by White, Gwynn
“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.
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 o
f 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?”