by Vic James
Though if she was honest, Abi wondered if he would care. Even in those panicked minutes up on the execution platform at the Blood Fair, she’d noticed that Silyen wasn’t in the viewing box with the other Jardines. Whatever schemes of his own he was pursuing, his family’s sick politics didn’t seem to be among them.
‘I’m going to take a walk,’ she told Midsummer and the others gathered in the rotunda. ‘I want some fresh air and to be by myself for a bit. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Of course.’
Midsummer smiled, and it made her beautiful, despite the sleeplessness and stress etched into her face. Abi desperately wanted to believe that what the Equal was planning was enough. But she’d seen Meilyr fail because he believed the best of people, and had tried to do things the right way.
Sometimes the wrong way was the only way to get the job done.
Abi would do it. Then when Whittam was gone, Midsummer and her clean hands could take over and set the country to rights.
She went upstairs to write a note to Mum, telling her how much she loved her, and that she was to lie low in Ulaidh until it was all over. She kissed her mum’s brow and tucked the paper beneath her pillow. Who knew when, or even if, she’d be back.
Then she picked up her backpack and checked that the gun was still inside. She should have no problem getting out of Lindum, because while the Zelstons were alerted to anyone arriving if the estate gates weren’t opened by Skill, as far as she was aware there were no restrictions on exits.
She’d find out soon enough.
She had to hunt around for the keys to Layla’s battered car, trying to remember where the woman had put them. When she eventually located them on a table by the exit to the colonnade, Abi pocketed them with a faint smile. Gavar Jardine’s motorbike. Those two boats in Ennor harbour, when she’d been trying to reach Highwithel. Vehicle theft was proving habit-forming.
The downside to Layla’s ancient vehicle was that it had no satnav, but Abi knew roughly where Far Carr was, and the cities that would take her in the right direction: Peterborough, then Cambridge, then she’d stop at a petrol station and buy a road atlas.
And if she felt a clench of anxiety and nauseous guilt as she bumped the car across the Lindum estate towards the back gate, taking the most obscure route? Well, both of those things did a good job of blocking out grief – though neither were as effective as anger.
Best of all was the hot burn of revenge.
The watch on her wrist told Abi she’d been driving for more than four hours when she turned over the bridge towards Rindlesham Forest. It was one of the oldest surviving woodlands in the country, she knew. A remnant of the land before Rome’s legions came. After the empire left, Britain’s history lapsed into obscurity for hundreds of years. A centuries-long silence. And then, gradually, towns appeared again. Roads again. Kings and queens escaped their palaces in London to hunt in these woods.
Until the day the Equals overturned it all.
Far Carr had once been a royal hunting ground, somewhere in this forest. And while Equals didn’t exactly hang out banners and put up signs to advertise the whereabouts of their estates, the spaces on maps said as much as the words. She pushed the atlas off her lap and drove on.
Rindlesham was an eerie place of filtered half-light and muffled sound. This deep into the woods, there was no other traffic. The road soon petered out into a track and Abi saw a car park on the left, a large, woodchipped space that looked as though it was regularly used. But it was presently empty of all save a luxurious saloon car. Perhaps the owners were walking their dog, Abi thought, as she drove past. That boded well for Lord Silyen not being a paranoid householder who’d surrounded his estate with bear traps.
And then the car engine stalled.
A few turns of the key later, she reached the obvious conclusion. This was Skill – which must mean the estate was near. Slinging the backpack over her shoulder, Abi got out.
The logical thing was to follow the track, so she did. It soon dwindled from track to path, then path to trail – then petered out entirely.
Abi scuffed the leaves on the ground for any trace of footprints, but couldn’t see an obvious route. Which was strange, because if this was the main approach to the estate, then this was where goods and supplies, visitors and slaves, would come in and out. The size of the car park made it plain that a number of vehicles might be here at any given time. Had she taken a wrong turning?
