Alan lifted him up and brought him to the fire. He gave him spring water to drink, filling and refilling the cup until the old man breathed more easily. As the pain from the burns lessened, he became aware of the growing light in the clearing. He looked north and west, but Wotan’s Eye was already sunk below the level of the trees and he knew he would never see the star again. The magical at-one-ment with the God would be his no more. He saw Kyri and Freyja, Caz with the spear over his shoulder and Alan crouching in front of him with the silver jug.
‘We are all home,’ he murmured thankfully. ‘We are all safe. Did we win the rune?’
Caz brought the black weapon into the firelight. Blue flame licked his fingers. The shaft was warm and faintly throbbing. Only one side of the great iron head was dark. The runes glowed. He looked down Sir Jonas.
‘Why would I share the prize with one who tried to betray me?’ he said coldly. ‘That was always your plan, wasn’t it, old man? You, and who else of the Guardians?’
Alan leapt to his feet, looking down at Sir Jonas. ‘What betrayal?’ he demanded. ‘What plan?’
The old man trembled, glancing nervously from one accusing face to the other. He dared not open his mouth.
‘That Kyri and I would be sacrificed so that he could win the runes,’ replied Caz.
Alan banged a fist into the numbed place over his heart.
‘Guardians take care of their own!’ he cried. ‘He acted alone and without our consent!’ He rounded on the old man. ‘What have you done?’
Sir Jonas bowed his head. ‘I am shamed and condemned, and will pay.’ He clasped both hands, pleading, ‘I beg you, both of you, to find it in your hearts to forgive me. Please, show me the rune while sight and sanity remain to me!’
‘Forgive you?’ Caz thrust the spear to within a hand’s breadth of the old man’s heart. ‘I’ll never forgive you, but if the God wills that you should see the rune, so be it, even if it strikes you blind.’
Sir Jonas peered eagerly at the head of the weapon. The smooth surfaces were dark and cold.
‘I can’t see it,’ he wailed despairingly. ‘The Will of the God is turned against me.’
‘I can’t see it either,’ said Alan.
The old man wept, begging Caz, ‘Please tell me what you can see.’
‘I’ll show you.’ Caz pointed the spear to where the snow was untrammelled and glistening. Using the heat of the weapon, he drew the outline of a rune that they had never seen before – two short lines angled and joined at the apex, a single line descending from the centre point and fletched with one downward stroke to the right of the halfway point, a second, smaller stroke beneath it at the quarter point from the base and joined at right angles to the first.
‘It’s the Rune of Geirr, the Rune of the Spear,’ he said, ‘and the first is the Rune of Víg, the Battle Rune of the Chosen.’
Tears came into Alan’s eyes. He knelt wonderingly, touching the steaming lines in the bare earth. ‘It’s so simple, just so simple.’
‘And potentially so powerful,’ whispered the old man.
‘Only when the third is won,’ said Caz. ‘You know they won’t work until then.’
Sir Jonas held his head in his hands. ‘I saw nothing of it at the Tree. At the last, all vision was denied me.’ The blue eye looked up at Caz, pleading and fearful. ‘You are, and always were, our only hope, my boy,’ he said sadly. ‘I see that now, too late. Let Guardian Armourer and Defender of Thunderslea bear witness. I name you Guardian Horsemaster. I am no longer worthy to bear the title.’
‘No, you are not,’ agreed Caz. There was no pity in his eyes, only contempt for the pathetic figure cowering at his feet. ‘Of all that you have done this night, your betrayal of Freyja was the worst.’
The old man nodded, weeping. ‘It is my deepest wish that I may earn your forgiveness.’
‘Then pray that she lives!’
A great gout of heavy snow from high in the branches of the old tree came crashing down and obliterated the outline of the rune. Alan put his arm around Sir Jonas and lifted him to his feet. ‘We must get the Master and the mare home before we find ourselves buried up here.’
