by Gwynn White
In the last year of the Second World War, the Russians had reached the Channel. They had battered London with nightly bomber raids launched from captured French airfields. The Cumberland mansion had taken a direct hit. The family had been eliminated down to the tenth or eleventh in line, leaving assorted second cousins to fight over the succession. From that day to this, the lawsuits and countersuits continued to drag on, while the Cumberland Corporation foundered under interim management. Meanwhile nature had reclaimed the ruined mansion. It was the best place in London to hold a party.
Grass rustled along the undercarriage of the convertible. Outside the roofless ruin of the great hall, several cars were already parked. Midges clouded the twilight. From the servants’ wing—the only part of the mansion still intact—drifted music . Someone had brought a portable wireless.
Tonight they had invited only their most trusted confederates. Everyone was at least the niece or nephew of a lord.
Right now, in the Tower of London, their fathers and grandfathers were debating whether to mobilize the army against the Irish pretender. But at the old Cumberland place, there was no debate. All of them agreed that war was bad. The world had had enough of it. First they’d fought the Germans, and then the Russians—were they now to start killing Britons, too? No! There had to be another solution to the problem of Ireland, even if they couldn’t quite think of it.
Millie tapped Vivienne on the arm. “I made this for you, m’lady.” She held out a cake, slightly squashed, with heraldic icing.
Vivienne winced in acute embarrassment. Her paternal arms, the white swan on a green field of House Sauvage, were displayed on an escutcheon of pretense, because her House allowed female succession and she and not her baby brother Francis would inherit their father’s title, superimposed on the Wessex arms of a black lion rampant on a crimson field, quartered with the plain cobalt-blue of Great Britain.
“It’s to congratulate you and the Prince on your engagement,” Millie said.
Tristan and Vivienne both cringed. They had not yet got used to their betrothal. It had been cooked up by their fathers.
“Well, thank you, Millie,” Tristan said, recovering. “That was extremely thoughtful of you. It looks delicious. Who’s got a knife?”
The cake was delicious. They munched it, putting off what they had come here to do. Then the wireless pipped. “This is the Royal Broadcasting Corporation. Welcome to the News at Nine. The pretender to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland, Diarmait MacConn, has repelled an assault by liveried police on Belfast Castle, which he has occupied with his followers since last Saturday. Unconfirmed reports put casualties at six dead and nine wounded. MacConn captured the strategic fastness last week …”
Tristan switched the wireless off. “That’s torn it. They’ll definitely send the army in now.”
“Bloody MacConn,” Emma Llywelyn exclaimed. “Why doesn’t he give up?”
“Well, a lot of people in Ireland are unhappy,” Tristan said. “They’ve been unhappy for the last twelve hundred years or so, but especially since House MacConn lost power. So I suppose he’s got a lot of grassroots support.”
No one looked at Vivienne, the daughter of Niall Sauvage, Earl of Dublin and Lord Protector of Ireland, whose policies had done so much to make the Irish unhappy.
“MacConn and his so-called Irish Royal Army will bend the knee to my father, one way or the other,” Tristan said flatly. “But if we go in with guns blazing, we’ll only make the situation worse. MacConn’s followers have got to be persuaded that Father is the true king. So let’s get on with it.”
“What do you want us to do?” Alec Northumberland said, jumping up.
“Roll back these rugs. I need to write on the floor.”
But the floor was patterned brown linoleum. Tristan’s chalk didn’t show up. “This isn’t working,” he said.
“We could go down into the crypt,” someone suggested. “The floor’s stone.”
“Good idea! Everyone grab a candle.”
“Yes, but that bomb,” William said.
“Don’t be a bore, Wills. We won’t be going near it. Anyway, if it hasn’t exploded yet, it isn’t going to.”
The crypt was the oldest part of the mansion. Round arches humped away into the darkness beyond the candlelight. The feuding Cumberland cousins had taken away all their family saints, but the empty tombs remained. The far end of the crypt had collapsed; during the day, you could see sunlight filtering down through the grass from the hole the second Russian bomb had made, when it crashed through the kitchens and buried itself in the ground.
