Coldfall Wood

by Steven Savile

  He was that memory.

  This was his land.

  And still they came, answering his call, his children.

  Word spread like fire, with the same destructive rage.

  Hwaet! Áríseaþ!

  Hark! Rise up!

  He was the Summer King.

  And he had returned.

  38

  Emmaline Barnes lay in her hospital bed. The name was a good one. It fit with who she thought she was, though the nurse insisted on shortening it to the more familiar Emma. She wasn’t an Emma. Never had been and never would be, not in any of her lives.

  Sweat matted the gray bangs of her hair and beaded in the deep crags and valleys of her face. She had no idea what that face looked like. No one had shown her a mirror since she’d woken up. There were no reflective surfaces for her to catch an unexpected glimpse of herself in. She had no idea when it was, or how long she’d been locked in the silences of her own mind, but she’d seen the slack skin of the backs of her hands, covered with liver spots, that looked like twigs in leather gloves; that was enough to know she’d slept the best part of a lifetime away in this body awaiting Arawn’s return.

  She had no real concept of time in this place.

  The sun came up in the window; the sun went down in the same window, day after day after day, night after night after night. She had no way of knowing how many times that had happened since she’d last uttered a word. Thousands. She’d become accustomed to telling the time by the changing fragrances of the ward around her, with the astringent burn of the disinfectants stronger in the dark hours as the cleaners worked unseen, fading during the daylight hours as the sweat and urine and blood battled to regain some sort of olfactory supremacy. The aromas had filtered through her unconsciousness to that strange place she’d been trapped, waiting for his return to wake her from hibernation. As it was, her old bones ached, her muscles atrophied, and her skin was raw with sores and sticky with the grease of ointments and unctions meant to alleviate the pain not moving caused.

  She could have changed it all, of course. It was in her power. All she had to do was give herself over to another facet of her trifold aspect; the innocent face of the maiden was her favorite for the subtle influences it wielded. Everyone loved a pretty face. There were things she was capable of in that guise that defied reason quite simply because men were so willingly stupid around her they forgot themselves; then there were the more womanly features of the mother, who had her own virtues when it came to manipulating the foolish sex, because every man at his core wanted to return to his mother, needing to be nourished with her love. But she chose the slack skin and brittle bones of the hag because they had suited her purpose. The world had a way of underestimating the elderly, it always had. And that was where true power lay, in being underestimated by your enemies.

  No one had taken away the dead flowers in the vase at the foot of the bed.

  The fragrance brought the flicker of sadness to her lips, but it didn’t last.

  She felt another one of them die. It was an acute stabbing pain that twisted in her gut as the thread binding them was severed. One by one the Sleepers were falling. It was only a matter of time now. Arawn was severing all ties with his Otherworld prison now that he was free of it, and there was nothing this old body of hers could do but wait for him to come for her. He would. They were bound in ways that went beyond the confines of the physical realm.

  She’d always known it would come to this.

  A crow settled on the sill outside the window. Within a minute it had been joined by a dozen more so that thirteen of the slick black birds jostled for place against the glass. Their beaks rata-tap-tapped against the window as they turned their beady eyes inward.

  The May Queen watched her children, listening to their muted caws through the glass as they told her their stories, her eyes and ears in the world outside, reporting back everything they had seen and heard since the Knucker found his legs. They were linked in ways that didn’t need words. Images of what they had seen out there flooded her mind; they were fractured and flighty, jumping from thought to thought like a bee pollinating a summer garden, but she was able to piece together a coherent whole: they had seen the Hunt abroad, the chalk twins doing the bidding of the trickster, Goodfellow. They were responsible for the deaths of the Sleepers and wouldn’t stop until the last of the five were dead and she was isolated in this place, the last tie to the past.

  The door opened.

  Alex Raines took the seat beside the bed, and reached for the communication board before she said, “How are we today, Emma?”

  Her eyes flicked across the letters, ignoring the question. She spelled out a name: Annie Cho.

  Alex looked confused.

  She spelled it out again. And again. Until she wrote it down.

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  This time she spelled out a different name: Bethany Laws.

  Alex wrote them both down. “I don’t understand what you are trying to tell me, Emma. Talk to me. Help me understand what you mean.”

  Dead. Her eyes flicked across the message quickly. Sleepers. Need to help the others. Keep them safe.

  Alex repeated the words back to her, as though she couldn’t quite believe she’d interpreted the eye movements correctly. She spelled out one word. Yes.

  “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, Emma.”

  Frustration bubbled over inside her head. She looked down at her hands, willing them to move, even just a finger, a twitch.

  Come closer, she spelled out with her eyes, causing Alex to lean in, ever so slightly. Closer, she repeated until Alex’s face was inches from hers, as though they were on the verge of that transition from friends to lovers with the first tentative kiss.

