be my guest,” Hazel said, almost beginning to enjoy herself. “You’ll be the one with soggy knickers.”
Bartlemy raised an eyebrow, but Margolaine appeared temporarily stymied.
“What are zese questions you wish to ask me?” she demanded. “I make no promise to answer, but—”
“We want to know about your son,” Hazel said, echoing Bartlemy. “Your son—Nathaniel?”
“Nevaire!” cried Margolaine. “I nevaire speak of hi
m—compris? It is interdit! Espèce de merde—” She shuddered with a spasm of what might have been rage, spitting more curses. Froth gathered at the corners of her mouth.
“You tell us about your son,” Hazel said, “or we stay here all night. You know how it goes.”
“Putain! Whore! You give me a name, or I call you a whore all night. You want that?”
“I don’t care,” Hazel said.
“You have no home—no shame!”
Hazel rather liked the idea of being shameless, but a nudge from Bartlemy reminded her to stick to the point.
“Your son,” she said. “Who was his father?”
The old woman champed her jaws—her eyes glared with a malevolence far beyond the strength of her meager body. “Eh bien,” she said, “we will speak of zese things, but only one time, and nevaire again. D’accord?” Hazel nodded. “Ze father was a magus, an emperor—more zan an emperor—ze ruler of anozzer world. He was a god among his people. His voice came to me through my spells, intruding on ze magic, saying he had chosen me—me alone, in all zer worlds—to be his bride, ze mozzer of his child. A special child, a child who would open ze Gate, at ze hour appointed, and unite me wiz my husband for all time. He teach me to make a great magic—we open ze Gate for a moment of time, un moment éternel—I am in his arms, in his love—his seed is in my body … Do you understand? Peux-tu imaginer?! was as ze Sainte-Marie, ze Sainte-Vièrge, but ze stupid priests, zey do not know what zey say. She was not vièrge after: how could she be? Ze love of a god, it is beyond such conneries—it fill you à jamais. I burned like ze stars—I shone like ze sun—you, who are little witch, wiz little spells, little dreams, you cannot know. To be loved by a god—no ozzer women in all time have zat, only me and zer Sainte-Marie.”
Hazel listened dumbly. Bartlemy had told her nothing of Margo-laine’s history, but the picture was becoming all too clear.
She thought: Annie … was it like that for Annie? Was that why there were no other men for so long?
But now Annie was dating a police inspector, an unlikely successor in the celestial shoes—or bedsocks. And Annie had no Gift, no delusions of sainthood. Somehow she didn’t think Annie would have seen it in quite the same way …
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