by ‘Ves. Thank goodness—I think? Are you okay? Gods—’ Jay was babbling, most unlike him, but he swept me into a fierce hug and somewhere in there I managed to stop screaming.
‘I’m okay,’ I said thickly against his chest, and I was—mostly. I was feeling an odd mix of profound relief and a strange desolation. For while the baroness had saved me from eternity stuck as a Fairy Stone, she’d also torn me out of the most profound peace I’d ever experienced in my life.
And now here I was, in Farringale, with a lost city to save and a few hundred people embroiled in fervid struggles around us while we did it.
It took me a few deep and tremulous breaths to pull myself together. Jay too, probably.
‘Any chance you could stop turning yourself into inanimate objects?’ said that gentleman after a while.
‘I may not have looked it, but I was fairly animate,’ I protested. I’d held a conversation, at least. A bit. Sort of.
‘That was not animated. This—this—is animated.’ Jay grasped both my arms and moved them about, most illustratively. ‘I prefer this.’
‘Me too,’ I sighed, meaning it more than I didn’t. I straightened, gently disentangling myself from Jay. ‘Right. Where are we at.’
‘Farringale Dell,’ Jay answered promptly, all business again. He pointed. ‘City’s that way.’
For once, I didn’t even need him to tell me. I could feel it, the deep, irresistible pull of Farringale’s wild and roiling magick, a lodestone I couldn’t have missed if I’d tried.
I took a proper, long look around, having scarcely noticed my surroundings before. Peaks and valleys, the sort they had in mind when they coined the phrase “rolling hills”. Landscape like a rumpled blanket, lusciously green, and—intriguing, this—laced still with that latent sense of ancient power, a tapestry of memory and magick. Would I always be so alive to these things from now on? Or was it the temporary effects of having played the—
‘The lyre,’ I blurted, rigid with horror. ‘I’ve lost the lyre.’
‘At your feet,’ said Jay calmingly.
There it was, indeed, and being a magickal object of indescribable power and unimaginable antiquity it wasn’t just lying there on its side, patently dropped by a careless hand (mine). It stood tall and proud atop a nicely flattened rock, as though I had placed it there myself with tender care, and it was playing some silent melody to itself: its glittering strings visibly vibrated.
‘I’m not sure I should be trusted with any more irreplaceable artefacts,’ I decided, though this one seemed to be able to take care of itself. ‘Will you carry it?’
Jay picked it up, gingerly, and stood frowning. ‘I think,’ he said after a moment, ‘that you’ll have to take it after all.’ He held it out to me.
I eyed it doubtfully. It shone at me, enticingly, radiating magick in most tempting fashion; but then it tends to do that. Nothing unusual there.
‘It’s singing at me,’ Jay elaborated.
‘And that isn’t a good thing.’
‘Emphatically not a good thing.’ Jay winced as he spoke, as though his teeth hurt.
The fact that I’d dropped it apparently didn’t mean that the lyre and I weren’t still all tangled up together. I took it from Jay’s hands feeling only slightly aggrieved. It played me a joyous ode, which mollified me—a little. ‘Everyone’s gone,’ I observed, for we were entirely alone on the windswept hillside.
‘Gone into the city, and we should follow. Are you ready?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Me neither.’
Jay set off, striding grimly over hill and dale like a modern-day Heathcliff. Breathless with magick and panic and admiration, I trotted in his wake.
***
Heading into the teeth of that magickal mess was like wading into the ocean against the incoming tide. It beat at me, waves of it, relentless as the sea—and all the while, the sense of irresistible force, an undertow waiting to sweep me up and drown me in it.
If it weren’t for Jay just ahead of me, advancing upon it like a human wrecking ball, inflexible as death itself, I might have turned tail and fled like a frightened hare, lyre and all. We could’ve been happy, me and the Yllanfalen Lyre. In Barbados, possibly, or the Seychelles.
But if Jay could face Farringale, so could I. We could face it together.
We had to.
The gate into Farringale city looked so much like an actual entrance I was almost disappointed. No cunningly disguised rocks or airy archways of subtle magick; this one was obviously and unabashedly a door. A grand one, to be sure: ten feet tall and wrought from solid granite, with a set of double doors occupying an ornately carved frame. They looked like they’d been there since the dawn of time, and hadn’t been opened in almost as long.
I wondered how the first teams to reach them had contrived to get them open, but they had: one stood far enough ajar for a human to slip through, if not a troll. I glanced through, and saw nothing but a white mist, like dense fog.
‘I’ll go first,’ said Jay, and went, without even waiting for me to reply.
‘Wait—’ I began, but too late. He was gone, leaving me alone with the hills and the doors and the lyre and the mist.
‘Damnit,’ I muttered. Nothing for it. I grabbed what passed for my courage with both hands, and stepped into the fog.
Jay caught me on the other side, physically grabbed me. Presumably before I could manage to wander off and get myself lost (plausible). ‘The doors lead right into the centre,’ he told me. ‘We’re near the library.’
Or what was left of it, after Ancestria Magicka and I were finished with it. I blushed a little at the recollection: had I knocked down a wall on my way out? I might very well have.
‘Which also means,’ he continued, ‘we’re near the mews where the griffins were being kept.’
I read the unspoken question in there. Now that we’d made it inside, what did we want to do? Milady hadn’t assigned us to any particular unit, nor given us any particular task.
