The Lost Queen

by Frewin Jones

  Tania nodded.

  She walked toward the glass doors, tucking loose strands of her hair under the black cloche hat that she had borrowed from Jade’s wardrobe. She had tied her hair back into a long, thick ponytail, and the hat hid the rest. She had also brought sunglasses with her—the idea of this simple change of appearance being to stop the receptionist from recognizing her and immediately calling security to have her thrown out.

  She put on her sunglasses and pushed through the doors, leading Sancha to the low seats in the waiting area.

  “You sit there,” she told her. “I’ll keep the receptionist busy while you do your thing, okay?”

  A wry smile lifted Sancha’s lips. “Oh-kay,” she said. “And pray that Cordelia is wrong and that I shall have time to…do my thing…ere the Gray Knights fall upon us.”

  “Here’s hoping,” Tania muttered as she turned and walked toward the high-fronted reception desk. One problem disappeared as she leaned over the counter. The woman seated behind was not the same one as before—she was a small, thin, dark-haired woman in her midthirties. At least Tania was not going to be recognized and asked to leave—not unless Mr. Mervyn turned up.

  Tania took off her dark glasses. “Hello there,” she said.

  “Hi, can I help you?” the woman asked with a professional smile.

  “I hope you can,” Tania said, leaning on the counter to try and stop her legs shaking so much. “I was wondering whether Lilith Mariner had come back from Beijing?”

  “I’m afraid not,” the receptionist said. “But I believe she’s due back in London any time now.”

  “Really?” Tania asked, her heart jumping a little. “Do you know exactly when?”

  “I don’t, sorry. She’s not expected back in the office till later in the week.”

  “Oh, that’s a pity,” Tania said. She got ready to spin the story that she and Edric had been rehearsing on their way over here. “The thing is, I was hoping to have a very quick word with her. I plan on studying law at university and I was hoping that Ms. Mariner might be able to provide me with some work experience over the summer holidays. I’ve been told that she’s very keen on assisting women who want to get into the legal profession.”

  “We do take on students as clerical assistants,” the receptionist said. “But Ms. Mariner doesn’t usually organize it personally, and I think you might be a bit young for our program. I’ll give Ms. Mariner’s office a call. One of her assistants may be free to come down and have a quick word with you.”

  “That would be brilliant,” Tania said. She didn’t mind who she spoke to—short of George Mervyn—so long as it gave her an excuse to stay here long enough for Sancha to locate and read the personnel files.

  The receptionist picked up the phone and punched in a number.

  Tania shot a quick glance over to Sancha. She was sitting ramrod straight on the low chair, her hands clasped together on her knees, her knuckles white. She was frowning and her eyes were half closed. Her lips were moving, as if she was reciting something in her head.

  “You’re in luck,” the receptionist said. “Ms. Mariner’s legal secretary says she can give you a couple of minutes. If you’d like to go and sit over there, I’m sure she won’t keep you waiting long.”

  “Great,” Tania said. “Thanks. Is there a coffee machine or anything?”

  “Yes, of course.” The receptionist stood up, obviously intending to point out where Tania should go to get refreshments, but something caught her eye, something that she could see through the windows behind Tania. “It’s getting very dark out there,” she said. “Looks like we’re in for a storm, and the weather girl said on TV this morning that it’d be a sunny day.”

  A cold fist clenched in Tania’s stomach. She snapped her head around. The day had grown suddenly dark but Tania did not think it had anything to do with gathering storm clouds.

  An oncoming movement swelled behind the tinted glass, like a gray wave beating its way across the courtyard. And there was noise: the clatter of hooves, the swish of sharp swords slicing the air, the rattle of harness, the slap of leather.

  A moment later the glass doors were flung open and Edric and Cordelia and Zara burst in, running for their lives.

  “They are upon us!” Cordelia screamed.

  The gray wave hit the windows. There was a tumultuous crash as four mounted knights plunged through the windows, sending thousands of fragments of glass exploding across the reception area. Tania threw herself over the reception desk, pulling the receptionist down as shards rained over them.

