A/N: Merry Christmas, all! ...what do you mean it's not Christmas any more, it's St David's Day. What do you mean it's Shrove Tuesday. What.
Well, the annual Christmas fic has landed, albeit two months late! This one comes with a lot of supplementary information required:
- This fic is set in roughly 1990.
- It is a sequel to "back in anno domini" and "eia nobis annus est": if you've read those, this is set well in their future. Catherine has died, and Susan has since moved in with Kay.
- If you're a Weirdstone reader, this fic takes The Moon of Gomrath as canon, but not Boneland.
- If you're a Dark Is Rising reader, this fic is the sequel to a Dark Is Rising fic that doesn't yet exist, in which Jane, Will and Bran stay in touch after canon. Jane and Bran ultimately regain their memories (see my other fic "time it took us (to where the water was)" for Jane), confront Will, and form a polyamorous triad with him. Other than that, all you need to know is that Jane is at St Andrews, Will at Oxford, and Bran living with his father.
- I've played fast and loose with canon, and with real medieval lit/history, to make this work, but in true Alan Garner fashion I haven't made anything up out of whole cloth! All the historical sources mentioned are real sources, and all the books are real books: you can find a detailed breakdown in the end notes.
- Likewise, I've tried not to make anything up about Alderley Edge if I could help it - but research can only go so far. If I got the geography wildly wrong, or if the Wizard tearoom and Wizard's Thatch hotel didn't exist in 1990, you'll have to forgive me.
- This fic has a playlist which you can find linked in the AO3 mirror, and I also listened to The Sixteen's album "Carol of the Bells" and Ora Singers' album "The Mystery of Christmas" while writing it. The title is a quote from Isaiah, often (mis-)translated as "Drop down, ye heavens", which is also the title of a gorgeous piece by Judith Weir.
Enjoy!
If Jane's flat in St Andrews hadn't fallen through that year, she would never have met Sue, and none of it would have happened.
But it did happen; and it was only because the flat she was supposed to be renting fell through – something to do with dry rot, which meant drastic re-flooring was required – that she'd found herself in a phone box, frantically calling her graduate supervisor; and it was only because her graduate supervisor happened to know Sue reasonably well through work, and because Sue's brother Colin happened to be on a dig for those few days, that Jane had been invited to stay at Sue's flat until something more permanent could be sorted out.
She and Sue had got on oddly well from the first, to the point that Sue had invited her back for dinner, even when Jane had moved out and Colin back in. Then they were Colin-and-Sue, a pair of siblings with a shared sense of humour which Jane fell easily into, and a better dinner table than Jane could manage for herself. Sue was an astronomer, Colin an archaeologist – Up and Down, you might say, said Colin – so they too were part of the university, but pleasantly removed from Jane's own work with deep-sea life. They were about ten years or so older than she was, and seemed as if they had always lived together and always would. It was a more stable existence than that of Jane and her peers.
And then the whole thing with Tethys, and Bran, and Will had happened, and Jane had come back to St Andrews feeling as if she had been turned inside out and shaken into a greater shape.
She hadn't had a chance to see Colin-and-Sue in between regaining her memories from Tethys, and confronting Will with Bran. When they'd invited her over for dinner, she'd said yes, but a little hesitantly, wondering whether she could hold together in front of them, or whether her seams would tear at the edges and all the wonder inside spill out.
And then Sue had looked at her, with a strange distant look that Jane had never seen before and yet seemed to know, and said: The Old Magic has touched you.
When they had explained it, Jane had half-believed, half-disbelieved it. How much magic could one world – one country – reasonably hold? She had spent so long chasing half-remembered shadows of magic, longings whose only key was the sight of the sea; now she had the truth, she was terrified of being credulous. It seemed too easy, and too implausible, that there was more magic still to be found. That the hills of England were overflowing with it.
But then, everything seemed to overflow, these days. The whole world seemed to have opened up and poured down like light, when her memories had returned. So who was to say what could not be true?
It did at least make sense of how quickly she'd taken to Colin and Sue. Colin, who went digging in the hills to find the past there, layer upon layer; Sue, who – now that Jane could see it, in hindsight – often had that distant look when she turned her face to the sky, as if remembering something far out of reach. It was as if some part of her had known even beforehand that they were safe.
She had told Will and Bran about it, of course. Will had been curious about it, in an academic sort of way – Jane knew him well enough by now to know that was a pose, a way to hold something at a distance as he armoured himself in Gumerry's – in Merriman Lyon's mannerisms. It had intrigued him and spooked him all at once.
Bran had sounded… interested, and ill at ease. All of this was more complicated for him than for Jane: it always had been. It meant something if magic was still loose in the world that held Arthur's only son.
Still, they had both listened, and neither had outright disbelieved. It seemed that after all that had happened, they'd both taken it to heart that she was worth listening to. She was glad of that. And they'd agreed to visit and meet Colin-and-Sue in person – but that had proved more difficult than it sounded: there weren't so very many weekends left in term, and Will and Bran were busy for most of them. Christmas loomed on the horizon, at which point even Colin-and-Sue would scatter to their family, and before that to their annual visit to Seekings.
It was Seekings that had given Jane the idea. Seekings, whose owners – Kay and Susan – had been the only people, before Jane, to whom Colin-and-Sue had confided their wild story. Who every year opened their doors to them, a little gathering of those who remembered childhoods shaped by magic. The whole secret society, all four of us, said Colin. And Seekings was on the road to Wales, where Jane and Will and Bran were all spending Christmas; and it had beds for overnight travellers, and a warm welcome for any friends of Colin-and-Sue's.
It wasn't ideal. But after all, as Bran had said over the phone, why meet two strangers when you could meet four? So Jane had set it all up, through a long and involved series of phone calls. And when the time had come, she'd driven down to Oxford, accordingly, to pick up Will – and Bran, who was visiting him – before driving all three of them up again for that final hour and a half towards the Chester Hills.
And then there was the beautiful old house, nestled just outside Condicote – Moving in rarefied circles now, aren't we, said Will, and Jane had said You can talk, Oxford boy, as Bran hissed Sais! cheerily next to them; and its two silver-haired inhabitants who came to meet them at the door, and Colin and Sue – a good thirty years younger – bustling out after them.
They didn't make anything but small talk as cases were hustled into the house; Jane had been driving all day, and Will and Bran packing and returning last-minute library books before she arrived. Even once in – You've been driving how long? said Susan-not-Sue, with kind concern, in her cultured alto voice. My God, then I won't keep you: come and wash up and change, and rest for a bit, before you have to face everybody.
And so there hadn't been any time for them all to talk, or even for an exhausted Jane to fill the other two in on the details of Colin-and-Sue's history, before they all trooped into the parlour to make polite, painstaking conversation together. Instead they had obediently taken their seats in antique chairs, and established that Jane and Will were students; that Bran lived and worked with his father; that Colin and Sue were both researchers; and that Kay and Susan were a gentleman and -woman of leisure, heavily involved with local organisations and charitable causes.
Jane had felt all the time that she ought to be saying something useful, but she hardly dared. Colin and Sue were her friends – her closest, perhaps, besides Will and Bran, who were different; but this was their reunion, not hers. They were at home in this graceful old house, so skilfully decorated to welcome them. And she couldn't help feeling a little intimidated by the painfully elegant Susan, whose grey hair and lined face couldn't diminish her sheer unbelievable beauty, and even by the kindly Kay's English-gentleman air of assurance. So it had fallen to Colin to take the reins and announce, Well, I suppose we should talk about what brings us all here, before launching into an account of what had befallen him and Sue in childhood.
Which was how it came to pass that the room fell silent when Will said, loud and unfeignedly shocked, "But Cadellin Tal Arian is dead."
"Now let's get this straight," said Kay, when the chaos had died down. He was sitting at the head of a table, in the Seekings library: maps and books were strewn across it, pulled eagerly down from the shelves. "Cadellin Silverbrow" – he had no trouble with the ll sound, Jane noticed; then again, he'd grown up here, not far from the Welsh border – "was once one of the Old Ones, the immortals who practised the High Magic."
"To aid them against the Dark," Will put in, in his colourless, scholarly voice. You could hear the capital D when he said it.
"One of the two," said Susan, soft and low. She was seated at the other end of the table, taking notes with a notepad and a fountain pen, as if she were a secretary; but she sat so straight-backed that she looked more like a queen in a throne.
"Yes," Will said. He was looking down at his hands, a sure sign that he was remembering something. "One of the two Darks, or one of the two aspects of the Dark, if you prefer." Yes, he was remembering: that was Merriman's wording, even his precise diction, reeled off like poetry learned by heart as a child. "The Old Ones were levied against the Dark Within: the Dark that sought to control human hearts. Against that, the High Magic is the most fitting weapon."
"Because the High Magic is the magic that men made." That from Colin.
"And that made men," said Bran, slow and deliberate. "The magic by which they were made more than men, that sustained them beyond the life of the body." He was sat next to Jane, and his eyes glinted in the light. Susan had kindled a fire in the grate when they had entered the room: its brightness made his eyes seem brighter, sharper than usual, a more metallic gold. It reminded her of how Gumerry had sometimes looked like a bird of prey.
She reached over to cover his hand with hers, and felt his breathing almost imperceptibly even out.
"But there was another Dark," said Sue. "And another Magic, which served to aid against it." Her voice was quiet, and one of her hands encircled her wrist, thumb rubbing against it.
"The Wild Magic," Jane said, meeting her eyes for a moment.
"The Wild Magic," Will echoed. "Which some of us know as the Old Magic" – he looked to Kay, and then to Colin and Sue. "The Wild Magic is the Old Ones' name for it, because it cannot be controlled. You may speak to it, you may bargain with it, but you may not ever control it."
"But you can call upon it, at need," said Colin. He shared an unreadable look with Sue.
"You can," Will allowed. "If you will work by its laws, and accept the consequences, you can call upon it. Before the time of the High Magic, that was the only form of magic humanity knew. Most likely that's why people do call it the Old Magic, those who have used it."
"Or," said Susan, "because it is old. Older than they are. Humanity can touch it, but it predates humanity." Her pen had stilled; her eyes flickered towards bird tracks, left by some enterprising robin, on the windowsill. "Humans always see those who came before them – animals, plants, rocks – as old, even if the individual animal was born only a few months ago. They know the older forms of life know things they've forgotten."
The words rang in Jane's mind, calling up echoes of the Greenwitch. That had felt incalculably old, when she spoke to it, though she had seen it being born. Even with its childish cadences, its newborn pain and helplessness. Older than the women who built it; older than the memory of Roger Toms, through which it howled out a far more ancient rage. As old as the first storms to shake the seas, to stir up the chemicals lying, live and dormant, in the water…
She looked at the braided pine branches which framed the bookcases, and shivered.
"It's like that," she said. "It is old, even when it takes human shapes and speaks with human words."
"Which is what makes it effective against the other Dark," said Kay, looking to Will sharply. Susan's pen, briefly still, began to scratch against the notepad again.
"The Dark Without," Will said, taking up the thread smoothly. "Yes, that's old, too. So old that I know little of it except what Merriman told me" – he spoke the name without flinching, but his eyes gave him away, wide and dark – "and what I learned from the Book of Gramarye. But as I understand it, it is like the Wild Magic, in that it is outside humanity."
He paused. He seemed… off-balance, Jane thought: knowledge was built into him, and he wasn't used to reaching its limits like this. It made her feel oddly protective of him, as if the Will who could be knocked off-guard like this was for her and Bran, and for them alone.
"Go on," said Kay, sounding so like a professor that Will sat up: Jane wondered if he was remembering Oxford tutorials. "From what you've said, the Dark Within is outside humanity, too. As is the Light."
"Though not its champions," said Bran firmly, his Welsh accent suddenly coming out strongly to lend the consonants weight. He reached a hand across the table, and Will took it, interlacing their fingers.
It still sent a little silvery glimmer through Jane's heart, watching that. They had never touched like that, as boys, that she saw; not even in the midst of great danger. This tenderness between them now – all three of them – felt like a needed fall of rain, or the unstoppering of a flood.
"I think what Kay means to ask," said Sue, leaning forward a little over the table, "is what makes the Dark Without different."
Will squeezed Bran's hand and released it. "It's a good question," he said. "They're not really separate, in all truth. There is the same bleakness at the root of them, the same… emptiness. I suppose what I mean is this: the Dark Within seeks dominion over humans. Humanity is its prize. But to the Dark Without, humanity is no more than a nuisance. Its goal isn't to control humanity, it's to sweep it away. To extinguish it along with everything else that lives."
"The dark outside," Colin murmured. "The great dark unknown outside your door. Whereas the Dark Within would be… the shadows on the hearth."
"Yes." Will's voice was very soft, as if revealing secrets. "The Dark Without is the fear of what lies out of bounds. The Dark Within is the fear of your neighbour within them."
Susan, without a word, got up and closed the curtains. How funny, Jane thought, that that was such a relief. She hadn't even thought to notice how tense the room had felt; yet suddenly it was as if everyone had breathed out.
Though it still didn't feel safe, exactly. You couldn't call it safety. Only, now that the dark was shut out – out of this room of remembered wonders – they were all seven shut in.
The chair creaked as Susan took her seat again. "So the Wild Magic," she said, "is the weapon which works best against the Dark Without. And that's why Cadellin took it up?"
"That's what I was told," said Will, his voice normal again. "Merriman told me it happened when Cadellin's brother Govannon turned – not to the Dark Within, which wouldn't have been unprecedented, but to the Dark Without."
"He did," Sue put in. "He took a new name to mark it: Grimnir. And he took up his abode in Lindow – Llyn-dhu, that is. We didn't know he was Cadellin's brother, when we met him." There was a shaken, resigned sound to her voice, as of old fear.
"Not till the end," Colin added. "Cadellin called him Govannon, then. When he – Grimnir – was dying. He said, Govannon, my brother, and wept."
