by Gwynn White
There were several cars and pantechnicons parked outside the Cork Hill Gate. The lettering on them read RBC and IBC and Scottish Television. Everyone in Britain wanted to know what Mother thought about the news that Lord Lancashire had turned traitor, slaying the king and Lord Stuart during a training exercise, only to be arrested himself by Lord Day.
What Ran would have said, if they’d asked him, was: “Hurrah!” The only bad part was that House Wessex still held the throne, as Oswild Day’s son, Crown Prince Michael, was now the heir apparent. But the fate of Britain didn’t really matter to Ran anymore. He was running away. Flying away, far far away from all of them. He might go to Africa or something.
For tonight, he planned to camp in the Wicklow Forest.
Stretching for miles south of Dublin, the Wicklow Forest was a remnant of the primordial forests that had blanketed Ireland in days of yore. Some of the trees in the heart of the wood were supposed to be thousands of years old. The forest had been preserved by the nobility for their sporting pleasure, so it was not exactly trackless. Hunting trails ran hither and yon through it, and there were several cabins, at least one of which had electricity and running water.
That was where Ran intended to camp: Randolph’s Retreat, built by his great-grandfather and namesake.
But now, as he peered down past Honor’s neck, the Forest looked black and wild, the trees forming a solid cover.
He and his brothers had flown this way dozens of times. Piers on the big, mackerel-striped dragon Egad Sir, Ran on Honor, and Guy on Utterly Hopeless, the blue dragon who was anything but. Those hunting trips with his brothers had been the best times Ran ever had, and now they would never, ever come again.
The lights of the castle grew smaller and smaller behind them until Ran, twisting in his saddle, could no longer see the glow of Dublin. The wind seemed to cut straight through his flying suit. His teeth chattered, and he’d forgotten to wear gloves.
Honor dived. Only Ran’s harness held him on her back. She snapped her wings out just above the treetops, throwing him back in his saddle, and he saw what she had seen, a clearing among the trees. She circled down and landed in long grass.
Ran jumped off her back, full of hope, but they had not landed on a trail, much less in front of a cabin. It was only a clearing, roughly circular, with a standing stone in the middle.
They were out of the wind, anyway. Honor had done well to find this place. They would just have to spend the night here, and look for the trail when dawn came.
Ran’s face tingled with returning warmth as he clumsily unsaddled Honor. Being reptiles and part-fey besides, dragons did not lather up like horses, but her sides heaved, and her carnivore’s breath whoofed into his face. She licked the wet grass, desperate for moisture.
Stupid, stupid! Ran had been so confident they would reach Randolph’s Retreat tonight. Treat your steed better than you treat yourself, and she’ll do the same for you, he remembered Piers saying. He pawed through the contents of his knapsack. He had two bottles of ginger ale, some sandwiches and chocolate, and a household-size packet of crisps he had begged from the kitchen staff, who were all eager to feed him up after his accident. Could dragons drink ginger ale? He poured some into a little depression at the foot of the standing stone. Honor took one taste and wrinkled her lips. Ran felt wretched.
“I’m sorry, my straker. I’m so sorry. Here, have some ham …” He pulled out the filling of his sandwiches. She wolfed it. “At least it’s stopped raining.”
They cuddled up in the wet grass at the foot of the standing stone, Ran getting much the better of it since he could lean against Honor’s warm back. She motitated, thrumming under him like an engine. All the same the cold and damp seeped through his flying suit. It would be drier under the trees, but the forest that pressed close all around the clearing looked black and unfriendly. He heard animals crashing distantly through the trees and thought with a shiver: Boars. Guy said he saw a wolf once … Fey!
No, that was just in books. In real life, the fey were extinct.
It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right … Somehow, Ran fell asleep.
A Few Minutes Later
His eyes opened. It had grown light in the clearing, but there was something odd about the light. Brackish, it seeped from the low grey sky, from everywhere and nowhere, the way minutes trickled past on long, slow afternoons of lessons.
And Honor was gone.
Ran tottered to his feet.
