by Frewin Jones
“A car?” said Tania. “That’s great!”
Tania and Rathina stood on the pavement, waving as Oliver drove off.
“So, sister?” said Rathina. “Where are we going to meet the youths?”
Tania raised her eyebrows. “We’re not meeting them,” she said. She rummaged in her bag and pulled out her debit card. “We’re going to get ourselves some money, then we’re catching a train to London.”
Rathina frowned. “Did you not give your word to the boy Oliver that we would ‘catch up later’?”
“I lied,” said Tania.
“You lied?” exclaimed Rathina. “Tania, what of honor?”
“There’s no such thing when you’re dealing with boys,” Tania explained. “Survival of the fittest is what counts here. They’ll be fine; they’ll just have to find a couple of other girls to practice their chat-up lines on.” She pointed across the busy street. “Look, there’s a charity shop. With any luck we’ll be able to swap these clothes for things that’ll blend in a bit better.”
They waited until the traffic light turned to red again and they were able to weave their way between the standing traffic. Tania was careful not to brush against the cars. It had been tricky avoiding all the metal in Oliver’s car, and sitting inside a vehicle that was effectively a metal box had given her a bad headache.
“Remember, Tania,” Rathina said as they came to the far pavement. “Beware of all things made of Isenmort!”
Tania nodded. She hardly needed reminding.
But how strange. Last time she had been in this world, it had been her Faerie sisters who needed to be wary of metal—and now she was traveling with the one person in the whole of Faerie who was immune to the perils of Isenmort.
Tania stood with her sister on the platform at Eastbourne station. The amount of metal everywhere was ridiculous! Just getting to this place had been a challenge. She had not even been able to open the door to the charity shop. It had a metal handle! The clothes racks were also metal, and the jeans she had originally chosen had metal studs and a metal zipper, so they were out of the question. In the end she had gone for a plain black T-shirt and loose black trousers with an elastic waist.
Rathina had chosen a red blouse over a pair of white combat trousers. The choice had surprised Tania—not the blouse but the trousers. Women in Faerie never wore such things, and of the three sisters who had previously been in the Mortal World, only tomboy Cordelia had been prepared to wear trousers. Sancha had dismissed them immediately, and Zara had been quite appalled by the idea.
Once they had negotiated away their Faerie dresses for more modern clothes, Tania had asked the way to the nearest ATM. The buttons were again made of metal. Rathina had pressed out her PIN for her and had collected the money from the perilous steel lips of the cash dispenser.
A passerby had explained to them how to get to the train station, and with Rathina’s help Tania had managed to buy two tickets to London Victoria.
Now they stood on the busy platform and waited for their train to pull in.
Once in London Tania’s plan was to call Connor Estabrook’s parents and track him down. She knew he wasn’t living at home now. The latest she’d heard was that he was sharing an apartment with some other premed students, but she wasn’t sure where.
“So who is this Mortal doctor whom we are to meet?” asked Rathina.
“Connor? Oh, I’ve known him most of my life, I guess,” explained Tania. “He’s three years older than me, which was fine when we were little—he was okay playing with me then. But when he hit thirteen he started ignoring me. I was really crazy about him at the time so I was pretty hurt. But over the past couple of years we’ve got more friendly again. We chat on the phone occasionally and text each other now and then. The last time I met up with him and his folks was at Christmas time to swap presents, like we always do.”
“Christmastime?”
“Uh, Yuletide,” Tania said. “Once we’ve tracked him down, it’ll just be a case of convincing him to help us in time to get back to Faerie.” She shrugged. “But don’t bother asking how I’m going to make that work, because I don’t know yet.”
“But you will seek to take him back to Faerie with us?” asked Rathina.
“I think I might have to,” said Tania. “Though I really wish there was some other way.”
“You fear he will be in danger from Hollin and Lord Aldritch?” asked Rathina.
“I know he will be,” said Tania. “We’re going to have to be really careful, Rathina. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to him.” She shook her head. “And that’s assuming he agrees to come with us.” She stared down the railway track. “And that our train ever turns up!”
Time was getting on and she was impatient with the delay. She glanced at the clock display on the arrivals screen. Come on! Look at the time! It’s ten to three already. If we don’t get this all sorted by dawn tomorrow, Oberon is going to shut down all the ways in and out of Faerie—and we’ll be stuck here forever.
Rathina stared about her with a frown on her brow.
Tania guessed what she was going through. Massive culture shock! “All this takes a bit of getting used to,” she said sympathetically.
“’Tis like the Feast of the White Hart and the Traveler’s Moon Festival and the Midsummer Revels all combined,” said Rathina. “’Tis pure madness to live thus. How do these Mortals suffer it? And the smell, Tania! Spirits of air, does this whole world stink thus?”
“The towns do, pretty much,” Tania admitted. “You probably won’t notice it after a while.” She hoped she was right. After three weeks of breathing the pure, sweet Faerie air, she was having trouble herself coping with the unpleasant odors that wafted all around them: the smell of sun-baked iron and gravel from the railway, hot diesel, hot engines, motor oil, exhaust fumes drifting in from the street, fried onions and stale coffee from the nearby café, overpowering perfume and deodorant—and worse, the smell of far too many hot humans in need of showers.
