The Lost Queen

by Frewin Jones

For a moment there was a silence so profound that Tania could hear the blood beating in her head. Then Edric stepped forward and fell to one knee at the woman’s feet, his head bowed.

  “Your most gracious Majesty.”

  His words shattered the airless silence.

  “My daughters!” The woman gasped, reaching out her arms toward the girls, her face full of an impossible joy. “My beloved daughters!”

  Zara, Sancha, and Cordelia ran from the elevator and fell into their mother’s arms with sobs and muffled cries.

  Tania hesitated, stepping out of the elevator as the doors closed but holding back, staring in confusion and uncertainty at the Queen of Faerie. It was not that Titania resembled her so closely—she had been prepared for that, up to a point. What pulled her up short was the heart-wrenching realization that she was finally face-to-face with the woman who was her Faerie mother, the woman who had given birth to the Faerie part of her nature as surely as Mary Palmer had brought her mortal half into this world.

  Tears of pure joy were running down Titania’s face as she hugged and kissed her daughters. And Tania was suddenly aware that warm tears were running down her own cheeks and that her chest hurt and her throat was full and that a bird seemed to be fluttering wildly in her heart.

  Titania lifted her head from her other daughters and looked at her—and in her face was such devotion and relief and happiness that all doubt and fear drained from Tania’s body and she found herself stumbling forward.

  “Tania! My darling child!”

  Tania came into her mother’s embrace, pressing her face into the warm neck, breathing in the Faerie scent of her.

  “Why did it take so long?” Tania sobbed. “Why so many years?”

  “Ah, I don’t know, my beloved girl. I don’t know why,” Titania murmured, kissing Tania’s face and caressing her hair. “It’s been such a long journey for the two of us. But it’s all done now. All done.”

  “Oh, mother,” cried Sancha. “Would that this moment could be perfect, but we bring terrible news!”

  A spasm of pain crossed Titania’s face. “I felt there was something wrong,” she said. “Three days ago I had a sense of some evil thing coming to life, but I didn’t know what it was.” She looked at Edric, who had risen to his feet and was standing quietly to one side.

  “Well met, Master Chanticleer,” she said. “Is it by your master’s Art and charity that I am reunited with these four of my children?”

  Edric looked up at her. “I am no longer in Lord Drake’s service, Your Grace.”

  Titania’s eyes narrowed. “I see,” she said. “Come, we can speak more freely behind closed doors. It seems there is a lot that I need to know.”

  Lilith Mariner’s living room was airy and clean, but strangely impersonal. The walls were white, and the floor stripped pine. The furniture was elegant but functional and there were no ornaments, nor pictures on the wall, nor any other objects that might give any hint as to the character of the woman who lived there.

  Titania sat on the couch with Zara at her feet, Sancha and Cordelia to either side, and Tania in one corner, holding tightly on to her Faerie mother’s hand. Edric was perched on the edge of an armchair facing them. Tania could hardly bear to look at Titania’s face as the long, terrible story of the past few weeks was revealed to her.

  Her eyes closed tightly as she was told of Rathina’s treachery, a single tear escaping and running down her cheek. “Poor child,” she whispered. “The poor lost child.”

  “You cannot feel sympathy for her, Mother,” Cordelia said. “She betrayed us all of her own free will. I will never forgive her. Never.”

  “No, no, Cordelia,” Titania said sadly. “Rathina is my daughter. I still love her, even though I hate what she has done.”

  “It may be that a mother must love her children, even though they become demons,” Sancha said. “But Rathina’s actions have loosed a great peril both to our own Realm and to this world. The great traitor Drake has led Gray Knights here, and they are pursuing us with a deadly loathing.”

  Titania looked at Edric. “Your former master has become a dark and corrupt being,” she said. “I’m glad you parted with him.”

  “I had to, Your Grace,” Edric said. “For Princess Tania’s sake.”

  “And for the sake of the love that has grown between you,” Titania added. She squeezed Tania’s hand. “You can tell me more about that later but first we have to decide what to do next.”