Mist curled between the trees around the clearing, which grew so densely that he couldn’t see more than a few yards into the forest.
“Ran! Hullo, Ran, are you there?”
Ran jumped. “Yes,” he shouted.
Piers strode into the clearing, carrying a pack, his hair hanging down past his shoulders. “It’s good to see you, little brother.”
Ran rushed at Piers and threw his arms around him. Piers picked him up the way he used to do when Ran was little.
“Oof! You’re too heavy for that now.”
Ran cried for sheer happiness. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “You’re alive! I thought you were dead! They wouldn’t let me go to the trial. They said you were—were executed. How did you get away? Everyone’s going to be so happy—oh, and Piers, Uncle Tristan is dead, did you know? So we can’t get our vengeance on him, what a bore! But who cares, you’re alive!”
Piers was still smiling, but his eyes were sad. He looked thin. His clothes were odd, too: he wore a dark business suit without a shirt underneath it, and an arms belt with a hunting knife. A Sauvage-green scarf was tied around his neck. He shook his head slowly.
“Oh.” Ran’s eyes welled up again. “Oh. I’m dreaming. I see.”
“No,” Piers said. “You’re not dreaming … well, not just dreaming.” He pinched Ran’s arm, eyebrows raised. “Did you wake up? No. You see, there’s something about this place.” He slapped the standing stone. “The ancient Irish didn’t just bung their standing stones up at random; they put them in important places. This one marks a door to the Otherworld.”
“We … we’re in the Otherworld?” His nurse had told him stories about the Otherworld, where the fey came from. Scary stories.
“Only sort of,” Piers said reassuringly. “This door is open, but you can’t actually go through it. Only the fey can do that. But because you’re an incurable, you can see through it. There’s something called the second sight, and that’s what you’re using right now.”
“Where’s Honor?”
“Don’t worry. She’s back in the real clearing, waiting for you.”
“They want to train me as a magician, Piers! Uncle Francis says he can teach me to do curses and charms and all sorts of things, but I don’t want to. I just want to be normal.”
“Oho, that wretch finally got his way, did he?” Piers shook his head. “Francis has been pestering Mother for years about you. He’s a miserable man. He’s wrecked every business Mother has given him to manage. Magic is all he’s good at, and so he pretends it’s a better thing than it really is. The truth is, magicians can’t do very much these days. Their lore has all been lost. I can’t tell you how much of our money Francis has wasted, hunting down old books and artefacts—and none of it is actually any more useful than a gun or a checkbook, when it comes to getting things done. It wasn’t only the Latin Scriptures that were purged, you see. It was an entire way of life.”
“That’s exactly what I said!” Well, he would have if he knew how to marshal arguments like Piers. “Oh, how I wish you could tell them ...”
“It’s an idiotic idea. You’re too old already! In the old days, incurables started training as soon as they could walk. Besides, you’ve got something more important to do. And that’s what I’m here for.”
Piers dumped his pack, drew his hunting knife and sliced into the turf. When he’d cut three sides of a rectangle, he worked his knife under the roots of the grass.
“One pace to the north of the standing stone. Pace it out s
o you’ll remember.”
Piers peeled the turf back like a lid. There was a long, narrow box buried in the ground. It had a ring in its top, which Piers twisted to open. From a bed of linen wrappings he lifted out—
A sword.
A perfectly ordinary double-edged bastard sword, like the ones they issued to army officers. Piers handed it to Ran. It had old-fashioned straight quillons. A cord-wrapped grip. An undecorated pommel. The blade was slender, with a diamond cross-section, almost as tall as Ran.
“This is the Worldcracker.”
“The what?”
“Do you ever pay attention in your lessons? This is the sword that slew sixty million Russians. The sword that can only be wielded by the true king of Great Britain. I died for this sword, little brother.”
“O-oh.”
“Harold Wessex gave it to our other grandfather, Niall Sauvage, and asked him to hide it. So Niall did. He told Mother about it, but she never told another living soul. Which proves that two people can keep a secret,” Piers joked, “if both of them are Sauvages. But Tristan wanted the sword back. And our father was afraid he might find it. So he started looking for it himself.”
