Silvertongue

by Charlie Fletcher

  “So you must fight the third battle on the ground,” she said, pointing to the middle of the river. “There.”

  “That’s a river,” said George after a beat during which the bell tolled again and his chest squeezed painfully in response, jerking the stone arm.

  “It’s a bridge. A bridge is solid enough ground for a duel,” she said. “Don’t be so picky, boy. It can’t matter a jot where you face your death.”

  Her cheerful callousness needled him.

  “It’s not a bloody bridge,” he said, pointing at the columns sticking out of the water. “It’s just some old bridge supports. They’re not joined up, are they?”

  “Of course they are,” she flounced back. “Don’t be a baby.”

  “You’re impossible,” he said, with a snort of frustration.

  “No I’m not,” she said, almost hurt at the suggestion. “But the bridge is.”

  “I know . . .” he said.

  “No you don’t. It’s the Impossible Bridge. Look . . .”

  He stared more closely but still could see nothing but sturdy, unconnected, red-painted stanchions stretching across the river toward the Dark Knight. He thought of the Impossible Door behind which he and Edie had taken sanctuary, only two, or was it three long nights back? Either way it seemed like a whole other lifetime ago. That had worked, but this didn’t look like it could work, and even if it did, the outcome was going to be the very opposite of sanctuary. It was going to be a fight to the death. And the twinging in his arm and chest were sending very strong hints as to who was likely to die.

  As he looked, the Knight kneed his horse forward. The horse stepped up onto the wall of the embankment, and then—to George’s amazement—out into thin air. It didn’t fall. It just walked forward on the line where a bridge—if there were a bridge—would lie on top of the columns. “How . . . ?” began George, then squinted and looked even harder at what was happening. As the horse walked slowly forward, the snow that was falling started to land. And where it landed, the space took on the distinct contours of a wide road: pavement and two sidewalls just ahead of the Knight’s progress, as if there had been an invisible bridge there all along.

  “It’s the Impossible Bridge,” repeated Ariel, again with that insufferable tone as if that explained everything. “All it requires is a leap of faith.”

  Suddenly George thought of Dictionary’s last words to him.

  He smiled grimly.

  “‘The natural flight of the human mind,’” he said.

  “What?” said the golden girl, hovering closer to him.

  “‘From hope to hope,’” he explained.

  He swallowed. This is it, he thought, looking at the approaching Dark Knight, who was clearly making the bridge as he came.

  This is the moment.

  The moment when I find out who I am.

  The last possible moment when I can run.

  He looked at the empty strip of walkway ribboning away to his left. He tensed. There was nothing and no one in the way to stop him from trying to escape this.

  Instead, or maybe because of this, he stepped up onto the wall and faced the darkness slowly riding toward him on the other side.

  “I’ve done enough running,” he said very quietly to himself.

  And stepped out into thin air.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Back to the Beach

  They fell out of the black strobing passage through the mirrors into gray evening light, the cold tang of sea air and the sharp sting of wind-blown drizzle in their faces.

  If Edie had looked back she’d have seen they had fallen out of the side mirror on the side of a parked lorry in a residential cul-de-sac. Edie didn’t look back, or sideways. One glance had told her where she was, and she knew with a violent twist in her gut exactly where she had to go and how to get there. She’d been this way a hundred times before.

  She ran down a narrow alley between two houses, brushing past dripping blue hydrangeas and breeze-blown tamarisk overhanging garden fences, and came to the sudden light and larger sky at the top of the small bluff overlooking the beach. She hurtled down the cracked concrete steps three at a time, followed by the Raven and the Gunner.

  “Take it easy,” the Gunner puffed.

  “I know where I’m going!” she shouted as she hit the wet promenade and swerved left, nearly falling as she changed direction

  She sprinted past the railings on her right. High tide heaved greasily between the wooden walls, only a narrow shelf of wet pebbles between her and the beckoning blankness of the sea.

