“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What do you want, Grace? Don’t feed me the Stella story.”
She took a long time to respond, but finally answered directly. “I came to see you, Jack. I knew you’d be here tonight.”
The truth at last. But how did she know he’d be here? Only Harry and Walter, and possibly Noah, knew about tonight.
Ah, but there was Malcolm. Malcolm knew he’d be coming to Faerie Hill Manor tonight, but—presumably—did not know the reason.
Will I see him atop Ambersbury Banks tonight? Jack wondered, and knew, without a doubt, that he would.
So. Malcolm told Grace. Interesting. What was there between them?
“Well, here I am, then.” Jack shook a cigarette out of its pack, then slid the pack back into the breast pocket of his jacket. “What did you want to see me about?”
She ran her tongue over her top lip. “I needed to talk to you about my mother. I wondered what you and my mother…what…you and she…um…”
Jack lit the cigarette with a match, the glow momentarily lighting his face. “Yes?”
She shifted, even more uncomfortable, and would not look at Jack’s face. Then she took a deep breath. “I wanted to know what you wanted with my mother.”
“It’s none of your business, Grace.”
Now she looked directly at him. “Don’t dismiss me like that. When you play with the Troy Game, you’re playing with my life, Jack.”
He watched her, hiding the expression of his eyes behind the drifting smoke of his cigarette. “I need and want a great deal from your mother.”
“Do you love her?”
“Of course,” he said, softly, wondering as he said it whether he really meant it, or if he’d said that only to goad Grace.
“Don’t tear us apart, Jack! Don’t upset things.”
“Oh, for god’s sake, Grace! What the hell business is it of yours? What is between your mother and me and your damned father goes back a very long time before you were born. She and I…she and I…ah!” He was too angry to go on.
“She loves my father.”
“Really?”
She was silent, again dropping her gaze away from his angry eyes.
“I have spent three thousand years loving your mother, Grace. Besides, she and I need to make the Great Marriage—”
Grace’s face tensed at that.
“—and we need to close out the Troy Game together. Or destroy it together. She and I are so linked, and so closely—don’t you know of the intimacy that must exist between a Mistress of the Labyrinth and a Kingman?—that I can’t just…” Jack stopped, wondering what he was doing, trying to explain himself to this girl. “I am not going to just walk away from Noah. Unless you give me a good reason, of course.”
Jack was angry enough to push Grace a bit too far. “Come now, what might that reason be? Ah, perhaps you think to offer yourself as compensation if I leave Noah alone. A suitable runners-up prize to the sorry loser? Oh come now, Grace, you can’t possibly think yourself any kind of replacement for your mother. You’re only—”
It was precisely at that moment that she looked at him, and Jack stopped mid-flow, appalled by what he saw in her eyes. He’d never once seen that in any person’s eyes, not even in Cornelia-Caela-Noah’s when he’d said the most vicious things to her. This he’d only ever seen in the eyes of an animal when it was trapped and knew it was going to die.
A great withdrawing, deep into itself.
A passing from the world.
“Jesus, Grace, I’m sorry.” Instantly contrite, and hating himself for what he’d said, Jack reached across the table and grabbed at the sleeve of her coat, certain in that moment that she was actually about to vanish. “I’m sorry, Grace.”
She hovered there, at the edge of that bleak place, and Jack’s fingers tightened about her coat sleeve. He had thought previously that he’d understood how terrible her life had been. Now he understood that he truly had no idea, and that he very likely never would.
What he did understand was her fright at the idea that he, Jack, would tear her mother and father apart. They must be one of her few constants; perhaps the only certainty she had.
Not to mention that any drama between Jack, Noah and Weyland, if it affected the Troy Game, had the distinct possibility of destroying any hope Grace had for freedom from Catling’s hex.
I’m sorry, Grace. This he said both with his power and with pure emotion. I’m sorry, Grace. That was a vicious thing to say, and I am sorry for it.
“You’ll destroy us,” she whispered. “You’ll destroy me.”
He tightened his fingers about her arm. “I don’t want to. I won’t, Grace.”
He could see that she didn’t believe him, but he felt her arm relax very slightly under his hand, and the terrible withdrawing in her eyes had stopped.
“You must love your father very much,” Jack said, releasing Grace’s coat sleeve and suddenly remembering his cigarette. He drew deeply on it.
“I don’t want to hurt him,” Grace said.
That response told him a great deal about Grace. Did she think everything her fault? Did she shoulder the responsibility for all the world’s ills?
“He and I go back a long way,” he said. “Many lives. I hadn’t ever imagined Asterion could be a good father.”
Grace had relaxed, at least enough that one of her hands crept out from beneath the coat sleeve, fingers idly drawing invisible patterns on the tabletop.
“Fatherhood is his redemption,” she said. “He thinks he dare not fail at it.”
Jack was watching the patterns her fingers made on the table, fascinated by their movement. “I’m surprised he and Noah have not had more children.”
“After their tragedy with me?” Grace said. “I’m surprised they even dare still make love.”
That remark should have been bitter, but instead Jack found himself smiling at the rich layer of amusement behind it. Who are you, he thought, behind that mask of fear?
Grace’s mouth lifted in a small smile as well, and for a brief instant they shared the moment of humour. Then her eyes dropped back to her fingers, and Jack’s followed them.
And he went cold as he realised what she’d been so idly doing, tracing out those patterns on the tabletop.
She had been tracing out harmonies. Meaningless, idle harmonies, but harmonies nonetheless, drawing together the strands of existence in the night air about them, in the tabletop, in the threads that made up her coat, in the smoke dribbling out the end of his cigarette…
Grace could have sat there and done that before almost any man save Jack, and they would have had no idea what she was doing.
But Jack was a Kingman, and he knew precisely what she was doing.
And what she was.
“Who taught you the arts of Mistress of the Labyrinth?” he asked.
Grace snatched her hand back from the table, and it vanished up the overlong sleeve of her coat.
“Ariadne?” said Jack, hating it that his voice had now hardened, but so surprised and unnerved by what he’d just realised—and by what he knew hovered beneath the flesh of her arms—that he was unable to stop it. “Your mother?”
“Stella.”
“Stella?”
“Why not?”
“Why?”
“She said I should learn, and so she taught me.”
“Not your mother?”
Grace’s tongue slid about her upper lip again. “I don’t think she knows I’ve been trained.”
Jack’s mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding me! How could she not know?”
“She doesn’t ever see me, Jack. She only sees a tragedy. She just sees her mistake.”
“Sweet mother of God, Grace.” He paused. Noah didn’t know? How blind was she when it came to her daughter? “Where did Stella teach you?”
“Where she was taught by her mother. On Tot Hill. There was a—”
Jack remembered back all those thousands of years. “There was a stone building on the hill. A meeting hall. Genvissa—Stella—took me there.”
Grace nodded. “That stone building was transformed into the Great Founding Labyrinth by her mother.”
As a Kingman, Jack knew the process by which all Mistresses of the Labyrinth were trained. They were taken by the one who taught them to a building which, through the arts of the labyrinth, was transformed into a mirror of the Great Founding Labyrinth that had once stood on Knossos. There they learned to manipulate the harmonies of life, and to control the labyrinth itself.
So Stella taught Grace on Tot Hill. “Which House of Parliament did you use?” Jack said, referring to the fact that the British Houses of Parliament stood on the exact site that Genvissa’s stone hall had once occupied. Now that his initial shock was over at the discovery Grace was a trained Mistress, he was vaguely amused at the thought that either Commons or Lords had been transformed, without any mortal realising it, into the Great Founding Labyrinth.