Now, of course, the crypt was dark. Holding her candle high, Vivienne thought she could make out the gleam of a tailfin projecting from the rubble.
“Yeeeek!” Tabitha shrieked. “A rat!”
The boys gave chase. The rat escaped.
“How are you feeling, Millie?” Tristan said.
“Very well, thank you, your highness,” Millie said.
Tristan spread out his notebook and copied Latin out of it onto the flagstones. Vivienne knew no Latin—and nor, she suspected, did Tristan, really. The language had been banned after the First World War, when the Church was broken up. Nowadays Bibles were only printed in vernacular translations. But Vivienne remembered her aunt Francine, a witch, reading incomprehensible words out of a big Bible bound in yellow calfskin, walking and reading and walking around her laboratory for hours on end while smelly pots bubbled on gas burners. Magicians used the Scriptures for their own twisted purposes. Years after that, Aunt Francine had knelt in front of her brother, shouting, Am I evil? Really, Niall? Am I? And Niall Sauvage had let out a terrible groan and shot his sister in the head.
Vivienne bit the insides of her lips, chasing away that memory. She hoped Tristan wasn’t making any mistakes in his copying.
He erased a whole paragraph with the tail of his shirt and wrote it over again.
Robert Cornwall, Tristan’s best friend, was the only one who dared to say: “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Yes!” Tristan said, sitting back on his heels. He glared at Robert, and the words that came out of his mouth were the ones they were all thinking. “I’ve been incurable all my life. The saints won’t heal me because I’m eeeevil. Right? If I’d been born in the nineteenth century, when magic was legal, I’d have trained as a magician and I would have been the Prince of Wales and no one would have turned a hair. Now, I’m just a prince who isn’t allowed to fight or ride or do anything at all in case I hurt myself, and if any of you were to blab to the press, I’d … well, I don’t know what I’d do!”
“Well, I’m incurable, too,” Robert said. “And my parents let me ride and fight, as long as I play it safe. I bet if my father talked to yours, he could convince him …”
“I don’t think so,” Tristan said without looking up. “You don’t have the court press corps watching your every move. You aren’t the heir to the damned throne.”
Vivienne thought, I’m his betrothed, I ought to stand up for him. But she did not know what to say.
Tristan drew a pentagram. At each of its points there was a chunk of Latin. The center of the pentagram was a circle three feet wide, outlined in yellow chalk.
“All right, done,” he said in his normal voice. “Where’s Millie?”
“Right here, m’lord!”
Vivienne froze. She heard everything he said!
The kitchen-maid was slow but not that slow.
She’d heard Tristan admitting that he was incurable.
We can’t trust her with his secret.
What are we going to do?
Oh God …
Tristan gave no indication that such considerations had occurred to him. “If you wouldn’t mind sitting here, Millie.” He indicated the circle in the middle of the pentagram. “Do you need a chair?”
“Not at all, m’lord.” Millie sat down on the floor.
Tristan directed them to put down their candles at the poin
ts of the pentagram and form a circle outside it. “Hold hands. Don’t be shy.” Vivienne took Tabitha and William’s hands.
Tristan walked behind them and scattered holy water over them, to protect them. “Super-holy,” he said. “I got it off Father’s private shrine to Mother.”
He ducked under their joined hands and stood in the top point of the pentagram. He hung a black stole around his neck and put on a half-mask made of beaten silver. Vivienne remembered that mask as soon as she saw it. It had belonged to Mamblese.
Tristan took firelighters, kindling, and a head-sized bundle out of his satchel. He unwrapped the bundle.
William shrieked, “Stannie, no! That’s Mother!”
Queen Sabrina Bismarck Wessex’s plastinated head gazed serenely at them. The late queen was a puissant saint whose relics had granted cures to tens of thousands of people since her death. Quite apart from its sentimental value, her head was worth millions of pounds. Vivienne was horrified.