Rathina’s expression changed suddenly, her lips tightening and her eyes becoming watchful. “Did you feel that, Tania?” she said.
“It’s probably just the train coming—”
“Nay. I felt a shadow on my heart.” She stared at Tania. “Did you feel nothing?”
Tania looked anxiously at her. “No. Nothing. What kind of thing?”
Rathina stared up and down the length of the platform.
“What is it?” asked Tania. “What’s wrong?”
“I can see nothing from here,” Rathina said. “These people mill around me like rats in a barrel!” She moved to the edge of the platform and made as if to jump onto the rails. Tania grabbed her just in time.
“No!” She dragged Rathina back through the staring people. “You can’t do that,” she said in a hard whisper. “You’ll get killed! Now tell me what’s the matter.”
Rathina’s eyes were dark with unease. “We are pursued,” she said. “Something has followed us through between the worlds. I feel a malign presence. It is close at hand.”
Before Tania could react to this, an electronic voice crackled over their heads. “The train now arriving at platform one is the fifteen fifty-eight service to London Victoria. Calling at Polegate, Lewes, Haywards Heath, Gatwick Airport, East Croydon, Clapham Junction, and London Victoria.”
A few moments later the rattle and growl of the coming train filled the air.
“Sweet blessed mercy!” said Rathina, shrinking away and throwing her hands over her ears as the green-and-white train came gliding in.
“I warned you it would be loud!” Tania shouted above the screaming brakes and clanking cars and hissing doors. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. It’ll take us to London.”
But as the passengers disembarked, Tania wondered uneasily about the shadowy pursuit that Rathina had sensed. She gazed at the milling crowds.
Had something really followed them through from Faerie? Something bad? If so, why was it
here—and who or what was it?
XII
“Does nothing in this benighted world function without hideous din?” complained Rathina.
“Not if you want to get somewhere fast,” said Tania. “And we do. We’re on a really tight deadline, Rathina.”
“Aye, indeed, but it will take much effort to accustom myself to the noise, sister.”
They had found themselves a double seat in a crowded car near the front of the train. Opposite them sat a young man plugged into an iPod and a woman talking on a cell phone.
The train was speeding through an open countryside of fields and woodlands under a blue sky bubbling with clouds.
“This train will get us to London in an hour and a half,” said Tania. “How long would it take you to travel from Veraglad to the Royal Palace?”
“On a mettlesome charger such as Maddalena and at the gallop, mayhap I could make the journey in half a day.”
“There you go, then,” said Tania. “Trains are good. How’s your sandwich?”
She had bought them some sandwiches and snacks from the cart. She had also quite fancied some soda, but since that came in a can, she had to make do with a carton of black currant juice. There had been a tricky moment when the attendant had tried to give her some change and Tania had only just managed to snatch her hand away. The coins had gone clattering and rolling over the floor.
Rathina chewed a mouthful of sandwich. “It will suffice.” She looked around and shook her head. “I do not know how it was that Edric Chanticleer was able to live in this world for half a year.” She looked at Tania. “Did he not find it strange and harsh?”
Tania pursed her lips. “I don’t know,” she said sharply. “Maybe. I never got around to asking him.” Her fingers moved up to fondle the teardrop of black onyx at her throat. She had considered throwing it in his face or perhaps just hurling it from her balcony in the Sunset Tower. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to part with it. Not just yet.
She was nowhere near ready to talk about Edric. She was surviving their break-up only by not thinking about it. But locked away in a miserable cellar in her mind a small voice was crying, It’s not real. It can’t be real. I love him. How could this have happened?
Change the subject. Now!
“Did you know our mother wasn’t from Faerie?” Tania asked. “I found out about it only yesterday.”
“The tale of our mother’s coming to Faerie is known by all,” said Rathina.
“Except that no one told me about it.”
“I thought you would have remembered.”
“Rathina, how many more times…? I can hardly remember anything. You know that.”
“Then listen and remember now, for it is a story we all know by heart,” said Rathina, glancing around the car to make sure no one was listening. “Some fifty years before the coming of the uneasy slumber of the Great Twilight, a small ship made landfall at the coastal town of Hymnal in the Earldom of Weir. It had but one passenger: a Mortal woman who was almost dead from hunger and thirst. She was taken to Caer Liel and questioned by Lord Aldritch.” Rathina’s eyes shone. “She told a remarkable tale. She said that her name was Titania and that she was the daughter of the House of Fenodree in the land of Alba, which lies across the Western Ocean. She revealed that it was foretold at her birth that when she came to her twentieth birthday, she should take a ship alone and seek out the Realm of Faerie. And this was a thing that none of her race had done for a thousand years. And furthermore it was prophesied that if she came to Faerie, she would be blessed with the gift of Immortality—for the people of Alba are but Mortals and live little over five score years. It was foretold also that she would never be able to return to Alba to share the secret of life everlasting but would live out her days forever in Faerie.”
Tania gazed spellbound as Rathina told the tale. These were things of which she knew nothing.
