The Witch Queen

by Jan Siegel

  “So what have we learned?” asked Fern. They were having a council of war at her flat in Pimlico. Although it was high summer, rain beat on the window, and she had switched on the artificial fire to ward off the chill. Gas-powered flames leaped and danced around a convincing array of coals; Gaynor, Will, and Ragginbone sat in a semicircle, warming themselves at its glow. Luc had not been invited.

  “Nothing and nothing,” Fern went on, answering her own question. “Morgus still looks invulnerable; Dana is still in a coma. We’re going nowhere.”

  “Gaynor did well getting the lowdown on Walgrim senior,” Will pointed out. “Anyone with that much integrity is always iffy, particularly a banker. Once you’re above suspicion, you can get away with anything.”

  “Get away with anything?” Ragginbone inquired.

  “Invent a company. Get people to invest in it. Pocket the money.” Will’s expression quirked into cynicism. “The easiest kind of fraud. And if Morgus has got her claws into him, he won’t be worrying about the future. Magical influence makes your mind furry around the edges. Your sense of self-preservation goes. At least, that was how it felt all those years ago when Alimond summoned me. I should think this would be something similar.”

  Ragginbone gave a nod of acquiescence. Gaynor said: “What about the goblins? Have they come up with anything?”

  “They don’t investigate,” Fern explained. “They simply watch. Dana is watched, Luc and Kaspar are watched—”

  “Luc . . .” Ragginbone murmured, with a swift glance from under lowering eyebrows.

  “Even Wrokeby is watched, from a safe distance. A couple of weeks ago, Morgus bought a litter of puppies. I know it seems unlikely, but Skuldunder was very positive. Any suggestions as to why?”

  “Maybe she likes dogs,” said Gaynor doubtfully.

  “She’s got a cat,” said Fern. “Witches have cats. It’s traditional. She isn’t a doggy person. I could imagine her with a tank full of poisonous octopi, a pet cobra, a tarantula on a golden chain—but not puppies. She would kill anything that slobbered on her skirt.”

  “What kind were they?” Will asked.

  “Don’t know. Goblins don’t like dogs of any description. Does it matter?”

  Will shrugged. “We can’t tell what matters. Maybe you should draw the circle again . . .”

  “Too dangerous,” said Ragginbone. “Have you forgotten? Potent magic attracts elementals. The many eyes of Oedaphor would be watching: Morgus has called him up, and he could betray Fern’s whereabouts. We were too quick for him last time, but that would not happen again. We are not yet ready for the big confrontation.”

  “Does it have to happen?” Will said. “If Fern can’t defeat her, maybe there’s some other way . . .”

  “She’s looking for me,” Fern said. “There were magpies around Dale House. Bradachin tackled the telephone—he thought it was important I should know. He says they were marked in blue, though it didn’t show when you looked at them directly. They’re birds from the Tree, spies for Morgus.”

  “Bradachin used the phone?” Ragginbone was distracted. “Goblins hate all technology: they see it as a kind of sinister contemporary magic. He must have thought it was important.”

  “He’s exceptional,” Will said shortly.

  “I have to face her.” Fern was following her own train of thought. “But not now.”

  “What about the Old Spirit?” Gaynor asked diffidently. “Is he involved in all this?”

  “Gaynor has a point,” said Ragginbone. “He is always involved. We would do well to keep that in mind. If any of you see or sense him, even in your dreams—especially in your dreams—“ something in Fern’s expression, in her silence, drew his attention; the other two followed his gaze “—share it with us.”

  “Haven’t you told him about your dream?” said Will.

  “Not yet.” She didn’t like talking about it, having to describe it again: the high office, and Azmordis, and the scritch-scratch of the quill as she signed the document she did not need to read. “It came again last night. It feels more real every time. I know it’s the Dark Tower, like in stories, only it’s modern, a black soaring skyscraper, all glass and steel. I think it’s in a dimension of its own, like the Tree, but not separate: it connects to the City, maybe to all cities. I’m looking for it, so I find it, and I sign in blood, sealing the bargain. Selling my soul, my Gift. My Self.”

  “It can’t be a prophecy,” said Will. “It might be a warning.”

