Jack realised he was staring, and tore his eyes away from Noah to the chair by which Weyland stood.
A girl, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, sat there. As Jack looked the girl turned her face towards him, then as quickly looked away.
Her face was tear-stained and contorted in agony. Some part of Jack’s brain registered that she was lovely, and that she reminded him of Cornelia when first he’d seen her, but his eyes were drawn immediately to her hands and wrists.
They were held out before her as if tied, and to Jack’s startled gaze it appeared as if they had been bound with red-hot wire.
“This is Grace,” said Harry quietly, “and we love her dearly, even though she is our doom.”
FOUR
Faerie Hill Manor
Saturday, 2nd September 1939
Jack had been looking at Grace as Harry spoke, but within the instant he was staring back at Harry. He couldn’t believe Harry had actually said that! Did he introduce Grace in that manner to everyone? Meet Grace, why don’t you? She’s such a sweet girl, but, oh, she’s our doom.
“Jack?”
It was Noah, and Jack forced himself to look at her. Jesus Christ, it was even more painful than he’d thought, to see her standing there with Weyland.
“Jack,” she said. “Welcome home. It’s good to see you.”
Jack wondered if the atmosphere could possibly get any more strained…or more surreal. Here was Noah trying to carry on a social conversation while not two paces away her daughter suffered horribly.
He looked back at Grace, appalled by her suffering and by everyone else’s apparent disinterest, and Weyland spoke.
“Do you know about…?” Weyland gestured down to Grace’s wrists.
“Yes.” Jack had heard from the Lord of the Faerie how Catling—the Troy Game incarnate—had cursed Grace. These terrible fiery bracelets bound Grace to Catling. Whatever was done to Catling (to the Troy Game), would be done to Grace. Complete the Troy Game, and Grace would live (although she, as everyone else, would be under the Game’s total dominion). Destroy the Game, and Grace, and everything Grace had touched—the Faerie, London, Weyland’s Idyll, everyone who had ever held her, or cared for her—would be destroyed as well.
An impossible and terrible situation, and one that no one—not Noah, not Weyland, not the Lord of the Faerie or all the might of the Faerie—could do anything to fix.
“This is Catling’s welcome to you, Jack,” said Grace, and Jack’s eyes jerked back to her face, surprised that Grace had managed to speak through her pain.
“Grace…” Noah said. She took a half step towards her daughter, and then stopped.
There was a tension there, and Jack wondered at it. Suddenly tired of all this standing about, Jack shrugged off his greatcoat, tossed it and his cap on a nearby chair, and walked over to Grace.
Gods, he could smell Noah’s perfume from here, could feel her warmth, could feel her every breath…
He sank down on his haunches before the girl, concentrating on her, trying to set his awareness of Noah, and his enmity of Weyland, to one side.
She still had her face partly averted towards her father, but Jack could now see her far more clearly. His initial impression that she looked like Cornelia was wrong. Her dark hair—worn in a cap of short, loose curls—was her mother’s, as were her dark blue eyes and pale skin, but her strong, angular bone structure, and the very look of her face, was all Weyland. Now that he was closer, Jack could see that although she wore the form of a young girl, teetering on the brink of womanhood, faint lines about her eyes and mouth bespoke years (hundreds of years) of torment.
He looked at her wrists, and had to use all the selfcontrol he’d learned over all his lives not to flinch back in horror.
Glowing red lines cut so deep into her wrists that, as they writhed and twisted back and forth, Jack could see glimpses of bone. Intuitively he understood that Grace felt every particle of pain that such injury caused, but that once the fiery bracelets faded then her wrists would be left with nothing but faint scars.
Catling’s intent was to cause agony, and to do it in such a manner that she could revisit the agony time after time.
“Grace…” he said, unable for the moment to come to grips with the enormity of Catling’s cruelty.
She finally turned her face directly to him. “Do not pity me,” she said.
“I am not pitying you,” Jack said, holding the girl’s eyes. “I am admiring you. Tell me, is there anything I can do to help?”
“Oh, Jack,” Noah said, and there was a world of hurt and need and pain in those two short words.
“It’s all we want of you, Jack,” Weyland said. “To damn well help her.”
“You want me to help your daughter,” Jack said, “after all you have taken from me?”
“Jack—” Noah said.
“Hate me all you want,” Weyland said, “but spare my daughter. Jack, please, she needs your help.”
Jack wondered what it must have cost Weyland to ask him for help. He stared at Weyland, all the illfeeling he felt for the man burning in his eyes, but was prevented from speaking further by Grace.
“No one can help,” Grace ground out as Jack looked back at her.
“Is it like this always?” Jack said, making a small gesture to her wrists.
“No,” Weyland replied. “Catling can leave her alone for weeks and months on end. Then, when Catling needs to make a point, remind us all of her power, she…” He couldn’t finish.
Jack didn’t need Weyland to finish in order to understand. Catling was using Grace to punish everyone who she thought stood in the way of her completion. She would tease, making people think that perhaps she’d relented, and then, just as everyone was crawling back towards a state resembling happiness, Grace would again be dragged into such torment that peace of mind and contentment flew out the door.
He realised that his initial impression of disinterest in Grace was very wrong. Everyone here was tormented by Grace’s agony.
“I am very sorry that my arrival has caused this,” Jack said to Grace. He reached out a hand, thinking to lay it on one of her upper arms, but she flinched away from him, and Jack let his hand drop back to his side.
He stood up. “When the fire has faded,” he said to Noah and Weyland, “then I’ll examine Catling’s hex. Maybe I can help, maybe not, but it won’t hurt to look.”
Noah’s face relaxed in relief. “Thank you, Jack.”
There was another one of those tense, awkward silences. Jack wanted to look away from Noah, but couldn’t, and hated that weakness. He knew Weyland was staring at him, everyone was staring at him, but he just couldn’t tear his eyes away from Noah.
In her turn, Noah was regarding him with unusual intensity. He could see words forming in her mind, and then being discarded as useless for the occasion.
“Why,” Jack said very softly, “have we always found it so damned hard to talk to each other, Noah?”
Noah’s dark blue eyes went absolutely brilliant with emotion, but before she could speak there was a clink of glass behind him. Immensely relieved at the distraction, Jack turned around. Silvius had poured out several glasses of whisky. He handed one to Jack, offered one to Noah, who refused, then gave a glass to Weyland before turning back to a side table and picking up another for himself.
Harry, Stella and Walter already had drinks.
“To your return, Jack,” Silvius said, and raised his glass.
Weyland grunted, set his glass aside, and turned away.
Jack downed his whisky in a single draught. “It’s no cause for celebration,” he said. Suddenly all he wanted to do was to get away from this room, and all the tension it contained. “Look, it’s late, and I—”
“We need to know where you stand,” Stella said. “George was right. We need to finish this. Soon. No one,” she glanced at Grace as she said this, “can survive another hundred or so years of this agony of indecision and reprisal by the Troy Game. It is destroying us all, piece by piece. So tell us, Jack, where do you stand? Are you going to complete the Troy Game and condemn us all to hell? Or will you destroy it, and destroy us as well?”
“Stella,” Jack said, “I walked away all those hundreds of years ago because Noah destroyed the very ground on which I walked.”
Out of the corner of his eye Jack saw Noah wince, but he didn’t care. He was too tired to hide behind diplomacy.
“She shifted everything when she chose to take Weyland as her lover,” Jack continued, “give him a child, and decide she didn’t want to like the Troy Game after all. I don’t know where I am, or who I want to be. I don’t know where I stand, and I don’t know what choices are open to me, damn it!”