  “Can you guide our footsteps back into Faerie?” Zara asked. “We hoped that you might be able to teach Tania how to break the iron barrier that Lyonesse has raised between our worlds.”

  Titania shook her head. “I don’t have those kinds of skills,” she said. “I can’t help Tania turn her gift into a weapon against the Sorcerer King’s enchantments.”

  Tania felt all her hopes shriveling away as Titania gently eased her daughters aside and stood up. The Queen walked to the window and stared out into the gathering night.

  “I chose to live here because from this window I can see the Palace at Hampton Court,” she said. She pointed. “The towers and roofs are visible over there, beyond Bushy Park.” She sighed. “After five hundred years in the Mortal World, I was afraid that I might forget my real home…and maybe even forget who I really am.”

  “Could you not have made a water-mirror and viewed it from afar?” Sancha asked. “Has your gift deserted you?”

  Tania remembered Sancha mentioning that Titania had the gift to see faraway things by looking into pure, still water.

  Titania gave a sad smile. “There is no water in this world pure enough to form an image,” she said.

  “I do not doubt it,” said Cordelia. “How have you survived for so long in this benighted world, Mother? We have been here but a few hours, and already the horror of it gnaws at my heart.”

  “And how have you survived the touch of Isenmort?” Zara asked. “We carry jewels of black amber with us at all times, but what protection have you used against the poison of metal?”

  Titania opened the collar of her blouse and drew out something that spun slowly at the end of a long fine chain. She held it up for them to see. It was a ring of white crystal, and set into it was a black jewel that flashed in the light.

  “Your father gave this ring to me on our wedding night, as a token of his undying love,” she said. “The stone is black amber. Don’t you remember it?”

  “Yes, of course,” Sancha said. “The Troth-ring of Tasha Dhul.”

  “It protected me from Isenmort,” Titania said. “And as for all the other dangerous things in this world, I used my knowledge of herbs and healing to fend off the worst diseases, and I was lucky not to suffer any life-threatening accidents.” Her eyes took on a faraway look. “I was probably in the greatest danger of death when the Great Plague hit London in 1665. A lot of people died then—a third of the population—but I couldn’t just run away and hide. I knew enough about medicine to be able to help some of them. And I was lucky; I never caught the disease.”

  “But how have you hidden your true identity for so long?” Sancha asked.

  “It was never easy,” Titania replied. “A few years would pass, and the friends that I had made would start commenting on the fact that I never seemed to grow any older. And then in time, the comments would change to suspicion and fear and I would have to disappear and reappear in another part of London with another name and another trade. It was hard in the early times, having to start from scratch over and over again, building a life, losing it, always on the move, or that’s how it felt at the time.” She smiled. “But these days that is less of a problem. I have been Lilith Mariner for almost thirty years and the only thing people ask about the way I look is the name of my cosmetic surgeon.”

  “But why did you choose to live in this dreadful place?” Cordelia asked. “Were I lost in this world, I would seek out the remote wildernesses where I would be free of the clamor of mortal-kind.”

  Titania c
ame back from the window. “I had to be within reach of your sister,” she said, taking Tania’s hand again. “It took me a while to find her. For two years I roamed the city in search of her, and then one day I finally came close enough to be able to sense her Faerie Spirit. It was like a warmth in my heart when I felt she was near to me, even though the Spirit was trapped in the body of a sickly mortal girl.”

  Tania stared at her. “Was her name Ann Burbage?” She remembered her Elizabethan flashback—five hundred years ago she had been called Ann, and her father had been called Richard Burbage. Was she the sickly child that Titania meant?

  “How did you know that?” Titania asked, frowning at her. “I didn’t think you had any memory of your previous lives once you were born again.”

  “I didn’t,” Tania explained. “It’s only been happening recently. I get these brief flashbacks. I was Ann Burbage, and I was a little girl called Gracie, and I was Flora Llewellyn. My father was a Victorian inventor called Ernest.”

