The Lord of the Faerie turned, his face breaking into a smile, and held out his arms. Noah ran into them, hugging the Lord of the Faerie tightly.
Jane watched, careful to keep her emotions from spilling forth onto her face. Ostensibly they’d been off to do more training—that is certainly what Weyland thought—but instead of going to the Tower, Noah had used her own powers to transport Jane and herself to The Naked.
“Noah, what is it?” the Lord of the Faerie said. “Why do you need to see me so badly?”
“Am I not allowed to see you from time to time?” “Noah…”
She sighed. “I need to see Louis. Badly. Very badly. You are the only one who can arrange that for me.”
“But he has not completed the transformation. And you—”
“I know! Gods, Charles, or whatever I should call you, I need to see him. Badly!”
“What is it? What is so wrong?”
The tip of Noah’s tongue wet her lips. “I need to speak with Louis.”
“Is it Weyland?”
“No. Please, can you arrange it?”
“It is the plague, isn’t it?”
Noah frowned. “The plague? No, I—”
“I would have thought that the fact Weyland has sent plague to consume London would have been reason enough, Noah.”
“What?”
The Lord of the Faerie sent a querying look to Jane.
“I did not tell her,” Jane said, her voice low. “I’m sorry. I did not have the courage.”
The Lord of the Faerie looked back at Noah, and sighed. “Weyland has caused this malevolence. He sent his imps to Elizabeth with a message for Brutus-reborn: Gather in the kingship bands, and hand them to me, and only then will the death stop.”
Noah stepped back from the Lord of the Faerie. “No. I cannot believe that. He would not…no…Weyland could not have done this.”
The Lord of the Faerie stared at her. “You cannot believe it?”
Noah looked bewildered. Veins of colour stained her pallid cheeks, and she clasped her hands together, wringing them about. “I can’t believe that he would do such a thing. The imps…no. No. He doesn’t control the imps. You said the imps sent the message?”
The Lord of the Faerie nodded, still watching Noah carefully.
“The imps are not in his control any more. If the imps have sent a message, then that message is from the Troy Game, not from Weyland.”
The Lord of the Faerie did not immediately respond. He stood, his eyes on Noah, his chest drawing in deep slow breaths as he thought.
“Noah,” he said eventually, “why would the Troy Game send plague to visit London? The Game is dedicated to protecting the city from evil, not instigating it. Its very purpose is protection. This plague stinks of Weyland, not of the Troy Game.”
Noah had regained her composure. “I no longer believe the Troy Game is dedicated only to protection. I think that it has infinite capacity for harm. It wants completion, and it will allow nothing to stand in its way.”
“Noah,” Jane said very slowly, very deliberately, “what are you saying?”
Noah looked only at the Lord of the Faerie. “I need to see Louis more than ever. Soon. Can you arrange it?”
The Lord of the Faerie nodded, his eyes intense as he gazed at Noah. “I can do it. But, by all the gods, Noah, it will be dangerous. Interrupting his transformation…”
Noah smiled, very sadly. “Danger is all about us.”
The Lord of the Faerie sat on his throne atop The Naked. He was alone. Not Jane, not even the magpie, kept him company.
He thought on Noah, and as he thought, so the fingertips of his right hand thrummed slowly against the armrest.
She was walking a dangerous path. The Lord of the Faerie was not sure if Weyland had corrupted Noah away from her allegiance to the land, or if her closeness to Weyland had enabled her to see the dangers about them far more clearly than he could himself.
There was a bleakness hanging over the land, somehow infecting it. The Lord of the Faerie had felt that on the day of his crowning, the instant the crown had settled on his head. Then he’d thought it was, as always, the presence of Asterion.
But what if it was not? What if the alliance between land and Troy Game was not beneficial, but cancerous?
The Lord of the Faerie sat on his throne, looking out over the rolling infinity of wooded hills, and wondered which might prove to be the more deadly. Noah? Or the Troy Game?
The Lord of the Faerie’s fingers stopped thrumming as he came to a decision within himself.
It might be a highly dangerous path, but in a previous life, when he had been Harold, he had promised to walk that path with her.
All every path needs is a companion with which to share it.
He sighed, and rose from his throne.
Eighteen
Idol Lane, London
NOAH SPEAKS
I was devastated as I absorbed what the Lord of the Faerie told me—that Weyland had sent the plague to further his ambition to acquire the kingship bands.
For an instant I believed him, but then my benumbed brain screamed at me that it was the imps who had delivered the message to Charles, and I knew that Weyland now had little or no control over the imps.
At least, I thought Weyland had no control over them. He rarely saw them. They had sometimes come to the house, and I knew Weyland occasionally sent them out on a mission. But then, he had not known that Catling had control of them until very recently.
Maybe the message had come from him.
I defended Weyland stoutly to Coel, but in my own mind I was no longer so sure.
Would he have done this?
A few short months ago I would not have doubted. The use of plague to force Brutus-reborn’s hand would have stunk of Weyland.
However, Weyland had promised me that he would make no move on the bands until I had attained my full powers as Mistress of the Labyrinth. Then I could retrieve the bands. I had believed Weyland’s promise.
Should I have done that?
When we left The Naked Jane and I did not go directly back to Idol Lane. Instead, we sent our senses scrying through London.
I felt the difference instantly. Death and disease were not unknown to me. As Eaving, goddess of the waters, I felt it constantly as it appeared here and there about the land. That was unwelcome, but always, always part of the natural order of things.
This plague was different. It was black and terrible, but it was also completely unnatural. It had no place within the natural cycle of life and death. If I had not been so absorbed with Weyland and with learning the ways of the labyrinth then I would have realised this long before.
“Dear gods,” I whispered. “This stinks of deceit!”
“Aye,” Jane said. “Weyland’s deceit, surely.”
I did not answer. She had far more reason, far more right, to blame him than myself.
“Do you truly think it is the Game and not Weyland?” said Jane. She was watching me very carefully, now.
“The plague stinks of Catling, Jane. Surely you can smell it?”
“No,” she said. “I can’t. I am curious, Noah, why you are so desperate to blame Catling and not Weyland. What has he done then, to merit such belief?”
We returned to Idol Lane, Jane still waiting for a response to her question.
She did not get it. In truth, I don’t know if I could have answered it. Why feel so wretched that Weyland might have set this plague? Should I not have expected it of Weyland, the great Minotaur?
I hadn’t expected it of the man I had come to know.
Unless that man was a lie.
I felt miserable, and I wondered if my promise to shelter Weyland was the reason I kept insisting that it could not have been him to cause this plague.
Weyland was, as usual, waiting for us in the kitchen. He rose, and, as usual, kissed me. Then he frowned, for he felt no increase in the power of the labyrinth.
“You did not learn today?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and looked significantly at Jane.
She threw me one of her sharp glances, but withdrew into the parlour, and a moment later up the stairs, and I turned back to Weyland.
“I was distracted,” I said, “by the spreading evil that has London in its clutches.”
He shrugged, disinterested.
That made me furious. “I am Mag’s successor, Weyland! I am this land—do not expect me to shrug and turn away!”
“What has caused this temper, Noah? You can hardly blame me for the plague.”
I said nothing, staring at him.
“What? You do want to blame me for the plague?” He gave a short laugh. “Why not lay at my heels the blame for every woman who has died in childbed, or for every cat which has become lethally entangled in the wheels of one of the city’s dung carts, or for every child dead of fever?”