The Giants’ Dance
Robert Carter

For Gerald Wiley, Four Candles.

‘First there were nine,

Then nine became seven,

And seven became five.

Now, as sure as the Ages decline,

Three are no more,

But one is alive.’

The Black Book of Tara

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

PART ONE JEOPARDY’S DILEMMA

CHAPTER ONE THE BLAZING

CHAPTER TWO LITTLE SLAUGHTER

CHAPTER THREE WHAT LIES WITHIN

CHAPTER FOUR THE LIGN OF THE ASH TREE

CHAPTER FIVE MAGICIAN, HEAL THYSELF!

CHAPTER SIX AN UNWELCOME GUEST

CHAPTER SEVEN A GOOD NIGHT’S REST

PART TWO A LOSING BATTLE

CHAPTER EIGHT THIS BLIGHTED LAND

CHAPTER NINE STONEHUNTERS

CHAPTER TEN THE MAD BARON

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE FLIES

CHAPTER TWELVE CAPTIVES

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE KINDLY STUMP

CHAPTER FIFTEEN A THIEF AT LUDFORD

CHAPTER SIXTEEN MOTHER BRIG

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE HOSTS GATHER

PART THREE MADNESS AT LUDFORD

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN HONEY MEAD

CHAPTER NINETEEN A TOAST BY THE DUKE

CHAPTER TWENTY THE MADNESS GROWS

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A GLIMPSE OF THE ENEMY

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO RAW MEAT

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE THE BLOOD STONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR FLESH ANEW

PART FOUR THE TURNING OF THE TIDE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE TURLOCH’S RING

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX CASTLE CORBEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN THE DRAGON’S JAWS

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT JASPER

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE THE NIGHT FLIER

CHAPTER THIRTY THE DUEL

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE A SURFEIT AT DELAMPREY

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO THE SECRET WEAPON

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE IN THE AFTERMATH

AUTHOR’S NOTE

APPENDIX I THE OGDOAD

APPENDIX II THE LORC

APPENDIX III THE LORC IN OUR WORLD

THE STORY CONTINUES IN

About the Author

By Robert Carter

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
THE STORY SO FAR

The Giants’ Dance is the second book in the Language of Stones cycle. The first book, called The Language of Stones, recounted the story of Willand, a boy whose life was changed forever when the wizard, Gwydion, arrived at the village of Nether Norton in the Vale.

Gwydion, it is revealed, brought Will to the Vale when he was a baby, and has returned to reclaim him on his thirteenth birthday. Before Will leaves, Breona, the woman Will has always thought of as his mother, hangs about his neck a talisman of green stone which is carved in the likeness of a leaping salmon. She tells him how she found it inside his blanket when he first came into her arms, and says that it should go with him now he is entering the wide world.

No one from Nether Norton has ever been out of the Vale, and the wide world seems terrifying to Will. Gwydion explains that he must leave the Vale for his own good. Twice he tries to run away and go home, but each time he is prevented by Gwydion’s magic, and eventually the wizard tells him they are being hunted by a fearsome enemy. At first, Will imagines it must be the Sightless Ones, the sinister fellowship of tax collectors who both squeeze the common people and engage in crooked politics with the lords of the Realm, but it soon becomes clear that a far more formidable foe is looking for them. Gwydion will drop only vague hints about this, but he says that Will is a ‘Child of Destiny’ – one whose coming has been foretold in the Black Book.

Soon they arrive at a gloomy tower in the depths of the Wychwoode, and there Will is lodged with the grotesque Lord Strange, a man who is afflicted by a vile spell and who wears the head of a boar. Gwydion leaves Will to live in the tower all summer long, and there he is taught to read and write. He also learns from the local Wise Woman something of the ‘redes of magic’ – these are curious rules that reveal the wisdom of the world and enable magic to be done. But Will’s spirit rebels against Lord Strange. He secretly looks in a forbidden book and reads certain spells, which he then uses for the unworthy purpose of trying to impress a pretty girl. What he attracts instead is the marish hag, a dangerous supernatural creature that inhabits the ancient wood. He is almost drowned by the hag, and only saved by Gwydion’s return.

But Will has also gained friends in the Wychwoode, among them the mysterious Green Man to whom he renders an unwitting service, and the girl, Willow, with whom he discovers Grendon Mill. This, it turns out, is Lord Strange’s secret armoury, where men have cut down the great oaks of a sacred grove to roast into charcoal so that weapons of war may be forged.

When Gwydion returns, he shows his great displeasure at Lord Strange’s activities. In turn, the hog-headed lord blames King Hal whose preparations for war are being fed by the mill. The wizard then leaves angrily, taking Will with him.

As they travel south Will is asked if he knows about King Arthur. He says he knows about him from old tales. Gwydion tells him that the tales about the sword in the stone speak about an Arthur who became king a thousand years ago, but that he was only the second incarnation of an original Arthur. That Arthur was an adventurer who lived in the time of the First Men in the far distant past, and travelled from the land of Albion into the Realm Below to bring out sacred objects known as ‘the Hallows’. Moreover, there is a prophetic verse that speaks of a third and final incarnation of Arthur…

Will begins to feel uncomfortable because it seems that the wizard is convinced that Will himself is that third incarnation.

Unfortunately, the prophecy is confirmed at every turn. At Uff, Will recognizes the White Horse, and stands upon the Dragon’s Mound where he experiences a vision of an army massing below. The earth yields up the gift of a horn to him, and in Severed Neck Woods Will is given the freedom of the wildwood by the Green Man himself.

They come at last to the royal hunting lodge of Clarendon, where Gwydion warns the weakling monarch, and asks for aid in a vital magical mission that will prevent the Realm from sliding into war. But the royal court is already deeply under the influence of the beautiful but greedy queen and her violent ally, Duke Edgar of Mells.

The queen is pregnant, and it seems to Will that Duke Edgar is the father. Will also suspects that the gentle king has been poisoned by them. And he notices a sinister figure lurking nearby, invisible to everyone but Will and the queen. Only later does he learn that this is the sorcerer, Maskull, Gwydion’s arch-enemy, who, among other things, is trying to find Will and kill him. Fortunately, Maskull does not realize Will is present, but even so events are about to take a turn for the worse. Gwydion’s request for royal aid is refused, and he is attacked by Duke Edgar, and forced to employ a powerful vanishing spell, which is accomplished only just in the nick of time.

Where Will and Gwydion vanish to is a sacred place, even by the standards of the Blessed Isle. They appear on cliff tops high above the sea, standing on the westernmost point of land in the whole world. Here Gwydion renews his strength and explains to Will about ‘the lorc’. This is a network of powerful earth streams that extend throughout the Isles. Long ago, he says, an array of standing stones was set up on these streams of power by an ancient race, the fae, who lived at the time of the First Men, but who long ago retired into the Realm Below. Each stone is filled with an immense quantity of harm.

According to the Black Book, these ‘battlestones’ were disposed across the Isles with the intention of repelling invasions. The fae believed that despotic sorcerers would one day arise in the Tortured Lands and begin to enslave men’s minds with a powerful idea called the Great Lie. In time the Isles themselves would face conquest, and their people, the First Men, would be enslaved – unless the lorc was erected as a defence. After much debate, the battlestones were wrought and put in place, and the secrets of the lorc bequeathed to the First Men when the fae withdrew.

For many centuries, the Isles remained free from interference. The Age of Trees passed into a second, lesser Age. Then the First Men failed, and the Isles became the haunt of giants and fire-breathing wyrms. When a third Age dawned, the Age of Iron, the hero-king, Brea arose and set foot upon the shores of Albion. He vanquished the giants and proclaimed the Realm, settling the land once again. After that the Realm went unmolested for eighty and more generations, until the time when, as the fae had foreseen, the Slavers’ power burgeoned in the east. By the time of King Caswalan, the sorcerers of the Tortured Lands had spread the Great Lie far and wide. They commanded huge armies, and made no secret of their desire to conquer the Isles. Their first coming, a thousand years after the landing of Brea, was repulsed. But soon afterwards the secret of the lorc was betrayed and its protective power undermined. The invading Slavers were then able to block the vital flows of earth power by building in stone. They shattered the Realm into many shards with their slave roads, and so the lorc was broken. But by Will’s time the slave roads are more than a thousand years old. Many have begun to fall into ruin, and the lorc, so long inactive, has begun to awaken…

Gwydion tells Will that he urgently needs to find and uproot the battlestones or there will be a bloodbath. Each stone will mark a place of great slaughter, and the ensuing chaos will enable Maskull to gain control of the mechanisms of fate. If Maskull is allowed to steer the Realm it will slide towards a devastating future – a future wholly without magic, and one in which strife and terror will reign for five hundred years.

Will and the wizard sail back from the Blessed Isle, and soon afterwards encounter a skeleton inside a yew tree. It is the remains of a lad Will’s age (and with a similar name) who has recently gone missing. He has been magically murdered. It is grisly evidence that Will is still being sought by Maskull. It cannot be long before he realizes that the wizard’s young bag-carrier is his quarry, and so Gwydion decides that Will must once more be lodged in a place of comparative safety.

Meanwhile, Gwydion makes absolutely sure that Will is Arthur’s third incarnation, by stirring up his latent magical talents and teaching him to ‘scry’. And so, using Will’s partly-fledged abilities and the wizard’s command of ancient lore they manage to locate their first battlestone, the Dragon Stone. As they dig it up, Will experiences for the first time the frightening mental disturbances caused when such stones are threatened, but eventually Gwydion wraps it in binding spells and they take it to a place where Gwydion thinks it may be temporarily stored.

Once at Castle Foderingham, the stone is carefully mortared into a dungeon under the keep – Gwydion hopes it will remain dormant there while he searches for further fragments of the Black Book in order to discover how to drain the stone of its harm. But the owner of Castle Foderingham is Duke Richard who, with some justice, considers himself to be the rightful king of the Realm. He has just discovered that his claim to the throne has been fatally weakened because the queen has at last given birth to a son. He is also already aware that the boy is not the king’s child, but fathered by Duke Edgar, who happens to be Richard’s political rival. Richard must do something about this, and soon. And Gwydion realizes that he must accompany Duke Richard on his urgent mission to the great city of Trinovant, or affairs will certainly take a turn for the worse. Thus, Will is abandoned once more. Now he must live with the duke’s family and the captive battlestone. He is told that under no circumstances must the Dragon Stone be interfered with.

As the weeks become months at Castle Foderingham, Will turns from boy to man. He begins to learn lordly ways alongside Duke Richard’s sons. But while he learns how to ride and hunt and fight as they do, he also starts to understand more about his own developing magical talents. He is befriended by the old herbalist, Wortmaster Gort, and battles with the duke’s fierce heir, Edward. One night, despite Will’s warnings, Edward acquires a set of keys and leads his many brothers and sisters down to visit the Dragon Stone. There, though they do not understand it at the time, they are stricken by the stone, and none more so than Edward’s brother, Edmund.

Life at Foderingham settles down again, but soon a wagon train of new weapons bound for the king’s armoury is captured by Duke Richard’s men, and Will is unexpectedly reunited with Willow, the girl he met in the Wychwoode. As vassals of Lord Strange, she and her father had been set to drive one of the ox-wagons from Grendon Mill to Trinovant, but they were intercepted by one of Duke Richard’s allies. When Will sees how scared they are of returning home to face Lord Strange’s wrath, he begs the duchess that they be attached to Duke Richard’s household, and she agrees.

Willow says that Will is turning into a young lord. Will thinks there might be more to Willow’s unlikely arrival than meets the eye – perhaps the Dragon Stone is warping the fate of everyone around it, as Gwydion has hinted it may do. Perhaps they are all riding for a fall.

As winter closes in, the news from Trinovant is sketchy, but Will learns that Gwydion’s patient diplomacy has so far failed to settle peace upon the factions. Despite having extracted the Dragon Stone the influence of the reawakening array of battlestones continues to increase. The harm contained within them begins to corrupt the political atmosphere. Greed, vengeance and malice begin to get the better of the spirit of compromise within the opposing parties, and the Realm slips ever closer to war.

Will’s fears grow when Duke Richard gathers his armies and moves his household to Ludford. This is a great castle, deep in the hills of the west. As soon as he arrives, Will’s sensitivity to the stones’ influence begins to grow beyond his control. A bout of suspicion overtakes him. He feels that Edward is becoming his rival for Willow’s affections, and so acute does his jealousy become that he begins to fear for his sanity. When Gwydion appears Will says he believes the duke has fetched the Dragon Stone to Ludford and is trying to use it to his own advantage. Gwydion settles his fears and then gives Will a choice: he can either stay at Ludford and fight with Edward for Willow’s favour, or he can venture out upon the land as Gwydion now must, and help in the tracking down of the other battlestones – and especially the crucial Doomstone, which appears to control the others. Will reluctantly chooses to follow the wizard, and Gwydion says that this brave decision is yet another proof that he is indeed the Child of Destiny that was foretold.

Gwydion now explains Maskull’s intentions. The two magicians are the last remaining members of an ancient wizardly council of nine whose task it was to direct the progress of the world along the true path. As Age succeeded Age their numbers have shrunk, until there are now only two, but one of the nine was always destined to become ‘the Betrayer’. When three wizards remained there was still room for doubt, but as soon as the phantarch, Semias, failed it became clear that Gwydion’s long-held suspicions about Maskull must have been right. Maskull has now thrown aside all pretences of guardianship and is working openly upon a plan of immense selfishness. As a sorcerer – one who misuses magic to his own benefit – he is seeking to direct the future along a path of his own choosing. It is one that will concentrate power in his own hands, but will also entail a new Age of Slavery and War far more dreadful than any that has gone before.

Maskull must be defeated, but the battlestones are the immediate problem. Fortunately, they can be made to reveal verses that predict events and describe in maddening riddles where the next stone in the sequence lies. Will manages to track down two more battlestones, and though neither of them is the Doomstone, they seem to be making progress at last.

But Maskull lays a clever trap at the stone circle known as the Giant’s Ring. Will is caught, and Gwydion is lured in to save him. Wizard and sorcerer fight and the wizard is defeated. His body is burned and his spirit banished into an elder tree. But he is saved by Will who braves his fears to restore his mentor to human form. Gwydion then sets to work on the perilous task of draining the nearby battlestone.

After several quantities of harm have been drained from it a verse is forced from the stone:

The Queen of the East shall spill Blood,

On the Slave Road, by Werlame’s Flood.

The King, in his Kingdom, a Martyr shall lie,

And never shall gain the Victory.

which, in the language of stones, has an alternative reading:

When a Queen shall Enslave a King,

Travel at Sunrise a Realm to gain,

Werlame’s Martyr shall lose the Victory,

And lie where Blood never Flows.

Gwydion is elated, but as soon as he has read the verse disaster strikes. An entrapping spell that Maskull has set on the stone causes the remaining harm to escape all in a rush. Will and the wizard must flee through the night on the back of the White Horse of Uff which Will summons using the magical silver-bound horn that was given to him one Lammas night. They are pursued through the darkness by the manifest harm that has emerged from the battlestone. It almost catches them, but is then forced to fight with the earth giant, Alba, whom it devours. The harm is dispersed at last by Will as the red light of dawn glints from his raised sword above the forgotten battlefield of Badon Hill.

They turn again to face two great armies marching, ready to give battle in the east. The shrine town of Verlamion is dominated by the great chapter house of the Fellowship of the Sightless Ones, and it is here that the Doomstone lies. Gwydion tries once again to avert disaster. He uses all his persuasion on Duke Richard, but the Doomstone has too strong a grip on the minds of those who have been drawn here to fight.

The duke’s army closes on Verlamion, which is strongly garrisoned by King Hal. As the two hosts come together, thousands of men clash in a terrifying death-struggle. Showers of deadly arrows darken the skies, and as soldier battles soldier in the market square, wizard battles sorcerer in a flame-fight that blasts across the rooftops in a blaze of fiery magic and counter magic.

Will is trapped among the savagery and bloodshed below. He knows he must reach the Doomstone and try to stop the battle, but the stone is somewhere inside the chapter house. Will claims the ‘sanctuary of the Fellowship’ and so gains entry. He fights his way through hundreds of blind, kneeling, enraptured Fellows before he locates the deadly stone under the Founder’s shrine. The power of the Doomstone is very strong, but Will remembers everything that Gwydion has taught him. He digs deep and finds the courage to do what he must – go down into the tomb to attack the battlestone directly.

As his spells are spoken out, the Doomstone fights back, but Will hangs on grimly. Appalling visions are cast into his mind, and it is only when he uses the leaping salmon talisman which Breona gave him that the stone submits. There is a blinding flash, and when the smoke clears he sees that the monstrous slab has been cracked in two!

Will emerges from the tomb, his head ringing. Outside, the roar of battle has ceased, brother has stopped killing brother, and war seems to have been averted. But there has been bloodshed – Duke Edgar, Baron Clifton and several of the other corrupt lords who have been controlling the king now lie dead. Others, including Queen Mag, have fled. As for Maskull, Will finds him atop the fire-blackened curfew tower where he has been conducting his own magical duel against Gwydion. When Will confronts him, Maskull recognizes him as the Child of Destiny, and prepares to kill him, saying, ‘I made you, I can just as easily unmake you.’ But as Maskull readies the killing stroke he is vanished away by a spell that Gwydion manages to land on him while his back is turned.

Now the battle is truly over. The king and Duke Richard jointly announce that they will ride to Trinovant together and put in place the foundations of good government.

Will is rewarded and says he wants nothing more than to return to his home village of Nether Norton with Willow, whose father has been killed in the fighting.

As they part, Gwydion gives Will a magic book, and bids him read from it often.

Will and Willow arrive home to general delight. Will tells his friends in the Vale that the king has freed them from the tithe and so they will never again have to hand over their livestock and grain to the sinister Sightless Ones. Then Will is reunited with his happy parents – after all they have not lost a son but gained a daughter – even so, there is a sense that things are not over quite yet.

More than four years have now passed since the fighting at Verlamion. We meet Will and Willow again in Nether Norton in the Vale at the Lammastide festival. It is the time of the first fruits and of harvest blessing and the joining of man and woman…

PART ONE JEOPARDY’S DILEMMA

CHAPTER ONE THE BLAZING

Flames leapt up from the fire, throwing long shadows across the green and dappling the cottages of Nether Norton with a mellow light. This year’s Blazing was a fine one. Tonight was what the wizard, Gwydion, called in the true tongue ‘Lughnasad’, the feast of Lugh, Lord of Light, the first day of autumn, when the first-cut sheaves of wheat were gathered in to the village and threshed with great ceremony. On Loaf Day, grain was ground, and loaves of Lammas bread toasted on long forks and eaten with fresh butter. On Loaf Day, Valesfolk thought of the good earth and what it gave them.

Today the weather had almost been as good as Lammas two years ago when Will had taken Willow’s hand and they had circled the fire together three times sunwise, and so given notice that henceforth they were to be regarded as husband and wife.

He put his arm around Willow’s shoulders as she cradled their sleeping daughter in her arms. It was a delight to see Bethe’s small head nestled in the crook of her mother’s elbow, her small hand resting on the blanket that covered her, and despite the dullness in the pit of his stomach, it felt good to be a husband and a father tonight. Life’s good here, he thought, so good it’s hard to see how it could be much better. If only that dull feeling would go away, tonight would be just about perfect.

But it would not go away – he knew that something was going to happen, that it was going to happen soon, and that it was not going to be anything pleasant. The foreboding had echoed in the marrow of his bones all day but, unlike a real echo, it had refused to die away. Which meant that it was a warning.

He brushed back the two thick braids of hair that hung at his left cheek and stared into the depths of the bonfire. Slowly he let his thoughts drift away from Nether Norton and slip into the fire-pictures that the flames made for him. He opened his mind and a dozen memories rushed upon him, memories of great days, terrible days, and worse nights. But the most insistent image was still of the moment when the sorcerer, Maskull, had raised him up in a blaze of fire above the stone circle called the Giant’s Ring. That night he had seen Gwydion blasted by Maskull’s magic, and afterwards, as Gwydion had tried to drain the harm from a battlestone, the future of the Realm had balanced on the edge of a knife…

It had been more than four years ago, but the dread he had felt on that night and the redeeming day that had followed remained alive in him. It always would.

‘Will?’ Willow asked, searching his face. ‘What are you thinking?’

He broached a smile. ‘Maybe I’ve taken a little too much to drink,’ he said and touched his wife’s hair. It was gold in the firelight and about as long as his own. He looked at her, then down at the child whose small hand had first clasped his finger just over a year ago. How she had begun to look like her mother.

‘Ah, but she’s a beautiful child!’ said old Baldgood the Brewster, his red face glowing from the day’s sunshine. He had begun to clear up and was carrying one end of a table back into the parlour of the Green Man. The other end of the table was carried by Baldram, one of Baldgood’s grown sons.

‘Seems like Bethe was born only yesterday,’ Will told the older man.

‘She’ll be a year and a quarter old tomorrow, won’t you, my lovely?’ Willow said dreamily.

‘Aye, and she’ll be grown up before you can say “Jack o’ Lantern”. Look at this big lumpkin of mine! Get a move on, Baldram my son, or we’ll be out here all night!’

‘My, but he’s a bossy old dad, ain’t he?’ Baldram said, grinning.

Will smiled back at the alehouse-keeper’s son as they disappeared into the Green Man. It was hard to imagine Baldram as a babe-in-arms – nowadays he could carry a barrel of ale under each arm all the way down to Pannage and still not break into a sweat.

‘Hey-ho, Will,’ one of the lads from Overmast said as he went by.

‘Hathra. How goes it?’

‘Very well. The hay’s in from Suckener’s Field and all’s ready for the morrow. Did you settle with Gunwold for them weaners?’

‘He offered me a dozen chickens each, but I beat him down to ten in the end. Seemed fairer.’

Hathra laughed. ‘Quite right, too!’

‘Show us a magic trick, Willand!’ one of the youngsters cried. It was Leomar, Leoftan the Smith’s boy, with three of his friends. He had eyes of piercing blue like his father and just as direct a manner.

Will asked for the ring from Leomar’s finger, but when the boy looked for it, it was not there. Then Will took a plum from the pouch at his own belt and offered it.

‘Go on. Bite into it. But be careful of the stone.’

The boy did as he was told and found his ring tight around the plumstone. He gasped. His friends wrinkled their noses and then laughed uncertainly.

‘How’dya do that?’ they asked.

‘It’s magic.’

‘No t’aint. It’s just conjuring!’

‘Away with you, now, and enjoy the Blazing!’ he said, ruffling the lad’s hair. ‘And you’re right – that was only conjuring. Real magic is not to be trifled with!’

Two more passers-by nodded their heads at Will, and he nodded back. The Vale was a place where everybody knew everybody else, and all were glad of that. Nobody from the outside ever came in, and nobody from the inside ever went out. Months and years passed by without anything out of the ordinary happening, and that was how everybody liked it. Everybody except Will.

Though the Valesmen did not know it, it was Gwydion who had made their lives run so quietly. Long ago he had cast a spell of concealment so that those passing by the Vale could not find it – and those living inside would never want to leave. The wizard had made it so that any man who wandered the path down from Nether Norton towards Great Norton would only get as far as Middle Norton before he found himself walking back into Nether Norton again. Only Tilwin the Tinker, knife-grinder and seller of necessaries, had ever come into the Vale from outside, but now even his visits had stopped. Apart from Tilwin, only the Sightless Ones, the ‘red hands’, with their withered eyes and love of gold, had ever had the knack of seeing through the cloak. But the Fellows were only interested in payment, and so long as the tithe carts were sent down to Middle Norton for collection they had always let the Valesmen be. Four years ago, Will’s service to King Hal in ending the battle at Verlamion had won him a secret royal warrant that paid Nether Norton’s tithe out of the king’s own coffers, so now the Vale was truly cut off.

