And at last, Lucy smiled.
“Well, whatever I have to work out, it needs to happen quickly. I can’t wait for everyone to nearly die every time I need to use it!”
“I should hope not! Something’s holding you back, Ned. We just need to figure out what it is.”
“What about his voice, Lucy – why haven’t we heard it?”
Lucy stopped walking.
“The Darkening King is rebuilding his strength, that’s all. Trust me, when we get close, if we ever get close, we’ll do more than hear him.”
Up ahead Mr Fox stopped and signalled for Mr Badger to wait. Mr Badger nodded and then placed himself by a shop window, blending in, Ned thought, with as much subtlety as a pillar in a pond.
Mr Fox led them on, down a narrow alley where a fairy was waiting for them. The strange creature bowed and as his lips parted, Ned could have sworn he heard distant bells as old as churches along with the smell of blackberries and sage.
“Lemnus Gemfeather, at your service.”
Lemnus Gemfeather
e had great plumes of wild red hair shimmering with what looked like spun gold, and eyes of brightest green and blue, with flecks of burning violet right at their centres. He was a strange mix, with a kind fatherly look about him and thick untameable eyebrows that gave him an almost severe expression, all framed round a long hooked nose. His clothes were all in red and from another era entirely, though completely untouched by age. He looked like a rich courtier in braiding and sequins, luscious silks and scarves. But beneath it all was mischief, as clear and as bright as day. He bowed dramatically again, waving a small lace handkerchief as he did so, and eyed Mr Fox’s party of three carefully.
“An honour, sirs and lady.”
Ned watched as the odd creature sniffed at the air inquisitively and his eyes narrowed to the ground by Ned’s feet.
“A familiar? Welcome, little cousin.”
There was an oozing and apprehensive “Arr”, as Gorrn shrank further into Ned’s shadow till there was very little of him left at all.
Behind Lemnus’s smile and theatrical gesturing, Ned sensed a power that frightened him. A bolt of lightning was only a thing of wonder so long as it didn’t strike you.
“Mr Gemfeather, I am Mr Fox. My associates here are—”
“Call me Lemnus, please,” cut in the fairy. “I like your name, I do, I like it very much. Fox in name and nature indeed. Quite so, quite so, though of course your usefulness remains to be seen.”
From the twitch of Mr Fox’s eye, Ned guessed he didn’t know what to make of the man, but decades of training took over and he simply smiled politely.
Lemnus turned to Ned next and stared into his eyes till he was close enough to touch. His expression changed for a moment, all the pomp and show quite drained out of him.
“The Engineer. It’s true then: quite ordinary to look at, yet extraordinary to behold.”
Ned wasn’t sure whether the creature was being kind or rude, but either way, far more pressing matters were on his mind.
“Lemnus, my parents and Benissimo – are they safe?”
“Undeniably, dear child, sleeping like babes in a wood.”
“Why? Why were they taken prisoner? They only came to ask for help.”
Lemnus’s features grew dark and he spoke in hushed tones. “To even know of the Heart Stone’s existence and not to be one of the Fey is a heinous crime in our realm. The greatest of crimes … But to ask to have it? For use in battle?! Only a fool or madman would request such a thing! Prince Aurelin did not take kindly to it.”
Ned suddenly found himself stricken with worry. Were his parents really safe? He’d met Prince Aurelin and as far as Ned could tell, the creature was devoid of any compassion, at least for those who weren’t from his realm.
The fairy’s eyes warmed and his face softened to a grandfatherly glow.
“Fear not, boy. I have seen them and they are well.”
Ned could feel his entire body physically unwind, and with that Lemnus turned his attentions to Lucy, who gave him a piercing look. The fairy stiffened, before his face broke into an uncontainable smile.
“Pretty and true,” he mumbled. “A firecracker, a spark of a thing you are, you are! A spark of a thing you are!”
Despite being relieved that his parents were safe, Ned couldn’t help wishing that the creature had seen some kind of spark in him. Was he disappointed in Ned? Had he picked up on the truth that the dragon had missed?
