by An odd feeling, retracing the steps of our first (and at the time, secret) mission to Farringale. We were almost the same company again, missing only Alban; the journey through the Ways was the same, bringing us out on the same sun-dappled hilltop near Winchester. Even the season was the same: had it really been a year ago? A whole year! And yet, only a year. We might be the same team on the same mission, but we were not the same people.
I wasn’t the same Ves.
Nor was this mission conducted in the same exploratory spirit as before. Where previously I had felt excitement, curiosity, a twinge of guilt (see: aforementioned secret status), now we were tense and focused, prepared to encounter a very different Farringale. I scarcely noticed the vivid yellow-flowered shrubs, or the shimmering blue bowl of the sky. I went straight for my syrinx pipes, played a distracted melody thereupon: down came Adeline, for me and Jay to ride, and her larger, darker friend for Rob.
Jay, once rendered almost prostrate by the effort of carrying three or four people through the Ways, stood superbly composed and in control: not even the prospect of a horseback ride through the skies had the power to unsettle him now. How far we’ve come, I thought, with an odd twist of pride; a feeling I had no time to indulge or to share, for we were in a hurry. I paused only to touch noses with Addie before I mounted up, and Jay scrambled up behind me. Rob took the lead, a godlike figure enthroned upon stallion-back: I spared momentary wisp of pity for whoever had been so unwise as to mount a foray in Farringale. They were going to regret it.
Ten miles or so winged away in no time at all; ten miles of crisp, clear air, Addie’s velvet hide shimmering in the sunlight, and Jay a warm, comforting weight against my back.
Then we were spiralling down and down, alighting near Alresford, at the bridge over the River Alre. How sturdy, how dependable a construct, this thing of dark bricks and weathered stones: staunchly guarding the entrance to Farringale for hundreds of years, immoveable by time or mischief; untouched, and untouchable—
These high-blown musings upon time and change came to an abrupt end as Addie planted her four silvery hooves upon solid ground, and I got a closer look at the agèd bridge.
Not so untouchable after all, and not untouched. It’s the type of bridge that looks like half a small castle: built from pale grey stone in great, heavy blocks, with a handsome pointed arch spanning the river beneath. It’s been there for eight hundred years, probably, and you’d think nothing could touch it, but something had.
That majestic arch lay shattered in several pieces, each one as large as my entire body. The back half of the bridge had crumbled, fallen in, lay blocking the river; water was forming a new path around the obstacle, split into a streaming fork. It was as though the hand of some kind of god had smashed it in a fit of pique: a single, stunning blow, and an irreplaceable piece of architectural history lay in ruins.
I stared at the devastation, too numb with shock to think, let alone speak. ‘Who—’ I began, but words failed me. I felt a tear spill down one cheek; more in anger than grief, though surely some of both.
Who could have committed an act of such wanton destruction? Who could have so little respect for history, for heritage, for art—
I’d forgotten Farringale, for a moment. I was recalled to duty by Rob’s grim pronouncement: ‘Well. We know how they got in.’
‘What?’ I looked up, away from the tumbled mess of stone and time. ‘But—just destroying the bridge shouldn’t open the gate, surely. It should make it inaccessible.’
‘I know it should,’ Rob agreed. ‘But it hasn’t.’
I saw what he meant. A nimbus of light hung somewhere under the remains of the bridge, a light I recognised: we’d passed through it before. On the other side lay Farringale.
Whatever they had done, it hadn’t been a physical act of destruction. The bridge had been wrecked by magick, and whoever had done it had hacked the gate open by the same means. A vicious, brutal, graceless stroke, committed by one whose only goal was to get inside, and hang the consequences.
Jay was already on his phone, talking in crisp, short sentences to someone from the Society. ‘—completely wrecked—gate’s clearly accessible—seriously urgent—’
I stepped nearer to the destroyed gate, my stomach flipping with alarm. Baroness Tremayne had talked of many intruders, too many to count, but hearing about it at some distance was one thing: seeing the evidence of this savage incursion was quite another. This was an invasion indeed, the destroyed bridge the kind of collateral damage inflicted by a hostile army.
‘Shit,’ I whispered, my head spinning. Farringale was in deep trouble.
Rob had been quiet for some minutes. At last he said: ‘This is much more serious than we anticipated. I’m half inclined to abort mission. Come back with greater numbers.’
I saw his point. We were woefully overmatched. But on the other hand—
‘We aren’t here to try to remove these people, yet,’ I reminded him. ‘We’re here to get a clear picture of the situation, so we can counter them more effectively later. What are we going to tell Milady, if we walk away now? We’ve learned almost nothing.’
‘Ves, there are three of us. Three, against—’ He waved a hand illustratively at the destroyed bridge, unable to specify precisely what the three of us faced.
And it was that very vagueness that worried me. ‘We’ve got to learn more,’ I argued. ‘Who are these people? What do they want with Farringale? Giddy gods, how did they get past the griffins? If we’re to have the slightest hope of besting them then we’ve got to answer these questions.’
Rob gave me one of his grim looks. I don’t mind admitting that it is a little intimidating. ‘And how do you propose we proceed? We’ll be spotted as soon as we step through that portal.’