“You can’t use her!” William yelled.
“Be quiet, Wills!” Tristan set the plastinated head on the firelighters. “She’ll know where it is if anyone does.” He arranged kindling around the head. “It doesn’t matter, all right?” he said, and struck a match.
Flames leapt up. Before anyone could think of snatching the late queen’s head off the fire, it began to melt, giving off vile black smoke.
Vivienne felt an odd, numb sensation on her face and bare arms. She tried to free her hands from Tabitha’s and Wills’s, but she could not let go. Her skin felt stretched too tight over her bones, and the fire was not hot. It was burning cold.
“Oh God, I don’t like this,” Emma Llywelyn whimpered.
Millie heaved her ungainly body upright.
Even Tristan recoiled.
“Everything here belongs to me!” Millie shouted. “This is my world! You’re just renting, and I want my money. I want my money! I want tribute and fame! Again, again, repeat after me! No, I won’t! I won’t!” She stared around wildly. “Where am I?”
“M … Mother?” Tristan stammered.
Vivienne forced words through her numb lips. “It’s not your mother! It’s something else! It’s gone wrong, Stannie. Make it stop!”
Tristan drew himself up. But he didn’t try to make it stop. He tried to make it work.
“Spirit, whatsoever thou be’st, answer me! Where is Worldcracker?”
Worldcracker was the magical sword that had belonged to Tristan’s father, and to his grandfather and his great-grandfather. It had come to Britain’s aid in her hour of mortal peril, not once but twice, helping the British to defeat first the Germans, and then, a couple of short decades later, the Russians. But at the end of the last war, in hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Moscow, Harold Wessex had lost Worldcracker. He had come home a hero—without the sword that had turned a good king into a murderer of millions.
“Worldcracker? That doesn’t belong to you,” Millie said.
The words twisted like knives in Vivienne’s ears. It was the same thing the Irish Royal Army—the IRA—said, when they argued that the Wessexes had lost their mandate to rule when they lost Worldcracker.
“It’s my father’s,” Tristan said. “He needs it back! Where is it?”
Millie batted her eyelashes like an odious little girl. “I don’t know, but someone here does!” She looked around at them, and Vivienne almost choked. A palpable sense of evil emanated from the kitchen-maid. “One of your friends is deceiving you, Your Highness. Which of them is it?” Bubbles of saliva burst on Millie’s lips. “I’ll give you three guesses!”
Vivienne found her voice. “Do something, Tristan! Make it go away!”
Millie cocked her head at her. “You shall gain a kingdom and lose your heart’s desire.”
“What about me?” Peter Lancashire shouted from the other side of the circle. “What’s my fortune?”
Then they were all shouting.
“Who’s going to win The Arches?”
“Who am I going to marry?”
“Will the fortunes of my House be restored?”
“Does God exist?”
“Why is there so much suffering in the world?”
Millie turned from one to the other of them. “None of you have any future!” she shrieked. “You’re all going to die!”
William tore his hand out of Vivienne’s. He shouted, “You’re not my mother! You’re something horrible from the Otherworld. Go away, go away, go AWAY!” In a frenzy, he rushed at Millie.
“Watch out! The circle!” Tristan threw himself at William to block him.
Vivienne didn’t see which brother’s foot landed on the circle inside the pentagram, smearing it.
Millie charged at the gap between Vivienne and Peter Lancashire. They broke apart before her. She darted into the shadows of the crypt, moving faster than you would have thought possible on those dumpy little legs.
“Get her! Get her!” Peter bellowed. The boys drew their swords, spreading out. The girls flanked their brothers with their daggers in their hands.
Tristan ran up the stairs.
Vivienne followed. Outside, it was full dark, still hot. Cicadas droned. Tristan wrestled with the latch of the convertible’s boot and lifted out their spare jerrycan of petrol. “Look in the other cars,” he shouted.
“What are you doing?” Vivienne pleaded.
“It’s one of the Elder Gods! You can’t slay something like that with steel! Only fire! Quick, before she gets away!”