Backtracking, trying not to panic about getting lost, Abi saw one tree that she recognized, then another – then the car park ahead. She must have just taken a fork off the path somehow. She tightened the straps on her backpack and turned back into the forest.
At the last point where the trail was distinguishable, Abi picked up a fallen leafy branch. Fishing a now-useless ponytail band out of her pocket, she secured it to an intact branch so that it hung down in plain view – a marker. She could see the route she’d taken before – what she had imagined was a straight continuation in the direction of the track. This time, she set out at a slight angle to it.
But again, frustratingly, the path soon disappeared. If only she had a compass, because the atlas had been clear: due east of here was the North Sea, and somewhere between it and where Abi stood was the estate.
She kept walking. Far Carr couldn’t be too far. According to the map there were perhaps six miles to the coast. The seashore formed one stretch of the estate perimeter, and the landward boundary arced out in a semicircle inside the woods.
The afternoon was wearing on, so the sun would be swinging towards the west. The light was still strong enough to cast shadows on the ground, so if she kept the sun at her back and her shadow roughly before her, that meant she was heading eastwards, towards the sea. Sooner or later, she’d reach the estate wall.
But she walked until her legs were tired and her shadow diluted. When she looked at her watch, an hour had passed. It had been slow but steady going. How had she not reached the wall yet?
Should she continue to blunder around, or turn back? Having walked for so long the wall must be close – maybe just a few hundred metres away. But she couldn’t tell, and didn’t want to get lost out here after dark. She needed to retrace her route while she could still see it. Groaning with the wasted time and effort, she turned back.
Except her route must have taken some pretty phenomenal wrong turns, because just five minutes later, while her eyes were fixed on the ground, something smacked into Abi’s face and she looked up to see the branch that marked her starting point.
How could she be so rubbish at this? Why was Far Carr’s entrance a million miles away from its car park?
Then Abi realized, and didn’t know if she wanted to curl up with dismay or screech with outrage.
Skill. It was Skill.
Silyen had hidden his entire damn estate, just as Gavar concealed the cottage in which he hid his daughter. Far Carr was right in front of her. She’d probably spent the past hour walking along its wall, like an imbecile, unable to discern that it was even there.
She hadn’t come this close only to give up now. She’d sleep in the car. Stake out this place. Silyen would have to come out sooner or later.
First, though, she’d make one last attempt to reach the estate tonight. She went back to Layla’s vehicle, and found that the engine sputtered to life once she’d put it in reverse gear. She backed it down the track to the car park and boxed in the swanky saloon car. If it was Silyen’s, she wasn’t having him simply driving away from here while she blundered around in his woods, hopelessly lost.
Then she headed into the woods for a third time. Did Silyen know she was here? If he’d cocooned his estate in Skill, would it also somehow alert him to her presence, as a spider sensed the thrumming of its web?
The thought gave her goosebumps, but then, she wanted him to find her. It was darker now, and cooler, and it turned out that fear was yet another emotion that was pretty good at keeping grief and sorrow at bay.
&nb
sp; And just as she was preparing to turn back, because the light had almost gone and it was just too creepy for words, the gate appeared.
There was no Skillful dazzle, like at Kyneston’s blazing entrance. Far Carr was barred by just a low iron gate. By the faint glow of Skill-light she saw the estate wall, an unusual design that flexed in and out. There was the dark shadow of a gatehouse, and by it she saw the figure of a man.
It wasn’t Silyen Jardine, though.
‘Abigail Hadley,’ rasped Dog. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’
Abi’s heart sped up. She would never not find this man alarming.
‘I could say the same about you. What are you doing at Far Carr?’
‘I’m one of Lord Silyen’s – personal retainers.’
He laughed and Abi’s skin crawled. She was here, in the dark, in a magically unfindable place, with a homicidal madman.
A madman who only kills Equals, she reminded herself. A madman who adored his dead wife and for her sake would never harm a commoner woman.