“Come along, my brave knights, let us enter the fray!” said Lemnus excitedly before turning away from them all and approaching a door at the end of the alley. Ned could have sworn it wasn’t there a moment ago.
“Ahem, Mr Gemfeather—” began Mr Fox.
“Lemnus, please,” said the red-haired fairy, looking back.
“Mr Gemfeather will do for now,” replied Mr Fox, and he reached to his side and placed his hand on a carefully concealed pistol. “These children are under my protection. I have somewhere in the region of three hundred operatives patrolling the street beyond this alley. Live satellite uplinks, radio and, well, a lot of eyes with which to watch – we’re not going anywhere unless Lucy tells me that she likes you.”
Lemnus turned to Lucy, raised both eyebrows and waited for her verdict.
Lucy’s mind was already somewhere else and, for an unbearable minute, no one said anything. Finally, she came out of her trance and smiled.
“Well, Lucy?” asked Mr Fox, eyeing the fairy threateningly, hand firm on his pistol. And not for the first time, Ned saw that the man’s words held true: he would do anything to keep them safe.
“Well, I’ve never ‘seen’ anything like it. But then I’ve never tried reading the Fey. His brain’s like a box full of frogs. It’s noisy, jumpy, and it feels like it could tear open at any minute. But …”
Ned held his breath.
“Deep down inside, at his core, he’s kind of … funny.”
Mr Fox pursed his lips and frowned. He looked to Lucy, then to Ned, and finally back to Lemnus.
“Funny?”
“Funny peculiar, and just plain old fun, I think – at least he seems to be,” said Lucy rather brightly. “And bad people, truly bad people, are rarely any fun.”
Mr Fox chuckled – actually chuckled – before whistling softly, in less of a tune and more of a “think”.
“Ned, Lucy, we appear to be at a crossroads,” he said. “Your parents are prisoners, Ned, and Benissimo, the only man who knows who all our allies are, or how to contact them, is with them. As if that weren’t enough, the one weapon we hope will be capable of bringing down the Darkening King is also with them. If Mr Gemfeather can be trusted, we have a chance, albeit a statistically minute one, of walking away from this alive with what we want. If we don’t, the entire planet will perish. Do we follow on the basis that this man is ‘fun’ or don’t we?”
Ned didn’t need to be asked. Lucy was all right with him and Lemnus knew where his parents were being held. Nothing else mattered.
He and his friend spoke as one. “We do.”
Mr Fox nodded. “Right then, Mr Gemfeather. Please lead the way, but do so knowing that if you try anything, anything at all, there is a giant ape not far from here that will make finding you and causing you pain his life’s work.”
“Quite so,” smiled Lemnus and waved a hand.
The door in front of him opened.
The party of three could not have been less prepared. They looked through its arch and one by one their mouths fell open.
The Glade Awakens
s Ned crossed the doorway, Dublin – at least the Dublin that the rest of the world knew – stopped existing. In its place was a wide glade of pure unbridled magic. Ned had crossed the Veil countless times and could never quite get used to it. Colours, sounds, even time were altered by the meeting of magic and non-magic in ways that never made sense and always filled him with awe.
Entering the heart and home of the Fey was another proposition entirely. Fo
r one thing, their realm did not need the Veil to stay hidden. The Fey had their own magic, a magic that was older and wilder, more untameable and strange. Silently Ned, Lucy and Mr Fox followed their guide into the glade, a glade that burst with colour and magic. Ned marvelled at buttercups the size of buckets; trees of turquoise, gold, ruby-red and lavender. As they waded through waist-high grass, the smell of roses was mixed with honey then moss, peaches, magnolia and thyme. If smells could deafen! The constant change of scents, like notes of music, was intoxicating. And there was sound too, or at least what Ned thought was sound. Not quite music, but some wordless song, and one that he’d heard somewhere before. It was as though the glade – every part of it, from the plants to the air, even its light – was speaking to him, calling with words that made his heart fill with memories as old as time yet they were not his own.
