by Gwynn White
Fighting wooziness, he scrambled to the other side of the standing stone. He drew his knife from the thigh pocket of his flying suit. One pace … one and a half. He hacked at the turf. His knife grated on metal. He ripped up the grass roots with his hands.
Verdigris gleamed through the soil. Ran wrestled the box out of its resting place. It looked just like it had in his dream. He opened the lid—
—and squeaked in shock.
The box held no sturdy army-issue blade, but only a toy. An electric sword like that one he’d had when he was six, with a blunt aluminum blade. It was not even a new toy. Most of the LEDs were missing from the hilt, and the lid to the battery compartment was broken. The only thing it had in common with the Worldcracker was that the battery was missing.
28
Leonie
The Same Morning. November 23rd, 1979. Penzance
The impact of the car crash flung Leonie upright in bed. Sun flooded in the window.
She had not crashed. She was in Acton Castle, near Penzance, in Cornwall.
She and HM had driven through the night, taking it in shifts. They’d only made a single stop, to refuel in a farmyard where no one was home. She’d shown the king how to siphon petrol out of another car’s tank using a length of plastic tubing and your mouth. One learns something new every day, HM had said, and she had laughed, but he wasn’t even smiling.
She’d kept waiting for him to be the way he was on television, wry and brisk. Maybe that was too much to expect under the circumstances. But maybe he wasn’t really like that at all. Maybe that was just an act, and the real king was the cold, formal, withdrawn man who had sat in silence for almost ten hours straight, letting her do most of the driving and make all the decisions.
The riskiest bit had been crossing Dartmoor, which hosted a Crown Army base. Only a single road crossed the moor. There’d been checkpoints at both ends. But the khaki lackeys had waved Leonie through with scarcely a glance at her ‘sleeping’ passenger. They weren’t on the lookout for the king, because Oswald Day could hardly mount a nationwide search for someone he’d already declared dead.
He must be shitting himself, she thought, stretching luxuriously in bed.
Bleeding hell, I hope he doesn’t guess we’re here.
She threw back the covers, a complicated assemblage of sheets and blankets and whisper-soft crochet. She was in a lady’s room with carved paneling and beast-footed furniture. The best room she’d ever slept in. Rising, she padded to the window.
Her heart sank.
When they arrived at Acton Castle at four in the morning, she hadn’t been able to get a feel for how the place was situated.
Now she could see that it was a security nightmare.
Her window overlooked an improbably lush garden. Beyond that, a tumbledown stone wall that wouldn’t stop an army of cripples. And beyond that, a barren slope dotted with sheep fell three-quarters of a mile or so to the seashore.
Opening the window, craning into a bitter wind, she saw that the headland curved back and dropped to a bay shielded by the cliffs. The town of Penzance lay at the head of the bay. Boats dotted the harbor. It looked as if there was only the one access road up to Acton Castle.
Castle, they called it, but this was no bloody castle. It was just a manor house.
The wind sliced through the pyjamas she was wearing, which were made of heavy yellow silk that caught on the rough skin of her knees and elbows. She banged the window down.
Her civvies had been laundered overnight. Clean and lavender-scented, they looked tattier than ever when she got them on. Feeling naked without a weapon, she found her way downstairs.
“Morning, mate. Where’s the bloke I came with?” she asked the first servant she met.
“His Majesty is in the library with Sir Robert. Would you …”
“Nah, I’m fine.” Cripes! But maybe it had been unavoidable to let the household know HM was here; he was recognizable, after all ...
“… care for breakfast? If you would be seated in the dining room …”
“Now that you mention it, I’ll take you up on that offer. But never mind the dining room. Just point me to the kitchen.”
The cook and kitchen-maid seemed to have no more grasp of the security situation than the steward had. Slow-moving country women with thick accents, they provided her with tea and a pile of toast with butter, clotted cream, and homemade blackcurrant jam. She gobbled the lot. Eat when you can, ’cos you don’t know when your next scoff is coming, Gav used to say.