His accent had changed, Jane realised, when he was quoting Cadellin. He must remember the moment very clearly. There were moments she remembered like that – that last moment with Gumerry, looking out over the Chiltern hills, before it was all taken away.
"Cadellin came to believe that the Dark Without would prove a greater danger than we had bargained for," Will went on. His eyes were wide again. Was he shaken, to hear the end of what he'd thought an unfinished tale? "He turned aside from the Old Ones and left the Circle. People said he had gone to pursue the Wild Magic and see what could be done with it against the Dark Without. I don't know how much truth there is to that, because Merriman didn't see him again."
"He still practised the High Magic when we knew him," Colin said. "In preference to the Wild Magic, or the Old Magic as he called it. The Old Magic he knew a great deal about, but it was not his province."
"No," said Sue – a look of strange and sudden sweetness on her face – "that was Angharad's department." She looked down, and Jane with her, to the book before her: a star map showing the Pleiades.
Susan coughed. "We're getting ahead of ourselves," she said, gentle but authoritative. She must run meetings beautifully, Jane thought. "We haven't reached Angharad yet."
"In any case," said Will, "he left the fellowship of the Old Ones. It was said that he was looking outside of humanity for company, and answers. That he went to creatures who were closer to the Wild Magic – the lios-alfar, for instance." He cast a look at Colin and Sue.
Sue nodded. "And dwarves," she added.
"And huldrafolk," Colin said, and for a moment his mouth twisted with some remembered pain. "And stromkarls, and the Children of Danu…"
He trailed off, and Will took up the thread again. "He must not have left humanity behind entirely," he said, "because the next we heard of him was that he had been with his nephew Gwenddolau, at the battle of Arfderydd."
"That would have been in 573," Kay put in. He pulled a book towards him from the right, and underlined something in pencil: when Jane leaned close she saw that it was the entry for that year in a chronicle. The spine of the book read Nennius. "And the site of the battle is thought to be Arthuret. So we can place him here, in that year." He made a circle, again in pencil, on one of his maps, and pushed it forward for the rest of the table to see. The place he'd circled was in Cumbria.
"Taliesin saw him there," Will said.
Bran looked up suddenly, from where he'd been staring at the fire. "This would be Gwion?"
"This would be Gwion." Will's face lightened, for a moment, at the memory. The look was bittersweet, knowing – as Jane did – that the Lost Land was truly lost forever, now. "Gwion the bard, who served Gwyddno Garanhir, and his son Elffin.
"He saw Cadellin at Arfderydd, and reported it to the Circle. For a while we heard nothing of him. Then Taliesin saw him again, and told us of it. He said Cadellin had gone mad with grief for his nephew, and was living wild in the woods. He had some magic left – he spoke in prophecy – but he was ragged and strange. He lived in trees like a bird, and spoke his prophecies to the wild pigs.
"The Old Ones at the time thought that the Wild Magic and grief between them had driven him mad, out of his humanity – such as it is, for an Old One – and into a wildness which would make him either mortal or inhuman. Not long after that, he seemed to disappear. The Circle's awareness of him blinked out like a candle, and everyone thought him dead."
"The sixth century," Kay murmured. "Not a good century, for the Light."
"Not good at all," said Bran, wryly. He had taken hold of the book marked Nennius – Jane saw now that the full title was Nennius: British History and the Welsh Annals – and was looking at the entry for 537, which marked the battle of Camlann. "537 and 573, two ill-fated years." He set it down again.
"All the rest I know," Will continued, "is what Merriman told me. I'd asked him why there were two Myrddins, you see… He said that in the twelfth century, as Arthur's legend took hold, a great confusion spread through the people's memories. People were drawn into Arthur's shadow who had never been there, and Arthur's companions intruded into stories they had nothing to do with. So Cadellin was written down as a relative of Arthur's" – Kay passed around a book marked Mabinogion, where Jane read the words Gweir son of Cadellin Silver-brow underlined in pencil – "and his own legend, as a prophet of the woods, was ascribed to Myrddin, or Merlin. Merriman."
Bran passed the book to his left across to Jane. The front read The Black Book of Carmarthen; the page where he held it open had a great initial M, followed by some large-print text in a language she could not read. Above it, indented, was printed Myrtin, and further down, Talyes. At the top of the page, someone had written in pencil, The Conversation of Myrddin and Taliesin.
"This is the poem about Arfderydd," he said, in an undertone: "where Taliesin talks to him about the battle."
"That's never Welsh!" Jane stared at the page.
"Oh, but it is." Bran grinned, sudden and charming. "Not that I can read it, mind." Across the table, Colin and Susan had the Mabinogion between them, both staring fixedly at the page.
"Strange how things change, through the centuries," Susan remarked. She was still writing, but she had ceased to look at the paper: instead she seemed to be gazing into the distance, and there was something wistful in her words. Somehow it unsettled Jane to look at her, a feeling like vertigo.
She wondered abruptly what Susan's story was. Susan was the only one of them who had said nothing about it at all, back in the hubbub of the parlour.
Now, she shook her head, dislodging a lock of silver hair from behind her ear, and poised her pen at the paper again. "So that brings us forward in time," she said, "to the '60s."
"Summer '62," said Colin, "to be exact."
"Which you would be," put in Sue, "you historian."
"Oh, and I suppose you don't need to be exact, as a scientist whose topic of study is light-years away –" But he didn't even bother pretending to sound annoyed: it was old, familiar banter, that Jane had heard a hundred times over their dinner table. "It was summer '62 when it started, because the autumn term began in the middle of it."
"In summer '62," said Sue, "we were out on Stormy Point, at Alderley Edge, when we were attacked by svart-alfar – creatures of the Dark Without." Kay passed the map around again, this time with a new pencil circle added in Cheshire. "A wizard rescued us. He called himself Cadellin Silverbrow, and brought us within the rock, for safety."
"Into Fundindelve." Colin's voice suddenly sounded younger, less academic. "That was the name of the cave – the set of caves. And he showed us the young king who slept there, and his hundred and forty knights around him, each of them with a matched white mare."
Jane saw Will mouth, Wild Magic, but he did not interrupt. His eyes were very wide, now.
"He told us about the spell that bound them there in sleep" – now Sue took up the story again – "ready for the day when they should wake, to fight the Great Spirit of Darkness. The spell was held together by a stone of power, called Firefrost. It had been lost long since, when a farmer had stumbled into Fundindelve and stolen it."
Will's fingers drummed against the table, restless. "A hidden stone," he said, almost under his breath. He seemed to be thinking aloud. "A king and forty knights asleep, and the seeming death of an Old One, and a thing of power to hide them, a stone of concealment… What king? What stone?" He was disquieted, Jane thought: even the armour of Merriman's way of speaking couldn't hide it.
Sue smiled – a strange smile, as if recalling some old joke and some old bitterness at the same time. "Later," she said, "we learned it was the same stone that I wore in my bracelet."
Jane had already heard this, of course, but Will and Bran had not. "There's a coincidence for you," she heard Bran breathe.
"No coincidence," Sue said: "I had it from our mother, who had it from her old nurse, Bess Mossock. And Bess's family had farmed in that area for generations."
"By the time we realised, it was too late to bring it to Cadellin." Colin took up the tale. "His brother Grimnir took it from us as we were on our way to him. But that winter we were able to get it back, and set out to bring it to Cadellin again.
"We managed it, but the journey was dangerous, and at one point we had to seek refuge on the island at Redesmere. Angharad Goldenhand's stronghold, one of the Two Floating Islands of Logris."
Will sucked in his breath very suddenly, as if the name came in answer to a question it hadn't occurred to him to ask. At the head of the table, Kay took up an Ordnance Survey map, smaller in scale than the larger one he'd passed around earlier. His pencil circled a blue shape marked Redesmere.
"We met her," here Sue spoke again, and her voice was warm as Jane had never heard it, "in a dream, on the island. It was high summer. She gave me a bracelet" – she rubbed her wrist again – "in exchange for the one I was to lose. It was called the Mark of Fohla. I didn't know it at the time, but it was a thing of the Old Magic."
"So Angharad practised the Old Magic, then," Jane said, looking to Will, "and not the High? She wasn't an Old One?"
Will drummed his fingers on the table again. "She wasn't an Old One," he said; "at least, not that I ever heard, and I think Merriman would have told me. And Fohla is a name to do with the Wild Magic. But things made to last like that, forged metal, always have to have something of the High Magic about them. She may have practised both forms. Wayland Smith was an Old One and a man of the High Magic, but he was closer to the Wild Magic than most of us. Smithcraft is like that."
"She was a human, then, you think?" said Susan.
Will frowned. Beside him, Bran reached for the book marked Mabinogion. "I could swear…" he muttered, and flipped through the pages. "Yes, here." He passed the book to Jane, who saw the words Lo, Angharad Golden-hand meeting him on the page – the top of the page read Peredur son of Efrawg – and passed it on again. "See, she is named here with Peredur, as his lady-love."
"She had a husband," Colin put in. He reached for the book. "Cadellin told us – he was one of the knights who slept in Fundindelve."
Kay scrambled for the Nennius book. "There was a Peredur who fell at Arfderydd," he said, fingers swiftly finding the right page. "The same battle as Gwenddolau, Cadellin's nephew."
He passed the book around. Colin's fingers lingered on the pages. "There it is, then," he said – Sue, next to him, had got her hands on the Mabinogion."To think she was in there all that time, and we never knew…"
His tone was conversational, but Jane thought from the look he and Sue shared that he was shaken. There was something in both their eyes that sent an answering pang through her chest: the pain of recognition, when it came too late.
Will took up the Nennius book next, and cast his eyes over it. "She was a human, then, most likely," he said. "One who practised the Wild Magic and the High Magic both. Tied to the island at Redesmere – that would be the Wild Magic. Giving her power, but binding her to it, too."
"It would make sense," Sue said, slowly. She was looking towards the curtains, where an infinitesimal gap showed the falling snow, and beyond it the stars. "She was like the Shining Ones, somehow – her power was like theirs – but she wasn't one of them. Any more than I was."
Jane could see Susan, about to point out that the Shining Ones hadn't been mentioned yet, but Will spoke before she could. "You saw the Shining Ones?" he said swiftly.
"You know them?" Sue sounded as taken-aback as he looked.
"The riders in the sky," Will said, reeling the description off easily, "the daughters of the Moon. Nine of them in all, and their leader was Celemon –"
"Daughter of Cei," Sue finished for him. "Yes. I remember. She wore red and white, and a bracelet like mine: she linked it to mine, when we met."
"You met her?" The wonder in Will's voice made him sound years younger. Why are you surprised? Jane wanted to ask. But even for an Old One there might still be marvels in the world, perhaps. He couldn't have expected Sue to meet Celemon, any more than he had expected… well, Jane to meet Tethys.
Besides, she wasn't quite sure whether that note in his voice was surprise, or hunger.
"Or dreamed her…" Sue trailed off, and looked at Colin. Jane couldn't see, but she thought they might be clasping hands, under the table.
"It's a long story," Colin said. He and Sue had told it together, to Jane, but now he took over as if to spare Sue. "That was the next year, in '63. The Brollachan was freed that year, and Sue was in danger from it. The Old Magic saved her, but it did not destroy the Brollachan. It did not seem as if anything could. So Angharad met with Sue again, and gave her the horn Anghalac, to blow as a last resort."
"That was another thing of the Old Magic, wasn't it," Jane said, making a guess.
"Yes," Sue said. "A powerful one. When I blew it, the Wild Hunt and the Shining Ones rode out, and they… I'm not sure I can describe it. They destroyed the Brollachan, or remade it: all the power that was in it went to unleashing them, and it was used up. And the Old Magic was freed."
A kind of solemnity settled on the room, for a moment, at that. There was something in Sue's voice that demanded it, as if the memory for her was so vivid that it was more real than anything or anyone there.
Will sat forward. "What month was this?" he asked, that same note still in his voice: not quite childish, but curious, vulnerable.
Colin thought for a moment. "It must have been around the spring equinox," he said slowly, "because it was the Eve of Gomrath when we woke the Wild Hunt. Late March, then."
"The spring equinox," Susan repeated, and took up her pen again. "Does the timing mean anything in particular to you, Will?"
But Will wasn't looking at her; he was looking across the table, at Bran. "The spring equinox," he said distractedly, thinking aloud again. "Spring of '63. And nine months later or so, around the winter solstice – just at the year's turning – your mother comes into Gwynedd, and her newborn son with her. Nine months later…"
Bran said, "But I was conceived centuries before that." Jane heard an intake of breath from Kay: he and Susan were the only people in the room who hadn't heard the tale, of how Bran had been the Pendragon, Arthur's son, brought forward in time. Susan, she realised, had gone very still.
"But you were brought forward to that point." There was something very odd about Will's voice: it was young and old all at once, an eleven-year-old clad in the armour of Merriman's phrasing. "It was when you were born into our time. And then I was born, a year after. Just in time to turn eleven, and find the Signs, before we met for the first time. And then, the summer after that, we came to the Midsummer Tree…"
Jane saw Susan murmur, Summer '77, and make a note.
"Where the Dark Within was driven back," Bran said softly, "for the last time."
"By Herne the Hunter," Jane said, with equal softness. Somehow the name seemed to demand it. The memory had come suddenly before her eyes: the great whirling storm of darkness, and then the first sight she had seen when she had been able to lift her head again, the seven riders and the glowing Huntsman against the sky. "Herne the Hunter, when he came riding out of the hills, with the Seven Sleepers behind him."
"You saw Herne?" The words, vivid with surprise, came from Kay. Jane looked over at him, startled: Herne had figured in Colin and Sue's tale to her, but not in Kay's.
How many Hernes can there be? she thought. That unsettled, vertigo-like feeling was taking hold of her again. Will's eyes, when she looked over at him, were bright, his mouth slightly open; Bran's mouth was set, but the sharpness of his gaze betrayed some disquiet. She wondered if they felt, as she did, that the ground kept shifting under them, broadening into a new landscape. To think she'd almost forgotten that feeling.
