Darkwitch Rising by Sara Douglass

“Louis,” Kate breathed, and stretched naked across the bed in a display of almost feline grace. Her hand was back on her belly, for on the night she had conceived this child she had lain with both Charles and Louis, and to be honest she had no idea which of the men had fathered the child, or if, in some magical way, the baby was an amalgam of both men’s seed. She hoped it was the latter, and knew in her heart that it was entirely possible. Charles and Louis were inseparable friends (if it hadn’t been for Hyde, Louis would have shared the recent bed sport with as much enthusiasm as the other three) and when it came to conception, Kate thought her body would have accepted the seed of both men as indistinguishable.

“I am glad you are here, Louis,” Charles said. “It is almost time.”

“And Charles is worried,” Marguerite said. “He feels…”

“He feels what?” said Louis. He had strolled over to the bed, kissed both Marguerite and Kate softly on their mouths in greeting, then stepped over to Charles, who he also kissed softly. “What is wrong?”

“There is a disturbance tonight,” Charles said. “An…expectation, almost. Something is waiting for us.”

Louis stilled, his dark eyes riveted on Charles’. “Then perhaps we should not form the Circle.”

“We must,” said Marguerite and Charles together.

“I will not be frightened off,” said Charles.

“Those are the words of the thwarted king, not of the wise man,” said Louis. “Charles, we—”

“I must,” said Charles. “We must. That I feel, too. Ah,” he made a frustrated gesture with a hand, “I cannot say why, but this night is both unknown and yet vitally important. Who knows, it may be Noah herself who is reaching out to us. It might be Asterion, yes, but it might also be Noah.” They had learned Cornelia-reborn’s name, not through the efforts of the Circle, but through discreet inquiries back in England. Who is the young girl living at Woburn Abbey? She of the lustrous hair and vivid eyes?

“Or myriad other unknown entities,” muttered Louis.

“I wish Matilda-reborn was here,” Marguerite said. “The Circle would be so much more powerful with her presence.”

Matilda-reborn, unlike Marguerite and Kate, had been born far distant and into high aristocracy—the daughter of the King of Portugal, no less. Catharine of Braganza, as Matilda was known in this life, was young and of great marriageable value. Her father, already aware of her attachment to the exiled Charles, was firm that she could not join him unless as his wife.

Negotiations were under way, but Charles had little hope of winning Catharine until he had his kingdom in hand; the King of Portugal was not going to let his beloved daughter marry a penniless, if prettily titled, exile.

In all save a few details it was history repeating itself: William, the Bastard of Normandy, had endured more than a few years of hardship in winning Matilda of Flanders, and Charles realised he would need to do the winning all over again in this life.

Well, Matilda was worth it.

But until she was with them, and the Circle of the three most powerful of Eaving’s Sisters complete, then they must make do with what they had.

In the silence, Louis turned away and disrobed, as he had the first night Marguerite had shown them how to form the Circle.

As Louis folded his clothes neatly on one of the chests, and Kate poured out water from the copper urns so that all could ritually cleanse themselves, Charles thought about the ever-increasing power and influence of the Troy Game itself.

In their last lives, the Game had shown that it was remarkably aware and capable of influencing the course of events. It had decided it wanted Cornelia, reborn as Eaving the goddess of the waters, to become the Mistress of the Labyrinth and to dance out the final steps of the Game with the resurrected Stag God, Og, as Kingman. Brutus and Genvissa, the originators of the Game, were to be discarded.

In this life, Eaving’s Sisters—Marguerite, Kate and Catharine—had been reborn with vastly more power than they’d ever commanded previously, and Charles suspected that this was as much the Game’s doing as it was the women’s connection with Eaving herself. Eaving needed protection, and, together with Charles and Louis, Eaving’s Sisters were to provide it.

It was, Charles had discovered years ago, the Game’s means of counteracting Asterion’s malevolence.

The women had done with washing and now Louis and Charles took their turn. Although the sexual intimacy the four shared further cemented the ties that bound them, to work the Circle they needed to come to it clean and naked, as they had been born. All the sexual tension that had permeated the room now dissipated; the four worked silently, the women stripping and remaking the bed with clean linens, the men sponging down before drying themselves. Their nakedness was no longer arousing, but binding and solidifying.

Once the bed was made, and the men dry, Charles stood in the centre of the chamber and held out his hands. Marguerite came to his right hand, Louis to his left, Kate took Louis’ and Marguerite’s other hands.

“We must name ourselves,” said Charles, and thus they did, using the names of their first lives, to bind themselves not only to the past, but to wherever the Game and the land needed them to go. Brutus, Coel, Ecub, Erith. Even now, after all of these lives, it felt strange to the others to accept Brutus among them, but then…he had changed, hadn’t he? More than any of them.

They dropped their hands, and moved to the bed. There they sat cross-legged on its vast expanse, forming a circle in the same order that they had named themselves when they were standing, and sitting at an equidistance.

“What is it we wish to view?” asked Marguerite quietly. As she had with Charles and Louis when they had made the first Circle together so many years ago, she took the lead here.

“We wish to view Eaving,” the others whispered, as one.

“What is it we wish to accomplish?” Marguerite said.

“To send Eaving our love and support, to let her know that she is not alone.”

Marguerite reached behind her and lifted something from a box she had earlier put on one of the pillows. It was the same lump of turf and dirt that Charles had torn from the Cornish coast on the night he and his mother had fled the land.

Now even more browned and crumbly than it had been when Marguerite first held it, it nonetheless stayed in one piece as Marguerite hefted it in her hand.

“The land,” she whispered, then threw the piece of turf high into the air. It hit the ceiling plaster with a distinct thud, then fell back towards the bed.

As it did so, it changed.

The watchers gasped in wonder, as they never failed to do. Even Kate’s baby twisted a little in the womb, awed at what she saw through her mother’s eyes.

The crumbled piece of turf and dirt shimmered, then in the blink of an eye flattened and spread out, its very nature changing as it fell (slower now, as both its nature changed and the magic which bound it took hold). It turned from turf into a large circle of lustrous emerald silk that rippled and glimmered in the candlelight as it continued to fall.

It settled to the bed in the centre of the Circle with a sigh, and as it did so once more it changed its contour, this time into the shape of the island that was the land. Its form undulated as it settled against the linen sheets, and mountains rose and moors spread out, and the lie of the land was revealed.

Llangarlia, the ancient land to which they were all bound by magic, murder and love.

“Noah,” said Charles, and as he spoke, he moved his hand so that it pointed towards Woburn Abbey to the north of London.

The emerald silk flattened, as if it had become a great lake, and then it clouded, and shapes began to form within its centre.

But not of Noah or Woburn Abbey, as it normally did.

The watchers gasped, and might have broken the Circle had not Charles held out a stern hand in warning. “Watch,” he commanded. “Whatever appears is for a reason. Watch!”

The view within the circle of silk resolved into that of the interior of a great hall, stacked with chairs and pews.

“The House of Commons,” Charles muttered, for the others here had not ever seen it.

The House was empty, save for a man who sat in the grandest chair of them all, the speaker’s chair. He had a powerful presence, his dark eyes looking about the hall as if he knew he was being watched, and his hands where they rested on the arms of the chair were tense, ready for action.