  Titania nodded. “Yes, I remember all those children,” she said. “And I remember the girl you were before you became Anita Palmer. Your name was Barbara and you were born twenty-seven years ago in Dulwich.” She gave a deep sigh. “But you were run down by a car on your way home from school when you were eleven years old.” Sadness filled her voice. “I read the details of it in the local newspaper. It took me eighteen months of searching before I discovered you again in the body of a baby girl called Anita Palmer. In Faerie the gifts of the Royal Family come alive at the age of sixteen. I was sure that if only you could survive for sixteen years in a mortal body, then the Faerie part of your nature would wake up and you would know who you were.”

  “And that’s why Your Grace sent Tania’s Soul Book to her,” Edric said.

  “That’s right,” said Titania. “I became more and more excited as Anita Palmer got closer to her sixteenth birthday, although my work prevented me from watching as constantly as I’d have liked.” She looked quizzically at Edric. “Otherwise I would certainly have recognized Lord Drake’s servant when he appeared in London disguised as a mortal.” She turned to look at Tania. “I posted the book to you so that you’d get it on your birthday, and once you’d had a chance to read some of it, I was going to come to your house and speak to you.”

  “And you did,” Tania said. “But by then I was gone.”

  “When I heard that you’d gone missing, I was certain that you must be dead.” She shuddered, gripping Tania’s hand fiercely. “I thought I’d lost you again, and I thought I’d also lost the only real thing that linked me to you, your Soul Book.” She sighed. “I can’t begin to tell you how I’ve ached for this moment, how I’ve longed to be with my children again.”

  “And we with you, Mother,” Sancha murmured.

  “I must have faith that Hopie and Eden are alive and well,” Titania said. She hugged the girls to her. “I wish that our reunion could have been under better circumstances, and I wish I knew how to defeat the evil of Lyonesse. But I don’t know how to fight the Gray Knights, and I don’t know how to get us back to Faerie.”

  Zara’s eyes widened in alarm. “Then are we trapped here forever?”

  “Not forever, I fear,” Sancha said. “For how long may we escape the Gray Knights of Lyonesse?”

  “We can’t just run and hide from them,” Edric said. “We have to fight back.”

  “And we have to find a way of getting into Faerie,” Tania said. “I could try again. Perhaps now we’re all together, it might work.”

  “I do not think so,” Sancha said. “Faerie lies behind a barrier of Isenmort. The Sorcerer King’s enchantments cannot be so easily broken.”

  “Black amber is ever a protection against Isenmort,” Zara said. “Could it not be turned into a weapon? We have your crown, Mother. There are yet eleven black amber stones upon it—can they not be used against Lyonesse?”

  “A blade shaped from black amber might be sharp enough to cut a way between the worlds,” Sancha said.

  “Black amber can be melted if it’s heated carefully,” Titania said. “But even then, a knife forged from molten amber would be too small to cut through into Faerie.”

  “Your Grace, what if we could melt it so that it made a coating over a crystal sword?” Edric asked. "The princesses brought four swords into this world. Could one of them be used?”

  “It’s possible,” Titania said. “A crystal sword coated with a layer of black amber might be powerful enough.” She looked at Tania. “If it was in the hands of the right person. But it takes a lot of heat to melt black amber, more than we could create without finding a furnace or something similar.”

  “How about an oxyacetylene torch?” Tania asked. “Would that give a hot enough flame?”

  “I should think so,” Titania said.

  “What is this of which you speak?” asked Sancha.

  “It’s an apparatus that allows you to make a very small, very hot flame,” Tania explained. She looked at Edric. “Do you remember what Jade’s dad’s hobby is?”

  He frowned. “Messing about with old motorbikes, isn’t it?”

  Tania nodded. “Their basement is full of bits and pieces of old bikes. He’s forever cutting up bikes and welding them back together, and sometimes he uses an oxyacetylene torch. I’ve seen it down there.”

  “But have you seen him use it?” Titania asked. “Do you know how to work it safely?”

  “Not exactly, but he’s the kind of person who’d keep the instruction manual,” Tania said. “We’ll be able to figure it out from there.”

