Grace looked him in the eye, and he saw for the first time a flash of confidence in their depths.
“Not the Houses of Parliament,” she said. “Westminster Abbey. The altar.”
Jack’s unease returned. When he was William, Asterion had crowned him at the altar of the abbey. That thought reminded Jack that Grace was not only a Mistress of the Labyrinth, she was also a Darkwitch, bred twice by the father of Darkcraft himself, Asterion.
Just how vulnerable was Grace really? Was this a reality which sat before him, or an act? He couldn’t read her, and it made him distrust everything she said.
“It seems I am surrounded by Mistresses of the Labyrinth,” he said, lighting up a fresh cigarette. “Stella, your mother, Ariadne—who I believe is still about—and now you. Is there anyone else I should know about?”
Grace shook her head.
“And just one Kingman. All of you, to fight over me.”
She didn’t reply to that, and eventually Jack sighed, wishing he was anywhere but here and that Noah and Weyland had never conceived this complication of a child. “Grace Orr, Mistress of the Labyrinth, what do you know of this ‘wrongness’ that I have felt over London? You know something, I can feel it. What, for Christ’s sake?”
She took her time in answering. “Catling comes and sits with me at night.”
Jack was torn between irritation at her evasiveness and horror at her revelation. “What? Do your parents know?”
Grace shook her head. “I can’t tell them. They already have enough of a burden to carry.”
Jack wasn’t sure whether to regard her as a supreme manipulator (look how pitiful my life is) or a truly tragic figure. Or was there something else lurking there? Who was Grace, truly? “How long has Catling been ‘sitting with you at night’?”
“Ever since I was a toddler.”
“And? What does she say? What does this have to do with what I felt?”
Grace made a helpless gesture. “She just…watches. But she smiles at me, and, oh gods, I know she has something planned. I can feel it! What you have felt, your ‘wrongness’…it must be her. A trap. Please, please, Jack, please don’t fall into it!”
Jack again drew deeply on his cigarette, watching Grace’s face through the drifting smoke, and said nothing.
There were traps everywhere, and Jack was sure he was staring at one of the biggest and most dangerous of them.
FIVE
Ambersbury Banks, Epping Forest
Sunday, 10th September 1939
At midnight, Jack left Faerie Hill Manor. He’d come here earlier, already unsettled at the thought of what this night held; after his conversation with Grace, he was so nervy that he found himself jumping at every noise.
The house was quiet when Jack walked out the front door. Harry had not reappeared, but Jack was not worried. He could feel the Lord of the Faerie watching, and knew he would be there to witness. Neither had Walter appeared, but Jack had felt him drawing closer, driving along the forest road north.
He, too, would be at the appointed place.
Grace had earlier gone up the stairs to the first floor of the house, saying she was going to bed.
But Jack didn’t believe her. What was her real purpose in talking to him? Why this night of all nights? And what was he supposed to make of her words…and of her?
He stood on the front terrace in the dark night, remembering her fingers idly twisting those harmonies out across the tabletop. Those harmonies had been compelling and he’d felt them thrumming through his blood. But he shouldn’t forget she was also a Darkwitch. Ringwalker had only one enemy, and that was the Darkwitch.
That’s what he had once thought, but Jack had made his peace with Noah, and with Stella. Should Grace then be feared?
“Why not,” he whispered, “until I know different?” Then, suddenly making up his mind, he ran lightly down the steps to where his Austin sat. Jack stood, stared at it, then he lifted his head, and looked northwards.
The night encircled him, very still and dark.
There was no moon.
Jack took a step away from the car. His hands clenched, then released as he forced himself to relax. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and walked away from the car towards the edge of the forest.
Epping Forest had existed since the land that was now Britain had first risen from the misty swamps of creation. It had once been much larger and much mightier, spreading eastwards and northwards across the land. Between its trees had roamed bears and wolves, hares and badgers, mammoth and aurochs, and stranger, wilder beasts that sometimes strayed out of the Faerie. By the mid-twentieth century, after thousands of years of depredation by the axe and plough, the forest covered only some five thousand acres.
Yet the forest’s power remained, as much power as when the forest had covered so much more of the land. Only now it was…concentrated.
Epping Forest was riddled with walkways and bridle paths, roads and forestry tracks, and the trails worn down by the tens of thousands of years of foxes hunting dormice and ghosts hunting resolution, but Jack walked none of these. He walked a strange causeway that had not been trodden since Og, the being who had walked formerly as the Stag God, had taken it over a hundred thousand years previously.
It was an easy path to follow, however, despite the dark of the moonless night.
The leaf litter marking the trail was speckled with drops of glistening blood. Og’s blood.
When tonight was done, the path would be laid anew for the next resurgent Stag God to walk down in perhaps another hundred thousand years’ time.
This time, it would be laid down in Jack’s blood.
The blood, and what it implied, settled Jack’s nerves. He was glad to be doing this finally. It was the ultimate step—or the ultimate plummet, whichever way you preferred to view it—into his life as Ringwalker, god of the forests.
He walked north, his feet scrunching down firmly on the blood-stained leaf litter as if he drew comfort from the blood leaching up through the soles of his shoes. His path took him roughly parallel—but sometimes he diverged, and wandered briefly into the Faerie, where Sidlesaghes and water sprites shadowed him—with New Epping Road, although Jack swung a little deeper into the forest when he passed the Wake Arms and the Fox and Hounds taverns. Within fifteen minutes of leaving Faerie Hill Manor, Jack entered the section of the forest called the Long Running. The forest drew back at this point, and Jack strode through long, coarse rush grass. Here he took a deep breath, and quickened his pace slightly.
He didn’t have far to go.
Another fifteen minutes, and Jack approached the ancient fort of Ambersbury Banks on the north-western edge of Epping Forest. He wasn’t far from Copt Hall, and for a moment his pace slowed, and his head turned westwards to where he felt the hall rising, but then he focussed forward once more.
Ambersbury Banks was a raised circular fortress, defended by earthen banks and ditches that had, over the centuries, crumbled and decayed under the onslaught of the forest. Historians and foresters had long argued over whether it was an ancient British camp, or one thrown up by the Romans, but in reality no human hand had built Ambersbury Banks. It was a part of the Faerie, one of The Naked’s children which had lost its way and slipped into the mortal world, never to find its way home. It had a twin, Loughton Camp to the south, but Ambersbury was the older and more powerful of the two hills.
And with a far bloodier history. Ambersbury was a place of blood, and it attracted blood to it. Boudicca’s army had been slaughtered here, but there had been lesser murders on Ambersbury, although no less tragic, as when Sulemaic, an Anglo-Saxon warrior, had raped then murdered twin thirteen-year-old sisters on the primeval Faerie hill one dark, moonless night in the eighth century. During the fourteenth century two young boys had been found at Ambersbury, with their throats cut and every drop of blood drained from their body into the ancient earth. In the eighteenth century a toddler had met a similar fate. Twice during the nineteenth century, in incidents separated by twenty-four years, two cuckolded husbands had slit their wives’ throats within the fort’s boundaries.
It was not a particularly pleasant place for the vulnerable to linger.
There had also been blood spilled on Ambersbury Banks that was not associated with either battles or tragedies. Almost four thousand years ago a young man, known as the Gormagog, had come here to be marked as Og’s living representative. Thirty years after that, Gormagog had brought his son Loth to be similarly marked.
They had been tattooed with the mark of the former Stag God.