"Yes," she said. The image was still glowing in her mind, like something half-remembered, a strain of music whose resolution she was waiting for. "Yes, he was the one who drove the Dark away, in the end. He had antlers like a stag, and eyes like an owl, and he rode a white horse."
"Antlers like a stag," Kay repeated. "Yes. Yes, that was him." He said nothing more.
"We saw him, too," Sue said, in answer to Will and Bran's bewilderment – they hadn't heard this part of her and Colin's story. "We summoned him by accident. It was the Eve of Gomrath, and we'd burned wendwood to make a fire, to keep us warm on the Beacon… Only we didn't know it was his burial mound."
"Garanhir, Gorlassar, Lord of the Herlathing," Colin murmured, as if reciting something. "And the Wild Hunt woke in answer to the summons, and came out of the hills they slept in, and called upon him to lead them."
"I woke the Wild Hunt, once," Will said. His eyes were distant: he seemed to be working something out. "There was a king who came out of a hill then, too."
"Always in hills," said Bran. He sounded very sober indeed: almost wary. "And always riders. In Cheshire, in Cader Idris, in the Thames Valley… How many sleeping riders are there in Britain, then? As many as there are hills?"
Of course, Jane reflected, his father had been one of those sleeping riders. One of his fathers. "I think your Sleepers were a different breed," she said, thinking aloud. "It feels as if we were borrowing Herne from the Hunt, that day. Like calling in a specialist from a different department." That made Bran smile, briefly, and Will too. She'd hoped it would. "But it is always hills, isn't it? Does the Wild Hunt stretch everywhere there are hills?"
"Why not?" That was Kay again, in an odd, almost opaque tone. "After all, the hills are where men have always laid their honoured dead." He shared a nod and a glance with Colin – who, Jane remembered, had met Kay on a dig, when Kay had happened to be walking nearby.
She shivered, again. She hadn't thought of the Sleepers – or the Wild Hunt of Colin and Sue's description – as dead, not really. And yet it was true to say that they had been cut off from the life of the world as surely as if they had died. Whatever life they had after they woke, it bore no resemblance to that of any living human in the world.
"The slaughter at the summit of the hill," Susan said, so quietly there was hardly any breath in the words. "And the story inside it, beneath." She didn't seem to be addressing any of them. Her pen had fallen to the table, stilled.
Jane was gathering her courage to ask what she meant by it, when Will said, "So Herne rides wherever the dead do. Or the almost-dead." His brow was still furrowed. "And on days and nights of great power: the Eve of Gomrath, the Twelfth Night after Christmas, the day of Midsummer…"
"Not every Eve of Gomrath, though," Jane put in. She felt as if she were tracing a seam with her hand, one she couldn't see. "Only if wendwood was burned. And it had to be on the right hill – didn't it?"
"Yes –" Colin leapt in to answer. "The Beacon, and no other. We caught a fair amount of flack for that, later. All the hills in the area, and we had to pick the only one with the Lord of the Hunt in it, on the only night in the year when he could answer."
At the head of the table, Kay said, "Not the only night. You could summon him other nights, if you had a thing of power. I knew a box once that could do it." His voice was very soft, now. "Or that could summon you, rather, into his dream of the wild woods. But he was not free to act; not as we were."
"So he was trapped," Jane said, following the seam, the trailing tune that had yet to be resolved. "Back then, he was trapped, until…"
"Till Sue blew Anghalac." Will's head came up. He was looking at Bran, his eyes burning. "Bran, do you see? It had to be then. That was the signal, the thing that resounded back to your birth. The Wild Magic had to be free. That was the only way Herne could come riding to your aid – he had to come freely – to drive back the dark, so you could cut the blossom from the tree…"
It seemed to click together in Jane's head, suddenly, how precise the whole thing was: the wheels of Time turning against each other like cogs. Everything happening as it must.
"So you were born into the present," she said, half-disbelieving, half-afloat in belief, "because of when Sue blew Anghalac. And Will" – the thought took hold of her like hysteria – "Will, you were conceived when you were because of it. Because it happened to be '63 when Sue did that. Sue set you up to be born."
"Oh God," Sue said, and she sounded as shaky as Jane felt and Will looked, "I don't know why, but that seems like so much more final a consequence than merely freeing the Wild Hunt and the Old Magic –" And then she was laughing, and so was Colin; and so, in a moment, was Will.
Bran put his head in his hands. His shoulders were shaking, and from his mouth came a kind of sobbing laughter. It sounded almost ripped out of him, as if he'd been torn in two. Torn in two again, remembering his two fathers, and still laughing…
Jane put her hand in his, and squeezed his, hard. The reassurance was as much for her as for him, really – an anchor, when she was floundering in the wide world that had suddenly opened around them.
This is ridiculous, she thought suddenly: all of this is ridiculous, all this talk of Wild Magic, and riders sleeping in the hills, and predestined births. It should sound ridiculous. Why didn't it? For somehow it didn't. In this book-lined, wood-panelled room, with the sound of the fire crackling in the grate and the smooth, steady movement of Susan's fountain pen, she felt once again that anything might be true.
She thought: it's something to do with this house, and looked afresh at Kay and Susan, sitting at each end of the table. If it was to do with the house, it wasn't through the beautiful rooms, or the ancient furniture. It was through the hands that kept it.
There was a sound from the foot of the table, and the laughter trailed off. "And so," said Susan, quietly dignified, "we are all here."
"So we are – somehow," Kay said, as Susan lifted her notepad from the table and turned back through the pages, looking for Jane knew not what. "And the next question, I suppose, is what we are to do about it."
"Do?" said Will. He still looked shaken, and uncharacteristically young. Jane thought, All of this is much stranger to him than to us two. She and Bran had already rediscovered magic once, but Will had braced himself for its ending, all those years ago.
Susan turned the pages in her notepad again. Whatever she was looking for, she seemed to have found it. "You thought Cadellin Silverbrow was dead," she said gently, in her low, musical voice; "yet now you know he is not. We four thought there were no others like him – not quite; and now we know there is at least one."
Colin leaned forward, seeming to take up her thought. "We thought there was no way back," he said. "There never has been, for me or Sue. The gates of Fundindelve were closed to us, after that final night." His tone was bittersweet, resigned. "But you are an Old One, as you say he was an Old One. You might find the doorway."
"Or be shown it," Jane breathed. Another Old One… she seemed to feel the thought taking shape in her mind as she spoke. It wasn't just the end of magic Will had braced himself for, was it. It was endless years of being alone.
It had taken her and Bran years to break in upon that loneliness, to remind him that he could be human. But human wasn't all he was. That fact felt more real than ever, with the painful youth showing in his face. The hunger in his eyes.
She said, "If he knew one of his kindred was looking for him, he might want to open the gates. He might be glad of a friend of his own kind."
"One who had seen his time," Kay mused, looking down at his book of annals again. Will had mentioned, in the first hubbub, that he had seen Arthur. "It's a hard thing, to be a man out of time."
"Or a woman," said Sue. She was wiping her eyes, all trace of laughter gone. "Angharad was as old as he, or nearly so. And she had no-one left from the old days – no-one but her husband, who sleeps in Fundindelve."
Bran lifted his head: there was moisture drying on his face. "You mean," he said – across the table, Will was very silent, wide-eyed and still, "that we could go looking for them. We could find your Cadellin, and your Angharad."
Colin let out a little breath, almost like a laugh. "It wouldn't be a matter of finding them," he said. Under his hand lay Kay's map of Cheshire: he was thumbing at it absent-mindedly. "They can't leave. Angharad's bound to Redesmere, and Cadellin to Fundindelve and the Edge."
"They'd both be in the same places, still," said Sue, softly. She was leaning over a little, to look at the map. She sounded as if she'd taken a gulp of liquor too strong for her. "Just where they always were."
"Just where they always were," Will repeated, even softer. In the silence that followed him, the very air seemed to still, till the only movement Jane saw was the falling snow beyond the curtains; the glinting shadows of the firelight on the walls.
After that, it was inevitable that they would go, of course.
They planned it for the New Year. They were all dispersed for Christmas – Susan and Kay to stay at Seekings, Colin and Sue to visit their parents, Will, Jane and Bran over the border to Gwynedd. But by New Year the various families in Bryn-crug would be returning home, to celebrate with neighbours and close-by relatives.
And it seemed appropriate. At the year's turning, said Bran. Between one year and the next. A time between times, when the high laws of magic might slacken, and things might happen that could be forgotten in the stark light of day.
New Year's Eve, then. In Alderley Edge. I'll take care of it, said Kay – or was it Susan? – and booked rooms for them at a hotel there, not too far from the Edge itself.
And so, on the penultimate day of December, they came: in Jane's battered little car, a "first-time driver" purchase if ever there was one; in Colin-and-Sue's perfectly respectable hatchback; in an elegant, antiquated vehicle that had been with Kay for decades.
They came, and the snow-shrouded Edge loomed over them, a white wave about to break.
"Well," said Colin, "I suppose we'd better set out."
Jane's fingers were begloved, but even so they were cold: she blew on them to warm them. She, Colin, Will and Bran had just left the Wizard, which Colin remembered as a pub but which turned out to have become a tearoom in the intervening decades. It had been considerably warmer than the National Trust carpark in which they were now standing.
They'd arrived the night before, to find that Kay and Susan had booked three suites in a hotel consisting of some of the oldest buildings in Alderley. It had four-poster beds, and almost certainly cost an extortionate amount of money to stay in. In hindsight, Jane realised, that quiet I'll take care of it had been a very delicate way of avoiding having any kind of financial discussion. She couldn't really feel anything but grateful.
The hotel had three suites: the Camelot, the Merlin, and the Wizardry. Fortunately, the Merlin only slept two, so Will – who was staying with Jane and Bran – had been spared sleeping in that one.
"We might as well drive round," Colin was saying, as they converged on his and Sue's hatchback. "The iron gates are round the other side of the Edge, closer to Castle Rock. We can park in Mottram Road." Jane forbore from reminding him that he was the only one of them who knew where Mottram Road was. "It's… probably better to have the car as close as possible, all things considered."
They climbed in. The hatchback was not large, but that was all the better: with the three younger ones squashed in the back, it was easier to stay warm.
All things considered was why they'd divided the way they had. It had been agreed early on that there would be two parties. Colin and Sue would have to split up, one to guide each party: Sue would lead those seeking Angharad, so Colin was to take Cadellin's group. And of course Will would have to go with Colin, in the hope of convincing Cadellin to open the gates. But the reason Jane and Bran were with these two – while Kay and Susan were driving Sue to Redesmere in their beautiful old car – was because they had the younger legs for running.
Redesmere ought to be safe enough, with a bit of luck, Colin had said: and the car park's nearer, and the terrain better for running. Whereas the Edge held mines, and the mines held svart-alfar. If it came down to it, Will, Jane and Bran could scramble down the hillside to the car, or fight their enemies off as best they could.
We're not as young as we once were, Susan had said, sensibly. Even if I had one, I couldn't bend a bow the way I used to. For a moment she'd sounded wistful.
The place was deserted when they arrived. It made sense: in this weather, no sensible tourist would attempt an uphill walk over rough ground, despite the Edge's desolate, wintry beauty. And especially not as it was getting dark.
"We'd best cut sticks," Colin observed, as they left the layby and came into the trees. "They're a stout enough weapon for svart-alfar, if there are any." Bran pulled out his penknife, a sturdy thing. It had been a gift from his father, Jane knew, a few years back.
Armed with sticks, they set out into the snow. The sky was a strange, hollow blue, the shade seen only between sunset and dusk. The evening was peaceful enough – there was hardly a breath of wind – but it was still bitterly cold: Jane pulled her hat further down on her head, and thanked God and Simon's Christmas-gift practicality for her new parka.
Part of her wanted to be back at the Wizard tearoom. Not just for the warmth – though mostly for that – but for the feeling of safety in numbers, for the hiding indoors-ness of it all. After a leisurely morning, all seven had driven over to lunch there, and they'd stayed the best part of the afternoon.
Officially, that had been because they weren't going to set out until just before dark. They'd agreed it between them that each group would make their way to their site, and wait there until moonrise. Hard to imagine those gates opening in the noonday sun, Kay had said. If after moonrise they got no answer, they'd switch to the more dangerous plan: returning to the village for dinner, and then making their way back to knock again at midnight.
Unofficially, there had been a strange, anticipatory feeling all that afternoon. Time had passed strangely – had felt slow as golden syrup, and yet had flown by, whenever anybody checked their watch. It was as if they were all waiting, with bated breath, and yet couldn't bear the wait to end. None of them wanted to be the first to walk out and face all of it, and let it be real.
And yet it was good to be out here, in the snow. To feel the bite of the air and the crunching give of the snow beneath her boots – the ragged feeling of moving against gravity, against the elements. The air against her face was so cool and unforgiving, it had to be real.
She was getting glimpses of that anything-might-happen feeling again; she thought to herself, I wonder if it's the fact that there's no other people out here. Or then again it might be the weather. The air was so motionless that every contour of the ground, every unmoved tree branch seemed outlined in perfect stillness.
"Good weather for it, isn't it?" she said brightly, as if to dispel the weight of that stillness.
"The weather?" Will called down from where he was, a little way ahead of her. "Is that what we're reduced to talking about now?"
"Oh, shut up," Jane retorted cheerfully, putting a little more stomp in her next few steps. It was a good thing she'd been in Bryn-crug for the past several days: it had given her her hill-walking legs back, so they didn't ache now. "Can't a person make a simple observation about the conditions, when they have to walk uphill in the snow?"
"Neither of you knows the first thing about snow," said Bran firmly. "Now if you'd had to tramp around Eryri in the snow every year of your life –"
"We did," Jane said, grinning up at him, "four days ago." He made a face at her, and stopped to tie one of his bootlaces, which had come undone.