Vivienne found a jerrycan in the back seat of the Llywelyns’ car. She struggled back down the steps after Tristan. Screams and yells came from the far end of the crypt. Petrol sloshed over her shoes.
“Get back, everyone!” Tristan bawled. “Get back, get back! Up the stairs! Get back, Wills, watch out! Oh, by the saints, Alec, careful, don’t touch—”
Vivienne did not feel the explosion or hear it. The world was simply ripped apart.
1
Val
Thirty-three years later. August 12th, 1979. Belfast
Valery Sullivan’s grandmother said, “Are you going down the town? Don’t. There’s going to be trouble today.”
“I’ll be back before dark.”
“You’re looking for Alyx O’Braonain, are you? Then you’ve got the right idea. Where there’s trouble, there she’ll be, like a crow following the dustmen.”
Val couldn’t think of a clever response to that. He kissed his grandmother on the cheek and set out through the summer afternoon.
The marchers had set off from the Aching Head estate while Val was still sleeping off last night’s hangover. He hurried to catch up. The route of the march had been devised to avoid loyalist areas: it wound past pockets of terraced housing, abandoned buildings, and forty-year-old bombsites. Cops in the forest-green livery of House Sauvage guarded the mouths of side streets. “What about you, boys,” Val called out in high spirits, teasing them. They looked nervous, as well they might. This was the zenith of the marching season, the anniversary of the Uprising of 1956.
He caught up with the parade on the Shankill Road. Drums thundered. Tricked-out jeeps towed flatbed trailers, each bearing a freshly painted plaster statue of a saint. As well as that, people had brought out their household saints: they were marching with them on their shoulders in feretory chests daubed with hagiographic pictures. Holy dust swirled in the air, flung by the priests standing in the open backs of the jeeps. The men riding the float conducted a sort of rough triage, beckoning to the sickest supplicants and hauling them up so they could touch the bases of the statues, which had actual miraculous relics inside. Getting rare, those were, and the chance to touch them for free was rarer yet.
Not that they would do Val any good, even if he could touch them.
He was an incurable.
Where was Alyx?
Behind the parade, the street looked like a battlefield. Exhaust fumes belching from the jeeps, bodies everywhere. Miracle cures were always followed b
y a period of deep sleep. Proper medical facilities had rooms where you could sleep off your cure.
“Glory, glory, glory to Ireland!” sang the marchers. “Glory, glory to the heroes of the Uprising! For they fell on them in fury at Belfast Castle, and there they made the craven English sing!”
“Up Eire!” Val shouted, and a dozen voices echoed the slogan.
Val could see the vanguard now, a clump of men with long wooden staves—the only weapon permitted to the lowborn.
“Glory, glory, glory to Ireland! Glory, glory to the heroes of the Uprising! What’s a land without defenses, what’s a man without a blade? Give us the right to bear arms now, so we sing!”
The parade spilled into Donegall Square. A line of khaki-clad British soldiers stood at attention in the middle of the square, several ranks deep. Muddy LongHOGs—armored jeeps with extended wheelbases—were drawn up at both ends of the line. Sauvage-green fire engines stood in reserve, their high-powered hoses snaking from the trucks to the hydrants at the edges of the square. Here the IRA parade overlapped with the route of the other parade scheduled today.
The loyalists claimed this as their own holy day. After all, on that day thirty-three years ago, they had won.
If the dueling parades were to meet, the saints would end the day working overtime to mend cracked heads.
The British army was here to stop that from happening.
Children screeched and pointed at people on the other side of the square. The tail end of the loyalist parade.
A lone IRA man ran into the square, whirling his stave around his head in a challenge.
“Independence for Ireland!”
“Up Eire!”
“I, R, motherfecking A!”
Sandwiched between the two sides, an English officer stood on the roof of one of the LongHOGs, shouting into a loudhailer.
The IRA vanguard levelled their staves and charged. The soldiers lowered their rifles. The charge faltered and broke up.
