The Witch Queen

by Jan Siegel

  The magic shrank inward, distorting the image into cubist fragments; then suddenly it imploded, and there was only smoke. She was in her own living room, sitting cross-legged before the fireplace, and the crystals were spilling out of the grate, and torn vapors hung on the air. She unblocked the chimney and let them go. Only when the last wisp of fume had departed did she unbind the protection spells and open the window to admit the midnight breeze.

  Before she went to bed, she plucked an ivy twig from the square’s garden and taped it to the front door.

  On the Sunday, Will and Gaynor met for lunch at a riverside pub in Hammersmith. They paid on ordering, causing a brief tussle over the bill that Will won. He was nervous, and consequently annoyed with himself, and brushed aside her offer to pay with unusual curtness. Two years before, at the end of a period of danger and growing intimacy, she had walked out on him without saying good-bye—a brand of rejection that was rare in Will’s experience—and the wound to his ego still smarted. If there was more than ego involved, he suppressed the notion. Although he was chronically broke and his production company had yet to produce anything, he had never gone short of girlfriends: generally long-legged, high-minded beauties who made it a point of honor to pay their way. Gaynor’s legs were not particularly long and her face was not particularly beautiful, lending itself more to sweetness, sadness, and sympathy than any expression of assurance and poise, but she had her own independence.

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  Grunt.

  “I’d really much rather—”

  “No.”

  “It’s just that Fern says you’re not awfully well off at . . . the moment . . .”

  “Fern says? The voice of the oracle? I didn’t know financial omniscience was part of her Gift. I’m doing fine. Take this.”

  He thrust a glass of lager toward her. Gaynor accepted it meekly, embarrassed by her own lack of tact. They found seats on an outdoor terrace overlooking the Thames; the gray river took the duller gray of the sky and sheened it with silver. A breeze off the water freshened the stuffy city air. There was a short silence, then they both crashed into conversation at once.

  “It’s been too long since we—”

  “I’m sorry I—”

  They stopped, abandoning both sentences unfinished. Will pulled himself together first. “Why don’t we start with the weather? That’s a nice, safe subject that should keep us both away from any areas of potential awkwardness.”

  “It hasn’t been a great summer so far,” Gaynor complied.

  “Very English,” Will agreed. “Cloudy skies, occasional showers, lots of isobars.”

  “I always expect to see those wavy lines passing overhead,” Gaynor offered.

  “You may yet,” said Will. “As we both know, anything can happen, and when we’re around, it usually does. I’d only just got over the events of ‘ninety-eight when Fate hit me with more last Friday. The gate-crashers were particularly nasty.”

  “The thing with the lips . . .” Gaynor shivered. “Did Fern actually kill it?” She knew enough about magic to be aware that otherworldly beings could rarely be depended on to die promptly.

  “ ‘Fraid not. Ragginbone says it’s an elemental, so it can sprout up again anytime. Apparently, it’s attracted to acts of sorcery—but I can’t imagine Fern’s in a hurry to try any more of that. She was pretty horrified when you just stepped into the circle and disappeared.” He added, rather more softly: “We all were.”

  Gaynor thought it prudent to ignore the softness. “You don’t think she’d try something alone?”

  Will opened his mouth to refute the suggestion and then shut it again, recollecting past experiences. “I hope not,” he said shortly. “She’s not stupid. She must know she isn’t ready to confront Morgus.”

  “She knows.” Gaynor’s words were bleak with memory.

  The arrival of their food created a welcome intermission.

  “Did Morgus say anything to you?” Will asked, dispensing cutlery.

  “Oh, yes. It was very strange: she talked as if she knew me, not my face but my name. She said I looked different—plainer. Maybe she thought I was a reincarnation or something. She called me Gwennifer.”

  “Guinevere,” said Will. “That’s where Gaynor comes from. You must know that.”