"Besides" – Will clambered onto a jutting edge of rock, and turned to look down at the slope – "you're forgetting the Great Storm of '75." Jane remembered that: it had hit the whole country, and in her own area they'd been without power for three days. "One of us had to be out and about in that, learning magic and rescuing the Walker and whatnot. Not to mention finding the Sign of Fire, to bring the thaw."
"That was you?" Colin put in. He was in better walking shape than any of them except Bran: his breathing was smooth and even. "I remember that year – I remember thinking it was almost the worst blizzard I'd ever seen."
Jane had almost forgotten he was there, for a moment; it shook her a little to hear him speak now. Another voice speaking up, in their we-three-alone counsels. But it was good, too, to hear someone else speak of these things, and treat them as real.
"It was bad," Will said, his voice turning serious for a moment. "People nearly died, in my village. We had to hole up in Greythorne Manor. And my sister was out in it, lured away by the Black Rider – she still doesn't know how close…" He swallowed. "It was bad."
"It sounds it. You would have been… eleven?" Colin had turned, too, looking down through the trees. He looked as if he were gazing at something far off. "It's funny… that was the age I was, too, when everything started."
Bran was catching up to them. "You said 'almost' the worst blizzard," he said. "What was your 'worst blizzard', then?"
"The fimbulwinter. A sorcerous winter, called by the morthbrood, with their spells." Colin's mouth firmed into a hard line, for a moment; then he shook his head. "It wasn't as bad as the Great Storm, really; certainly it didn't last as long, or cover such wide ground. But it felt more bitter, then, than any winter I've known since. I suppose it was knowing it was trying to kill us that did it. That, and how badly my hands hurt at the time." He smiled, rueful, and shook his hands as if to shake the memory off them.
"What did the morthbrood call it for?" Jane asked. "To keep you indoors?" Now they had all begun walking again. Somehow it was reassuring to be moving, as if those remembered winter storms, which had kept people penned indoors, could be held at bay simply by the steady movement of one's legs.
"To keep us from reaching Cadellin," Colin replied, stick striking the snow and sending up flecks of white against his rain-trousers. "This was when we were carrying Firefrost – it was why we needed to shelter on Angharad's island in the first place, because we had to sleep, and there was nowhere safe. And because we were being pursued," he added, with a little twitch of his head, like a shiver. "They called out the mara against us."
"The mara?" Will spoke before Jane could ask further, sounding aghast. "The troll-women?"
"You've heard of them?"
Will nodded. "Nothing good." His eyes flickered around warily, as if he had just noticed the deepening shadows falling through the trees, and been spooked by them.
"There isn't anything good to say about the mara," Colin agreed, his tone wry. "They are… you have to see them to understand why they are so fearsome, but they are. Tall women of green stone, three times the height of a tall man, and far more than three times as strong. And tireless hunters. They tracked us to Redesmere, and if Angharad hadn't opened the island to us, they would have had us."
His voice was calm, describing it, but somehow Jane had a deep sense of unease from him. There was something unnatural about the calm, something learned: it was as if he had relived his sight of the mara a thousand times, had stared straight into the reality of how close he had come to death, in the aftermath, and forged this strange calm in response.
She knew that feeling, because she recognised it. The lurching, vertiginous feeling that came with suddenly understanding how sharply your childhood might have been cut off at the root…
"It's frightening to think of," she said, even as Bran and Will shifted, bunching a little closer to her and Colin almost unconsciously. "You think it's frightening in the moment, but it's not half as bad as when you remember it afterwards, and think what might have happened. When all the adrenaline wears off."
"Yes," Colin said, bowing in his head in a motion that wasn't quite a nod. "That's the worst of it, you're right." He turned a little to look at her. "Was it the same with you, when you regained your memories? Easier, or worse?" Of course, Colin, memories intact, had had many more years to turn the events of his childhood over in his mind.
"Worse, I think, in some ways," Jane said. Even thinking it sent a pang through her, like pressing down on a healing scab: the skin stretched around it, the sharp pain beneath. "Because I – we – had to realise it all at once. I don't know what it would have been like if I'd just grown into the memories, as a teenager. As it was, after I went to see Tethys, I used to wake up in a cold sweat and sit bolt upright, just thinking about it."
"The afanc?" Bran said softly, coming up next to her to press his hand into hers.
Jane smiled at him warmly, easily. "No, not really. I was about as safe as I could have been, then, even if I didn't know it at the time. No, it's Cornwall I keep thinking about. The things that could have happened, with that painter… or earlier, when we found the Grail in the first place. When Simon was running for his life with the map, and that awful Bill following him… or I was sitting there in the vicarage with Mr Hastings, not knowing… or Barney, looking for the Grail in that cave, with the sea coming in…"
She shuddered. Somehow reciting that litany of dangers in front of Colin, who hadn't known them before, made her feel more exposed than she'd expected.
"Funny," said Will, "how many of us on this hill have been chased while holding onto something." His voice was ragged with effort – the slope had steepened just where he was – but his tone was distant, far-off as if he was looking into the past.
"Like Simon with the map," he went on, after a moment of silence. "Or all three of you, Jane, with the Grail – and Colin and Sue with Firefrost. Or me and Bran, with the harp of gold."
"I'd forgotten you were chased, with that," said Jane: "it was – Caradog Pritchard, wasn't it?" She'd never met the man: somehow she always imagined him looking like the man she had seen, Caradog Lewis, the Dark's creature in the Aberdyfi of decades past.
"Caradog Pritchard, yes." Bran spoke up. "And the Brenin Llwyd. Watching us with his warestone, and chasing us with fire on the mountain." Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold: it ran through Jane's head like the line of a song.
"Was that when it was worst, for you?" she said. "The time with the harp?"
"Yes." Will's round ordinary face had a sudden way of turning gaunt and serious when his voice did: it was doing it now. "Because there was no Merriman, it was my first quest, alone… and not on my own turf: on the Brenin Llwyd's. And there were others who would suffer with me, if I failed." He shot Bran a look, one Bran met and returned.
Both thinking of Cafall, Jane knew. There was something particularly horrible about the Dark killing a dog.
"So we have all been hunted," said Bran, "one way or another."
In his clear, deliberate diction, the words seemed to clarify something in Jane. To delineate the shape of the fear, as if those haunting images – the dark surface of Kemare Head in the moonless night, the Lady Mary rounding the headland as they left the cave – grew suddenly sharper. The shadows in the wood seemed to have grown sharper, blacker, too all of a sudden, against the snow.
Colin shook himself, a little, and put his shoulders back; Jane hadn't even noticed him hunch. "So we have," he said, that far-off look in his eyes again, and turned to lead them further westwards.
Yes, the shadows were darker now. The light had leached out of the sky, and in the trees the blueness of twilight was transmuted into dark mists and black pockets of shadow. Their little group had bunched close, Jane and Bran no longer holding hands but brushing shoulders, and Colin setting himself a little ahead of Will – an older brother's instinct, perhaps, somehow recognising the youngest of nine. Their breath hovered in the air between them all, hardly visible any more: hardly detectable except as a brief, warm cloud, which shivered and was gone as they inhaled. Small and fragile.
Jane felt that she could feel every fleeting darkness around them – every black, impenetrable hollow and covert, every imagined mineshaft beneath their feet – as clear and distinct as the tips of her fingers. Like this, it was easy to imagine the Edge as a hunting-ground.
And yet it was beautiful. The blue of the sky, staining it like ink dropped into water, was rich and dark; the evening star stood out against it so clearly that she could have drawn it in white correction fluid, in fine rainbow-edged lines. In the woods, the deep blackness made arches and sculpted caverns of the trees, the brush. And the four of them, small black shapes against the snow, walking forward into something unknown to all but one.
Even now it's beautiful, she thought, helplessly. Cold, and dangerous, and frighteningly real; and beautiful. There was no getting away from it. There was no safe, simple answer.
Jane pulled her scarf closer round her throat, and trudged on.
"Not that I'm questioning your memory," said Kay, "but I don't see an island."
Susan felt her mouth twitch. They had left the car down on Redesmere Lane, and now stood in the snow, feet armoured in walking boots, hands equipped with stout sticks which – she couldn't deny – were as much a walking aid as a weapon, these days.
Not that there was any sign of attack, despite the late hour. The last bleak light of the sun had left the sky, and seemed to have gathered in the lake, which lay as still as a mirror before them, empty and shining. The snow lay heavy on the trees, having settled on them like a thick blanket of silence: against it, Kay's voice sounded peculiarly loud and clear. Susan found she was glad of it. Snow always made her feel a little strange, and hollow.
"It isn't there, most of the time," Sue said; "or rather, mostly you can't see it. Until you're on it, at any rate." She was in charge of this leg of the journey, which was why it was of her Kay had asked, What are we looking for?, as they set out. "Then it's very solid, I can promise you."
"We believe you," Susan assured her. "An invisible island is no stranger than a floating one, after all."
Sue laughed. "Do you know," she said, as they walked on, "I'd almost forgotten, until Colin said it, that that was its title. One of the Two Floating Islands of Logris."
"I wonder what the other one is." Kay was thinking aloud. "Avalon, I suppose, perhaps. But why an island? Why always islands?"
"Think of Tintagel, as well," Susan pointed out: "that's all but an island by now. Or Cair Paravel" – her voice hardly faltered, saying the name, these days – "that was a peninsula when we ruled it, but a few hundred years later or so, it had become an island too."
She found she was speaking softly. Somehow she felt she had to. There wasn't a bird to be seen in the trees: their voices reverberated as if they were the only sound for miles around.
(And thinking of Cair Paravel took her like that, sometimes. A ghost castle on a ghost island, not faded but bright, its colours too vivid and brilliant to be real. It seemed to live in a very soft-voiced part of her heart.)
"They do make good fortresses," Kay said thoughtfully. "That's probably why people settled there in the first place. A source of water, and a way to keep people out… what more do you need?"
"And they're separate," came Sue's voice, a little way ahead. She was sounding thoughtful, too, in a slightly different way. "They're of the land, but not in it. So they have their own identity, their own name. Magic can gather and stick to them."
"Like a magnet," Kay observed, "or flypaper." Susan cast him a look of feigned disapproval; he grinned.
"And so that's how people can bind themselves to them," she said, looking out again at the water stretching to the fringe of trees on the opposite shore. "Taking on the island's identity to gain access to the Wild Magic, as Will thinks your Angharad did."
"Yes." Sue had stopped, courteously, to let the two of them catch up. "Which I suppose makes her the Lady of the Lake. Funny that there should be two of those, too. The image repeating itself."
"If Cadellin really is an Old One as Will says" – Kay was striding forward, eager to draw level with Sue; Susan tugged at his arm, and he offered her it – "then it makes a certain sense. He and Merlin – Myrddin – were trained to work in the same ways, after all. Singing from the same hymnbook."
The humour had left his voice: there was curiosity in it still, but he was taking it seriously. You always did know when to make light of things, Susan thought, and when to tread carefully. It was one of the things she'd liked about him, right from when they met.
"Were any of yours based in an island?" she asked. She knew Kay's history pretty well, after all these years, but memory could be deceptive.
But she was right: he shook his head. "No," he said, with the particular wistful tone she always heard in his voice, when he was thinking of the strange ageless beings who had peopled his childhood. "No islands. There was a time, once, when I recall crossing a stretch of water, to reach the Lady; but I can't tell what part of that was dream and what part was real. Another time I met her inside a tree, in King Charles's Oak. And of course Herne the Hunter was always in his Wild Wood." He broke off for a moment. "And old Cole was bound to the roads, if he was bound to anything."
It was Cole he had spoken of the most to young Will, Bran and Jane, that night back at Seekings. Will had not known of any Cole Hawlings, or anything of Ramon Lully besides his reputation as a philosopher: if the old Punch-and-Judy man had been an Old One, there was no-one left to remember it. But Will had not thought it likely. More plausible that he had practised a blended style of magic, like Angharad's: close to the Wild Magic, but with elements of the High in it, too. It was such a blended style that resulted in things like brewing elixirs, and commanding – or freeing – spirits.
(It was also a style similar to that practised by the witches of Kay's childhood, or the morthbrood of Colin and Sue's. But none of them had brought that up.)
It was a good answer, a likely answer. But it had not given Kay anything to grasp onto, any name or place or skeletal story to anchor his treasured, hazy memories of the old man. Still, Susan had dutifully written it down, with all the other questions and half-answers.
Bound to the roads. "Like Will's Walker," said Sue, beginning to stride along again, "only happier." The description of an aged, eternal man, who walked the roads carrying a treasure, had made Will flinch visibly, in Seekings library. He had told them a little of the man he called 'the Walker': Susan suspected Kay's assurance that Cole Hawlings had been his own master, and well content, was bittersweet for him.
"Yes," said Kay; and then, as if to turn their thoughts from that path, "If this island is invisible, Sue, then how does one find it?"
How strange it was to hear that question, as if they were all certain that such things could be found. Susan was out of practice with it. She grasped her stick more firmly, its rough surface prodding into her skin.
"I don't quite know," Sue replied steadily. "But we'll come to the right spot sooner or later, I think. I'll know it when we get to it." She was looking out over the water. It seemed to be reflected in her eyes for a moment – not the image of the lake itself, but the black depths of it, and the mirrored surface. The strands of her pale hair feathered around her face like a bank of dead winter grass.
She lengthened her stride then, as if to indicate her determination; Susan and Kay did the same, and for a while none of them spoke. The snow beneath them was packed quite hard, and glassy-smooth in places. More than once one of them slipped – Kay would catch Susan by the arm, when her boots betrayed her. Their path traced through trees, to be as close to the water's edge as possible.
"Is it strange," Susan asked, after a while, "to come back?" The rough ground beneath her feet, the sharp impact of each step up her spine, was opening memories behind her eyes. Scrambling down a gorge, and then back up again, as arrows flew above them…
And then we never went back at all. Those last snatched glimpses of beauty as they'd gone down the gorge, the clear flying water, the deep moss: they unfurled now, almost painlessly, into arrows in her heart.
