In as few words as possible, Jack told them of his meeting with Catling just outside Marble Arch Station, and of subsequent events.
“It was a warning,” he concluded. “If Noah and I try it again…”
“She’s scared,” said Noah. “What she did tonight proves it. We came too close, Jack.”
Jack glanced at Grace, who was sitting in a chair, her head resting back, her eyes closed. A small vein throbbed in her throat, and Jack wished he’d had a chance to speak with her alone without either her mother or the entire tribe of Eaving’s Sisters about. They hadn’t had a chance, in fact, since their walk along Lambeth Embankment, and Jack needed not only to reassure himself that she was all right after this recent incident, but that she hadn’t had any second thoughts…
He was mildly appalled at how anxious he was regarding the latter.
“I don’t want Catling to come closer,” Jack said.
Noah had seen the direction of Jack’s eyes. “Jack, Catling can’t hurt Grace! Their fates are tied too closely. Tonight was bluff only.”
“A ‘bluff’ which has killed a score of people and injured many more,” Jack said. “And you’re not included in whatever Grace’s and Catling’s co-fate might be. Any of you, Noah, could be killed by Catling’s malevolence.”
“Not me,” said Noah quietly. “She needs me to execute the final Dance of the Flowers with you.”
“Then Ecub or Erith or Matilda, damn it!” Jack said.
“This was going to get bloody sooner or later,” Harry said. “There is only one question. What to do?”
“I get the bands of Troy,” said Jack. “I need them.”
Silvius, who had expected Jack to say this, watched with some wry amusement the interplay throughout the room at Jack’s words. Grace tensed, opening her eyes and looking first at Jack, then at Ariadne. Ariadne smiled—one of her better, predatory smiles—and, having acknowledged Grace’s glance, then winked at Silvius. Noah noticed none of the interplay involving Grace and Ariadne, and merely smiled at Jack.
Oh dear, Silvius thought, I expect that Jack has forgotten to take Noah aside for a quiet word about this.
“I agree,” Noah said. “When?”
“Sunday,” Jack said, “the spring equinox. Noah—”
She had smiled at his words, then broke in before he could continue. “Jack, I have waited so many years to give these bands back to you. I—”
“Noah,” Jack said, “Grace will be the one to hand them to me. I’m sorry. I should have said something earlier.”
Noah’s face froze. Her eyes twitched over to her daughter, who had flushed and was looking studiously at the hands in her lap, then she looked back at Jack. “You can’t want Grace…” she started to say, then drifted to a halt in confusion.
There was a silence. Noah’s face suddenly flamed a far deeper colour than her daughter’s. “I apologise,” she said, glancing first at Weyland—who was looking stolidly ahead at the wall as if he found it fascinating—then around the circle of faces. “That didn’t come out the way I meant it. I, um, meant that…oh, gods…”
“Noah, stop, please,” Jack said. “Grace needs to do it because the bands never left her. They’re resting within her flesh.”
Noah stared at him. She’d just made a total fool of herself, and for no reason. She wanted to be angry at Jack (he should have told her earlier, he should have said instantly why it was that Grace needed to be the one to hand over the bands), but all she felt was more stupidly foolish than ever.
That was a little outburst befitting Cornelia, not Noah. Not Eaving.
“I had no idea, Grace,” Noah said, wincing internally at how stiff that sounded. “It seems there is so much I have no idea about.”
With that she rose with as much dignity as she could summon, and walked to the door.
Jack spoke before she got there. “I should have said something to you earlier, Noah. I meant to, before that damn bomb fell. I do apologise.”
Noah nodded, and put a hand on the doorknob.
“Nonetheless,” Jack continued, his voice a little firmer, “I want Grace.”
Having been silently congratulating his son on his apology, Silvius drew in a silent breath at that last. Jack had phrased his response in the same way as Noah had originally objected, and, when all was said and done, Silvius knew that neither had been referring to the kingship bands of Troy.