And I’m the reason Gwydion’s kept us all hidden, Will thought uncomfortably as he stared again into the depths of the fire. He must believe the danger’s not yet fully passed. But with Maskull sent into exile and the Doomstone broken, is there still a need to hide us away?

Maskull’s defeat had given Gwydion the upper hand, but he had shown scant joy at his victory. He and Maskull had once been part of the Ogdoad, the council of nine earth guardians whose job it had been to steer the fate of the world along the true path. But then Maskull had given himself over to selfishness, and though a great betrayal had been prophesied all along, that had not made it any easier for Gwydion to accept.

Will sighed, roused himself from his thoughts and looked around at the familiar surroundings. It was strange – in all his months of wandering he had thought there was nothing better than home. And now he had a family of his own there was even more reason to love the way life was in the Vale. And yet…when a man had extraordinary adventures they changed him…

It’s easy for a man to go to war, he thought. But having seen it, can he so easily settle down behind a plough once more?

It hardly seemed so. Occasionally, a yearning would steal over Will’s heart. At such times he would go alone into the woods and practise with his quarterstaff until his body shone with sweat and his muscles ached. There was wanderlust in him, and at the root of it was a mess of unanswered questions.

He stirred himself and kissed Willow on the cheek. ‘Happy Lammas,’ he said.

‘And a happy Lammas to you too,’ she said and kissed him back. ‘I guess we’re just about finished with the Blazing. Looks like everyone’s had a good time.’

‘As usual.’

‘What about you?’

‘Me?’ he asked, his eyebrows lifting. ‘I enjoyed it.’

‘It looks like you did,’ she said, a strange little half-smile on her lips.

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

She fingered the manly braid that hung beside his ear. ‘I saw you looking into the bonfire just then. What were you thinking?’

‘I was thinking that only a fool would want to be anywhere else today.’

She smiled. ‘Truly?’

‘Truly.’

It was good to see everyone so happy. They had watched the lads and lasses circling the fire. They had listened to the vows that had brought the night’s celebration to a fitting close. Some had plighted their troths, and others had made final handfasting vows. Now couples were slipping off into the shadows, heading for home.

There was no doubt about it, since the ending of the tithe the Vale had prospered as never before. They had put up three new cottages in the summer. They had filled the new granary too, and all this from the working of less land. Now the surpluses were not being taken away to make others rich, the plenty was such that Valesmen’s families had already forgotten what it was to feel the pinch of hunger.

‘About time this little one was abed,’ Willow said.

‘Yes, it’s been a long day.’

They walked up the dark path to their cottage, his arm about her in the warm, calm night. In the paddock, Avon, the white warhorse that Duke Richard of Ebor had given him, moved like a ghost in the darkness. Away from the fire the stars glittered brightly – Brigita’s star, sinking now in the west; Arondiel rising in the east; and to the south Iolirn Fireunha, the Golden Eagle.

An owl called. Will remembered the Lammastide he had spent six years ago sitting with a wizard atop Dumhacan Nadir, the Dragon’s Mound, close by the turf-cut figure of an ancient white horse. Together they had watched a thousand stars and a hundred bonfires dying red across the Plains of Barklea.

He sighed again.

‘What’s that for?’ Willow asked.

He scrubbed fingers through his hair. ‘Oh…I was just thinking. You know – about old times. About Gwydion.’

It seemed a long time since Will and the wizard had last set eyes on one another. How good it would be to wander the ways as they had once done. To walk abroad again among summer hedgerows, enjoying the sun and the rain, or feeling the bite of an icy wind on their cheeks.

‘I wonder what he’s doing right now?’ Will muttered.

‘Unless I miss my guess, he’ll be striding the green hills of the Blessed Isle,’ Willow said. ‘Or sitting in a high tower somewhere out in the wilds of Albanay.’

Will’s eyes wandered the dark gulfs between the stars. ‘Hmmm. Probably.’

‘Wilds?’ he could almost hear Gwydion chuckle. ‘It is not wild here. See! These trees in a line show where a hedge once grew. And what of those ancient furrow marks? The Realm has been loved and tended for a hundred generations of men. It is almost, you might say, a garden.’

While Willow went indoors to put Bethe into her cradle, Will lingered in the yard at the back of their cottage. He could smell the herbs, all the green leaf he had grown in the good soil – plants ripe and ready to offer the sweetness of the earth’s bounty. The scents of the orchard were keen on the still air. He heard Avon whinny again, and tried to recall when he had noticed the elusive feeling in his belly before, but when he looked inside himself he was shocked.

‘A premonition about a premonition,’ he told himself wryly. ‘Now that would be something…’

Willow came out and said, ‘I’m glad we chose to call her Bethe. There’s strong magic in naming, for I can’t think now what else we could have called her.’

‘Bethe is the birch tree,’ he said. ‘“Beth”, first letter of the druid’s alphabet, and Bethe our firstborn.’

‘I like that.’

‘You know, the birch was the first tree to clothe these isles when the ice drew back into the north. Her white bark remembers the White Lady, she who was wise and first taught about births and beginnings, the one who some call the Lady Cerridwen. Our May Pole is always a birch, and Bethe was born on May Day, which is my birthday too. In the old tongue of the west “bith” means “being”. And “beitharn” in the true tongue means “the world”. Maybe that’s the reason I suggested the name and why you agreed – because our daughter means the world to us.’

Willow squeezed him close and laid her head against his breast. ‘There’s such a power of learning in that book of yours.’

She meant the magic book that Gwydion had given him that sad day at Verlamion. He said, ‘There’s much to read and more to know. It’s said that a country swain comes of age at thirteen years, that the son of a fighting lord may carry arms in battle at fifteen, and that a king must reach eighteen years to rule by his word alone – but one who would learn magic may not be properly called wise until he has come to full manhood.’

Willow looked at him. ‘And how old’s that?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But as the saying has it: “The willow wand is slow to become an oaken staff.” And so it must be, for if I know anything at all it’s that there’s much more to be understood in the world than can ever be learned in one man’s lifetime.’

Now it was Willow’s turn to sigh. ‘Then tell me true: do you read that book every day in the hope that one day you’ll become a wizard too? Like Gwydion?’

He laughed. ‘No. That I can never be.’

‘Then why?’

‘Because Gwydion gave it to me and bade me read it. And I gave him my word that I would.’

She squeezed him again, but this time it was to stress her words. ‘Well, now, you’re going to promise me something, Willand Bookreader: that you won’t be burning any candle stubs over hard words tonight!’

He grinned. ‘Now that I’ll gladly promise!’

They held one another in the starlight for a moment. A shooting star flared brilliantly and briefly in the west, and then a coolness stirred among the leaves of the nearest apple trees. She looked up, and he felt her stiffen.

‘What is it?’

But there was no need for an answer, for there, high up over the Tops, an eerie purple glow had begun to bruise the sky.

‘Don’t look at it,’ she told him, turning away suddenly.

He felt his foreboding intensify. ‘It’s…it’s only the northern lights.’

‘I don’t care what it is…’ Her voice faded.

He stared at the flickering as it grew. ‘Gwydion once told me about the northern lights,’ he whispered, ‘but I’ve never seen them.’

As he looked into the darkness he felt the earth power crackling in his toes. The apple trees felt it too. His eyes narrowed as he realized that this flaring glow was not – could not be – the northern lights. This was brighter, more focused, and it spoke to him.

‘Will, come inside!’ she said, pulling at his arm.

‘I…’ The light pulsed irregularly like distant lightning, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It was livid. It seemed to reach out from a source that was hidden by the dark hills surrounding the Vale. When he recalled what he knew of sky lore, his unease grew, for this was no natural light.

His thoughts went immediately to the lorc, that web of lines in the earth that fed the battlestones. They had glowed with an eerie light. At certain phases of the moon they had stood out in the darkness, clothed with a pale and otherworldly sheen.

‘Look!’ he said, pointing. ‘That halo. It seems to be coming from near the Giant’s Ring.’

The ancient stone circle could not be seen from the Vale. It was in Gwydion’s words Bethen feilli Imbliungh, the Navel of the World, a place of tremendous influence, and the fount through which earth power erupted into the lorc. That, Will had always supposed, was the reason the fae had set up one of their terrible battlestones there, the one that had fought Gwydion’s magic and won.

‘It can’t be the battlestone, can it?’ Willow asked as she peered into the inconstant light. ‘You said Gwydion had drawn all the harm out of it.’

‘So he did. But tonight is Lammas when the power of the earth waxes highest.’

‘We didn’t see lights there last year. Nor any year before.’

Willow’s words ceased as a low rumbling passed through the ground. It was so low that it could not be heard, only felt in the bones. Will heard Avon whinny, then came the sound of ripe apples dropping in the orchard. The ground itself was trembling. As he stared into the night he was aware of Willow’s frightened eyes upon him. Then two flower pots fell from the window ledge at the back of the cottage. He heard them crack one after the other on the stone kerb below. Willow jumped.

‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m going to see if Bethe’s all right.’ She vanished into the cottage.

Will let her go, listening only to the night as the rumble passed away beneath his feet and stillness returned to the Vale. Gwydion had once spoken of mountains of fire that rose up in remote parts of the world, mountains that spewed forth flames and hot cinders. But there were none of those in the Realm. He had spoken too of tremblings that shook the land from time to time. They came sometimes as workings that had been delved deep under the earth long ago shifted or fell in on themselves.

Could that have caused the rumblings?

And if so, what about the light?

There was something about that light that caused a shiver to run up Will’s spine. This rippling, eye-deceiving glow was the same colour as the flames that had once trapped and burned him within the compass of the Giant’s Ring. It was purple fire that had lifted him up high over the stones and had begun to consume his flesh. Purple fire that would have killed him in dreadful agony had not Gwydion’s magic saved him. And such a flame as that came only from Maskull’s hands.

‘By the moon and stars, he’s found me…’

A great terror seized him. He recalled the time when he had sat alongside Gwydion in a cart and the wizard had told him what could happen if someone tried to tamper magically with a battlestone. ‘If all the harm were to be released in a single hand clap…it would be enough to torment the land beyond endurance.’

And who else but Maskull would dare to tamper with a battlestone?

Fears stirred, wormlike, in Will’s guts as he looked up at the Tops now. There was no doubt what he must do. He went inside and lit a fresh candle. The damp wick crackled as it caught from a flame that already glowed in its niche. Dust still sifted down from the rafters in the gloom. Willow stood by the cradle, her daughter in her arms. Bethe had been woken up by the quake and was mewling.

‘Where’re you going?’ Willow asked, seeing him climb the ladder into the loft.

‘To call on an old friend.’

He went to his oak chest and brought out the book that grew bigger the more it was read. He brought it down the ladder, took a soft cloth and wiped clean the great covers of tooled brown leather. There was not much time. Soon the other Valesmen would notice the glow and they would come for his advice.

He placed the treasured book on the wooden lectern by the fire, a piece of furniture he had made himself specially for it. Then he composed himself for the ritual that should always attend the opening of any book of magic.

He placed his left hand flat on the book’s front cover and repeated the words of the true tongue that were written there:

‘Ane radhas a’leguim oicheamna;

ainsagimn deo teuiccimn.’

And then he voiced the spell again in plain speech.

‘Speak these words to read the secrets within;

learn and so come to a true understanding.’

There were no iron clasps on this book as there were on most others, for this book was locked by magic. As he muttered the charm the bindings were released and he was able to open it. Inside were words for his eyes alone. He turned to a special page with Gwydion’s parting words in mind.

‘…should you find yourself in dire need, you must

find the page where flies the swiftest bird. Call

it by name and that will be enough.’

His fingers trembled as the page before him began to fill with the picture of a bird, black and white with a russet throat and long tail streamers. He hesitated. Is this truly a moment of ‘dire need’? he asked himself. Am I doing the right thing?

He looked inside himself, then across to where Willow nursed their daughter, and suddenly he feared to invoke the spell. But then he saw the livid light flare and heard Bethe begin to cry, and he knew he must pronounce the trigger-word without delay.

‘Fannala!’

He spoke the true name of the swallow. Immediately, his thoughts were knocked sideways as if by a great blow to his head. A bird flew up out of the book and into the candlelight. There was a flash of white breast feathers and it was gone, so that when Will’s bedazzled eyes tried to follow it he lost it in the shadows. When he looked again not knowing what to expect, a grey shape had appeared in the corner.

‘Who’s there?’ Willow shouted, clutching Bethe close to her and snatching up a fire iron.

Will was overwhelmed. It seemed that a great bear or tiger cat had appeared in the room and was making ready to attack. Yet the shape gave off a pale blue light that faded, and then the figure of an old man walked out of the darkness.

The wizard was tall and grave, swathed in his long wayfarer’s cloak of mouse-brown. His head was closely clad in a dark skullcap, and his hand clasped an oaken staff. Bare toes peeped out from under the long skirts of his belted robe, and he wore a long beard that was divided now into two forks.

‘A swift, I told you! Not a swallow! Fool!’

Will stared as the wizard stroked the two stiff prongs of his beard together and made them into one.

‘Master Gwydion…’

The wizard looked around the homely room with heavylidded eyes, his brow knotted. He footed his staff with a bang against the fireplace. ‘I hope you have good reason to summon me thus!’

Will felt the wizard’s displeasure like a knife. Their parting had been more than four years ago, and Will expected warmer words.

‘Good reason?’ Willow said, putting down the fire iron but still unwilling to have her husband roughly spoken to beside his own hearth. ‘I should say there’s good reason. And less of the “fool”, if you please, Master Gwydion. Those who don’t mind their manners in this house gets shown off these premises right quick, and that’s whoever they may be.’

Gwydion turned to her sharply, but then seeming to bethink himself he swept out a low bow. ‘I have offended you. Please, accept my apologies. If I was rude, it was because I was upon an important errand and I did not expect to be disturbed from it.’

Will stepped towards the door without hesitation. ‘I can’t be sure, Gwydion, but I think this is something you ought to see.’

Once they were outside Gwydion shielded his eyes from the purple glare, then took Will’s arm. ‘You were right to summon me. Of course you were.’

Will’s heart sank. ‘What is it?’

‘Something I have feared daily these four years.’

‘Hey!’ Will called, but Gwydion had already taken himself halfway down the path. ‘Hey, where are you going?’

‘To the Giant’s Ring, of course!’

‘Alone?’

‘That,’ the wizard called over his shoulder, ‘is entirely up to you.’

Will watched the wizard stride away into the darkness. He looked helplessly towards the cottage door. ‘But…what about Willow? What about Bethe?’

‘Oh, they must not come! There is likely to be great danger on the Tops.’

Will ran to the doorway and put his head inside. ‘Gwydion needs my help,’ he said. ‘I have to go with him.’

Willow dandled their daughter. ‘Go? Go where?’

‘Up onto the Tops.’

Her pretty eyes quizzed him, then she sighed. ‘Oh, Will…’

‘Don’t worry. I won’t be long. I promise.’ He held her for a moment, then kissed her hurriedly, unhooked his cloak and left.

‘What do you think it is?’ he asked as he caught up with the wizard.

Gwydion tasted the air. He made hissing noises and held out his arm, but no barn owl came to his call. ‘Do you see how the night creatures hereabouts have all gone to ground? No bird can fly in this glare.’

They climbed up the stony path that no one but Gwydion could ever find. It led up through the woods of Nethershaw, yet it wound past trees and the phantasms of trees and passed through impenetrable thickets of brambles that parted to let Gwydion through but then closed behind Will. He scrambled smartly up a mossy bank after the wizard and felt the earth crumbling away under his toes. But then the trees gave out and a dark land opened before them, stark under the purple glow.

They walked onward across tussocky grass, over pools of shadow and a maze of spirals that Will sensed patterning the earth. Soon five great standing stones loomed out of the night, huddled closely one upon another like a group of conspirators. They were, Will knew, vastly ancient, all that remained of the tomb of Orba, Queen of the Summer Moon, who had lived in the Age of the First Men.

She it was who had ruled the land here long ago, and close by was the dragon-ravaged tomb of her husband, Finglas, now no more than a bump in the flow-tattooed earth. The wizard swung his staff before him, his eyes penetrating the dark like lamps. Will’s heart was hammering as the wizard paused and shaded his eyes against the sky’s sickly violet sheen. ‘It’s not coming from the Giant’s Ring after all,’ he said. ‘It’s coming from somewhere in the west!’

The wizard drew Will to a sudden halt beside him. ‘Behold! Liarix Finglas!’

The awesome flickerings rose up in the sky behind the King’s Stone like a monstrous lightning storm. Will saw the great, crooked fang cut out in black against the glare. Beside it stood the twisted elder tree where Gwydion had once been trapped by sorcerer’s magic. Four years ago he had crossed blackened grass; now it had regrown and was lush and dew-cool underfoot.

A clear view to the west opened up. There the sky was smudged by cloud, and far away a great plume had risen up through the layers, its top blown sideways by high winds, its underside lit amethyst and white.

‘Look,’ Will cried. ‘It’s a lightning storm on the Wolds!’

‘Did you ever see such lightning as that?’ When Gwydion turned a silent play of light smote the distant Wolds, making crags of his face. ‘And the rumble that shook down your pretty flower pots? Was that thunder?’

‘It seemed to come from far away.’

Gwydion gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘You want to think the danger is far away and so none of your concern. But remember that the earth is one. Magic connects all who walk upon it. Faraway trouble is trouble all the same. Do not try to find comfort in what you see now, for the further away it is the bigger it must be.’

Will felt the wizard’s words cut him. They accused him of a way of thinking that ran powerfully against the redes and laws of magic.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said humbly. ‘That was selfish.’

‘Liarix Finglas,’ Gwydion muttered, moving on. He slid fingers over the stone, savouring the name in the true tongue. ‘In the lesser words of latter days, “the King’s Stone”. And nowadays the herding men who come by here call it “the Shepherd’s Delight”. How quaint! For to them it is no more than a lump from which lucky charms may be chipped. Oh, how the Ages have declined! What a sorry inheritance the mighty days of yore have bequeathed! We are living in the old age of the world, Willand. And things are determined to turn against us!’

He heard the bitterness in the wizard’s words. ‘Surely you don’t believe that.’

The wizard’s face was difficult to read as he turned to Will again. ‘I believe that at this moment, you and your fellow villagers are very lucky to be alive.’

A chill ran through him. ‘Why do you say that?’

The wizard offered only a dismissive gesture, and Will took his arm in a firmer grip. ‘Gwydion, I asked you a question!’

The wizard scowled and pulled his arm away. ‘And, as you see, I am avoiding answering you.’

‘But why? This isn’t how it was with us.’

‘Why?’ Gwydion put back his head and stared at the sky. ‘Because I am afraid.’

A fresh pang of fear swam through Will’s belly and surfaced in his mind. This was worse than anything he could have expected. Yet the fear freshened his thinking, awakened him further to the danger. He felt intensely alert as he looked around. Up on the Tops the sky was large. It stretched all the way from east to west, from north to south. He felt suddenly very vulnerable.

With a sinking heart he looked around for the place where they had unearthed the battlestone and found its grave, a shallow depression now partly filled and overgrown, but the burned-out stone was nowhere to be seen.

‘You’re not as kindly as I remembered you,’ he told Gwydion.

‘Memories are seldom accurate. And you too have changed. Do not forget that.’

‘Even so, you’re less amiable. Sharper tongued.’

‘If you find me so, that is because you see more these days. You are no longer the trusting innocent.’

‘I was never that.’

The wizard gazed up and down an avenue of earthlight that stretched, spear-straight across the land. To Will’s eye it was greenish, elfin and fey. But it was a light that he knew well, though very bright for lign-light, brighter than he had ever seen it. It passed close by the circle of standing stones.

‘That shimmering path is called Eburos,’ Gwydion told him. ‘It is the lign of the yew tree. Look upon it, Willand, and remember what you see, for according to the Black Book this is the greatest of the nine ligns that make up the lorc. Its brightness surprises you, I see. But perhaps it should not, for tonight is Lughnasad, and very close after the new moon. All crossquarter days are magical but now is the start of Iucer, the time when the edges of this world blur with those of the Realm Below – Lughnasad upon a new moon is a time when even lowland swine rooting in the forest floor may see the lign glowing strongly in the earth. “Trea lathan iucer sean vailan…” Three days of magic in the earth, as the old saying goes. Even I can see it tonight.’

Will nodded. ‘The lorc is once more growing in power.’

Gwydion met his eye. ‘I feared you would say that.’

Frustration erupted sourly inside Will. ‘But how can that be? I destroyed the Doomstone at Verlamion. The heart of the lorc was broken!’

‘But was the Doomstone destroyed?’

‘Do you doubt that I told you the truth?’

There was silence.

‘The battle stopped, didn’t it?’ Will said.

The wizard inclined his head a fraction. ‘The battle did not continue.’

‘I only know what I saw, Gwydion. The Doomstone was cracked clean across. It must have been destroyed, for it fell silent and all the Sightless Ones in the chapter house lost their minds.’

To that the wizard made no reply other than to give a doubtful grunt. Then he raised his staff towards the livid glow. They walked the lign together across the crest of the Tops. Earth power tingled in Will’s fingers and toes as he walked. They soon came to what looked from a distance like a ring of silent, unmoving figures. He looked at the perfect circle of eighty or so stones, the ring that was forty paces across. The shadows cast by each stone groped out across the uneven land. He felt as if he was intruding and said so.

‘You know,’ Gwydion said in a distant voice, ‘the druida used to come here unfailingly at the spring equinox – and then again in the autumn of each year. Ah, what processions we had when the world was young! They brought their white horses, all marked red upon the forehead like so many unhorned unicorns. Here they made their signs two days before the new moon and sat down to drink milk and mead and witness the waxing of the power of the lorc. They were great days, Willand. Great days…’

They entered the Ring respectfully, going in by the proper entrance, bowing to the four directions before approaching the centre and sitting down. The stones of the Ring were small, no taller than children, hunched, misshapen, brooding. The greatest of them stood to the north. When Will had come here four years ago he had made no obeisance, asked no formal permission, but when he had touched the chief stone there had been a welcome all the same. He had been privileged to feel the rich and undiminished power that lay dormant here. Before Maskull’s sorcery had ambushed him he had felt an enormous store of power, something as vast as a mountain buried deep in the earth, and its summit was the Ring. That sense was still here, a muted but deeply comfortable emanation, a power that spilled endlessly from the Navel of the World. Will understood very well why the stone-wise druida had come here twice a year without fail.

He waited for Gwydion to decide what to do, and meanwhile he watched the distant glow in the west until it guttered low and they were bathed in darkness. Breaths of wind ruffled the lush grass. Overhead high veils of cloud were sweeping in. They were not thick enough to hide the stars, but they made them twinkle violently, and that seemed to Will a sign of ill omen.

He pulled his cloak tighter about him and was about to speak when he felt a presence lurking nearby. As he turned, a wild-haired figure broke from cover. Then a blood-freezing scream split the silence. The figure dashed towards them, and came to within a pace of Gwydion’s back. An arm jerked upward, and Will saw a blade flash against the sky.

‘Gwydion!’ he cried.

But the wizard did not move.