  “I never really thought about it. It always seemed too glamorous a name for me.” Suddenly she laughed. “You don’t suppose she really thought I was a reincarnation of the original Guinevere—Arthur’s queen—the ultimate femme fatale? Me? That would be utterly ridiculous.”

  “Not from where I’m sitting,” said Will. His smile narrowed his eyes to bright slits, blue against a freckle-topped tan. His hair was blond from what little sun the season had provided. She thought she saw new lines on his forehead, evidence of maturity, or so she hoped, and a sudden warmth rushed through her that was both wonderful and terrifying, heating her cheeks to a glow. The garlic mushrooms on her plate became mysteriously uneatable.

  “I never saw you blush before,” Will continued presently. “You should do it more often. It suits you.”

  “I don’t get many opportunities,” said Gaynor.

  “That’s not what I hear. According to Fern, some man is always dumping his troubles on you.”

  “Yes,” Gaynor replied before she could stop herself, “but that doesn’t make me blush.” Panicked that she might incriminate herself further, she rushed on. “We were talking about Morgus. Fern can’t deal with her till we find her weakness, whatever that is—”

  “If she has one.”

  “The seeresses sort of implied it, didn’t they? Everything that lives must die.”

  “That isn’t prophecy, that’s common sense,” Will retorted. “I might have said it.”

  “Really?” murmured Gaynor, with a furtive grin.

  There was a brief check in Will’s manner; this time, his eyes narrowed without the smile. “The real issue,” he declaimed in an edged voice, “is what we can do. Fern has the Gift, but we have gifts of our own. I can’t immediately remember yours, but I have common sense. And there are more ways than magic of finding things out.”

  “You mean ancient manuscripts,” Gaynor said. “I could look up some stuff about Morgus. She must get a few mentions.”

  “Ancient manuscripts, modern manuscripts. Questions. People. I told Ragginbone we’d investigate the superbanker.”

  Gaynor forgot to balk at the “we.” “I know nothing about banking,” she said. “Nor do you. I don’t even know any bankers.”

  “Yes, you do. Everybody knows a banker nowadays. It’s one of those embarrassing facts of life. A couple of generations ago everybody knew a bishop; now it’s bankers. I can think of at least two old school friends who are in high finance. One of them’s in prison, but it’s the same thing.”

  “I don’t know any,” Gaynor maintained. “I—oh, shit.”

  Will cast her a questioning look.

  “Actually, I do,” Gaynor confessed. “It had slipped my mind. Wishful nonthinking. Hugh.”

  “Hugh who?” Will uttered owl-like. Hadn’t Fern mentioned someone called Hugh?

  “Hugh Fairbairn. He’s married to a friend of Fern’s—an acquaintance really—called Vanessa, only he says she doesn’t appreciate him. He likes me. I’ve had to refuse to—to appreciate him twice already.”

  “Good.” Will picked up a fry that had long gone cold and took an absentminded bite. “We can dispense with his help. I’ll get hold of Adam. He’s already declined to invest in my production company, so he owes me.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “He failed in his allegiance to our old school tie,” Will explained.

  “You never wear a tie.”

  Will abandoned the fry and shoved his largely untouched plate to one side. Gaynor’s garlic mushrooms were beginning to look soggy. “Why don’t you just drink up and I’ll get another round?” Will suggested.

  The conversation deteri
orated rapidly when Gaynor wanted to pay for it.

  In the small hours of the morning a mist had oozed out of the ground and hung in pale ribbons along the verges of the Wrokewood, screening the façade of the house. The walls showed only their stony roots rising out of grass and gravel. Above the mist, pointed roofs and gnarly chimneys floated as if detached from their moorings. The stump of the old tower was completely hidden. Such mists normally kept to the open fields, but rain had dampened the earth and the mild air drew the moisture upward into fogs that were thicker and more extensive than usual. A benighted local, on the road after a drunken party, saw the disembodied gables outlined against the predawn gloom and hurried away, sobered and shivering. The house had never had a bad reputation, but with the arrival of the latest tenant there had been some mutterings. Builders and deliverymen had talked of a changed atmosphere. The evacuation of the ghosts had produced strange ripples, which touched sensitive minds. The nervous reveler, quickening his pace on the three-mile walk to his home village, did not see the mist curdling in the wake of a passing figure, or the clawed feet padding beneath the veil, across the grass to the house. There was no knock or chime, but the front door opened and someone went inside. A little of the mist went with him and hung around the entrance hall, making the air clammy.