  Fly, she thought, the thought greeted by a flurry of wings beating against the glass as the gathering of crows took flight. Bring me back word of what is happening to the land, my children. The sudden burst of noise made Alex turn toward the window. In that moment, the hag’s cadaverous hands snaked out and grasped either side of her head, bones digging into her temples as she drew her close. There was nothing tender in this twisted embrace. Alex cried out, more in shock than in pain, at least at first, but the pain followed as her mind was flooded with all Emmaline had seen, all she feared, filling her head with images of Albion fallen, of the Wild Hunt, the chalk giants, Jenny Greenteeth, the mischievous Puck himself, and of course, at the heart of everything, Arawn. The myths and legends of an all but forgotten land flashed through Alex’s mind; the truths of the Time Between Times, of the failed magic of the earth, all of it, and every time the picture she shared was worth so much more than a thousand words wasted trying to explain the importance or impact of what she was sharing. Emmaline shared the truth of the lightning-struck tree and the nature of the Bain Shee, the single darkest evil to face this and all other realms. They were the eaters of worlds. They were the darkness. And with the veil between their worlds tearing, the inevitability of death for all, promised oblivion as more of the pale warriors came through. Hidden away within the kaleidoscope of icons and images, the truth about the old woman on the bed and who she really was. The last thing Alex saw was a great sword sheathed in light. Runes chased down the sides of it. There were runnels carved deep into the blade to help the blood of the dead spill off it. She couldn’t read the ancient script, but somehow she knew what it said: Freagarthach. The blade of Manannan, she knew, forged by the Mother Goddess of the Aos Shee, Danu. It blazed with a light strong enough to banish the darkness of their kin, the Bain Shee. The sword was a weapon fit to kill a God King. Through the ages of man it had owned many names, the Answerer, the Retaliator, but most fitting of all, the last it had ever answered to: Widowmaker. She saw it lying on the chest of a dead man, in a ruined temple.

  She grasped the nature of balance and the war that was to come. She understood that the Bain Shee—or Banshee as the word formed in her mind—stood against all humanity, old gods and new, agai
nst the realm of the fae and the sons and daughters of the Aos Shee, or the fair folk as the stories had renamed them. In the struggle for life she saw the ultimate darkness of the Bain Shee and how it would need the amassed strengths of all the champions of light, no matter their differences, to come together against the coming dark or they would all perish. The Horned God and his Hunt, the Eternal, The Holly King and the Oak King, the May Queen, the Chalk Brothers, the trickster, all of them would have to stand beside her friends and loved ones, despite all of their differences, it was that or the end of everything.

  The enemy they faced was not their enemy at all. Arawn was one of the purest champions of the Aos Shee, and everything he was doing here, to this place, now, was in his mind meant to make it stronger, to return the magic that mankind had so foolishly choked out of the Earth Mother.

  He was cursed to return at the time of the land’s greatest need—she saw it all and understood—the last hope. He would die for her. He already had.

  Alex understood.

  She saw the veil, though in her mind’s eye it became a more metaphorical wall, the last barrier between the Annwyn and that netherhell where the Bain Shee had been banished at the dawn of time. And she saw the fissures in it and knew that it was crumbling. The first evil, the essence of all the world’s unmaking, was pounding against it, weakening it blow by blow.

  It could not stand. Not forever. Not without the greatest sacrifice.

  And that sacrifice fell on them.

  Alex pulled away, breaking the bond between them. She gasped hard, trembling. Sweat beaded on her brow and streamed in a single tiny rivulet down her temple and cheek. Her eyes took on a haunted aspect. She had seen things that could never be unseen. She understood things that could never be forgotten.

  “Understand?” the hag managed; one word in a dry rasp of voice that hadn’t managed a word in longer than Alex Raines had been alive.

  Alex shook her head, more in denial than confusion.

  She understood.

  “You must protect the others,” those five words were all that her brittle vocal cords could muster before she broke down in a coughing fit that hacked away at the substance of her voice and made itself soundless even as it wracked her emaciated frame. She swallowed hard, struggling to muster the strength to finish the warning. “If they die…” she didn’t need to say the rest. The woman understood.

  Alex pushed herself back, lurching away from the bed. She dropped the communication board, which hit the bed frame and the floor with a thunderclap. She took two steps back. Another two. Half turned to look out of the window as the crows banked and turned in the sky, riding the wind away from their perch. “Danu?”

  “The last hope,” the hag said, not answering the question.

  The wilted flowers in the vase began to slowly straighten, the browned petals finding their bright colors again, full of life.

  Alex saw it, but didn’t seem to grasp the fundamental importance of what otherwise might have been a parlor trick. At least not at first. But then the implanted memory of the triple aspect of the goddess surfaced in her mind, the maiden with the crown of flowers in her hair.

  The King and Queen.

  Now she understood. She was in the presence of the Horned God’s wife.

  “Go,” the hag said, more strength in her new voice than she would have imagined possible even a few moments ago.

  Alex couldn’t resist the command.

  She closed the door behind her, leaving Emmaline Barnes alone in the room. It took her a moment to gather herself before she forced her old bones to move, ignoring the pain and the weakness of atrophied muscles to stand. Her head spun as vertigo threatened to overwhelm her. She reached out for the bedstead for support, and shuffled a couple of faltering steps around the bed. This weakness would never do. She had waited too long.