  She remembered her dream, but there was no hare and no owl to help her here. She was the helper.

  The doors of the beach huts set into the base of the cliff jolted blurrily closer as she hammered down the wet cement walkway. They were all closed and padlocked, as they always were—all except the one that was open, as she knew it would be.

  Seeing the blackness within stopped her.

  This was her bad place.

  This is where the nightmares came from.

  This is where she had glinted the worst thing.

  If she was so very, very tired, if she was at the end of her tether because it felt like she’d been trying to escape from something since forever began, this was where she had started running. And this was what she had been running from. This was the other end of that tether, and here she was.

  She hadn’t escaped it at all.

  She had been pulled right back.

  She turned away from the open door and jumped down onto the beach in front of it.

  “Edie,” said the Gunner, sliding to a stop behind the metal balustrade and looking down at her. “You all right?”

  “No,” she said flatly. “No, I’m not all right. . . .” She wiped wetness from her face and realized it was not just the drizzle, because drizzle doesn’t taste of salt. “I’m here.”

  She didn’t have time to be embarrassed.

  She leaned down and picked up the biggest stone she could grasp in one hand and climbed back up on the promenade, heading straight for the black doorway with a face hard as the flint she was carrying.

  The Gunner reached out a hand to slow her, but she shrugged out of it and kept on going.

  It was all as she’d seen it before. The white-painted brick walls. The dripping ceiling. The Thermoses, the beach ball, the broken deck chair, and the two plastic seats with the table between them. The beer cans. The bottles. The sour reek of old cigarette smoke.

  Her mother.

  Her mother sat in the gloom on one of the white plastic chairs, looking out at the gray seascape beyond. A cigarette had burned down to a fragile arc of ash in her unmoving hand, ash as gray and burned-out as her eyes.

  Edie had always hated it when drink made her mother’s eyes lose focus and go flat like that. It was as if she had partly gone, partly left, partly died. It was only when she was drunk that her mother let her sadness take over, only then when she became unreachable.

  The stepfather emerged from the shadows, unscrewing the top of another bottle of wine. And of course it was always he who poured the wine in the first place, always he who prodded her mum into another glass.

  “Come on,” he said, blurring the edges of his words as he sat down with the exaggerated care of the truly inebriated and poured a shaky stream of red into the clouded plastic tumbler at her mother’s elbow. “Misery loves company.”

  He cracked open another can of beer, with a cackle, and sucked the foam from the top.

  Her mother shook her head as if waking up from a long, wide-eyed sleep. The ash fell onto the floor, unnoticed.

  “Edie,” she said.

  Edie’s heart stopped dead. Her mouth made silent shapes, and only the Raven saw her eyes become a drowning pool in which both despair and hope fought to survive.

  “Mum?” she whispered.

  Her mother looked right through her.

  “Got to get Edie,” she mumbled, trying to focus on her watch. “Get her tea on. . .
.”

  “She’s got a key,” said the stepfather, belching. “S’nice here.”

  “It’s cold.” Her mother shivered.

  “Come on.” He giggled. “I’ll give you a little cuddle. . . .”

  Edie knew this. The drunker he got, the nastier he got. And the nastier he got, the more babyish his language became. The flint felt smooth and hard in her hand.

  Her mother pushed his hand away.

  “Can’t go anyway.” He shrugged. “Got to meet my mate. You’ll like him.”

  “No,” said her mother. And she got to her feet. “I don’t know why you like it here. It’s creepy. Feels like I’m being watched.”

  “You are!” cried Edie. “I’m here, Mum!”

  Edie lurched forward. She couldn’t help herself. She threw her arms around her mum, trying to bury her face in the coat and sweater she knew so well. The force field that protected the past from the future just neatly slid her off to one side as her mother stepped past, a finger twisting her earring.

