The Witch Queen (10 page)

“Actually,” said Gaynor, “just tea would be good. I’ll make it.”

“No, it’s all right.” Fern headed for the kitchen.

“Are you—are you going to tell Will about this?”

“Probably.” There was a pause filled with the noise of gurgling water, and the click of a switch on the kettle. “Why?”

Gaynor stiffened her sinews, screwing her courage, such as it was, to the sticking point. “I just think you should. Because he’s your brother. Because three heads are better than two. Because we’re a team.”

“Are we?”

“You said so.”

“I think that was your idea.” Fern came to the kitchen doorway, propping herself against the frame. “Last time you both nearly got killed. That’s not going to happen again. I can protect myself, but I can’t always protect you, so you
must
—you must
promise
—do exactly what I say, and stay out of trouble. I don’t like the sound of this witch. I didn’t fully understand what Skuldunder meant when he said she opened the abyss, but I do now. You must promise me—”

“No,” said Gaynor baldly. “I mean, I could say it, but it wouldn’t be true, and anyway, you haven’t the
right
. I may not be Gifted like you, but that doesn’t mean you can control me or exclude me. Or Will. I got involved last time because you were in denial, and now I’m involved for good. You can’t change that.” She spoke in a hurry, determined to get the words out before Fern could interrupt or she lost her nerve.

After a minute the set look that was becoming habitual to Fern relaxed. “Sorry,” she said unexpectedly. “I’ve been a control freak from childhood. Years of managing Dad. Just . . . be careful this time. No rushing off into the dragon’s den. Please.”

“No fear,” said Gaynor with an uncertain smile.

Fern returned to the kettle, reemerging presently with two mugs of tea, both overfull. As she set them down the contents of the left one splashed over the rim. “Damn,” she said. “Not again.” She sucked at the injury, then lowered her hand, extending it until it was directly under the lamplight. “Gaynor . . .” The scald mark faded even as she watched, leaving her skin unblemished. There was no other burn to be seen.

“What did you do?” Gaynor demanded. “Is it more magic?”

“Maybe,” said Fern, “but not mine.” There was a long moment while recollection and doubt turned over in her mind. “This happened before . . . when I set fire to Morgus. My hand was burned. Kal made me dip it in the river . . .”

“The river healed you, didn’t it?” Gaynor said. “It was the Styx. Remember Achilles. Supposing . . . you’re invulnerable? I mean, your hand . . . Have you hurt it at all since then?”

“I don’t know. A scratch or two. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“You might not have noticed,” Gaynor said.

“There’s only one way to find out,” said Fern. She thrust her hand into the nearest candle flame. Gaynor saw her face whiten and her lips clench and cried out in protest. Fern withdrew it, trembling: her palm was red and already puckering into blisters. But as they watched the blisters sank, the angry ridges smoothed, the red dimmed to pink and vanished altogether. They stared at each other, incredulous and amazed. Then Fern got up and fetched a fruit knife from the kitchen. “It works for burns,” she said. “Let’s try something different.” She jabbed the blade into her finger. The cut opened, filling with blood—and closed, flesh binding with flesh, leaving no scar.

“Please don’t try breaking any bones,” Gaynor begged. “I’ve never been into self-abuse, even if it’s someone else.”

“I don’t think I could,” said Fern. “It may heal straight after, but I feel pain first.”

They were still discussing the implications of their discovery when a glance at the clock showed a startled Gaynor that it was past three. “Stay over,” Fern suggested. “You left your washcloth behind anyway, and I think the Body Shop night cream must be yours.”

Gaynor was already in bed when Fern appeared in the doorway, silhouetted against the light beyond. Gaynor could not see her face clearly, but she was somehow aware that it had changed. “If the river healed my hand,” Fern said, “supposing—supposing it healed Morgus?”

“She was dead,” Gaynor insisted. “You said she was dead.”

“She was alive when she crawled to the river and threw herself in. I never saw the body. I should have thought of it before. She knew the power of the river: that’s why she did it. And if it worked—if it healed her—then she must be invulnerable now, mustn’t she?
Completely
invulnerable. Invincible.”

“We don’t
know
,” said Gaynor unhappily.

“No, we don’t,” Fern agreed. “It’s late, we’re tired, this may be only a brainstorm. In the morning everything will look different . . .”

“I hope so,” Gaynor said.