They braced themselves to walk the Medustig. Caz arranged Alan’s cloak over Freyja’s withers and across her quarters. He tore a long length from his own cloak and fastened one end around her neck to steady her as she stumbled after Kyri across the clearing. Their progress was slow. They entered the tunnel and Alan stopped to transfer the guttering flame of one torch to another fresh one from the rack. Left momentarily without support, Sir Jonas lost his balance and fell on his face.
‘I have no strength in my legs,‘ he gasped.
Alan was immediately at his side, giving him more water and supporting him as he tried to stand, but the old man’s legs were useless. Kyri’s great eyes were luminous in the torchlight. She nudged at Caz’s arm, whickering softly.
He spoke through clenched teeth. ‘She says he’s to ride.’
The astounded old man was lifted up onto her back. Caz unhooked the bent fingers clutching at her shining mane.
‘Trust her to carry you,’ he said curtly. ‘It will be the first and the last time. Make the most of it.’
‘I am humbled,’ whispered Sir Jonas.
‘She’s wise and forgives more easily that I do. Be grateful.’
Alan led the way with the torch. Freyja kept close to Kyri with Caz walking beside her, whispering words of love and encouragement with every step. When they drew level with the warm current of air and the promise of fire, food and rest in the cave, Alan looked back at Freyja.
‘How’s she doing?’ he asked. ‘Does she need a break?’
Caz shook his head. ‘We must go on. Once she goes down she’ll sleep all day, maybe longer. We must get her rugged and settled before any of the others come and find we’re not in the yard.’
CHAPTER 96
Jemima was ready to leave for work as soon as it was light. Maddie came into the kitchen to find the fire lit, the kettle boiling and the cats already fed. Sara and Jasper were eating breakfast.
‘You’re all up early,’ she said.
Jemima pulled on her boots. ‘I’m going up to the house to make the breakfast.’
‘I thought Caz was on duty this morning.’
Jasper made phone signs with his fingers at his ear. Jemima nodded.
‘I always do the breakfast on Saturday,’ she said. ‘You stay here, Ma. We won’t need you until after ten o’clock.’
The morning was crisp and clear. The sun was rising into a peach-coloured sky, shot with gold over the white, gleaming fields and hills. She walked as fast as she could, stamping her feet every now and again to thaw out her toes. She hurried up the slope to the gate, red-cheeked and breathless, anxiety hammering her every heartbeat. Instinctively, she came straight to Freyja’s box, crying out when she saw the mare laid in the straw, ‘She can’t be dead too! What happened?’
Caz put his finger to his lips. ‘Keep your voice down. Nothing’s happened. She’s not dead. She’s just asleep. Come and see. She’s okay.’
He hoped she wouldn’t notice the damaged partition between Rúna’s and Nanna’s boxes. It has been straightened but it was still undeniably badly cracked.
Jemima crept over the straw to Freyja. She felt her neck and touched her nose and her ears. ‘Why is she so fast asleep at this time of the morning?’
‘She’s just tired. We were out late last night. It was hard going in the snow.’
‘But Kyri’s okay.’
‘Kyri can take it.’
Jemima eyed her brother suspiciously. ‘This is what happened two years ago on the party morning when Bryn died.’
‘No it isn’t. Freyja’s not dead.’
‘But she’s asleep just like she was then.’
Caz shrugged. ‘Coincidence.’
They heard footsteps. Alan appeared at the stable door. ‘Caz, I need a quick word.’
Caz got up slowly, motioning to J
emima to take his place beside Freyja in the straw. ‘Stay with her until I get back.’
They walked quickly towards the house. Alan looked exhausted and nervous. ‘The Master’s in a bad way.’
‘Well, we know that.’
‘No, it’s bad now, really bad.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘I got him upstairs to his room. He was babbling a lot about the fight and the hounds, and how the Valkyrs were waiting at Thunderslea to take him to World Tree. He said that all the others were being marked for the Spear but not him.’
‘Only the chosen take the Bite of the Spear,’ Caz said quietly.
‘And evidently he wasn’t chosen.’