  A wild neighing tore the air and the four knights began to shout in shrill, cruel voices. Tania heard Cordelia shouting, her voice thin but brave in all the tumult.

  “Gray steeds! Gray steeds! Harm us not! I have the power of love over you! I have the power of light over you! I have the power of the sweet white water over you! I have the power of lush spring grasses over you! These powers I have over you. Go back! Harm us not. Go back!”

  Tania pushed the terrified receptionist under the desk. “Stay there,” she said. On her knees, surrounded by broken glass, Tania looked around for some kind of weapon.

  There was nothing. She lifted her head and peered over the desk.

  Sancha had been thrown to the floor by the assault of the four horsemen, but her chair had tipped over on top of her and seemed to have shielded her from the flying glass. Zara and Edric were leaping this way and that, their arms up to ward off the lashing hooves of the horses. Only Cordelia was standing still in all the mayhem, her arms stiff at her sides, fists clenched, out-staring the horses as they reared and bucked around her.

  It looked to Tania as if at any moment, Cordelia would be struck down and trampled but for some reason the maddened horses never touched her as they plunged around her. One of the knights swung out sideways from the saddle, clinging grimly to the reins with one hand and aiming a long, sweeping blow at Cordelia’s head.

  “No!” Tania screamed. She snatched up the keyboard from the desk and flung it at the knight with all her strength. It struck his sword arm, jolting the blade from his grip, sending it spinning in a white blur through the air as he howled in rage.

  Tania scrambled onto the top of the desk. With a wild yell she flung herself at the nearest of the knights. But he spurred his horse forward and Tania missed him by inches, her momentum sending her hurtling to the floor.

  She sprawled on her face, all the air driven out of her lungs, colored lights flashing in the darkness that swam in front of her eyes.

  She was vaguely aware of Edric’s voice. “Zara! See to Sancha!” And then a wild shout. “Tania! Tania!”

  She managed to drag herself to her feet. She saw a sword slicing through the air toward her, the slender white crystal carving the gloom. A razor’s edge come to spill her blood.

  She even had time to regret that she would never see her Faerie mother. So sad that it would all end like this.

  And then a second blade cut the darkness, blocking the first.

  And then the black cloud was gone and the fog cleared from Tania’s brain. Edric stood between her and the Gray Knight, fighting grimly, a sword rising and falling in his hand as he forced the dismounted knight back. He must have snatched up the blade that she had knocked from the other knight’s hand.

  Edric lifted the sword into the high ward and drove the blade down into the creature’s chest. The Gray Knight’s body exploded into dust. His clothing fell empty to the floor, his sword ringing on the tiles, his long glistening cloak settling like a shroud over the scattered ashes.

  And as the creature died, his horse reared, screaming aloud as the flesh shriveled on its bones until it was nothing more than a skeleton hung with shreds of dried skin. The crazed red light went out of its hollow eye sockets and it fell onto its side, crashing to the floor and shattering to dust like its rider.

  The three remaining horses reared away, letting out ear-splitting screeches of terror.

  “Tania, run!” It
was Edric’s voice, and it was Edric’s hand that caught her arm and pulled her away as another sword slashed the air where she had been standing.

  She saw Zara ahead of them, running down one of the corridors that led from the reception area. She had Sancha with her. Cordelia was only half a step behind.

  “Get them out of here!” Edric shouted to Tania, letting go of her arm and turning to confront the first of the oncoming riders. He lunged with his sword at the first knight. With a fierce snarl, the creature deflected the weapon with his own blade.

  But even as he bore down on Edric, his horse swerved under a rising stairway, and the knight was knocked out of the saddle. The horse spun on its haunches, its head dragged around by the reins that were still clutched in the fallen knight’s fist. The other two horses crashed into it and for a few moments everything was pandemonium as horses and riders fought to stay upright.

