The purging of Farringale took a long time; time that seemed boundless, endless, in that state, and it seemed to me that I had always been down there among the rocks and roots, a part of the city as ancient, as immoveable, as time itself—and as relentless. I ran through the undercity like a wildfire, like a plague; and when, at long last, I was spent, the city rested in a profound, half-shattered silence.
The infestation was gone. The city had suffered for it, somewhat, but it would stand: time lay spread before it in welcome, bursting with potential, with possibility. The ortherex were a part of its past, now, purged from its present and its future. The people of Farringale could come back.
Great, I thought, weakly; a ghost of something like satisfaction, like joy, passed over my exhausted heart, and faded.
I was spent. I had nothing left, which was good; nothing to draw the magick of Farringale back to me, to keep it about me. I was an echo, a whisper, everything I had once been poured into the earth and stone; and the magick followed, rippling through the city like spreading water. Mine; Merlin’s; Farringale’s; magick, old and new, sank into the bones of the city and held.
A thought stirred, distantly. Baroness? I called, weakly.
Is it time? Came the answer.
Yes.
She withdrew, out of the echoes and into the light. Somewhere above, she would be bringing her own arcane arts to bear, taking on the mantle I had so recently occupied. A griffin would sail the skies over Farringale once more, and all the latent magick of the city would rise up to welcome her.
The rest would return, too, soon enough, and Farringale would be restored in full: its people and its magick, thriving as they always should have done.
Me, though. I was—tired. I was rainwater and dirt, I was weathered stone and the roots of tall trees. I was magick, old and slow, permeating air and brick and rock.
My consciousness faltered, and winked out, snuffed as thoroughly as the parasites I had destroyed. Darkness, thick and serene, enveloped me, and I was gone.
***
The earthquake lasted long enough to shake Farringale down to its foundations. It ought to have brought the roof down on us; how the walls held I’ll never know. The whole world shook in a deafening roar of distressed stone, and all I could do was cling to Indira and pray.
It passed at last, settling into a shocked, hushed silence. Dust and dirt and plaster rained down from the ceiling, centuries of detritus suddenly dislodged. For a time I couldn’t see through it—or breathe; we pulled our shirts up to mask our mouths, and choked.
The haze dissolved, bit by bit, until I could see—somewhat. The cellar had gone dark, which, I vaguely realised, was a very good thing. That weird, sickly light was gone, which meant the ortherex were, too. Several long moments passed before my eyes adjusted, and the full impact of what I wasn’t seeing hit me.
‘Ves?’ I called. The word echoed off the blank, bare walls, and no answer came.
Indira summoned a wisp of light with a snap of her fingers. I was already scrambling to my feet, running forward, hoping against all the evidence of my eyes that I’d find her back there. Somewhere. ‘Ves!’
‘She’s not here,’ said Indira tightly.
‘What do you mean, not here. She has to be here.’ I looked around wildly, my heart pounding with fresh terror. ‘Where else could she possibly be?’
Indira looked hard at the neat, square flagstones that covered the floor, and probed at one with the tip of her shoe.
‘Gods, no,’ I gasped. But it was all too probable, wasn’t it, she’d ended up as a stone before—more than once. I might be standing on her.
I backed away from where I’d last seen Ves, horrified—and fell over something. My elbow cracked hard against the floor, my head hit the wall, and for a dazed instant I couldn’t think.
‘That’s—’ Indira darted towards me, and fell to her knees before a dim object sticking out of the stonework. ‘It’s—’
‘The lyre.’ Ves’s moonsilver lyre, the beautiful, dangerous instrument we’d unburied from Ygranyllon. I’d never seen it other than luminous, bright silver like the moon, and now it was dead and dark and embedded into the floor of the cellar like it had been there for centuries.
I grabbed it, and tugged uselessly. It didn’t budge.
‘It’s completely inert,’ Indira said, wrapping both her clever hands around its frame. ‘It’s like—normal silver. Like it never had any magick at all.’
Normal silver, swept bare of magick, and grievously tarnished. Its strings were gone; it would never play music again.
‘You don’t think…’ I stared at Indira in horror. ‘You don’t think the same thing happened to Ves?’
She stared back, appalled. ‘That she was—no. Surely not.’
Ves had more in common with Mab than the rest of us, these days: a creature of overwhelming magick. What would happen if something had taken that away? Would she end up like the lyre? Inert. Used up. Dead.
I couldn’t think about that for too long. I pushed the thought away, and clung instead to that knowledge of Ves’s recent escapades that gave me hope. ‘She’s just ended up—stuck,’ I said, with as much confidence as I could manage. ‘Like the Fairy Stone. And the chair.’
‘And the tree.’
‘Right. We just need to figure out which one she is, and—we can probably snap her out of it.’
Indira and I stared in helpless silence at the wide expanse of the cellar, paved with hundreds of identical stones.