‘No. Did he say anything else?’
Alan pushed open the front door. ‘He didn’t have a chance. I was helping him get himself sorted out when he fell on the floor in some kind of a fit. He’s been out cold ever since and I can’t rouse him.’
‘Have you called the ambulance?’
‘I can’t, not this time. Come and have a look at him and tell me what you think.’
Sir Jonas lay in the middle of the four-poster bed. His lips were swollen and bruised where he had bitten into them. Alan turned back the collar of the nightshirt. The marks of the chains were livid purple-red around the old man’s neck. The skin looked as though it had been deeply and selectively burned.
Alan pulled back the bedcovers. ‘All the wounds you came back with faded away in a matter of minutes, but not so for him. It’s the same all over him. They haven’t even begun to lose colour.’
Caz folded his arms, looking down at the wrecked body on the bed. ‘They won’t fade. They will always be there.’
Alan looked aghast. ‘Surely not as bad as this?’
‘Traitors are branded.’
Alan covered up the old man and sat down wearily on the edge of the bed. ‘Daisy and John’ll be here any minute and I’ve called Charles. He’s bringing down his doctor friend. He’s going to be asking a lot of questions. Can I repeat what I’ve just told you?’
Caz nodded. ‘Tell him what you know. That’ll be good enough.’
‘The hounds and the fight and what you’ve just said as well?’
‘Yes, all of it, as you know it. It will keep him off my back.’
‘The Master’s not going to pull out of this, is he?’
‘No. He’ll come round later but he won’t die, perhaps not for a long time.’
Alan sighed. ‘This is going to be hard.’
‘As it was meant to be.’
‘The chains were still on him when he came back. I saw them break up and crumble away. When I picked him up, he told me he was condemned to know every weakness, every degradation of body and torment of mind. Every moment of the rest of his days will count as an age as he dies slowly in the straw. “The shields were black, Mister Alan,” he said. I’ve never seen anybody that terrified.’ Alan looked up at Caz. ‘What colour were they for you?’
‘They were red.’
‘Did the Valkyrs really reject him?’
‘They did.’
‘So you saw them? They were really there this time?’
Caz nodded again. ‘I think they were always there in one form or another, and yes, this time I saw them for what they truly are.’
‘Are they beautiful, like the Master always said?’
‘Beautiful, and terrible, as they are meant to be.’
Alan put his hand to his heart. There were tears in his eyes. ‘How I pray I’ll see them for myself one day.’
Caz rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘You will.’
Left alone in the loose box with Freyja, Jemima stroked her neck, listening to her steady breathing.
‘No, you’re not going to die,’ she whispered, ‘but whatever goes on here on winter solstice night, has happened again. Caz isn’t so messed up this time but he’s different. Everything’s different but I can’t work out how.’
Kyri was standing on the other side of the partition, watching Freyja. Jemima got up and went to her, stroking her great head and combing her fingers through her mane, separating each silken strand.
‘You’re so beautiful, Kyri,’ she murmured. ‘But the problem is that you’re too beautiful. You’re always so clean and perfect, no matter where you’ve been or what you’ve been doing, and that’s not normal for a horse. You never get muddy and you don’t need a rug. I don’t think I’ve seen you get down in the field for a roll since you were a baby.’ She looked into the luminous depths of the blue-black eyes. ‘What are you really, Kyri? Or maybe I should say, who are you?’
CHAPTER 97
Lunch was a sombre affair served promptly at noon to enable Charles Fordham-Marshall to return to London in time to organise the continuing care of Sir Jonas. The party had been cancelled. All the guests were assembled around the dining table in their work clothes, their plans for the great feast forgotten. The girls had cleared away most of the silver and all of the crystal. By general agreement the decorations remained in place and the fires burned merrily in the reception room and the ballroom. The gleaming packages for the gift giving lay untouched under the tree in the hall.
