“Jack.”
“Don’t ask, please. I have to work something out. Grace, I think I have something, but let me work it out.”
“Jack…”
He cuddled me to him, rocking me back and forth, kissing the top of my head. “I think there’s a way,” he said, “but I need to nut it out. Please, trust me.”
So I did. I went to bed, where I didn’t sleep, but sat up with Malcolm all night playing cards and refusing the biscuits he tried to press on me.
There were no answers in the morning. Jack spoke to me, and kissed me, and reassured me, but said he needed more time. He looked haggard with lack of sleep, but his eyes still shone with that wild, intoxicated excitement.
I left him to it.
Malcolm took care of me, keeping me reasonably calm, keeping me company, taking me for long walks in the forest and telling me druidic tales that were so strange I think he made them up. He fielded the phone calls from my parents and from Ariadne and Silvius, and refused the Lord of the Faerie entry into the hall. He kept me quiet, and he kept a buffer of quiet around Jack, who emerged from his study only to use the bathroom or snatch a bite from the kitchen.
Jack stayed in the study until Saturday morning, then came out, kissed me again, asked Malcolm to ring my parents and Ariadne and Silvius, and to contact the Lord of the Faerie, and request that they all meet with us at the hall in the evening.
“I have it,” he said. “Believe me.”
Then he went up to bed, and slept through the day until the late afternoon, when he rose and bathed, and only emerged from the bathroom as my parents were arriving.
I wish he could have told me beforehand what he’d discovered, but it was only much, much later, when we were all sitting stunned about the fire, that I realised why he hadn’t.
What he had to say was so incredible, so complex, and so dangerous, that I wouldn’t want to have to explain it twice, either.
“We can do this,” said Jack, leaning forward in his chair, his keen eyes shifting slowly about the group, “but it is going to take most of us, and it is going to take everything we have. Everything. Nothing can go wrong, and none of us can take a misstep.”
We were sitting in the drawing room, the chairs and sofas pulled, as usual, in a semicircle about the fire. My parents were here, as were Ariadne and Silvius and Stella and the Lord of the Faerie. Malcolm had abandoned his usual listening post in the hall to sit on the arm of my chair.
“I want to go back over some things,” said Jack. “I’m doing this so that everything is very clear in our minds. I want no shadows, no puddles of murkiness. I want everyone to walk out of this room tonight with our course of action so unambiguous that you can have no questions. Okay?”
Nods all about, and also a few shared glances of concern.
“Noah’s and my daughter,” said Jack, “who we know as the White Queen, has spent the past two thousand years building a Shadow Game so powerful that it can trap the Troy Game. The White Queen requires Grace and me to dance this Game—to open it and to bring it to a conclusion. The only problem, as you all know, is that Grace is also bound by hex to Catling…to the Troy Game. Its fate is her fate. Grace will also be trapped inside the dark heart of the Shadow Game with Catling, for eternity.”
Jack explained that while the weaker part of Catling’s hex (that which bound everything I had touched to my shared fate with Catling) could be shattered, the White Queen could do little for the original and far more powerful hex.
“Grace will even have to complete the final Dance of the Flowers of the Shadow Game inside its dark heart,” Jack said, “as she will be dragged in with Catling during the process of raising the Flower Gate.
“On the face of it, bad news. Not what we want to hear. But it told me something else—that Grace can complete her portion of the Dance of the Flowers elsewhere. She doesn’t have to be with me.”
He reached out to me then, taking my hand and smiling at me with such warmth that my heart skipped a beat.
“What Grace and I share,” said Jack, gently squeezing my hand, “is so powerful, and our abilities are so perfectly matched, that we could almost be on opposite sides of the planet and so long as we remained perfectly coordinated, we would still be able to complete the Dance of the Flowers.”
He gave my hand a final squeeze then let it go, turning back to the rest of the group.
“We need to get Grace somewhere safe,” he said. “Somewhere so secure Catling’s hex can’t extend into it. She and I can begin the Dance of the Flowers together, but at the precise moment that the labyrinth begins to pull Catling into its heart, we need to get Grace somewhere where Catling’s hex can’t touch her. I don’t know how to break that hex, no one else does, but I think we can move Grace to a place of safety—”
“A shelter,” I heard my mother whisper.
“—at the precise moment Catling is being pulled through into the dark heart, when Catling is disorientated and likely to be expending most of her energy trying to escape the Shadow Game.
“Noah,” he looked at my mother, “I want you to use your powers as Eaving, as Mistress of the Labyrinth and as Darkwitch to construct a shelter for Grace. An enchantment whose only purpose is to shelter Grace during those terrible moments when Catling is being dragged into the dark heart of the Shadow Game and the Flower Gate closes on her for eternity. Can you do it?”
My mother’s eyes were wide, wide with the same thing I’d seen in Jack’s eyes over the past few days—an intoxicating excitement.
“Yes,” she said, “I can do it. I can construct a devising…something to keep her safe. Yes, I can do it.” She thought for a moment. “It will be similar to a Game, but not quite. The devising will need to be danced by a Mistress and Kingman, which will tie it in with the labyrinthine forces involved in the Shadow Game…yes, yes, I can do it.”
I saw Ariadne move slightly in a deliberate attempt to capture my attention, and I looked at her.
When I first trained your mother, Ariadne said in my mind, I realised then that she could do things with labyrinthine power that no one else could have ever imagined. She was born for this, Grace. She can do this for you.
“And I will dance the devising with Weyland,” said my mother. “With your father, Grace.”
“No,” said Jack, “Ariadne and Silvius will dance it.”
Everyone’s attention focussed back on Jack, and Noah opened her mouth to protest.
“Let me speak,” he said gently. “Let me show you what will happen.”
He looked now at the Lord of the Faerie. “Coel, the Faerie is in desperate peril, yes?”
The Lord of the Faerie gave a terse nod. “You know it is.”
“Then Noah and I will go to Catling very soon, and we will say to Catling that we’ve had enough, we cannot bear to see the Faerie perish, and we will complete her. She’ll be wary of our promises—after all, we’ve done this before—but I’m sure we can make her listen.
“Then, on the night of the next big air raid, Grace and I will open the Shadow Game.”
I felt my chest constrict both with fear and with excitement.
“Catling won’t realise?” Silvius said.
“I don’t think so,” said Jack. “The White Queen has made her Shadow Game well. It is so close a reflection of the Troy Game that Catling will think
—and especially during a night of a massive air raid
—of the slight reverberation of its waking as…oh, as nothing more important than a distant wavering along the borders of her own existence.”
Of course, Jack and I also needed the power of the air raid to infuse this Game with as much power as possible, but I hoped he and the White Queen were right about Catling not realising what was happening.
“Eventually, within weeks, I hope, we will close out the Shadow Game, but at the same time as it is closed, so also must we begin to close the Troy Game, and Ariadne and Silvius must dance the devising to save Grace. Everything must be done at the same time. They are all interconnected.”
“Of course!” I said. “The Savoy, the night we were all there, dancing.”