In the morning it was a gray, ordinary sort of day, the kind of day on which it is difficult to believe in witches and dark sorcery and impossible to believe in summer. But Fern had seen many such days and she was not to be deceived, even in the heart of London: she could sense the evil moving under the skin of the city. She left Gaynor with assurances that she would tell her everything and went to work, trying to focus on the forthcoming magazine launch, and failing. Lucas rang just before lunch, saying could she come to the clinic that evening. The assumption that her time was his annoyed her, but instinct told her she was being petty so she agreed.

“She’s in love,” opined a colleague, watching her through a glass partition. “She has all the symptoms: abstraction, absent-mindedness, personal calls from unknown men . . .”

“She doesn’t have a glow of happiness,” said a PA.

“Happiness? What’s that got to do with love? You poor innocent girl . . .”

Fern, oblivious to the speculation she aroused, retouched her makeup before leaving the office and took a taxi to the Queen Square clinic. Lucas was waiting for her in reception. She registered privately that he was definitely attractive, or might be if he smiled. He did not smile. He said hello, thanked her for coming, and suggested: “Call me Luc,” when she greeted him formally. L-U-C, he explained, like the French. Poser, she decided. They went up in an elevator, passed an office where a male nurse nodded a greeting, and walked the length of a corridor to a private room with an impeccable display of flowers and the customary array of life support systems. There was a view over the square, a white glimpse of sky atop the buildings. The obligatory water jug was untouched, the bed linen drawn up smoothly under the sleeper’s arms. Fern found herself thinking: This is how my family felt, when it was me. This is what they saw. She had seen herself in dream or vision, when her spirit was far away, and it seemed to her this girl’s face was the same, pale and empty, a wax mask framed in the dark shadows of her hair. She was sure now, if she had ever doubted, that Dana Walgrim’s soul had been stolen, torn from its fleshly home and sent who knew where. But there was one difference that struck her disagreeably. Fern knew she had been watched over, protected—by onetime wizard and present tramp Ragginbone, by her father, her brother, her friend; by the local vicar and his wife. Her vacant body had been constantly guarded and cared for. Yet Dana seemed to have only her brother and the nurses. The flowers had been professionally arranged. There was nothing personal in the room, nothing disordered. No one had sat on the bed or moved the chairs all day. “Where are the rest of your family?” Fern asked. “Surely there should be people here—relatives, friends?”

“She didn’t have any real friends,” Luc said, not noticing the insidious past tense. “My father comes now and then. His helplessness distresses him.”

“Yes,” said Fern ambiguously. “It is distressing.”

“Her best friend went to Australia about a year ago.”

“Call her,” said Fern. “Fly her over here. You can afford it.” A statement, not a question. “It’s important for her to know that she’s loved, that people want her back.”

“Do you think she can
see
—?”

“Maybe.” She remembered the Atlantean veil that Gaynor had knotted round her shoulders, a scarf of protection. Dana could have no such thing, but there were other possibilities. “Does she still have a special toy from when she was a child—a favorite teddy or something?”

“I never thought of that.” Luc frowned. “Stupid of me. There was a teddy bear that used to belong to my grandmother; it was called William—never Bill, always William, I don’t know why. One of its ears fell off and the au pair sewed it on again the wrong way around. I suspect it’s an antique, probably worth a fortune in today’s market. Dana might still have it. I’ll go over to her flat later.”

“Good.”

“It won’t help to find it, though, will it? Are you just giving me something to do? Keep him occupied, keep him from panicking, make him feel
useful
.” The light eyes held hers.

“I told you,” Fern said, “it will help her to know she’s loved. She has to
want
to come back, or she may not be able to.”

“I’ve tried to be here for her.” His tone was level, but the words sounded faintly defensive.

“And before?” Fern inquired, almost without thinking.

He did not answer. He was holding his sister’s hand, looking down into her face. “Have you any idea where she’s gone?”

“I have an idea,” Fern admitted. “I just don’t know if it’s the right one. I saw someone last night who told me something that might be relevant.”

“Research, or coincidence?”

“Not research, but . . . there are no coincidences, only patterns. Fragments, so they say, of the greater pattern. It depends on what you believe.”

“No pattern,” Luc said bleakly. “Just chaos.” And then: “What did you learn?”

“I’m not sure yet. I need you to answer a couple of questions.”

“Okay.”

“What’s the name of your father’s country house where your sister fainted?”

“Wrokeby,” he said. “With a W.” He saw the slight alteration in her expression. “Was that what you wanted—needed—to hear?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Afraid?”

“Never mind. It ties in, but there’s still too much I don’t understand. At that party, were there many people you didn’t know?”