  “You have it?” said Morgus.

  For answer, he passed her the pouch at his side. It was heavy, and long tresses of hair spilled over the top. Morgus seized a handful of the hair and lifted the contents clear of the bag. “My coven sister,” she said. “My Sysselore. It is good to see you again.”

  “I will rot swiftly in this world,” snapped the head. “Why bring me here? What have we to say to each other that we have not said before, many times?”

  “I have missed your sweet discourse,” said Morgus. “Fear not: you will rot only at my pleasure. I have potions that will preserve you in this form for as long as I wish. Of course, I may let you age a little first. Your cheek is smoother than it was, but I might prefer to see the Sysselore I knew and loved.”

  “You look younger, too,” said the head. “Maggot magic, no doubt. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “Naughty,” Morgus chided, pinching the cheek so that sap spread like a bruise under the rind. “You seem to have forgotten your courtesies. Am I not still your queen?”

  She turned to Kaliban, who had shrunk back into the shadows. “You have done well, though it took you too long. Enough of freedom. Get you to your attic, and for a while I may let you sleep in peace, if it pleases me.”

  “Take this brand off my brow.”

  “The brand is there for good. With it, I can find you, wherever you may skulk. Now go, or I will set the nightmares on you!”

  He made a half move toward the door, visibly torn, and her smile widened. Seeing it, he wheeled and began to climb the stair. She followed him, carrying the head, ready to reseal the spells that bound him. The bag lay where she had tossed it, discarded. The cat Nehemet came, and probed it with a curious paw, and sniffed at it, and let it be. When the cat had gone a white spiderling emerged and scuttled across the floor. On the Tree it had been scarcely bigger than an aphid, but now it had grown to thumbnail size. The vitality of this new dimension surged through its tiny body: it pulsed with the urgency of Time and the potential for growth. The life of a tree is slow, measured in centuries, but the life of an arachnid is swift, desperate, and hungry. The spider’s minute germ of thought sensed that it had found a place with room for expansion. It moved eagerly, following instinct, drawn toward the sapling of the Tree that had nurtured it. The house spiders might have tried to kill it, for it was still undersized, but most of them had gone with the ghosts, unsettled by corridors that felt suddenly too bare. When it reached the conservatory it ascended the tree trunk and crawled under a broken leaf, sucking the sap that bubbled from its veins. Soon, the leaf would no longer conceal it.

  In his attic prison, Kal waited. Dawn came and went, a sunless affair that lightened the room only to show the dust. When he was sure Morgus would not return, he removed a package that had been tied up in his hair, a package looted from the cave beneath the Tree where the witches had dwelt for so long. He shook a little red powder out onto the floor, mixing it with spittle, using a wood splinter to pound it into paste. Presently, it began to steam; both the surrounding patch of floor and the splinter turned black. He took a scraping on the splinter’s end and, bracing himself, applied it to his forehead. Only an indrawn hiss of breath, a fixed grimace betrayed his agony. He sat with his teeth locked against a scream while the sweat rolled down from under his hair and the pain ate into him. Eventually, he wiped the paste off with a rag of old curtain and daubed the wound with another rag soaked in saliva, which was the only moisture available. Then he repeated the whole process, slightly higher up on his brow. Not only would the rune of Agares find him for Morgus, but for anyone who knew the spell; it was more efficient than an electronic tag. With it, even beyond the prison, he would never be free.