Will was aware only of soft words being uttered as he dived low at the figure and carried it to the ground, pinning it. Will’s strength slowly forced the blade from the fist that had wielded it. He was hit, then hit again, in the face, but the blows lacked power and he held his grip long enough to apply an immobilizing spell, which put the attacker’s limbs in struggle against one another.

‘Take care not to hurt her, Will. She cannot help herself.’

He shook the pain from his head and staggered to his feet. The furiously writhing body repulsed him. Strangled gasps came from the assailant as he picked up the blade.

‘Who is she?’ He wiped his mouth where one of the woman’s blows had drawn a little blood. ‘It’s lucky you heard her coming. I had no idea.’

‘I did not hear her so much as feel the approach of her magic.’

‘That’s a trick I wish you’d teach me.’

Gwydion grunted. ‘It was never easy to kill an Ogdoad wizard. And quite hard to take one by surprise.’

Will shook his head again and brushed back his braids. Then he turned the blade over in his fingers. It was broad and double-edged and had a heavy, black handle. ‘This knife is an evil weapon,’ he said, passing the blade to Gwydion.

The wizard would not take it. ‘It is not evil.’

‘No?’

‘Nor is it a weapon. Or even a knife. Did I teach you to think that way?’

‘It looks like a dagger to me,’ he muttered. ‘And it would’ve made a mess of you.’

‘Look again. It is made of obsidian, the same black glass which the Sightless Ones use in the windows of their chapter houses. It is a sacred object, one used in ritual and not to be lightly profaned with blood.’

‘Well, the blood it was intended to spill was yours.’

‘It has more in common with this.’ Gwydion drew the blade of star-iron from the sheath that always hung on a cord about his neck. He held it up. ‘An “iscian”, called by some “athame”, though strictly speaking athamen may be used only by women. It is not a dagger but a compass used to scribe the circle that becomes the border between two worlds. It is the season of Iucer, and tonight this Sister has travelled here by magic. I do not know why she has chosen to meddle far above her knowledge, but look what it has done to her.’

Will turned to where the woman still kicked and struggled as arm fought arm and leg fought leg.

‘Release her, now. But be mindful of the powers that flow here.’

Will rebuckled his belt over his shirt and straightened his pouch. He felt his heart hammering as he danced out the counterspell. At length the woman’s body collapsed into the grass, as if her bones had been turned to blood. Though slender, she was of middle age, with long hair, silvered in streaks now. Twenty years ago it would have been dark and she would have been a handsome woman.

‘Speak to me now!’ Gwydion commanded, and made a sign above her head.

The Sister shrieked and writhed, but then her voice became one of malice.

‘Slaughter great,

Slaughter small!

All slaughter now,

No Slaughter at all!’

‘Peace!’ Gwydion said, and made a second sign over her.

Instantly she fell quiet, and seemed to sleep comfortably.

‘Who is she?’ Will asked.

‘She comes from one of the hamlets near…that.’ Gwydion gestured towards the last glimmerings of lilac fire in the west. ‘She invoked a spell of great magic to bring herself here. She should not have done that, nor would she have unless her life had been threatened. By rights she should not even have known how to use such magic, but curiosity is a powerful urge in some of the Sisters of the Wise. This time it has saved her life, though we shall soon see if it was worth the saving.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The spell was ill-wrought. It has touched her mind with madness. That is, I hope, the only reason she tried to fall upon me as she did.’

Will examined the blade critically. ‘I didn’t know it was the practice of Sisters to go abroad with their athamen upon them.’

‘Ordinarily, they do not. Take care to keep that one from her, Will. I recognize it for what it is, and I believe that unless you keep it away from her she will try to kill herself with it when she wakes.’

CHAPTER TWO LITTLE SLAUGHTER

Gwydion slowly unwound the strands of magic that had afflicted the woman. Will marvelled at the wizard’s calm composure as he laid her down inside the circle and danced the harm from her. He laid charms upon her head, made signs above her body with his staff, and finally he drew a glistening adder from her mouth. He laid it down to vanish into the night.

Afterwards Will found himself drawn to watch the simmering lights. The corner of his lip tingled, and a lump had started to come up where the witch’s flailing fist had marked him.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

‘Do?’ Gwydion stirred. ‘Perhaps you should decide what’s best.’

‘You’re the wizard.’

‘But it was you who summoned me.’

‘Yes, well I thought you ought to know about…that. It seemed to me to be Maskull’s doing.’

‘You are right. It is.’

Will was about to ask the wizard how he could be so sure, but then he remembered how seldom Gwydion was wholly open with the truth, and how closely he shepherded his wisdom. Of course a wizard needed to, for he was a guardian and therefore must be adept at manipulation. It was the entire purpose of the Ogdoad to steer fate in order to keep the world going along on the true path, and so many times during the long history of the Realm members of the wizardly council had intervened at crucial moments. Gwydion knew about cause and effect and the motivation of folk, and he had lived for such a time that long consequences were plain to his eyes. Will understood very well that there were some things Gwydion could afford to divulge and others that he must certainly not, but it did not hurt any the less to think that certain of the wizard’s secrets probably concerned his own origins.

He felt discomfort run through him while the Wise Woman twitched and muttered in dream at their backs and all three waited for the dawn to come. At last, the east grew grey with filtered light.

‘She’ll be worried,’ he said, meaning Willow. ‘I’ll bet she hasn’t slept a wink.’

Gwydion stared at him for a moment and then broke off the look. ‘Why not wait until the sun is truly up?’ he said. ‘You will find it easier to decide by the full light of day. The spell that cloaks the Vale is of necessity a powerful one. It is unlikely that even you would succeed in finding your way home in this half light.’

‘Decide? About what?’

‘About what you should do.’

Will sighed. He had heard Gwydion speak this way before, and he wondered where it was leading.

In the grey of that cold hour before sunrise the dew was penetrating. Thin mists rolled in the valleys that clefted the Tops, and as the stars went out one by one, he went over to the elder tree. He would not approach it too closely for fear that it might swallow him up again. Instead, he kicked his toes at the edge of the hole from which the battlestone had been taken. It was like the gap from which a rotten tooth had been pulled, but the pain and the stench had almost been washed from the ground.

‘Gwydion, where’s the stump gone?’

‘Stump?’

‘The big piece of battlestone that was left.’

‘I took it away.’

He inclined his head, surprised. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘I wanted to give it to my friend Cormac.’

‘It’s a strange gift for a friend.’

‘Strange, perhaps, but useful certainly. Cormac is Lord of the Clan MacCarthach. He is a lord of the Blessed Isle, and a great builder of castles. Once drained, the battlestones are changed from deadly to mildly benign. Once the harm is gone there remains a small residue of kindness that works much as a charm does. I believe the stone will sit well once it is mortared into the ramparts of Cormac’s castle of An Blarna.’

‘What power will it confer, there? Invulnerability?’

‘Ha! Not that. Cormac will have to look to his own security as ever he did. But now he will be able to defend himself with the gift of diplomacy, for it seems that this particular stump gives those who touch it a fine way with words.’

‘Then you yourself must have slept seven nights upon it, I’d say.’

Gwydion laughed. ‘Did I never tell you that mockery is a very childish skill? I will have you know that many is the night since last we met when I have wished myself upon a bed that was as soft as a castle parapet.’

‘I’m wishing myself abed at this very moment.’ Will stretched again and yawned. ‘As sorry as I am for your poor old spine, it’s time I rested mine. I really should be going home.’

At this Gwydion looked silently away, and Will knew the wizard had more to say for himself. They sat until the skylarks began singing, until the eastern sky had turned a fragile blue above the pale mists of a summer dawn. Long, low streamers of cloud hovered close by the eastern horizon, as pink as the boiled flesh of a salmon. They turned slowly to fiery gold as the sun rose to burn off night mists that still clung to the land.

‘Did you ever find the Black Book?’ Will asked, meaning the ancient scroll that Gwydion had often spoken about, the one that told of the history of the battlestones.

The wizard stiffened. ‘I did not, and perhaps I never will. But I have not been idle. I have learned something of what the Black Book might once have contained. There are here and there snippets to be found, lines taken from fragments, copies of copies, translations made from memory long after the Black Book was lost. My gleanings have been meagre; still they have given me some much-needed clues regarding how best to set about the perilous task of draining a battlestone.’

‘Surely you don’t think—’

‘My first attempt was foolhardy. I am aware of that now. But if I had been wiser sooner, then I should not have done as I did. And where would that have left us?’

Will grunted. ‘All decisions must be made on the basis of imperfect knowledge, I suppose.’

The wizard’s chin jutted. ‘I will say that now I believe I have almost learned enough to try again.’

There was a noise then, and Will turned. ‘Look! The Sister. She stirs.’

They went to attend the Wise Woman as she came out of sleep. First her eyes opened and rolled in her head, then she struggled weakly and spoke like one in a fever. Gwydion lifted her head and made her drink from a small leather bottle. Then he said firmly, ‘Where are you from, Sister?’

‘My home is at Fossewyke, Master,’ she said in the voice of a young girl.

‘That is by Little Slaughter, is it not?’

Her eyes roamed, but then she said, ‘Yes, Master. It is in the vale of the Eyne Brook.’

‘Well, get you home now without delay. Do not eat or drink again until night falls. By which time you will be wholly yourself again. Do you promise to do as I bid you?’

‘Yes, Master.’

Will hid the sheathed blade away from her as Gwydion pointed a warning finger in her face. ‘To thine own self be true – now promise me that also.’

‘I promise, Master.’

‘Go now! Prosper under the sky, and do not be tempted to meddle again with crafts that lie beyond your scope.’

And with that the Sister rose to her feet and skipped away as briskly as a lamb, leaving Will in awe of the power that lay in Gwydion’s words.

‘Is she in her right mind again?’ he asked doubtfully.

‘Not yet. But by sundown she will be, save for a strong cider headache. And that might teach her to go more slowly in high matters. I did not chastise her further, for she must have acted in fear to save her life. By rights great magic such as she used should have killed her, but it did not, and that is a discrepancy which troubles me.’

‘Discrepancy?’ Will asked, his heart sinking. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Come, Willand, I have a favour to ask of you.’

He followed, going towards the lign and out along it to the west until Gwydion said:

‘Slaughter great,

Slaughter small!

All slaughter now,

No Slaughter at all!

‘Do you know what that means?’

Will shook his head. ‘Should I?’

‘It is the answer to the lights that burned last night over the Wolds.’

‘How could that be an answer?’

Gwydion sat down on the ground. ‘I will tell you, but first you must tell me again what happened to the Doomstone of Verlamion, the same which you think you destroyed – but cannot say how.’

Will sat down too. He thought back to the desperate moment when he had struggled against the Doomstone. He told all he could remember of what had taken place in the cellar under the great chapter house of the Sightless Ones. The Doomstone had been none other than the slab that covered the Founder’s sarcophagus.

‘In the end I used this to break it,’ he said, hooking a finger inside the neck of his shirt.

He had meant to draw out his fish talisman and show it to Gwydion, but it was not there. He patted his chest in puzzlement, then remembered how the day before he had washed his hair and replaited his braids ready for the Lammas celebrations. He had hung the fish on a nail and had forgotten to put it back on. It was only the figure of a fish, no bigger than his thumb, carved in green and with a red eye, but he missed it.

‘No matter,’ he said regretfully. ‘It’s probably not important.’

Gwydion’s grey eyes watched him. ‘The power of magic is often made greater by tokens. Much strength may be drawn upon in time of peril if a true belief lies within your heart. You knew what to do without being taught. I have said it many times, Willand, you are the Child of Destiny. The Black Book has said so.’

He chewed his lip, a heavy weight burdening him. ‘I don’t know where I come from, and that scares me, Gwydion.’

The wizard touched him with a kindly hand. ‘Willand, I must interfere as lightly as possible where you are concerned. I know little enough about the part you are to play, except a pitiful portion revealed by the seers of old. Believe me when I say that I am hiding nothing from you that it would serve you to know.’

He sighed and hugged his knees. ‘I’ve been having the same nightmare over and over lately. An idea comes to me in shallow sleep – that Maskull is my father.’

Gwydion shook his head. ‘The Doomstone traded in fear and lies. The planting of deceits in men’s minds is the way all such stones make a defence of themselves.’

‘Then how do you explain what Maskull himself said when I faced him on top of the curfew tower? That was something else I can’t forget. He said, “I made you, I can just as easily unmake you.” I’ve wondered too many times what he meant by it.’

Gwydion said gently, ‘Maskull is not your father. Be assured of that.’

‘Then why did he say what he did?’

‘Try to forget about it.’

The wizard got up and walked away. Will wanted to leap up, to go after him and badger him on the matter, but Gwydion’s certainty made him pause, made him remember that a wizard’s secrets must be respected.

‘If you say so.’

As he watched his long morning shadow stretching before him, a keen hunger gnawed at his spirit. After a while, he shivered and got up. A cool westerly breeze had sprung up and he felt an ache in his bones that he thought must be coming from the dampness of the grass. The power flowing from the Giant’s Ring was subsiding as the sun rose higher, but still he could feel the echoes coursing in darkness beneath his bare feet. He looked inside himself for an answer, then went to talk with Gwydion about the power that moved in the earth.

‘Can’t you find a way to stop the empowering of the lorc?’ he asked. ‘Why not halt the flow right here at its source? That way the battlestones would never awaken.’

Gwydion shook his head. ‘What you suggest is impossible.’

‘But why? You said the Giant’s Ring controls the earth flow like a sluice controls a millstream. I can feel the influence surging under here. It’s huge.’

‘So it is, but I could not control it any more than I could dam a raging river torrent with my bare hands. And in any case, it would do no good. Any attempt to block the flow would wreak havoc – blocking the millrace would surely stop the mill-wheel turning, but it would also raise the millpond to overflowing and eventually it would burst the dam. To interfere with the lorc directly would risk disrupting all the earth flows that sustain us. In the end it would turn the Realm into a wasteland.’

‘If the power of this lign is anything to go by, I’d say the lorc is about to do that anyway. It’s definitely waking up. Can’t you feel it, Gwydion? Have your powers declined that much?’

The wizard’s glance was sharp. ‘Declined? You know very well that I could never feel the lorc directly. In that respect, your abilities are unmatched.’

Will’s mind tuned to a sound high in the air. The untiring warbling of the skylark. Could they hear that song in the Vale too? Could Willow hear it? He stopped and turned.

‘What’s the favour you wanted to ask me?’

Gwydion leaned on his staff. ‘I now know what must be done. No matter what the dangers, I must find the battlestones one at a time. I must either drain them or bind them, for I dare not confront them as you did the Doomstone.’

‘How many more have you found?’

‘In the past four years? None.’

‘None?’ The news was shocking.

‘Without your talent to guide me I have been blind.’ Gwydion opened his hands in a gesture that showed there was no other answer to the problem.

‘You should have called on me,’ Will told him. Then he saw the trap the wizard had set for him, and added, ‘Before Bethe was born I would gladly have come with you.’

Gwydion met his gaze knowingly. ‘Would you?’

He stared sullenly into the western haze, noting the starlings and how they flew. Their movements said there was something wrong with the air, something nasty blowing in from the Wolds.

‘You know I would have done anything to help you, Gwydion.’

‘But would you have wanted to?’ The wizard pulled up his staff and gestured westward. ‘I see you can taste the bitterness that lies upon the west wind. Do you smell that ghastly taint of burning? It is human flesh. We must go now. Straight away. To the hamlet of Little Slaughter to see what a fatal weakness in the spirit of a powerful man has done.’

Will’s heart sickened to hear the words that he had known were coming since before sunrise. ‘I’m a husband and a father now. I can’t just leave without a word. It’s harvest time, Gwydion, and I promised Willow I wouldn’t be long.’

His words were reasonable, sane by any standard. But they already sounded hollow in his ears.

As the morning wore on, the August sun rose hot on their backs. Will saw its golden beams glittering on the headwaters of the Evenlode stream, and by midday they were across it and turning south, so that the sun began to fill the ups and downs of their path with shimmering patches and pools.

They went a league or two out of their way to the south and passed many folk on the road. Gwydion made a sign to them and warned Will to silence. Some people seemed to see Will but not the wizard. Some seemed to see neither. Others turned about as if alarmed, or at least puzzled by some unaccountable presence. Occasionally there were those who embraced Gwydion as if they had been met by a long-dead kinsman, and to these Gwydion gave a word in friendship and sometimes a token of reward.

They came down to a little river and saw a bridge-keeper’s shack. Here two men in red livery guarded the bridge. Arms had once been painted on a board but they had faded and peeled away.

Neither the keeper of the Windrush crossing nor the two men-at-arms seemed to notice them, though a witless beggar put his hands out for a blessing and Gwydion clasped his hand briefly as he passed.

‘Welcome, Master Jack-in-a-box!’ the beggar said.

‘Keep up!’ Gwydion warned as Will looked pitifully at the beggar’s sores.

‘Has he no friends to take care of him?’ Will asked angrily. ‘Is he a man or a dog? And why is he clad in such filthy rags? Is there no Sister here? What sort of place is this?’

‘We are at the village of Lowe, and shall soon be through it,’ Gwydion said.

‘Can nothing be done for the people here?’

‘This village belongs to an ill-starred fellow whose company is best avoided. This lord has driven the local Wise Woman away, and for that his people will one day murder him, for it is a true rede that “by the least of men shall the best of men always be judged”.’

There were cottages clustered here, with folk sitting at their doors. Half a dozen dirty children played in the way, and the people seemed odd. They made no acknowledgment of Will’s greetings as he passed. One old woman, however, received Gwydion as a subject would receive a king. She gave him a bundle which was put into the wizard’s crane bag which was instantly passed to Will to carry. As they left the village and rose up the hill high above the mossy thatches Will looked back down into the valley to where the brimming waters of the Windrush shone in brash daylight. There was a large manor some way to the right of the bridge.

‘Do not look at it,’ Gwydion said, and pulled him onward.

‘But how did the village get that way?’

‘It is a place of poor aspect. Land-blighted. Not every village in the Realm is as well set as Nether Norton. Many do not have a kindly lord. You should think yourself fortunate that the Vale is a place without any ruler, for some delight in making themselves overmighty while they may.’

Their journey, Gwydion had said, would not take them far, but they had already walked many a long league and Will’s feet ached. They were going to the place where the violet light had burned, but it was ever the wizard’s way not to go anywhere very directly. He took account of the flows in the land, choosing ancient paths, or striding along great arcs that swirled from hill to saddle and then swept on along the spring-lines of an upland or plunged down into the cool heart of a wood. Always the wizard’s staff would swing out in a striding rhythm, seeking narrow deer paths, and more often than not Will found himself following in his guide’s footsteps instead of walking at his shoulder as he preferred. Seldom did they follow the ways used by men, though sometimes they found dusty tracks, or a line of gnarled trees, or a trackway that meandered among planted fields. By now Will had begun to worry about Willow and his regret at their not having said a proper farewell was eating at him. He went through what he would have liked to have said, then he pictured his daughter crawling across the grass while her mother gathered windfall apples, and that image brought him back to the events of the night and to the matter in hand.

There were dangers. There was no denying that, for Maskull was implicated. And no denying the bubbling excitement in Will’s belly that others might have feared to call fear.

When he paused to take stock he saw people in the distance, working in the fields or making their way to market. As soon as Gwydion saw them he turned away and passed into the dark shade of a wood. He whispered to himself, nor was he whispering blessings. From time to time he would put his hands flat on the smooth grey trunk of a tall beech tree to mutter an incantation or to ask the air for directions. He stooped to crumble soil between his fingers, then to drink a handful of cool water which he found bubbling fresh from the earth. Will thought of old Wortmaster Gort, whose own skills upon the land were a delight. But he had once said that a true wizard such as Gwydion knew all parts of the Realm, from having walked every step of it a dozen and one times. He said that Gwydion could tell from the taste of a handful of water, or the feel of a pinch of dust, where he stood to the nearest league, just as carriers upon the Great North Road might know how far they had gone just by listening to the way people said certain words.

‘How far is it now?’ Will asked.

‘Not far.’

When Will began to feel hungry, Gwydion plunged into a wood and brought out a great armful of morels. They had a delicious taste. And again, down beside a stream where willows grew he found several white fleshy growths on the tree trunks that looked like giant ears and tasted like they looked but which filled the belly well.

Here there were many dry-stone walls and sheep meadows, and ahead a country of windy heath on which the bracken was slowly turning russet. Gwydion halted as they approached one of the ancient roads that he detested so much. Will looked up and down it, finding that his eye could follow it a long way to north and south. It was dead straight and did not yield to the earth in any way. Though old and broken in places now, still it scarred the land like a knife wound.

‘Slave road!’ Gwydion said with disgust as he hurried to the far side. ‘The straightest of them, built here fifty generations ago, when the Slaver empire took the Isle by force. Its name now is the Fosse. Do you see how it still works its dividing influence upon the land?’

After so long following Gwydion, Will’s feet had learned how to tread a true path through the land. When he planted his feet and felt for the earth streams, he could sense the way the power was turned and pent up as if into brackish pools by the ancient highway. He could see what Gwydion meant about the village of Lowe being a place that was land-blighted. He wondered at how his talent had sharpened and matured during the past few years. What could that mean?

After crossing the Fosse their own path trended more southerly. The land began to open out and there was more rising than falling. They began to cross a wide sweep of planted country that rose up into the higher Wolds. At length, Gwydion stopped and danced magic, calling out in the true tongue that there might now be an opening. In moments a path between the briars appeared where no path had been before. They went along it, and Will felt a tingle in his bones, the same he had felt when entering the Vale. At that time there had been joy in his heart, but not now, for the smell of burning had been rising on the wind and he began to taste something unpleasant at the back of his throat. Fine grit stuck to his lips and gathered in the corners of his eyes. The track before them and the leaves on the trees and bushes were dusty. Now they gave way to leaves that were rain spotted and again to leaves washed clean by a recent downpour.

Will thought of the great towering cloud that had risen high into the sky last night. It was as if a column of rain had been sent deliberately to damp the fires down. The stream that came from the higher land was running milkygrey with dust, carrying black flecks on its surface. Gwydion stooped to look at it, but this time he did not dip his hand in or try to drink.

‘This is the valley of the Eyne Brook,’ he said at last. ‘Yonder lies Fossewyke. We are nearing our goal.’

Will looked at the scum of ash that floated on the brook’s surface. He soon found the reason for it – the water had bubbled across a great heath that had been turned black by fire. When they ventured into the valley the soil was warm underfoot and smoking in places even though there had been rain heavy enough to douse it.

‘Steam,’ Gwydion said, nodding at the wisps. ‘Nothing could have survived here last night.’

As they journeyed to the heart of the devastation, Will found himself gagging at the acrid smell. All the trees nearby had been smashed down, their trunks charred black on one side. Everything was layered in thin ash. In places it had drifted into banks that looked like so many grey snowdrifts. The woods seemed to have been brushed flat by a tremendous wind. Nothing green remained. Nothing stood properly upright. All around was a steamy haze, heaps of roasted dust and twisted rock rubble.

Will gouged at his eyes to clear them as they came to what had been a fish pond. Its bed was still too warm to walk on. It had been dried so suddenly that the fish had been boiled alive and lay simmered on the cracked clay. Will stretched out his hands and felt the remains of ovenlike heat. Now he could see why Gwydion had not striven to get here sooner.

Everything around them was strange and terrifying. He walked into a stinking ruin, staggered on after Gwydion over the hot ground until they came to a rise. A great bank of loose, smouldering earth reared up before them, and beyond stretched a curtain of smoke. Ash and cinders were raw and sharp underfoot. They scraped and crunched under Will’s feet as he climbed, sending up dust and a vile smell. He tried not to breathe but then as he reached the top of the bank he gasped, for beyond was a sight that he had not expected – a huge, smoking crater.