The television on the kitchen counter flashed the intro to the ten o’clock news.
“Today, the nation mourns,” intoned an RBC presenter. “While condolences from international royalty continued to pour into the Tower of London, the Royal Broadcasting Corporation received a staggering volume of correspondence from the English people.” The presenter started to read some of the letters. “’I feel as if I’ve lost one of my own family …’”
People really do love HM. They might’ve made fun of him, but now they’re sorry. Good.
Leonie felt uneasy, though: all this public mourning was going to make HM’s reappearance awkward—people might feel as if they’d been played for fools.
“This morning, thousands have converged on the Tower of London to pay their respects. An estimated twenty thousand more line the route from the Tower to St. Paul’s Cathedral, where the late king’s funeral will be held at noon.”
They must be hoping to get away with a closed coffin and fake relics. What brass neck.
“You are now watching live footage shot from the RBC’s helicopter.”
Crowds jamming Thames Street and Tower Park, the chaos providing a handy excuse for roadblocks that diverted vehicle traffic away from the castle.
Close-ups of flowers piled in heaps, handwritten notes—WE STILL LUV U TRISTAN—and a young man jumping up on one of the security chicanes to shake his fist at the sky, a Wessex flag wrapped around his shoulders, tears pouring down his face.
“Here they come! Oswald Day, Lord Regent! And standing at his side, the heir presumptive! Crown Prince Michael!”
There was no sound feed from the helicopter, but Leonie could practically read the lips of the crowd—Michael! Michael! As if they were cheering a favorite who’d just cantered into the stadium. And there was the little prince himself, standing in the open back of a limousine, holding his father’s hand. The black arch of the Traitor’s Gate framed them in sunlight for an instant. Lord Day was doing the royal wave with crocodile tears in his eyes. Michael was just a tot, dark-haired like his mother, small for his age.
“Eee, the little angel,” said the cook, standing at Leonie’s shoulder.
Leonie looked at the woman. What on earth could be going on inside that thick skull? “But His Majesty’s not dead,” she said.
“Of course he’s not. It’s all a mistake, i’nt it? By, folk will be happy when he comes back from the dead.”
“Dunno why they think he’s dead this time,” the maid said. “He allus keeps it quiet when he’s down here, don’t he, Miss Bessie? Must be half a dozen times he’s visited Sir Robert since I was taken on, and they never said nothing about it on the telly before.”
Oh, Leonie thought. I see.
She took a last gulp of tea and wiped her mouth. “I’m going for a stroll, all right?”
The kitchen had a back door that opened directly onto a vegetable garden. Around the side of the house, fruit trees bowed their branches over neatly trimmed lawns and masses of roses. The white rose was the Cornwall crest, but here were not only white but yellow, pink, red, tiger-striped, polka-dotted, and rainbow-gradated ones. Leonie wandered down paths between solid walls of ornamental rhododendrons. You could get lost in here, easy. But shubbery mazes wouldn’t stop the ROCK, if they found out HM was here.
She cast a baleful eye at the hilltop looming behind the house. If worst came to worst, maybe they could escape over the headland on foot. But there was no cover up there. The
coast of Cornwall was as barren as a looted shop.
Which meant that Sir Robert must employ a small army of gardeners to keep this spread up. Funny she hadn’t seen any of them.
A man’s voice came suddenly from beyond the rhododendrons. “If only you’d consulted me beforehand, Tristan!”
Leonie froze. She heard footsteps, and then HM’s voice. “I suppose I was afraid you’d talk me out of it.”
“I would have tried.” The other speaker had to be Sir Robert. He sounded old, breathless. They sat down on the other side of the bushes. She stood motionless, scarcely daring to breathe. “Why did you not tell me the Black Mother had parleyed with you?”
“I do not think it was a parley. She came to me after Harry’s death in the form of a raven. Does this sound as if I have gone around the twist? I wish I had. A raven the size of a dog. It perched on my windowsill and broke the glass with its beak at four o’clock in the morning. I have your sacrifice of you now, it said. And I will have the rest, too. Look to your daughter and your grandchildren. She came to gloat over me, Robert. I will have it all! she shouted, and when I sat up in bed, she shat on the windowsill and flew off.”