She felt fairly confident on the the first point, but the second one could have been wishful thinking.
‘A retainer?’
‘There are two of us. You know – the other one.’
‘I don’t care about anyone else. I’ve come for you. I mean, I came to ask Silyen if he knew where you were . . . but here you are.’ She gripped the gate, and it was cool to the touch, just as it should be, and its solidity was reassuring. ‘I’ve been stumbling around in the woods for hours. He’s hidden this place, hasn’t he? Using Skill. I guess I can only see the wall because you’re there at the gate?’
Dog nodded. In the silence, Abi heard a ringing, scraping sound, and looked down to see that the man was running a knife along the middle bar of the gate. He stopped it just a few inches from her hip as she jumped back. Her heart was thudding. Was this some kind of threat?
She looked more closely. It wasn’t one knife – it was five. One for each finger of his hand. The blades dripped with blood. And suddenly she wasn’t scared – she was absolutely terrified. What the hell was Silyen up to, behind the walls of his concealed estate? Abi remembered when she, Daisy and baby Libby had stumbled across him in Kyneston’s woods one day, after finding the unmarked but nonetheless stone-cold-dead deer that he had claimed was an ‘experiment’.
Had coming here been an awful mistake?
No, it hadn’t. She needed Dog. And he would do what she asked, she was sure.
‘You told my brother – Luke – that he had to hate the Equals, to beat them.’
‘Yes.’
Dog stepped right up against the gate, gripping it with his unsheathed hand. His skin gleamed in the frail moonlight, his fingers scrawny as a skeleton’s.
‘I hate them,’ Abi said. ‘And I need your help to beat them.’
Dog threw back his head and laughed. Whatever he’d been doing here with Silyen Jardine, becoming more normal hadn’t been part of it. But Abi didn’t need him to be sane. She just needed him to be deadly.
‘Never thought you had it in you – Abigail Hadley.’
And Dog stooped over the gate so close she caught the reek of his breath. It smelled like raw meat and she saw traces of blood around his mouth. Had he been catching and eating creatures in the woods?
Well, Abi had better prey for him. The kind that deserved everything it got.
‘Come with me to London. I want to find a use for this.’
She pulled the gun from her backpack.
18
Rædwald
They were deep in conversation as they came down the beach, and hadn’t noticed him yet.
The tall one was the Searugléaw, and the strong one at his side his gesið.
Rædwald rubbed his chin ruefully. The words of his youth were unknown now. Not entirely vanished, though. Searu had become Skill. And while men no longer had a gesið with whom to stand back to back in battle, everyone needed a friend at their side in this world.
In all the worlds.
He should know.
The light was just fading; the day ending. He crouched down on the pebbles and passed his hands over the kindling he’d gathered. Conjuring Skill-light would have done the job, but it felt good to do things the old way. As salt in the driftwood hissed and popped, the pair saw his firelight and hurried towards him on the shifting stones.
‘You,’ said the tall one, as they crashed to a stop. A disbelieving smile lit his face. ‘Right here on my beach.’
Rædwald lifted an eyebrow. ‘I think you’ll find it was mine first.’
‘Indeed it was, Your Majesty. I’m Silyen Jardine. May we join you?’
Rædwald gestured to the opposite side of the fire and the boy flopped down, cross-legged. The blond one was still standing, amazed.
‘I’m Luke Hadley,’ he eventually managed. ‘Your Majesty.’
‘None of this “majesty”. I’m hardly majestic.’
He wasn’t. His crown was made of twigs and flowers. His robe had been given to him on his twentieth birthday. It would be fair to say it was showing its age. He plucked its crimson tatters around himself with dignity.
‘I am Rædwald. Please, sit.’
‘Thank you, King Rædwald.’
‘He’s very polite,’ explained the dark-haired one. Silyen. ‘He’s from the North, where they’re well brought up.’