  In those few precious seconds Tania hurled a pair of swing doors open and shouted for everyone to follow. They came tumbling through after her: Zara and Sancha first, then Cordelia and last Edric. Tania and Edric slammed the doors closed but there was no catch, no lock. Edric stared around for something to block the doors.

  Tania saw that they were on the landing of a stairway that zigzagged up and down, but to one side she saw an elevator, and the door was open.

  “In here!” she shouted and her sisters plunged in after her. “Edric! Quickly!” He leaped across the landing, slipping through the doors just as they were closing.

  Tania hit the lowest button and the elevator began to descend. She guessed that down would be safer than up. Down might lead to a way out; up could only trap them in the building.

  They dropped three levels. The elevator came to a smooth halt and the doors opened. They were in a large underground parking lot, the low roof held up by rows of square concrete pillars.

  The place was illuminated by yellowish strip lighting, but through the ranks of parked cars they could see a haze of white sunlight that filtered down from a ramp at the far end.

  They ran toward the ramp, but at the top they found that the rising roadway was blocked by a steel grid. Edric led them to a narrow doorway and a flight of plain stone steps. They went through another door and came into an alley blocked off by a wrought-iron gate.

  “Do they pursue?” Zara gasped, staring back the way they had come.

  “Not yet,” Cordelia panted. “But I would put distance between us ere we take rest.”

  Edric rattled the black gate. It was padlocked. “Up and over,” he said. He sprang onto the gate and climbed to sit astride it. He reached down a hand. Cordelia took it and jumped easily down on the far side.

  It was not long before all the princesses were on the pavement on the other side of the gate. Tania didn’t recognize where they were, but she knew it wasn’t Spenser Road; they must have emerged on the far side of the Forum. Still, it wouldn’t take long for them to find their way back to the main streets and get the first tube train out of here.

  Sancha was leaning against the wall, looking dazed.

  “Are you okay?” Tania asked, putting her arm around her sister’s shoulder. “Did you have time to find anything out before the knights came?”

  “I am unhurt,” Sancha said. “The knights were swift upon our heels, but I did manage to glean some knowledge before the sky fell on me!”

  They all stopped, turning to look at Sancha.

  “What did you learn?” Zara breathed.

  “All that you would wish!” Sancha said. “I learned where the woman named Lilith Mariner lives. I know where our mother has made her home!”

  XIX

  The summer afternoon had given way to a warm, shadowy evening. The cloudless sky was a grainy gray-blue and seemed to shimmer like water reflecting off a shield of brushed steel. Tania and Edric and the princesses were standing in the shade of a long brick wall, gazing across the road at a four-story block of flats set back off the street behind tall poplar trees and hedges of privet and fuchsia and yew.

  The elegant block was of warm brown brickwork, with balconies and angular bays and wide white-framed windows.

  Traffic moved steadily along the road. A sign stood above a low brick wall that fronted the hedges and trees.

  Dover Court

  Park Lane

  Hampton Wick

  Kingston-Upon-Thames

  If Sancha was right, then Lilith Mariner owned flat 7 in this block.

  They were very close to Hampton Court Palace—the diminished mortal echo of the great Royal Palace of Faerie—but they had not come here via the direct route from Richmond. Once on the Underground they had headed north, taking the first train and changing three or four times, moving from the District Line to the Piccadilly Line to the Northern Line and then doubling back and heading south of the Thames to Waterloo, where they caught an over-ground train to Hampton Wick, a five-minute walk from where they were now standing.

  Their travels had taken several hours, but they had to do everything they could to try and throw the Gray Knights off their track.

  “A grand house, indeed,” Sancha said. “A worthy residence for a Queen of Faerie.”

  “She won’t own the whole place,” Tania explained. “Just one flat.”

  Sancha gave her a puzzled look. “One flat?”

  “Lilith Mariner’s apartment will be only a few rooms in one part of the block,” Edric said. “The rest will belong to other people.”

  “Servants and attendants and courtiers, yes?”

