She shook her head. “Jack—”
“But it is good whisky,” Jack said. “Are you sure you won’t have—”
“Jack—”
“Shit,” he said. He put the decanter to one side, stepped forward, and took Noah’s face in his hands. She started to pull back, but his hands tightened, and he leaned forward and kissed her with such an intensity that when Noah finally managed to wrench herself free her face was flushed and her breath rough.
“Have you tired of Weyland, then?” he said. “Have you come to tell me that you’ve got over your foolishness? That you want what we both should have had four thousand years ago?”
“No,” she said. “I love Weyland still.” More than ever I loved you.
“Then what the fuck are you doing here, Noah? What do you want?”
“I wanted to welcome you home, Jack. I didn’t get a chance at Faerie Hill Manor.”
Of course not. She’d been bound and gagged and couldn’t get a word in edgewise. So she’d had to come out here in the middle of the night.
He wondered if Weyland should be as sure of her as Noah thought he was.
“Jack, you are home. Oh, please, gods, we cannot be at odds like this. Everything is wrong. The land suffers, its people suffer, Catling—” she said the name with such vehement loathing that Jack’s face stilled “—looms over us with such menace that each dawn increases our burden of dread. And we don’t know what to do about it. We don’t know how to stop it, save by destroying the damned Troy Game.”
“But you can’t, can you?”
“No,” she said, “not without you.”
“And even then, how, Noah? Shall we destroy your daughter, as well? That should do it…but, oh, I forget, if we do Grace to death then we destroy the Faerie, and most of us—although I’m not sure that I’m included in that curse, am I?—and likely London and all of the land as well.”
He saw then just how badly Noah suffered. Her beautiful eyes became so agonised, and her lovely face so drawn, that he instantly took one of her hands and held it as softly as he could.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She pulled her hand from his and dashed away the tears that threatened to spill over. “You have no idea what it has been like, Jack.”
“No, but you somehow want me to make it instantly better, don’t you? Well, I’m sorry, Noah, I really am, but I don’t know how I can do that. I have no bloody idea. When Catling trapped Grace with her hex, she trapped all of us. What the hell am I doing back here?”
He walked away, standing staring into the vast interior of the hall, hands on hips. After a long moment he turned back to look at Noah. “What if I said there is nothing I can do?”
“I can’t accept that, Jack,” she said. “I won’t.”
He sighed, sat in one of the chairs and gestured to another. “Sit down. Tell me about the state of the Troy Game.”
“It is unbelievably strong,” she said, sitting on the edge of a chair. “You can feel that, surely.”
He hesitated, then gave a small nod. He remembered that momentary impression of the shadow hanging over St Paul’s, but thought it more likely a figment of his nerves at that point than of anything else.
“You know what powers I command, Jack,” Noah continued. “I am Noah, goddess of the waters. I am also a powerful Mistress of the Labyrinth. And I am a Darkwitch. I have three strengths and powers at my command and I can combine all three of them into something so powerful, so lethal, that, if I so choose, I could probably murder the entire world. But I can’t murder Catling. I can’t murder the Troy Game. It is too cunning for me now. Too deep. Too dark.”
“But you are also Eaving, the shelterer,” Jack said, calling Noah by her goddess name. “Wouldn’t that contra-indicate any and all of these murderous ambitions?”
She studied him, then laughed softly, realising that he was attempting a small jest. “Oh, aye, you are right. My Eaving nature would probably preclude any attempt at using my Darkwitch and Mistress of the Labyrinth powers to ‘murder’ anyone. I can’t think why Catling hasn’t asked me for shelter already.” Because her goddess name meant shelter, Noah was forced to shelter and protect any who asked it of her, no matter what she thought of them, or how she feared them.
Now Jack smiled, and the tension between them relaxed a little. “Tell me,” he said, very softly, and Noah didn’t need any more words to know exactly what he meant.
“I thought I was being so clever,” she said, “burning London. I thought it would stop the Troy Game—Catling—in her tracks for a while, give us enough time to prepare. But Catling had already trapped us.”
She stopped, and both remembered that terrible day when Jack, in his form as Ringwalker, had battled with Weyland within the Idyll as Noah watched helplessly on. While they’d been so stupidly, pointlessly engaged, Catling had sent her two dark imps into the Idyll to twist the red wool hex about Grace’s wrists, thenceforth binding Grace’s fate to that of the Troy Game’s.
“Afterwards,” Noah continued, “when London lay burned and desecrated and you had left, we did everything we could think of to free Grace. Everything.” She paused, and Jack could again see the pain well up inside her. “Nothing worked. Not from any of us, gods or Faerie alike. Jack, it wasn’t just that Grace had been so cruelly trapped, it was that Catling then wrapped Grace in agony whenever she felt like it. Or whenever she felt she needed to remind us how badly, how finally, we were trapped, or whenever she had a particular message to get across. She has made Grace suffer all these years. All these years. And in the process…” Again she paused, and Jack realised it was to bring her emotions under control. “And in the process I lost my daughter.”
That statement startled Jack somewhat, although earlier he’d recognised the tension between Noah and Grace. Surely Grace had lost a great deal more than Noah?
Noah hadn’t noticed Jack’s reaction. “Grace was never a baby. She was never a child. She has spent her entire life struggling to survive the anguish and the hopelessness. Jack,” Noah looked over to him with eyes full of emotion, “all I had wanted was a daughter to love. I thought I’d have it with Catling, but look what she truly was. I was certain I’d have it with Grace, but then…”
“She doesn’t like to be mothered, does she?”
Noah made a small gesture of unhappiness. “I fuss too much. All I want to do is to take her in my arms and somehow take some of that hurt into myself, but she hates that.”
“She loathes pity.”
“I don’t know what to do any more, Jack.”
He wasn’t sure what she meant those words to apply to—Grace or the wider disaster they were all involved in—then he decided it didn’t matter. The statement held true enough for whatever subject.
“Do you think this looming war is Catling’s doing?” Jack asked, wanting to change the subject.
“Who knows? Whether Catling is responsible for the war or not, I am sure she will grow in power from it. We are all sure she will use what is coming to force us to her will. Jack, there is a frightful despair winging its way towards us, and none of us know what to do about it.”
“I don’t have a magical answer for you.”
Noah looked down at her hands.
Jack sighed. “I am not Catling’s tool, Noah, but I am not yours either. All I know is that I want to be free of this debacle we have created for ourselves and of you. But I don’t know how to do that.”
At Faerie Hill Manor, Grace stood at the window of her room and looked towards London.
She went white, and a hand flew to her mouth.
“By the gods,” she whispered. “What is that?”
SIX
Copt Hall and Faerie Hill Manor
Sunday, 3rd September 1939
As Jack and Noah talked, Malcolm cleaned the kitchen and laid the table for breakfast. Just as he set out the plates, he heard a scratching at the door which led outside.
Malcolm’s eyes flew to the door leading into the hall, as if he thought to find Jack standing there. Then, reassured that Jack and Noah were still deep in conversation, he opened the door and slipped outside.
Two dark, overcoated figures stood in the shadow of the porch, jittering from foot to foot in excitement.
“Malcolm! Malcolm! Malcolm!”
“Shush!” Malcolm hissed at the imps. “What are you doing here? Why? Don’t you realise how dangerous it would be for Jack to see—”