‘They weren’t in my day,’ Rædwald muttered, thinking darkly of the raiders who had brought this land to its knees. He wondered what he sounded like to this pair. They’d find his accent Germanic, perhaps.
‘Silyen, on the other hand,’ said the blond one, Luke, ‘often comes across like he was raised by wolves. Though in a way, he was.’
The boys scowled at each other. Rædwald remembered the teasing of his own youth, from his hearth-sisters and shield-brothers in King Tytila’s hall. How innocent their rivalries had been – until the day that they weren’t.
For all their jests, though, the two young men were plainly awed. They sat in silence for a few moments. He expected the Searugléaw, the Skilled one, to speak first, but instead it was the other.
‘We’ve been looking for you, to see if you can help us find my friend. Silyen thinks you’ve been searching for her, too – and found us instead. But you were in my mind, at Eilean Dòchais. And now you’re here in the real world. How is that possible?’
Rædwald smiled.
‘Because to one who walks in Skill, there is no difference.’
‘You’re the Wundorcyning, the Wonder King,’ said the other, Silyen. And he was confident enough that it wasn’t even a question.
‘Among other names. Cealdcyning. Gastcyning. Cwiccyning.’
‘The Cold King. The Terrible King. The Living King,’ Silyen translated, his face radiant with more than firelight. ‘And you made us forget you.’
‘I did.’
‘But we’ve started to remember again.’
‘You have.’
Rædwald pulled pine cones from his pocket and tossed them onto the fire. He’d always liked their resinous scent. When he died, they should have laid him in a boat among his furs and jewels and weapons, and covered him in cones and pine branches, and scattered him with incense. Then the boat would have been pushed out to sea, and his gesið, his shield-brother Hryth, would have shot a flaming arrow into his heart.
That’s what they should have done. If he’d died.
‘It’s like I’ve done here at Far Carr,’ Silyen continued, ‘but . . . inside out. And so much bigger. I’ve enchanted the wall, so no one outside can find this place. You enchanted the borders of this entire land, so no one inside Britain could remember you. Am I right?’
The boy was so convinced he was right that he waited for nothing more than a nod before continuing.
‘We know that magical restrictions can last generations – just like a hereditary Quiet. This forgetting of you stayed intact for centuries, like a strong old wall, with just the occasional crack through which a memory crep
t in: the person who wrote down The Tales of the King, or the one who painted the picture that hangs in my hall. But it happened so rarely, there was never enough memory of you to be actual history. You were a king of whispers and legends.’
Silyen sat back, flushed and triumphant. As he should be, thought Rædwald. He had pieced it out entirely.
‘Very good.’
The king leaned against his stag’s warm flank and petted its neck. He looked at the other one. Luke.
‘But why?’ Luke asked. ‘Why would you want to be forgotten? And not just by the people who knew you, but by everyone, forever after? Aren’t you Coira’s father?’
They were a good pair, these boys. A brain and a heart. A how and a why.
‘It is a long story,’ Rædwald told them. ‘And it began a long time ago. Let me show you.’
He got to his feet and shook out his tattered robe, then reached into the middle of the fire and opened a door.
Through it, Rædwald could see King Tytila’s hall by torch light. He could smell the hog grease of the burning rushes, and the juicy stink of meat. There was his mother, the king’s wife, pouring wine for the men of the royal bench. There was Rædwald himself, at the king’s right hand. On his other side sat his shield-brother Hryth, while Ædla brushed her hip not-so accidentally against his shoulder as she passed with another steaming dish. It was Rædwald’s twentieth birthday, and there was merriment among his assembled friends.
Among those he had thought were his friends. He was heartsick to see them.
‘Come.’
He beckoned the two boys. Luke squared back his shoulders and stepped through first.
‘Is this real?’ the boy asked, once they all stood together and the feast swirled around them in a haze of sweat, smoke and spilled mead. ‘Have we . . . gone back in time?’