I and the soon-to-rise Stag God draw most of our power and knowledge and comfort from the Realm of the Faerie. It is our nourishment, and our ultimate home.
The Realm of the Faerie is ruled by that strange creature known as the Lord of the Faerie. The Lord of the Faerie was not exactly my lord and master, but he was most certainly my senior, and I would owe him both deference and respect.
As I grew in Woburn Abbey, and basked in the peace and stillness, I tried to recall all I could of the Lord of the Faerie from Mag’s memories. He had not walked during her lifetime, nor during that of three or four of her predecessors. The Lord of the Faerie was ancient beyond measure, a part of the primeval earth; he had literally grown with the island of Great Britain, and was one with it as neither myself nor the Stag God could be. The Lord of the Faerie was of its soil. He was not creature or beast, so much as a glorious living evergreen. Indeed, if I rightly recall my many conversations with Woburn’s head gardener, Samuel Tenfler—who referred to the Lord of the Faerie as the Green Man—the ancient deity was the supreme perennial.
The Lord of the Faerie was magic beyond knowing, if you can describe that strange power of the faerie as ‘magic’—such a cumbersome and overused word. Even thinking about the Lord of the Faerie and his eventual rise made my spine tingle. Every time thoughts of Asterion depressed me, I only had to turn my mind to the Lord of the Faerie, to that wonderful day when I might finally meet with him face to face, and I would rise from my misery and smile.
Apart from what Long Tom had told me, I came to realise there was one other duty for me to accomplish. Something I needed to do in order to achieve my full power and understanding as Eaving.
A duty which pleased me very, very much.
I sat through that night when Brutus, Coel and Ecub had reached out to me, and while I thought on Brutus most of the time, and on what lay ahead of us through this lifetime, I also thought on the intimacy that I had felt between the three of them. I envied them that intimacy, both sexual and emotional, and it made me apprehend that, as Eaving, there was something I needed to do so I could truly fulfil my potential and which would give me the strength to survive whatever Asterion had awaiting me.
An easy task, and not one I would mismanage as I had when I was Caela.
Thus it was, that harvest season of 1649, I took myself a lover.
Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire
One of the Reverend John Thornton’s favourite rituals was to sit by his window, with all but one of the candles in his chamber extinguished, and watch the night settle over Woburn Park as he sipped a small glass of wine. It relaxed him for his bed, enabling his mind to let go the myriad little worries and irritations that had beset it during the day: one of the children refused to pay attention; the eldest son, Francis, was weaker than usual and unable to attend his studies; the new translation of Machiavelli (never to be displayed in the schoolroom) had yet to arrive even though he’d ordered it six months past; and Noah Banks…
Noah Banks. Invariably, during this nightly peaceful ritual, Thornton found his mind returning to the strange girl-woman that the countess had brought into the household. Noah was an unsolvable puzzle. How had she become so learned in ancient languages and in history and the manner of conquerors and saints, when, by all accounts, her father had barely enough learning to write his sermons each week, and her mother could only sign her name with a cross? From where had she received her wit and her perception?
And at such a young age.
She was sixteen years old, yet she had the maturity and demeanour of a woman far older. During his thirty-two years Thornton had met women who, although young, had been old far beyond their years. Women who had suffered, women who had been debased—the wretched of street and alleyway. These women wore their experience and knowledge poorly; hardness glittered from their eyes, and spilled in brittle and bitter words from their mouths. These were women who had been spoiled; not allowed to ease from innocence into experienced womanhood with gentleness or the guidance of either a parental or spousal hand.
Noah Banks was not one of these hard, ruined women. She wore her experience and knowledge easily. It did not emerge in her demeanour as coquettishness, which Thornton would have despised, or as pride, which he would have loathed even more thoroughly, but as a deep peacefulness of which he was—he sighed, admitting it to himself—deeply envious.
She was a girl (a woman) who Thornton suspected had such boundless compassion combined with her strange store of knowledge and experience that she would, to whoever loved her, become an endless source of comfort.
Of shelter.
Thornton slouched in the wooden chair, his half-drunk glass of wine resting on his chest. This was a rare moment of relaxation for him. The Reverend Thornton was a man who never relaxed in another’s company, only in his own. He was a tall man, his long legs now stretched out before him, crossed at their ankles, with shoulder-length, wavy dark brown hair worn swept back from his brow. He had a thin humorous mouth, and dark eyes that sparkled with what might appear to be mischief—save that Thornton so habitually clothed himself in the dark tones of Puritan garb that the humour of his mouth and the mischief of his eyes was (thankfully for the reverend’s public persona) quite obscured and shadowed. Thornton had dedicated himself to God and to instil the knowledge of God into his young charges; his humour and mischief he tried to bury or to ignore.
Now relaxed, at ease, Thornton’s eyes drifted lazily over the deep twilight outside, the still of the gathering night broken only by the movement of a small group of deer towards the shelter of a stand of great oaks and the haunting cry of an owl, out hunting mice and kittens.
There was a movement—the sudden sweep of the owl’s wings as it launched itself from one of the trees—and Thornton sighed, and sipped his wine.
The only reminder of the day past was the line of gentle light sinking across the horizon of the hills. It was a beautiful sight, peaceful and powerful, and Thornton imagined for a moment that the land was about to rise up and reach out to him, seeping in through the window until it embraced him and made him part of its earthiness.
“Do you feel it, John?” she said, and her voice seemed so much a part of the gathering night and of the gentle landscape beyond the windows, that Thornton was not perturbed, nor even overly surprised, to hear her speak, here, within the inner sanctum of his private chambers.
He turned his head, slowly, almost lazily, but otherwise did not move.
She was standing a pace or two inside the door, and Thornton, so given over to the magic of the twilit landscape, found himself thinking that she had not entered the chamber as any mortal person would have done, through the door, but had instead just materialised where now she stood, just as the night slowly fell outside without any discernible movement of arrival.
Then his reserve roared to the fore.
“Noah!” Thornton said, rising so abruptly from his chair that the remnants of his wine spilled from the glass. He suddenly realised that he stood before her in bare feet, clad only in breeches and a linen shirt that he’d unbuttoned in the warmth of the night, and he almost dropped the glass in his haste to set it to one side so he could pull the shirt closed about his chest.
“John,” she said, and smiled.
It was very gentle, that smile, and so unexpected in a sixteen-year-old girl, so comforting, so deep, that Thornton’s hands stilled where they fumbled at the shirt.
Noah was still dressed as she had been this evening, when she’d sat with Thornton and the earl and countess for an hour after supper. In the past year she’d taken to wearing the costume of a woman rather than a girl, and this evening she was wearing one of her favourites: a full skirt of green silk topped with a bodice of green and ivory striped silk, its square neckline low cut over the swell of her breasts, the lacy cuffs of her chemise tumbling from its elbow-length sleeves. On most sixteen-year-old girls the costume would have looked ridiculously and horribly provocative, but on Noah it looked perfect, perhaps because she eschewed the overbearing ringleted hairstyle so beloved of women of fashion and wore her sleek dark hair loosely piled atop the crown of her head where it made clothing that would otherwise have been overly flirtatious and insulting to Noah’s youth merely an adornment to the beauty of the girl herself.