“You did not think to throw salt on her tail?”
“Are you making light of this?”
“No. God help me, no. I saw her with my own eyes, when she returned to our world in the body of a kitchen-maid.”
“Vivienne and Alec also saw her. They also survived that night. But both of them have chosen to forget.” Anger thickened HM’s voice. “So did I! For thirty long years I tried to forget … and Harry paid for it with his life.”
“Is that why …”
“Why I killed Piers? To even things out?”
“No, old friend,” Sir Robert said hastily. “I did not mean—”
“Yes, you did. That is what the whole country thinks. But it’s not true. Robert, I loved that boy. Vivienne forced me to take his life, because she would not give me the damned sword.”
“The Worldcracker.”
“What other sword is there? She has it, you know. She’s had it all along.”
“And so you planned to assault Dublin and take it from her.”
“Yes.”
“Ah, Tristan.”
“I know! Damn you, I know! She was my brother’s wife. I did not want to do it, do you understand me? And that is why—before we launched the assault—I determined to try—one last thing.”
“Tell me about that,” breathed Sir Robert’s creaky voice.
When HM spoke at last, his voice was thick, broken. “I thought I could use the loser of the trial. A warrior dead in combat—that’s just the sort of sacrifice she favors, according to the ancient sources. But neither of them died! So then I had no choice.”
“You executed Piers.”
“And kept his head.”
“Yes. The head of an innocent man unjustly slain. That, too, is a powerful material.”
“And Castle Arundel is a place of power. It’s why the Arundels moved out. Ghosts, they said, strange noises in the crypt, milk always going sour. I had half a regiment of the Crown Army to help me cast the circle. Unknowingly, of course.”
Half a regiment … and one Company operator. Leonie stood immobile, mouth hanging open.
“You sought to summon the Black Mother.” Sir Robert sounded as horrified as Leonie felt. “This time, a-purpose.”
“Yes!” HM said defiantly. “That foul demon has taken so much of me, does it not seem fair that I should have something of her in return? In the old days, she shared her power with her chosen acolytes. That is why the magicians of yore were so much more powerful than we are.”
“But theirs was black magic! The magicians of old were divided. Those who belonged to the Church relied upon the Latin Scriptures for their power. The others … as you say. They made sacrifices to the Elder Gods and shared in their power. The power to destroy! It was black magic that sank the Americas, black magic that turned China into a wasteland; it is black magic that has bound the subcontinent to the Pharaoh’s evil will. Would you now bring black magic into Europe, the last remaining bastion of civilization?”
“Robert, we cannot turn back time. It was a mistake to purge all the magicians, black and white alike. We agree on that. But done is done. Not a single intact copy of the Latin Scriptures survives, and even if it did, what good would it do us, who no longer believe in the Lord of Miracles? Look me in the eye, Robert, and tell me you believe … in anything.”
There was a silence.
“As you say,” Sir Robert admitted. “I believe in … yes, in anything. Whatever works, as the commoners say.”
HM laughed shortly. “I forgot to congratulate you on the garden. Your roses are looking splendid.”
“Watered with the tears of young boys. My little hobby.”
“That’s right. so don’t you take a high moral tone with me. We can hardly call ourselves magicians. Scavengers, rather, sifting through the debris of the past for crumbs of power. We are in no position to pass up any opportunity … especially when the safety of the realm may depend on it.”
Magicians. Black magic. Foul demon. Power power power power. The words rang around Leonie’s head like coins in a spin-drier. What had she gotten herself mixed up in here?
A struck match spat. Smoke wafted through the rhododendrons.
“So, tell me, Tristan … did it work?”
“If it had, would I be here now, officially dead, on the run from my own son-in-law? Before we could complete the ritual, Oswald betrayed me.”
“That traitorous knave.”