  “Maybe,” said Ragginbone.

  “I thought Azmodel was his place.” Gaynor was frowning. “I don’t understand about the Tower.”

  “He has many strongholds,” Ragginbone explained. “Azmodel—the Beautiful Valley—is the most ancient. But the Dark Tower is old, nonetheless. Once it had dungeons and arrow slots, a spiral stair where now there is an elevator and an escalator, a stone chamber instead of a carpeted office. It has fallen and been rebuilt, adapting to history. He moves with Time, growing closer to Men, battening on their weaknesses. Long ago the Tower stood in a barren waste; now, as Fern says, it is in every city. He makes it easy for the great and the good to beat a path to his door.”

  “Not Fern,” Will asserted positively. In a rare gesture, he reached for his sister’s hand. “Don’t worry. We know you would never do that.”

  “Worry,” said Ragginbone. “Prophecy is a gray area, but the insights of the Gifted are not to be ignored. What are you thinking, when you sign?”

  “I don’t really want to,” Fern said instantly. “It’s as if I have no choice. There’s someone in danger—someone I love.”

  “That old chestnut,” said Will, and “One of us?” from Gaynor.

  Fern shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “We can take care of ourselves,” Will said.

  “I remember.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. People can learn from their mistakes. You should learn, too, and not just from dreams.”

  “Meaning?” his sister queried.

  “The Gifted are always alone. Not just Alimond and Morgus; think of Zohrâne. Even Ragginbone, in his wizardly days. Power isolates. Like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. Maybe they had a Gift of a kind: who knows what drove them? The point is, they didn’t have friends, only minions. Henchpersons to do their dirty deeds, courtiers to adore them and listen to their rantings. No one they truly cared for or who cared for them, no one to take them out of their little selves. Their lives were bounded in a walnut shell, and they tried to fit the whole world in there with them. Result: madness.”

  “I respect your arguments,” Ragginbone murmured, “but I would like to point out that I at least am not mad.”

  “Debatable,” said Will. “Anyway, you lost your power. More important, you gained Lougarry. She may well have saved your sanity.”

  “Are you saying,” Fern interjected, “that without you lot I might end up like Zohrâne?”

  “Yes,” said Will. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. You keep things from us, you distance yourself, you try to ‘protect’ us. That’s incredibly dangerous—for you. I think that’s the principal danger of the Gift. Power plus solitude equals disassociation from reality. Hence arrogance, paranoia, and so on. You told me if Zohrâne became attached to one of her body slaves, she would have him killed. Your friends and family aren’t your weakness: we’re your strength. You have to accept that.”

  “And the risk?” said Fern.

  “All life is risky. For myself, I believe it’s better for me to die than for you to become a megalomaniac witch queen.”

  “Me too,” said Gaynor, before Fern had a chance to ask.

  “Wisdom,” Ragginbone remarked, “springs from unlikely sources. Your brother may indeed have pinpointed the true peril of Prospero’s Children.”

  “Did they all turn to evil,” Fern asked, “in the end?”

  “Let us say that few turned to good.”

  “I lose either way, don’t I?” said Fern. “My friends, or my
head.”

  “The choice isn’t yours to make,” Will retorted. “We’ve chosen. Forget your dream for the moment, and the Old Spirit. We have to deal with Morgus first.”

  “If we can,” said Fern. She turned to Gaynor. “Did you get hold of a translation of that Welsh stuff?”

  “Mm.”

  “And?”

  “It was all about Wales.”

  They kicked the subject around for a while longer, going nowhere, as Fern had said at the beginning. Yet afterward, she sensed a difference in herself, as if a shadow had been lifted from her mind, a barrier removed. She remembered how alone she had felt when, at sixteen, she first confronted the dark and became aware of her own power. But I am not alone, she thought. I never was. And for all her fears, relinquishing that burden of solitude and ultimate responsibility gave her a new lightness of heart, a different angle on their problems. I will find a way, she concluded. We will find a way.

  That night, what dreams she had were beyond recollection, and she was at peace.

