The Witch Queen (34 page)

“There are no debts between friends,” she said.

“For that also I owe you. I will find a means to repay . . .”

She was growing tired now and she thought he had begun to fade, blurring from her sight. Then, as in a dream, there were strong arms lifting her, carrying her to her bed, and even as sleep supervened she felt the pillow beneath her head, and someone drawing the quilt up to her chin.

About three weeks later, she returned home from work to find a phial on her dressing table that had not been there before. Beside it was a note written in an ill-formed hand on a scrap of her own paper.
You know what this is. A single draft, and your Gift, and all you have accomplished with it, good or bad, will be forgotten. You can start again, no longer my little witch, just Fernanda. Good luck to you, however you choose.

The phial was very small, the size of a perfume bottle, and seemed to be made of rock crystal. As far as she could tell, it contained about a mouthful of clear water. When she held it up it took the light and broke it into rainbow drops that danced and flickered around the walls.

She sat for a while, remembering the caverns of the Underworld where Kal had been her guide, and the silver notes of a fountain now little more than a trickle, all that remained of a spring that had once fed a great river. Its name lived on in legend, though the healing water had all but gone. The well of Lethe.

She closed her hand tight around the phial, but did not touch the stopper.

Summer declined into autumn with little appreciable change in the weather, except that it got wetter. Will’s production company won its first significant commission, involving about six weeks’ filming in the more inaccessible parts of India, as a result of which he decided he needed to cement his relationship with Gaynor by moving into her flat. “With such an unstable job,” he announced, “I need a stable home life. Besides, when some unhappily married creep comes around trying to sob his way into your sympathy, I want him to see my socks in the bathroom. And I want photos of us all over the place. Soppy ones.”

“Next you’ll be saying you want me to get pregnant,” said Gaynor.

“We’ll see about that in due course.”

They gave a party to celebrate and Fern brought Dane, who, perhaps under her influence, had cut his hair short and wore something that might have been a suit if the jacket and trousers had matched. “He’s lovely,” Gaynor told her friend in an aside, hoping desperately that with someone like that Fern might learn to forgive herself, and let go of a past she could not forget.

“Isn’t he?” said Fern, and her expression went cold. “I don’t really know what to do about it. I don’t deserve him.”

As Will was going to be away until the second week in December, they made long-term plans for Christmas. “Family, friends, all together,” said Will, offhandedly including Dane. Fern said nothing either to confirm or deny.

“We could go to Yorkshire,” suggested Abby, Robin Capel’s permanent girlfriend. “The house is big enough.”

“Not Yorkshire,” said Fern, so flatly that no one attempted to disagree with her.

Ragginbone paid Will a visit, a few days later, on one of his occasional trips to London. Hearing about Dane Hunter, he remarked: “I knew something about that excavation was important to Fern. I didn’t pretend to know what.”

“Will she ever be able to put all that business with Lucas Walgrim behind her?” Will inquired.

“Who knows? She is who she is. That is something that cannot change.”

“As long as Dane doesn’t turn out to be the reincarnation of some psychotic Viking or a mad Celtic druid.”

“He may well be,” said Ragginbone. “So may you. Since you can’t remember, what does it matter?”

In late October, Fern and Dane took a weekend break in the Peak District. He had asked her to come to America to meet his family, but she refused, insisting it would be inappropriate as theirs was only a casual affair. The peaks were mostly obscured by rain, but he dragged her out on bracing walks and warmed her up afterward by the log fire in their hotel, and she wished she had more to give him than just the outer layer of her self. She was driving down the motorway on the way home when it happened. That sudden jolting of reality—an image from the spellfire flashing into her mind—a blinding glimpse into the moment ahead. She was in the fast lane, doing perhaps sixty-five, the wipers swishing the rain this way and that across the windshield. On the other side of the central divide there was a lorry coming toward her—huge, dirty, anonymous—she saw it in great detail. And behind the sweep of a single wiper the driver’s face shrank into a skull, and his teeth jutted in a grin of triumph . . .

