The Witch Queen (2 page)

Part One

Succor

I

It was New Year’s Eve 2000. Under the eaves of the Wrokewood, the ancient house of Wrokeby normally brooded in silence, a haphazard sprawl of huddled rooms, writhen staircases, arthritic beams, and creaking floors, its thick walls attacked from without by monstrous creepers and gnawed from within by mice, beetles, and dry rot. English Heritage had no mandate here: shadows prowled the empty corridors, drafts fingered the drapes, water demons gurgled in the plumbing. The Fitzherberts who originally built the house had, through the vicissitudes of history, subsequently knocked it down, razed it, burnt it, and built it up again, constructing the priest’s hole, burrowing the secret passages, and locking unwanted wives and lunatic relatives in the more inaccessible attics until the family expired of inbreeding and ownership passed to a private trust. Now it was leased to members of the nouveau riche, who enjoyed decrying its many inconveniences and complained formally only when the domestic staff fell through the moldering floorboards and threatened to sue. The latest tenant was one Kaspar Walgrim, an investment banker with a self-made reputation for cast-iron judgment and stainless steel integrity. He liked to mention the house in passing to colleagues and clients, but he rarely got around to visiting it. Until tonight. Tonight, Wrokeby was having a ball.

Lights had invaded the unoccupied rooms and furtive corridors: clusters of candles, fairy stars set in flower trumpets, globes that spun and flashed. The shadows were confused, shredded into tissue-thin layers and dancing a tarantella across floor and walls; the glancing illumination showed costumes historical and fantastical, fantastical-historical, and merely erotic wandering the unhallowed halls. Music blared and thumped from various sources: Abba in the ballroom, Queen in the gallery, grunge in the stables. The Norman church tower that was the oldest part of the building had been hung with red lanterns, and stray guests sat on the twisting stair smoking, snorting, and pill popping, until some of them could actually see the headless ghost of William Fitzherbert watching them in horror from under his own arm. Spiders that had lurked undisturbed for generations scuttled into hiding. In the kitchen, a poltergeist worked among the drinks, adding unexpected ingredients, but no one noticed.

Suddenly, all over the house—all over the country—the music stopped. Midnight struck. Those who were still conscious laughed and wept and kissed and hugged with more than their customary exuberance: it was, after all, the second millennium, and mere survival was something worth celebrating. The unsteady throng caroled “Auld Lang Syne,” a ballad written expressly to be sung by inebriates. Some revelers removed masks, others removed clothing (not necessarily their own). One hapless youth threw up over the balustrade of the gallery in the misguided belief that he was vomiting into the moat. There was no moat. In the dining hall, a beauty with long black hair and in a trailing gown of tattered chiffon refused to unmask, telling her light-hearted molester: “I am Morgause, queen of air and darkness. Who are you to look upon the unknown enchantment of my face?”

“More—gauze?” hazarded her admirer, touching the chiffon.

“Sister of Morgan Le Fay,” said a celebrated literary critic, thinly disguised under the scaly features and curling horns of a low-grade demon. “Mother—according to some—of the traitor Mordred. I think the lady has been reading T. H. White.”

“Who was he?” asked a tall blonde in a leather corselette, sporting short spiked hair and long spiked heels. Behind a mask of scarlet feathers her eyes gleamed black. She did not listen to the answer; instead, her lips moved on words that the demon critic could not quite hear.

After a brief tussle, Morgause lost her visor and a couple of hairpieces, revealing a flushed Dana Walgrim, daughter of their host. She lunged at her molester, stumbled over her dress, and crashed to the floor; they heard the thud of her head hitting the parquet. There was a moment when the conversation stopped dead. Then people rushed forward and said the things people usually do under the circumstances: “Lift her head—No, don’t move her—She’s not badly hurt—There’s no blood—Give her air—Get some water—Give her
brandy
—She’ll come around.” She did not come around. Someone went to look for her brother; someone else called an ambulance. “No point,” said Lucas Walgrim, arriving on the scene with the slightly blank expression of a person who has gone from very drunk to very sober in a matter of seconds. “We’ll take her ourselves. My car’s in the drive.”

“You’ll lose your license,” said a nervous pirate.