  The conservatory at Wrokeby was a vast semicircular structure built toward the end of the Victorian age, when wealthy botanists headed into the Himalayas with mules and native porters, returning with the stolen flora of the mountains. Once, it had been the home of majestic gardeners, potted palms, wagging bustles, afternoon tea parties. But its north-facing situation, with the trees crowding close outside, meant that little light could pass through the towering glass walls, and any that did seek admittance was rapidly choked out of existence by the jungle inside. The builders had restored broken panes and replaced roof joists, but they had not tried to penetrate the thickets of plant life within. Now there were new shadows to strangle the intrusive light, woven webs whose weight bent the palms. The spider had grown too big for its surroundings, and the miniature rainforest could no longer contain it. There was no prey for it to snare, no food to sate its growing appetite, save at Morgus’s whim. The tiny brain grappled with its overgrown body, filled with a nebulous rage at an existence that was against all instincts. Somehow, it sensed that there should have been webs to spin which did not snap their supports, juicy flies to eat, haphazard mating rituals. Instead, it was trapped in this shrunken world, hand-fed by a creature who was far from arachnoid in appearance. It stayed close to the Tree, finding it familiar, pining for a Tree that constituted its whole universe, and the safety of sheltering under a single leaf.

  Morgus felt its bewilderment and its fury, and was glad.

  She came day and night to look at the fruit. On one occasion the spider drew too close, lured by the scent of edible flesh, but a lightning flare scorched its foreleg, and it withdrew. Nehemet hissed at it, secure in the proximity of her mistress. Her fur would have bristled, but she had none, and only the goose bumps along her back betrayed her. “Do not threaten me, little monster,” Morgus admonished. “Am I not the hand that feeds?” She did not give it a second look, turning back to the fruit, examining its colors in the murky daylight, the gradual development of its features. “It is a head,” she told the goblin cat, and her sudden shortening of breath revealed her eagerness. “It is truly a human head. See the uncurling of its ears, the flattening brow, the hollows around the eyes. A head—but whose? Man or woman, living or dead? The skin is growing paler . . . there is the first tuft of raven hair. Whose head is ripening here for me? And why here, and not on its parent Tree? Ah, my kitten, we shall see. Soon, we shall see.”

  The head matured swiftly in the world of Time. Its complexion was almost white, the shadow of its brows very black. Its hair grew thick and long, a tangle of dense curls that snagged on neighboring twigs and writhed downward like snakes. Dark lashes lay against its cheek. Morgus gazed at it as into a mirror. “It is my sister,” she said at last. “My blood-sister, my twin. Morgun. But why should she come here to haunt me? I saw her on the Eternal Tree long ago. Her fruit withered, she passed the Gate—I know she passed the Gate—her soul cannot come again. Yet here she is: her eyes will open soon. I must understand. When the moon waxes I will draw the circle again, and question the seeresses and the Old Spirits—even the ghouls who gather in graveyards, looking for ghosts to eat. Someone will tell me the answer, if I have to interrogate the Powers themselves! The life of the Tree runs in my veins, and I flow in the sap of its sapling, so it responds to my thought and my need. But why Morgun? I have hardly thought of her in a thousand years. I had hoped it would give me the head of my erstwhile pupil, to show me the way to revenge. It is long overdue. But . . . Morgun? Why Morgun?”

  The cat arched its spine; a flicker of static ran across its bare skin, visible as a leaping spark, but Morgus did not see it.

  It was evening now, and together they stepped out into the sunset, watching the sky kindled to gold behind Farsee Hill, where the silhouette of blasted trees rose up like finger bones. The golden light reached even to the west lawn, long unshaven, stretching the shadow of a veteran oak across the grass. The witch and the cat swam in the light, gilded phantoms of the fading day, until the sun vanished, and the slow dusk crept out of the woods, and the house, purged of its past, stood like an unoccupied tomb, filled with an uneasy expectancy.

  The owl followed close on the dark, cruising on motionless wings. Morgus extended her arm, and it alighted there, speaking in soft owl noises. “So she has not been there,” Morgus said. “I dared not hope for it. But keep watch. She must come out from under her stone sooner or later. Meanwhile, Grodda will give you your reward.”

