Eaving, who came from the eastern section of the crowd, still wore the gown that appeared to have been woven from water.
They met at the table, and Ringwalker gave the Caroller an affectionate glance. “Fine words,” he whispered, “but how do I know you do not secrete a knife amid all your rosy prettiness, ready to finally plunge it into my, or Eaving’s, back?”
She smiled. “There has been too much death between us, all three of us. No more death. Life only ever after.”
She turned to the table, and indicated a shallow wooden bowl of water, and an identical bowl filled with leaves and fruit of the forest. “This is not a marriage that I can make,” she said, “but only facilitate. Ringwalker? Eaving?”
And she stepped back.
Ringwalker and Eaving stood for a long moment, looking at each other, then Ringwalker spoke.
“We made a marriage a long time ago,” he said, his voice quiet but nonetheless reaching to everyone atop The Naked, “and we made it very badly. This time, we need to do it properly, and with love and understanding, rather than with hatred and suspicion.”
He smiled, and it was so gentle, and so full of love, that hands reached surreptitiously to brush at eyes all through the watching crowd. “Hades’ daughter, Cornelia, I should have treated you as a jewel from the moment I first met you, and yet failed. Will you forgive me?”
Eaving reached out, and touched his cheek as she had so recently touched her daughter’s. “And I should have kissed you, and failed to. Will you forgive me?”
“Will you kiss me now?” Ringwalker said.
“And will you love me now?” Eaving said, taking Ringwalker’s hands in hers.
Then, not responding in words, both leaned forward and kissed, deeply and passionately, as if they had been lovers parted for aeons.
And Ringwalker’s markings, the blue-inked scars over his upper body, flowed down his arms to where Noah held his hands. They touched her flesh once, twice, as if probing, and then retreated up his arms to once more writhe about his shoulders and chest.
On her hill, the black-haired woman saw, and smiled.
Deep within the crowd, Malcolm saw also, and he looked over to Grace and gave a little nod, as if something had just been confirmed in his mind.
Then he moved his head very slightly in the direction of the hill where the black-haired woman hid, and his eyes crinkled in delight.
Eaving drew back, smiled, and reached for the bowl of water. She balanced it carefully in her hands, then raised it up to Ringwalker’s face that he might drink.
He took a long draught, then, as Eaving replaced the bowl on the table, he reached for a strand of leaves and loosely twisted it within her hair.
They kissed again, and as they did, so the crowd erupted in a great cry of jubilation.
Ringwalker and Eaving had drawn away from the crowd now, making their departure, and Grace turned to realise, with a start, that her father was gone.
Already feeling empty and desolate at the sight of her mother and Ringwalker embracing, Grace looked about, her heart beating fast.
What had happened to Weyland?
She saw him, finally, standing on the very far side of The Naked, as far away from Eaving and Ringwalker as he could get. Grace walked over slowly, coming to a silent halt by his side. She followed his eyes, looking out over the Faerie, then very quietly slipped her hand into his.
“I wish…” Weyland finally said.
Grace blinked away tears. “I know,” she whispered, and leaned against her father.
Ringwalker and Eaving went to a place very private and very secretive, a cave that existed at the borderlands of water and forest.
There they kissed again.
“We have made love in such a variety of places,” Ringwalker said as Eaving turned away from him slightly, and slid the gown from her shoulders, “and over so many thousands of years.”
“And as so many different people,” Eaving said. Naked now, she turned back to Ringwalker, running her hands over his body, untying the wrap about his hips.
“I was glad to see Grace at the ceremony,” Ringwalker said, then wished he could have dragged the words back. He supposed that the last thing Eaving wanted to chat about now was her daughter.
“Mmmmm,” Eaving said distractedly, her attention on everything but her daughter.
Ringwalker opened his mouth to say something else, and then realised, with a jolt, that he was using words to delay that moment when he would need to act on this consummation.