“About half of them, I should think. Anyway, I told you, everyone was in fancy dress. Costumes, wigs, bizarre makeup, masks. I couldn’t always recognize the ones I
did
know.”

“The person I want would be a woman—”

“That really cuts down the list of suspects.”

Fern ignored his sarcasm. “Perhaps dressed as a witch.”

“There must have been several witches. No pointy hats: the glamorous kind. Come to think of it, Dana went as a witch of sorts. Yards of ragged chiffon and hair extensions. Medieval meets New Age. Not Morgan Le Fay, but some name like that. She’d been reading T. H. White.”

He saw Fern stiffen; for a moment, her face was as pale as the girl in the bed.

“Morgus?”

“I think so.”

Fern went to the window; her fingers gripped the sill. In the cloud-cast sky, a chink of blue opened up, like an illusion of hope. She thought: Morgus is out there. She’s out there and she’s invulnerable. And if she isn’t looking for me, then I have to look for her. At Wrokeby—Wrokeby with a W. Her stomach knotted in fear; her heartbeat quickened. I’m not ready. I can’t face her, not again, not yet, not now. If she cannot be killed . . . She struggled to conquer physical weakness and mental block. It seemed to her a long time before she turned around, managing at least the semblance of calm.

“I must go away,” she said. “This weekend. I have to go to Yorkshire. There’s someone I need to consult.” Like a doctor, she thought, a specialist—in witchcraft. “I’ll call you when I get back.”

“You’d better have all my numbers.” He gave her a business card with office and cell phone, wrote his home number on the back. “Should I really fly her friend over from Oz? She may not want to come: she’s pregnant.”

“Leave it for now.”

She’s scared, he thought. Behind that immaculate face, she’s really scared . . .

He said: “So what can I do—apart from the teddy bear?”

“Think of her,” said Fern. “You have the Gift. Look for her in your dreams. You can find all sorts of things in dreams.”

“I know,” he said.

The dream came to him when he was barely asleep, plunging him from a state of half-waking into a world of turbulent darkness, with no interim of quiet slumber, no gradual descent through the many layers of the subconscious. This was not the sleep-spun region of fairy nightmares and haphazard imaginings: this was a different reality, violent and harsh. He stood on wooden planks that heaved and tilted, clinging to a great wheel. Water streamed across the boards and black rain drove in his face and lashed at his body. His clothes were clammy rags, his long hair—he had worn long hair, in his teens—whipped around his neck, almost cutting his skin. He was on the deck of a ship—no, a boat, some kind of fishing vessel, less than forty feet long, with a single mast and sail splitting under the impact of a savage wind. Giant waves reared up like cliffs on either hand, spume capped; thunder boomed; greenish lightning darted from the tumult of the clouds. There were other people on the boat with him, half a dozen or so, hauling on the rigging, clutching the base of the mast, but he could not call out to them, he was isolated in a vortex of chaos. His teeth chattered from terror and cold.

As long as he could remember, he had been afraid of the sea. In childhood, his worst nightmares had been of a huge tsunami, a great wall of blue-green water rolling over the land to engulf him. He climbed the nearest hills, but they were never high enough, and he would waken, sweat sodden and shaking, convinced he was drowning. His father made him learn to swim at five, believing that would cure him, but the enforced proximity of water taught him only to hide his fear, not to conquer it. The dreams faded as he grew older, but not the phobia. He once spent three days on a friend’s yacht, a trip undertaken in a spirit of icy determination, and the whole time he was pale and silent, unable to eat. His friend thought he was seasick; but he was never seasick. After his mother’s death in a car crash when he was nineteen he woke gasping from a dream that he was actually drowned, lying on the seabed while tiny creatures picked at his flesh and his bones poked through and a mermaid with eyes like bits of glass came to stare at him. And now here he was, pitchforked somehow onto a tiny boat in the heart of a hurricane. He did not know how he came there, or why; he knew only fear. He thought: This is madness, folly and madness, we must use the engines, radio for help; but there were no engines, no radio. He heard the hissing crack. Lightning struck the mast, and it broke. The sail was in shreds. Someone screamed, perhaps a man overboard, a dreadful long ululation that sounded hardly human anymore; but he could do nothing. He hung on to the helm because that was all there was. And at last it came to him that he was in charge, he was the captain, he had led the others into this, the madness and the folly were all his. The realization dragged him down like a great stone, down through the breaking timbers of the boat into the black water. And there was the mermaid with her strange flat eyes, her living hair crackling with storm static, her arms reaching for him.