‘We’re going to need help,’ said Indira. ‘I don’t have anything that… I don’t know how to find her.’
I didn’t either, but I hated to admit it. Hated to walk away and leave Ves there, even temporarily. Was she aware? Did she know she was stuck? She might be frightened. She’d certainly be exhausted.
‘We’re coming back,’ I said, loudly and firmly. ‘Ves? All right? We’re coming back for you.’
Nothing answered me, and another shred of hope died. I shook my head, made myself turn my back to the devastated lyre and walk away. We needed to find Milady. She would know what to do. She was Mab, magick incarnate.
I hadn’t noticed my physical state until I started up the stairs. Then it came crashing in upon me that I’d suffered through an earthquake, not to mention falling and hitting my head afterwards. I had aches and bruises in too many places, and I shambled and staggered up the stairs like an old man of ninety. Indira, spared the embarrassing fall, fared a little better, but she too groaned in protest as we started up the second flight.
When we emerged at last into the open air, breathing in great, gulping gasps, we found a darkening sky. Twilight glimmered overhead, a dim scattering of stars beginning to shimmer. A great, raucous cry split the silence, and a dark shape wheeled overhead, lightning crackling in bursts over its feathered hide.
A griffin. Despite my fear for Ves, something in me smiled, for a moment: magick was coming back to Farringale at last, the way it should always have been.
‘She did it,’ said Indira, watching the griffin’s progress as it banked and wheeled far above. ‘She saved Farringale.’
‘And now we need to save her. Come on.’ I turned away from the griffin’s majestic flight, and headed back towards the mews.
It was deserted, empty and still. No sign of Milady, or Rob, so they had moved her after all. But where to? I felt a rising frustration, and choked it down: I had to stay in control. ‘The guardian,’ I said, suddenly remembering. He had said he would watch over us, but he’d been gone by the time the earthquake had ceased. For a little while I’d forgotten him.
‘Let’s go,’ Indira agreed, and set off at a run for the library once more. I followed with a stifled groan, my abused muscles protesting at the punishing pace.
We clattered back through the streets, clambered over the remains of the wall Ves had bashed her way through when she’d been a tree. In minutes we were back on the stairs. ‘Um,’ said Indira. ‘Did you catch his name?’
I hadn’t. ‘Baroness Tremayne?’ I tried, in case it hadn’t been her we had seen in the skies. ‘Or—anyone?’
Silence, for three agonising breaths; nothing moved.
Then—
‘Yes,’ came a voice, a whisper, so faint I could barely hear it. A shape emerged, a wavering outline lightly etched upon the air. Our guardian friend, but—diminished, fighting for breath, bent almost double under the weight of a kind of suffering I couldn’t imagine.
‘Are you well?’ Indira rushed forward to help him, but her outstretched hands passed through empty air.
‘I—may be,’ he answered weakly. ‘In time.’
Time. He had already endured so much of it. ‘Is there something we can do to help?’ I asked him.
He waved this away, and said, between gasping breaths, ‘You seek your—companion.’
‘Yes,’ I said instantly, hope flaring back to life. ‘Is she—can you reach her?’
‘She’s not—’ Indira started, and hesitated over the terrible words. ‘She isn’t—gone, is she?’
‘She remains.’ Two little words, but they brought such a world of relief. ‘She remains,’ he said again, ‘but she is… distant. I do not know how to recall her.’
‘Can you tell us where Mab is?’ I tried. I wasn’t sure how I expected him to know, but he was tied into the fabric of Farringale in ways I didn’t understand. The baroness knew things, sensed things, that I never could have: would this, her fellow guardian, prove the same?
‘Mab,’ echoed the guardian. ‘Yes. Mab, old as the stones themselves. Her light is—brighter.’ He took a breath, steadied himself, and added, ‘She lingers at the gate.’
Hoofbeats interrupted anything else he might have said, and a shimmering unicorn came cantering up the street towards us, shining like the very stars and evidently pissed off. She came to an abrupt halt before me, stamped a hoof in pure temper, and snorted.
‘I know,’ I told her, not daring to touch her when she was in such a rage. ‘We don’t know where she is either, exactly, but we’re working on it.’
‘Can you take us to the gate?’ Indira said, and was bold enough to approach.
Addie stood quietly as Indira swung herself up, and snorted at me when I didn’t.
‘Okay, okay,’ I sighed, resigning myself to one more bruising, alarming horseback ride, and without the comfort of Ves to hang onto.
She was fast, though, so it was worth it. We left the beleaguered guardian with promises of an imminent return, and thundered through the shadowed streets to the gate.
A small crater made a blank, black hole in the earth, surrounded by debris: the spot where George Mercer had blown the regulator into the sky. Addie skirted easily around it, and came to a halt around the corner, near the elegant archway that marked the gate itself.
A great many people were gathered there, an entire crowd, many talking at once. After the eery quiet of the rest of the city, I found it a relief.
