Noah remained silent.
Ariadne drew in a deep breath. “There are few people who would accept this with the same equanimity that I have, Noah. It is dangerous.”
“Really? But am I not a product of such ‘danger’?”
Ariadne laughed. “Oh, yes, you are a product of my own lustful cuddlings with the Minotaur. Aye. I can see what a daughter of mine you truly are.” She sobered. “Be careful. Use him, do not allow him to use you. And think also, do you not have this Stag God lover awaiting you? Your Kingman? Why jeopardise that with an affair with Asterion?”
“I do not have to justify this to you, Ariadne.”
Ariadne’s eyes narrowed, and she nodded to herself very slightly. Oh, gods…
Jane gaped, unable to believe what she had heard. Behind her the Lord of the Faerie laughed merrily. All about her the faerie folk were laughing, and she thought that perhaps this was a great jest on their part. That at any moment their laughter would reveal it for what it truly was—malicious retribution.
“We want you to carol,” said the Lord of the Faerie, and Jane jumped, for suddenly he was standing at her side. “We want you to carol in the dawn and the dusk, and lighten all our hearts. You shall spend an eternity paying your recompense, Jane, but I think you will do very well at it.”
Jane stared at him. Her eyes had filled with tears, and the Lord of the Faerie had become nothing but a misty blur, and the great crowd of faerie folk were little more than an undulating ocean surrounding her.
“I can’t sing very well,” she finally whispered.
The Lord of the Faerie bent his head down, and kissed her, and it was for Jane the greatest kiss she could ever have imagined for it was full of nothing but laughter and mercy.
“Then we shall teach you,” he said, lifting his mouth away from hers.
Noah and Ariadne drank an ale with Warneke in his chambers before he escorted them back to the Lion Gate. Jane waited for the two women there, standing patiently a few paces away in the shadow of the wall.
“Have you been bored, sweeting?” Ariadne said. She did not move from beneath the Lion Gate.
“Deeply,” Jane said, walking over and looking at Noah. “You’re still alive, then?”
“Deeply,” said Noah, and Jane’s mouth twitched, and then smiled.
Charles sat in the most inner and private of his chambers in Whitehall, Eaving’s Sisters gathered about him.
“Well?” asked Marguerite.
Charles smiled, soft and warm. “She is learning the ways of the labyrinth,” he said.
“And Jane teaches her?” said Catharine, her tone incredulous.
Charles looked at her, then raised a hand and twisted a finger about one of her dark curls which had escaped a pin. “Of course,” he said. “Who else?”
At the window, unbeknown to any in the room, the little girl smiled, and then stepped back from the window and faded away.
Eleven
The Great Founding Labyrinth within the Tower of London, and Idol Lane, London
NOAH SPEAKS
Noah, Mistress of the Labyrinth. That alliance of name and title had a certain ring to it. Most certainly it had been something I’d needed to achieve for well over a lifetime so that I could be Mistress to Brutus-reborn’s Kingman and complete the Troy Game.
What surprised me was this: once I began to learn the ways of the labyrinth, then I wanted it as well. Badly. Ariadne said it was my blood coming out. I’d been bred to it; thus, once my eyes were opened and I realised my potential, then I could not wait a single moment before I reached out with both hands and seized that potential and that heritage, and made it mine.
The power of the labyrinth was sublime, exciting, sexual, enlivening, addictive. I could not get enough of it. I wallowed in it. I was proud of my natural abilities, and lived for Ariadne’s smile, her nod, her rare, “That was well done, Noah”. For six visits Ariadne took me about the White Tower (although to our perception it rose above us in a twisting mass of darkness rather than whitewashed ragstone) in meandering circles, but we did not enter it. Ariadne did not so much teach as draw forth from me understanding that I had not realised was there, and which made me wonder if indeed I had been bred for this task, rather than having it thrust suddenly upon me. Then, at the end of my sixth visit, I realised that Ariadne had not been leading me in meaningless perambulations about the White Tower at all, but in clearly defined patterns.
As we had walked, so we had recreated the windings of the labyrinth. I exclaimed, and told Ariadne of my realisation, and she smiled, and patted my arm, and said, “So. Now you are ready.”
On my seventh visit to the Tower, Ariadne took me inside the White Tower itself. Here, entwined in representative form—although only our eyes could see it—the harmonies of stars and tides, moon and brain, blood vessel and forest path. Here, I would learn to control and, eventually, to manipulate these harmonies.
The labyrinth of creation.
It was terrifying and exhilarating, all in one.
Managing the power within the Great Founding Labyrinth was not easy: even as eager as I was, even with the heritage I had, I found it a troublesome task. To open myself up to the harmonies was to allow so much apparently chaotic discord to flood my being that I found it difficult to concentrate for longer than two or three minutes. Ariadne told me my initial training was to enable me to cope with this flood of sensory information; later stages would enable me to control and manipulate it.
To rebuild the labyrinth to my own needs.
“Previous Mistresses of the Labyrinth and Kingmen have rebuilt it only for reasons of protection,” Ariadne said to me one day as I sat on the outer steps of the White Tower, nursing my aching head in my hands. “It was all we knew how to do. You? You may go much further, do more with the labyrinthine enchantments than any before you.”
She shrugged, seemingly disinterested. “And maybe not.”
Ariadne may have affected dismissive indifference on occasion, but there was one thing about me which fascinated her—and myself, come to that.
I was not simply Noah, long-lost daughter-heir returned to Ariadne, nor even an Asterion-bred Darkwitch. I was also Eaving, goddess of the waters and fields and fertility of the land, and, as Eaving, I had a peculiarly strong bonding with the labyrinth. I was deeply attuned to the seasons and the turning of the tides and the years, and this meant I was even more attuned to the harmonies of the labyrinth than I might otherwise have been. Eaving complemented what natural skills I had as Mistress of the Labyrinth, and my increasing skills as Mistress of the Labyrinth complemented my abilities as Eaving.
“I should never have been so dismissive of my role as MagaLlan,” Ariadne said thoughtfully one day as we walked back to share our usual ale with Frederick Warneke. “Imagine what I might have achieved had I truly realised how complementary were the land and the labyrinth.”
I shot her a dark, cynical look. Ariadne controlling both powers as goddess and labyrinth would have sent the stars themselves into a panic.
And myself? Was I worthy of panic?
“Ariadne,” I said. “Should I use the darkcraft within me? What of this dark heritage? I am terrified of using it…or of it using me.”
“The darkcraft is not to be feared, Noah. It will be a better lover to you than any man ever could be. Even Weyland.”
I could not smile. The truth was that the thought of just having the darkcraft inside me was terrifying. What would it do if ever I unleashed it? What did it feel like? Would it corrupt me? Would it alter who I was as Eaving, and as a Mistress of the Labyrinth?
If I was unsure about the darkcraft, then I was terribly uncertain about the Troy Game itself. I still had no true idea of why the Game had decided to emerge as flesh incarnate, and the fact that Catling was on the loose in London worried me from time to time. My faith in the value of the Troy Game to this land had been severely undermined. I most certainly no longer believed in “the one true way”. I was no longer ready to accept that there was merely the one path, and that it was my duty as female representative of all things good and fair to walk its straight and narrow boundaries.
I was learning that life, like the labyrinth, and like creation itself, is made up of varied subjective interpretations.
I was realising that for any one problem there were many solutions, many paths which could be trod.