  The owl sped toward the kitchen windows, and Morgus went back into the house. The cat stayed outside for a while, until the moon rose and an owl-shaped shadow skimmed across its face, flying back to the north.

  A couple of days later Ragginbone returned to the site in King’s Cross with Fern in his swath. He was amused to note the altered manner of the guard on the gate, taking her, perhaps, for a student to Ragginbone’s professor, elevating him from eccentric to academic. She had come straight from work and was dressed accordingly in soft pale gray trousers and collarless jacket, looking elegant and out-of-place as she picked her way across the excavations, followed by admiring glances from the guard and a lingering builder. Beside the bejeaned volunteers she seemed to be a different species, sophisticated and unnatural. Dane Hunter, climbing out of a ditch to greet Ragginbone, surveyed her without enthusiasm. “Your granddaughter?” he hazarded.

  “My friend. Fern Capel. Fern, this is Dane Hunter.” They shook hands formally, hers white and well-manicured, his rough and dry from grubbing in soil and brick dust, with dirt under the nails.

  He said: “You don’t look like an archaeologist.”

  “I’m not. I work in PR. Mr. Watchman—“ she shot Ragginbone a malicious look “—thought you might need some.”

  “It’s an idea,” said Ragginbone, fielding the ball. “You could do with backers. I know Fernanda feels she spends too much time promoting products and not enough promoting causes.”

  Dane said: “I doubt if we could afford you.”

  “Her services would come gratis,” Ragginbone assured him, ignoring Fern’s steely glare. “Her gesture to posterity.”

  “Really.” Dane looked skeptical, Fern irritated by them both. Then her mood changed. They were bending over a stone now fully exposed, his candidate for the altar. Fern, letting her witch senses take over, caught the long-lost scent of blood, the shadow of ancient death—a shadow that could be felt but not seen, lurking in the crevices and at the roots of walls now all but razed. She laid a hand on the bare surface, touching the deep pulse of the earth. Her eyes closed.

  “You’re a psychic?” Dane inquired, conscientiously polite.

  Fern opened her eyes again. “Not exactly,” she said, at her most matter-of-fact. “I’m a witch.”

  “In PR?”

  “Absolutely. I sell largely useless products to people who don’t need them. That takes witchcraft.”

  Dane, taken by surprise, relaxed into a smile. “Are you really interested in archaeology?”<
br />
  “Isn’t everyone?” She glanced down at the stone again. “I think it’s the wrong way up. Fallen forward, maybe, or deliberately overturned. Christians vandalizing a pagan temple—a rival sect—whatever. There is an inscription underneath.”

  “You know, do you?”

  She nodded, ignoring sarcasm. “It’s in a language you won’t recognize. It says . . .” she hesitated “—Uval haadé. Uval néan-charne. I’ll write it down for you if you like.” He did not seem to like, but she searched in her bag for pen and paper. She wrote down the words in block capitals on the back of a business card.

  “And—er—what does it mean?” Dane asked. The smile had gone and his courtesy was wearing thin.

  “The Gate of Death. Well, not Gate . . . Portal is better. Uval means that which opens. The Portal of Death, the Portal to the Abyss. I know you don’t believe me, but this isn’t a spiel. I’m not mad, either.”

  “You look sane, and rather decorative, but appearances can be misleading.”

  “No doubt.” She looked him up and down, as if criticizing his soil-stained garb and student-length hair. “Dig. That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it?” And, turning to Ragginbone: “There’s nothing more here. We may as well go.”

  Hostile female eyes watched as she made her way back across the site to the exit. Dane Hunter turned the card over, scrutinizing it thoughtfully. His fingers left smudge marks on the white surface. Of course, she had been talking rubbish; that air of cool confidence was just a part of her professional artifice. He thrust the card into the back pocket of his jeans and returned to his work.

  Fern summoned a further meeting at her flat on the following Tuesday. This time, she brought Luc. “This is Lucas Walgrim,” she told the others. “He has to join us now. We need him. Luc, this is my brother, Will—Gaynor Mobberley—and a shady friend of ours whom we usually call Ragginbone. Mr. Watchman, if you want to be polite.”