by Jay and I were not to go with the main force. Ours was the role of scout: we were to whisk away on the Winds and get back to Farringale well ahead of Milady and the rest of the Society. We left Rob (apparently in field command) organising our colleagues into teams—or, one may as well say, units—and hurried back down into the cellar.
Indira emerged from the crowd as we pushed and apologised our way back to the cellar stairs. ‘Here,’ she said, thrusting something into my hands; I caught it reflexively, felt rather than saw what it was. Smooth, jellyish spheres, cool to the touch: Orlando’s spellware.
‘Restoratives?’ I asked in hope.
She nodded once. ‘And sleep pearls. Don’t eat the red ones.’ With which words of wisdom, she vanished into the crowd.
I checked the contents of my palms: I had several red ones, and four green ones. I gave two of each to Jay, and pocketed the rest of the spheres in separate pockets: red ones left, green ones right.
Well, one green one; one of them went straight into my mouth. I blessed Indira’s forethought as it dissolved on my tongue, tasting of peaches. They’re fast-acting: within a minute or two, a lot of my fatigue had receded, and that delicious fizz of energy began racing through my veins. I was bouncing on my toes as we ran down to the henge, bursting with vigour.
‘If only it were possible to feel like this all the time,’ I mused, as Jay’s Winds of the Ways began to swirl through the room.
‘Exhausting prospect,’ Jay disagreed, absently. ‘You’d never sleep again.’
‘I’d never need to.’ Jay hadn’t taken his yet, that I had seen. I hoped he wasn’t going to pull a manly manoeuvre, and stubbornly go without. He had to be at least as fatigued as I was, after several trips through the Ways.
There followed a period of scrambling hurry, Jay too tense and focused for conversation. I chose not to distract him, for fear he might fly us into the side of a building, or smear us, pancake-like, up and down the unforgiving face of a cliff.
Once we emerged near Winchester, it was my turn: my job, to get us over the several miles to Farringale as fast as possible. Addie bore both of us proudly, and shot like an arrow through the balmy skies of southern England. The nearer we got, the greater my sense of urgency; all thoughts of Mandridore faded, and of Mab, replaced by a growing disquiet.
We’d been absent from Farringale for too much of the day. The sun remained high, but the afternoon was wearing away, and what had become of the griffins while we’d been mobilising? What of the rest of the city? For there must be some ultimate purpose behind the raiding of the library, and the subduing of the griffins—not to mention the theft and installation of at least one of Orlando’s regulators. What if we were too late? We had—I had—given away our presence, earlier. They knew their activities there were no longer a secret. If I were Fenella, I’d have accelerated my timeline to warp speed, and got out as fast as possible—before, for example, the Society and the Troll Court could form a devastating alliance (aided by several other magickal communities), and descend upon them in force.
We might arrive to find the city empty, of griffins and anything else of value. Our enemies gone, absconded with innumerable priceless and irreplaceable articles of troll culture and heritage.
Were I to give voice to my real fear, though, it was nothing of the sort. Why bother with the regulators, if the goal was only to rob the city? Why subdue the griffins, and then—rather than taking them out of the city, as I’d have expected—leave them in situ? They would never kill them: griffins were far too valuable. But if they weren’t stealing them, what were they doing?
They’d arrived in force—as we were doing. Was that in order to empty the city as fast as possible? Was it merely a question of bringing as many hands as possible, the better to thieve at speed?
Or had they brought so much manpower to Farringale because they were taking over the city?
Such unhappy thoughts kept me silent with mounting worry through the ten-mile flight, conducted at a speed that might, ordinarily, have set my guts churning with exhilarated terror. As we drew near to the bridge, my reverie came to an abrupt end, and with it, my long silence.
The site was no longer deserted. Stationed either side of the bridge, right there in the open, and very obviously armed with Wands, stood a pair of giants, the largest I’d ever seen. Each had a small unit of mixed troops with them: humans side-by-side with, to my very great dismay, several trolls.
‘Crap,’ I uttered eloquently. ‘That’s not—good.’
‘That,’ said Jay, ‘is very bad indeed.’
I pulled Addie up, halting our flight. ‘They’re entrenched. That’s a hostile takeover going on down there.’
Jay nodded. He understood the implications: if they were guarding the gate, and so openly, then they were declaring control of the city. This was a shameless, blatant attempt to seize Farringale entirely, and all its contents.
My heart sank to see trolls down there, supporting a cause so flagrantly founded upon greed. But perhaps it wasn’t so surprising, after all. The romance of Farringale could seduce the hardest heart; and since, as far as I knew, the Court at Mandridore had not, until today, publicised their own intentions in the direction of their lost enclave, it mightn’t have been difficult for Fenella to sway these to her side.
‘What do we do?’ I asked Jay, momentarily stymied. Milady’s plan to surge through the gate en masse, and attempt a quick overthrow of Ancestria Magicka’s forces, had suffered a check already. If Fenella had stationed so many on this side of the gate, I was willing to bet many more waited on the other side.