“I’ll be careful.”

He scooped Dana into his arms; helpful hands supported her head and hitched up the long folds of her dress. As they went out the literary critic opined, turning back to the spike-haired blonde, “Drugs. And they only let her out of rehab three months ago.”

But the blonde had vanished.

In a small room some distance from the action, Kaspar Walgrim was oblivious to his daughter’s misfortune. One or two people had gone to search for him, thinking that news of the accident might be of interest, although father and child were barely on speaking terms. But they could not find him. The room where Walgrim sat was reached through the back of a wardrobe in the main bedchamber, the yielding panels revealing not a secret country of snow and magic, but an office equipped by a previous owner with an obsolete computer on the desk and books jacketed thickly with dust. Beside the computer lay a pristine sheet of paper headed
Tenancy Agreement
. Words wrote themselves in strangely spiky italics across the page. Kaspar Walgrim was not watching. His flannel-gray eyes had misted over like a windshield in cold weather. He was handsome in a chilly, bankeresque fashion, with an adamantine jaw and a mouth like the slit in a money box, but his present rigidity of expression was unnatural, the stony blankness of a zombie. The angled desk lamp illumined his face from below, underwriting browbone and cheekbone and cupping his eyes in pouches of light. At his hand stood a glass filled with a red liquid that was not wine. Behind him, a solitary voice dripped words into his ears as smoothly as honey from a spoon. A hand with supple fingers and nails like silver claws crept along his shoulder. “I like this place,” said the voice. “It will suit me. You will be happy to rent it to me . . . for nothing. For gratitude. For succor.
Per siéquor. Escri né luthor.
You will be happy . . .”

“I will be happy.”

“It is well. You will remember how I healed your spirit, in gratitude, as in a dream, a vision. You will remember sensation, pleasure, peace.” The hand slid down across his chest; the man gave a deep groan that might have been ecstasy. “Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“Finish your drink.”

Kaspar Walgrim drank. The liquid in his glass held the light as if it were trapped there.

The spiked blond hair was screwed into a ball on the desk. The knife-blade heels prowled to and fro, stabbing the floorboards. The bird mask seemed to blend with the face of its wearer, transforming her into some exotic raptor, unhuman and predatory.

When he was told, Kaspar Walgrim signed the paper.

The year was barely an hour old when a cab pulled up outside a house in Pimlico. This was smart Pimlico, the part that likes to pretend it is tonier than it is. The house was cream-colored Georgian in a square of the same, which surrounded a garden that fenced off would-be trespassers with genteel railings. Two young women got out of the taxi, fumbling for their respective wallets. One found hers and paid the fare; the other scattered the contents of her handbag on the pavement and bent down to retrieve them, snatching at a stray tampon. The girl who paid was slender and not very tall, perhaps five foot five: the streetlamp glowed on the auburn lowlights in her short designer haircut. Her coat hung open to reveal a minimalist figure, gray chiffoned and silver frosted for the occasion. Her features might have been described as elfin if it had not been for a glossy coating of makeup and an immaculate veneer of self-assurance. She looked exquisitely groomed, successful, competent—she had booked the taxi, one of the few available, three months in advance and had negotiated both fare and tip at the time. Her name was Fern Capel.

She was a witch.

Her companion gave up on the tampon, which had rolled into the gutter, collected her other belongings, and straightened up. She had a lot of heavy dark hair that had started the evening piled on her head but was now beginning to escape from bondage, a wayward wrap, and a dress patterned in sequined flowers that was slightly the wrong shape for the body inside. Her face was in a state of nature save for a little blusher and some lipstick, most of which had been smudged off. For all that she had an elusive attraction that her friend lacked, an air of warmth and vulnerability. The deep-set eyes were soft behind concealing lashes and the faintly tragic mouth suggested a temperament too often prone to both sympathy and empathy. In fact, Gaynor Mobberley was not long out of her latest disastrous relationship, this time with a neurotic flautist who had trashed her flat when she attempted to end the affair. She had been staying with Fern ever since.

They went indoors and up the stairs to the second-floor apartment. “It was a good party,” Gaynor hazarded, extricating the few remaining pins and an overburdened butterfly clip from her hair.