“I trusted him, Robert. He was my closest confidant, my daughter’s husband, the father of my heir. Fool that I am! And now I’ve lost Ringgil.”
“He’ll be sorely missed.”
“But all hope is not lost,” HM said.
It isn’t? Leonie thought.
“I have in my possession a little book that once belonged to Diarmait MacConn, with his handwriting on it and a trace of his blood. As you know, the Black Mother joined herself to his cause after the Belfast Uprising, under the name of Millie O’Braonain.”
“Alyx O’Braonain—”
“Their daughter. Still pesters Ireland, and I have had to let her live, for fear of offending the mother. But that’s scarcely the most pressing of my troubles now. See here?” There was a crackling noise, as of a map being unfolded. “Ringgil and I used the souvenir to trace the Black Mother to her lair.”
“How did you do that?”
“She was the only woman Diarmair MacConn truly loved, God help him. What endures of him is indissolubly joined to her. And so his spirit guided us to her. I saw her in Ringgil’s cauldron—a vision of ugliness, by the way. The years have not been kind.”
“Having found her, couldn’t you have winkled her out the usual way, using the police?”
“The Black Mother, Robert? How well do you think that would have gone? No, I had to summon her with power—to make her obey me. But then Oswald’s men struck.”
“So near, and yet so far,” Sir Robert grunted.
“But all is not lost. I know where she is, and I shall go there myself.”
“Impossible! Depend on it, Oswild’s men are hunting you even now. Your first duty is to survive. You must flee to safety!”
“You certainly know how to hearten a man, Robert.”
“I speak only the truth. I would lay down my life for you, but I cannot protect you here. You must go to your cousins in Germany.”
Leonie exhaled in relief. At last they were talking sense. But then HM laughed. It was the first real laugh she’d heard from him since Castle Arundel. “The Bismarcks? Are you serious? My father-in-law has wished me dead for years. For all I know he may have plotted this with Oswald.”
“Rainer Bismarck is an honorable man—”
“And the financial markets are in a mess, and he takes that sort of thing seriously.” HM spoke with utter contempt. “No, if I went to Rainer I would end
up plastinated. Or rather, I would end up cremated, and a touched-up doppelganger with a decent credit rating would end up on the auction block, sold off to pay the senior bondholders.”
“Go to Spain, then! King Carlos owes his realm to you. He cannot refuse you sanctuary. My yacht is at your disposal.”
“Old friend, your loyalty means a great deal. But I’m done with running.”
There was a long pause.
“At least I beg you, don’t do this alone,” Sir Robert said, sounding defeated. “Can’t you call on your livery for aid?”
“Not and hope for much,” HM said cheerfully. “I kept the Wessex livery separate from National Chivalry. But all the really useful people wanted to be in NatChiv. I’m afraid the livery has turned into a sinecure for retired navy men and minor nobles prone to the vapors.”
Leonie started to back away from the rhododendrons.
“At any rate, I have a handful of men of whom I’m fairly sure,” HM said, “if only because they’re too stupid for Oswald to have recruited them. Brakespear—you know, the retired admiral, former ambassador to Germany—he should be capable of getting my daughter here in one piece. When she arrives, we’ll discuss this again. You’ll have another chance to dissuade me then, and no doubt Madelaine will try to dissuade me, too.”
Leonie clutched her head. Sire, no! You DIDN’T!
Sir Robert sounded equally shocked. “You aren’t thinking of taking her with you, Tristan?”
“God, no! We’ll put her on your yacht. She shall go to Carlos in Spain, and we’ll pray he has enough chivalry to protect her from her enemies … such as her husband.”
Leonie fled through the shrubbery, placing her toes down before her heels to make as little sound as possible. When she got out of hearing range, she swore out loud.
“You are mad, Sire! Bringing Her Royal Highness here?”
But then she stopped. Outrageous as it seemed, this could be their best chance of derailing Live-Long Day’s coup. If he couldn’t produce the king’s body, and he couldn’t produce his wife, either, his regency was going to start looking quite dodgy, wasn’t it?