It took a while to notice but Lemnus had stopped walking because, as it turned out, there simply wasn’t any need. The glade, its trees and flowers, were moving closer and at an alarming speed. From every side great arms of twisting, knotting greenery grew up around them. Branches reached across the sky, and every flower, from foxglove to dandelion, grew and grew till their small party gazed up like ants in a living forest, so different from the taiga yet wilder and more strange. The ground at their feet began to soften, like moss-filled quicksand, and Ned felt himself lowering into it. His mind raced to a half-remembered biology lesson he’d had at school. He’d learnt in detail how the carnivorous Venus flytrap would welcome in a fly with its sticky sap and then violently snap shut round it.
“Lucy, why is the garden getting bigger?”
As the vines shot towards them, Lucy’s hand gripped his own.
“Stay close,” she whispered.
“Unt!” came Gorrn’s muffled groan.
And just as he groaned it, Lemnus turned on them, his face quite changed and as serious as stone. Reaching into his dress coat and pulling out a small silk pouch, he poured a yellow powder into his palm and blew. A great cloud of pollen flew up into the air and smothered them.
And with that, Ned and his allies were swallowed up whole.
St Albertsburg
lsewhere, away from fairies and frozen forests, a great and desperate gathering was under way. Steel mills were rebuilding a fleet, with thicker hulls and more powerful engines. Troops were being trained, supplies stockpiled and all the many races and species of man, woman and beast were putting aside their differences for a single common purpose.
These gathered fair-folk no longer trusted what was left of the Twelve, no longer trusted Atticus Fife. On Barbarossa’s orders, Madame Oublier’s former second-in-command, now their new leader, had forced those remaining under his control to act in a way that was nothing short of cruel. At a time when they needed it most, communication of any kind amongst the many factions of the Hidden had been banned unless sanctioned by the Twelve, and travel had been outlawed completely. As a result, entire cities, towns and villages found themselves completely isolated, and any information they were party to heavily monitored and doctored by Fife and his men. It didn’t matter that the Twelve no longer had the ear of its people. Fife was on a different mission: a mission to keep them separated. The more apart and leaderless they remained, the less likely they were to unite.
But that was the thing about the Hidden and its many factions – they needed each other both in peace and war, and the Governor-General of St Albertsburg, its Protector and Viceroy, was doing what he could to spearhead an alliance. They were now preparing to fight for their very existence. His beloved city literally groaned with the weight of new bodies walking its streets. St Albertsburg and its twelve isles had become a beacon of hope in a world where light had been all but extinguished.
With Benissimo’s help and advice, the Viceroy had offered up St Albertsburg as a place to prepare for the coming battle, and those brave enough to make a stand had come in their thousands, in their tens of thousands, with many more ready to heed the call to arms when the time came. Every square inch of the isle’s open spaces was now full to bursting with airships, supplies and tents – the greatest military gathering of the Hidden in living memory. Deep in the guts of the coal-heavy isle, furnaces burned by day and by night. But not for the making of arms – St Albertsburg had stockpiles of weapons that could arm any force of man or beast. They burned for glass – for the making of mirrors.
Carrion Slight and his network of mirrors had given them the notion. The plan was as follows: on Benissimo’s command, the Viceroy’s owls and any airship deemed battle-ready would go by air, as expected, to fight the Darkening King. Their ground troops, however, would arrive at the taiga by mirror. No amount of winged or legged ticker could warn Barbarossa in time, not if they arrived at once. Overseeing the operation from the painstaking creation of the mirrors, to their packing and transport to Siberian Russia, was Ignatius P. Littleton the Third, otherwise known as the Glimmerman.
The Viceroy’s mind was ablaze as he made his way to the hangar. In every crevice, nook and cranny that he walked past he saw the same thing: hope, a desperate hope that their tireless efforts would be enough to win the day and that their faith in him would be answered with victory. The Viceroy also hoped – hoped that they were right, even though his heart told him it was madness. Everything now rested on the gambit of surprise – almost everything. Benissimo had assured him before travelling to Ireland that everything was in hand, though he still hadn’t divulged what it was he was hoping to find at the Seelie Court. Whatever it was, the Viceroy knew that no amount of hope or courage would win the day without it.