"Yes," said Sue, after a moment, with a tinge of hoarseness in her voice. "Yes, it is." She paused for a moment in the shade of a tree, skeletal but so covered with ivy that it might have passed for an evergreen. Half her face was in shadow.
"I knew I could come back sometime, you know," she went on. "Any time, really. When I was ready. But I never – quite thought of doing it. I wasn't ever quite ready." Her eyes flickered downwards, to her wrist, peeping out of her jacket sleeve. From here, Susan could just see a band of paler skin ringing it: a place that looked burned into stark whiteness.
The place where the Mark of Fohla had been worn, and sunk into the skin. Sometimes Susan saw Sue contemplate it, when she thought Colin wasn't looking, an odd half-pained, half-tender look on her face. It was an understood thing between the four of them, though they had never fully spoken it aloud: that one day – when Colin was dead and gone, most likely, and not before – Sue would look to her wrist and speak a word, and the nine huntswomen in the sky would become ten, and ride to Caer Rigor.
But not yet. Not this time. And until then, she could never quite let herself think it was possible: "No," said Sue, softly, as they began to walk again. "No, I never thought of coming back."
"Nor did I," said Susan, almost under her breath.
If I could go back… She had never thought it. The break had been clean and quick, and then slow, as she grew into and out of herself. Even with Kay, telling over their memories like a rosary, she had never thought of going back; and yet now the snow, carpeting the ground and lining the branches overhead like the fur of some polar animal, seemed to un-anchor her from herself again, so that she could float once more into childhood. Any turn might bring her into a different set of woods, bound under a different kind of snow. The beloved trees murmuring beneath it in sleep; the bright lantern in their midst.
She looked to Kay, out of habit: he looked equally unmoored, untethered, when his eyes met hers. "The snow," he said, quietly, as if he'd read her mind. "It reminds me of Arthur's Camp, that first night, and in the morning. And the last night, too, on the way back to Tatchester."
Speaking with Cole Hawlings in the past, only to see him kidnapped in the present; struggling through the snow on Christmas Eve to be met by Herne and the Lady. Yes, it was strange for him too. Her snow had been another world's snow, but his had covered familiar hills, places he knew.
The figures of her childhood magic had been cut off, clean as the sweep of a knife. His had simply vanished: melted away, back into the landscape whence they had come. Everywhere and nowhere, beyond his finding.
Susan reached for his gloved hand with hers. Above them – and below, in the lake's surface – stars were beginning to appear.
The woods were growing darker by the minute. Jane had almost begun to wonder if they ought to be getting the torches out of their backpacks, for their footing if nothing else. The ground was bright and pale with snow, true enough, but beneath that lay rock and tussock, and unexpected shapes pressed together out of the last of the fallen leaves. But then Colin – who had been looking about him very intently, yet with an odd, abstracted look – had said, "This is it, the old elf-road," and shifted their path onto an old, broad track.
And, "Yes," had said Will, his eyes turning opaque for a moment, in the dim light. "I feel it now. They must have used this for hundreds of years." Suddenly his movements had changed, so that he moved naturally to the front of their party, as if called by some strain of music the rest of them couldn't hear.
Now, Jane followed his footing – Mark my footsteps, good my page, the tune ran through her mind – as the slope grew ever steeper. Bran was close behind him, a shock of white hair against the pitch-dark shadows, the blue-tinted snow. Then came Colin, near enough to see where Will was going and correct their course, if need be; and then Jane, now behind him, now almost shoulder-to-shoulder. He knew the ground better, but younger lungs still counted for something.
She liked to see Will like this, so sure of himself. It seemed to fill him out, to unfold some missing part of him she'd half-forgotten: like the sun changing angle behind a stained-glass window. Yet it was strange, too. There was a kind of dizzying feeling that came with it that made her think of the first moments on board ship.
Sing oh, my love, oh, my love, my love, my love, his voice sang in her mind – it hadn't been long since the three of them had carolled together: Bran had taught them some plygain carols. Now she seemed to follow the other two into a key she did not know. Reading the sheet music to a song Will knew already.
One of her gloves had come loose. She pulled it tightly back on, and looked up to see that Colin had stopped to wait for her. Taking up the implicit invitation, she joined him to walk in parallel.
"Strange, isn't it?" he said, as they followed the two heads, mouse-brown and bone-white, hovering ahead in the darkness.
"What is?"
"Being the human one."
He'd noticed it too, then. "Yes," Jane said. The stark phrasing might have made her defensive, at some other time: as if Bran and Will weren't human, embedded in human relationships, the loving bonds of which John Rowlands had spoken. But in this moment it was also simply true, and there was a kind of relief in hearing it.
And this was Colin, who knew. "It's funny," she went on, in the calm silence made by their steady footsteps, the occasional fall of snow from a branch. "Seeing them like this, it… it's like the pattern of the whole thing, somehow. The danger's the same for both of you, but for one of you it means following a path towards it. And then for the other it means walking into the dark just hoping there is a path, somewhere beneath you."
"That's exactly it." They were having to work harder, here, as the track curved steeply uphill, almost concave against the slope. "You might be just as close to the danger – it might be inches from your face – without seeing it." There was a wry tone in his voice again, and Jane wondered if their route was bringing back memories of being ambushed by the svart-alfar. "And you know more than most of the world about it, and less than anyone else who knows."
Yes. The keen particular loneliness of it, held close in the lockbox of the chest, clear and sharp as iron on the tongue. As if one had been blindfolded and handed a precious, ancient sword, priceless and double-edged.
"And yet," Jane said, "you don't turn back," thinking of the uphill path that lay behind her and the sure, certain commitment of the stick she was carrying. Above her, in a sudden, brief gap in the canopy, Orion's belt gleamed down. "You couldn't."
"You couldn't," Colin agreed, his voice suddenly softened somehow. "You never would."
No, Jane thought, remembering that he had lived with his sister all their lives. Sue was the one who had borne the Mark of Fohla, after all; Sue was the one who studied the stars where she had once ridden in a dream. You never would. Colin knew what it was to be the human one, and live with those who had been set apart.
For a moment she felt a kind of ghostly pang in her ribcage. Her brothers were far away, Simon returned to the last few years of his medical degree, Barney to art school. They had not come with her, to bicker their way up the path, looking for magic.
She had never been sure whether she ought to tell them what she remembered. They seemed happy, both of them. If they had felt the same restlessness she had, in the years after the Midsummer Tree, she had never seen any marks of it on them, no melancholy or unquiet dreams. She had chosen to let well alone, and mostly she was resigned to it.
Still, just now, their absence felt as piercing as the bitter, cold air.
"We're coming close," Colin said, beside her. Above them, jutting out over the beech wood, lay Stormy Point. He strode forward to join Will: she followed him, so that they formed a line of four, across the slope this time. For a while, there was no talking. The nearness of their goal seemed to blot it out: silence hovered over them like birds hanging in the air.
Then they crested one final ridge, and came to the rock where the iron gates lived.
It did not need pointing out. It stood sharply out against the landscape, a single shark's tooth embedded in the snow. Something about the obviousness of it, the stark blatancy, made Jane feel strangely off-balance. What was it like, she thought, glancing at Colin, to live so near this, and know it would never open to you again? That strange calm had settled over him again.
There was a silence. "Will you do the honours?" said Colin, sweeping out his arm in an oddly courtly gesture.
Will took a step forward; his hand rose from his side as if of its own will. His lips parted, and a little silvery curl of breath formed before his face. "It's here," he murmured. "There is magic here, but subtle… Almost… almost, you can only sense it by how it covers itself.
"There is a key, but I can't find the shape of it." He turned, meeting Colin's eyes, and Jane saw a kind of hunger in his face. It made him look very young – younger, perhaps, than he had looked since he was eleven. "Will you try? I have the power to open the way, I think, but the way will show itself more readily to you than to me."
"You think so?" There was something equally young in Colin's gaze: some pain he had grown around, like a young tree, only apparent when you stripped away the bark.
"Try," said Will. In his voice was a peculiar sweetness that Jane only heard very rarely, and only between their trio. Beside him, Bran was grave and silent.
Colin reached out and touched one hand to the rock. His eyes closed, then opened again. For a moment he looked utterly different, so much so that Jane would not have known him: transfigured completely. He said, "Ebeloia," and the sound curled around the rock like smoke, the caressing l-sound pulsing in the air.
The rock remained unmoved. Suddenly Colin's face was the same as Jane was used to again, a thread of wistfulness folded into his expression as if it belonged there. But Will looked enlivened, anticipatory, as if something had fallen into place in his head. His lips moved soundlessly over the syllables.
"So that's it," he said. His hand rose again, and covered Colin's, which had not yet left the rock. Then, in a tone Jane had not heard for more than a decade – "Ebeloia."
The rock split open beneath their hands.
It took a moment for any of them to move. There had been a great blue flash, when the rock clove asunder, and the air was sharp and electric with ozone. And the blue light was still there, Jane realised: it was shining out of the two halves of the rock. Its rays stretched, pale and liquid, through a pair of iron gates.
"That's them," Colin breathed. His face was very pale, his eyes bright. His mouth trembled, then set, tightly. "Come on."
But none of them moved forward. Jane didn't feel she could. She was frozen in the snow, in the air which suddenly felt alive as if flocks of tiny birds had suddenly taken flight out of it. Swarming starlings. There was a sound in the back of her mind which was not a sound, like wind through a tunnel: more a feeling than a sound, that said, Something is coming. And all the time, echoing through her mind in a voice which was hers and her child-self's, It's real, it's real, it's all real, it'srealit'srealit'srealit'sreal…
She could taste iron on her tongue.
A sound of metal moving rang out over the clearing. A voice, rich and resonant with the weight of years, said, "Who comes to Fundindelve?"
Jane looked at the figure who stood behind the iron gates, as they swung open, and felt her heart rise into her mouth like a sob.
It wasn't that they looked, or sounded, the same. The voice was different, less careful, less measured: more like the sort of baritone singer from a choir who couldn't help carrying his training and breath in the way he spoke. And the hair was longer, and more dignified – less like a lion's mane – and came down to join a beard. And the white robe was nothing she had ever seen before. And yet when she looked at Bran, there was a look of disbelief on his face; and Will's eyes were bright and wet.
Without the barest hint of a facial resemblance, Cadellin Silverbrow was the spitting image of Gumerry.
They were more than halfway around the lake when Sue stopped and said, "This is it."
And about time, Susan could have said, but didn't. She remembered enough of the laws of these things to know that important places – and events – never occurred conveniently. But it was really quite dark now: the tips of the trees had been swallowed up into the sky, a magnetic darkness, and the lake no longer shone but now glimmered with rare, liquid pinpricks of light. The crescent moon hung above them, a bright sliver cut into the sky.
In any case she would not have said it to Sue: not with that tone in Sue's voice. There was a certainty in it that seemed to come from within and outside her all at once. Water from a deep well, drawn up from the spreading rock beneath. She had never heard that tone from Sue before.
(Though she had heard it elsewhere, and she drew in her breath against the memory, the bell-like voice dancing at the edge of hearing. But she did not bite her lip to drive it away as she might once have done. She and grief were old enough friends to be done with that, now.)
"It's a good place for it," Kay said. They were off the public footpaths by now, and had been walking in the trees for some time; but here the treeline broke for a moment, giving them a view of the lake almost at its widest point. "What would you have us do now?"
"Nothing," Sue said; "nothing except stand nearby, and watch for – I don't know – people coming to drive us off their land. If I can do this, it shouldn't take long."
She removed one glove, and pulled the sleeve of her coat up a little so that the white band around her wrist showed. Then she knelt down, with the easy grace of youth, and plunged her hand into the cold water with a little gasp. It flowed down from her palm, silver and translucent, as she rose again.
"Lenisteia," she breathed, over the still surface of the lake.
There was no movement, not even a breath of wind. Susan thought, later, how stilly it had all taken place. Where they were standing, they could just see the blurry, delicate shapes of the tree-branches, on the other side, a kind of deep brown-black cloud in the night; in the water, these shapes rippled, shifting and smudged. And then somehow the whole seemed to emerge into perfect clarity, and they were the same shapes, and there were tree branches there, in the centre of the lake. The fluid and blending hues in the water, an inchoate, ever-moving darkness, were suddenly no longer water-colours but the colours of land rising out of it.
And that darkness was stretching over the shining ribbon of water between it and the shore, until there was no more ribbon, and the snow gave way to the bare earth. Tree, rock and slope bloomed out of the gloom, limned finely in silver.
Susan looked over to Sue. She was very still, and all the colour had gone out of her face, even as her eyes suddenly shone with painful longing. Susan touched her arm, gently, with one gloved hand.
That seemed to wake her. "Come," she said, in a voice suddenly empty of certainty and full of something far less easily described. "This way." She stepped out onto the new peninsula, and the other two followed.
A wave of warm air was how Susan felt it, first. Suddenly the air was very soft against her face, like a mother's hand, and light, and bearing the smell of meadowsweet. There was grass, springy and fresh, beneath her boots: she stumbled. Kay's hand caught her beneath the elbow, steadying her as she straightened up. Then she felt him stagger, and reached out to clasp his arms, so that they were holding onto each other.
The island was alight with summer. Wildflowers had free rein over its banks, and the trees were rich with tides of whispering leaves. Light flashed down from a sky so deeply blue it was almost dark, just at the centre, and flashed back a thousand times, reflecting from little streams that leapt from a spring and wove across the island to the lake. Everywhere there was sound, and light, borne on a warm breeze.
For a long moment the strength of the memory seemed to wrench Susan out of her body, so that she dwelled only loosely in her skin, the image ringing in her head like a gong. Flowers emerging from snow, from bare earth, and chill waters loosened into glad motion… When she could feel her fingertips again, she looked to Kay, whose arm was under them; upwards, to his face. His eyes were wet, his throat working soundlessly. He too had seen summer in the depths of winter.
She wondered if he felt the same thing she did – something which was at once like hunger and like being full.