‘What could have done this?’ he whispered, looking across the shimmering waste.

‘Welcome,’ Gwydion said emptily, ‘to the village of Little Slaughter.’

The whole village had been obliterated. But how? Ten thousand lightning strokes would not have been enough to cause such destruction. Nothing was left of cottage, granary, alehouse, mill. Everything had been smashed to powder and the powder scattered for half a league.

‘There was a battlestone here,’ Will said slowly. ‘A battlestone that someone tried to break. Is that it?’

Gwydion looked at him for a moment but said nothing.

Will went as close to the hole as he dared. It was still red hot, and fuming. He could not see how deep it was, but it was so big around that all of Nether Norton could have fitted inside. He felt numbed, drained of all feeling. His mind raced as he tried to understand what could have happened. When he knelt to touch the dust at the crater’s edge he saw there the brightness of what had been molten iron; now it shone like a solidified pool of the Wortmaster’s most precious quicksilver. He could not speak or tear his gaze away for a long time.

Gwydion laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I am sorry you had to see this.’

All around were ashes, but here and there away from the crater they saw small signs that this place had been home to many dozens of folk – a horseshoe, a burned chair, a child’s rag doll.

A fist of fear clutched at Will’s stomach, and he suddenly looked up into the wizard’s face. ‘I remember Preston Mantles and the lad, Waylan, who Maskull mistook for me. This ruin was meant for Nether Norton, wasn’t it?’

‘It might have been.’ Gwydion closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. ‘And it may still happen.’

Will stood up and walked away. He wanted to run, to run from the wizard, to run far away. And when his thoughts touched Willow and Bethe the blood in his heart froze solid. He was scared to open his mind in case too many terrors rushed in on him at once. Instead he wandered wherever his feet might lead him and cried for the people of the lost village, and his tears fell upon the wounded earth.

In return the earth threw up an unlooked-for gift. He bent to look at a reaping hook that was lying on the ground nearby. It was rusted as red as hearth iron and the handle was black, turned wholly to charcoal. It flaked away as he tried to pick it up. But then a blood redness caught at his tear-blurred eyes. Something was down there in the dust at his feet. It was a little figure, carved in some material that was not harmed by fire. When he picked it up it was warm in his hand. It was a stone fish.

He looked around, suspecting sorcery. This little fish was so very like his own in size and shape. But whereas his own had an eye of red set in green, this one had an eye of green set in red. On its side were marks he could not read, but they were just like those on his own talisman, and it bore the same sigil of three triple-sided figures set one within another. Hardly knowing why, he closed his hand over it as Gwydion came to stand beside him. The wizard signalled that they should leave, for there was nothing else to be done here.

Will said, ‘You knew last night that something as terrible as this was happening, didn’t you?’

Gwydion fixed his eyes on Will’s own. ‘As soon as you showed me the light in the sky I knew that a vicious revenge had been taken. I did not know precisely how, but it was clear that we were already too late to stop it.’

‘Then it was a battlestone?’

‘You are wrong.’

‘But what else could have done this?’

‘This was the work of a fireball.’ The wizard took his little knife from its sheath and showed it to Will. ‘I have spoken of this before. It is made from star-iron, the only thing of metal I carry, for it was neither wrested from the earth nor roasted from the rocks by men. This iron came down from above, just like the fireball that destroyed Little Slaughter. Have I not told you about the great, turning dome of the sky? How it is pierced in many places by holes through which we can see the brilliance that lies in the Beyond? Those holes are what we call the stars. It is said that nothing lives on the far side of the dome of the sky. There is only a great furnace that goes on forever, a parched realm of heat, of blinding light and searing fireballs.’

Will nodded, seeing what the wizard was driving at. ‘And sometimes it happens that a fireball falls through a star hole and it’s then what we call a shooting star.’

‘Correct. Mostly these lumps burn away in the upper airs. But sometimes they are big enough to fall to earth as pieces of star-iron. Such iron was once rarer than gold. And in the days before men learned how to burn iron from the bones of the earth the finest magical tools were made from it.’

‘Is that what happened here?’ Will coughed and rubbed at his eyes as he looked around again. ‘A shooting star landed on the village? A lump of star-iron? But it must have been as big as a house to have done this. How could a thing so big fall through something so tiny as a star?’

‘Stars are not tiny. They are far away – nearly seventeen hundred leagues, which is half a world away. Each star is a hole, a great round window like the pupil of your eye. It opens as it rises and closes as it sets. And the biggest stars at their largest are large indeed – as many as twenty paces across when fully open. I know, for I have sailed to the very rim of the Western Deeps and stood upon the cataract at the end of the world. There the stars seem as big as the sun does here, and they move at great speed.’

Will listened as Gwydion spoke. He shook the dust from his scalp as he tried to make sense of what he was being told. Stars that were giant eyes twenty or more paces across. Great holes through which fiery lumps of iron flew down to kill whole villages of people…It made no sense. It made no sense at all.

He said, ‘It’s strange to me that Little Slaughter should have been hit so exactly.’

‘Do not imagine this was a chance misfortune.’

‘Then the fireball was directed here? By…Maskull?’

The wizard nodded. ‘And the purpose of the thunderstorm we watched afterwards was to put out these fires. The storm was whipped up so that folk in other villages of the Wolds would believe as you tried to believe – that the noise and light were no more than a particularly violent summer storm, that what happened here was none of their concern.’

Will thought again of Willow and Bethe. He said, ‘Gwydion, I must go home right away.’

But the wizard took his arm. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the very last thing you should do.’

‘But…if Maskull’s free again and in the world…’

Gwydion took himself a few paces apart and conjured a small bird from one of his sleeves. He gentled its head with his finger, kissed it or perhaps murmured to it, then threw it up into the sky where it took wing and quickly flew away to the east.

‘Recall, if you will, the battle of Verlamion, and the moment when Maskull vanished. Do you know where I sent him? It was into the Realm Below. He has remained for years lost there, trapped in that great maze that was made by the fae when they withdrew from the light. My hope and belief was that Maskull would take far longer to find his way clear of those myriad chambers. I thought that in that time I would be able to solve the problem of the battlestones, but my hopes have proved groundless. Late last year I began to notice an uneasy presence at Trinovant and elsewhere. It warned me that Maskull had made good his escape. “By his magic, so shall ye know him!”The rede says that spells betray their makers to others who are skilled in the same arts. You see, I have known for some time about Maskull’s return. I have read his signature in much, and I have expected his power to be unleashed again. But not like this. Not like this.’

Will’s anger surfaced. ‘Why didn’t you warn me?’

‘Warn you?’ There was recrimination in Gwydion’s eyes. ‘To what end? You were already in what I believed to be the safest place there was. Living where you do, Willand, it would not have been clear to you that the spirit of the Realm has been growing steadily darker since this year’s beginning. Mistrust is burgeoning, confidence slackening. A great turbulence and greed is increasing among the lords in Trinovant. As Lord Protector, Richard of Ebor is the centre about which all now revolves, but that centre cannot hold for long. An attempt will soon be made to arrest him. His enemies are ready to move again. You see, I have had much to contend with.’

Will followed Gwydion’s words with difficulty. The shock of seeing Little Slaughter filled his mind, and his fears about Willow and Bethe and the Vale came once again to the fore. If Maskull was now at large and the lorc drawing power again, then nothing but misery could be foreseen.

Gwydion turned to survey the fuming waste they had left behind. He spent a moment deep in thought, and then measured his words carefully. ‘You may rest a little easier in your mind, my friend, for I do not believe Maskull will have quite the opportunity to do again what he has done here. Nor do I believe you were the reason he destroyed Little Slaughter.’

CHAPTER THREE WHAT LIES WITHIN

Gwydion led Will some way back eastward, heading towards the Four-shire Stone before the light died. This was no battlestone, but a benign landmark that showed the place where four earldoms met. On the way they spoke of the strife that was growing among the lords at Trinovant. The trouble, Gwydion explained, had not come solely out of the queen’s viciousness. Richard of Ebor had also played his part.

‘That is not what I required of the man whom I chose to be Lord Protector,’ Gwydion said ruefully. ‘He is by nature a ruler, and usually dedicated to good governance, but as long as a year ago I began to look for reasons why his nature might have been turned. I now ask myself whether leakage of harm from the Dragon Stone might not be to blame, for when I told him I wished to visit Foderingham Castle to inspect the Dragon Stone, he denied me out of hand. “No one,” said he, “is to go near that stone.”’

Will listened with mounting alarm, and also a pang of guilt. He already knew, from having lived among the duke’s family, that Richard of Ebor was a man who treated his duties seriously. He was not a crudely ambitious man. He did regard himself as the rightful king of the Realm, but that was more out of respect for the laws of blood than any personal desire for power. Following the battle at Verlamion he had been prepared to agree to Gwydion’s compromise, which was to content himself with the modest title of Lord Protector and to take on the day-to-day running of the Realm. For the sake of peace, he had allowed the weak usurper-king, Hal, to continue on the throne as figurehead despite his having fallen twice into further bouts of incapacity and madness.

But things must have soured a great deal, Will told himself, if Duke Richard won’t allow Gwydion to see the Dragon Stone.

As for Will’s uncomfortable pang of guilt, that came because he had never admitted an incident when one night he and Edward, the duke’s eldest son, had led the other Ebor children down to look at what Edward had called ‘the magic stone’.

‘Duke Richard has not been quite himself lately,’ Gwydion said.

‘Do you think he’s hiding something? About the Dragon Stone, I mean.’

‘It may be nothing more than Friend Richard’s woebegotten attempt to haggle with me. He is inclined to treat everything as if it might become part of a political bargain. He often says: “I will do something for you, Master Gwydion, if you will do something for me.” Though he must know well enough by now that magic cannot be traded that way.’

‘That would be a hard lesson for any lord to learn,’ Will said. ‘It seems to me that Duke Richard is not a man who’ll ever understand magic.’

Gwydion grunted. ‘You are right, for the trading of favours is how men of power try to gain advantage over one another. What self-seeking fools they are, when trust and selflessness are what is truly needed. So little magic is left in the world that men have lost their taste for it. Even the greatest exercise of magic does not stick for long in the memory. It fades from men’s minds – speak today with anyone who fought at Verlamion and they will keenly remember arrow and sword, but they will have little recollection of the beams of fire that burst so scorchingly over their heads as the fighting raged below.’

Will thought about that, hearing a note of regret in the wizard’s voice, and realizing that his own memories were vivid enough. A sudden suspicion prickled him. ‘Were you by any chance on your way to Foderingham when I conjured you?’

‘In truth I was already there – passing through the inner bailey and about to reclaim my wayward charge.’

Will blinked. ‘You were going to take the Dragon Stone away without the duke’s permission?’

The wizard made a dismissive gesture. ‘I had not yet made my decision.’

Will wondered at what Gwydion knew and what he needed to know concerning the Dragon Stone. He had always said there was no such thing as coincidence, that every weft thread in the great tapestry of fate touched every warp thread and vice-versa, and from all those touches was made the great picture of existence.

Will’s thoughts returned to what had happened that night at Foderingham when he had last clapped eyes on the Dragon Stone. ‘Gwydion, I think there’s something I ought to tell you…’

He explained how he and Edward, and all the Ebor children, had got more than their curiosities had bargained for. The stone’s writhing surface had terrified them. It had begun by posing a morbid riddle for Edward, and had finished by attacking Edmund, the duke’s second son, sending him into a swoon from which he had never fully recovered. He told of how he had wrestled with the stone and how it had almost overcome him, before cringing back at the mention of its true name.

When Will had finished explaining, the wizard leaned heavily on his staff and said, ‘Let us overnight here. We shall talk more on this after supper, though it would have been better for all concerned if you had told me about this sooner.’

‘I couldn’t break a confidence,’ Will said lamely.

‘You are breaking it now.’

‘That’s because Edward is boastful and very close to his father. He may have told tales about the powers that dwell in the stone. That might be the reason the duke is behaving this way.’

Gwydion turned sharply. ‘You think Friend Richard seeks to use the battlestone’s power for himself?’

Will knit his brows over the suggestion. ‘I don’t think he would ever be that foolhardy.’

‘Hmmm. It would depend on how desperate he became.’

Here, east of the Slaver road, the air was cleaner and the grass greener. At their backs a slim crescent moon was following the sun down over the western horizon. Their camp was made on a rise close by the manor of Swell. Once again Gwydion had avoided the villages and farms that nestled nearby. He chose the best ground and then carefully cut away the turf to make a fire pit and piled up enough dry sticks to give them good cheer until they should fall asleep. Will was very hungry, and glad of old dry bread and a delicious soup of dried roots and morels that Gwydion cooked up from ingredients he took from his crane bag.

Will’s eyes drooped as, with a full belly, he listened to the crackle of burning wood and the calls of night creatures. The ground was hard under his elbow and hip bone. He smelled the drowsy perfume of cow parsley and meadowsweet and bruised grass, and felt pleased to be back in the wider world.

‘My First in the West shall Marry…’ he said, stirring himself to recite the riddle that had appeared in the skin of the Dragon Stone.

‘My first in the West shall marry,

My second a king shall be.

My third upon a bridge lies dead.

My fourth far in the East shall wed.

My fifth over the seas shall send.

My sixth in wine shall meet his end.

My seventh, whom none now fears,

Shall be reviled five hundred years.’

‘What are we to make of that?’ Gwydion asked.

Will looked into the night. ‘If the Black Book said there were many battlestones, maybe it’s the Dragon Stone’s way of giving clues about its brothers. Maybe one of the stones is fated to be reunited with its sister-stone in the West – that might fit with the piece you sailed over to your friend Cormac in the Blessed Isle. Or maybe that’s the second stone mentioned, because it stood in the shadow of the King’s Stone. It could be that the third will be found, or drained, on a bridge. Or maybe it lies near a place called Deadbridge – oh, you know better than I how riddles go.’

Gwydion settled back, watching the last rosy blink of moonset. He said distantly, ‘It may be that the Dragon Stone is more important than we have so far supposed.’

‘Why did you choose to lodge it with Duke Richard?’ Will asked, unable to keep the criticism from his voice.

‘You think that was a mistake. In truth, it was no choice of mine, but a course forced on me by events. There was nowhere better to lodge a battlestone at the time. Do you know that time itself has a most curious character? I have discussed it much with the loremaster who lives at the Castle of Sundials. Though he speaks of “time’s arrow”, its nature, he says, is not straight so much as turning ever and again upon itself – wheels within wheels, like the cogs that turn within his confounded engines. As the rede of time says, “History repeateth.” Thus, if we are wise, we may learn from the past—’

‘Gwydion,’ Will knew when he was being distracted, ‘what are we going to do?’

The wizard stirred restlessly. ‘Rather than return to Foderingham, let us find out first if it has been put back in its original resting place. That is my greatest fear. And in any case we must go by Nadderstone if we would go to Foderingham by the shortest way.’

‘Who would want to re-bury the stone at Nadderstone?’

‘Who do you think? If it has come to Maskull’s notice, and if he is making it his business to tamper with the lorc, then we should know about that.’

‘What if we find it’s been put back?’

‘Then the time will have come for me to drain it. For, whatever the other merits of your midnight visit to the Dragon Stone, you have certainly given us a great advantage by discovering its true name.’

‘Oh, no, Gwydion,’ Will said, feeling dismay blow through him. ‘Please promise me you won’t try another draining.’

‘I must do what I must do,’ Gwydion said, then added with a note of finality, ‘Do not worry about it yet. It may never come to that.’

Will blew out a long breath. He watched the flames of their little camp fire and wished himself back at the Blazing, but the coils of intrigue seemed to have wound themselves more tightly about him than any serpent. He said doggedly, ‘Gwydion, before I set off anywhere else, I must get a message to Willow.’

‘As a matter of fact, Willand,’ the wizard said archly, ‘I have already sent word to her explaining your absence. Good night.’

After three days’ walk along highways and byways they came at last to the village of Eiton. There were many harvest carts about the lanes and straw was blowing everywhere along the dusty road that led to the Plough Inn. Gwydion looked for signs that the Sightless Ones were out overseeing the tithe, but he saw nothing.

The Plough was a much-praised alehouse and inn, and one that Will knew well. It was a long, low building set to the side of the road, with a walled yard, a great spreading thatch and a big square sign swinging between two stout posts. It glowed now in the mellow golden light of an August evening. A straw cockerel stood guard on the rooftree and seemed to tell the world that all were welcome, except troublemakers.

The inn was frequented by travellers and local folk alike. It was far bigger and busier than the Green Man, and had not changed at all since Will had come here last. A dozen churlish folk were slaking harvest thirsts in the homely, rush-scattered room.

The man who kept house was called Dimmet. He was a big man, very busy and jolly, the sort who folk took care not to upset. When he looked up his welcome could not have been warmer. ‘Now then, if it ain’t my lucky day! Master Gwydion! How nice! How nice!’ He roared with delight as he came to greet them. ‘Duffred! Come down here and see who’s paid us the honour of yet another visit!’

The innkeeper’s grown son poked his curly, ginger head in at the door and grinned broadly. ‘Hey-ho, Master Gwydion! How goes it with you?’

‘He looks like a man what’s footsore and road-weary to me. And properly in need of a drop of my best ale – if you’ll take the hint, my son.’

‘That is very kind,’ Gwydion said.

‘And a jar of ale for the young feller too, I’d guess?’

The Plough’s big, black mastiff dog came out to see what the excitement was. Being fond of dogs, Will put out an open palm to help it decide he was more friend than foe. It sniffed at his feet, then began to lick his toes.

‘It’s a big, old dog you have here,’ Will said. ‘Maybe you should put some water out for him.’

‘Pack that up, Bolt!’ Duffred called, pulling on the dog’s iron collar. ‘Out in the yard with you. Go on, now.’

Will grinned and shook Dimmet’s huge, freckled hand.

‘Glad to meet you.’

‘They call me Will.’

‘Do they now? Then, we shall have to do the same.’

‘He don’t recall you,’ Duffred said impishly from the taps. ‘Cider still more to your taste than ale, is it?’

Will nodded vigorously, pleased to be recognized after so long.

‘I never forgets a face!’ Dimmet touched a finger to his chin. ‘Wait a bit! Are you not the young lad who came here that time Master Gwydion led our horse, Bessie, off on some business or another up by Nadderstone?’

‘That’s it.’

‘You see! I never do forget a face. Though you was a mere lad then, and not so filled out. Must have been all of five or six year ago.’

‘I hope Bessie got back safe to you.’

‘That she did.’ Duffred set down two tankards. ‘She was fetched back by a man in my Lord of Ebor’s livery as I recall.’

‘Always happy to render Master Gwydion a service if I can.’ Dimmet glanced shrewdly at the wizard. ‘And in return he’ll often put a good word on my vats, or he makes sure my thatch don’t catch fire.’

Duffred tugged at his father’s sleeve and said, lowering his voice, ‘You might think to tell them about the odd one who’s been sat in the snug all day.’

Will looked sharply to Gwydion, knowing it was not usually possible to get into the snug.

‘Easy, Will,’ Gwydion said, as if reading his mind. ‘The Sightless Ones do not agree with the drinking of wine or ale. Nor would Dimmet here take kindly to one of them poking his nose in at the Plough, much less getting into his snug.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Dimmet said. ‘He’s a shifty one. Got wilted primroses on his hat, though I don’t know where he got them. Said he wanted “privacy”, if you please!’

Dimmet’s eyes rolled as he made the last remark. The last reason anyone would come to the Plough, Will thought, was to be alone. He looked to Gwydion again in puzzlement, but then followed the wizard into the passageway and along a swept stone floor that was so footworn it shone.

They passed a great oaken table that was stacked with platters and bowls as if a celebration had only just been cleared away. In the middle was a trencher decked with flowers and a large pig’s head with a red apple in its mouth. The head seemed to be grinning. It reminded Will of Lord Strange.

When they came to the great empty hearth with its stone chimney and inglenooks on either side, Gwydion paused and raised his arms. Then he muttered words and laid a spell on the little room that lay behind the chimney breast.

‘What are you doing?’ Will mouthed, suddenly anxious about what might be lying in wait for them inside.

The wizard looked around, then whispered, ‘Calling down a defence against eavesdroppers.’ Then he ushered Will through the hidden entrance.

The snug was cool and dark, for it was summer and the little grate was empty. The only light came from a small window and the polished oak boards that made it seem like a ship’s cabin gave the room a rare cosiness. At the table sat a man Will was delighted to recognize.

‘Tilwin!’

The dark-haired travelling man rose with a heartening greeting and gave him a bear hug. His eyes were as blue as chips of summer sky. ‘How are you now, Willand?’ he said. ‘And Master Gwydion, well met, my old friend!’

Then Will heard Tilwin utter words half under his breath to the wizard, and something made him think that a formula had been spoken in the true tongue, words of recognition, a greeting between men who stood tall in one another’s esteem. He watched them embrace briefly, then all three sat down together.

‘You’re the last person I expected to meet here,’ Will said.

‘Whereas I’ve been waiting for you to turn up like a bad penny all this fine afternoon!’ Tilwin grinned, and there was laughter in his eyes, but also, Will thought, a deeper gleam that spoke of troubles.

In all the years of Will’s childhood Tilwin the Tinker was the only outsider who had ever come up the Vale as far as Nether Norton. He was a knife-grinder and a trader who travelled far across the Realm. He had always helped take the tithe down to Middle Norton, and he had brought many necessaries to the Vale – tools, medicines, bolts of cloth, pretty gems and love tokens too, for he knew all the different kinds of precious stone and what could be done with them. One day he had given Will a black stone to put under his pillow to ward off nightmares. Another time he had cracked a glassy pebble for Breona, cutting it with a series of skilled blows, and so had made a false diamond for her to wear as a brooch on high days.

Some of the Valesmen swore it was Tilwin who had thought up the game of cards, and as if to prove them right he always carried a faded card stuck in the band of his hat. He usually put wayside flowers there too, to lift the spirits of those he met. Today, as Dimmet had said, there were primroses but, like Tilwin, they seemed a little worse for wear.

‘Tell us why you’ve stopped coming to the Vale,’ Will said. ‘We’ve all missed you, you know.’

Tilwin glanced at Gwydion, and some more of his smile faded. ‘I’ve had a deal to do lately, and little time to do it.’ Then his smile came bravely again, and he poked Will’s shoulder. ‘Besides, there’s less need for me to come to the Vale these days. Now the tithe has stopped and Nether Norton can afford its own grinding wheel. That was hero’s work you did for your folk, Willand. I hope they appreciate you.’

Will reddened, embarrassed.

‘I sent word for…Tilwin…to meet us here,’ Gwydion said. ‘But a word of warning to you: do you recall my saying that Tilwin the Tinker is not necessarily what he seems?’

Will looked uncertainly from the wizard to Tilwin and back. ‘I’ve long known there was something rare about him, but I never knew quite what.’

‘My name is not Tilwin – it is Morann.’

Gwydion smiled. ‘He is, among other things, a lord of the Blessed Isle.’

‘I can see that now you mention it,’ Will said. And it was true, there had always been an assured manner about the man. Will jumped up and took his tankard in both hands. ‘Allow me to greet you properly in your own name: here’s to you, Morann, Lord Knife-grinder, as keen a blade as ever there was!’

‘And here’s to the meadows and mists of the Blessed Isle, where strange tales begin!’ said Gwydion, rising and lifting his tankard also.