‘Mab,’ I was already shouting as Addie halted. ‘Please, we need Mab. Anybody seen her?’
I was answered, vaguely, in the negative, several utterances in the negative reaching my ears. Milady’s voice I did not hear, nor any other that I recognised—
No, that wasn’t true. One rose above the others, a raw, somewhat uncouth holler. Out of the milling crowd with a stride like a soldier’s came Delia Vesper.
‘Jay? Where the bloody hell is my daughter?’
‘She’s—’
‘And what the bloody hell has she been doing?’
Delia Vesper had arrived with an entourage. Half the people around her were Yllanfalen, brought, in all probability, from Ygranyllon; they were here to help.
No Mab, though.
‘She’s in trouble,’ I said. ‘We know where she is, sort of, but—well, it’s tricky to explain—’
‘Just spit it out,’ she ordered, and I did, pouring the whole story out in a muddled torrent while Ves’s mother glared daggers at me.
‘Right,’ she said when I’d finished. ‘Take me there.’
‘Can you—’
‘Just take me there, and don’t talk until we get there. I need to think.’
‘I’ll keep looking for Mab,’ Indira said, making go-forth gestures with her hands.
I went. Addie bore Delia and I back to the library with a kind of boundless energy born, probably, from rage—or fear.
The guardian was nowhere in sight when we clattered once again down the steps, and I didn’t call for him again. It had obviously cost him to materialise for us before, and besides, he’d told us all he could. It was down to me, now, and Delia Vesper.
That lady stormed into the cellar like it had personally offended her, and stood in the middle of it, staring wordlessly at the remains of the lyre. ‘Right,’ she said again, and sat down, her good hand pressed to the cold floor and her other arm draped over the lyre.
That’s right: Delia Vesper, the archaeologist (before she became a fairy queen), adept at detecting the lingering traces of past magick. The memory of it, so to speak. I waited in silent hope, hardly daring to breathe, as she did—whatever it was she was doing.
‘She is here,’ said Delia at last, and opened her eyes in order to glower at me again. ‘But it’s like she was here ten years ago, not earlier today. What exactly was it you did to her again?’
‘Er, nothing,’ I blurted. ‘Maybe that’s the problem, there was something I should have done in order to keep her—ground her, or something—but I didn’t know.’
‘Right.’ Delia tapped a fingernail against the tarnished silver of the lyre, making a tinny, rhythmic, pinging sound. ‘The problem is, the person most likely to be able to get her out of there is Ves herself. I don’t know anyone else who has the power.’
‘We thought Mab—’
‘Mab isn’t here. I am. And Cordelia is fading fast.’
‘Shit,’ I said, eloquent as only terror could make me.
‘Yes,’ Delia agreed. ‘I’m going to—’
The air flashed oddly, and fractured—I was starting to hate the way it did that, way too hard on the nerves—and a figure rippled into view: the guardian returned.
No, not the guardian—or, not the one we had spoken to before. Baroness Tremayne. And where her compatriot had been pale and faded, she was all vivid energy and colour. I knew with a sudden certainty that it had been she I’d seen in the twilit skies, revelling in magick and moonlight.
‘I can reach her,’ said the baroness, and my knees weakened in sheer relief. ‘But you must assist me.’
***
Stones dream. Did you know that? So does loam. Leaves and tumbling river-water, flowers and vines and trees—above all, trees. Everything dreams, after its own fashion.
I dreamed with it, for a time; a pebble in rich earth, a droplet of water in a downpour of rain.
Then came a sharp, fierce pain, and a bludgeoning force struck me: once, twice. Thrice.
Something grabbed me—hooked long, relentless fingers into every part of me, and, merciless, pulled.
I came forth out of the land in screaming protest, ablaze with searing agony—and then I was free, and whole, and separate, and the pain stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
I lay in a boneless, gasping heap on a very cold floor, blinking in blurry confusion at three figures looming out of the shadows.
Baroness Tremayne, straight-backed, resplendent in her wide-skirted gown: the source of the agony. And the reprieve. ‘Hi,’ I said weakly, and belatedly croaked, ‘Thanks.’
‘Ves.’ The second figure grabbed me, then thought better of it, touched me with gentle hands that shook a little. Jay. ‘Are you okay? Gods, I thought we’d lost you.’ Something was wrong with his voice: there were tears in it.
‘I’m all right,’ I told him, and said it a couple more times; he didn’t seem to be hearing me properly. I patted his shoulder, his hair, trying, with the little energy I possessed, to comfort him.
The third figure thrust itself rather rudely in upon this tender reunion: a familiar shape, with wild auburn hair and the kind of deeply-etched scowl left by three or four decades of near-permanent irritation. ‘Cordelia,’ my mother demanded. ‘What the bloody hell did you think you were doing?’
Then, to my utter astonishment, she threw her arms around me, and squeezed me so tightly I couldn’t breathe.
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