  “No, people don’t live like that here,” Tania said. “At least hardly anyone does these days. I think we should go over there and check whether she’s home yet.”

  “And if she is not?” asked Zara.

  “Then we’ll leave her a letter,” Edric said.

  “And trust that her response is swifter than the steeds of Lyonesse,” Sancha murmured. She turned to where Cordelia stood, slightly apart from them, her fingers tight around the black iron bars of a gate set in the long wall at their backs. “Cordelia? Come, we are departing now.”

  Cordelia pulled her gaze with obvious reluctance from whatever she had been looking at through the gate, and Tania saw that tears had left shining pathways down her freckled cheeks.

  Tania was the first to move toward her, but the others were close behind.

  “Cordie? What’s wrong?” She peered through the gate’s filigree of twisted and shaped wrought-iron, seeing a wide flat area of rough grassland traversed by paths and scattered with slender trees. “It’s Bushy Park,” Tania said. “Why has it upset you?”

  Cordelia wiped a sleeve across her eyes. “Do you not recognize where we are? In Faerie it is upon this very ground that the menagerie stood. Here I tended the hounds and gave food and shelter to the animals that chose to dwell with me: The otters and the swans and the deer and the unicorns and ravens. All the houseless creatures of Faerie.” She turned her face away. “I cannot bear it,” she said quietly. “Where the clamor and filth of mortals hold sway, there I see no image of Faerie, but here, where some small part of nature is allowed to survive in chains and fetters of concrete and iron, that is when I see a glimpse of home, and it pierces my heart.”

  Zara turned to look across the road at Dover Court. “And it is here that our mother chose to dwell,” she said thoughtfully. “So close to home, but yet so very far away.”

  They crossed the road and walked through a gap in the low wall that surrounded Dover Court. They made their way down wide steps into an attractive sunken garden circled with shrubs and flowering plants and containing wooden benches and a stone fountain. The noise of the traffic seemed less intrusive down here behind the screen of trees.

  They walked through the garden and came to the main doors leading into the apartment block. They were white with frosted-glass panels.

  Edric gave them a push. “Locked,” he said.

  Tania was standing to one side of the entranceway, running her finger down a series of labeled butt
ons on the brass plate of an intercom system.

  7. L. MARINER.

  She pressed the button. An electronic buzzing came from the slotted grid at the top of the intercom.

  “Yes?” A metallic, rasping voice; the speaker was female, but that was all Tania could tell.

  “Ms. Mariner?”

  “Yes.”

  Tania’s mouth was suddenly bone dry. “It’s Tania….” she croaked. She brought her mouth closer to the microphone. “It’s Tania.”

  There was no response.

  She looked at the others. “I’m not sure….”

  An electronic growl sounded from the doors. Edric pushed at them and one swung open. He walked through, followed by Cordelia, Zara, and Sancha. Tania followed, not quite able to believe that this was really happening. The door swung shut at her back and the lock clicked.

  They were in a clean white vestibule. Corridors stretched off to the left and the right. To one side a stairway led up. A sign fixed inside the doorway showed on what floors the various flats could be found. Flat 7 was on the fourth. Directly ahead of them was an elevator. Edric pressed the small square panel and a white triangle lit up above the door. A few moments later the metal door slid open and the five of them stepped inside.

  Tania pressed 4 and the door glided closed.

  She didn’t look at the others—they all seemed enclosed in private bubbles of silence, as though they were afraid that if they spoke of their hopes, it might somehow ruin everything.

  The elevator came to a halt. The tension was unbearable.

  The door swished open.

  A woman stood facing the elevator, bare-legged and barefoot, wearing a knee-length, dark green suit skirt and a lime green blouse. Her long curling red hair was tied back off her face. Her hands were up, almost as if in prayer, covering the lower half of her face, but above her long, elegant fingers finely sculpted cheekbones and wide green eyes were visible. The expression in her eyes was both eager and wary, as though she feared to trust the truth of what the opening elevator door might reveal.