Then up got Morann. ‘And here’s to you, Willand of the Vale. And to you, Master Gwydion Pathfinder. You’re both of you no better than you should be!’

They clashed tankards and supped, then all laughed together and sat down again as one.

‘You’re a loremaster like Wortmaster Gort,’ Will said. ‘Isn’t that it?’

Morann made a modest gesture. ‘Where old Gort’s learning concerns all the forests and all the herbs of the field, mine only touches bits of pebbles and such like.’

Gwydion laughed. ‘He gives himself no credit. He’s a “magical lapidary” – the greatest jewelmaster of latter days.’

Like Wortmaster Gort, Morann was another of the ageless druida who had wandered abroad, collecting magical knowledge for a hundred generations and more. They had no homes, but attached themselves here and there as circumstances arose. They were not quite wizards, but their magical skills were great, and they had lived long.

Will thought immediately of the strange red fish he had found at Little Slaughter. How could it be that a thing so exactly like his own talisman had been there for the finding down in the dust? Surely a jewelmaster as knowledgeable as Morann would be able to cast light upon its origin.

But as Will put a hand down towards his pouch a powerful feeling came over him that he should not tell Morann about the talisman any more than he had told Gwydion, which was nothing at all. He examined the feeling suspiciously, and had almost decided to put his doubts aside and draw out the red fish, when Duffred arrived with cheese and bread and apple jam.

Then Morann unsheathed his favourite long, thin knife and in deference to Gwydion laid it handle inwards on the table before him. He said to Will, ‘Be it hidden or carried openly, in former days it was thought a deadly crime to wear a blade in the presence of a druid, much less a person of Master Gwydion’s standing.’

‘I’m thinking you’ll be cutting no flesh, nor even bread with that knife, Morann,’ Gwydion said, his eyes twinkling.

‘Indeed not, Master Gwydion. However I like to respect the Old Ways when I can.’

Will saw that a wonderful pattern like knotted cord was worked into the old steel. He wondered what was so special about the knife, but he could not ask after it for the two old friends were already busy with one another’s memories.

They munched and drank as they talked about former times. Will listened more than he spoke and the three wore away most of the golden light of evening in remaking their friendship and gilding old memories. Morann told of recent travels, and of his adventures in the land of his fathers. Gwydion spoke of his wanderings in the wilds of Albanay, and of voyages he had made in frail coracles far out into the Western Deeps. Then they asked Will to tell of his wedding, and to speak of his life with Willow and the joy he had felt at his daughter’s birth.

He told them as well as he could, but when a pause came in their talk the fears that had been banished for a while began to crowd in on him. Again he began to reach for the red fish, but then he told himself that he did not want to be the first to speak of troubles, and so once more he chose to lay the matter aside.

Instead, his eye caught the ring on Morann’s finger. A ring of gold, it was, and the stone in it one of emerald green. Will had seen it many times before, but now its colour seemed to capture his attention and he felt prompted to ask about it.

‘It’s the ring of Turloch of Connat,’ Morann said. ‘It bears the great smaragd emerald of my ancestors. The tale says that Turloch used to wear it when trying suspected traitors. He would strike in the face any follower who was accused of treachery against him. If the man got up and kissed the ring then he was innocent. But if he could not bring himself to kiss the ring then he was guilty.’

Will wanted to hear more, but Gwydion cleared his throat and said, ‘We could listen all night with great pleasure to the deeds of your forebears, Morann, but I fear that darkness is pressing. Let us not forget that we are met for a more solemn purpose.’

They pushed their empty trenchers away and sat back. Then Gwydion laid out matters concerning the battlestones, and as the sun set he began to make a summary of what was presently known.

‘According to ancient writings, there were nine channels of earth power made by the fae long ago. These channels are called “ligns” – and collectively “the lorc”. The battlestones are planted on the lorc. There are two kinds of battlestone – the greater and the lesser. The greater sort come to life one at a time. Each of them has the power to raise bloodlust in the hearts of men and draw them to battle. We have tracked down five battlestones so far—’ Gwydion raised a stark finger, ‘—the first was the Dragon Stone, which we found just a few leagues to the east of here.’

‘Gwydion put it into Castle Foderingham for safekeeping,’ Will added. ‘It’s one of the greater sort.’

‘And you hope it’s still entombed there,’ Morann added dubiously. ‘Hope, but do not know? Is that it?’

‘Quite so.’ Gwydion unfolded his thumb. ‘The second of the stones was the Plaguestone, which was left by us in the cave of Anstin the Hermit.’

A cloud passed fleetingly across Morann’s face. ‘Surely stones such as these will not be safe in castles and hermits’ caves.’

Gwydion said, ‘Indeed. But I judged they would do better when placed in fresh lodgings than when left to rot in the ground. Foderingham’s walls are thick and I counted its master to be a stalwart friend. As for Anstin’s cave, no man dares go there for fear of leprosy. It is hardly spoken of locally, and not at all elsewhere, therefore it is one of the most secret places in the Realm.’

Morann shook his head. ‘Would the Plaguestone not have been better mortared into Foderingham’s foundations alongside the Dragon Stone?’

‘Yes, Gwydion,’ Will agreed. ‘Surely Maskull, with all his arts, would not fear the leper’s touch. If to get at a stone, even one of the lesser sort, is his aim—’

Gwydion held up a hand at mention of the sorcerer’s name. ‘Hear me out. Of the Plaguestone I shall say more presently. Meanwhile, let me speak of the third stone.’ He unfolded another finger. ‘This is the Stone of Aston Oddingley, whose malignant power Willand first felt in his bones as we combed the land in search of the lign of the rowan. That stone, which he says is probably of the greater sort, remains undisturbed, for when we found it we had another quarry in mind, and my advice was that we should leave it be for the moment.’

Will turned to Morann. ‘That’s because the Aston Oddingley stone was planted on lands controlled by mad Lord Clifton, who Gwydion said would never bid us welcome. It was true. He was killed at Verlamion.’

Gwydion looked to Morann and the many charms hanging at the wizard’s chest rattled together. ‘I wanted to show Will here that according to the redes of magic some problems, though they are insoluble in themselves, in time often turn into different problems which may be solved.’ He raised another finger. ‘Fourthly came the stone we found near the Giant’s Ring. Our triumph over it was accomplished at great risk, for it was a stone of the greater sort, though its nearness to the King’s Stone had muted it. Its downfall was complete, and now its stump has been returned whence it came. Henceforth it will do good service for a mutual friend.’

Gwydion now unfolded his little finger and tapped it significantly. ‘And that brings us to the final stone of which we have sure knowledge, the Doomstone of Verlamion, the same one that Will may have destroyed.’

‘May have…’ Will repeated.

The wizard took a deep breath. ‘That stone, I believe to be the controlling stone, and without it the power of the others will be so diminished that they cannot complete their tasks. But when Will made his brave attack he was young and untried, so it is possible that the Doomstone was not destroyed after all. Perhaps it only suffered a disabling shock, one which temporarily shattered its power into many parts. But perhaps those parts have been growing together again like drops of lead in the bottom of a fiery crucible.’

‘And when enough drops are gathered into one?’ Will asked.

‘Then we shall know if I am right.’

Gwydion’s mouse-brown robes had merged with the shadows of the snug. Will had been aware of a bumble bee buzzing at the trellis, but now even this tireless labourer had gone to its burrow and the climbing flowers that had listened in all around the window had closed their trumpets for the night.

Morann, whose chin rested on his hand, said, ‘So, of the stones you know about, one has been drained, two are stored, one lies yet undisturbed, and the master of them all, the Doomstone, has been attacked but may be repairing itself. The sites of the other battlestones – if there are others – you have not yet learned.’

‘We do know something.’ Gwydion clasped his hands before him. ‘When Willand was at Ludford Castle he felt himself affected by a strange melancholy. He thought it may have been caused by the emanations of a powerful stone, but in such a fortified place it was hard to tell exactly where they were coming from.’

Will thought back to the morbid feelings he had endured while staying at Ludford. ‘I was certain it was a battlestone, Morann. At first I believed it to be the Dragon Stone, and I suspected Duke Richard of having carried it there for his own purposes. But then Gwydion explained to me that my thinking was out of kilter. The Dragon Stone was still at Foderingham, and my state of mind must have been roused up by another stone.’

‘But you couldn’t find it?’ Morann asked.

Will shook his head. ‘Though it seemed very strong. Ludford Castle and the town itself is a maze of walls and towers. There is too much dressed stone there. My feelings were confused. It was like listening for a sound inside a cave full of echoes.’

‘Yet you were able to find the Doomstone, even though it lay under a great stone-built chapter house,’ Morann said.

Gwydion spread his hands. ‘That is because the Doomstone was by then awake, in the full flood of its power and actively calling men to the fight. It is possible that some powerful hiding magic is at work at Ludford. That may be a good reason to let the battlestone lie for the meanwhile, just as we have let the Aston Oddingley stone lie.’

‘The trouble is,’ Will muttered, glancing at Gwydion, ‘we can’t keep deciding to let sleeping dogs lie.’

Gwydion nodded at the hidden accusation. ‘What Willand wants to know is why I seem to have done nothing to unearth the battlestones in the intervening years. I will tell him, for what youthful impatience sees as idleness may now appear otherwise. When the battle at Verlamion was halted I believed that the breaking of the Doomstone had likely solved the problem of the lorc. The Black Book predicts that Arthur’s third coming signals the end of the fifth Age – therefore we know that it must end within Will’s lifetime. When he cracked the Doomstone and I banished Maskull into the Realm Below there seemed little likelihood of trouble arising again before the current Age drew to a close, and so I went about on other errands, in Albanay and elsewhere. It has turned out that my optimism was misplaced. I might have known it would be, for the end of each Age is a strange time and in the last days odd things do happen. But if optimism is one of my failings, I have at least learned not to put all my eggs in the same basket. It could be that neither Maskull nor the lorc were wholly settled – and so I kept Will safe in the Vale against the possibility of rainier days.’

Morann nodded. ‘He dared not risk squandering you, for you are the only way he has of finding the stones.’

Will compressed his lips. ‘You make it seem as if my life is hardly my own.’

Gwydion’s face was never more serious. ‘It has never been that, Willand.’

They lapsed into a gloomy silence, but then the wizard strove to lift their spirits. ‘My friends, let me speak rather of what lies within the hearts of brave men. I should tell you that the true tally of stones is more encouraging than you presently imagine, for my efforts during the past four years have not been entirely without fruit. I returned to the cave of Anstin the Hermit, and now a second stone is undone.’

‘You mean you succeeded in draining the Plaguestone?’ Will said, sitting up in amazement.

The wizard set a taper to a candle and brought a rich golden light to the gloom. ‘It was a far from simple task. My plan was to take the Plaguestone across to the Blessed Isle, but I could find no safe way to sail an undrained battlestone, even one of the lesser sort, over the seas. I could not hazard the lives of a ship’s crew. Nor could I allow the stone to sink itself into the Deeps, for even the lesser stones will blight whatever they can, and many a ship would be wrecked by such a hazard forever afterwards.’

‘So what did you do?’ Will asked.

‘Anstin the Hermit agreed to aid me, and in the end he paid dearly for his decision.’ Gwydion’s face set in sadness once more. ‘I was much troubled, for when I reached Anstin’s cave he told me the battlestone had been struggling against the bondage into which I had placed it. He said he feared that soon the harm would succeed against the spells that contained it. Every month it would writhe and spit at the eye of the full moon. Anstin was a man of true worth who came to know the nature of the stone very well. Great valour lived in his heart. In his younger days he was a lad with a good head for heights and for this one reason he was sent into a trade that did not sit well with his spirit. Even so, his hands proved to be talented. They were taught to work stone, and he decorated many of the high spires that sit atop the chapter houses and cloisters of the Sightless Ones. But in time his spirit cried against such work, and the feeling withdrew from his fingers. When the Sightless Ones learned of his plight they pressed upon him admission to their Fellowship, and when he refused them they said he had deliberately dropped a hammer, meaning for it to fall onto the head of an Elder. He repeatedly swore his innocence until they saw that he would not be moved. Then they drove him off, saying they would have nothing more to do with a man who was touched by obstinate evil. When I came upon him in Trinovant he was a lonely leper whose flesh was rotting on the living bone. I took him to dwell in a cave, away from all others, and there he was cared for by a Sister who brought him bread, but whom he would not suffer to see him, so ugly did he imagine he had become.’

Will said, ‘I remember a rede you once told me: “Delicious fruit most often has a spotted rind.”’

‘And so it does. Anstin the Hermit was never ugly to my eye, but he yearned only for death when I first came upon him. I could not heal his flesh, for the damage had come of a deep contention within his heart, but I could and did reveal to him the true length of his lifespan. This he asked of me, for he said he wanted to know how much more suffering he must endure.’

‘You actually told him the day on which he would die?’ Will asked.

‘That is not something to be undertaken lightly,’ Morann said.

Gwydion’s face betrayed no regret. ‘I told him he was fated to die a hero. Only when he knew the true date of his death was I able to arrest his illness and thereby win for him a space of time to make a proper peace with the world. For this he was grateful, and when I brought the Plaguestone to him he was quite pleased to take it.’

Will thought back to the time when they had delivered the Plaguestone. He had waited outside Anstin’s cave, imagining what was going on inside. He wondered if Gwydion had also foretold the manner of Anstin’s death.

The wizard went on. ‘Anstin understood very well the dangers the Plaguestone posed, but as ever he had a wry answer at the ready. “There can be no danger to a man who is already composed for the grave,” said he. And I replied that, in truth, there was no gainsaying him. Therefore, this man whose fingers once knew stone so well kept the Plaguestone for thirteen seasons of the year under close watch and ward. At all times he lived in its presence. Fearlessly and with great strength he repulsed its struggles to ensnare him. When I returned to him just before the end he told me movingly of the continuing misery of his life, how he wished to pledge his last day to my cause if I should choose to attempt a draining of the Plaguestone. Hearing this bravery, how could I have done other than agree?’

Gwydion stirred and the living flame of the candle shivered. ‘I will not tell in detail what happened that night in the cave of Anstin the Hermit. Suffice to say that there are few horrors that were not visited against his mind and body as the black breath of the stone was slowly drawn. I had learned much from my earlier mistakes, but even so the drawing out of the Plaguestone did not go well. The Black Book said the Plaguestone was far less powerful than the Doomstone, yet it was all I could do to drain it. Poor Anstin died when a cloud that had issued from the stone enveloped his body. He alone soaked up the harm, yet until the moment he was burst asunder he laughed at death and showed more courage than all the knights of this Realm might hope to muster. Such is the power of what lies within.’

Will clasped his hands in respect. He tried to dispel the images that swarmed in his mind, but it was difficult, for he himself had been under attack from a battlestone and his memory of the agony was sharp. Never before had he heard Gwydion speak with such a power of sadness in his voice. But the wizard was not yet done, and strength gathered in his words again. ‘Friends, my decision to try to drain the Plaguestone was not taken lightly. There is a very deep rede of magic that says: “There is no good and no evil in the world, except that which is made by the wilful action of people.” Yet all things are but vessels in which two contrary kinds of spirit are equally mixed. Some call these spirits “bliss” and “bale”, the one having the power to drive kindness and the other the power to drive harm. Men, by their choices, liberate both into the world just by moving through it. We upset the balance whatever we do, unwittingly and without malice, sometimes through our failings, sometimes even when we strive to do what is best. But those imbalances are mostly small, and it is only when malice aforethought is involved that the balance is more widely upset, for then the malicious man acts as a sieve. He strains out the bliss from all that he touches, and so he gathers harm about him in ever greater concentration.’

‘But how are kindness and harm different from what the Sightless Ones preach about good and evil?’ Will asked. ‘Aren’t you just using different names for the same things?’

‘Do not think that! Words are important. Dogs are not cats, which is why we trouble to call them by different names.’

‘But surely good and kindness are the same, aren’t they?’

‘If you mean kindness, then you must say kindness. Good and evil are notions invented by the Fellowship for their own purposes, and the difference is this: the Sightless Ones say there are conscious sources of good and evil. They say that both good and evil are active in the world, driven by intent; one is sent to scourge us, and the other to save us. The Sightless Ones would have us believe that invisible monsters of great power use us as their playthings. This is quite different from the magical understanding of the spirits of kindness and harm which lie latent and in balance and scattered throughout all things.’

Will shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand.’

‘The idea of good fighting to survive evil is a very dangerous one. It represents the second greatest tool of the Fellowship, and is something that softens and warps the minds of any who allow themselves to see the world in those terms.’

‘The second greatest?’ Will raised his eyebrows. ‘You mean there’s a worse one?’

‘Much worse. Long ago the Sightless Ones harnessed an even more dangerous idea, one that came from the Tortured Lands of the east. It is an idea that makes folk into willing slaves once it is planted in their heads.’

‘A simple idea can do that?’

‘Do you doubt it?’

‘But what can it be?’

‘I dare not tell you for, though it is lethal, it also has great appeal. It might seize you and destroy you, and do so seemingly within the bounds of your own free will.’

‘Gwydion, I am no longer a child. I have a child of my own.’

‘Then I will tell you, but…are you sure you are ready to hear it?’

He thought about that for a moment then shook his head. ‘No, I’m not sure. How could I be? Maybe I’m just letting idle curiosity get the better of me.’

‘Ah, now that is a mature response. Then I can at least refresh your memory on the matter: the idea is called the Great Lie. The Sightless Ones have used it ruthlessly to bend the common people to their will, for once brought to a false belief they are easily persuaded into other lies. They become obedient and willingly swap their lives for no more than the promise of a better one to come. Thus may a man’s true fate be twisted out of his own control. Thus is a real, living person sent walking into a glittering maze of deceptions.’

Will sat back, unsure about what Gwydion was saying. He knew little enough about the Sightless Ones, except that thinking about their red, scaly hands made him itch. He wanted to ask how an idea could make a man give up his life, and what reward could possibly be offered to make him do it, but then he thought about what he had seen inside the great chapter house at Verlamion and he knew that whatever this idea was, it certainly did drive men insane.

He held up his hand, suddenly fearful. ‘I don’t think I’m ready to know what the Great Lie is.’

Gwydion smiled and then said, ‘Perhaps we are straying from the true path, for the kindness and harm that exist in the battlestones are another thing entirely. What is known is this: the fae of old readied two similar stones and worked high magic upon them. They drew all the kindness they could from the first and put it into the second, while at the same time they drew almost all the harm from the second and put it into the first. Thus the sister-stone was filled twice over with unbalanced kindness, whereas the battlestone contained a double measure of almost pure harm. The draining in which Anstin offered himself as bait was attempted to prevent a battle in which thousands would have died, but there was a second reason. We must not permit the battlestones to fall into Maskull’s hands, for he will certainly misuse them if he can. My belief is that, at present, he knows less than we do about them, but he learns speedily and is ever ready to experiment in matters which he would not touch if he were wiser. I fear he may have taken the Dragon Stone. Perhaps he has even put it back into the lorc. That is why tomorrow we must go to Nadderstone and see for ourselves.’

In the silence that followed, Will heard the muted sound of merry revels coming from the rest of the inn. Voices were raised in laughter, a round of song and the scraping of a long-handled fiddle. Perhaps Gwydion’s spell of defence against eavesdroppers had spent itself. Duffred came in to collect the trenchers and to flap the crumbs from the table. He brought a measure of brisk good cheer with him that dispelled their thoughtfulness, and when he asked if they needed their tankards refilling, they agreed that that was a very good idea.

They spoke more lightly for a while, reminiscing about this and that until at last Morann rose up. ‘I think it’s time I was away to my bed.’

‘In that case, may you remember to forget only what you forget to remember,’ Will told him in parting toast.

Gwydion drained his tankard. ‘Black swan, white crow, take good care, wheresoever you go!’

Morann picked up his knife and sheathed it. ‘And I have a parting toast for the both of you: may misfortune follow you all the days of your life…’ he smiled a warm smile, ‘…but never catch up with you.’

And with that Morann was walking with uneven steps towards the passageway, and soon the stairs were creaking under his heels. When Gwydion also took his leave, Will sat alone in the snug for a few moments, his thoughts darkening as he wondered about Willow and their baby daughter and the peril that still seemed to him to hang over the Vale like a dark cloud.

CHAPTER FOUR THE LIGN OF THE ASH TREE

Will was surprised to find the sun high in the sky by the time he awoke. Bright shafts of sunlight pierced the shutters, and he sprang up from the mattress and got dressed as quickly as he could, fearing that Gwydion and Morann might have left without him.

But he soon found them outside in the yard, talking with the inn’s people.

‘Morning, Gwydion. Morning, Morann.’

‘And a fine morning it is,’ Morann said.

‘Ah, Willand,’ Gwydion said. ‘I hope you are feeling able today. There may be tough work ahead.’

Dimmet sniffed at a side of beef that was hanging in his out-house. ‘Not too high for the pie, nor yet too low for the crow,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Now, Master Gwydion, shall I expect you back by noon?’

‘You may expect us, Dimmet, when next you see us.’

‘Right you are,’ Dimmet said affably. ‘I’ll take that to mean I should mind my own business.’

He went off to take delivery of the milk jugs, but soon Duffred had hitched Bessie, the bay cob, to the tithe wagon. Will got up onto the cart to sit alongside Morann and Gwydion, and then they were off, heading east along a road that Will had travelled before.

A rolling land of good, brown clay met them as they drove steadily onward. The going was easy past Hemmel and Hencoop. The wagon ruts that had been made in the road during a wet spring had been baked into hard ridges by the summer sun and worn to dust. Hills to their left threw out low green rises that sloped across their path, and the sun shone on the part-harvested wheatfields to their right. But soon, tended fields gave way to wilder country.

Gwydion told of the times he had visited Caer Lugdunum, an ancient fortress that had once stood on a hill a little way to the north, and how graciously he had been received in poem and song by the druida who had lived there. Then Morann sang ‘The Lay of the Lady’ in a rich, clear voice that knew the true tongue well. His song was about the brave Queen of the East and the stand she had made long ago against the armies of the Slaver empire. It was so sad a song that Will felt shivers pass through him, and it was a long while before he returned to himself and felt the hot sun on his face again. When he did, he found that Bessie had already covered half the road to Nadderstone.

Hereabouts the land was scrubby and unkempt, and Will looked to a cluster of bushes on his left that he knew hid a pond. Gwydion had once said there was probably star-iron in the bottom of it, and now Will realized how the pond had been made, by a shooting star landing hard on the earth, though one much smaller than the one that had smashed Little Slaughter. The thought made him shiver.

‘There’s power flowing here,’ Morann said, his blue eyes on the far horizon. ‘We may expect miracles, or worse, I’m thinking, before the day is done.’

‘Remember, the road follows the path of a lign,’ Gwydion said, ‘whether we can see it or not. Willand, do you feel anything yet?’

‘Not yet, Master Gwydion. You can be sure I’ll speak up soon enough when I do.’

A short shower of rain came to refresh the land and went away again as soon as it had come. They continued across the valley and soon Will noticed a tall tower of mottled brown stone. It was the same one he had seen before, standing sentinel on a ridge, above lands that had once been tilled by the Sightless Ones, or those who laboured for them. But those fields were now neglected and overgrown, and that caused Will to wonder, for the Fellowship was notorious for never allowing its lands to lie fallow if gold could be mined in them.

As they drew near Will was shocked to realize that the tower was now in ruins, as was the cloister and chapter house it had served.

‘What happened to the Fellows?’ he asked in amazement.