  Edie recognized the gesture. It was a tic her mother had; and only now, now that she knew what being a glint was and what a heart stone meant to one, did Edie understand. She longed to be able to explain it to her mother. She knew it would help; she knew that once she had a chance to explain it, the great burden of thinking she was mad would disappear and she wouldn’t have to try and lighten it by looking for forgetfulness in a bottle.

  “Mum!” she shouted.

  The Gunner’s hand clasped her shoulder. “She just can’t hear you, girl,” he said softly.

  “MUM!” she yelled, so loud that it felt like her vocal chords were tearing.

  “I don’t want to meet him,” said her mother, leaning down to pick up her shoulder bag. “I don’t know him, why would I want to?”

  “He’s a laugh; you’ll like him,” said the stepfather, putting his foot on the bag. “Come on, don’t be a spoilsport. He’s heard all about you, he wants to meet you, he’ll be in a right old huff if you go. . . .”

  “Who is he anyway?” said her mother. She kept hold of the bag handles with one hand, but reached for her glass with the other.

  “John, Johnny something. Like the whisky,” he slurred, his S’s skidding all over the place. “Johnny Walker.”

  Edie’d known this was coming, but still the word caught her by surprise. She saw her mother let go of the bag and reach again for her ear, in the way she did when she got agitated, and in that moment Edie saw the sea-glass fragment blaze light.

  “NO!” she shouted. “GET OUT!!! RUN!!!”

  “’E’s a mate from London,” said the stepfather, swigging more beer. “You’ll like him. He’s a right cutup. . . .”

  Edie flashed the memory of the Walker coming after her on the ice, the light from a distant brazier flashing redness on the long dagger he held as he came after her, and she was in motion before the Gunner could pull her back.

  “NO!” she roared, and hit the stepfather with every ounce of power in her body, slamming the sea-smoothed flint into his temple like a sledgehammer.

  The rounded edges of the stone spun out of her tight grip with the force of the impact, but his head didn’t move an inch. He just kept on smiling his nasty smile as the stone flew into the darkness at the back of the hut. Only when the stone hit the back wall with a clatter did he react, turning toward the sound.

  “What was that?” sad Edie’s mother, head coming up in fright.

  “Something fell off the roof,” he said, peering backward.

  Edie grabbed her mother’s arm and tried to yank her to the door. She, of course, didn’t move at all.

  “I hate this place,” she said. “I’m going to go get Edie her tea. She shouldn’t be alone. It’s getting dark. And I want to go see her, see how she’s doing.”

  She turned to the door, pausing to scoop up her bag.

  The door slammed shut.

  And a slightly bored voice said: “Ah, but it’s so much more fun in the dark, don’t you find?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Darkness Invincible

  The moment George stepped off the parapet of the river walk and out into the empty air, the falling snow stopped tumbling to the water below and started to land on the invisible surface of the Impossible Bridge, all around him.

  It felt weird as his leading foot felt unexpectedly solid ground, where his eyes saw nothing but a long drop. But by the time his other foot touched down, the few snowflakes that had already landed were ghosting an outline of solidity beneath him.

  “Right,” he said.

  He took a last look back. Ariel was standing on one foot in midair, her filmy clothing fluttering about her in the gentle breeze, which seemed to blow everywhere she went. She raised a hand and gave George a surprisingly wide smile.

  “Well done, boy, for much more is always lost by fleeing fate than facing it. I wish you well, whatever the outcome.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I think.”

  I am your worst fear. Will you face me? boomed the Dark Knight, in a voice like a thunderclap.

  George felt the vibrations of sound hit him head-on as he kept walking forward. He kept going because he knew something the darkness clearly didn’t: his worst fear had been about his dad. He had worried that he’d died thinking George had meant the last angry words he’d flung at him, unaware they were to be their last words; that he’d died thinking George didn’t love him. He’d lived with the fear that this had somehow been responsible for his dad’s death. But he’d faced that fear when he’d stood the Gunner’s watch on the memorial. He’d faced it and it had evaporated.