Well, well, so now it was all out in the open. Silvius met Ariadne’s eyes. She was very watchful, very careful. One of the greatest, if most difficult, alliances in history, that between Brutus and Cornelia, had just been shattered. A new alliance would need to be built, and soon, if there was even the slightest chance that they could win out against the Troy Game.
“Grace will do very well,” Ariadne said, as if everyone had been talking of nothing more dramatic than who should arrange the flowers for the Sunday church services.
Noah finally opened the door, and walked out.
Grace started to rise, but Weyland waved her down.
“No,” he said, shooting a baleful glare at Jack, “let me talk to her.”
EIGHT
Faerie Hill Manor
Friday, 20th September 1940
“I can’t believe I said that. I just can’t believe it.” Noah had retreated to the downstairs cloakroom, and it was here that Weyland found her.
He leaned against the wall, arms crossed, looking steadily at Noah. He didn’t know what to say, or rather, Weyland didn’t know how to phrase what he was feeling without making the situation infinitely worse.
“I’m sorry,” Noah said again, barely able to look Weyland in the eye.
“I didn’t realise you still loved Jack so much.”
Noah closed her eyes briefly. What could she say?
“I don’t love him, Weyland. Not in the way I love you.”
Weyland’s face twisted. “Ah. That makes it all better, then.”
“Weyland…” All Noah really wanted to do was walk back into that drawing room and deliver Jack a stinging slap across his face. Telling her in front of everyone else, with no warning, all stated so baldly (“I want Grace”) was vintage Brutus. Damn it! She had deserved some warning, surely?
What Noah knew she needed to do was repair all the vast cracks which had appeared in her relationship with Weyland with that one, stupid remark.
You can’t want Grace…
“Weyland.” Noah thought about reaching out to touch him, then reconsidered it with one look at his stony face. “My pride has been hurt today, Weyland. Not my heart.”
“Really.”
Noah couldn’t blame him for being so hurt, for closing himself off. Had that been scripted she could not have done a better task of ruining the fragile trust existing between them.
She twisted her mouth ruefully. “I don’t love him, Weyland. Not as Cornelia once did. Not as Caela did. Not even as I did before I’d come to know you. I think what has happened,” she gave a rueful laugh to match her expression and hoped it sounded genuine, “was that I had grown used to the idea of Jack pining for me. Jack had fled England after I’d rejected him for you. Then he’d spent almost three hundred years yearning for me. He’d come home, desperate for me. And what does he do? Toss away all of that tradition for our daughter.”
Noah stopped there. She hadn’t even come close to thinking about that. Jack wanted Grace. Their daughter…
“Aye, it is dented pride, Weyland. Nothing more, although that is hard enough. One of the pillars of my life has been Jack’s useless yearning for what he could not have—me. Now I discover he yearns for something, someone, he can well have. My world is out of kilter, both as a woman and as a mother.” Please believe me, Weyland. Please. I don’t want to lose you.
Weyland, who had caught her mind-sent message, more than anything wanted to believe her. His entire world depended on believing her. But could he?
And Grace. Jack wanted Grace. Like Noah, Weyland hadn’t even come close to thinkin
g about that, and he didn’t think he was capable of doing so right now.
“I do not want to lose you, either,” Weyland said very softly, “but I am terribly afraid I already have.”
Jack stood beside Grace on the terrace outside the drawing room. It was cold, and they were well wrapped in coats, but their pale faces and pinched cheeks had less to do with the weather than with what had happened earlier.
“I didn’t do that very well, did I?” Jack said tiredly.
“I feel so guilty,” Grace said. “My mother…I feel as if I shouldn’t even think of stepping into her shoes.”
“Grace, don’t say that. Please. Don’t feel guilty.”
Grace gave a small, hollow laugh. “I am a daughter, Jack, and daughters always feel guilty when it comes to their mothers.”
Jack didn’t know what to say. He had meant to talk to Noah beforehand, but then came the bomb, and he hadn’t thought before he’d mentioned the bands, and then Noah spoke up…
He lifted a hand, sliding it under the collar of Grace’s coat so he cradled the back of her head.