‘Gone,’ Gwydion said.

They passed by two large fishponds. Once this place had made Will feel very uneasy. And now, as their road climbed up past the tall, iron-brown walls and vacant windows of the chapter house, Will suppressed a shudder. He turned to Gwydion and saw the wizard’s keen, grey eyes examining the battlements. The wizard called Bessie to a halt.

‘What are we stopping for?’ Will asked.

Gwydion handed him the reins. ‘We must look into what has happened.’

Will shielded his eyes against the sun and studied the tower, but he saw nothing more noteworthy than a lone gargoyle that stuck out from the corner of the parapet high above them. Morann jumped down from the cart and they both followed Gwydion through a yard of tumbled graves beside the chapter house.

The garden that had once held neat rows of green plants was now overgrown and its bee skeps smashed. The iron weather vane that had once shown the sign of a white heart and had stretched its four arms out above the roofs, had been cast into a corner of the yard. The roofs themselves were broken and pulled down too. Ahead the great gates were unhinged, and where, to Will’s recollection, the arch of the doorway had been incised with the curious motto:

Now the stonework was defaced so that only the letters R, A, N, S and I remained. Gwydion stood before the doors, deep in thought.

‘Strange,’ Will said, looking at the damage. ‘Do you think it means something?’

‘Everything means something.’ Gwydion made no further answer but continued to stare at the arch and then to run his fingers over the letters.

Morann spoke in a low voice. ‘Isnar is the name of the late Grand High Warden of the Sightless Ones. It seems the letters of his name were spared from the Fellowship’s motto when the rest were stricken out.’

Gwydion stirred. ‘This has meaning, for it surely was Isnar who ordered the roof of this chapter house to be broken in.’

‘How do you know that?’ Will asked.

‘Because no one else has the power to order it.’

Will heard the scurry and squeak of rats as they moved inside. Black glass had been shattered from windows. It crunched underfoot in the dampness. Two or three winters had ruined the fabric of the building, yet a greasy odour still clung to the place. They came back out into the open, entered the walled tithe yards and saw hurdles of woven willow sticks scattered about the cobbles. They were all that remained of stock pens and stalls. There was rotting gear here, tools for hauling animal carcasses: blocks, hooks, red rusted chains…

Will picked his way through the ghastly ruins and saw the slaughter sheds and the stone basins that had once caught the hot blood of terrified animals. The slaughter knives and poleaxes were all gone from their racks, but the grim channels and lead pipes put down to feed a line of barrels were still there. In the next shed was what remained of the fat-rendering cauldrons – the vats and moulds where the Sightless Ones had once mixed up wood-ash and fat to make their ritual washing blocks. The stone floor was still waxy from old spills, and slippery.

Will’s skin tingled as he looked around, but he could not be sure if it was the lign that was causing it. The pillars of the cloister stood like broken teeth now and the space of the great hall was open to the sky, though half of the roof beams remained overhead like the ribs of a great whale. Will saw ear-like growths on the timbers, and many of them were nibbled, as if by rats, though how rats had got up so high he could not imagine. Fragments of gilding and painting remained on the walls. Everything was defaced, rain-washed and sun-faded, and the gravestone floor was scattered with thousands of broken candles and spoiled washing blocks. The place seemed to have been ransacked and then abandoned quite suddenly many months ago. There had been much violence done here.

‘Now you see the horrible truth about what happens when the Sightless Ones gather the tithe,’ Morann said. ‘It’s not just carts full of grain they take to hoard and sell. Horses, cattle, sheep, fowl – all go into their slaughterhouses.’

Will saw the place where sheep and calves had been strung up to have their throats cut. Anything that walked on two legs or four was bled into ritual jars, then soap and wax made from their fat.

‘A sickly smoke always hangs over the houses of the Fellowship at tithing time,’ Gwydion said. ‘Many trees are hewn and much wood burned for ash to make soap. Flesh is boiled up and rendered of its fat, and the meat buried or left to rot, for the Fellows partake only of the blood.’

Will knew that the soap was used in ritual washing, which was why townspeople nicknamed the Fellows ‘red hands’, though never in public for that was punishable and could end in a person’s lips being cut off.

‘And why do they make so many candles?’ Gwydion asked, and when Will made no answer he added, ‘The Fellowship make candles to light their sacred pictures.’

Will looked to the wizard and then up at the faded remnants of paint and gold leaf. ‘But…why? When the Fellows have no eyes to see them? And why would a Grand High Warden want to visit destruction upon one of his own chapter houses?’

‘The Fellows call such a thing a “Decree of the Night Fogs”,’ Gwydion told him distantly. ‘It is ordered only rarely. It is their punishment for deviation.’

‘Deviation?’

‘That is, if a house strays from their creed so far that they cannot whip it back into line. Then they cut it off and trample it into dust. This is done partly lest the disease spreads to other chapter houses, and partly by way of example. They erase all reference to the broken house from their records. They destroy its chronicle, take away its adherents. Such a house becomes to them a house that has never stood, and the Fellows who failed become men who have never lived.’

‘Is that what happened here?’ Will said, looking around. He could feel the prickling in his skin growing stronger and wanted now only to get away from the place.

‘I do not know what happened here, for the doings of the Fellowship are kept a tightly bound secret. But did I not tell you how the houses of the Sightless Ones are most often built upon ligns and other streams of earth power?’

‘How could this house have failed?’ Will asked, stepping over piles of broken wood and fallen slates.

‘This may be the explanation,’ Gwydion said. ‘You know that the Doomstone was the slab that capped the tomb of their Founder. When it was broken that source of power which is habitually tapped and abused by the Sightless Ones must have shifted. Did you not tell me of the madness that beat through the chapter house of Verlamion when the lorc came alive?’

Will remembered. ‘It was hardly to be imagined. As if the one idea filling all their heads had suddenly gone out like a candle and left a darkness which they could not bear.’

Gwydion turned to him. ‘In like wise, Willand, the troubles of this house may have started as soon as we plucked up the Dragon Stone. For the power of the lorc certainly shifts when a battlestone is taken from the earth, and this house also stands upon the lign of the ash.’

Will looked around the stone-cold walls, aware of the perpetual shadows that lurked in the corners.

‘You must beware the Sightless Ones,’ Gwydion told him earnestly, ‘for they do not love you. They will not easily forgive the intruder who defiled their most revered shrine.’

Will felt the walls close in around him. ‘I’ve wondered more than once why the Fellowship has not come into the Vale to get me. They were the only ones, apart from yourself and Morann, who ever came near.’

Morann shook his head. ‘They cannot find the Vale. They’ve never come into it, nor will they ever. I was always at Nether Norton when the tithe fell due. It was I who took the carts through the quag and down to Middle Norton. The red hands from Great Norton never approached further than that. They don’t know of the Vale’s cloaking. They’re interested only in amassing wealth. It’s gold that gives them influence.’

Gwydion said, ‘The Fellowship does not connect the Vale and what they call the pollution of their chapter house at Verlamion. Still, at their annual public self-mutilations in Trinovant Isnar has sworn to destroy the one who broke the Doomstone. You must not underestimate him, for he never underestimates his enemies. And the threat you pose them is very great.’

‘With all their wealth and power?’ Will said, looking about. ‘What threat could I be to them?’

‘That is easy to answer. I have already said that you are the Child of Destiny, third incarnation of Great Arthur of old. What you will do if the prophecies of the Black Book are brought to full fruit, will cause their spires to topple. And not before time!’

‘But I don’t see how—’

Morann made an open-handed gesture at what lay around them. ‘It’s been their habit for at least a thousand years to build where the men of olden times set up cairns and groves, and so supplant the Old Ways.’

Gwydion grasped his staff tighter. ‘Many of their chapter houses must be built upon ligns. They do not know it, but they feed on the power of the lorc as greenfly feed upon sap that rises in a flower stem. With every battlestone we discover and root out, Willand, another of their houses will fall as this one has.’

Will folded his arms. ‘Then let us hope we find all the battlestones. Whatever it was that made the Sightless Ones leave here, I’m glad.’

‘Bravely said.’ Morann clapped him on the back. ‘The red hands tell all who will listen that they bring freedom, life and peace, but they trade in slavery, death and war.’

Now Gwydion hastened forward like one who has suddenly found what he was looking for: a steep stone stair that led down into the cellars. They followed him into the stinking darkness, until he struck up a pale blue light for them to see by. The place was vacant now, the treasury emptied of its gold and all the strongroom doors thrown open. The blue glow that lit the palm of the wizard’s hand seemed reluctant to penetrate the gloom. He walked alone in the magelight shadows, and unguessable thoughts troubled him. ‘Behold!’ he said, raising his staff. ‘It is as I suspected. This is more than a thieves’ hoard-room.’

As Will’s eyes adjusted there appeared in the cellar wall a low gate of iron bars. It was meant to stop off the way, but it was wrecked. A hole had been rent in it as if by some powerful beast.

‘What is it?’ Will asked. The magelight did not penetrate far beyond the bars.

Morann clasped his arm tightly, hushing him. Gwydion’s voice was rising: ‘I can smell it! Truly these are dungeons of despair!’

‘What could have done this to iron bars?’ Will asked, looking to Morann and putting his finger on the place where brute strength had torn the barrier.

Morann whispered, ‘Do you know what this is? It’s a passageway into the Realm Below. Can you feel the air moving up, and with it the salt of the Desolate Sea?’

And Will could feel it. On his face, a dank draught that issued up from a hidden place below the earth. Air that bespoke tremendous depths, great caverns, ceaseless tunnels, dark rivers that had never seen the light of the sun. This was truly the air of another world.

And something in Will wanted to go beyond the bars and venture into that darkness. He wanted to see for himself what lay below, but Morann drew his knife and said he thought the cellar unwholesome and that the fissure had the whiff of sorcery about it and needed to be blocked up. He wanted to leave the vile place for the sake of his lungs.

Will, and then Gwydion, followed him up the stone stair and out into the light. They stepped back across the rubblestrewn yard, and Will blew out a great breath. ‘Let’s go. Just being here makes my flesh crawl.’

Gwydion set a bleak eye on him. ‘The Sightless Ones are involved in a bigger way than I thought.’

The wizard quickly turned away and Will said, ‘So big that you daren’t speak of it?’

He was not sure Gwydion had heard, and the wizard offered no reply, saying only, ‘Have you forgotten why we set out?’

‘What’s bothering him?’ Will whispered to Morann as they followed on.

‘I think he’s found what he came here for. And whatever it is, he doesn’t like it.’

Out in the open again the wizard climbed quickly aboard the cart and clicked his tongue at the horse. Will looked up at the dismal tower and his eyes sought the lone gargoyle that he had seen on his arrival, but it was nowhere to be seen.

They rode on in silence, their spirits overcome by the stagnant earth streams that ran sluggishly now under the cloister. But Will’s low mood stemmed more from the gloom that Gwydion showed. Their walk in the ruins had put the wizard in a mighty sulk.

When the road rose and Bessie laboured in her pulling, Morann and Will jumped down and walked the meadows for a while. Morann renewed the flowers in his hat with bright yellow dandelions and purple knapweed. Will cooled his toes in the lush grass. He said, ‘What are the Sightless Ones involved in? Finding the stones? Did Gwydion mean that?’

Morann looked back towards the cart. ‘You must ask him that yourself, but if I had to hazard a guess I’d say he’s most worried about those broken bars and what must have come through them.’

‘I can feel the lign right here,’ Will said. He stopped suddenly.

Morann took his hazel wand and began to scry, but unsuccessfully. ‘I feel nothing unusual.’

‘It’s dispelled the bad taste left by the ruins. It’s running strongly under my heels.’

‘Where?’

Will ignored the question. ‘Oh, how can I explain it? It’s like a fiddle string, and once the chapter house was a finger pressing down on it in the wrong place, making a discordant note. And now the string is open the note is more pure again.’

‘We’ll tell Master Gwydion that. Maybe it’ll cheer him up.’

It was not long before they arrived in Nadderstone. Will hardly recognized the place. Flow along the lign was swift and joyous, like water in a new-dredged channel. Where once there had been abandoned buildings now there were new, white cottages. Lime-washed walls were bright in the noonday sun and new thatch shone neat and golden. Much of the land round about was under cultivation or had been fenced to keep cattle in. Men, women and children were busy in a barn threshing grain with flails. When they saw the cart approaching they came out. The place was clean and prosperous and the four or five young families who lived here now were courteous and welcoming.

Gwydion approached the foremost. ‘Where have you come from?’ he asked. ‘And who is your lord?’

For a moment it was as if a shadow had passed over them. The man fell under the spell of Gwydion’s voice. He shifted his feet and said, ‘We are poor, landless folk. We came here from a faraway place on the strength of a rumour that there was good land here that might be had.’

Gwydion smiled. ‘Have no fear – that rumour was mine. Enjoy Nadderstone and make it your own, for your hard work and care have already won me as your protector. I offer you a blessing of words upon your new homes, so that all will be well and when the time comes your sons and daughters will find good husbands and wives in the villages round about.’

While the wizard talked, Will and Morann went up into the meadows north of the hamlet. As soon as Will began to feel the lign running strongly underfoot again he took back his hazel wand and began to pace out the limits of it, scrying just as Gwydion had first taught him in this very same place.

Either the flow had increased several fold since then, or his own talents had developed greatly. ‘All the pain’s been cleaned out,’ he said. ‘It’s the difference between dirty ditchwater and a mountain stream.’

They came to the spot where the Dragon Stone had once lain. Its hole was filled in and there was a bed of pretty yellow flowers growing there. ‘I’m sure the Dragon Stone hasn’t been returned to the place where we found it. Let’s go and tell Gwydion the good news.’

Morann laughed. ‘I think he already knows. It doesn’t take a talent such as yours to see that this place is flourishing as never before.’

Will scrubbed at his head. ‘You know what I think? I think Nadderstone’s now taking its fair share of earth power – flows that were for too long pent up by that chapter house.’

Morann looked eastward. ‘This is the lign of the ash, you say?’

‘Yes. Its taste is unmistakably Indonen.’ Will shaded his eyes and looked east also.

‘Taste?’ Morann said, turning to look back the way they had come. ‘That seems a curious way to speak of it. Did you not just tell me that the tower and chapter house were like the finger that stops a fiddle string?’

‘I could just as easily have said it’s like the grip that pinches off a vein in a man’s arm and so holds back the flow of blood to his hand, bringing numbness and robbing his grasp of strength. I said “tasted”, but it’s not really a flavour I’m talking about.’ He shrugged, finding his talent impossible to describe.

Morann let out a piercing whistle and beckoned to Gwydion. ‘Let me see now. There are supposed to be nine ligns that make up the lorc. The one that runs by the Giant’s Ring is “Eburos”, the lign of the yew. The battlestone that you say is planted at Aston Oddingley lies upon the lign of the rowan, and the true name of that lign is “Caorthan”. While this lign is “Indonen” of the ash. What of the others?’

‘I’ve felt other ligns sometimes as we crossed them. There’s the one named “Mulart” for the elder tree, and “Tanne” for the oak. The rest are named in honour of the hazel, the holly, the willow and the birch. I’ve not felt them at all, or if I have I can’t easily call to mind their particular qualities.’

The wizard came up to join them. He leaned on his staff, seeming troubled still.

‘A fair old morning’s work,’ Morann said.

Gwydion wiped his brow and resettled his hat. ‘But as is so often the case, work begets more work, for now I must go urgently to the place that I was called away from.’

‘Foderingham?’ Will said.

‘Plainly, the Dragon Stone is not here, so I must go there.’

‘Now?’

‘As the rede says: “No time is as useful as the present.” Nor, in this case, is there any reason to delay. I shall leave at once.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Will murmured, sure that Gwydion had set his heart on a perilous path.

‘In what I must now do you cannot help me. I mean to gain entry to the dungeon of Foderingham. I will do it with or without Richard of Ebor’s consent. Once there, if the Dragon Stone is present, I shall lay hands upon it. Recall the rede: “By his magic, so shall ye know him!” I shall search for Maskull’s signature, and if I find he has not meddled with the stone, then I shall renew the holding spells in which I first wrapped it, and perhaps add a few more for good measure.’

‘You won’t try to drain it?’ Will said, only half convinced by the wizard’s assurances.

But Gwydion smiled an indulgent smile. ‘I promise, I will not try to do that.’

‘And if you find that Maskull has been there?’ Morann asked.

‘Then I shall have to undo that which he has done, before renewing my own spells.’

Will brightened. ‘Surely we can help you, if only in keeping the jacks who guard the walls of Foderingham occupied for a while.’

‘I have greater need of stealth than assistance.’ The wizard regarded him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘But, Willand, if you would help me then make a promise.’

‘Anything.’

‘Go to the Plough and wait quietly for my return. Do not stray far from that place. Dimmet will begrudge you neither board nor lodging if you tell him of my request. If you will heed my advice, you’ll lay low. Speak to no one, and do not advertise yourself widely abroad. This is most important.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

The wizard took his hand briefly and nodded as if sealing a bargain. Then he clasped Morann to him and words passed between them in a language that seemed ancient to Will, though it was not of his ken.

He watched Gwydion go down into the hamlet, speak to one of the farmers and then he was up on a piebald horse and riding away east out of the village, while Bessie was being led towards the farmer’s stable.

‘Well, I like that!’ Will said as he realized their ride back to Eiton had just been bargained away.

‘That’s wizards for you,’ Morann said. ‘For a man who cannot be in two places at once he’s powerful good at being in one place not very much at all.’

Will put his hands on his hips. ‘I suppose we’d better start walking. It’ll be thirsty work in this warmth. I guess Gwydion’ll be right about Dimmet’s charity. I just hope it lasts when he finds out that Bessie’s been handed to a farmer in Nadderstone to ease a wizard’s emergency!’

The walk back to the Plough was indeed hot work and much was talked over as they wended their way towards Eiton. When they were about halfway there Will cut and whittled for himself a staff. It was fit for a quarterstaff, though he wanted to use it as a walking stick. Morann would have nothing of it, and was not content until Will had whittled a second staff and given him the choice of which to use.

Gwydion had once said that the quarterstaff was the diamond among weapons, striking like a sword and thrusting like a spear, it was able to disable and dispirit without inflicting undue damage. ‘The skilled wielder of a staff has the advantage against even two swordsmen, for a staff has two ends, and if one opponent should break his distance against a skilled staff he will suffer a hit. Against the single sword, a staff always has four paces in hand. Such is its dignity it metes out humiliating reminders while barely drawing blood.’

Will had never forgotten that lesson, and had practised the staff until he could easily beat the best who lived in the Vale. But there were many more whacks that Morann was able to teach him, and their journey back to Eiton became in part a running fight.

They got back aching and bruised and laughing. Once they were in the Plough’s yard Will found Dimmet among his flitches of bacon. They told him what had happened to his horse.

‘No matter,’ Dimmet said, wiping his hands on his apron. ‘One good turn deserves another, or so they say. And all things have a way of coming full circle in the end. If Master Gwydion’s gone off all of a sudden, there’s bound to be something needful at the root of it. I know he’ll return her to me some time. Now, what’s it to be for you?’

Morann grinned broadly. ‘A quart of your finest nutbrown ale. And we’ll take it to the snug, if we may.’

‘That you may, and with pleasure. Stew and leftovers all right for you?’

‘Enough is as good as a feast, as my friend the Maceugh always used to say.’

‘The Maceugh?’ Will said, his brow rutting. ‘Have I heard of him before?’

‘Maybe you have not,’ Morann said lightly, then added, ‘But maybe you will come to know him one day.’

Will took a tallow dip, passed behind the inglenook and the snug door opened at Morann’s touch. The space inside was soon golden with candlelight. They slaked their throats with first-mash ale, and then set to work on a supper of spoon-meat, barley bread and cold roast goose before they pushed their bowls and trenchers away from them and sat back content.

‘Old Dimmet’s right about something needful being at the root of Gwydion’s going,’ Morann said. Once more he took out his knife and laid it on the table before him. ‘There’s talk of Commissioners riding abroad all up and down the Realm. Folk are worried. They’re talking about war everywhere you care to go.’

Will knew that Morann meant Commissioners of Array, the officers that were sent out in the king’s name to raise an army. ‘It must be serious if they’re coming for men in the middle of harvest,’ he said. ‘Who’ll gather in the crop if all the able-bodied men are marched off the land?’

Morann lowered his voice. ‘Gathered in or not, the Commissioners will have their men in the end. Have you ever known a lord starve because of a bad harvest? Likewise, it’s the churl, the common man, and those who depend on him, who come most to grief when a war begins.’

‘That’s right enough.’

‘It’s said that in Trinovant the Sightless Ones are offering large loans. They lend only to lords, so what does that tell you?’ Morann’s eyes twinkled. ‘If lords are borrowing gold, it’s for only one purpose.’

Will laced his fingers together, stretched and yawned. ‘They’ll spend gold enough on the feeding and equipping of soldiers, but it’s a risk they care to take. They go to war in hope to gain the lands held by their enemies.’

The large green stone in Morann’s ring seemed to glow with crystal fire, and his voice became passionate. ‘I tell you, Willand, the queen has spent most of the past four years trying every way to undermine Duke Richard’s rule as Lord Protector. If he’s stopped taking Master Gwydion’s good advice there’ll be a clash soon. That’s why I must be on my way tomorrow.’

‘Not you too?’ Will’s spirit rebelled at the idea. ‘Am I to wait here all alone and do nothing?’

‘It can’t be helped. Master Gwydion asked me to go to Trinovant. I’m to do what I can to steady events. I could hardly refuse him, so I’ve agreed to speak to some friends I know there. They are people of influence who owe me a small debt of gratitude and are willing to pay it – which is the best kind of friend a man can have.’

‘What will these friends do?’

‘Tell me how things truly stand at court. It’s rumoured that the king’s latest insanity is ended. Perhaps it was a natural brain fever, but poison cannot be ruled out, and Master Gwydion suspects that the queen has arranged for spells to be cast upon his mind to make him appear well again.’

‘She’s done that kind of thing before, and that was at Maskull’s prompting.’

‘These days Master Gwydion sees the sorcerer’s hand in everything.’

Will took the remark without comment and thought to console himself with a slice of cheese. He reached out for Morann’s knife, which was handy, but when he came to cut the cheese the blade would not enter.

‘Either this cheese is a lot older than I thought,’ Will said, frowning at the knife, ‘or your steel has lost its edge.’

Morann laughed. ‘Do not worry yourself. Being a knife-grinder I’m never far from a whetstone.’

Will tried again, but looked up, seeing the cheese rind was untouched. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Nothing’s wrong with it. What you have in your hand is the second most precious item that I have ever clapped eyes upon.’

‘This old knife?’

‘It’s an old knife, surely, but not any old knife. This knife has been sharpened on the Whetstone of Tudwal, which is one of the spoils that was brought forth from Annuin by Great Arthur of old.’

Will’s interest deepened. ‘Master Gwydion has spoken many times of prophecies that concern Great Arthur, but he’s never told me much.’

Morann sat back in his chair and began to sing,

‘Where is the man who is mightier?

The four winds tell it not!

When greater the treasures that were taken?

Won in war and fair fight.

How bright was the blessing

Brought upon Albion?

Whose land now shall be the Wasteland?

Before Great Arthur led,

the Cauldron swirled…

Before Great Arthur sailed,

the Sword smote…

Before Great Arthur entered,

the Staff upheld…

Before Great Arthur’s coming,

the Star shone…

‘Aye, Willand. In those early days the Hallows were bound, blind and in darkness all, down in Annuin, in the Realm Below.