“But Mother had it all along?”
“Yes, and she tried to put Father off his quest, but Father never gave up. And in the end, he found it. In the weapons room at Sixpoints.”
“That’s where Mother hid it?”
“A good hiding-place! It took Father decades to figure it out. But he thought it wasn’t a good hiding-place. So he took it and he buried it here.”
“Did he tell Mother he’d found it?”
“No. The subject had become quite sensitive by then.”
Ran nodded.
“And then he died. So the Worldcracker was lost, after all. It’s one of those laugh-or-cry things.”
“But—but how did you find it?”
An unfamiliar, sad expression pinched Piers’s features. “When I got here, the first person I met was Father himself.”
“Really? Where is he now?” Ran looked around as if the father he could not remember might walk out of the trees.
“He couldn’t come today,” Piers said evasively. “He sent you his love. How does the sword feel in your hands?”
“It’s too big for me.”
“Notice anything else?”
“It’s really light.” Ran swung the Worldcracker experimentally, its three-and-a-half-foot length less awkward than he would have expected.
“Try twisting the pommel.”
Ran did. It came off in his hands. The grip was hollow. “I know what’s supposed to go in here! A battery! It’s an electric sword! I had one of these when I was six.”
“Right.”
“But—but isn’t it really old? Did they even have batteries in those days?”
“It was a magical battery. And now for the bad news: the battery is missing. We think Harold must have lost it in Russia. “
“Doesn’t it work without it?”
“Well, in the hands of the true king of Great Britain, it ought to do something. But I don’t know exactly what.” Piers mustered a smile. “I thought maybe I’d wield it myself one day, if I ever found it. Ha, ha.”
“But you aren’t, weren’t, the true king.”
“Harry’s death left me second in line to the throne.”
“After Michael.”
“Yes. And now Tristan’s dead … I haven’t seen him around; maybe he’s been caught already …”
“Caught by what? By who?” Ran said, glancing nervously at the trees.
Piers did not answer. He pointed at Ran, and for a moment his face looked like a skull, his eyes too bright. “One five-year-old boy is all that stands between you and the throne. Michael’s a sweet kid. I wish him long life. But no one knows what may happen in the future.”
“I don’t want to …” The words slipped out of his mouth, and Piers bore down on him, angry now, angrier than Ran had ever seen him .
“Don’t want to! Don’t want to? Too bloody bad, Ran. This sanctity crisis is getting worse and worse. One doesn’t want to scare the populace, but there are people who spend every day thinking about these things, and they’re predicting war within ten years at the current rates of decline. That gives you enough time to grow up, barely. Do you have any idea what war in Europe would look like, now that we’ve all got aircraft carriers and jet fighters and ballistic missiles? No one has any idea. It is a terrifying prospect. And I should hope you know we’re seriously outgunned by Germany. We’d probably even lose a battle with Spain. Years of arse-backwards budgets and malfeasance at Defence to thank for that. But the Worldcracker is our ace in the hole. Our equalizer.”
“I—I didn’t know…”
“Of course you didn’t,” Piers said in an even scarier voice, quiet and sarcastic. “You don’t know anything. You’re a nine-year-old incurable bookworm with two left feet. God really must have a sense of humor.”
“Take it!” Ran squeaked. “I don’t want it!” He thrust the Worldcracker at Piers
Piers snatched the sword and hefted it into the third guard position, crossways over his head. It looked right in his hand. He looked right: splendid, menacing, terrible. For a dizzying instant he seemed to be taller than the trees.
Then he lowered the Sword, and the anger seemed to go out of him like a sigh. “Sorry.”
Ran felt like crying, but instead he squared his shoulders. “I’ll avenge you, Piers,” he said stoutly. “I’ll see House Wessex ground into dust for what they did to you. I swear it on the honor of Sauvage.”
“No. No, no, no! We can’t afford any more feuding. No vengeance, Ran. Promise me.”