  In the evening, the hag came from the kitchen, bringing him a plate of food, the reward for his service. Switching on the single naked lightbulb, she did not seem to notice the acid mark on the floor. After she had gone, he peered at his reflection in the window, lifting the swatch of hair with which he concealed his brow. It was difficult to see clearly under the overhead light, but he was almost sure the fresh burns had begun to obliterate the brand.

  Down in the basement, where Morgus kept her phials and philters, the head of Sysselore sat in a pickle jar, mouthing furiously.

  “I will take you out when you are ready to be polite,” Morgus said, smiling to herself as she moved from bottle to bottle, preparing another potion in a basin of stone. She had found little to please her since her aborted encounter with Fern and Gaynor, but now she smiled with genuine satisfaction.

  She too had friends.

  Fern felt she needed Sunday to herself, if only to think. But her thoughts went around and around like rats in a barrel, going nowhere, straying off at tangents concerning Luc or Kal and returning always to the place where she had started: the impossibility of destroying Morgus. She met Luc on Monday, this time at his own flat, situated in a mews over a two-Porsche garage. “Bankers measure their success in Porsches,” he told Fern without visible humor. “I know someone with four. One for each suit.”

  “He only has four suits?” Fern said.

  “Oh, yes. And one of them’s Chinese red.”

  The interior of the flat was a surprise: its white-walled minimalism was negated by overcrowded bookshelves and unlikely paintings, including a huge grayish abstract resembling an enlargement of the cerebral cortex, a snowscape clearly influenced by Caspar David Friedrich, and some original architectural drawings of what seemed to be a chapel. The latest technology was slotted into designer units: widescreen TV, DVD player, and a music center with strategic speakers. There was a wafer-thin sofa with stick-insect arms, one armchair of the same design, two others from the Edwardian smoking-room era. A half-full ashtray and unwashed glasses evidently awaited the attention of a maid. Sleek glass lamps dispensed a slightly chilly light that made the apartment feel colder than it was. Luc switched on a fake fire with gas-powered flames that gave out no heat. “This place is a bit of a mess,” he apologized. “I used to be tidy, but lately I haven’t bothered.”

  “It isn’t a mess,” Fern said. “It’s just—lived in. Not enough, perhaps.”

  “I prefer the hermit’s cell,” he explained. “Bare, uncluttered—but clutter always creeps in somehow. I grew up in nouveau riche luxury—my mother had no taste, my father no time—but Westminster and Oxford turned me from tough into toff, at least on the surface.”

  “How often have you used that line?” Fern inquired.

  “Once or twice.”

  “It’s quite good,” she affirmed. “But the tough shows through. Sometimes.”

  He had removed his tie and poured her a G and T, himself a whiskey. “Like you,” he said. “The wi
tch shows through—sometimes. You said you were going to find things out.”

  “I saw your sister.” The words were out before she had time to doubt their wisdom.

  He turned his back on the liquor cabinet, giving her a long, still look. “You mean—not in the hospital?” The tone was muted, but she detected his reservations.

  “Last seen wearing a long floating dress, many-layered, probably chiffon, and lots of hair, presumably false. The lost spirit tends to retain its latest physical appearance, clothes and all. I shouldn’t think she understands what’s happened to her. Even if she does, it’s all dreamlike, unreal . . .”

  “Where is she?”

  “If I tell you,” Fern said, “you must promise me not to rush into anything. One wrong move, and she might be lost forever. You have to believe me. I know what I’m doing.” I think.

  “You described her costume accurately,” Luc said. “There’s no way you could have known . . . unless you’ve spoken to one of the party guests.”

  “I might have done,” Fern conceded. “Our social circles probably overlap. You can trust me—or not. It’s up to you.”

  “I don’t have a very trusting nature,” he said, “but I believe you. Call it gut instinct.” He passed her the gin, sat down in the modern chair. “Go on.”

  “She’s at Wrokeby,” Fern said. “She never left. Your father’s tenant there is . . . a witch of a different color. A collector of souls. At a guess, she was at the party—I don’t know why—and took offense at your sister’s disguise.”