“We don’t know they were working on behalf of the new Game, Jack. They just may have been worshipping it.”
Jack shrugged his shoulders in frustration. There were too many things left unknown. “Who is this White Queen that she should care…and that she should be able to build this massive ‘potential’ Game?”
“A friend of the druids, obviously.”
“Even so, the druids could not ever construct a Game, or show someone how to do it. So how could this White Queen do it? How? And you say that it should reveal itself only to you and me, but Noah can also sense it, if not as strongly. I don’t understand that. Grace, I’m sorry, but none of this makes sense.”
Grace’s hands tightened very slightly around his hand. “Jack, the only reason my mother can sense the shadow is that she has a close connection to the White Queen. She cannot sense the shadow because she has any connection to the new Game as such, but because she has an ancient bond with the White Queen.”
“Look, I’m sorry. Grace, I am not following a word of this.”
Grace’s eyes filled with tears. “Jack, Noah is the White Queen’s mother.”
Jack stared blankly at Grace, his mind refusing to accept the logical implication of that.
“Please, please understand the rest before I am forced to tell it to you,” Grace whispered.
“No…no…it can’t be possible.”
“The White Queen is she who has never lived, Jack. She is your and Cornelia’s daughter, conceived in the magic of Mag’s Pond, and forced stillborn from Cornelia’s body by Genvissa’s ill will.”
Jack stared at Grace.
“Jack, Jack, please, just say something…”
“I…” There wasn’t anything to say. Jack felt as though someone had snatched his mind and made away with it.
His daughter? His and Cornelia’s? A faint memory came back of something Noah had said on his return to England. I wish my daughter had been born. Who knows what she may have been.
Prophetic words, indeed.
Jack tried to order his thoughts, to think this through logically. A daughter of himself and Noah would have the ability to construct this “potential” Game. Also, the White Queen was born of Noah, born of the line of Ariadne, which meant she was both Mistress of the Labyrinth and Darkwitch bred. She would naturally have the talent to construct a shadow labyrinthine Game.
And she would have built it of Darkcraft.
No wonder it required murder to feed.
Then Jack’s heart skipped a beat as he thought of something else. The White Queen and Catling looked almost identical—they shared identical parents—and Grace had mistaken the White Queen for Catling when she’d come to sit at her side at night. Did that mean that the woman Jack had spoken to had sometimes been the White Queen, not Catling? It all made so much sense now!
“Jack?”
He blinked, refocussing on Grace’s face. She looked distraught, and more than anything else it was that look which cleared Jack’s mind. “Grace, I’m sorry.” He put his free hand about the back of her head, cradling it, and drew her closer until he could kiss the top of her forehead and then her mouth. “I’m sorry. I…I just can’t believe…I can’t fathom this.”
“I know so little, Jack. I don’t know her reasons, or her motive—save that I am sure she wants us to destroy the Troy Game—I don’t even know how this new Game works…it looks so different to what I learned as a Mistress of the Labyrinth, or what I understand of the Troy Game. I don’t even know if I completely trust the White Queen.” Grace took a deep breath. “I remember once she asked me if I was prepared to die for you, and I said yes, if only to get rid of her.”
Jack went cold all over again. “Jesus, Grace.” He remembered how he had felt watching her sleep, wondering if she was to be snatched away from him again, and foreboding overwhelmed him.
Jack forced the presentiment away and kissed Grace’s forehead once more. “I kept hoping that you’d come back with answers, Grace, but this?”
“The White Queen has the bands, Jack.”
“Of course.” She had them in her dark heart. She’d told him that day she’d appeared before him with the bands in her hands. And he’d thought her Catling, and cursed her. “Aeneas said my daughter came and asked for them. I’d assumed Catling.”
“What else were you supposed to assume?”
“Where are they?”
“On an altar somewhere. I have no idea where. They’re waiting for you. I think the White Queen took them so that you wouldn’t be able to finish the Troy Game. She had no idea you’d try without them.”
“My daughter…” He drifted into silence, thinking, then spoke. “But Noah couldn’t sense the shadow at first. It was only later that she could. Why?”
“It was after the Great Marriage, yes?”
Jack nodded.
“Her parents had made the Great Marriage, maybe that made my…our…mother a ‘part of the team’ in a casual way. Or perhaps it made the White Queen happy, to see her parents at peace.”
Grace leaned in against Jack’s body. He still had no shirt on, and she lifted her hands to his shoulders, and played with the markings. She slid her fingers underneath them, lifting them slightly away from his skin, then allowed them to snap back into place.
“Grace,” Jack said very softly, wondering if she were trying to distract him away from his worries, “unless you want to take this a great deal further, right now, then please don’t do that.”
“Sorry.” She leaned back, the mischievous expression on her face anything but apologetic.
“You’ve changed,” he said.
“I’ve grown up.”
“And…?”
“And at the moment I am all skin and bone,” she said, “and I couldn’t manage much more than I have just done. I need more of Malcolm’s soup, I think.”
Jack knew what she was saying—I still don’t want to rush—and wondered at the sense of pleasant anticipation that gave him. He had spent almost four thousand years taking what he wanted, generally at a great rush, and the thought of drawing closer to Grace only at a pace best measured in inches rather than leaps and bounds should have frustrated him beyond measure. But it didn’t.
“We’ve both grown up, I think,” he said, “and you’ve deflected the conversation very nicely away from my daughter.”
“I think she, and this Game she has made for us, is something which needs to be taken at leisure as well. I don’t know whether to trust either the White Queen or her Game.”
With that Jack thoroughly agreed. He ran a hand over Grace’s shoulder, and down one arm. She was so thin. She literally did need more of Malcolm’s soup, and as much other nourishment and rest as she could manage. The months spent in a coma would need months of recuperation. If what she said was true, that a new Game awaited them, then Grace would need to be very strong in order to be able to manage it.
A new Game. How could it be used?
“We need time, Jack,” Grace said.
He sighed. “And is Catling going to give it to us? She has threatened to destroy every creature in the Faerie—”
Grace interrupted him with a finger over his mouth. She told him what had happened on her way to Copt Hall.
“She will not touch the Faerie creatures,” she concluded, “and she cannot use me as an effective threat any more, but what else she can do…” She shuddered.
“But we won’t rush,” he said.
She smiled. “No, we won’t rush.”
“Grace, what of the Sidlesaghes? What happened? We knew that Catling had attacked them, murdered them, but it did not feel to me as if they had passed completely. Grace, are they the reason why you were able to stop Catling from touching any other Faerie creature?”
“Yes. Catling forced me to watch their deaths. I think she hoped that it would drive me insane when her previous attempt had failed. Or perhaps she thought I would go mad from guilt. But I didn’t. There is no blame to me or you or anyone else save Catling over the Sidlesaghes’ deaths. And, yes, they are dead, and yet you are right to say they have not passed completely.”
She paused, and Jack gave her the time she needed to continue.
“As Long Tom was dying, he crawled towards me, and gave me his hand. With his dying breath, and that of every other Sidlesaghe, their knowledge and their ‘oneness’ with the land passed into me.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned her backwards a little so he could look at her full in the face. He studied her for a long moment. “So now you are of the land.”
“Oh, aye. A bad mistake for Catling to make. She worries that if she kills any other Faerie creature then their knowledge and oneness with the land would pass to me. She won’t take that risk.”