“Are you all right?” Now the fingers of his other hand were running lightly over the abrasions on her temple. “The bomb didn’t hurt you?”
Grace was looking at some vague point over Jack’s shoulder. “I’m fine, Jack.”
“Ariadne said you’ve done well with your training.”
“Yes.”
Christ! This was going badly. “I wish we’d had a chance to speak earlier. I wanted to talk to you about Thursday night last week. You know. On Lambeth Embankment.” Now he was sounding like an insecure teenager. “I meant what I said about Noah. I meant what I said about you. But I wonder…I’m afraid that…perhaps after some time…I meant to talk to you earlier, but didn’t get the chance and…oh Jesus, I am not doing well here.”
At least now she was looking at him, her eyes brilliant in her pinched face.
“Is it still okay with you,” he said, “that I get to know you better?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Are you happy to hand the bands to me?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
“Don’t worry about Catling,” Jack said. “Between Malcolm and me, we can wrap Ambersbury Banks in so much druidic magic even Catling won’t be able to penetrate it.”
“I wasn’t worried about Catling,” Grace said.
“There is something else I need to tell you. Something good,” he added. Jack was reading Grace better now, and he recognised her instant wariness whenever he mentioned he needed to talk to her about something. He wondered what series of childhood grave “talks” had so inhibited her.
“When we danced together on Ambersbury Banks, Grace, you shook my entire world. As a Mistress of the Labyrinth you are my perfect match. Your power not only matches mine, but it fits in beside it so seamlessly that together any Game we danced would be so flawless, so powerful, that nothing could ever attack it. Grace, our labyrinthine powers and abilities are entirely, harmoniously matched. Your mother and I together are good, but you and I…you and I will be legendary.”
“Oh.”
Jack realised suddenly what that must have sounded like. “Grace” was immaterial. All Jack wanted was her power. “And, oh,” he said, very softly, both his hands cupping her face now, “to find this in a woman who is…so…damn…beautiful. It is not the Mistress I want to get to know, Grace—I already know her—but the woman. It is those brief glimpses of the woman that you allow me that tie my tongue in knots.”
“Oh,” she said again, but at least that time she sounded a little happier than the last.
“Can I take you out to dinner some time. Some time soon?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
Grace looked so sweet at that point, and her face felt so warm under his hands, that Jack found himself leaning slightly towards her.
Then, just before he kissed her, the French windows to the drawing room opened and Noah walked out.
Noah sent Jack one of those blank, deeply meaningful looks, and asked if she could speak to her daughter alone. Jack’s hands tightened briefly about Grace’s face, then he smiled at her, stepped back, and left.
Once he had gone, Noah took a deep breath, clenched her fists deep inside her coat pockets, and hoped she hadn’t lost her daughter as she was very much afraid she had lost Weyland.
“Grace,” she said, “I have made an utter fool of myself, and I need to apologise to you as much as I do to Weyland.”
Grace made no response, but at least she was looking at her mother, and Noah took some heart from that.
“I have grown too used to having Jack pine for me,” Noah said. “It was a horrible shock to my pride to realise he’d abandoned me to pine after you instead.”
Noah gave a small, wan smile. “And it was a terrible shock to realise that I have been so blind when it came to you.”
“Mother—”
Noah pulled her hands out of her pockets and pulled Grace into an embrace. “I have no call either on Jack or on the Troy Game, whether it be its destruction or its completion. Grace, the world is yours if you want it. Take it, please, with all my love.”
Grace hugged her mother tightly, then leaned back a little. “Ariadne has taught me what she knows, but you could teach me so much more. Will you?”