True, our numbers were still superior; hers would be scattered across Farringale, enacting the various parts of her plan. But still. A pitched battle at the gate was not what anyone wanted.
‘We need another way in,’ Jay decided. ‘And fast.’
‘There is no other way in,’ I protested. ‘That’s why we’ve always faffed around with the keys.’
‘There must be. Or there must have been, at one time. It’s an entire city. They can’t have managed with only one way in.’
‘You’re right, but it’s been closed for centuries. Sealed. Those old ways must be long gone, and even if they aren’t, how do you propose to find—and unseal—one of them in the next couple of hours?’
‘You’ve got the lyre.’
I had. I was unlikely to forget it, for the thing sang ceaselessly at me at the back of my mind; an alluring, enchanting melody, hard to resist. I was mentally postponing the moment when I would, inevitably, have to take up the beautiful, dangerous instrument, and play it again. The last time I’d done so, the results had been—explosive. Especially for me.
‘What do you imagine me able to do with it?’ I asked, cautiously.
‘I don’t know. But you’ve got the lyre, and you’ve got all of Merlin’s magick. If anybody can find a way in, and fast, it’s going to be you.’
In other words: this problem was all mine.
I felt a surge of panic, and suppressed it. No time for that. Farringale needed me; the Society needed me. Think, Ves.
Jay, a warm weight at my back, squeezed my waist. ‘You can do this,’ he said, sensitive, apparently, to the intense pressure my mind was trying to buckle under.
Addie was beginning to tire: unicorns aren’t made to hover. I turned her, and bade her fly a slow circle around the environs of Farringale. ‘Can you ward us from sight?’ I asked Jay. ‘I don’t want that lot to spot us, yet.’
‘Done,’ said Jay, and fell silent. I felt a little surge of magick from him, a charm woven around Addie and her riders: if we were visible at all to those below, we’d appear as a large bird.
One problem solved. I let Addie and Jay take over our direction: my mind shifted to the problem of entry.
Jay, broadly, was right: there must have been another way in, once upon a time. Any fae settlement or enclave typically had two ways of entry and egress: one between the enclave and the outside world, and one communicating with the wider magickal dell in which it was situated.
The bridge over the river Alre belonged to the former category. What of the latter? Was there a way into Farringale Dell, besides going through Farringale itself?
I fished in my trusty satchel, and withdrew the glorious, glittering lyre. Time was, they’d never have simply handed the thing to me: far too dangerous. Its deep, wild powers were wont to overwhelm me. That they had done so now—my mother, anyway, apparently on Milady’s orders—disquieted me rather. Was it that I was powerful enough now to bear it? Or was the threat to Farringale so dire, and so important, that I was considered an acceptable sacrifice?
No. My mother might throw me under the proverbial bus, if it suited her, but Milady wouldn’t. I had to trust her judgement—and my own strength. I was, after all, much mightier than I used to be.
I took a breath, and did my best to dismiss such an unhelpful spiral of fear. The lyre, cool in my hands, greeted me with a ripple of its airy strings, and a soft swell of its distinctive Yllanfalen magick. At least one of us was pleased to be working together again.
It wasn’t hard to lose myself in it. I began to play, one of the plaintive airs I’d once acquired from Ygranyllon: the melody didn’t matter, it was merely a conduit for the magick.
The effects were neither so intense, nor so terrifying, as when I’d played the lyre in the town of Vale. There, I’d been on another world: a more deeply magickal world than ours. Here, there were no such currents to sweep me away. This was our own plain, stolid Britain, a magickal backwater, and the threads of latent power I was able to perceive, even with the lyre, were meagre indeed.
I closed my eyes as I sank into the spells I was weaving; when I opened them again, an altered landscape lay spread before me. I saw, through Merlin’s eyes, a blanket of rolling green, dotted with knots of trees, and the clustered rooftops of towns. Laced through this verdure ran rivulets of ancient magick, latent and weak, half smothered by technology and time, but they held; oh, they held.
And there, away towards the Farringale gate: a savage pull of deep power, like the undertow of the ocean. Farringale lay tucked between the spaces in this landscape, on the other side of its fortified gate; but a city so ancient, so magick-drowned, could not help but exert its influence.
‘That way,’ I murmured to Addie, and it seemed to me that my voice echoed, throbbing with profound magick—painfully so. The currents shook me to my bones, and on some deep, frightening level I wanted to hurl myself into it—merge with it—drown in that sea of power. I would emerge—changed. Something other.
I gritted my teeth, and focused afresh on Farringale. On the dell I sought, and the way through. My mind skittered across that landscape of leylines, testing, probing, touching—there. There, a concentrated knot of magick, a thousand layers deep. An ancient cluster of charms, dormant now, shuttered like a window against the sun: but they had opened something, once, had presided over the passage of a thousand long-dead souls.
A gate—or what had once been a gate. It would be so again.
‘I’ve got it,’ I said.