“So remarkable was Titania’s story that Lord Aldritch sent her south with his only son, that she might tell her tale to the King himself. But when our father first set his eyes upon her, he was consumed with such a love that he would brook no other outcome of their meeting but that they should wed.” Rathina smiled. “And such was the love that swelled for the King in Titania’s heart that she full gladly accepted his hand. They were married upon Midsummer’s Eve, not two moons later than her ship had first made landfall. And with the Hand-Fasting Ceremony so the doom of mortality sloughed from our dear mother’s soul and thus was the prophecy fulfilled.”
“So she was born Mortal?” murmured Tania.
“Aye, and for twenty summers did she bear that burden.” Rathina frowned thoughtfully. “Mayhap that is how she was able to endure with such fortitude her five-hundred-year exile among Mortal folk.”
Tania let out a breath and sat back, gazing blankly out of the window at the rushing blur of the countryside, hardly knowing what to make of Rathina’s tale. All she knew was that she felt a new closeness to her Faerie mother. She, too, had been forced to choose between the place where she was brought up and a strange new world of which she knew almost nothing.
Rathina had trouble coping with the crowds that flooded the platform at London Victoria Station. Life as a princess in Faerie had not prepared her for rush hour at a major London terminal.
“Keep up and keep with me,” Tania warned her. “It’s easy to get lost otherwise.”
“To what manner of place have you brought me, sister?” asked Rathina, staring around her. “Is all of London thus?”
“No, this is especially bad,” said Tania, linking her arm with Rathina’s to keep her by her side. “It’s crazy, I know, but we’ll soon be out of it. Trust me, this world isn’t as bad as you think. There are things here you’d really like.”
“I will have to take your word on that,” Rathina said doubtfully.
As the crowds surged toward the exit, Tania realized she would not be able to go through the metal ticket barriers. She pulled Rathina to one side, letting the main rush of people sweep by them. Fortunately there was a man at the swing door who allowed them through.
The forecourt was as packed as the platform but more chaotic, with people hurrying or standing around watching the departure screen that stretched above the entrance to the platforms.
“Are you hungry at all?” Tania asked her sister.
“I think not. The sandcakes you bartered for on the train sated my appetite for the present.”
Tania squeezed her sister’s arm. “Sandwiches,” she said. “And it wasn’t bartering; I paid cash.”
Rathina looked confused. “Yes, you must explain this cash to me.”
“I will but not now. We have to find a phone.” She tried to head for the main exit from the station—she was pretty sure that was where the pay phones were—but Rathina wouldn’t budge.
“What’s wrong?” Tania asked.
“What is a ‘phone’?”
“I told you. It’s a thing we use to talk to people a long way away.”
“Ah. Like the water-mirrors from which our mother conjures distant faces and voices, yes?”
“Kind of.”
“And do all Mortals have the skills to use this phone?”
“Rathina, it’s not a mystical thing. It’s a machine. Come with me and I’ll show you how it works. You’ll have to help me, anyway: The keypad and receiver will be metal, so you’ll have to dial.”
Rathina allowed herself to be led across the forecourt, but Tania could hear her muttering to herself, “Keypad! Dial! Phone! Cash! Forsooth I shall need a tutor and an almanac if I am to understand the ways of this new world.”
The sisters were on another train. Tania had managed to get Connor’s cell phone number from his mum, and she had called him and arranged to meet at his student digs. It was a much shorter journey this time, but the train was considerably more crowded.
They couldn’t even find seats, which proved a real problem for Tania. Everything she could have held on to was made of metal
. In the end she stood Rathina in a corner by a door and leaned against her for support as the train went rattling over the River Thames and away into the southeast of London.
The train finally clattered to a halt at their stop and the doors hissed open. A number of people got off with them, and Tania went with the flow along the platform. She had never been here before. She didn’t really know this part of London; everything south of the Thames was a bit of a mystery to her.
Connor Estabrook had sounded really pleased to hear from her when she had called him from Victoria Station. After some general chat about their families, she had told him that she was in need of some expert medical info for a school project she had to research and write up over the summer break. He’d been only too happy to oblige, although he had been a bit surprised that she needed to see him immediately.
“Yeah, why not,” he’d said after a moment’s pause. “I’ve got nothing on this evening. I’m on workplace training at King’s College Hospital in Camberwell. If I can get away early, I’ll meet you at Denmark Hill station. If not, my address is Top Flat, thirteen Garner Road, Peckham. Ask for directions. My flatmate Peter will be there; he’ll keep you entertained till I arrive.”
Now here they were, coming out of the station along with several dozen commuters. The other people peeled off in different directions, leaving Tania and Rathina standing alone on the pavement outside the brick railway station.
“Is this still London?” asked Rathina, gazing around. “It has a more wholesome air, Tania. I can breathe here, and there is much that lives and grows!”
“Yes, it’s still London,” Tania said. “London is a big place.”
But Rathina was right. It was as if all the grime and bustle and cramped oppression of the city had been left north of the river. They were on a wide street lined with trees. A short way off Tania saw huge rhododendron bushes pressing against park railings, their deep pink flowers hanging into the street. There were still tarmac and large buildings and passing traffic, but there was also a sense of space.