Somewhat clumsily, he put his hands on her shoulders, then caressed her upper arms.
I wonder, he thought, why I don’t feel more joy.
“Ringwalker,” she breathed, pressing her warm body the full length of his, her hands about his lower back, then running up to his shoulders.
“These marks are so wondrous,” she said, and kissed them. “So…seductive.”
Then her hands ran down his arms, pausing at those spots where the kingship bands of Troy would eventually rest.
“I can’t wait for the moment that I slide the bands on your limbs,” Eaving said, and her voice was so sensuous and the promise so imbued with deep sexual overtones, Ringwalker should have responded.
But he didn’t, not in the way he thought Eaving may have hoped. Everything felt…not wrong…but faded and pale. Muted. There was desire, yes, but it was a faint ghost of what he’d once felt for this woman.
She looked up at him questioningly, wondering why he took so long to respond, and Ringwalker bent his head to kiss her so that she could not see the hesitation in his eyes.
As their mouths touched, then clung, he understood very suddenly that what he had said to Weyland was true. He was tired of loving Noah.
“Ringwalker?” Eaving said. “Is anything the matter?”
“Nothing,” Ringwalker said, and picked her up in his arms and carried her to the bed that rested between two lighted braziers.
All night, as he lay with Eaving, the marks on his shoulders remained quiescent, as if sleeping, and whenever Eaving moved her hands over them, Ringwalker shifted them away again, very gently.
Noah returned to her apartment within the Savoy the next morning at ten o’clock.
Weyland was sitting on the sofa, not even pretending to read his newspaper, his fingers drumming lightly on the arm of the seat. He stood as Noah entered, and tried to smile.
“So what did you do all night, my lovely?” he said.
Noah shrugged off her coat and kissed him softly on the mouth. She was very relaxed, very calm, very confident. “We spent all night laughing at how stupid we had been as Brutus and Cornelia, and admitted that we preferred a friendship to the constant strife of loving.”
She said it so guilelessly that Weyland was tempted to believe her, but he wished before anything else that she had told him the truth.
At Copt Hall Malcolm was setting out the breakfast things when Jack walked in the kitchen door.
“I would have expected more of a spring in your step,” Malcolm commented as Jack sat down at the table.
“Last night was none of your business, Malcolm.”
Oh, but it surely was, Malcolm thought. “You’re very irritable this morning.”
“It is none of your business, Malcolm!”
Unperturbed, Malcolm set down some toast and tea. “Great marriages,” he said, “need not necessarily be made in Faerie places.”
Jack had no idea what Malcolm meant, but he knew the man well enough to know that if he responded it would only encourage Malcolm further.
He began to butter his toast with hard, jerky movements of his knife.
Behind him, Malcolm arched one eyebrow as the toast finally crumbled into disarray.
For him, the Great Marriage had gone better than he could have hoped.
THREE
Faerie Hill Manor
Friday, May 10th 1940
Spring more than made up for the terrible winter. Once May arrived then, almost overnight, or so it seemed to the bemused inhabitants of England, the skies cleared, what was left of snow and ice immediately evaporated, floods receded, and mud and slush turned to newly sprung turf and emerging meadow flowers. Even in the concrete and tarmac City, flowers pushed their heads out of cracks in walls and butterfly bushes sprang out of gutters and old tiled roofs, producing their gorgeously scented purple flowers a full six weeks early.
No one had ever seen a spring like it. The newspapers were full of reports of the bounty: the surge in crops, the record weights of vegetables, and the wonderfully clear and warm weather. Old-timers shook their heads and said they’d not heard of the like, even in their grandparents’ time. Many were seen to grin, and remark on how winter still lingered in the German Fatherland.
The results in the Faerie were as spectacular as those in the mortal world. All signs of frost damage vanished, and the hills and forests seemed somehow to “lift”; foliage became thicker, flowers more beautifully scented, shrubbery denser, the very air itself almost decadently sweeter.