‘The spoils were brought out by Arthur, upon his ship,’ he said as if half remembering. ‘Out from a sea cave in the north. The Cave of Finglas, which was then a mouth into the Realm Below…

‘Many adventurers sailed with Great Arthur aboard the ship Prydwen. Bards, warriors and harpers – great men of old, they were! Among them, the famous Wordmaster Taliesin, who was one of seven who survived to tell the tale. He wrought a great poem about it called “The Breaking of the Dark”. Much went missing from the Black Book in the days when giants ruled the land of Albion, yet there was enough of it remaining for it to speak of a promise to be redeemed – a king shall come, a king whose forewarning sign shall be the drawing forth of a sword from a stone.’ And Morann sang again,

‘Child of magical union,

Hidden among hunters, weaned upon warriors.

Brave son of a poisoned father,

Sent to the city, tried at the tourney.

A king of tender years,

Sired by a sovereign, but made by Merlyn,

Drew he forth Branstock,

Great Arthur, the once and future king…’

The loremaster’s eyes softened, and he smiled. ‘So you see, Willand, you are not the only one to have been named in the Black Book. Master Gwydion is there too, when Master Merlyn was his name.’

Will tried to smile back. ‘It’s an uncomfortable feeling sometimes knowing that whatever path you choose, the outcome has long been decided.’

‘Don’t think that! Master Gwydion did not mean that when he said your life was hardly your own, only that you were mantled with duties and responsibilities that are heavier than those of most men. But your choices have always been free. It’s not the fulfilment of prophecies that matters, so much as the manner in which they are fulfilled. That’s where final outcomes are decided. Consider the next fragment of the Black Book in which we hear of Great Arthur’s passing, there by the lakeshore of Llyn Llydaw. He made another promise without fear or faltering, one that was to last a thousand years. The verses tell it thus:

‘The worth of my life, such that it be,

Has chained the future to a fateful turn.

When comes the final catastrophe,

Then, only then, shall I return!’

‘When rises the greatest need I shall come again…’ Will whispered in the true tongue.

‘Those were your words. And what turbulent times have we seen since the overrunning of the Realm by the Easterlings. Though none have been worse than those that are upon us now. I will say it straightly, this is the final catastrophe.’

‘The once and future king did not come to save us from the Conquest.’

‘Perhaps the arrival of Gillan might have seemed to warrant it, but in the end the Phantarch, Semias, reached an understanding with the Conqueror and we saw that his invasion was not the ending of the world such as we had feared. That was near four hundred years ago.’

‘How long is it since Arthur fought his last fight at Camlan?’

‘I think you already know the answer to that – near a thousand. So we come to you, Will, and the last pitiful fragments of the Black Book that Master Gwydion has cherished in a secret place down so many generations. This also seems to speak of a king, though no one can be certain. One who is “…a True King, born of Strife, born of Calamity, born at Beltane in the Twentieth Year, when the beams of Eluned are strongest at the ending of the world”.’

‘The ending of the world?’ Will felt the shock of the idea. ‘I was born in a twentieth year…’

‘Aye, in the twentieth year of the reign of King Hal. And on the night of the full moon. And it was said that you would deny yourself thrice, and so you did.’

‘And “One being made two”?’ Will said, looking up suddenly from the strange knife that lay upon the table. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It too seems to be a part of the prophecy.’ Morann looked away. ‘As also is the suggestion that “two shall be made one”.’

Will straightened. ‘Then it was written all along that the Doomstone would mend itself!’

‘That could be one interpretation.’

Morann reached out to take his blade but Will stayed his hand. ‘You said this had been sharpened on the Whetstone of Tudwal. So what if it was?’

‘Ah, well, you see, a blade so sharpened will deal only a lethal blow, or no blow at all.’

Will quickly put the knife down.

‘Morann, if you’re leaving tomorrow, may I ask a favour of you tonight? Could you go to Trinovant by way of Nether Norton? I don’t know of another messenger who could find his way into the Vale.’

‘You may consider it done.’

CHAPTER FIVE MAGICIAN, HEAL THYSELF!

When Will woke the next day at first light, he found that Morann had already left. He sat down at a small oak table and, while he waited for breakfast, took out the little red fish from his pouch. It was so like his own green fish that there could be no doubt that it had come from the same place. And as Gwydion always reminded him, a famous rede said there was no such thing as a coincidence. But what the meaning might be in the fish was far from clear. As he turned it over in his fingers he wondered why he had not shown it to Gwydion, or to Morann, who was surely the best person to give an opinion. He had just put it in his pouch and forgotten about it. Or had he?

Delicious smells wafted in from the kitchens and soon the Plough began to fill with Eiton’s harvesters. Will, who was sitting alone in the corner, saw how they first noticed him then touched their foreheads and shook him by the hand as they filed in.

‘Morning. Morning…’

Will breathed deep. He seemed to have lost his appetite, and took a little oatmeal. When he had finished it he took up the red fish and studied it again, while its beady little green eye studied him. It was so like his own talisman, yet the comfort he had always got from the green fish did not come from this one.

Now, as he looked up, he saw the harvesters holding out their sickles towards him.

‘Thank you, Master,’ the nearest of them said.

‘What?’

‘For your blessings upon our trade tools.’

He looked back at the man blankly, then he saw that his quarterstaff was propped up behind him and he realized with a bump what the men had taken him for.

They think I’m a wizard, he thought, smiling. A wizard! Would you believe it?

The men would not leave until he had touched each of their sickles in turn and muttered the name of it in the true tongue.

As the last of the harvesters left, a young mother came to him and asked to have a blessing laid on her child.

‘A blessing? Well, I don’t think I—’

‘Please. Just a good word for the babe, Master,’ she said. ‘To keep the horse flies off her while I ties up the corn stooks. See?’

‘You want me to put a good word on the baby?’ Will asked doubtfully. He looked across the room and saw Dimmet watching with folded arms. Will inclined his head, then shrugged. ‘Here. Give him to me. What’s his name?’

‘Rosy,’ said the child’s mother.

‘Oh, yes. Yes…of course.’

Will made a sign on the babe’s forehead, while muttering a spell of general protection against insects. He realized he couldn’t remember the true name for horse flies, so he protected her from wasps and creepy-crafties of all kinds, then he handed the child back.

‘She’ll be fine in the fields, but make sure she stays out of the sun, won’t you?’

‘Thank you, Master,’ the woman said and went away.

But no sooner had she gone than a toothless old woman appeared. She had with her a girl of five or six. When Will looked up the old woman said nothing, but the child smiled the most astonishing smile. She had no more teeth than the old woman, and was also cross-eyed.

‘Can I…help?’ Will said at last.

‘Begging your pardon, Master,’ the old woman said. ‘I brung the daughter’s daughter when I heard you was here.’

Will waited, but when nothing more came from the old woman except an expectant look, he said, ‘What I mean is…is there something I can do for you?’

He watched as the old woman shuffled and then said something to the child, pointing to Will’s staff. Straight away the child put her hands to her mouth and grinned shyly, then she darted forward to touch the staff.

‘Hoy! What’s this?’ Will asked. ‘What did you just tell her? That’s no wizard’s staff.’

The old woman looked suddenly cast down and began to beg piteously. ‘Is there nothing can be done for the poor little one, Master?’

‘What’s your name?’ Will asked the girl.

‘Thithwin.’

‘Thithwin. What a very nice name.’

‘It’s Siswin,’ said the old woman. ‘I’m africkened she’ll never get a husband looking like she do, Master.’

‘Surely it’s a mite early to be thinking of husbands for…ah, Siswin,’ Will said frowning. He was uncomfortable discussing the child’s looks in her hearing.

‘Ain’t there nothing at all can be done against plug ugliness, Master?’

‘Just…wait a moment.’

He thought back to his studies and knew there was something that could be done, if only it was to make the child believe that she was beautiful. According to the magic book Gwydion had given him that usually did the trick, for children had a way of growing into what they thought they wanted to be most of the time.

He took the girl’s shoulders in both hands, steadying her before him. Then he brushed back the hair from her face with his thumbs and put a pinch of salt on top of her head, after which he muttered a spell that was used to untangle knots.

‘Look at this finger with this eye, and that finger with that eye,’ he said holding up two fingers before her. Then he slowly moved his two fingers apart and muttered a ‘let it be’ spell.

‘You are a very pretty girl, do you know that?’ he said solemnly, and the girl nodded.

‘Now will you make my teeth grow, pleeth?’ she said.

‘Don’t worry about them. They’ll grow out in their own good time. They always do.’

Will waited for them to leave and allow him to finish his breakfast in peace, but they did not move.

‘And what about grandmammy? Will her teeth grow out ath well?’

Will spread his hands in regret. ‘Now that I can’t promise.’

‘Say “thank you” to the Master,’ the old woman said.

‘Thank you, Mathter.’

When they had gone Will finished his meal then, alerted by a buzz of voices, he got up to look along the passageway. There was a knot of people at the door of the inn, and all of them were marvelling at the improvement in the girl’s eyes. Dimmet was foremost among them, his voice booming.

Will spoke to Dimmet the moment he came in. ‘What did you tell them?’

‘Oh, ‘twern’t me. Word has just got about.’

‘What word?’

‘Why, that there’s a wizard in the district.’

Will tried to lower his voice. ‘But I’m not a wizard.’

‘You could have fooled me about that. That was as pretty a piece of healing as what ever I’ve seen. And I’ve seen a fair few healers in my time, genuine as well as the other sort.’

‘But that was just a little helper magic.’

‘Well, that’s it! Folks’ll walk for days to have a touch of magic. Don’t you know that? Many a time when Master Gwydion’s come here there’s been a crowd of folk started to gather outside. One time there was a line stretched halfway up to Lawn Hill. That’s why he don’t never stop in a place for too long.’ Dimmet grinned. ‘I expect he asked you to look after business for him for a day or two, did he? Save him the bother?’

‘What?’ Will said, aghast.

‘You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like, Willand, you know that!’ Dimmet winked. ‘I expect I can handle all the extra customers. And there’s generally a powerful thirst on folk who’ve walked a half dozen leagues or more on a summer’s day in search of a cure.’

Just then Duffred put his head in. ‘There’s a man out here says can he bring his cow in to see the wizard?’

‘No, he cannot!’ Dimmet said and marched off down the passageway.

‘Where’re you going?’ Will called after him. ‘Duffred, where’s your father gone?’

But Duffred only grinned and said, ‘He’s found a mare’s nest and he’s gone to laugh at the eggs. What do you think? You’d better come out here before they start breaking the door down.’

Will groaned, and resigned himself to a long day.

A clamour began as he came to the alehouse door.

‘One at a time!’ he said. ‘Please!’

Duffred and two of his father’s serving men came out and marshalled the folk into a line, saying that if they did not stand quietly and in good order the wizard would not see anybody.

‘What did you say that for?’ Will hissed as Duffred went back inside.

‘Eh?’

‘What did you call me a wizard for?’

‘Oh, they don’t know no different. Besides, you are a wizard to us.’ And Duffred went off whistling.

When noon came, Will hardly stopped to eat. He had not bothered to count but he supposed that over a hundred folk had gone away happier than when they had arrived. He helped them over everything from bunions and hens that refused to lay to pig-bitten fingers and a troublesome toothache. But no matter how hard he listened, or how many signs he placed on heads, still more folk presented themselves.

Throughout the afternoon it seemed that two hopefuls arrived for every one who went away, and as the heat of the day began to mount, Will began to wonder how many folk there were left in this part of the Realm. The promise he had made to Gwydion to lie low had somehow failed without any intention on his part, and that was worrying. If I keep on like this, he thought, someone nasty is bound to hear of me and be drawn here – if only to have a cure for their boils.

‘I don’t want to disappoint anyone,’ he told Dimmet at last as the innkeeper brought him out another tankard of cider. ‘They come here with such faith in me. But there’s got to be a limit. I’ll have to call it a day when the sun does the same.’

‘You’ll never get through this lot by sundown!’

‘I’ll have to. It’s necessary to transpose spells when they’re cast at night. And of that art I know very little.’

The end of the line was still a long way down the road, and only when Will refused to see another person did Dimmet send Duffred along to guard the end so that newly arriving folk could be sent away.

The crescent moon was setting when Will finally escaped to take his supper. Dimmet, who was counting a stack of silver pennies, said Will deserved the best room in the inn, which was up a set of stairs jealously guarded by Bolt, the Plough’s big black dog.

‘That’s it!’ Will announced. ‘No more! You’d better tell them to go away, Dimmet. Because I am not seeing anyone else.’

‘There’s always tomorrow.’

‘Not tomorrow. Not ever!’

He went to bed very tired, but he could not rest easy, for though none of the casts had been great in power or extent, the exercise of so many spells still sparked in all the channels of his body.

As he lay restlessly, a thousand faces appeared to him – all the poor folk who had passed under his hands, all the wounds and worries, all the ailments and afflictions.

Surely, he thought as he turned onto his side, I couldn’t have advertised myself more widely if I’d shouted my name out from the rooftops.

The next day he woke early. He was still tired, and quite ravenous, but when he opened the shutters he saw a swelling crowd was already gathered below. They waited in hope, though they had been told that there would be no more healing. Those who had arrived since dawn were reluctant to believe what those who had waited all night were telling them. And so the crowd had continued to grow.

As Will sat at breakfast he debated what he would say. When he peeped through a crack in the shutters he saw that several hawkers had come hoping to profit from the crowd. There was even a juggler in red and yellow walking up and down with a chair balanced on his chin.

‘You’ll have to be strong with them today,’ Dimmet said, a gleam in his eye.

‘I’m not going out there. Tell them I’ve gone.’

‘Tell them yourself.’

Will’s fists clenched. ‘Dimmet!’

Dimmet was about to go out to make the announcement that Will was shortly to address them all when there came the drumming of a horse’s hooves.

‘Master! Master!’ someone cried at the back door. ‘Come quick!’

That sounded too urgent to ignore, and Will decided to go into the yard. He pushed his way through the onlookers and was met by a man sitting astride a dun pony who begged him to come along the Nadderstone road with him.

‘What is it?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Is someone injured?’

‘It’s up on the tower!’ he cried. ‘Come quick!’

‘What’s on the tower? What tower?’

‘They caught a goggly in a trap up by the old chapter house!’

‘A goggly?’

A great gust of surprise swept through those who were listening at the gate as they all caught their breath at once.

‘They wants to kill it! You got to come quick!’

That sounded sinister, though Will had no idea what a goggly was. Still, it was his opportunity to escape and he seized it. ‘Stand back!’ he said, waving an uncompromising arm at the crowd.

There were groans for fear that he would leave them. Some gave tongue to angry shouts and began to press in around him, but he leapt up behind the rider and thrust out his oak staff. He cried out as he had once heard Gwydion cry out, ‘Give way, there! Hinder me who dares!’

The crowd was struck dumb by that. Dimmet and Duffred and their helpers began to push people back from the gate. A way parted and allowed the pony to canter away. A moment later they had left Eiton village far behind, and Will clung on as they passed into open country.

They followed the road that Will had taken the day before along the broad valley and past the ruined chapter house. But when they came up the ridge where the tower stood he saw that it was abandoned no more. A knot of folk were gathered at its foot, and they were looking up at the mottled brown stone. Many had armed themselves with sticks and were shouting angry oaths at the tower. They broke off when they saw their messenger had returned with the wizard.

As Will got down from the horse he saw one of the young men begin throwing stones up at the tower.

‘Hoy!’ he shouted, and made the lad turn. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Trying to wallop that there goggly.’

When Will shaded his eyes and looked up he saw they were trying to dislodge the gargoyle.

‘It’s naught but a carven image!’

‘Nooo! ‘tis a goggly! Look, it moves!’

Will stared at their red faces and began to suspect they had been put under an enchantment. But then the creature actually did move.

‘See, Master! Now then! What kind of a carving is that?’

Will’s eyes narrowed. It was a live animal trapped high up in a corner of the wall. One of the ugliest creatures he had ever seen. Its every movement lifted the hairs in Will’s flesh, as the sight of a spider did in some. The creature was brown-grey and mottled, batlike yet baby-faced at the same time, and there was something elfin about it. It had wings and a tail and four thin limbs, and was about the size of a three-year-old child, though it was built much slighter and in strange proportions. Whenever it moved the folk below gasped and hooted. And when the bold lad made to pitch another stone up at it Will stayed him with a question.

‘Who found it?’

One of the men spoke up. ‘My brother seen it up there around dawn when we come up from Morton Ashley to check on the snares.’

‘Snares?’ Will asked sharply. ‘Shame on you. There’s a deal of suffering in snares, you know that.’

‘Well, fetch it down then so’s we can kill it!’ the man said.

‘Is that what you brought me out here for?’ Will demanded.

‘Look!’

The thing moved again, crouched in a corner, then scuttled at speed across a sheer wall, clinging to the vertical surface and the overhang of the parapet with long, clawlike nails. Will saw that something was clamped to its ankle and it trailed a long, rusty chain that seemed to be attached to the masonry of the tower.

Stones were let fly at it and fists shaken.

‘Naaw! Naaaw!’ it cried, and a shower of grit flaked down into their eyes from its struggles.

‘Stop that!’ Will cried with all the authority he could muster. ‘You must try to calm yourselves!’

‘At night them gogglies fly out from caverns and drink the milk of our animals,’ a woman said, hate shining in her eyes. ‘And they steal babies from out their cradles!’

‘And they shuns the light,’ another told him. ‘But ‘tis said they can sit out even in the noonday sun and not budge once they’ve tasted of the flesh of a child!’

‘Nonsense.’

‘’Tis true! That’s why they hide out on towers and the like. Pose as gargles in the daytime, they do. Until folk discovers them and drives them away. Pitch a rock at it, Erngar!’

‘I said no throwing!’ Will pointed his staff at the man and he dropped the rock. ‘Or I shall not help you.’

A memory stirred as he caught the latest movement. He was reminded of a candle-blackened roof and hideous faces and winged creatures just like this one. What he had at first taken for carvings had clustered high up among the roof beams of the great chapter house of Verlamion, looking down on him with hungry eyes.

‘Goggly child-stealer!’ a fat woman shouted up at it, wrathfully shaking her fist.

Just then, Duffred came up on a horse. ‘What’s to do here?’ he asked.

Once he had dismounted Will drew him aside out of earshot of the others. ‘What is that thing?’ he asked shading his eyes.

‘Don’t rightly know. But you want to be careful, the folk at Morton Ashley and right down as far as Helmsgrave say these creatures steal newborn babes,’ Duffred murmured.

‘So I’ve discovered.’

The Nadderstone man who had brought Will here joined them, and so did his wife. ‘Gogglies come from a land under the ground.’

‘How do you know that?’ Will asked, a sudden anxiety seizing him.

The man looked back challengingly. ‘Every seven years them gogglies must pay a tithe to the infernal king who lives down below. But it’s a living tithe. They must give over one of their own young – unless they can find a manchild to offer instead.’

‘That’s why they’re always prowling for our young ones,’ the woman said, picking up a stone.

Duffred said quietly, ‘I don’t know if it’s the truth, but it’s what they believe. They all do. When this chapter house was still lived in, the folk hereabouts would bring their children here to have a mark put on their heads – the Rite of Unction they called it. It was supposed to be a protection against these…things.’

Will folded his arms. ‘And was it paid for?’

‘Aye. A gold piece taken from the village coffer.’

He snorted. ‘Gwydion says the Sightless Ones love gold above all else. And that the Elders of the Fellowship delight most in taking it piecemeal from the needy and the credulous.’

‘But is that not a fair exchange?’ Duffred asked. ‘A piece of gold for a charm against evil?’

‘Evil!’ Will gave Duffred a hard look. ‘That is a meaningless word, an idea invented by power-hungry men to enslave folk’s minds. And how many times must it be said: true magic is never to be bought or sold. Don’t you see? The red hands were just squeezing these folk, frightening them into bringing their babes here. Doubtless so they could be registered with a magical mark, one that helps to make recruits of them in later life. Gwydion says the Sightless Ones believe in something very dangerous.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘It’s called the Great Lie.’

Duffred looked unsure and gave the cloister a thoughtful glance. ‘So you’re saying the goggly ain’t a child-stealer after all?’

‘I hardly think so. Look at it, Duff. It’s terrified!’ Will thought of the vent in the cellar under the chapter house and smelled again the strange air that had issued from below.

As he walked towards the tower, one of the skin-like wings flapped pathetically and he knew the creature was in pain.

‘I’m going up there,’ he said, rolling up his sleeves.

‘You can’t do that!’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s said they got a poison bite on them!’

‘I’ll bet that’s a lot of nonsense too!’

Inside the tower a few floorboards were still clinging to the beams and three broken and rotting staircases led precariously from one level to the next. Will had to be helped up to the first floor, but then he climbed alone, walking with arms outstretched along the beams, testing his footing with care as he went. Birds had nested here and the rain of several winters had made the walls mossy. When he reached the top he saw marks that showed how the roof of the tower had been deliberately broken with axes and hammers. He looked down from what seemed now to be a dizzying height, and began to edge out along the bare parapet. At last he came to the place where the iron chain was wedged tight in a crevice of the stonework. One of the creature’s ankles was shut in an iron trap, and the ring on the chain that dangled from the trap was fixed through a staple in the masonry.

He wiped the sweat from his eyes and tried not to look down. The sooner he did what he had come to do the better it would be. But when the creature found that he had come close to it, it began to screech. It had big eyes, a broad muzzle and a wide mouth with many needlelike teeth. Its grey fur was threadbare, and its lips were bloodied, which gave it an even more monstrous appearance.

‘Naaw! Naaaw!’ it cried, and tried again to escape, but it could not bite through the chain, nor was it strong enough to pull the ring free, no matter how it tugged.

‘Stop flapping, you foolish beast. There, now,’ he murmured, trying to gentle it. ‘Can’t you see you’re only hurting yourself?’

‘Naaw! Naaaw!’ the thing cried back.

Balancing on top of the parapet was difficult. The masons who had built the tower had made castellations on top, perhaps so that princely armies marching by would believe it was part of a great fortification and so leave it alone. Will sat astride the battlement and inched along the wall. His left leg overhung a sheer drop every bit as far down as the ground beneath the curfew tower at Verlamion. When he came to the iron ring he found it was made fast, and was too strong to break.

He thought about using a spell, but he had no knowledge of the creature’s true name, nor could he say how magic would work upon it. There’s no alternative but to speak calmly to it, he thought, and to try, bit by bit, to tempt it in.

‘Naaaw!’ it screamed when he put his hand on the chain.

There was no trust in the fragile creature. It pulled against his efforts, obstinately hurting itself, and he worried that he might break its leg if he were to pull too hard. It was already in pain, for the rusty teeth of the trap had bitten deep.

‘How long have you been here?’ he asked, leaning out as far as he could. ‘You poor little thing. Are you hungry? I wish I’d brought a sausage or two for you. That might have tempted you down, eh? And by the looks of you you’re parched too. I’ve never seen such a depth of mistrust in any beast. Where did you learn that? Now, if I can only reach out and…’

But when he stretched out his hand towards the trap the creature flapped in a renewed frenzy. It flew at him, and scratched him with its slender claws.

‘Steady…I’m not going to hurt you,’ he muttered, drawing away.

His outstretched fingers trembled as he tried to reach the trap, and perhaps turn it over a little to see how the mechanism worked and how the iron teeth might be parted, but the creature took fright once more. Terror flashed in its eyes. It hissed and lunged, and then sank its teeth into his hand.