  So now he decided that he’d feel frightened but just not show it. And as he moved forward, it seemed to be working. He heard his dad’s voice saying sometimes you just had to walk the walk, even when it was the last thing you felt like doing, and how it actually helped, because once your feet started walking, your heart and your brain had no choice but to follow. He hadn’t understood it then, but now that he was doing it, he knew exactly what it meant.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Are you ready to face your fear? repeated the Knight as George walked right up to the lance.

  And then there was no chance to turn around, because he was too close, and he had stepped past the tip of the lance, reaching for the horse’s head.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But why is my fear hiding?”

  And though his flesh crawled at what his good hand was doing, he plunged his fingers into the eyeholes, through the dark smoke curling out of them, and took a firm grip. He looked up into the eye slits of the Dark Knight’s helmet, and tried to clear his mind as he felt with his hand. The hand tingled, as it had when he mended Spout’s wing, only this time he was not feeling for the place where sundered stone fragments wished to rejoin. He was feeling for the flaws in the metal, the places the welding was weakest. He felt the heat in his hand radiate through the outer sheets of metal. The Knight must have felt it too, because he tried to back up the horse.

  What are you doing, boy? he roared.

  “Using a making hand to mar,” said George. “Like this.”

  And he closed his eyes, felt the flaw in the welding, and with the next toll of the bell he flexed his muscles and ripped the armored front clean off the face of the Night Mare within.

  “HA!”

  There was the sound of a great invisible host roaring in approval and smashing their weapons against their shields like a thunderclap, followed a beat later by a crack of lightning. And in the lightning George saw that the Dark Knight had not ridden alone. Rather, he had ridden as the Last Knight of the Cnihtengild had ridden, before the darkness had taken him over and filled the hollow shell of the man and horse with the blackness of the Night Mare.

  Unknown to himself, the Dark Knight had ridden with all the Knights of the Cnihtengild, the phantom band of war-scarred horsemen now ranged on each side of the Impossible Bridge.

  The Dark Knight saw them at the same time, and reined his h
orse backward toward the City shore. As they reversed, the darkness smoked forward in wisps leaking from the exposed inner void of the horse’s skull.

  Now you die, screamed the darkness. Now the light goes out.

  And he kicked the charger forward, the sharp lance point barreling in through the big flakes of falling snow, straight toward George’s heart.

  The bell tolled again, and in the flash that came with it, George saw the Cnihtengild. He saw that every battle-hardened face was looking at him, not the Dark Knight, to see if he would stand.

  What they didn’t know was that he had passed the moment when he would let himself run.

  He’d taken the leap of faith.

  All that remained, he thought, was the landing.

  He braced one leg at an angle behind himself, twisting his hips so that his chest remained head-on to the Knight.

  Death whistled toward the core of his being, his heart pounding in time with the horse’s hoofbeats.

  And in the moment before impact, he realized he had never, ever felt so calm.

  This was it.

  In what felt like a life spent running, this was the great unavoidable.

  And as he faced it, he abruptly stopped feeling alone.

  He stopped feeling like a lonely boy of thirteen summers.

  He felt older, much older, almost ancient, and stronger than any one person could ever be.

  He felt the great weight of every earlier George, every Chapman, every mother, every father down the long centuries who had lived before him and struggled and made and endured to bring their line to this point in the world, and they were all somehow standing with him, their shoulders to his.

  It was as if that long line of dead men and women had shouted a great “Yes!” and stamped their feet in approval as he straightened his back and hacked his heel into the ground.

  And then it was over.

  His stone arm snapped up and caught the tip of the lance dead center in the open palm of his outspread hand.

  The impact and the forward momentum of the horse and rider jarred the breath out of him and jolted him so badly that his jaw jumped and he bit the side of his tongue by mistake. They slammed him at least twenty feet, but he kept his leg braced and held his footing. A great pile of snow built up behind his foot as it plowed backward.