‘Sir Jonas will wake up by Christmas and we can have the presents then,’ said Jemima, determined to take the most optimistic view of the catastrophe. ‘He would hate to think that everything had been spoiled just because he was ill for a couple of days.’
The meal was concluded mostly in silence. Caz’s mind was divided between guiding Freyja’s gradual return to the secure familiarity of her life in the Shadowed World and his intense curiosity about the contents of an envelope he had found in the desk drawer in the study. It had been sealed with red wax and stamped with the Pring family crest. Sir Jonas had written his name under the seal: Caspar Wylde.
Inside the envelope was a small and obviously very old book. It was a slim volume, bound in fine red leather with thirty-six gold-edged vellum pages. Someone had written The Chanting of the Runes very faintly in pencil on the flyleaf. A different hand had more formally inscribed each of the pages with a beautifully decorated rune and the related lines from the poem. Originally written in Old Norse, a translation into modern English had been added at a later date by the same hand, the identity of whom was revealed on the endpaper. It seemed to Caz that the words had been written especially for him:
Rune-Winner,
Scourge of the Trickster,
Speech-Friend of the Fates,
Go with the blessing of all good men,
that the High One look well upon you and favour you,
and be not treacherous.
Walfried
Everything about the book was a mystery. The runes had been placed in what looked to be random order after the first three pages. The Rune of Ós was completely out of context, sandwiched between the fourth last and the penultimate pages, which had been left blank – presumably to allow for the insertion of the Runes of the Deathless on those two and the empty final page. Sir Jonas had left no letter or note to explain why he had chosen to hand on such a precious artefact at that particular time. Caz sensed that it was something the Masters had kept to themselves and never shared with the Guardians.
As usual, during the daylight hours, he kept company with the constantly replenished coffee pot and the sugar bowl at the far end of the table – a phenomenon that both fascinated and appalled Charles Fordham-Marshall, who was witnessing it personally for the first time. He searched the silent young man’s gaunt face for signs of what he had experienced the night before, Alan’s comment that ‘he looked like he’d been through a meat grinder’ uppermost in his mind.
The coffee was generally served before Charles took the vacant seat at the head of the table.
‘This is a working lunch,’ he said, flashing the smile deemed part of his well-considered charm that, hitherto, had been entirely lost on Caz. He gave a brief report on the old man’s condition. The doctor had just left and the emergency nurses would care for Sir Jonas un
til the arrival of their resident colleagues, who were expected within the hour. ‘They will remain with us for the foreseeable future, at least until his condition has stabilised.’
Under Daisy’s direction, John and Alan had already carried a plain but serviceable bed from the servants’ quarters to Lady Mathilda’s small suite of rooms and opened up the bedroom on the north side of the gallery that was most conveniently close to the tower room. The hushed sound of sickness reigned in the east wing of the manor house… people talking in low voices… the constant bleep of monitoring machines.
As a precaution, the inner door from the old man’s bedroom to the narrow staircase was locked and barred, and the key removed. No stranger would find the way into the observatory or discover the secrets locked among the books and papers in the study.
‘Wouldn’t Sir Jonas be better in hospital?’ asked Maddie, voicing an opinion that was generally shared by those present who were not Guardians and who had not been permitted to attend to the old man.
‘Not in this case,’ replied Charles firmly. ‘Although he is extremely unwell, his illness is not considered to be life threatening. The advent of advanced technology enables his case to be closely monitored by the staff in London and affords us with the opportunity to be able to care for him here at home where he would most wish to be.’
‘And where he’ll be properly looked after,’ added Daisy, doing her best to sound brisk despite the fragile, worn look on her face and the tendency to shake that had not been evident the day before. ‘John and I will be moving into my parents’ old rooms in the housekeeper’s flat. We’ll be needing some willing hands to get that organised.’
‘Is that something Tris and I can do?’ asked Laurence.
‘That would be helpful,’ said Charles.
Tristan nodded. ‘Just say the word.’
‘How about tomorrow?’ suggested John.
‘Fine by me,’ said Laurence.
Second Night Page 43