I knew why. My not-so-secret personal mission, mad as it was: I’d personally declared war on the ortherex. Milady hadn’t endorsed it, but she hadn’t forbidden it either. She’d left Jay and me free to choose where we placed ourselves and our talents.
I chose to conclude that a lack of active opposition from Milady was as good as support, as far as Jay’s reservations were concerned. And I’d go on thinking so unless and until he clearly stated otherwise.
I chewed a thumbnail, thinking. If I wanted to purge Farringale of its infestation, how would I even do that?
They were feeding off its wild flows of magick, or so we had theorised. It was those surges of power that kept them here, oddly static, like the rest of the city. If I wanted to remove them, I’d have to take away their source of sustenance.
I’d have to take the magick out of Farringale. All of it.
A thought I’d been shying away from ever since the emergency council at Mandridore. It was too insane, even for me; too vast, surely, to be accomplished, even with all the magick of Merlin at my disposal.
I didn’t want to consider the possibility that I couldn’t do it, at all—that it wasn’t within my power, or anyone’s. Because that would mean accepting defeat. There wasn’t a way to save Farringale for the trolls without clearing the ortherex, and as long as they had all the deep power of ages to feed upon, they’d be here forever.
We had to find a way, or give up on Farringale. And I wasn’t prepared to do that.
I looked at Jay, and his face told me he knew. He hadn’t mentioned the griffins at random. ‘We’ve got to get them out of here, haven’t we?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
The griffins, bound up inextricably with the magickal ebbs and flows of Farringale. The very heart and soul of it, the core; without them, magick would wither and die, and Farringale Dell with it. And they’d been resident here for more centuries than I could imagine.
Taking them out—all of them—I didn’t even know what that would do to the city. But I knew that I couldn’t perform my nigh-impossible task in the face of all their terrible power.
‘Miranda’s team went straight there,’ Jay said. ‘With Rob’s. They’ll be—I don’t know what they’ll have done by now.’
‘And Indira?’ I asked.
‘Retrieving the regulators. Plus she’s got two more that Orlando rushed.’
Good. We’d be needing those. Four might be… enough. Perhaps.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
***
We passed few people on our way through the contested streets of Farringale, at least at first. The combated areas were elsewhere; nobody had cause to care about the library anymore, not now I’d emptied it of its treasures.
Nonetheless, the atmosphere of the city couldn’t be more different from our first visit. A palpable tension set my teeth on edge, a sense of urgency, of menace; and the magick of Farringale tossed and roiled like the sea in a storm. It dizzied me, threatened to overwhelm me—what in the name of all the gods had they done with the regulators? Not to mention the griffins—Jay had to steady me several times when I threatened to topple under it.
The lyre wasn’t much help. I felt like a tree trapped betwixt two hurricanes, each of them trying to tear me to pieces.
When we neared the griffins’ makeshift prison, the fraught peace quickly shattered. I heard a tumult of voices raised in conflict, and a terrible, sharp, raucous cry that could only have come from a griffin. Jay and I quickened our steps down a widening street, passing towering townhouses of brick and stone at a near run.
The mews had become a battleground. We tore into an open square, lined on three sides with large, brick-built stable blocks. I counted four griffins still captured, chained and enchanted, unnaturally placid. People were everywhere, I couldn’t tell how many were ours, and how many Ancestria Magicka.
I recognised Fenella Beaumont, however, poised beside her imprisoned griffins like a queen holding court. She was dressed all in black, tight trousers and jacket, with her grey hair tied back: practical attire for taking over a city.
She had a Wand out, something emerald, by the look of it, and she was pointing it at Rob.
Rob, unmoved, had his own Wand trained on her right back. He was flanked by his entire team, but then so was Fenella. We had a stand-off going on.
I looked for Indira, or Zareen, but didn’t see them.
‘Release the griffins,’ Rob was saying, calmly but firmly. ‘You are surrounded. Reinforcements are imminent. You cannot win this.’
Fenella looked by no means ready to accept defeat, and I wondered afresh what her plan had actually been. If her only goal had been to empty the library, well, she and her organisation should be long gone by now. They’d have no further reason to stay.
But they’d seized control of the gate, and the griffins. Something else was afoot, something much larger. Surely she hadn’t thought she could get away with occupying Farringale?
‘We’re so close,’ Fenella said angrily, which wasn’t an answer to anything Rob had said. ‘Let us work, Rob Foster. We’re doing great things—things the Society can only dream of—’
‘Oh, balderdash,’ I interrupted, and stepped forward. ‘What could you possibly be doing that involves imprisoning the—’ I stopped, because as I spoke a horrible thought entered my head.
Fenella’s eyes glittered with rage at sight of me. ‘Ah, the great Merlin,’ she said nastily. ‘You should have joined us when you had the chance.’
I didn’t waste any time wondering how she’d heard about my new role: expecting to keep anything much from the knowledge of these sneaks was clearly futile. Ignoring her remark, I said, warily, ‘What exactly is it you think you’re doing?’
She smirked at me. ‘Can’t you guess?’ And I could guess, of course I could: for weren’t the Society and Ancestria Magicka like opposite sides of the same coin? I heard, with a horrible sense of inevitability, the expected words fall from Fenella’s smirking lips: ‘We’re saving Farringale.’