  Like an aged angel of death, the hag shuffled painfully out of her room and with one hand trailing down the wall to keep herself upright, followed the smell of sickness. Cancer had a unique aroma. She followed the stench to a room not far from her own. These were death rooms along this ward, she realized. Every single patient here was marked for death by the doctors and nurses tending them. These were nothing more than waiting rooms. She opened the door to the first room and shuffled inside, her bare feet scuffing on the linoleum floor.

  The old man in the bed looked at her as she entered, and knew.

  He nodded, like her arrival was the most welcome thing in the world and he was giving her permission to take him, and didn’t flinch once as she leaned in low to place her teeth against his cold, cold skin and suckled, drawing the life and the blood out of him.

  He kicked twice, his back arching as his spirit left the mortal realm, and collapsed back into the sweat-stained sheets.

  She stopped feeding in that moment, not wanting to swallow dead blood. There was nothing to be gained from that. The hag straightened up, and wiped at her bloody lips with the back of her leathery hand.

  It wasn’t enough, but it was a start.

  Thankfully there was a banquet of suffering outside this room, more than enough to give her the strength she needed to face her once and future love.

  39

  Dispatch forwarded Ellie’s summons.

  Joshua Raines was at Ravenshill Cemetery.

  What the fuck was he doing back there?

  Confronting his demons?

  Starting the slow process of putting Humpty together again, even if he lacked all of the king’s horses and men?

  The only logical reason Julie could come up with for Josh being at the graveyard was that he’d gone looking for Damiola, just as he had, to ask how they were supposed to fight whatever it was they were up against?

  What didn’t make sense was Ellie’s involvement.

  She didn’t have anything to do with this. Julie couldn’t imagine Josh bringing her into the fold willingly—he wasn’t big on sharing his own personal hell—which meant trouble was waiting for him down among the dead men.

  Julie’s driving skirted legality, running lights and cutting corners and up other drivers as he redlined it across London. All along the pavements, the pedestrians were like butterflies emerging from their cocoons of winter colors, greeting the sun with bright shirts and shorter skirts. They sat on rickety aluminum and wooden chairs chain-smoking and trading empty philosophies and celebrity gossip; who’d died, who looked good and didn’t look good in the candid snaps of the Paparazzi, who’d put on weight or was losing the battle with anorexia, who had a drug problem or personality disorder or any of the many permutations being “normal” offered.

  He heard the call for all cars to respond to disturbances along the High Street, the outskirts of the Rothery, and the shadow of Cane Hill and Coldfall Wood, and more calls going out from the Embankment, Canary Wharf, the city proper, and the tourist traps of the West End.

  He ignored them all.

  The nearest parking space he could find was still a couple of minutes’ walk from the cemetery gates. That gave him time to run a hundred worst-case scenarios through his mind but none of those imagined things matched the pain of finding Josh with his head in his hands on Damiola’s bench, discolored streaks of tears down his red cheeks. Ellie had her arm around him, trying to comfort Josh as another wave of grief threatened to overwhelm him.

  “What happened?” Julie said, before he was close enough to be heard.

  Ellie saw him coming.

  She inclined her head toward the cemetery gates, but Julie couldn’t see anything wrong as he peered through.

  Josh tried to speak, but the words refused to come so Ellie filled him in.

  He couldn’t believe that Damiola was dead, or that Seth had somehow escaped his mirror prison, not if the glass was unbroken. The one person he would have wanted to ask wasn’t talking.

  “I need to tell you something, Julie. You’re not going to believe me, but I’m not lying.”

  “You’ll be surprised how much I’m willing to be
lieve,” he said, casting a glance toward the mausoleum in the distance.

  “I can talk to him. I don’t know for how much longer, but while he lingers I can still talk to him if there’s something you need to say. To ask.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “The old man. I can talk to him.”

  “Damiola? You said he was dead.”

  “He is.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Neither do I. It started happening after we found the old man, Viridius. He did something to me.”

  “How can you—?”

  “Talk to his ghost? Same way you’re talking to me.”

  She didn’t sound the least bit weirded out by the craziness of what she was saying, and he desperately wanted to believe her, so he followed his partner as she got up and walked through the graves to the magician’s tomb. The ghost greeted them at the door, though only Ellie Taylor could see him. Without contact she couldn’t hear a word he had to say. She led Julie through to where the dead man lay, and stood beside him with both hands on his chest. “What do you want to say to him?”

  “What do we do? How do we fight this thing? I don’t know … how are we supposed to win?”

  She didn’t look down at the body, he realized, she looked over to the right, toward the door where, he assumed, the ghost was lurking. He turned slightly to follow the direction of her gaze, but all he saw were shadows. There was nothing unnatural or supernatural about any of them. She actually smiled before she answered him. “He said if he knew that, he wouldn’t be dead. He sounded quite amused by that and said you needed to ask better questions.”