“Not permanently crippled, Jack,” Walter said as he came close and held out a hand. “Fell off the damn bicycle on the weekend and sprained my ankle. Be right as rain in a couple of days.”
Jack hesitated, then took Walter’s hand. “You preach here?” He flicked a glance at the cathedral.
Walter stared at him a long moment, a small amused smile on his face. “I’m not that brave, Jack. I’ve just been spending the afternoon in the cathedral library. I don’t have a regular parish. Just fill in when and where needed. Now…well, at the moment I appear to be on sick leave. I’m sure I’ll find enough to keep me busy, what with the war and all.”
What war are you referring to, Walter? “And are you sure you want to participate in this war?” Jack asked, nodding at the cathedral.
Three hundred years ago, as James Duke of York, Walter had done everything he could to deny his ancient past and heritage, including a fanatical devotion to Christianity—a total contradiction to his life as a powerful pagan priest when he’d lived as Loth. Jack didn’t hold out much hope Walter had improved in this life, not from the evidence of that dog collar, but why else would he be here tonight?
“I am sick to death of it, Jack,” Walter said, all humour draining from his face. “I want it to end so that I might be at peace.”
“Amen to that,” said Silvius, who had opened his door and was now standing looking over the roof of the car towards Jack and Walter. “Unless you want to do some sightseeing, Jack, would you two like to get inside so that we can hasten with all possible speed towards the nice reception that I know awaits us?”
That last earned him yet another cynical glance from Jack, but both he and Walter moved towards the car. Walter opened the back door and got inside, stretching his bad leg along the bench seat, but just before Jack slid down into the front seat he stopped and looked skyward.
For a moment he thought he saw something hanging in the sky. A shadow…He frowned, trying to concentrate. Whatever it was, it made his Kingman blood tingle, as if he were being summoned. Without thinking, Jack half raised his hand to reach out…
And then it was gone. Jack thought it must just have been a shadow only of his nerves, and nothing more.
“Jack?” Silvius said, and Jack gave a tiny shake of his head and slid into the car seat, closing the door after him.
A moment later Silvius pulled out into Aldersgate and headed north, turning in a more easterly direction once he was past London’s wall.
As the car vanished around a corner, two dark figures stepped out from the shadow of St Paul’s southern face. Dressed almost identically in belted overcoats and with broad-brimmed felt hats pulled low over their foreheads, the men stared for a moment after the car, then both looked upwards.
One of the men hissed urgently, “D’you see? D’you see?”, one hand clutching at the other man’s shoulder.
“Aye,” said the other, softly, “it’s alive.”
“Our mistress has done well.”
“He’s back. She said it would appear when he came back. When he and she were together in London.”
His brother giggled. “It’s a pretty thing, isn’t it? A pretty dancing.”
“Shush!” the other hissed. “Careful what you say!”
They fell into silence, now looking furtively about the streets, their shoulders hunched, hands thrust into the deep pockets of their overcoats.
“It’ll want to feed, then,” said one, eventually.
The other took his time in replying, but when he did his voice was rigid with excitement. “It’ll want to feed tonight!”
Both men grinned, their teeth sharply white.
Then they were gone, and the streets of London were suddenly far more dangerous than a moment earlier.
They had been driving for more than fifteen minutes, slowly wending their way through the eastern and northern suburbs of London, when Silvius finally broke the silence.
“You know where we’re going?” he said quietly.
Jack took a moment to respond. “Yeah. Epping Forest.” He lit a cigarette, using it as an excuse to pause. “And Faerie Hill Manor. I’ve been dreaming of it for months now.”
And of who will be there to meet me.
“You’ll find the forest somewhat depleted since last you were there,” said Walter from the back seat.
Jack pulled heavily on the cigarette. “I know.” Epping Forest was one of the few remaining stands of what had once been woodlands stretching for hundreds of square miles above north-eastern London. When he had been Brutus, almost four thousand years ago, the great primeval woodlands had connected with all the other forests of the island. Even when he’d walked under its branches as Louis de Silva (and then as Ringwalker), Epping Forest had still been extensive.
Now, most of the forest was gone, murdered by urban sprawl and hungry tractors, and all that was left of the dappled, moody shadows where the Stag God had once roamed was this pitiful remnant. Eight or nine minutes in a car—providing you didn’t stop for a beer at one of the quaint pubs secreted within the trees—was all you’d need to drive straight through it.
“How long has…Harry…been living in Faerie Hill Manor?” Jack said after a few more minutes of silence. They were well on their way now, traversing the A11 as it proceeded north, and Jack needed the solace of conversation to calm his nerves.
“Permanently, about eight years,” said Silvius. “But he’s been using the house for, oh, probably close to ninety years, off and on.”
“And no one comments on the fact that Sir Harry appears so long-lived?”
Silvius grinned. “Faerie Hill Manor and its master fade away into the Faerie from time to time, Jack. As do we all. Half of the doors in Faerie Hill Manor open directly into the Faerie, half into bedrooms and closets. It fades away and people forget about it, and then it is back again and it is as if both house and master are new. There are people alive today, their homes close by the forest, who have never noticed when Faerie Hill Manor has faded back into the Faerie, and then, thirty years later, when it reappears once more, they do not realise that they knew it previously. Faerie magic.”
Jack opened his window an inch and tossed out the stub of his cigarette. “You’re mighty acquainted with the Faerie, it seems.”
“It has been a good home to me, Jack.” Better than the dark heart of the labyrinth.
Jack went very still for a moment, then swivelled about so he could look at Walter Herne in the back seat. “And you, Walter? Are you more comfortable with the Faerie than you were last life?”
“As I said earlier,” Walter said quietly, holding Jack’s steady gaze, “all I want is to see this through. We finish it this life, Jack. Once and for all.”
“And then…what? You can be Christ’s man, once and for all?” Don’t forget who and what I am, Walter. I’m everything your damned Christ doesn’t want to know about.
They stared at each other a long moment, then Walter leaned forward a little and shifted his gaze to focus on something over Jack’s shoulder.
“Look,” said Walter. “Look.”
Jack turned forward, and his stomach clenched. Somehow they’d left suburbia behind and now approached a roundabout with a small congregation of cattle standing half asleep on the central grassy island. On the right side of the roundabout stood a somewhat ugly tavern, the Robin Hood Inn, and several cottages crowded in close to its whitewashed walls.
Beyond the roundabout and the inn, the A11 continued for perhaps fifty yards before it vanished into trees.
“We’re home,” whispered Jack, and Silvius glanced sharply at him.
THREE
Faerie Hill Manor
Saturday, 2nd September 1939
“Do you know where we are?” Silvius asked after they’d been driving through the forest for a few minutes. The car’s dimmed headlamps illuminated a small patch of the road ahead and enough of the encircling forest to show the closely packed trees and the occasional branch that dipped down from nowhere to scrape the top of the car.
Most humans found driving through Epping Forest at night an eerie experience. Jack found it unbelievably painful. He was overwhelmed with nerves; (only partly caused by the confrontation he knew lay directly ahead); with guilt (he should have been back so much earlier than this); with an extraordinary excitement and with such an overwhelming sense of love and companionship that he instantly hated himself for having so long been alienated from this land and this forest.
This was his home now. He should have remembered that.
He had a cigarette in his hand, drawn from the pack before they’d passed the Robin Hood Inn, and still unlit, but now it lay unnoticed, crushed and broken between his clenched fingers.