‘Not necessarily.’
Rob stared at me, waiting. Unimpressed.
‘Did I never tell you how I first met Baroness Tremayne?’
‘Not in any great detail, no.’
‘She was—she doesn’t exist in the real world, precisely.’ I held up a hand as he made to object. ‘Yes, I know she does; we saw her, not long ago. But she’s ancient, Rob. She’s hundreds of years old. She’s survived by existing outside of our reality, for the most part. She calls it between the echoes. I was in there with her, for a bit. It’s like—you can’t be seen by anyone outside of it, not even if you’re standing right next to them. She can pull us in, she’s done it before, and we can sneak around as much as we need to.’
A light of interest dawned in Rob’s dark eyes, and I knew I had him. ‘Are you sure?’ he said, ever the health and safety manager. ‘There’s no danger?’
‘There’s probably some,’ I admitted. ‘But not much.’
Rob’s mouth twitched in a smile, mostly suppressed. ‘Right,’ he said.
‘It’s too much to hope for no danger. I mean, when was the last time that happened?’
He answered with a shrug, or perhaps he was merely rolling his powerful shoulders, preparing for action.
Jay appeared at my elbow. ‘They’re sending some people to have a look at the bridge situation,’ he informed us.
‘We can’t wait for them,’ I said. ‘There’s no time to be lost. Who knows what they’re doing to Farringale while we’re dithering out here.’
‘I told them we can’t wait,’ Jay agreed. ‘This mess is out of our hands. That mess—’ he pointed at the portal—‘is entirely our problem.’
Right. I squared my shoulders, too, a smaller, feistier version of Rob. ‘I’ll go in first,’ I said.
Both men looked at me, and I could see questions and objections crystallising in their faces.
I held up a hand. ‘Hear me out. I know I said the baroness will help us, but we’ve got to reach her first. And you’re right, if we waltz straight through we’ll probably be spotted immediately.’ I wondered how Baroness Tremayne had got in and out, presumably without being observed. But she was a griffin. She had other, skyborne pathways. ‘I expect Milady told her where we’d be going in. She’ll be waiting for us nearby. So I’ll just—Merlin in, and let her know we’re here.’
‘Merlin in,’ Jay said.
‘Yes.’
‘I wasn’t aware that “Merlin” was a verb.’
‘If that’s an oblique way of asking me how I propose to accomplish this feat, I can only tell you: accidentally, via means I can neither anticipate nor plan for.’
I saw the escapade of the Fairy Stone pass behind Jay’s eyes, not to mention the episode with the chair. ‘This is—haphazard,’ he objected.
‘I know.’
‘Disorganised, uncertain, chaotic, and therefore dangerous.’
‘That’s me,’ I agreed.
He smiled in spite of himself. ‘I meant dangerous to you.’
‘Do you have a better idea?’ I hated to challenge him with the deal-breaking what-else-would-you-suggest manoeuvre, it’s crude. But we were not furnished with a great many options, nor with a great deal of time in which to laboriously reject most of them.
Jay didn’t like it either. His smile vanished into grimness: his stare was flinty. ‘If you get killed,’ he said ominously, ‘I’ll—’
‘Get Zareen to wake me up just so you can kill me again,’ I finished for him.
‘No. I’ll mourn you for the rest of my life.’ It was said very seriously, with real feeling.
Ouch. That hit me where it hurts. ‘I promise,’ I said, really meaning it. ‘I’ll be careful as pie.’
‘As pie? Careful as pie? Pies are easy but I never heard they were careful—Ves!’
While he was busy muddling his way through my very mixed simile, I was off, striding for that beckoning nimbus of light with all the courage I couldn’t quite muster. I’d spoken with outrageous certainty, as though I had any real control over these accidental brilliancies of mine. I hadn’t been trying to turn into a Fairy Stone, or a chair either; what made me think I could accidentally-on-purpose stealth my way into Farringale via some mysteriously mystical means, and without getting caught?
Only the fact that I’d lucked or catastrophised my way into—and out of—a lot of interesting situations already. And that was before someone had been mad enough to make a Merlin of me.
This jumble of doubts and hopes drained away as I neared the portal, for I was assailed by a—by a deep, shimmering, compelling awareness of it, and of the land beyond, that briefly shocked me into immobility. This certainly hadn’t happened before. My senses were awash with magick, and with Farringale: the scents and sights of its golden-paved streets and overgrown gardens; water, fresh and chill, or sharply, greenly stagnant; the mulch of old earth, the perfume of spring roses—those damned roses were everywhere—I inhaled, closing my eyes, and I could almost see the winding streets, the grand boulevards, the timber-framed townhouses. That sky. That sky, twilight-coloured and roiling with angry, devastating, glorious golden clouds.
Warmth wreathed my limbs, a warmth that came—I thought—from the light itself. The gentle warmth of an afternoon in early summer, like bathing in liquid sunshine.
I felt no movement; there was no sensation of passage. Time passed, and I knew, in some distant way, that I had gone out of England, and into Farringale; that I was a part of it, like a tree rooted in the deep earth; like a stream rushing, bubbling through grassy banks; like a rose, petals unfurled to drink in the sun.