They released each other, and moved forward to catch up with Sue. Sue had walked – lurched, almost – ahead of them, but now she was stilled. Before her, almost glowing in the sunlight, stood a woman dressed in a white robe. Like the island, she was very vivid, almost too alive and real. Her robe was an incandescent swan-white, and the flush of summer was in her cheeks, deep as a foxglove. Her hair was red-gold, the shade of molten gold in the fire; and her circlet was gold; and her eyes were gold. Sue's face was turned towards her like a flower to the sun.
"Ah," said the woman. Even the sound was music. "So you have come back. Be welcome here: be welcome, and three times welcome to Redesmere."
She stepped forward, and took Sue's face between her two hands. "Welcome," she said, some secret warmth in the words, "my dear." Sue breathed in and out beneath her touch, long and deep. It was as if she had been released from some lingering, unseen strain.
Then the woman – Angharad Goldenhand, for it could be none other – turned to them. "And welcome to you," she said, meeting Kay's eyes, "Herne's acolyte. And to you" – and now those golden eyes met Susan's, too bright to look away from – "who bear the mark of the Lion's breath."
Susan met her gaze steadily, even through her own flinch at the words. She had not heard those words in a long time.
It marks me still, then, she thought, to those with eyes to see it, and the thought was bitter and sweet at once, blood and spring water in the mouth.
That thought took her away from the conversation, a little, as Angharad and Sue spoke. She reached for Kay's hand to ground her, and found that he squeezed hers tightly when their fingers intertwined. They were as off-balance as each other. The island beneath Susan's feet was solid, but it might as well have been the water of the lake: she felt strangely weightless. I never expected this, some part of her kept realising, over and over. Not this, not like this…
She wondered if Sue had, quite. All Sue's attention was fixed on Angharad Goldenhand as if by the pull of a magnet: her focus was almost trance-like. There was no way to know what vertigo she might suddenly feel, when the trance was broken.
The odd thing was that Angharad seemed equally intent. At any time she would have been hard to look away from: she was every inch the great lady. Susan knew full well how easy it was for someone like that – a great queen, a peerless beauty – to make you feel you were the only person in the room, in any room, anywhere. But to Angharad, it seemed, Sue really was the only person on the island. There was something beyond charisma in her gaze when she looked at Sue, something more than gracious. Some potent mix of benison and long-borne pain.
It took Susan a while to place what was familiar about it. That chord in the heart, that struck notes of love and shame at once, when a name or a memory plucked at it: it made her think of her siblings, and the long years she had carried their memories as guilt.
Strange to think of Angharad Goldenhand, immortal island-mistress, as so similar to herself. She did remind Susan of her past self, a little, and the way people had once looked at her; but she was less human, more like a Dryad. Or a Naiad whose river was in full flood, resplendent in her strength. Another resemblance that shook Susan out of her skin like a ghost.
She looked at Kay, and knew that he felt the same, as if the ghost of his boy-self shivered within the bounds of his body. He had known a Lady who spoke with children and animals, in whose domain it was spring and summer and harvest all at once. If anything, memory's grip would be stronger on him right now. We two, she thought, always accosted by our childhoods, always reshaping ourselves to let them in again…
At least they were together. At least they both knew what it was, to carry your childhood with you so that its ghosts filled streets and country, before your eyes and out of your reach.
The tone of the voices shifted, and Susan realised that Sue was coming to the end of her tale, and explaining to Angharad what it was their plan had been. That their party would split to find Cadellin and Angharad separately, and then rejoin to gather with both, in either Fundindelve or Redesmere. Will would meet them both, Colin and Sue would both have a chance to greet them, to wish them well for the new year – perhaps to see out the last of the old year with them, if they wished it.
But at the mention of Cadellin, Angharad's face turned grave and still, and joy went out of her eyes. "Go to Cadellin if you will," she said: "he would be glad to see you well, and I would not deny you. But he will not receive me. And I do not think he would come here."
"Why?" said Sue. She had seen what Susan and Kay could both see likewise, the tightness around Angharad's eyes and mouth as she spoke. The marks of some grief or solemn anger.
Angharad said, "Cadellin Silverbrow has not spoken to me since the Wild Magic was freed."
"No," said Cadellin, as they made their way along the blue-lit tunnel towards the cave of Fundindelve; "I did not see Taliesin at Arfderydd. He would have been there in eagle-shape, and there were plenty of those about, looking for meat."
He had welcomed them in readily, even joyfully, though his demeanour was still a little sombre. Jane could not be sure, but she thought she had heard his breath catch when he had seen Will, and been told who – what – Will was. His tone had changed after that, to include a quiet note of glad disbelief. Then he had learned that Will was the last one left, the Watchman, and his voice had changed again so that Jane could not read it at all.
But he was glad of Will's presence, that much seemed certain. When he had said Come in, it had been a plea, an invitation, not a command. And now he was answering Will's avid questions without hesitation. Jane wondered if he realised how much of that eagerness was actually a desperate hunger: a hunger for closeness with the Circle who were lost to them both, but one which would feed on knowledge of their past if no better food was to be had.
"But he was there? You spoke to him, later?" Will kept pace with him, ahead of them in the tunnel.
"Yes, I spoke to him," Cadellin's voice was quiet, mindful: "he found me in Coed Celyddon. He told me what he had seen. Which of course was what I had meant him to see, him and anyone else. I never knew whether he had really been deceived by the trick."
"It was a trick, then, somehow?"
"From beginning to end." They were coming deeper into the tunnel now, and the light was growing paler and brighter at once – still blue-hued, so that Jane hardly knew whether they were walking through rock or water, but now the blue was that of a winter sky with the sun at full strength. It suffused the rock in the strangest way. If people tried to recreate this from one end of a year to another, with neon lights, they'd get nowhere, she thought, nonsensically.
"It had to happen in Cumbria," Cadellin went on, "so that no-one would think to look further south. I made a great show of it – hundreds of men dying in bloody battle, the flower of the North slain in a day. Who would think to look beneath the enchantment, and see that the bodies fighting and dying were trees?"
Bran laughed suddenly from behind Jane. "What is it?" Jane hissed.
"Tell you later," he whispered.
Will had let out an Ah-noise of comprehension: he must have recognised the spell. "You faked their deaths," he said. "So that no-one would think to look for them, when a hundred and forty of the North's finest disappeared into a cave in Cheshire, to wait out the centuries until they were needed. But why stay in Coed Celyddon?"
Cadellin laughed then, though it was more like an exhale, really: a release of breath. "The Wild Magic has its prices, Watchman. Where did you think I found the trees?" Another Ah. "And besides, I could not risk leading watchers to Fundindelve. I had to wait them out, to seem mad, beyond reason."
"As you seemed to Taliesin," said Will, "when he found you."
"Yes." Jane could not see Cadellin's expression closely enough to tell what that sudden, inward sound in his voice meant. "All this time later, I still do not know whether he was truly deceived, or whether he saw through me and simply kept his own counsel. He seemed to believe what he had seen of the battle; and you say he carried my words back to the Old Ones faithfully enough. And yet… there was a reason he chose the eagle-shape so often. He had the keenest eyes of any man I ever knew."
"He knew," came Bran's voice, from the back of their little procession. They all turned to look at him, from Jane to Cadellin. The wizard's gaze was somehow piercing, like the light from a diamond.
Bran looked back at him in a way Jane recognised from his father, grave but not unkind. "Cad Goddau," he said, simply. "The Battle of the Trees. Even when he had told the Old Ones all that you wanted him to, he saw the joke of it all, and hid it in a piece of art: in a poem, in the book that bears his name."
For a moment, the tunnel was silent. Then, "Ah," said Cadellin, very softly. "Ah, Gwion bach."
You fool, Jane though, her eyes stinging. You fool, Jane Drew. Foolish, to wonder why he bothered to answer Will's hungry questions. As if this man was not just as starved even for the chance to speak of his old friends.
The walls around them were widening now, and the light was growing brighter and less blue: ahead of them it strengthened into the dazzling white of the morning star. It was so bright that Jane could not see what lay beyond it. Then they passed through it, as if passing through a veil, and the rock took shape around them into a cavern.
It was long and low: it would just admit a man of Cadellin's height, but only just. The light within it was softer, less blinding, though not less brilliant. And every inch of the light was needed, for the path through it was narrow. The ground was covered with the sleeping bodies of men and horses. Their silver armour shone, reflecting the light back again, so that it shimmered as their chests rose and fell.
They really are sleeping, Jane realised. The whole cave seemed to beat, like a heartbeat, with the inhale and exhale of its inhabitants. I drove here in a car, and woke up in a hotel, and I'm looking at men who were alive in the sixth century. And still are.
She would almost have felt more comfortable had the room been larger. A vast cavern might have allowed her to feel small, in the face of this. In such a long, low room, there was no getting away from how human those sleeping faces were, eyelashes twitching as they breathed.
"So these are they," said Will quietly, "the Men of the North."
Cadellin had drawn further ahead of them, into the centre of the room. The stone rose up in the middle, forming a kind of natural bier, where a man lay at rest. Jane could not see him close to yet, but even at this distance she saw that there was gold in his armour, and on the hilt of his sword. "Yes," Cadellin said. "These are they. Gwrgi and Peredur, Cedfyw and Cadfan, and all the rest."
"And your nephew?"
Cadellin did not move to touch the man on the bier, but for a moment Jane thought she saw his hand twitch. "Yes," he said, his voice even softer now. "Yes, here he lies. My Gwenddolau."
"You never said he was your nephew," said Colin, but his tone was gentle, not accusatory.
"How should I?" Cadellin did not look up, did not turn to face any of them. "You had no need to know: to you he was merely the king within the hill. And to me, also, or how could I have bound him in sleep like this?" His voice was very, very quiet.
"All these hundreds of years he has slept, and I have kept watch. I have been the wizard of the Edge, his watcher and his gaoler, for longer than I ever was his uncle."
The words made Jane shiver, all of a sudden, and bite her lip, thinking of Gumerry whom her mother had called uncle so easily. She looked at Will and saw a familiar pained, distant look in his expression: the sharp shapeless pain of living as an Old One set apart by knowledge. When she reached for his hand, his eyes flickered to hers in surprise. But his hand was warm and firm in her grip, and his thumb swiped gratefully over the back of her hand.
"Did anyone else know?" That was Bran's voice, moving through the cave; he had wandered to the side when they entered, and now was approaching the bier. He sounded somehow opaque, as he often did when he felt deeply about something.
Jane wondered if he was thinking of his birth, and Gumerry – Merlin – shepherding his mother through time, godfathering them both into the Dysynni Valley.
"No," said Cadellin, and then, speaking a little faster: "no, no-one else. None but the others who cast the spell, and Angharad Goldenhand, since she was our ally. But no-one else – not friends, not lovers, not parents. I had to tell my sister Gwenddydd that her son was dead, when she came to find me in Coed Celyddon, searching for survivors. I saw her grieve him, I watched it break her marriage apart, as she wondered whether her husband – Gwenddolau's stepfather – had had a hand in it."
He looked up, at last, from where Gwenddolau lay, and faced – not Bran, but Colin. "Can you see, now, why I wanted no more children of men involved in this? Why I swore to myself that there would be no more grieving parents?"
"Yes," said Colin; and he moved forward to touch Cadellin's shoulder with one hand. "Yes, I see."
They left the chamber of the Sleepers soon after that, and made their way up through a tunnel that climbed again out of the heart of the Edge, where the light slowly turned again to blue. It cast strange shadows on the simple rock walls, so that the sandstone seemed like some shifting sculpture, shining with the hues of washed-out slate, or the sea-cliffs beneath a hanging moon.
At last they came into another chamber, smaller and more rounded than the first. The light here was gentle, the walls pale sandstone; the floor was split in two by a stream, which flowed into a pool by one of the walls and escaped beneath it. There was very little furniture – only a table and a few carved chairs, and a pile of something soft in the corner: Jane squinted and realised it was animal skins.
Cadellin bade them sit. There were not enough chairs for the company, so Will and Bran crowded into one. Jane hesitated for a moment, looking at the table, and then Cadellin caught her eye and said with solemn good humour, "Yes, take a seat there if it please you: that table was built sturdy," so she hopped up onto it.
This must have been what he was like with Colin and Sue, she realised, legs dangling from the table: this must have been why they counted him a friend, as well as a… a figure of awe. She swallowed around the thought of Gumerry.
This was a humbler lodging than the Cave of the Sleepers, and more comfortable. Yet somehow that did not banish the feeling she had had in that cave, the feeling of something great and distant and yet too close, all at once. The very plainness of it – the prosaic simplicity of the table, the stark ancientness of the pile of skins in lieu of a bed – made it feel more real. This was a room for living in: this was the room Cadellin Silverbrow had dwelt in, since Arfderydd, fourteen hundred years ago.
Cadellin had been told the rough outline of how the Dark Within had risen and been driven back, and the rest of the Old Ones had finally left the bounds of the world for their long rest. He must surely, Jane thought, have been longing to know more, but instead he courteously asked after his guests – their lives, their professions. He heard of Colin's vocation and laughed; he asked if Sue was happy, and seemed glad to know she was. He heard how Will was following in his old mentor's footsteps, and how Bran lived with his father on the farm – that is right, he said, on hearing that. Arthur would have wanted that for you: peace, and time with the man who raised you. It is what he could not have himself.
(Bran blinked hard when he said that, and Jane thought of the bitten-back sound of weeping in his voice, over the phone to her, when he regained his memories. The wound reopened fresh upon remembering the choice he had made – Owen Davies over Arthur Pendragon – before the choice itself was wiped from his mind.)
She even found herself telling Cadellin about Tethys and Greenwitch, and how she had chased that memory across the years and halfway into a postgraduate degree in marine biology. Somehow the way he listened – with eyes fixed on hers, and all his attention brought to it – made it easy, her speech flowing out of her. And the cave had a quietness to it that seemed to draw secrets out without sound or pain, deep within the hill. Under the snow.
