It wasn’t a view that the Lord of the Faerie shared. One frosty March morning he arrived at the door of Copt Hall and asked Malcolm to fetch Jack.
“Coel?” Jack said. It was still very early, and he’d only just risen. He was dressed, but his jaw was still unshaven, and he gratefully took the cup of tea that Malcolm offered.
The Lord of the Faerie shook his head when Malcolm asked him if he wanted tea, then waited until the valet had left the drawing room before speaking.
“Jack, we have a problem in the Faerie.”
Jack drained his cup of tea and set it aside. “Yes?”
“It is better if you come. You have barely set foot in the Faerie since your return, and this you need to see.”
Jack gave the Lord of the Faerie a long look, then nodded, fetched his coat, and led the Lord of the Faerie to the front door.
From the front door they walked straight into the Faerie.
The Lord of the Faerie was right, Jack thought, as he gazed over the misted wooded hills rolling away into infinity. He should come here more often. The instant his foot stepped onto the magical soil, Jack felt a sense of wellness, almost of nurturing, envelop his being.
And something else. Something…not quite right.
His marks moved slightly, drawing icy trails across his shoulders. “Coel?” he said.
In response the Lord of the Faerie led him towards the edge of the woodlands that led into the first of the forested hills. At first glance the trees and plants seemed healthy enough, but the Lord of the Faerie pointed to a shrub, and then the lower branches of a tree.
“See…here, and here,” he said.
Jack stepped closer. There were patches of blackness on the lower leaves of the tree, and many of the leaves over the top of the shrub were similarly dead. “What is it?” he said.
“Frost,” said the Lord of the Faerie. “The iciness which grips the land has started to penetrate into the Faerie.”
Jack picked one of the blackened leaves of the shrub. It crumbled into dust between his fingers. His marks moved again, and Jack’s uneasiness increased.
The Faerie was cut off from the mortal world. The infections of the mortal world simply should not touch the Faerie.
“Catling,” Jack said. What else could explain it? “Why?” he said. Catling already knew that Jack would do nothing until the Great Marriage on May Day, so why send these tendrils of attack into the Faerie now?
“Why not?” said the Lord of the Faerie, then he sighed, and pinched at the bridge of his nose. “It might be Catling, or it may be an indication of how sick and weak the land has become. Either possibility terrifies me, Jack.”
“I’d lean towards the latter,” said Jack. He touched another leaf, watching it crumble. “I just don’t think Catling would move this early.”
“If it is the latter, Jack, we need the Great Marriage sooner rather than—”
“It should wait until May, Coel.”
“Why?”
“Damn it, you know why! Done that day, during spring resurgent, it will have the greatest effectiveness possible!” Jack sighed, and moderated his tone. “My friend, I am not delaying, only wanting to wait until the marriage will be its most potent.”
“I know, I know. It is just that when one of the Sidlesaghes pointed this out to me this morning…” The Lord of the Faerie looked up towards the summit of The Naked. “Noah tells me that Weyland is not…happy.”
“Ah. I should have spoken to him sooner. I will, Harry. I will.”
The Lord of the Faerie nodded. “Do that. Jack, there is something else.”
Jack raised his eyebrows.
The Lord of the Faerie nodded to something over Jack’s shoulder. “Look.”
Jack turned.
When he’d come into the Faerie previously, he’d remarked to himself on the Idyll which stood at the borders of the Faerie. Now he could still see the Idyll, but it appeared to have retreated. Between it and the Faerie was a blue haze, almost like a mystic ocean.
“The Idyll is retreating,” the Lord of the Faerie said, very softly. “It no longer wants to touch the Faerie. Something is very, very badly wrong, Jack.”
Weyland had put his name down for warden duty within the ARP as soon as they had called for volunteers when war loomed. He wasn’t able to say why he had done it—the last thing that the Minotaur Asterion was likely to do was to volunteer his services in defence of something he had spent thousands of years trying to destroy—but Weyland found a curious kind of peace when he was on the roof of the Savoy watching for enemy aircraft.
It felt almost like making amends, but that notion was so alien to him that Weyland tended to shy away from it.
Weyland stood duty one or two nights a week, as needed. As usual, on this night he was alone. Initially, the Savoy had posted two or three men (either employees who had volunteered, or similarly minded permanent residents), but as the early months of the war had dragged on, and London had suffered nothing more than a scare or two, the manager of the hotel had decided that only one man need sit up each night.
And, being the Savoy, that man was well supplied with thermoses of the best coffee, thick sandwiches, and the lightest of sponge cakes.
Weyland enjoyed his nights alone atop the Savoy.
He’d settled himself down in a small canvas shelter, almost like a game blind, that the hotel manager had caused to be erected. Canvas it might be, but it was triple-layered canvas, and there was a small kerosene heater inside that kept the occupant cosy, and an armchair to keep him comfortable. There were small windows cut at eye level in its four walls and door, and the warden on duty need only scan the sky with his binoculars through these cutout windows, rather than actually venture out in the cold to wander the roof.
The shelter was also quite roomy (having been built originally to house two or three men), but even so, Weyland had nowhere to go when the door suddenly lifted up and Jack stepped in.
“May I sit down?” Jack said, indicating a stool set to one side.
“What are you doing here?”
Jack sat down on the stool. “I thought you might like some company.”
Weyland grunted.
“And I wanted to talk to you. About the Great Marriage.”
Now Weyland shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t really want to—”
“When I leapt into the Idyll, when Grace was just a baby, and said that Noah would betray you—that betrayal was in her very blood—I was wrong, Weyland.”
Weyland remained silent. He was staring out one of the windows in the canvas, carefully not looking at Jack.
“It was a stupid thing to say, and I was angry beyond belief,” Jack said. “You know I was wrong.”
Weyland sighed, and moved his head so that he was almost—but not yet quite—looking at Jack. “You had every right to be angry. And you had picked your moment too well. I was livid with fury as well, and when you appeared…”
When Jack—in his form as Ringwalker—had appeared, Weyland had leapt for his throat, and both men had engaged in a bitter, hateful, brutal struggle.
“We engaged with disaster, Weyland,” Jack said. “While we battled and Noah watched us, Catling placed her hex on Grace. We can’t afford to have that happen again.”
“What do you mean?”
“If we are at odds, if we wallow in misunderstandings and jealousies, then we are fractured and vulnerable. Weyland, you were right when we met on the night Noah set the Great Fire. She and I never had a chance. Whatever we might have had was doomed from the start.”
“But you still love Noah.”
Jack gave a wry smile. “Oh, yes. I do. I will never stop loving her. But I am tired of loving her, Weyland. It has only ever hurt, and I know full well that I could never keep her.” He gave a short, humourless laugh. “Do you remember the day that Noah first came to you in your house in Idol Lane?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t know what happened in your house that night, Weyland, but John Thornton and I met in a tavern called the Broken Bough on the Strand. There I drank myself into almost-oblivion, and Thornton sat there and pitied me. We agreed on one thing, Weyland, and that was that we were both lovesmitten fools who would never, ever have the woman we both craved so much. I hadn’t come close to accepting it at that point, but that was, I think, the start of it.”
Weyland finally looked Jack full in the face. “And you have accepted it now?”
Jack hesitated fractionally before replying. “Yes.”