“No, it wasn’t,” said Fern. “It was dire. The food was quiche and the champagne was blanc de blanc. We only went for the view of the fireworks. Like all the other guests. What were you discussing so intimately with our host?”

“He and Vanessa are having problems,” said Gaynor unhappily. “He wants to buy me lunch and tell me all about it.”

“You attract men with hang-ups like a blocked drain attracts flies,” Fern said brutally. “So what did you say?”

Gaynor fluffed. “I couldn’t think of an excuse to get out of it.”

“You don’t need an excuse. Just say no. Like the antidrug campaign.” Fern pressed the button on her answering machine, which was flashing to indicate a message.

A male voice invaded the room on a wave of background noise. “Hi, sis. Just ringing to wish you a Happy New Year. I think we’re in Ulan Bator, but I’m not quite sure: the fermented mare’s milk tends to cloud my geography. Anyway, we’re in a yurt somewhere and a wizened rustic is strumming his souzouki . . .”

“Bouzouki,” murmured Fern. “Which is Greek, not Mongolian. Idiot.” What music they could hear was pure disco, Eastern Eurostyle.

“
Shine jiliin bayar hurgeye
, as they say over here,” her brother concluded. “Be seeing you.”
Bleep
.

“
Shin jillian
what?” echoed Gaynor.

“God knows,” said Fern. “He’s probably showing off. Still,” she added rather too pointedly, “he hasn’t any hang-ups.”

“I know,” said Gaynor, reminded uncomfortably of her abortive non-affair with Fern’s younger brother. “That’s what scared me. It gave me nothing to hold on to. Anyhow, he’s obviously airbrushed me from his memory. You said you told him I was staying here, but . . . well, he didn’t even mention my name.”

“He doesn’t have to,” Fern responded. “He wouldn’t normally bother to phone just to wish me Happy New Year. I suspect he called for your benefit, not mine.”

“We never even slept together,” Gaynor said. “Just one kiss . . .”

“Exactly,” said Fern. “You’re the one that got away. A career angler like Will could never get over that. You couldn’t have done better if you’d tried.” Gaynor flushed. “I’m sorry,” Fern resumed. “I know you weren’t trying. Look . . . there’s a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the fridge. Let’s have our own celebration.”

They discarded coats and wraps, kicked off their shoes. Fern deposited her jewelry on a low table, took a couple of glasses from a cabinet, and fetched the champagne. After a cautious interval, the cork gave a satisfactory pop. “Happy New Year.” Fern curled up in a big armchair, tucking her legs under her.

Gaynor, on the sofa, sat knees together, feet apart. “Happy New Century. It’s got to be better than the old one.”

“It doesn’t start quite yet,” her friend pointed out. “Two thousand and one is the first year of the century. This is the in-between year, the millennium year. The year everything can change.”

“Will it?” asked Gaynor. “Can you
see
?”

“I’m a witch, not a seeress. Everything can change any year. Any
day
. Dates aren’t magical—I think. All the same . . .” Her expression altered, hardening to alertness. She set down her glass. “There’s something here. Now. Something . . . that doesn’t belong.” Her skin prickled with an unearthly static. The striation of green in her eyes seemed to intensify until they shone with a feline brilliance between the shadow-painted lids. Her gaze was fixed on the shelving at the far end of the room, where a vase rocked slightly on its base for no visible reason. Without looking, she reached for the switch on the table lamp. There was a click, and the room was in semidarkness. In the corner beside the vase there seemed to be a nucleus of shadow deeper than those around it. The light had concealed it, but in the gloom it had substance and the suggestion of a shape. A very small shape, hunch-shouldered and shrinking from the witch’s stare. The glow of the streetlamps filtering through the curtains tinted the dark with a faint orange glimmer, and as Gaynor’s vision adjusted, it appeared to her that the shape was trembling, though that might have been the uncertainty of its materialization. It began to fade, but Fern moved her hand with a Command hardly louder than a whisper, soft strange words that seemed to travel through the air like a zephyr of power.
“Vissari! Inbar fiassé . . .”
The shadow condensed, petrifying into solidity. Fern pressed the light switch.