That led into telling the story of how she had met Colin-and-Sue, and then of course how she had brought Will and Bran to meet them, at Seekings. Will's sudden discovery that Cadellin, a name he only knew from inherited memory, was not dead. And then into their scheme: to come together at the year's end and seek Cadellin, if he would answer, and watch out the last of the year with him. To send Sue and the others to Redesmere to find Angharad, and bring her here if she would come.
By that point Colin had taken up the thread from Jane, and she was free to simply watch Cadellin. So she saw – perhaps before any of the others – when his gaze turned suddenly diamond-sharp again, before his whole body seemed to sink into heaviness.
Colin said, after what felt like a full minute of tense silence in which Cadellin said nothing, "Do you think she will not?"
"I do not know," said Cadellin. His voice was full of that same heaviness, as if every year of his many centuries suddenly lay heavy in his bones. There was something implacable in it. "I do not know if the question is whether she will."
"What do you mean?"
Cadellin looked away from them all, towards the pool which glinted by the wall. "I have not spoken face to face with Angharad Goldenhand," he said, the words so clear that they might have been cut into the air by a sword, "since the night the Old Magic was freed."
"Why not?" Colin said. He sounded surprised, and disquieted. Jane shifted closer to where Will and Bran sat, from her perch on the table.
For half a minute, if that, it seemed as if that tense silence might return: it hummed in the air like a cord drawn taught. Then – "Why not?" The words seemed drawn from Cadellin like a fish out of water, on a hook. "In God's name, Colin. Who gave your sister the Mark of Fohla? Who drew her further in, over and over, as I sought to keep the two of you safely out of it? Who took a ten-year-old child and handed her Anghalac?"
He sounded angry in a way that Jane had not heard for years – not since she had seen Gumerry, confronting Caradog Lewis in an Aberdyfi shipyard: the comparison made her hair stand on end. And weary, heavy, still. "Do you think it is what I wanted for you," he said, "to be tied to this, beyond escape?"
Colin sat forward in his chair, his eyes bright, even as his face was drawn and saddened. "Sue knew what it meant to blow Anghalac," he said. "She was warned. She chose it anyway, because she believed it had to be done. You weren't there – you didn't see her – she was sure." He broke off for a moment; then his voice softened. "You can't think Angharad lied to her."
"I do not think she ever needed to," Cadellin said, bleak. "The truth was as good a weapon to her hand. And the truth can be better than a lie, sometimes, at taking a person's choices away."
"That's true enough." The words were Bran's. He was rising from the chair he shared with Will, standing to lean against the table, next to Jane. "I had many choices, when I was Owen Davies' son, and Owen Davies' son alone. And then I learned the truth, and I had almost none."
Jane thought: He's struck a nerve with you, and shivered, as if in tandem with it. The air had hummed with tension; now it was very still. As if waiting to find out where things were going next. It was she who was vibrating, with all this talk of choices, of children…
"Except that the Dark was there, already, in the mountains," Bran went on. He sounded so composed, so adult, and yet Jane knew him well enough to sense the echo of old fear and pain in the words. "And so the truth was that I had all the same choices as before. I only knew more about them, now. For some of us, Cadellin Tal Arian, there has never been any choice at all."
Oh my love, thought Jane, if I could have spared you, helped you somehow,and suddenly her chest ached, thinking of the twelve-year-old boy with his dog. The eleven-year-old girl with her brothers, holding the rope and tugging it to warn them of the turning tide. She bit her lip.
"And some of us did make choices," she said, slowly, sliding off the table to stand by him. "I made choices, back then, when the Dark was rising. I didn't always understand what they were, I wasn't – Gumerry didn't let –" That turning tide was there, now, in her breast, and she bit her lip again fiercely. Felt Bran's hand at her waist, Will's fingers reach out to touch hers. Gumerry, Gumerry… "But I did make them. And then they took them away, when they took my memories. At least Sue" – the words were not bitter, to say, but they hurt – "at least Sue got to remember. At least she got to live with it."
Gumerry, Gumerry, were you trying to protect me? Then why does it hurt, now? After all these years, is it the danger or the protection that makes me angry? Questions that would never be answered, now. Merriman Lyon had sailed away up the great river, and taken all such answers with him. She would never see him again.
Cadellin's eyes, fixed on hers, were very blue. She met them steadily. "You tried to do right by them," she said, trying to keep her voice steady: "Sue told me how you did. I don't think you were wrong. Only" – she squeezed Will's hand, hard – "there are times when being shut out is worse. There are ways it's worse. To know the danger is there, and others are facing it, and you can't even face it with them…"
To be a child, not quite protected, not quite trusted. To carry the naked sword in your hands blindfolded, and clutch at the memory of the steel.
The tight lines of Cadellin's face had loosened a little, as she spoke, to make room for a kind of grieved, bewildered gentleness. He seemed to search her face for something; then he looked down, towards the floor. Raising his eyes to hers again, he said, softly, "And if you would rather be alone, than ever let another face such danger?"
The tone was suddenly so close to Gumerry's at his gentlest that Jane could not speak. She shoved her face into Bran's shoulder.
Will said, "And will you, then, be alone?"
He was leaning forward in his chair. He met Cadellin's eyes with a gaze as diamond-sharp as Cadellin's own, that look he could pull out of nowhere; his fingertips pressed hard, quivered, in Jane's palm. He said, "You remember Arfderydd. Will you go through all the ages of the world without another person to share the memory? Without one other person who remembers Britain as it was? As if the world were empty?"
Jane lifted her face from Bran's shoulder to look at him, to catch his glance at her and meet it with her own: glad, fond, bittersweet. His gaze was as sharp as ever, but there was water standing in the corners of his eyes.
"It is empty," said Cadellin. He sounded suddenly very tired, not weary-angry but merely exhausted. "You speak of memory? The woman I remember is gone. That woman would never have handed Anghalac to a child of ten years." All the lines of his face slackened, and the ancient wizard was an old, old man. "The woman who would doom a human child to that destiny, I do not know."
"Yes, you do."
Colin had been very still, for all this. Now he slid forwards, out of his chair, and onto the floor before Cadellin: onto one knee. Laid a hand on Cadellin's shining-white sleeve.
"You do know," he said. There was a strange tenderness in his voice, like a man realising his father had grown old. "You were very careful, with me and Sue, when we were too young to understand why. You took the care you would have taken with – with a sister's son. Because you couldn't, with him, could you? You doomed a human child once, and you couldn't bear to do it again. And then Angharad did it.
"It's not that she's not like you, any more. It's that she's grown too much like you." Cadellin flinched, visibly; Colin's hand stayed steady on his arm.
His voice softened even further. "Will you really leave her to bear that alone?"
There was a long, long silence. Jane leaned into Bran, and drew her hand out of Will's grasp, to snake round his shoulders. Cadellin had looked down, when Colin's hand met his arm; he did not lift his eyes.
The air was so still, Jane almost felt she could hear the snow falling.
Cadellin closed his eyes. For one instant his face was all tension, lines drawn taut, and then it all went slack as if the strings had been cut. "I did not think I would ever see you again," he said quietly, in quite a different tone of voice. He did not sound as if he meant them to hear him. "I did not expect to see either of you ever again."
He opened his eyes, and raised them to Colin's. "Do you think she will come?" he said.
"Try her," said Colin, and he sounded as young as a boy of eleven again. "Try her."
Cadellin got up. He went, not to the passage that led out to the gates, as Jane expected, but to the pool at the edge of the chamber, whose waters shone very blue in the strange light. It was the same blue as his eyes, Jane realised. There he knelt down, and traced a pattern on the still surface of the water.
"Liræ," he said, hardly more than a breath.
At first nothing happened. Cadellin did not seem troubled; he began, slowly, to rise again. Then, as he rose, the water started to glow. The blue turned pale and very bright, and then to blue-white, and then to the brilliant white of a star's heart. His robe seemed to glow in response – but no, that was the light spreading: it was filling the cave, reflecting from every wall, not painful to look at but somehow intense, like perfume.
And now there was a scent to it, so unexpected that Jane could not place it at first: a scent of flowers, blossoming into the underground air. Dog-roses and meadowsweet.
The glow receded, narrowed. Brightened, at the centre, so that Jane could see four shining figures standing in the pool. Three were rapidly fading into Susan, Kay and Sue, still dressed in their winter coats and thick gloves. The fourth was almost too bright to look at. But it was the fourth figure Cadellin's eyes were fixed on.
As they watched, the figure became, instead of a star, a glowing woman. Then merely a woman, with no glow about her but the whiteness of her raiment, beneath a fiery red cloak; the fiery gold of her hair. There was a terrible beauty in her face and bearing, a beauty that took you by surprise, as if you didn't expect it still to exist in the world today.
But then it isn't the beauty of today, Jane thought, madly. It's the beauty of fourteen hundred years ago. She could not look away. Angharad Goldenhand drew all eyes like the heart of summer.
Her eyes were fixed on Cadellin's alone. If she had tried for a week straight, Jane could not have described all the things she saw, or thought she saw, in Angharad Goldenhand's face. Familiarity, long centuries' worth of knowledge; long-earned respect and friendship; pain, borne long enough to wear smooth; a bittersweet resignation; a loving, disbelieving hope, that wanted, and anticipated disappointment – forgave it, already – and yet could not quite not want…
One of Angharad's hands was halfway raised, curving as if she had meant to hold it out and thought better of it. Cadellin reached out with his own, far more aged hand: their hands met and intertwined in a clasp, bringing them arm to arm. Then he used that grasp to draw Angharad out of the water and into the cave, Sue and the other two following silently.
They said nothing. It did not seem that they needed to. There was the same look on both faces, and it was a look that needed no words: a look of relief and recognition so powerful that it might have echoed around the cave like a bell.
As if – Jane thought – as if each was looking in a mirror, fearing what they might see there, only to be greeted by a familiar and beloved reflection.
The cave was alight with lanterns and conversation. Not that it had needed additional lighting, Jane thought, leaning contentedly against a wall and nursing a beaker full of mead. It hadn't exactly been dark before. But Cadellin, when the welcomes and the greetings were over, had gone to the cave where Fundindelve's treasures were kept, and come out with strange vessels of bronze and coloured glass, into which he summoned light without the aid of oil or flame. The casual, easy display of magic made Jane feel like a child again.
In truth, she still felt like a child up too late. The lights, merry against the weight of the darkness above them, outside the rock, blurred in her sight. She was full of food and drink – that was thanks to Angharad, who had travelled back to Redesmere through the pool again to bring them provisions.
(And what provisions – meat spiced in ways Jane had never tasted, bread that seemed as fresh as if it had been baked that hour… and little honeyed cakes that seemed to carry all the sweetness and warmth of the promised new year. And the honey-sweet mead, drunk from bronze cups.)
And she was tired out, as was all the company. When they had eaten and drunk to their heart's content, Susan had suggested some music to ring in the New Year, and Cadellin and Angharad between them had produced a bewildering variety of instruments. There had been a harp for Bran, not the kind he was used to but playable nonetheless; Colin, who apparently had dragged Sue to meetings of some kind of early music society when they were undergraduates, had handed his sister a plucked psaltery, and himself done a creditable job with a rebec. And Susan had reached immediately for a kind of horn-like instrument, which sounded like an ocarina when played.
The Fauns used to play these, she'd said, and then looked suddenly as if she'd let out a secret.
The rest of them – the less skilled, Jane thought ruefully – had made do as best they might: her on a wooden recorder, recalling what she could from primary school, Kay tapping out a merry rhythm on a drum. Will had joined them with his pleasant, well-trained baritone voice. And sometimes Angharad, a strangely pure, silvery alto sound issuing from her throat like water.
Mostly, they had played songs they all knew: it was easiest that way. A joy, too, to bring Cadellin and Angharad tunes that were new to them, that they might never hear except from a stray tourist, happening to pass with a song in mind. But somehow there had been something – different, in the air, at the rare times when Angharad began a melody. Or Cadellin, taking the psaltery from Sue to spare her fingers a while.
It had taken every inch of Jane's concentration to follow them, let alone find harmonies around them as Bran and the others did; yet she found she did not begrudge it. Somehow the concentration itself had… made the air come alive, somehow. As if those sixth-century tunes were the only music in the world, and the great world had stopped to listen to them.
They'd played a long time: the group, weary now, had broken into smaller clusters, holding soft-voiced conversations. Colin, Sue, Cadellin and Angharad had split off – to reminisce, Jane wondered? – at one end of the table, Sue leaning against the side of her brother's chair. At the other end of the room, Kay, Will and Bran had ended up half-sitting, half-lying on the animal skins that made up Cadellin's bed. Susan was by the pool, one finger of one hand trailing in the water.
And Jane herself – feeling happy, and quiet, a half-drunk cup of mead still waiting for her to finish it – had set herself against a blue-lit wall, to drink and bask, for a while, in the half-light.
Funny, to call it half-light, when it was more light than usual. It was something about how the lamps scattered it, perhaps, and the curving walls of the cave. And the late hour, and the songs, their memory hovering in her bones and muscles in the form of gentle finger-aches and this strange, dreamy lassitude. She really did feel like a child again.
As if anything could happen, she thought, and then, wildly and happily: anything is happening. They were in Fundindelve, and Colin and Sue were talking to two people out of the time of chronicles.
Almost as she thought it her ears seemed to hone in on the conversation. She heard Colin's voice, quiet and serious, "…many people make choices, in childhood, that set their path into adulthood. Even if they don't understand it at the time. If anything, Sue understood more than – than someone who takes up a sport that's going to end up wrecking their health, or learns an instrument and then becomes a star with it decades later."
"You've thought about this a great deal." Cadellin, grave, but not distressed as he had sounded earlier.
"I've had to." Colin's head turning, so he could share a glance with Susan. "We've had to. But archaeology, if there's one thing it makes you think of, it's – how unexpected everything is. No-one is born expecting to be buried. And even the people doing the burying make plans that go awry. Half the stuff we find is only still there by chance."