A sharp pain shot through him. He stifled a yell, but then the creature pulled back, jerking furiously on the chain in another vain effort to pull itself free. Its claws began to scrabble horribly against the stone, and then it flattened itself on the wall. It shut its eyes and made a horrible face, freezing in an outstretched pose in a last senseless effort to deceive the hunter by playing the gargoyle.

‘Come on! Let’s be sensible now,’ Will said. ‘We both know you’re not a stone carving.’

He hung on to the chain even though he felt the fingers of his other hand sliding. Fear of falling froze him, put a rod of steel in his arm. He summoned the power to ignore pain and the strength of three men to slowly drag himself back. His braids brushed his cheek, and as he came upright he found he was shaking.

‘I’m only here to help you, you stupid creature,’ he said. There was blood on his fingers where the ingrate had bitten him. Drops of blood pooled at the wound and began to run in red lines down his arm as he watched. Blood dripped from his elbow into the void below.

He was dimly aware of upturned faces as Duffred and the other folk watched him. He hoped Duffred’s claim about a poison bite was empty.

‘Those folks down there think I’m either very brave,’ he told the frozen creature, ‘or very foolish. I’m not sure myself which it is. What do you think?’

But the beast was not listening.

‘Magician, heal thyself!’ he said, and laughed at the irony. So much healing had come from his hands just lately, yet he could do nothing for himself.

‘That’s how magic works, I’m afraid,’ he said, looking hard at the beast. Then he realized that nothing his magic could do was likely to be worse than the injuries he would end up with by fighting the creature’s stubbornness headon.

There was nothing for it but to use a spell of great magic. He resettled himself on the wall like a man astride a horse. He put his hands together and summoned up his inner calm. After all the practice of yesterday a magical state of mind came to him easily and he felt the tingling in his skin begin to rise in waves. Then he fixed his attention on the chain.

He began to blow on it. Hot breath, hotter as it left his lips, hotter still as it played on the iron chain link. Soon the rusted iron began to glow a deep cherry red. The red intensified until it was glowing yellow and then white. Will put two fingers through the link and opened it easily.

When magic snaps, best beware the afterclap!

Will recalled the rede only just in time as the effort of the spell broke back against him. It was like a fall from a great height. Darkness closed in on him very suddenly. For a moment he was in a faint, then his thoughts seemed to move outside his head, and he was looking down at an unconscious fool who sat astride a battlement with two pieces of chain clasped in unfeeling hands.

But as the chain swung free the creature’s eyes opened. It sensed freedom and came to life, scuttling first halfway across the wall. Then it launched itself into the air.

It fell for a moment in a great flat-bellied curve, weighed down by the trap and chain that dangled from its leg. But the rush of air under its wings bore it upward, and it flapped in a desperate arc over the trees and disappeared.

Will saw everything haloed in blue light. He battled to bring his mind once more into focus. Stupidly he looked at the patterns of the ground far below but could make no sense of them. But then he felt a trickle of spittle run wetly from the side of his mouth. He felt his teeth grating on the stone and a great sickness welled up in his belly.

A moment passed before he understood his precariousness. Another moment before he began to wonder just how long he had been slumped on the wall. He heard Duffred calling to him. Then the life started to flow back into his limbs again, and he breathed a deep draught of air that made him realize just how close a fool had come to killing himself.

CHAPTER SIX AN UNWELCOME GUEST

Bright sunshine was shafting through an open window and sparrows were chasing one another noisily through the eaves when Will came to again. He found himself stiff in every joint, and his left hand was tied up tightly in a cloth strip.

Bolt began to bark and came up to him with a wagging tail when he tried to turn over. Then Duffred appeared and said, ‘How are you feeling this fine morning? – what’s left of it, anyway.’

‘Sore.’ He smiled. ‘And hungry.’

‘Soon fix that. Does bacon and eggs sound good enough?’

‘Hmmm.’ He glanced up at the window. ‘What about the folk outside?’

‘Oh, they’ve all gone.’

‘But I can hear voices.’

‘Market day. And a busy one too. I should lay low if I was you, in case folk start to put the word out you’ve come back again.’

He gave Duffred a nod of agreement. ‘Good idea.’

Will replaited his braids, dressed and slipped down to the snug. Dimmet appeared from one of the pantries. He planted his hands on his hips when he saw Will was awake and laughed his great laugh. ‘Oh, so you’ve come back to us, have you? You was as mad as a March hare when we put you to bed. Rattling on about this and that.’ He turned to Duffred. ‘How is he now?’

‘Says he’s hungry.’

Duffred raised his eyebrows. ‘And how’s the hand?’

Will flexed it testingly. ‘Stiff. And I still feel tired, despite sleeping a full night on your softest mattress.’

‘Two nights and the day in between if you really want to know. We was getting a mite concerned about you.’

Will was astonished. ‘That long?’

‘I suppose doing magic takes it out of a body.’ Dimmet’s voice hardened. ‘Duffred here says them folks from Morton Ashley weren’t best pleased you let their goggly get away, mind.’

‘It didn’t get away. I let it go.’

Dimmet blinked. ‘What? A-purpose?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, then. No wonder they was upset with you. Gogglies ain’t the easiest of things to catch ahold of by all accounts.’

‘I thought I’d been called there to save a life. But they’d caught the creature in an iron snare. They wanted me to kill it for them. What do they think I am?’

Dimmet put a pewter platter down in front of him and withdrew. Will make short work of the breakfast, then he went back upstairs, having remembered the red fish that was still in his pouch. He took it out. A stunning idea had come to him.

Maybe, just maybe, it was his own green fish. Maybe something or someone had stolen it away from Nether Norton, and had taken it to Little Slaughter where it had been altered by the heat of the fireball.

He looked at it with new eyes. If it had been altered, then it was a change for the worse. There was something secretive about it now, something that did not sit very comfortably with his magical sense. Even so, he felt prompted to put it on a thread and wear it inside his shirt, just as he had before. But after a while sitting alone he began to feel so restless that he decided to go out.

He tied a bundle to his staff, stuck his hazel wand in his belt and put up the hood of his cloak. Then he crept downstairs again and stepped out by the back way.

He felt drained, like a man who wakes in the thin hours of the night and cannot get back to sleep. The wound in his hand had begun to throb. He knew he should rest, but what he wanted most was to get away from Eiton and its throngs of people for the rest of the day. He needed to plant his feet in the good earth, drink his fill of pure spring water and feast on fresh air. He would walk the lign, and soon he would feel more like his old self again. The sun would burn the tiredness out of him, and he might even be able to think a few things through at last.

He slipped back into the Plough’s yard unnoticed a little after sunset. He was tired and displeased with what now seemed to have been a fruitless and ill-spent day. The night was clear and warm. Many stars were twinkling overhead, but he had no time for them. He came in past the stables, and felt the presence of a big animal shifting its weight from foot to foot. His magical sense flared vividly, and he got the impression that the beast in the stall was thirsty, but he was too tired to pull the thought fully up into his conscious mind or to do anything practical about it.

The inn was warm and welcoming and busy with village folk making merry, but it seemed to Will both close and stuffy. There was a man sawing on a fiddle and another beating on a tabor. Duffred was washing a bucket of greasy wooden spoons over by the ale taps, and he hailed Will.

‘It’s too busy in there,’ Will said, preparing to slip upstairs.

‘My old dad says that “too” and “busy” are words that never go well together in an innkeeper’s hearing. Mind you, after all the tumults of this week I confess I’d be happier if it was a little quieter just now. Where’ve you been all the day?’

‘I…think it’s best if I make myself scarce.’ He glanced at the many customers, disliking their raucous laughter and the merry singing that had begun.

Duffred looked up and handed him a full tankard. ‘Here. This’ll wet your whistle. You get yourself down the far corner. Nobody much’ll bother you down there.’

He took the cider. ‘Thank you. I don’t think I’ll need to whet my appetite though. I’m ravenous.’

He watched Duffred break off half a loaf and then ladle out a bowl of pauper’s pea soup for him. Will carried it off down the passageway and found the quietest corner, but no sooner had he broken bread than a bent-backed old man shambled over. He was wrapped in a dark cloak, and there was a dusting of sparkles about his hair and upon the wool of his mantle, as if he had just come through fine rain.

‘Hey-ho, Master!’ the old man said in a jocular voice, and sat himself down.

Will resettled himself. ‘How do,’ he said more than a little gruffly and fearing that more was about to be asked of him. The old man edged his stool closer to the table and leaned forward and Will felt a pair of faded eyes boring into him as he ate.

He looked up at last and saw the old man nod at him. ‘Looks right tasty, does that, Master.’

‘I’m nobody’s master.’ He frowned. There was something about the old man’s appearance that made Will feel mightily uneasy. He wished the singers would quieten down. ‘I dare say Duffred’ll give you a splash of good pauper’s soup and the rest of this loaf if you ask him.’

‘Oh, I ain’t much hungry for soup.’

‘That’s all right then,’ Will said with his mouth full.

‘But see, I heard there was a crow visiting hereabouts.’

Will stopped chewing and put his hunk of bread down. ‘Crow’ was the word some used to mean a wizard. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’

‘And I heard there was a lot of healing going on here. A regular hero of a healer at work they told me – a friend of the crow’s, a young feller not unlike yourself.’

‘I’m no hero,’ Will said lightly, and started eating again.

‘Maybe you’re not,’ the old man said, but his eyes strayed to Will’s staff, and then to a meat knife that was on the uncleared table, and finally back to Will’s face. ‘But what if I said I’d been looking for you?’

Will saw the old man’s eyes fasten upon his own. His hand went unconsciously to the place where the red fish was concealed. ‘Looking for me, you say?’

The old man smiled a yellow smile. ‘Oh, I’ve known about you for a very long time, Willand. As a matter of fact, we’ve met before.’

The singing stopped and the sudden silence was blemished by the sounds of a big horse snorting and big hooves clopping out in the yard. Will looked to the tiny window, then to the door and irresistibly back to the old man. ‘Who are you?’ he said, his blood running cold. ‘How do you know me?’

‘You know very well, I think.’ The old man’s arm moved as fast as lightning. He suddenly plucked out the hazel wand that Will had in his belt. ‘I see you’ve a talent!’

As the old man snapped the wand in two a surge of fear ran through Will’s belly. He found he could not look away from the other’s binding stare. Not even towards the knife that was within easy reach on the table top.

‘Who are you?’ Will demanded.

‘One who wishes to know if you are a born fool who has learned nothing since.’ Suddenly the old man’s voice was gone and another that was deeper and wholly compelling filled the air.

Will’s mind whirled in terror. His hand moved towards the knife, knocking his soup bowl from the table. But the bowl and its contents froze in mid air and never reached the floor. Nor would his hand move further towards the knife no matter how hard he tried to make it.

‘Who are you?’ he asked for the third time, though he had already decided he knew the answer. He heard his voice rise in panic, betraying him as complete powerlessness overtook him. He tried to get to his feet but he could not move. You fool! his mind screamed. You broke a promise and look what it’s brought you to!

‘You know who I am. And I command you – speak my name if you dare!’

A blade of ice slipped into Will’s heart. All the hairs on his head stood up, and against his will his lips formed the word, ‘Maskull!’

No sooner was the word spoken than the face of the old man began to change. It shimmered like ripples on a pond. Will watched motionless as a new face began to form. Nor did much relief come to him when the face that appeared was Gwydion’s.

‘Easy now, Will. There is no danger. Fortunately you are with a friend.’

But Will still could not speak. He blinked and looked again, still unsure if the apparition was real. Then the shock that gripped him began slowly to ebb away. The soup bowl clattered to the floor, splashing his feet.

Anger overtook him.

‘You scared me half to death!’ he cried, and sprang to his feet.

‘I am sorry to have frightened you, Willand, but the lesson was an essential one. I told you to remain here but you did not remain here. I told you to lie low, but you did not lie low.’

‘I only did what I had to!’

‘Is that what you call it?’

‘What was I supposed to do? It all seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’

But the wizard’s grey eyes were on him, relentlessly accusing and shaming him. ‘Listen to me, Willand. You are not taking the task that lies before you seriously enough. In future you must be more guarded. You must make an effort to recognize and pierce magical disguises. You act as if you have forgotten the dangers that you face.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But it’s not my way to mistrust everyone I meet.’

‘That must become second nature to you.’

‘No!’ Will shook his head. ‘That will never be. I can’t live like that, Gwydion.’

‘Then you will not live long!’

‘At least I’ll stay myself.’

‘Fool. If that really had been Maskull, you would have become his unwilling slave, and our world would have been lost!’

The wizard sat back and allowed Will’s anger to fully subside, then he said in a more composed voice, ‘Too much depends on you. You must listen more closely to your inner warnings.’

‘What inner warnings?’ he asked, still shaking. ‘If I’d felt anything then I would have listened to it.’

‘Is that the truth?’

‘Yes!’

But when Will looked inside himself he saw that a part of him had noted the spangling that had covered the hair and shoulders of the old man. It had made him think of fine rain, but how could it have been rain when the sky outside had not a cloud in sight? And, to add to that, he had ignored the sounds of Bessie moving about in the stable yard. He had selfishly ignored the horse’s thirst. If he had been more alert – or perhaps if he had been a little kinder – he would have noticed Bessie and straight away he would have been warned of Gwydion’s return.

He said, chastened, ‘I was wrong to disobey you. But what am I to do when I have the power to cure ailments and ailments come to me to be cured? I didn’t plan to spread the word of my being here, it just happened.’

Gwydion muttered and Will’s stomach turned over as he watched the pea soup slowly return to the bowl and the bowl settle itself back on the table. ‘You must learn to understand a very basic rule, Willand. The Sightless Ones say that life presents endless choices between good and evil. They are wrong. In their terms, life’s endless choices are all about choosing between two “evils” or comparing two “goods”. Now weigh the many small mercies you have given to the local people against the vastly greater mercy that you alone can give to the world. Keep a sense of proportion. Be mindful of your true duty.’

‘You speak as if I was pursuing gratitude, or fame, or that I did it for gain.’

The wizard put a hand on Will’s shoulder. ‘I know that your motives were not ignoble or unfitting. Nor is it my wish to lay blame on you. I am concerned for your safety. Now let me see that hand.’

Will unwrapped the strip of linen from his hand and the wizard looked at the angry redness of the wound.

‘Teeth,’ Gwydion said.

Will told him what had passed. The wizard spoke healing words and treated the wound with a kind touch and a pinch of aromatic powder whose sting made Will flinch.

‘It wasn’t the prettiest or best-tempered of beasts I’ve ever met with,’ he said. ‘But it seemed to me more pitiful than malicious.’

‘It seems that your kindness may have rebounded on you, Willand.’

‘That’s an odd sort of remark to come from you. Did you not once tell me that the Rede of Friendship lies at the very heart of magic? And is there not a common rede that says: “One good turn deserveth another”?’

‘In the natural world, but perhaps not so when matters have been twisted into their opposites by sorcery.’ Gwydion slapped his hand hard then held it tight.

‘Ouch!’ He recoiled from the sharp pain as Gwydion let go, but when he looked down the wound had almost gone. Only two purplish pits remained where the deepest punctures had been.

Suddenly, Will heard the sound of hooves. He wheeled about and made for the door.

‘Come on, Gwydion,’ he cried. ‘You told me to take notice of my inner feelings. That’s just what I’m doing!’

They headed for the back door and reached the yard at the same time. Two shapes loomed at the end of the yard. The lead horseman drew his mount up sharp and Will felt his right hand grasped in friendship.

‘Tilwin!’

‘Tilwin if you must, though I prefer my own name.’

As Will caught hold of the horse’s bridle his eyes fixed on a pale horse that walked through a pool of moonlight. It was Avon, and on his back was Willow.

CHAPTER SEVEN A GOOD NIGHT’S REST

Despite his surprise, Will embraced Willow as soon as she got down from the horse. Then his surprise turned to alarm.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked her, taking his daughter in his arms.

‘As you see, we’re as well as we’ve always been.’

‘I was worried about you—’ he turned a questioning eye on Morann, ‘—but I didn’t expect you to be brought here.’

‘Well, here we are,’ Willow said.

He cuddled the child. ‘She looks well.’

‘She’s fine! I was more worried about you.’

He looked to the wizard as he hugged Willow again. Gwydion’s silent sternness said much. When they all went inside the inn, Will hissed at Morann, ‘I only asked you to give her my message.’

‘That may be so, but you have a wife who is not so easily put off.’

‘I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but—’

Morann was blithely unconcerned. ‘I’m sorry we’ve arrived so late. It’s hard travelling on horseback along a dark road when there’s a babe-in-arms to cope with. And our journey was not without peril.’

‘Peril?’

‘Don’t worry.’

‘What about that important errand in Trinovant you said you were going on?’

‘Things have already gone too far for that – as you shall soon learn.’

Fiddle music met them as they opened the door. There were better than two dozen folk in the Plough. Some were singing, others talking in huddles. One or two turned to look as the new arrivals came by, but Will led them along the passageway and down to the far end, where they squeezed one at a time into the inglenook, and so into the snug. It was only when food and drink had been brought to them, and after Dimmet had left, that Gwydion called down a fresh spell of privacy upon the room and the sounds of merriment faded away.

‘We were almost caught out as we tried to cross the Charrel south of Baneburgh,’ Morann said. ‘I spied a column of five hundred men or more.’

‘Five hundred?’ Will said in alarm.

‘At the very least. They were marching south and east under the Duke of Mells’ banner. From the way they carried themselves I judged them to be farmers only lately raised to arms, but there were veteran horsemen with them, hard men who had been set to chase down any of the column who might decide to stray. I thought it likely these riders would ask unwelcome questions if they spied us, so we went a longer way round.’

‘There’s no doubt that war is coming again,’ Willow said. ‘If a while ago they were taking men off the land by the dozen, now they’re taking them by the score, and even by the hundred.’

‘That’s right enough.’ Morann nodded. ‘I’d guess the Commissioners will be here in Eiton by the week’s end.’

Will took Willow’s hand, thinking about the harvesters who would be swept from the fields like so much chaff. Many of them would never return if the spectre of war was allowed to escape into the world. Willow asked what the wizard foresaw, and Gwydion told her about the battlestones and the significance of what had happened at Little Slaughter. She shook her head in concern at the news that Maskull was once more abroad.

‘Did you find the Dragon Stone?’ Will asked.

‘I entered Castle Foderingham and saw that the stone remained entombed there. I enmeshed it in fresh holding spells, and did all that I dared short of attempting to drain it. It now slumbers as deeply as ever it did.’

Will wondered what more there was to the wizard’s story. In particular, whether the Duke of Ebor had in the end given his consent.

He leaned across to check on his sleeping daughter. ‘Why did you bring her?’

She searched his face. ‘What else was I going to do?’

‘You could have left her with Breona.’

‘Will, she’s our child, and her place is with us.’

‘The work we’re about is perilous.’ He shook his head at her lack of understanding, still feeling the shock of the lesson that Gwydion had taught him. ‘I don’t want her to be put in danger.’

She gave him a hard look that stifled further comment. He glanced at Gwydion anticipating what the wizard would have to say on the matter. He did not have to wait long.

‘Tomorrow our fight against the battlestones must resume in earnest,’ Gwydion said. ‘Willow, you must stay here tonight, of course. But at first light tomorrow you should set off for home.’

‘As you can see, Master Gwydion,’ Willow said, unmoved by the wizard’s persuasion, ‘I’m well, and Bethe is well also. Far better than either of us would have been if a shooting star had landed flat on our village like it did on Little Slaughter.’

The wizard glanced at Morann with displeasure. ‘Be that as it may—’

‘So the Vale is no safer for us than anywhere else, I’d say.’

Will jumped in. ‘Gwydion’s right. It’s more dangerous for you to be here.’

‘Well, maybe there’s another thing that you should know,’ she said stubbornly. ‘You can thank Master Gwydion for his advice. But I’d say it’s my duty to go with my man and help him in whatever business he’s upon. That’s what I undertook to do at our handfasting, and that’s what I’m going to do. And as for Bethe, babies are a lot tougher than folk generally give them credit for. She’ll want for nothing on the road.’

At that there was silence. Then Gwydion laid both hands flat on the table. ‘It is right and proper that we have all been able to say our say tonight, but it is getting late now. Let us go to our beds and settle the matter tomorrow.’

When they emerged from the snug the dancing and music and eating and drinking were all finished. The inn’s big room was quiet and half in darkness. Will took Willow and Bethe upstairs and saw they were comfortable, then he went out through the darkened yard, down the lane, over a stile and into a grassy field in which an old oak grew. Overhead the stars of late summer twinkled. He asked them to tell him what to do for the best, but they only gazed down in pitiless silence.

The stars don’t know what to do, he told himself sternly. They’re just holes in the sky, holes seventeen hundred leagues away. You’ll have to answer questions like that yourself, Willand, as hard as they are.

Whatever happened tomorrow, it was going to be an eventful day. It would be wise to meet it fully prepared. He did not know why, but he took the red fish from around his neck and put it back into his pouch. Then he found a place that felt right, stood straight, his feet a little apart and his arms loose at his sides. When he felt the time had come to begin, he closed his eyes and breathed three deep draughts of air, drawing them in through his nose and blowing them out each time from his mouth. Then he planted his feet hard in the good earth and invited the power to fill him.

First it trembled in the soles of his feet, an irresistible force rising through his legs, then up through his body. He felt the tingling rush over his ribs and all the way up his spine. It surrounded his heart, and there split into three streams. Slowly, he raised his arms until they were as far apart as they would go. The power kept rising inside him until it reached his hands and it seemed to Will that a pale blue light that only he could see had begun shooting out from the tips of his splayed fingers. But it was when the power reached his head that he was hit by an overwhelming feeling of joy and peace.

He felt he was inside a great cold flame, and even though his eyes were closed he could sense a brilliant light filling him. As he accepted it, it grew brighter and stronger, blotting out everything, so that in that ultimate timeless moment he forgot who and what he was.

But then, gradually, the light began to draw back inside him. He did not mind that it was dimming for he knew that, although he could no longer see it, the power had not forsaken him. It was wonderful how that moment seemed to last forever and yet to take no longer than a brief moment. Wholly refreshed in spirit, he went back inside, feeling content and happy to be with his family despite everything.

Will did not know what woke him. At first he thought it was Bethe’s crying, but as he lay still in the darkness the echoes died in his mind and he heard only Willow’s breathing and what he thought must be the furtive rustling of mice in the thatch.

But then, as he came fully awake, he felt pins and needles tingling in the nape of his neck, and he sat up when a scratching and scrabbling came at the shutters.

That’s no mouse, he thought. It’s far too big. Someone’s trying to get in!

He was about to shout out, but he stopped himself. A shout would wake everyone, but it would also drive away whoever was outside.

Silently, he pulled his clothes on, wrapped himself in his cloak to cover his shirt’s whiteness, and crept along the passageway. He moved carefully down the stair, pausing only to take up the balk of wood that barred the door, and went out into the slanting moonlight. No sooner had he stepped outside, than he heard a scream. It was Willow. Then Bethe began to cry.

‘Hoy!’ he shouted as he reached the place below the window. There, up on the thatch and scraping at the shutter, was a goggly.

So they are child-stealers after all, Will thought. It’s after Bethe! But it hasn’t reckoned on the spells of protection that Gwydion’s put on the Plough! That must have been what woke me up.

‘You! Get away from there!’

The thing was fighting to open the shutters, and now it was hissing and scratching like a mad thing, then it slid down a little among the hard moonlight shadows and began to tear at the thatch.

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