“Jack…”
“When I agreed with Weyland last Friday that without the final two bands we could neither destroy nor complete the Troy Game…I wasn’t quite correct. Silvius had a word to me afterwards.”
“What did the damn fool say?” Noah said in a tight voice.
“He reminded me that I could actually close out the Troy Game with only four bands.”
“But Catling thinks that you need the six bands. Wouldn’t she know?”
He gave a shake of his head. “She’s only insisting on the six bands because I’ve been insisting on it. I don’t know if she really knows the full intricacies of how a Game is woven through to completion. Closing the Game is nowhere near as difficult as opening it. Opening a Game requires the full strength of the bands.”
“Get to the point.”
“You and I could complete the Troy Game with just the four bands, Noah. It would be difficult, and we’d need to use every ounce of power we commanded, both as Kingman and Mistress and as gods of this land. But…”
“Jesus, Jack,” Noah whispered, suddenly realising where he was heading. “Don’t say it!”
“But,” Jack whispered, and now the tears glittered in his eyes as well, “I wouldn’t survive it, Noah.”
SIX
December, 1940
GRACE SPEAKS
Impossibly, the images became even more jumbled, but their nature changed entirely.
I continued to see images of my mother’s and Jack’s past lives, and while many of these were uncomfortable, they were not of the horrific variety Catling wanted me to see. I saw also fractured memories of people I didn’t know, all associated in some way with London: builders and craftsmen, ferrymen, priests, architects.
I saw faint memories of a little girl with black curly hair and a cold face—but I was now not so foolish as to be certain of her identity.
I saw a tall man with a lovely, gentle face, peering into the ruins of…a church, I think.
I saw Jack, Brutus as he had been then, and my mother making frantic love inside a circular hut somewhere close to where Lambeth is now.
I saw Jack’s two lost bands, but indistinctly. They looked to be lying on an altar, next to what appeared to be a plate of food.
They were waiting for him.
I saw Christopher Wren inspecting, not St Paul’s, or any other of his famous churches, but what was probably Greenwich Hospital.
I saw the gentle-faced man again, now standing next to a printing press, arguing with a typesetter. Londina Illustrata, he was saying, not Londinia Ilustratum!
I saw the shadow, writhing over London, and I saw what it was, what it could be, and I wept for our stupidity.
“I don’t know how this can be,” I said to the woman who now stood closer to me. “It shouldn’t be.”
“You and Jack have to sort it out,” she said, and I studied her very closely as she spoke. She looked so much like Catling—the beautiful, cold face, the thick tumbling curls of black hair, the slim body clothed in tight black silk.
“Who are you? Why do you look so much like Catling?”
She smiled, although it never quite reached her eyes, and did not reply.
“Why are you so cold?”
“I have never lived. Never drawn breath. You’d be cold also, if that was your fate.”
“What is your name?”
Again, that terrible smile. “I have never lived and have never been named. Some call me the White Queen, others call me the druid’s sword.”
I latched onto the first name only. The White Queen…cafe? “Mrs Stanford?”
“No. I appeared using a glamour of the real woman.”
I realised what had been tickling at my mind, and now I felt sick with stupidity. When we decide to see things one way, we are then incapable of seeing them any other way. “It has been you, at night, sitting with me all these years.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To get to know you.”
“Why?”
She didn’t answer that question. “Jack is going to do something very silly, Grace. You need to stop him, and for that you need to be able to break out of this little hell Catling has built for you far more than you need to know my whys and wherefores.”
“Why do you talk to me here, and yet not when you came a-visiting?”
Her eyes glittered with anger, and, oh, she looked so much like Catling then. “Why would I want to talk to you when you kept calling me ‘bitch’?”
I winced, and could not reply.
She took pity on me, and her face softened fractionally. “It is only very recently that you’ve been prepared to see me any other way than as the hated sister.”
Far too recently. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “Grace, listen to me. Catling fatally wounded you in the rubble of Coronation Avenue. If it wasn’t for Catling’s need to keep you alive, even if so indifferently alive, then your broken body would not still be drawing breath. She doesn’t need you whole, Grace, she just needs you alive. But you need to be whole, you need to be alive and walking and speaking, because you need to get to Jack as soon as you can, and stop him before he condemns all of us to the everlasting hell of the Troy Game. Grace, only you can break free of this. I can’t do it for you. Only you can. And you can. You just need to believe in yourself.”
SEVEN
Epping Forest
Monday, 16th December, 1940
“You think it is worth it, to have you dead?” Noah said. “The Troy Game completed, and you dead? That is a double tragedy.”
“A worse tragedy than seeing the land suffer as it is now?” Jack said. “A worse tragedy than watching the Faerie sicken and die? Better to complete the Troy Game and hope that, somehow, Grace returns from the living dead with some means of subsequently destroying the Game. Better I dead, than this nightmare continue.”
“The Troy Game will not be able to be destroyed once it is completed. Ariadne said—”
“Ariadne has been wrong before. All Games can be unwound, even one so powerful as the Troy Game. You’re a powerful Darkwitch, Noah, as is Grace. Between you—”
“Between us there will be nothing but grief if you were dead,” said Noah very softly. “Do you think Grace wants to return to find you gone? What will it do to her?”
“She will cope,” said Jack, but his face was terribly tight, and Noah could see the effort it took him to remain calm. He, and Noah, knew that if he died during the completion of the Troy Game, it wouldn’t just be a death…it would be an eternal damnation to whatever the malignant forces of the dark heart of the labyrinth chose for him.
Catling would not let him rest easy.
“Perhaps Grace can…” Jack’s voice drifted off.
“Perhaps Grace can pull you out of death? Jack, there are too many perhapses. This is such a stupid plan. We—”
“It is the only plan we have, Noah. Can you think of something better?”
Noah was silent.
“We have almost no room left to move, Noah. Catling will eviscerate both land and Faerie and Grace if we don’t complete her. We don’t have any means by which to unwind her—she is too powerful and I don’t have the final two bands. Besides, doing that will kill Grace more certainly than anything Catling has done to her. Noah, we must complete the Game, with whatever consequences, and pray that Grace returns with something.”
“Grace may not return, Jack. We have only Catling’s word that she will, and we all know what her word is worth.”
Jack did not reply, staring instead with dark, unfathomable eyes into the forest.
“We need to discuss this with the Lord of the Faerie and Weyland and—” Noah said.
Jack’s gaze swung back to her. “No. We don’t discuss it. We just do it, Noah. There is nothing left to discuss.”
EIGHT
St Paul’s Cathedral, London
Sunday, 29th December, 1940
The winter solstice was late. A week late, and that week, more than anything else, was an indication that Catling was spiralling not merely the Faerie and the land, but the entire planet, downward into oblivion.
There was no choice, in the end, except to do what she wanted. While the Lord of the Faerie, Weyland, Stella, Ariadne and Silvius did not know that the day could prove fatal to Jack, they did know that he and Noah meant to complete the Troy Game. Given the circumstances, and despite their terrible misgivings, they reluctantly agreed that completion of the Game was the only option left to them.
No one would survive another year if Catling did not get what she wanted.
When Brutus and Genvissa had started the final Dance of the Flowers atop Og’s Hill three and a half thousand years previously, it had been a grand occasion with virtually the entire population of Troia Nova and the Sacred Hills in attendance. Hundreds of Trojan youths, men and women, had accompanied Brutus and Genvissa in the final dance. It had been held in light and openness and majesty, and Brutus and Genvissa had come close to completing the Troy Game then and there.