by Jay and I stayed frozen like that a moment longer—and then ran, full tilt, down the corridors and stairways to the ground floor—to the nearest of the many side-doors—I reached it first, hurled it open, pelted out onto the lawn, breathless and staring. A few others were spilling out of the House around me, and the griffin, when it came to land, had an audience of adepts readying Wands and spells and hexes—
‘Wait!’ I shouted, half involuntarily, hardly knowing what I was saying, but—
‘Ves, are you crazy?’ That was Marian, readying a devastating blast of something aimed to kill, or at least maim, and she was good, she’d hurt it for certain—
‘Don’t,’ I pleaded. ‘Just give it a moment.’ I’d seen griffins when they were intent on destruction and this didn’t look at all like that. There wasn’t nearly enough lightning.
‘She’s right,’ said Jay from right behind me. ‘I don’t think we’re in danger.’
The griffin loomed right over us by then, unthinkably huge; a long shadow fell, the sun momentarily hidden behind enormous, feathered wings.
‘You’re both crazy,’ Marian opined, and I could see her point: if the griffin had attacked us from such a vantage point we’d all have been dead in seconds.
It didn’t. Its desperate speed slowed; it drifted lazily down, wafted like dandelion seed, until its great, taloned feet connected with the rich green grass—
Light flashed—
I blinked rapidly, my eyes streaming—and when the blindness faded and I could see again, the griffin had gone.
Before us, statuesque, and making a grand, sweeping curtsey of effortless elegance: a lady of unmistakeable troll heritage, and a great, grand lady at that.
I knew her. I’d seen her before.
‘Baroness Tremayne? Surely not—it can’t be—’
Jay said: ‘Wait, Baroness Tremayne? The one you met in Farringale—’
‘Yes.’ I returned the lady’s curtsey; she isn’t so much old-fashioned as old, impossibly so, survived somehow since the days before Farringale’s fall, and she’s an aristocrat. One shows respect.
She nodded to me, and to Jay, her gaze sweeping unseeingly over the crowd assembled around us. She looked: harried. Her white hair formed a dishevelled halo around her troubled face, and her gown, as handsome and rich as ever, was soiled with cobwebs and grime.
I’d never quite seen her in the flesh before; not like this. She lived—or existed—a step outside of time; “between the echoes”, she called it, a hazy, indistinct state that preserved her indefinitely. A lonely existence: she watched over Farringale, had done so down the long ages since its fall.
Previously I would have said nothing could have brought her out of Farringale.
Now: only the very direst emergency could have done so.
A stab of profound unease unfurled within.
She spoke, her voice rusty with disuse. ‘I must—I bring dire news. I must see Mab.’
She hadn’t come all this way looking for me, then. I smothered a twinge of disappointment. ‘Mab?’ I echoed. ‘I don’t think we know anyone by that name—’
She interrupted me; the heights of rudeness in so grave, so courteous, a woman, but she could not wait for me to finish my trailing, unhelpful syllables. ‘She is here. I know her to be. I must see her.’
‘I—’ I began, and stopped, for at that moment my phone, tucked into a pocket in my dress, began to buzz. Not an unusual occurrence, but a feeling of foreboding swept over me, and I hurriedly fished it out.
An ornate, silver chocolate pot dominated the screen: Milady calling. As Jay interrogated the baroness about the identity of “Mab” (assisted, or impeded, by numerous interpolations from others), I stepped away to answer the call. ‘Milady?’
‘Ves,’ she said crisply. ‘We have a problem.’
‘It seems so,’ I agreed. ‘Although this particular griffin isn’t a danger to us—’
‘Griffin?’ Milady uttered the word sharply, with a snap: unmistakeably a question.
‘You… you aren’t calling me about the griffin?’
‘I am calling about Silvessen,’ Milady said. ‘You will have to explain to me what you mean about the—’
‘I’m coming up,’ I said, shamelessly interrupting in my turn.
‘Quickly,’ Milady agreed, and hung up.
I grabbed Jay’s elbow. ‘This morning grows ever more interesting,’ I informed him. ‘Baroness? I believe you should come with us.’
***
House took pity on the ancient baroness—or perhaps its attendant colony of obliging fruit-fanciers had grasped the sheer urgency of our various missions;. Either way, we entered the House via a side-door and emerged, with a single step, into Milady’s tower-top chamber. A plump arm-chair materialised almost immediately, and I assisted the baroness into it: she, winded and weak, sank into its comfortable embrace with a sigh. Her eyes closed, briefly: when they opened again, she said, ‘Ah, Mab.’
The air sparkled frenetically. ‘Who is—I don’t quite—Ves, enlighten me.’
Having never before encountered anything but a perfectly self-possessed Milady, I could only gape; my uneasy feelings deepened into a yawning crater of alarm.
It was Jay who said: ‘Milady, this is the Baroness Tremayne, of Farringale. Baroness, Milady is the leader of our Society. Whatever has occurred at Farringale, I am sure she will be able to assist—’
‘Morgan,’ said Milady. ‘Ves, you never mentioned the baroness was also Morgan le Fay—’
‘I didn’t know,’ I put in, distressed.
At the same time, Baroness Tremayne said, again, ‘Mab. I did not know these were emissaries of yours.’
Jay said, ‘You mean Milady—’
‘What’s happened with Silvessen?’ I interjected, my head whirling.
‘The regulators are gone,’ Milady said, clearly, into a sudden silence.
‘From Silvessen?’ I said, recovering my wits. ‘The regulators are gone from Silvessen?’
