The Black Rose (16 page)

Sardâr turned away in disgust. “If she's to live, then we need to decide what to do with her and her companions. I'm calling a meeting of all the fairies.”

Jack was the only one who didn't take part in the discussion. He knew Ruth was there to ensure the death penalty wasn't dealt out, and he presumed Dannie was feeling responsible for closing the portal in the first place. Jack didn't blame her, though. Now that his initial anger had ebbed, he didn't blame anyone. He just sat at the edge of the glade, gazing at the remnants of the machine and the point where Bál had disappeared. He hadn't been particularly close to the dwarf, but the idea of him drifting alone through the Darkness was chilling.

He had been seated for a few minutes when he caught a glimmer of white light to his left. He turned to look and saw a flick of a bushy tail behind a trunk. Ensuring no one was watching him, he got up and made his way into the forest. As he'd expected, hidden behind a large birch was Inari, etched out of the background in ivory light despite the canopy of leaves.

“What took you so long?”

“You've been around people for days. There's been no chance for me to get to you—”

“Why do you need to hide yourself? I
trust
these people. Can't you just—?”

“It's Lucy and the others. The Cult got them.”

“What! Where?”

“In the Sveta Mountains. They laid a trap for your friends. They've taken them back to Nexus.”

“Why didn't you do anything?”

“You know I can't intervene in your affairs.”

“Can't or won't? You gave me the Shard. You woke me inside that volcano. I'm pretty sure you helped me fight that lobster demon the second time, though that's something we haven't discussed yet. Was Isaac right?
Are
you trustworthy?”

The fox was speechless.

Jack waited only a few moments. Then, shaking his head, he turned and marched back into the glade.

The council was dispersing as he got there, and a group made its way to Nimue, still bolted to the ground by Dannie's arrow. Jack walked straight to her, and Ruth quickened her step, evidently worried he would start battering her with alchemy again.

“What do you know about Lucy Goodman?” Jack bellowed. Part of him thought Nimue looked confused and might actually not know, but he wasn't going to be fooled. He turned to Sardâr. “Get her to reactivate the black mirror.”

“Jack, what's wrong?”

“Just do it!”

Sardâr's forehead creased. He reached inside his tunic and pulled out the slender mirror salvaged from the battlefield at Thorin Salr. The back was carved with the rose emblem of the Cult, but the front was glass, which was clouded with smoke like a window on a foggy day. The elf held it down to the fairy.

“She's not going to do this
willingly,
is she?” Dannie said, apparently pretty sure of the answer already.

“I don't think we need to worry about that,” Sardâr said quietly and dropped the mirror onto Nimue's stomach.

The instant it made contact, the etchings flashed indigo and the smoke seemed to unfurl from behind the glass.

“I thought so,” Sardâr said. “Automatically activated when any Cultist archbishop touches it. But what's this for?”

Jack didn't reply. He grabbed the mirror from Nimue and took it up in both hands. He could see only his reflection distorted by darkness, but with his fingers pressed to the frame, he felt the strangest sensation of convergence. It was as if his senses had been extended, as if his nerve endings ran through the mirror and out across the universe so that he needed only to focus to see anywhere. He squinted at Lucy, Adâ, Hakim, and Vince. He could picture their faces, as if they were right in front of him, and then they
were
right in front of him, a telescopic image in the center of the screen.

He jumped back, letting go of the mirror. As if suspended by invisible cords, it did not fall. The picture had grown to the screen's full size, and as before in King Thorin's throne room, it expanded beyond the edges of the mirror to shroud the glade in shadows. He and all the other onlookers seemed to be standing in a chamber that was completely black, save for a clinically lit white cube in the center that would have fitted several cars.

Lucy and Hakim were seated, Adâ was apparently asleep, and Vince was leaning against a curved wall, flicking his lighter open and shut restlessly. They all looked considerably worse for wear. All of them were bruised and cut across their hands and faces, and their clothes—Arctic-grade furs over their tunics—were tattered and in some places burnt.

“Lucy! Lucy!” But Jack knew she wouldn't be able to hear him. This was just an image, like live CCTV footage. She and the others didn't have a mirror, so they didn't even know they were being watched.

“Where is this?” Sardâr demanded, leaning to grab Nimue by the shoulder and shake her.

The fairy cackled again. “You guessed right before, just for the wrong question. This room is in Nexus; probably in the Precinct of Despair.”

Sardâr dropped Nimue and stood, ashen-faced. He was not looking at any of the watchers. His gaze was fixed upon Adâ, curled upon the ground like a starving cat. He looked as if he was about to reach out and touch her but instead took hold of the mirror and muttered a syllable. In the last moment of brightness before the image was sucked into the glass, Jack thought he saw a tear escape Sardâr's eye and trickle down his angular cheek. But as the natural daylight returned, it was gone.

There was silence. The fairies, from the maple to the cedar, looked aghast. Dannie and Ruth shared a grim expression. Jack could tell what they were thinking, because he was thinking the same. First Bál, and now all four of the other group who had left Thorin Salr had been taken by the Darkness. Their numbers had been sliced to a fraction.