Glancing around, hand on the horn, she swerved abruptly across the traffic flow, skidding to a halt on the hard shoulder. Dane cried: “What the
hell
—“ but his words were cut off by the scream of tires, a horrific thud, the crunch of metal on metal. Even as Fern moved to evade it the lorry had mounted the crash barrier, bucking like a giant bronco, carried forward by its own weight and slamming straight into the car that had been behind her, mashing it into the road. The two interlocked vehicles slid across the wet asphalt, adding other victims to a pileup that finally stopped about thirty yards back. Dane took one look and reached for his mobile, dialing emergency services with his left hand while his right arm held Fern very tight. She was still clutching the wheel, her teeth starting to chatter from shock. “How did you know?” he said. “How did you know to swing over like that?”

“I’m a w-witch,” she said when she could speak. “I knew.”

It had not been an accident—she realized that only too clearly. The death’s-head was no hallucination; she didn’t need to listen to the news the next day to learn that the driver of the lorry had mysteriously disappeared from the scene of the pileup in which two people in the car behind her had been killed and three others seriously injured. (My fault, whispered a still, small voice in the back of her mind.) She was at the top of Azmordis’s hit list: she always would be.

Until they got her.

That night, for the first time in a long while, she dreamed of Atlantis. She was back in the Past, living it, at one with it, and she was sixteen again, and the burden of her years was so light, so light, and the Fern she was now dwelt in the mind of Fernani, the girl of those far-off days, and danced for joy in the cleanness of her spirit, the freshness of her heart. And there were the lion-colored colonnades, and the slaves sweeping horse dung, and the smell of perfume and spices and dust, and the great disc of the sun beating down on the dome of the temple, and the sound of the drums throbbing like heat on stone, like blood in the brain. In her dream she experienced all the sweetest moments again, jumbled together in a moving mosaic, a wonderful kaleidoscope of images and feelings, taste, touch, scent. She was in the dungeon with Rafarl, and escaping over the rooftops, and supping in his mother’s villa in the sapphire-blue evening, and making love on a beach at sunset where the sand was made of gold and the sea of bronze, and the great arc of the sky hung over all. Rafarl’s face was clear in her vision, and the beauty that came to him when he stood in a fountain shaking the water drops from his hair, or rose from the waves like a sea god, and they walked in the deserted orchard of Tamiszandre plucking the peaches that grew there, silver and golden, and the Fern of today thought her heart would break with happiness to be revisiting her city, her love, her self.

But the throb of the drums grew louder, until the mosaic shattered like glass, and she was in the temple with the priests chanting and Zohrâne opening the Door, and the shadow of the tsunami swept over them, blocking out the sun. The dome broke like an eggshell, and the columns cracked, and the
nympheline
Uuinarde was hurled into the maelstrom, and Fern fled with Rafarl down the tunnel to the harbor with Ixavo the High Priest in pursuit, clutching the wound in his head to stop his brains from oozing out. And they took ship, though it was too late, but at the last she threw herself overboard to delay Ixavo, and saw Rafarl sailing, sailing into the tempest, and thought he was saved. But the hurricane tore the ship apart, the mermaid took Rafarl, and the earthquake swallowed the golden city and everyone in it. The Ultimate Powers buried it deep and forbade even the vision of it to witch and sybil alike. But they cannot forbid my dreams, thought Fern, even as she slept, and in her dream she woke, and wept, wept a pool of tears, like Alice, then a lake, then her tears turned to starlight and she was sitting on the silver shores at the Margin of the World, waiting for the unicorn who would never come again. But because it was a dream he came, and bore her away, bounding through the star spray.

Where are we going?
she asked, and he said:
Home,
and she was glad, though she knew
home
was neither Yorkshire nor London, nor even Atlantis. They rode on, and on, and the constellations were beaten to dust beneath his hooves, and the galaxies unraveled around them and streamed in ribbons through the flying universe.

When will we get there?
she asked, and she knew it was the wrong question, because he answered:
Someday,
and with that word the stars vanished, and the world turned black, and she moved on to another awakening.