“Guy wants to avenge you, too. It’s all he’s been talking about.”
“Oh, God. Tell him not to do anything stupid.”
“Can I tell him about you? Can I tell him I met you?”
“You can try,” Piers said. “Dearly as I love him, Guy isn’t really one for mystical stuff, is he? But the best thing you can do right now is simply to stay alive and grow up. Which is to say—on guard!”
Piers snatched his hunting knife out of its sheath and slashed at Ran’s head, slowly enough for Ran to catch the blow on the forte of the Worldcracker.
They hacked back and forth through the clearing, slashing and parrying. Piers’s shorter blade compensated for his longer reach. He corrected Ran’s footwork with curt shouts, and it was just like a hundred sweaty afternoons back in the arms yard at Dublin Castle . Ran struggled to adjust to the length of the Worldcracker. He started to slip back into some of his bad old habits, too, like staying on the defensive, and forgetting to thrust as well as cut.
“Follow through! Follow through!” Piers shouted, and Ran obeyed, lunging so violently that several inches of his blade ended up buried in Piers’s torso.
The hilt slid from his fingers. He gasped in horror. “I—I forgot you weren’t wearing armor—oh Piers—”
Piers hiked up his shirt. No trace of a wound showed on his belly. He smiled crookedly. “Stung a bit, but no damage done. Benefit of being dead.” He picked up the Worldcracker and passed it back to Ran. “That was good, but you let your center of gravity get ahead of your leading foot. You’d have lost your balance and been vulnerable to a counter-stroke.”
“Sorry.”
“Swordplay is ten percent skill and ninety percent aggression. Your heart has to lead the way. That’s why I’m trying to get you to be more aggressive.”
“So has everyone, for years and years,” Ran said sadly.
“You have to stop worrying about getting hurt.” Piers prodded him very gently in the chest with his knife.
“All right.”
“All right?”
“All right … Sauvage!’ Ran screamed, and attacked, surprising Piers onto the back foot.
At last they tired and sat down with their backs to the standing stone. Ran felt pleasantly limp. He leaned his head against Piers’s shoulder. “Do you remember when
we used to go hunting in Wicklow Forest? Remember that big boar Guy slew on my birthday?”
“Saints, yes! She brought down his horse and gored him in the leg. A noble brute. Ran, do you remember when …”
The time slipped by in reminiscences. Suddenly Ran realized the sky had grown lighter. “That’s funny,” he said drowsily. “I thought it was always the same time here.”
“No,” said Piers, who’d been quiet for a little while. “This is what dawn in the Otherworld looks like. The mist never lifts, but …” He stiffened abruptly. “Can you hear that?”
“What?”
Piers jumped to his feet. “Damn it.” He threw his things back into his pack. “I shouldn’t have stayed here so long! Stay on the move, Father told me ...”
Ran heard a faint noise from far away in the forest. It sounded like singing. “What’s happening?”
“They’re coming. Take the Worldcracker.”
“Are you going to be all right?”
“Yes! Go!”
“But—but I don’t know how to get back!”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Piers said. The singing was coming nearer. It was high, eerie, inhuman. “Just go back through the door! If you happen to see Hanna one of these days, tell her I still love her and I’m waiting for her. I hope I have to wait a long time. Now go, go!”
He thrust the flat of his hand into Ran’s back.
Ran lost his balance. He stumbled towards the standing stone, and because he was holding the Worldcracker he could not fling out a hand to catch himself. At the moment when the Worldcracker should have collided with it, the stone cracked open, sharp fragments of granite pelting his shoulders, and the crack grew into an abyss that swallowed him up.
He fell through darkness, weightless, paralyzed—
—and woke up.
Dawn filled the clearing, the sky rinsed blue, the first rays of sun catching the treetops, the air chilly. Spurts of birdsong trilled from the forest, a wholesome, cheerful sound.
Ran tasted lichen and stone dust in his mouth. Honor was awake. She snaked her head around and nipped his shoulder.