Noah took a deep breath. “No. Grace, I don’t think I should. I think you and I…” What Noah wanted to say was that she thought there were too many barriers between her and Grace, not the least of them being Jack, and those barriers would make teaching impossible. But she could hardly say that. “I’m too close to you, Grace. Too blind. I should have known Catling had been coming to you, and that the bands never left you, and I didn’t. Ariadne has the clarity of distance.” Noah gave a soft laugh. “She’ll drive you hard, which is what you need, whereas I’d always be watching what I said around you. Grace, I love you dearly for asking, and I didn’t deserve that, but Ariadne would be better for you.”
“And Jack…do you mind?”
“I am worried about my daughter. I would worry whatever man came courting her. And Jack has so much baggage.” Noah let a mischievous smile spread over her face. “But, he’s a great deal better than Brutus. Just don’t let him push you, Grace. Do what you want, not what he wants for you.”
NINE
London
Friday, 20th September to Saturday, 21st September 1940
GRACE SPEAKS
So much had happened over the past week or so that it proved difficult to process it all and put it in calm order. Everything from that strange walk down Lambeth Embankment with Jack, to going to live and train with Ariadne, to discovering that I had four of the kingship bands of Troy buried within my flesh, and, on top of all this, to have Jack tell me that I was apparently his perfect labyrinthine match as well.
I found it difficult to believe that I, who had lived her entire life at the edge of the circle, was now very much in the heart of it.
Most of all I found it difficult to believe that Jack—Brutus-William-Louis-Jack—who had spent the past few thousand years aching for my mother, should now abandon that ache to profess an interest in me.
I don’t think I would have believed it, save for that painful scene at Faerie Hill Manor when my mother said, You can’t want Grace (mirroring my own belief, precisely), and then Jack had replied, I want Grace. It wasn’t just the words, but the expressions on everyone’s faces, as well. There was disbelief, amazement, intrigue and, as eyes slid my way, interest.
None of that had been staged, none of it rehearsed, all of it open, painful, wounding. Jack had told my mother he didn’t want her any more.
That he wanted me.
I spent a great deal of time sitting on my bed in Ariadne’s apartment, just thinking, learning to feel.
I was changing, becoming more confident—learning to live, learning who I was—and that was due almost as much to Ariadne as it was to Jack. Hitherto, I’d spent my life cringing in corners; Ariadne,
through her training and the fact that she treated me as an equal, gave me the confidence to dare on my own.
I had never believed that I could ever be anything other than the most mediocre of Mistresses. I had never dared hope that any man might find me as fascinating as my mother. I’d never hoped to be important to anyone (in anything other than a negative way).
What really surprised me was how much I liked this new state of being. People were beginning to see me.
I had feared Jack’s arrival, and while I certainly could not pretend that it hadn’t been painful, in a variety of ways, since his arrival, I had begun to live.
I began, inch by inch, to believe there might be some hope for me. That somehow, Jack might be able to find a way to destroy the Troy Game, and save me in the process.
On Saturday, Jack took me out to dinner. Ariadne took one look at the clothes I had brought with me, sniffed, and produced something from her wardrobe that I might wear. Amazingly, it wasn’t scarlet, and not even too revealing, but a lovely ice-blue dress of some clingy material that I actually felt comfortable wearing —although I knew that a year ago I probably would have cringed at wearing it.
Jack took me to a restaurant in Chelsea.
I had a wonderful time.
We didn’t talk about anything that had been said between us at Lambeth Embankment, or about what had been said at Faerie Hill Manor the day he’d told everyone, my mother included, that I carried the bands within me.
We didn’t even talk about the Troy Game.
Instead, we chatted very much as we had that Christmas when Jack and Harry had kept me company with my pain on the terrace. I discovered I very much liked talking to Jack, and that he found no effort in talking to me. We talked mostly about what he’d done and what he’d seen over his lives. Nothing too demanding—funny, humorous tales, as well as some more reflective ones.
It was partway through the evening when I realised, with a jolt, that Jack wasn’t going to push. He would leave it up to me, whatever I wanted, and all I needed was to ask. I felt a weight lift away from my shoulders and, remarkably, I discovered I was enjoying myself, and that I was quite at ease.
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