Cal stood instantly. He went straight for the door and had almost reached it when Merlin said, “The way back to the Grail is long and hard. You had your chance and you didn’t take it. Did you not notice, Cal, did you not see, how the Fisher King has your own face?”
Cal stopped. He put both hands out and pushed against the doorframe on each side of him, letting his breath out slowly, because it hurt him, like a sudden stitch, a stab wound. Panic crashed through him like sweat, like a chorus of voices.
When he looked up he saw Shadow. She was staring in concern. “Have you hurt yourself?”
“No,” he said hoarsely.
“You look awful. Go back in and sit down.”
“Not with him. He gives me the creeps.”
She turned him around. There was no one else in the room.
Cal stared a moment, then crossed to the chair and looked down at it. No smell, no chicken bones. Not a dent in the cushion. “He was here.”
“Who?”
“Merlin. The crazy one.” He turned. “Does he live here too? Is he part of the setup?”
She sat, pulling her black hair through her fingers. “Yes. At least he has a place out in the woods; he calls it his ‘moulting cage.’ Hawk says it’s full of feathers, and there’s a pig there that he talks to. But I haven’t seen him around for a while. He comes and goes. He’s . . . not like the rest of us.”
“Not if he can disappear into thin air he’s not.” But already the old, terrifying doubts were rising up in the corners of his mind, like shadows—what if he’d imagined the whole thing, talked to himself? What if these were the voices?
He turned abruptly. “Let’s go outside.”
They walked along the back lane of the farm, and leaned on the gate to the meadow, watching Hawk ride down and thunder lances against a swinging target that flung itself around to try and strike him on the back with its flailing ball and chain.
Cal said, “Tell me about him.”
“Hawk?”
“Merlin. I don’t mean the old stories—who is he? Really?”
Shadow smiled behind her cobweb. “Cal, when these people join the Company, they join it. All I know about the hermit is that there was a battle, some terrible slaughter, and a friend of his was killed. Now don’t ask me if it was a real battle or if it was some reenactment that went wrong, because it really doesn’t matter in the end, whatever you might think.” Ignoring his groan she went on. “He had some sort of breakdown. Went off and lived wild in the woods for years; Arthur had given up hope, but he just turned up one day and started building this den of his, this cage. He lives there most of the time, though he goes off on strange journeys.”
“He talks a lot of odd stuff.”
She tapped her black painted nails on the worn wood and laughed shortly. “Don’t we all. But they say he’s a prophet. That he knows what’s to come and what’s been. You have to look for the sense in what he says. Once he told me, really seriously, that the whole Company was his, not Arthur’s.” She turned, curious. “Did you really see him?”
“I thought I did.” He caught her look and changed it to, “Yes. Of course I did. He went on about some apple tree.”
Shadow laughed. “If it’s not the tree, it’s the pig.” The dinner gong rang, whacked by one of the sweaty men from the kitchen; catching Cal’s arm, Shadow pulled him toward the barn. “You’ll get used to him. It’s not easy, I know, being around someone like that.”
As he queued for the hot soup and the greasy dollop of meat he thought bitterly that he knew far more than she did about people like that. He wished he could talk to her about his mother. But then he’d have to tell her she’d got it wrong, and he couldn’t. He liked the idea that she thought Thérèse was his mother. But even that had its dangers. “Cal’s half French,” she said, at some point in a conversation he wasn’t listening to. He looked up, off guard, swallowing the hot soup in a painful gulp.
“Do you speak it at home?” To his horror it was Gwrhyr who asked, the one they called the Interpreter.
Cal took a hasty drink of water. “No,” he said.
“Pity.”
Cal grinned, embarrassed, noncommittal.
Hawk and Shadow were staying over at the farm for some sort of gathering that night. They were annoyingly secretive about it. “Don’t tell me,” Cal said sourly, feeling the edge of the newly sharpened sword. “The Knights of the Round Table gather to feast. I’ve been looking for that piece of furniture ever since I got here.”
Hawk snorted. “It exists, laddie. But not like you think.”
After the archery practice Shadow drove him over the hill to the Chepstow bus stop. Glancing at the clean shirt he’d borrowed she grinned. “I heard about Kai.”
He scowled, silent.
“You’re really anxious about keeping clean, did you know that?”
“No, I’m not.”
She glanced in the mirror. “Yes you are. I saw you re-arranging Hawk’s books the other day. Tall ones at one end, small ones at the other. He was cursing later, trying to find something.”
“I like order. Nothing wrong with that.”
“Not if it doesn’t get to be an obsession.”
“If you knew what my house was like . . .” He’d said it before he could stop himself.
Shadow laughed. “Yes, well I’ve been there, remember. Talk about neat!” She grinned. “I think your father thought he’d catch something from me.”
The van swung around a corner. Desperate to change the subject he said, “You’re not really one of the Company yet, are you?”
“What?”
“You’re like me. You’re new. I can tell by the way you talk about them. And don’t tell me Shadow’s your real name.”
She was concentrating hard on the narrow lane. Too hard. Finally she said, “No, it isn’t. I was traveling on my own, out toward Gloucester, and I got into a bit of trouble. Got stranded on a road, late at night, nowhere to go. It was raining, and I was a bit scared to hitch a lift, to be honest, and I didn’t know where I was going anyway. Didn’t care.” Her hands were tight on the wheel. He knew all the signs. “I was wet and cold and . . . well, anyway, I’d had it with everything. Then this van pulls up. With sunflowers painted on it.” She grinned. “I was crazy ever to get in. I mean, total stranger. But you know Hawk.”
He nodded, trying to imagine it. There was a lot she hadn’t said. “So you’d left home?”
“Yes.”
“They let you? Why?”
“Let’s just say I couldn’t get on with things at home.”
She was the one sounding irritated now but he wanted to know so he waited till they stopped at the junction and said, “What sort of things?”
She glanced at him. On the wheel her hands looked oddly small, the crystals on her nails glinting. She wore frail black lace gloves with no fingers. “Look, Cal, I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s just say we don’t all have the cozy little setup in Otter’s Brook.”
And then it really was hard. Not to blurt out that she’d never seen anything like Sutton Street, that he could tell from her voice that she’d been to some good school and probably had a pony and an au pair and lived in a nice little suburban place in Somerset. That she’d never had to run the house at seven years old, shopping and cleaning and holding her mother’s head while she was sick and hiding the knives and hiding the bottles and all of it from the social workers and the teachers. But he kept quiet, so that when she dropped him off she said, “See you next week?”
“Sure.” He opened the van door, and as he got out she said, “I wish you’d tell us what makes you so unhappy.”
He stared at her in shock. “What?”
“Hawk thinks so. So does Arthur. And it’s not just about Corbenic, though that has something to do with it.”