“I think,” Sardâr said after a long time, “that we should deal with this fiend. We need a while to think about everything else.”

Two fairies passed him and, touching Dannie's arrow to dissolve it into the air, hauled Nimue to her feet between them. She was breathing heavily as they half-marched, half-dragged her over to the edge of the glade. Jack followed, keen to see what was to come of her. They dropped her roughly to the ground directly in front of a tree.

An oak drew up to stand over her at his formidable height. “Nimue, you have a criminal record which stretches back long before the events of today. Most recently the Avalon commune of fairies has charged you with environmental destruction and murder. We have all agreed that these crimes deserve the harshest sentence our custom shall allow. Under the Titania Pact, which ended our last civil war, all violence and corporal punishment have been forbidden. We therefore sentence you to a fate of your own design: imprisonment within this tree until the very end of your lifetime.”

Nimue's eyes widened. “No! You cannot! I am an archbishop of the Cult of Dionysus; I cannot be—”

But all were deaf to her protestations.

The oak raised one leafy arm to point directly into the Cultist's face. “Be gone.”

The bark of the tree behind Nimue began to ripple as if it were wind-disturbed water. She was pulled back, yanked by a gale that only affected her. She dropped to the grass, clawing at the mud with her twigs, trying to gain some traction, but it was no use. The raven demon appeared from her shadow and beat its wings, trying to escape the fate of its mistress, but in vain. Nimue's body contorted, flicking between many different figures like an early animation film: Lady Osborne in her nightgown, her human shape in a black cloak, several others they had never seen, and back to the gnarled grey of her fairy body.

She shrieked as her feet disappeared into bark, followed by her legs, torso, arms, and finally her head. The raven demon was sucked in after her, and the moment the tip of its ebony beak passed out of sight, the wood froze.

If Jack had never seen that tree before, he wouldn't have thought anything of it. But, with a little imagination, he could just make out the form of a body frozen in time and two tiny jewels positioned like eyes, below a beak and beating wings.

Jack was listless for the rest of the day. He wasn't afflicted by even one of the emotions he thought he should be feeling: shock at Bál's disappearance into the Darkness, anger for the destruction of the forest, hatred for the Cult, savage pleasure at Nimue's suffering, guilt at Lucy's predicament. It was as if all of them were attempting to cram into his mind at once and had halted each other in the process. Above all, he felt tired: in the wake of the day's events, the rest he had managed to recoup aboard
The Golden Turtle
seemed to have dispersed.

Sardâr and Ruth kept their distance from each other and from him, all taking turns pacing, attempting to sleep, or engaging the fairies in conversation. Jack supposed they must be thinking hard about what to do and within a few hours would have their next move planned out to the tiniest detail. He couldn't even begin to think beyond sleep, and yet whenever he lay down he found himself restless.

The fairies had spent several hours deliberating what to do with the remaining Cultists, during which time the sorcerers were held, incapacitated, by various trees and shrubs. Despite their part in the battle, the fairies were resolute in their pacifism.

Eventually, after ungagging and negotiating with a cruel-looking but obviously intimidated follower of Nimue, the fairies agreed that the Cultists would remain imprisoned in the commune until a given time after the Apollonians' departure, when they would be allowed to go free and return to Nexus. Sardâr had begun to interrogate a Cultist but was obviously too ashamed to extract information by force. It quickly became clear that there was nothing to be got out of them.

As the sun dropped below the tree line and darkness fell, Jack went to sit up against a birch at the edge of the glade. Dannie was a few feet away, engaged in lively conversation with several fairies. The fairies seemed utterly unfazed by the trauma of the sorcerous attack. But then, despite the damage to the forest, they had not sustained a single injury among them. Dannie, unlike the other visitors, had also seemed to bounce back immediately.

That made Jack smile slightly. He really liked Dannie. She was fun to be around and always friendly. He hoped she'd come with them and join the Apollonians, not that he knew where they'd next be going.

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep again. An owl welcomed the night somewhere in the trees behind him. The breeze rustled the leaves slightly. Like Dannie and the fairies, the forest seemed to have recovered remarkably quickly from the Cult attack. He could hear the interplay of Welsh and Cockney accents drifting past him on the night air.

“…so what's the deal with this place? How come we never hear of you down in Albion?”

“We've never had very good relations with your sort. There were several hundred years where our people and yours vied for control of the land: our Republic of Avalon against your Kingdom of Albion.”

“In the end we agreed to a peace treaty: we would control the forests, and you the plains. That lasted pretty well until the humans started clearing the trees to feed the appetite of their new machines. You think you control them, but which of you is really slave to the other?”

“But why don't you fight back? The forest
needs
to be protected.”

“During our last civil war, Nimue was banished for sealing our greatest alchemist, Merlin, inside a tree. You see, that was the irony of her sentence…”

“That war ripped us apart. Our society had never seen such horrors. At the end of the fighting, we swore a vow of peace. But now, I think all of us are reconsidering. We fought alongside you because you overcame the Shard's protections. Perhaps violence is justified to protect the good—maybe there is such thing as a just war.”

“Yeah, how did I do that? Get the Shard, I mean. What's so special about me?”

And Jack was finally asleep.