“You don’t trust her,” Boudicca said again.
Prasutagus sighed. “No. I don’t. But if we don’t accept her offer, I am afraid that the land will wither and die under this evil. It grows stronger every day. It is…vile.”
“Who is this girl?”
Prasutagus took a long time to answer. “The spirits call her the White Queen for the coldness that besets her. Who is she? I don’t know. But she is powerful and she loathes this evil and wants it gone.”
Boudicca wondered about that. Every instinct within her screamed to not accept what her husband said. But she trusted his judgement so greatly that if he said this strange girl was their only hope, perhaps she should believe him.
“If this White Queen is so powerful,” said Boudicca, “and wants this evil gone, then why does she need us?”
Again Prasutagus took a long time to answer, and Boudicca wished he’d hurry up for the Romans sounded even closer. Maybe Prasutagus had no sense of time and urgency now that he was dead.
“She says she needs to be bound to the land—” Prasutagus began, and suddenly Boudicca, horrifically, knew what her husband was going to say and what he needed of her.
“No!” she said.
“She is not bound to the land,” said Prasutagus, “and needs to be if she has any hope of—”
“Prasutagus, you want me to use my death to construct a Seething?”
A Seething was the most potent of rituals a druid could construct—and Boudicca could construct it, for she was as much druid as was Prasutagus. A Seething could be used to bind anything to any cause, and if this strange little girl could help, and she said she needed to be bound to the land in order to be able to do so, then a Seething would do that magnificently.
But a Seething needed a death to make it.
No wonder Prasutagus had appeared to her just as she was about to take her own life.
Boudicca didn’t know what to say. The fact of her own death did not trouble her at all, but to use it to bind the land to this unknown White Queen? What if she was as bad as that evil which Prasutagus said had infected the land? What if, by constructing the Seething, Boudicca bound the land to an even more terrible fate than the one it already faced?
“Boudicca,” said a new voice, a small child’s voice, and Boudicca’s head whipped about as the circle of warriors murmured again and, one by one, melted into the trees.
The child Prasutagus had spoken of now stood a few paces away. She was just as he’d described her. A beautiful face, framed with dark curls that tumbled down her back, and eyes so blue that Boudicca thought the sky must spend its days in envy of her.
And yet she was so cold. Her heart was ringed with icicles, and Boudicca wondered why.
“No one has ever loved me,” said the child, and Boudicca felt the breath of her speaking as keenly as she would the wintry Arctic winds that blew down from the north.
“We do not trust you,” said Boudicca. “Why should we trust you? And what is this evil that—”
The child slid forward, grasping Boudicca’s wrist.
Boudicca gasped and tried to pull back, but she could not. She felt as if she were frozen.
A vision consumed her.
She saw a naked man with dark curly hair just like this girl’s, and six gleaming bands about his limbs, dancing through a labyrinth atop a hill.
She saw a young girl run out from the witnesses who stood about, and plunge a dagger into the throat of a heavily pregnant woman who stood to one side of the labyrinth watching the dancing man.
She saw fire and death and destruction at the hands of an invader, and for a moment she thought that it was he who was the terrible evil.
“Not he,” whispered the cold-faced child. “Watch.”
Boudicca saw bodies pile atop the labyrinth, then, as if years passed in an instant, she saw the bodies decay into dust.
The labyrinth sank into the hill, and Boudicca saw the roots of trees become ensnared in it, and the burrowing creatures of the land become its slave.
“We need to stop the labyrinth,” said the little girl, “before it overwhelms the entire land.”
“And why should you care?” said Boudicca, finally managing to wrench her wrist free. “I can sense that you are not of this land, either. Why should you care?”
“Because I loathe it,” said the little girl.
Then she smiled, and Boudicca’s heart flipped over in horror. For an instant a death mask had replaced the girl’s cold beauty.
There was something about this girl. Something about the White Queen. Something that Boudicca could not identify, but something which screamed at her to trust this child.
Trust me.
Boudicca wondered if she were being ensorcelled.
“For a good cause,” whispered the girl, and Boudicca capitulated.
“Of course we will help you,” she said, and the White Queen gave her death’s-head grin again.
“Good,” she said. “Now where’s that poison?”
Still feeling strangely alien, as if the White Queen had taken over her entire being, Boudicca took the gourd from the ground.
“Prasutagus, watch over me,” she whispered, then lifted the gourd to her mouth as the White Queen stepped back.
The poison acted within moments. Boudicca felt it eating at her stomach, then slithering into her blood.
Agony coursed through her, and her limbs twitched, wanting to flail and twist.
But Boudicca held firm. She began to mutter in the ancient druidic language, using not only her dying, but the deaths of everyone over this past year—starting with her husband’s—to fuel the Seething which would bind the White Queen to the land.
Was she doing the right thing? As the agony intensified, Boudicca began to doubt herself.
But it was too late now, too late to call back the words of the Seething, too late to stop the slow, triumphant smile that twisted the White Queen’s face.
Her body twitched to and fro, and something shifted in the earth of the glade. Boudicca’s voice cracked, then fell silent as her body succumbed to the convulsions.
“Ah,” sighed the little girl. “It is done, now.”
Boudicca accepted the arm of her husband so that he might guide her to the Otherworld.
She turned to him and said, “What have we done?”
Part One
NOAH
ONE
Waterloo Station, London
Saturday, 2nd September 1939
“Major? Major? I’m sorry to wake you, sir, but the train has arrived at Waterloo and you’ll have to disembark.”
Jack Skelton jerked too fast from deep sleep into wakefulness, and for several disorientating moments stared into the face of the conductor leaning over him, his mind unable to let go the dream images that skidded through it.
Frank Bentley and his insipid wife Violet. Stella Wentworth, standing beautiful and untouchable under the Embankment light. Matilda and Ecub, suburban housewives in dressing gowns. Asterion—Weyland Orr—taking him to Pen Hill. Faerie Hill Manor, and both the Lord of the Faerie and the King of England, George VI, waiting for him.
Grace—everyone’s doom.
“Sir, I must ask you to—”
“Yes, yes. I’m awake.” Jack Skelton struggled to his feet, one hand clutching at the overhead luggage rack for support as his head reeled.
The conductor stepped back. “It’s been a bad few days, sir,” he said, watching the American major curiously as he straightened his tie and uniform jacket, then lifted his greatcoat down from the rack. He wondered why the American was here. He hoped that it might be some indication that the Yanks wouldn’t leave it as long to help out in this war as they had left it the last. “We’ve heard news on the wireless that the PM sent an ultimatum to the Nazis yesterday. Get out of Poland or we’ll go to war.”
The conductor paused, his face glum. “No chance that the Germans will back off, d’you think, Major?”
Fully awake and orientated, Jack studied the man, knowing there was no chance of peace, and wondering if the man wanted false reassurances or the truth.
“It is too late now,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
The conductor’s face tightened, and he gave a small nod. “Let me help you with your bag, sir.”
Once on the platform, Jack tipped the conductor then stood motionless, looking about. Because he’d been so deeply asleep when the train pulled in, and had probably then slept for fifteen minutes or more before the conductor woke him up, most of the other passengers had departed and the great cavernous space of Waterloo Station was all but deserted. He shivered, and tried to put it down to the cold night air.
The conductor had got back on the train, but several baggage handlers stood about an empty trolley at the far end of the train, smoking and talking.