  “Must we then return to your friend’s house?” Cordelia asked. “Is that not perilous?”

  “All choices are fraught with peril,” Zara said. “But inaction is the most perilous of all. At the very least, we shall put up such a fight that any Gray Knights that outlive us will long remember the battle.”

  “Pray that it does not come to that,” said Sancha. “Mayhap it were safer for only one or two to go to the house and for the rest to remain here?”

  “No,” Titania said. “We have to keep together now, whatever happens. My car is in the underground parking lot. I’ll drive us all over there, if you’ll tell me the way, Tania.”

  “I think I can do that,” Tania said.

  “Ere we depart, let me learn the lie of the land,” Cordelia said. She got off the couch and walked to the window. Edric went with her and undid the latch.

  Cordelia threw the window open. A gentle breeze wafted into the room.

  “Can you smell the stink of the Gray Knights?” Zara asked.

  Cordelia took a long, deep breath. “Nay,” she said. “They are not near.” She leaned out of the window and let out a series of whistles.

  Tania got up and stood behind her, peering out into the night. She heard a distant whirring and fluttering sound that grew nearer and louder—and soon dark shapes began to swoop through the darkness toward the window.

  Birds. Scores of birds, coming from every direction at Cordelia’s call. Swifts and swallows and tits and sparrows and rooks came in wheeling formation, darting this way and that across the glass, circling in front of the window. A flock of pigeons flew noisily over the rooftops. Some birds landed on the sill, jostling for space as more and more arrived. Starlings and blackbirds and jays and magpies sped through the air. An owl flapped slowly up, landing heavily on the sill, dislodging most of the others as it caught its balance and folded its great brown wings.

  Tania gazed into the eerie luminous eyes of the owl as it bobbed its round head and ruffled its feathers.

  “My friends,” Cordelia called. “A dreadful evil is at large in this place. Twelve gray monsters upon twelve undead steeds. Have any of you seen these creatures, or do you have any knowledge of them?”

  The air was suddenly full of the voices of birds, whistling and cheeping and trilling and chirruping and croaking. The owl hooted several times.

  It sounded chaotic to Tania, but Cordelia listened intently.
r />   “Thank you, my friends,” she said when the noise died down. “Do not put yourselves in peril. If you chance upon these creatures, flee them. Go now, and the blessing of all good things be upon you.”

  The owl bobbed its head again, then turned clumsily on the sill and launched itself off. It dropped like a stone for several yards, then its wings spread and it was suddenly elegant, brushing the treetops as it soared away and was lost in the night. All the other birds scattered, too, filling the air with noise and hectic motion as they went, gliding and swooping, high and low, until they spread out across the dark sky and were gone.

  Cordelia closed the window. “Many of them have smelled the creatures on the air and some have seen gray shapes, like shrouds of walking mist in the streets. But there are no Gray Knights near this place.”

  “I suggest we stay here and rest for a few hours,” Titania said. “Then I’ll drive us to the Andersons’ house. Maybe the Gray Knights will be less alert when the night is at its darkest.”

  “Let’s hope there won’t be any Gray Knights between us and Jade’s house,” Tania said, tightening her fist around an imaginary hilt. “I want to have a sword in my hand next time we meet up with them!”

  XX

  Titania parked her dark blue BMW about fifty yards down the street from the Andersons’ house.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” she said.

  The journey from Hampton had passed without incident. There had been no sign of the Gray Knights and Cordelia had not been able to sense the presence of their steeds in the air. They arrived in the Kent House area of London in the small hours of the night. The street where the Andersons lived was quiet and empty and shrouded in darkness, save for the pools of orange light that cascaded from the streetlamps.

  “Wait here till I beckon you,” Tania said, peering through the windshield. “Then come one at a time. If you hear anyone or see any movement from the other houses, just walk straight past, okay?”

  She got out and walked alone along the pavement. There were no lights on in the neighboring houses; the street was deserted. At the gate of Jade’s house Tania turned and raised her hand as a sign for the next person to follow. Then she slipped in through the gate and sprinted up the path to the door.