The loading bay was frantic with last-minute preparation. They had built a special transport for the journey and several of his own carriers would travel in convoy to offer protection. Once the initial load of mirrors had safely made it to Siberia, the rest would go via the mirror-verse itself.
The Glimmerman was less rotund than when he’d arrived and the Viceroy had been informed that the man no longer slept. Gone was his cheerful jacket of tiny mirrors; in its place a white shirt long stained with soot and sweat.
“Well, Ignatius, how goes the glass?”
Despite the heat and exhaustion, the arrival of the Viceroy in the loading bay straightened up Ignatius and his group of master glassmen immediately. They were in one of the many loading bays that cut into the isle’s side and all about them military personnel heaved at the vast mirrors as they loaded them on to the transport.
“A-another hour or so, my lord,” said Ignatius, then, spotting something from the corner of his eye, his face turned bright red as he shouted, “Will you be careful with that? You have no idea what it took to make!”
The little man’s nerves were clearly shot to pieces. Any movement of glass was a tense affair and Ignatius had never been tasked with creating so much and certainly not in such a short space of time.
“Ignatius, you’ve done admirably. Why don’t you give yourself some time off? There are plenty of glassmen who can hold the fort for one night.”
“T-time off, sir?” he answered as though the words were completely alien. “Time … off?” he mouthed again.
And that was when they heard it, muffled as it was, high above the city and its streets – a scream, and then another, till there was a long, drawn-out wail of hundreds and thousands. The rock above their heads shook and the air filled with sirens and the screeching of the Viceroy’s giant owls. It was only when the first bomb dropped that His Grace, the Viceroy and Governor-General of St Albertsburg, the 37th Duke of de Fresnes, understood.
BOOM!
And one bomb became many. High above them the crystal city shattered under hellfire, and beside them two vast planes of mirrored glass cracked from the ensuing tremors.
“My glass!” stammered the Glimmerman.
“My city!” roared the Viceroy.
To their left, the loading bay’s open doors offered a clear view to the sky – a sky now peppered with the black silhouettes of Barbaro
ssa’s fleet. Each and every one of its Daedali loaded with the Central Intelligence’s metal men and a hoard of Demons to guide them.
A Ball of Vines
ed found himself in a dimly lit tunnel, bordered at every side with knotted roots from the glade above.
Mr Fox was the first to speak and did so while raising his pistol.
“What did you do to us?! Lemnus, if this was all some elaborate trap—”
His gun was pointing squarely at the fairy’s head and any sense of humour he’d had before stepping into the glade utterly evaporated.
“Trap? Oh no, sir, no trap to be sure. The pollen I blew was to protect you from the glade. You see, it likes new visitors and rarely lets them leave.”
“Are you telling me that it can think?”
“Oh, quite so, though what it thinks we never know!”
“Then the Seelie Court must know we’re here? You promised me when you made contact that you could get us to the boy’s parents undetected.”
Mr Fox’s face became entirely military. Gone were his polite mannerisms and in their place, focused, pin-sharp eyes locked on Lemnus, trying to read his every word.
“Our magic does not work that way. It is not ours to control but a living thing of its own. We merely understand how to talk to it, and even then only in ways that it allows. If I had not used the pollen, our glade would have fallen in love with you just as surely as you with it, and you would have lived out the rest of your days in its leafy embrace. The glade works to its own rhythm and yes, it knows you are here, but the court do not and will not, if you follow my lead.”
Mr Fox eyed the tunnel mistrustfully, his keen senses picking out every detail till he concentrated on the only details that mattered: they were alone, no guards had come running, no weapons had been drawn.
Lucy’s eyes were shut tight, though Ned could see from her lined brow that she was deep in thought; a single bead of sweat was trickling down the side of her face.
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