She was in the Cave of Roots beneath the Eternal Tree, gazing into the spellfire. She saw the graveyard of dragons in a mountain range beyond the reach of man or beast, the huge bones of one long-dead behemoth soaring upward like the skeleton of a cathedral, the dark-faced man who had come to steal the last dragon’s egg walking under the arched ribs. She met his eyes in the smoke, in the instant before his death, and they were blue as wereflame and seared her like an ice burn. And she cut his head from the Eternal Tree, and brought it back to the real world, to finish what he had begun. He told her he was helpless in that form, without limbs to carry him or heart to care, but
I will be your limbs
, she promised him.
I will be your heart.
But he burned in dragonfire, and passed the Gate, and she knew him no more.

Fern turned over in bed, reaching for the head on the pillow where she had laid it, and started back, because it was not the dragon charmer, it was Luc. He was as pale as his own corpse, and there was blood on his lips, but his eyes lived. “Blood washes out,” he said, “but not the sap of this Tree. My sap is on your pillow, on your hands. Look—“ and he vomited a gush of red, and smiled, and the smile became Rafarl’s, and the head was rolling over and over down the beach, bouncing on juts of rock, spattering her with sap. The tide had gone out, exposing the seabed, and tiny fishes flapped helplessly to and fro, dying in the air. The head of Rafarl lay among the fishes, half sunk in the ooze, watching her sideways. She struggled to get out of the dream, but she was floundering in a quicksand, and the darkness closed over her.

With an effort that felt like lifting gigantic weights she opened her eyes. But the dream went on relentlessly; she was trapped in its maze and it would not release her until she was dreamed out. She was making her way through the city—the unreal city of rain-soaked lights and people with animal faces, beaked and furred and fanged. She reached the Dark Tower, and the elevator whisked her skyward, and she stood in the topmost office with the dripping quill in her hand, and Luc said:
Sign
. And she must have signed, because he was smiling, and his face was changed, becoming both more beautiful and more terrible, and his wings unfurled like angel’s wings, only black. The huge window vanished, and he drew her after him on wings of her own, soaring through the cloud wrack, and the city lights spread out far below, numerous as grains of sand. Ahead they saw the storm clouds piled into top-heavy cliffs, but they flew over them, and beneath them the lightning stabbed earthward, and whole areas of the city were darkened, but Fern knew it did not matter, because Luc said so.
I am Lukastor, Lord of the Serafain. I will show you your destiny
. But now it was all dark below them, blacker than a black hole, and the last grains of light were sucked in, and the storm clouds, and she knew it was the abyss. She too was being sucked downward, and she snatched Luc’s hand, but her fingers slipped through his.
You are too heavy,
he said.
It is your soul that drags you down
. . .

She was floating in a lightless vacuum of utter cold. Every so often a face drifted past, billowing like a jellyfish. Some she recognized, Morgus, Sysselore, Alimond; others were merely familiar. One was just a pair of eyeballs trailing a few thin filaments of nerve. She did not like this part of the dream at all, but it seemed to go on a long time, the floating and the emptiness and the cold that ate into her heart. Eventually there were no more faces. She grew very afraid, and cried out, calling on God, though she was not sure she believed in Him, not the God of conventional religion with His constant demands for worship and repentance. But there He was, drawing her out of the darkness, and she was sitting on a green bank beside Him, having a chat. He looked rather like Ragginbone, only kinder, white-haired and bearded, wearing a sky blue cape.

“How do I stop the dream?” she asked.

“You know how,” he said.

And of course she knew.

She awoke in the pale gray of early morning feeling like a traveler returned from a long, weary voyage. For a while she lay thinking and thinking, conscious of what she must do yet dreading that final irrevocable step. She would have to make the necessary preparations, close every loophole; a single mistake could cost her more than her life. And maybe she should say farewell, to Ragginbone, Lougarry, Bradachin—but no, it would be too hard, she would do what had to be done and leave the explanations to Will. (Will and Gaynor: she must talk to them.) At least now that she had made her decision there was no more need to agonize: she had only to plan, and to act. She had killed—whatever the motive, whatever the circumstances—and there was a price to pay. The price for Luc’s life, and for hers. Now she knew how it must be paid.