“Of course you have. Nonetheless, you will happily engage in the Great Marriage with her.”
“Certainly. But, Weyland, the Great Marriage doesn’t have to involve sex.”
“Don’t feed me lies. What kind of fool do you think I am?”
“I was just trying to make it easier for you,” Jack snapped.
Weyland sighed, looking away. For a long minute there was silence.
“I don’t want to lose her,” Weyland murmured eventually.
“And you won’t,” said Jack, and surprised himself by sounding as if he meant it. He made a move then, as if to rise, but Weyland forestalled him.
“Don’t leave just yet,” Weyland said. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Jack sank back onto his stool.
“The murders,” Weyland said.
Something cold and black coiled about Jack’s stomach.
“The imps are doing them,” Weyland said.
““What?”
“I had suspected them, but Silvius came to see me a week or so back, and mentioned something to me.”
“And that was…?”
“Remember how the imps tore themselves out of Jane and Noah?”
Suddenly what had been worrying at Jack’s mind about the murders fell into place. “They’re re-creating their own births!”
Weyland inclined his head in agreement.
“Why?” said Jack. “What are they about?”
“I don’t know,” said Weyland, “but I intend to discover it.”
TWO
The Faerie
Wednesday, May 1st 1940
The Great Marriage took place atop The Naked on the first day in May 1940. All of the Faerie were invited, and some from the mortal world: Eaving’s Sisters, Walter (an invitation he did not accept, although his wife, Anne, did come), and Weyland, among others. Ariadne was not invited.
But Grace had been. That had not been certain at first, but Jack insisted she be invited, and finally the Lord of the Faerie had bowed to his request. Jack did not know if Grace would actually come and was pleased when, finally, she turned up with the last group of guests to arrive.
The Naked was thronged with guests, but, as always when a court or convocation was held here, even the tens of thousands of attendees did not make the summit feel crowded. The Lord of the Faerie and the Caroller—Stella as she was in the mortal world—mingled with the assembly, their presence easily marked by the glossy blue and black magpie that hovered over the Caroller’s head.
Weyland and Grace stood to one side of the gathering. Grace was patently uncomfortable, while Weyland had assumed an air of boredom. He was dressed, not in a modern, dapper suit, but in a very old-worldly style that was highly reminiscent of his seventeenth-century attire; his daughter had dressed herself in a simple white dress that clung to her slim figure and drifted softly about her calves. She stood very close to her father, her face grave, her eyes troubled, as she watched the crowds before her.
From time to time she would twist a little, and allow her eyes to roam over the magical landscape of hills and valleys.
Jack and Noah attended in their magical godforms of Ringwalker and Eaving. As with the Lord of the Faerie and the Caroller, they mingled freely among the crowd—if separately—laughing with this friend, embracing another, giving the appearance of a joyful couple about to be united in marriage.
No one saw, or even intuited, the woman with long black curls hiding on a hill that rose two distant from The Naked. She crouched behind a tree, her white face occasionally peeping out from behind it, her dark blue eyes following either Ringwalker or Eaving, although sometimes she glanced towards Grace.
“Are you all right?” Grace whispered, leaning even closer to her father.
Weyland put an arm about her shoulders, wondering that she felt so cold. “It has to be done, Grace. There is nothing I can do about it. Besides, I have grown used to your mother’s lovers.”
“Liar,” she whispered, and he hugged her a little tighter.
“Your mother is so beautiful,” he said. “It is difficult.”
At that moment Eaving passed close by, and she looked around and saw them. She came over and kissed Weyland on the mouth and then Grace on the cheek.
She looked stunning. When she walked as Eaving, Noah generally wore a sleeveless loose-fitting robe of ecru, cream and silver that drifted about her like a cloud.
On this day, she wore a gown of deep emerald shot through with flashes of grey and black: she wore the water, of which she was goddess, and which she would take into her marriage.
Her eyes, too, were different from her normal dark blue. Now they were a sage green, with lightning flashes of gold.
Eaving smiled at Grace. “I am still your mother,” she said.
Grace managed a smile, but it was obviously forced.
Eaving laid her hand against Grace’s cheek, and shot Weyland an anxious look, but he gave a brief shake of his head, and Eaving sighed. “I love your father, Grace,” she said. “More than anything in this world.”
“Save Jack?” said Grace.
Eaving did not mind the question, understanding the anxiety behind it. “Oh, I love him, too, but not as I do your father.” She looked at Weyland. “Ringwalker has never given me candied fruits to eat out of a human skull, nor has he presented me with a wraith from the Halls of the Dead on Christmas Eve. Only your father could ever think of that.”
Weyland smiled, remembering their midnight feast in the bone house of St Dunstan’s-in-the-East when he had arranged for long-dead wraiths to serve them. That had been the night she’d told him she was pregnant with Grace.
Grace frowned, not understanding, and Eaving once again laid a soft hand briefly against her cheek. “Your father can share that memory with you tonight, while I am gone. Maybe it will give you comfort.”
Then she turned, and vanished into the crowd.
It was not the Lord of the Faerie who opened and conducted the ceremony, as may have been expected, but the Caroller. At some point the crowds had formed a gigantic circle about a central table, and it was at this simple oak table that the Caroller stood.
As with so many others, she, too, was clothed in magical raiment of a rosy light that barely hid her figure. She was the one who carolled in the dawn and the dusk, and she stood, the centre of all attention, as lovely as the sun as it crested the horizon.
“My lord,” the Caroller inclined her head to the Lord of the Faerie, who stood at the crowd’s edge some distance away, “asked me to conduct this ceremony, and it pleased me to accept. It also amused me—” her eyes did, indeed, dance with merriment “—because I spent so many thousands of years trying to keep these two apart.” She gave an expressive shrug. “We can all make mistakes occasionally.
“I stand here because I know this pair so well. I have known them for almost four thousand years—a mere blink in the lives of some of those present, but significant enough for our story. Ringwalker, once Brutus, once William, once Louis, now Jack when he walks the mortal land, has been my partner in dance and ambition and power. He has been my husband, my lover, my enemy, the focus of all my lives save in the latter years of my last when—” the Caroller turned and looked at the Lord of the Faerie, her face so alive with love, so radiant, that Grace, who with Weyland had come to stand within the inner ranks of the encircling crowd, blinked away tears “—I discovered that the greatest love of my life had been with me all the time.”
The Lord of the Faerie smiled, and put his right hand on his heart.
“Eaving,” the Caroller continued, “I knew first as Cornelia, who I hated.” She paused, as if needing time to remember the depth of that hate. “Then I knew her as Caela, and I despised and ridiculed her. Then she came to me as Noah, and I discovered a friend.”
Again the Caroller paused, her face deeply reflective. “I had never had a friend, before.” She sighed, and shook herself slightly, as if rousing herself from her memories. “And, finally, I came to know her as my sister, and as Eaving, the goddess of the waters. It has been a long journey.
“A journey that ends tonight. Ends for me, but starts anew for this land and for Eaving and Ringwalker. My friends, will you stand forward?”
The crowd parted at the eastern and western edges of its inner circle and Ringwalker and Eaving stepped out. Ringwalker, who walked forth from the western section of the summit, wore nothing more than a white linen hipwrap, much as he had when Brutus. Otherwise his flesh was bare—save for the inky, raised lines of black which writhed across his shoulders, back and upper chest.