"It's not as if there's much certainty in the stars, either," said Sue, leaning closer so her side bumped against his shoulder. "For all that people say about them setting your fate. Even the ones we can see, they're so far off, we're seeing them as they were hundreds of years ago. We're seeing now what – what will start them off being what they are now. Only they aren't it, yet." She made a sound halfway between a laugh and a yawn. "Everything that happens started hundreds of years ago."
"Is that how you think of what happened to you?" said Angharad softly, a thread of – was that guilt? – running through her voice. Her eyes, it seemed to Jane, were very drawn to Sue, and could not leave her. "Of what I did?"
"Sort of." Sue met that gaze frankly, easily, even gladly: the mead seemed to have taken the edge off… something. Her habitual restlessness, perhaps. "Plenty of people live with the consequences of choices made before their birth – sometimes hundreds of years before. The men of the High Magic didn't know what Anghalac would cost me, when they bound the Wild Magic."
"Any more than that farmer Mossock knew," put in Colin, from below her, "what would come to us, when he took Firefrost." He shared a wry look with Cadellin. "It's not even as if we're the only people in this cave it's true of. Look at Susan – the things that caused her to be brought to the other world, to Narnia, they happened a hundred years earlier. Or more, the second time around. And then, what happened to her family…"
He and Sue looked at each other, again. Unreadably this time. The words the other world seemed to swim round Jane's head, fish in a clear bowl. She never had learned what Susan's story was. Had she? Her eyes went to the older woman, still sitting peacefully by the pool. She was… very still, now Jane was looking at her.
What happened to her family…
"Yes," said Cadellin – heavily, but not with undue sadness, Jane thought. "All things happen as they will. Even grief. It is a disease of the immortals, perhaps, that we must watch it play out over the centuries, and find pain in the pattern of it."
"It doesn't have to be centuries, even," said Sue. "What about Kay? He didn't choose to grow up with the morthbrood in his house. He had to get to grips with magic fast – but ask him now if he'd choose to give it up." She tilted her head towards where Kay was speaking, still, with Will and Bran, seemingly engrossed.
"And would you give it up?" said Angharad, in a tone so clearly only for Sue that Jane felt like an interloper simply for being able to hear.
She pushed off from the wall – stumbled a little – and righted herself. Took up one of the golden dishes from the table, which still held a few honey cakes, and an empty bronze cup. Susan was still sitting alone by the pool, looking at nothing in particular.
She had stripped out of her winter coat, taken off her shoes; her hair had begun to come loose from its bun, so she'd taken it down. With loose hair and the collar of her shirt open, she looked young. Very young, somehow, in socked feet. Like someone who had had adventures, and now was a little lost, returning.
Narnia went whispering round Jane's head, pregnant with mystery. And what happened to her family, words with a much darker, crueller weight.
Jane's steps took her past Kay and the boys, on the animal skins. As she approached, she heard Kay say, softly, "I saw your father once in a dream, you know. A knight brought me to his court, and I saw him hearing petitions, with Merlin. I thought it only a dream, until I met you."
"What makes you think it was real, now?" said Will, not critical, Jane thought: just honestly curious. It was good to hear him like that. "I mean, plenty of people do dream of Arthur. Or so I should think." Bran said nothing at all.
But it was to Bran that Kay spoke, when he spoke again: he said, "Because I saw your mother, too. You have the look of her, a little. Something in the jaw, and the way you hold your head. Not her eyes, though – she had eyes like violets." He sounded almost taken aback by the memory.
Bran said, "My father told me that," clearly meaning Owen Davies, and then shut his mouth hard in a way Jane knew meant he was close to tears. Oh, my love. Will pressed close to him, a hand reaching up to spread over the back of his neck, a warm touch.
It did not seem to faze Kay. "I know," he said, in a quiet voice Jane had not heard from him, even in Seekings. "I know. It's a hard thing, to be in between like that. To have them go where you can't follow." He broke off. "But they are there. They are all there, at the end of time, making old things new again – your Arthur among them. Be sure he is waiting for you." He smiled, an oddly gentle expression. "He has time."
Jane did not hear what Bran said in response to that, if he said anything: her path had carried her past the animal skins, towards the pool. She thought she saw him lean his head on Will's shoulder, and Will settle into it. They'll be all right, she thought; we'll be all right. We're all together.
She carried her dish and her cup to the pool, and made a little sound, to announce herself; Susan looked up, seemingly surprised. "Honey cake?" Jane said, and crouched down so she was squatting, knees bent, to offer the dish. "Or – here's a cup, if you wanted water to drink. I think Cadellin drinks this water, so it must be clean."
Susan smiled, that shockingly beautiful smile that had so intimidated Jane, when first they met. "You're kind to think of it," she said. "But I'm all right, really. I didn't come over here for a drink."
The squat was already starting to tell on Jane's knees: she unfolded herself and sat on the floor, cross-legged. "You seemed deep in thought," she said, cautiously.
"Oh, yes," said Susan, after a moment. She had been looking away from Jane, staring into nothing; when she responded, her eyes flickered over to Jane again. "Yes, I was just… thinking, I suppose. Reminiscing." She stirred the water with one finger, watching the ripples.
"My siblings used to have gatherings like this," she said, so soft that at first Jane thought she had imagined it. "Every now and then. But I never went."
"Why not?" The words were out of Jane's mouth before she could take them back. I'm more tired than I thought, she thought ruefully; or else it was the mead, or the cave, drawing her thoughts out of her in the deep quietness under the snow.
They did not seem to offend Susan, at least, though something changed about the set of her mouth. She looked down, and took her hand from the water, interlacing her fingers about her knees. "Because they remembered the truth about what happened to us," she said; "and I did not." Her eyes met Jane's, and suddenly Jane recognised that twist in her mouth as pain. "Your memories were taken from you, weren't they? But I lost mine on purpose."
"What do you mean?" Jane said. It came out as a whisper, as if Susan's air of secrecy – of secrets revealed – had pervaded her, unknowing. In the back of her mind she felt a kind of echo, something she had felt before, as if it had bounced off the future and was thrown back into the present: some warning.
This is some deep, unfathomed secret. Like a sword in a child's hand.
"All your adventures," said Susan, still with that set of pain about her mouth, "happened in Britain. If you went back to those places, the memories would come back to you – if they were not suppressed. But my siblings and I found our way to another world. Narnia." She lingered over the word, almost lovingly. "Or were summoned there, I should say. Once we had returned, we could never take the same way back. And there was nothing here to remind us but each other. Once I had decided to forget, they had no power to remind me."
Her tone was something Jane had never heard before. It made her think of the bite of the air before snowfall, or the taste of iron on her tongue: not bitter, but cool and truthful. Truths scattered in shining fragments like coloured glass.
She leaned forward. "Why did you forget?" she said, in one soft breath.
Susan blinked, as if against the possibility of tears, but when she spoke she sounded as calm as ever. "Oh… because there was no space for the memory, in the life I came back to. Because it seemed like a childish indulgence, to continue to believe in it; and it was an indulgence I couldn't afford, without losing… other things."
She sighed. That pained twist at the corner of her mouth melted into a smile, bittersweet. "Because to treat it as real would have set me apart. And I wanted so badly to be part of things."
There was a crack in her voice. Jane, silent, handed her the bronze cup, and watched her dip it into the water and drink from it. Just as if her throat really had been dry.
"So I forgot," she said, simply. "I let myself think of it as a game, for children. And I didn't talk about it anymore, even with my siblings, until there was no-one else left to remember it."
By the door, Cadellin and Angharad were still speaking with Colin and Sue, exchanging reminiscences; on the bed of animal skins, Kay and the other two were rapt in conversation. No-one was listening to the two by the pool. "What happened?" Jane breathed, some strange mixture of secrecy and urgency driving her. Snow borne on a silent wind.
Susan said, "A railway accident." The words came out smoothly, as if she had said them many times before. "They were all on the same train, you see. All gone in a day."
Her voice, so calm all through her account, suddenly had a sharp, shocked sting to it at the end: a hook that caught at the throat and heart.
Jane looked at her and saw, again, that younger woman overlaid on the older one. Coupled with the abrupt, piercing note of loss in her voice, it was very easy to imagine her as she had been years ago. The image of a young woman suddenly bereft – all her family gone, and all her memory with them, snuffed out – flickered into vision as quick as a lit flame, and as bright and hard to look at.
Jane could not speak for a moment, so she reached out with a hand, instead.
Susan took it. Her hand was soft, the skin beginning to wear thin. "I met Kay a few years later," she said, composed again. "That was how I began to remember, in the end. We recognised something in each other."
"And you built this," Jane said, thinking of the image of that younger woman again, all shelter ripped away. Susan's gaze sharpened, and Jane shifted in her seat, feeling those eyes trained on her. It was a little like looking directly into the sun.
"I mean," she said, "you made it so that other people could remember, too. You made something to be part of. So other people could come to you, and not be set apart by what they knew."
It was what she'd been feeling so on-edge about, wasn't it? That she wasn't set apart any more. Colin and Sue's revelation had knocked her off-balance; Susan and Kay's serene acceptance had sent her spinning further. She'd spent years staring into the dark unknown where her memories ought to be, combing it for what she was missing. Clung to Will and Bran as it was illuminated again, and they all three, shaking, had to face the new and widened world, which only they could see.
And now that great wide world was peopled again, and the people were kind.
"Yes." The word was more than half a breath, drawn from Susan. "Yes, I suppose so." She tilted her head to look down at their joined hands: hers was pleasantly cool, in Jane's hotter one. A cooling presence, like water in summer, or the deep silence of a windless night over the snow.
"My brothers forgot too, you know," Jane said, the words slipping out easily, not hindered by the lump in her throat. "I mean, not forgot. Their memories were taken, the same as mine. But they never wanted them back. Or at least they never looked for them where I could see."
Susan smiled at her, that same bittersweet smile as before, yet sweetened somehow. "It's hard," she said. "If you don't remember, you have only what's missing in yourself, to go on. Other things can rush in to fill the space before you even notice."
Jane bit her lip, thinking of Simon's long working hours. Barney's paintings, coming on so well and so quickly, after that summer in Wales when he started sketching with their mother, that he spent more and more time shut up in her studio.
"Don't let it keep you apart," Susan said gently. "Nothing is promised to us, not even time. Especially not time. Don't – take any of it for granted." She squeezed Jane's hand.
"I won't," Jane said, the lump in her throat as smooth as ice, as water. Water from the thaw. "I won't."
She cast her eyes down to the pool. The lights, reflected in it, were blurred and gentle, a cat's-cradle of radiance enfolding the cave. Which itself was enfolded in the bosom of the hill, deep within the rock. The rock, within the snow, within the silent air and the great night sky…
And deep in the centre of all of it, a hundred and forty men, sleeping through the long centuries and filling the caves with their breath. Here, deep in the kindly heart of winter where all memory was kept. Where the past lived, neither a dagger trained on the heart nor a lost treasure, but a living, breathing human face.
Jane broke a honey cake in half, and handed the other half to Susan. "Will you tell me about Narnia?" she said. "I'd like to hear about it. So we could remember it, together."
Susan took it. "I'd like that, too," she said. In her voice, the simple, civil phrase took on that peculiar dignity she had, so that it sounded oddly regal; and yet there was a note of such joy in it that Jane did not know whether she was hearing a queen or a child.
And above them the stars wheeled steadily across the sky, and the old year was new.
A/N: Copious footnotes!
- Cadellin's backstory here is stolen from the "real" Myrddin rather than the other way round. (Cadellin is a real figure from medieval Welsh lit, but he only appears in the court list in Culhwch ac Olwen.) The current scholarly consensus, as I understand it, is that there were originally two figures - "Myrddin", a northern wildman and prophet who appears in Welsh poetry, and "Emrys", a southern prophet and fatherless boy who appears in Historia Brittonum - and Geoffrey of Monmouth combined the two into one "Merlinus" and placed him in an Arthurian context for the first time. Obviously, the "Merlin" of DiR is very much Geoffrey's, so I have reversed the process and given "Myrddin's" backstory to Cadellin.
- The original Gwenddolau was Myrddin's lord, NOT his nephew. But in the Welsh poetry, Myrddin refers to having "killed" his sister's son; and in Geoffrey's Latin Life of the northern Merlin, Merlin accuses his sister of having a lover besides her husband (Rhydderch Hael). I've combined these two motifs to make Gwenddolau the nephew of my Myrddin-figure (Cadellin), and the son of his sister Gwenddydd and either her lover or her previous husband (Ceidio).
- "Cad Goddau", or The Battle of the Trees, has nothing to do with all this: it's a poem from the Book of Taliesin, describing a magical battle of trees which "Taliesin" witnessed, and is thought by some scholars to be a parody. I've brought it in here as a fun Easter egg. "Ymddiddan Myrddin a Thaliesin" is genuinely a poem about the northern Myrddin figure and the battle of Arfderydd, though - among other things.
- Angharad Goldenhand's literary background is pretty much exactly as I've depicted it here. She isn't linked with Peredur in a northern context, only in an Arthurian one, but I've made sure to link her with the northern Peredur because I want to believe that that guy is a better boyfriend than the Peredur we meet in the Three Romances...
- All of the books consulted in Seekings Library are real books! Specifically, they're the Morris edition of Historia Brittonum/"Nennius" (1980), the Jones & Jones translation of the Mabinogion (1948), and Gwenogvryn Evans' diplomatic edition of the Black Book of Carmarthen (1906).
- Alan Garner seems to have got his spells from The Book of Ceremonial Magic (1913), but I didn't know this when I was coming up with mine! So mine are taken from a medieval Irish text called "The Ever-New Tongue" which is to do with the language of angels: all three spell-words are taken from the angelic language (essentially a medieval Irish conlang!) found there.
- Finally, the set of instruments they play in Fundindelve is based off the set of instruments played by the Baltimore Consort on their album "Bright Day Star" - some of which appears on the fic's playlist.
Thanks for reading, and a belated merry Christmas!