I hadn’t had occasion to visit Silvessen for a few weeks, but when I’d last been there, everything had been progressing beautifully. Our artisans (including my father) had rebuilt large parts of the village; a small but enthusiastic population of Yllanfalen were moving in, most of them from my mother’s kingdom; and the regulators were doing a resoundingly good job of restoring and balancing the magickal flow in Silvessen Dell.
My head began to whirl again. ‘You mean they’ve—they’re faulty, or—’
‘I mean that someone has taken them,’ said Milady.
Someone had dug out the regulators from Silvessen Dell—and, just as that news reached us, so had Baroness Tremayne.
Surely, not a coincidence.
Jay and I, silent with consternation, looked at the baroness, and waited.
‘Farringale is no longer inviolate,’ Baroness Tremayne told us. ‘There has been—an incursion.’
‘Who,’ I said, faintly.
‘I hardly know,’ said the baroness—Morgan, as she also was—that explained her griffin shape, legends claimed Morgan le Fay could take the form of any animal, and surely that would include the magickal ones—my brain was spinning; I forced it to focus.
Milady had been silent, absolutely silent. At last she spoke: ‘These things cannot be unconnected.’
My thoughts exactly. ‘Baroness, did these intruders bring devices with them—they are made from argent, highly potent things—’
‘I do not know what it is they have done, but it has—the disruption is—severe. The city stands in sore need of aid.’
I could well imagine what kind of disruption might afflict Farringale, if someone had taken Silvessen’s regulators there.
Well, scratch that: I couldn’t imagine it, nobody could. We had tested the devices in a town where magick was, had been, dead; drained away down the ages, its Dell dormant and inert. We hadn’t yet tested what the regulators could do, would do, in a place like Farringale: potent still, disordered, chaotic. Dangerous.
Ideally, they would help restore balance: the lost city would be calmed, settled, by them. But if that had been the case, would Baroness Tremayne have come here, desperately seeking help? No.
Besides, there had been only two regulators installed at Silvessen: nobody knew, no one could guess, how many might be required in so gravely disordered a place as Farringale. More than two, anyway.
A question circled in my gut, sickening me with foreboding: I had to ask it. ‘When you speak of an “incursion”, Baroness. Just…how many people do you mean?’
‘I hardly know,’ she said again. ‘You must understand. It is—chaos.’
I did understand. Farringale was subject to great surges of magick; when such chaos as that held sway, there could be no maintaining any sound grip on reality whatsoever.
‘Have you an estimate?’ said Milady. ‘I must have some idea of the extent of the problem before I can decide how best to help.’
‘They are…’ Baroness Tremayne shook her head. ‘They seemed to be everywhere.’
My hopes, feeble as they were, lay in pieces. She wasn’t talking about the kind of minor incursion I had made into Farringale, once or twice in the past; just me and a few others poking at things and taking notes. This was on another scale.
She wasn’t talking about an incursion so much as—as an invasion.
‘Giddy gods,’ I breathed. ‘This is some kind of war.’
‘I do not know what their goal may be,’ answered the Baroness. ‘I did not show myself to them—yet.’
She had got straight out in search of help, and had come to us.
Well, who else could she go to? The Troll Court couldn’t intervene; the ortherex infesting half of that city were supremely dangerous to them.
Wait, though. She hadn’t come to ask the Society for help.
She’d come to ask Mab for help.
A living archetype herself, when faced with an unanswerable threat, she had fled to another—the only other, perhaps, that she knew.
Milady.
‘I’ll help,’ I blurted. ‘I mean, I’m only a new Merlin, but there must be something I could do—’
‘Ves,’ said Milady.
‘Yes ma’am.’
She was quiet for a moment. Jay and I, and possibly Baroness Tremayne, sat in breathless silence, awaiting her decision.
‘We will, of course, assist in every way we can,’ she decreed. ‘But first we must understand what we are up against. Ves.’
‘Yes ma’am!’
‘And Jay. As two of the very few who have set foot in Farringale at all, I will be requiring you to conduct reconnaissance.’
‘Anything,’ I said.
‘It appears that this assignment may be dangerous, so you will be taking Rob with you.’
Jay seemed about to speak, but Milady forestalled him: ‘Not Indira. Not yet. I would like you to go unseen by these interlopers, if you can, and I am therefore inclined to limit this assignment to the three of you. Ves, any special assistance you are able to offer as Merlin will be fully necessary.’
In other words, I had a carte blanche.
‘I will requisition the appropriate keys from Mandridore immediately. You will leave as soon as they arrive.’
Which begged an interesting question: how had these interlopers got in? There was only one known way into Farringale at present, and it took three separate keys, one of which we held. If that were missing, Milady would have known about it already.
One of the several questions we would have to find answers to, and quickly.
‘Baroness,’ said Milady. ‘Will your state of health permit you to—’
‘I shall return with your representatives,’ said Baroness Tremayne, firmly.
‘That would be ideal,’ said Milady, with palpable approval. ‘Rest assured they will attend to your safety.’
‘And I, to theirs,’ answered she, with just cause. She was Morgan le Fay: what strange and ancient arts might she have at her disposal?
‘Please, prepare yourselves,’ concluded Milady. ‘And quickly. You may requisition anything you require from Stores.’
Meeting adjourned. Jay and I filed out in a tense silence, leaving the Baroness to confer with Milady further.
Outside, I stopped, momentarily overwhelmed.
Someone had plundered our prized new tech from Silvessen, Farringale was under some kind of attack, and Milady turned out to be the living embodiment of a faerie queen.
‘Shit,’ I observed.
Jay said, ‘Verily.’
