He points back. ‘Can you see them?’
I strain my eyes, but don’t see anything. ‘Who?’
‘The riders. They’ve been following us all the way from Caerleon.’
‘Malegant’s men?’ I look again; I still can’t see them.
‘Morgan’s.’
‘Has he changed his mind? Are they chasing us?’
‘Stalking us.’ He gives a grim laugh. ‘Did you really think your story was so powerful it moved Morgan to mercy? He understood what you were saying, for all you disguised it. He knows we’re after something powerful — a weapon. He wants it for himself.’
I scan the long valley behind us, the ranks of trees like furrows in a field. Browns fade to greys as they fall in the mountain shadows. It feels like the end of the world.
At dusk on the third day we come to a long lake nestled in a valley. High summits loom all around it like sleeping giants. On one of them, at the eastern end of the lake, a fire glows against the sky.
Hugh slips off his horse. ‘That’s them. Please God we’re not too late.’
We dismount and leave the horses drinking from the lake. We don’t need to tether them — they don’t have the strength to wander far. We’re not much better off, but we don’t have a choice. We jog along the dusky lakeshore, hoping the men on the hill don’t hear the sound of our arms.
Even on foot, the hill looks too steep to climb. But at the far end of the lake, we find steps cut in to the mountain face, climbing towards the pass between two summits. It doesn’t surprise me. I remember what my mother said, how Wales is a wild realm on the rim of the world, how every rock and tree might hide the door to an enchanted land. Stones stand upright like trees; sometimes when the tide goes out, whole forests appear on the seabed. I think these steps must be the same, a hidden road that’s opened by a beam of moonlight, or the song of a wren.
Scrambling up the stairs in the dark is agonising work. There isn’t a muscle in my body that doesn’t ache from so many long days in the saddle. The moon’s behind a cloud: we scuttle like crabs, ungainly in our armour, testing every rock to make sure it won’t make a noise. Distant thunder rumbles across the valley — a storm’s coming. Above us, the flames on the mountain sway into the night.
The last few yards are the hardest: an almost vertical climb up a damp rock face. There must be another way, but Hugh doesn’t want to run into any sentries. We strap our swords to our backs and cling on with numb fingers, praying the fire masks the noise we make.
At last I haul myself over the lip of the cliff, and flop belly-down in a patch of heather. I tilt back my head and stare at the open hilltop.
The Land Rover had a satnav, but Ellie turned it off. She didn’t think you could track a car through its GPS, but the idea of a chip sending a signal into space, broadcasting her position, made her too anxious. Instead, she studied the map book and made a list of waypoints, then set out following the road signs. She stuck to secondary roads as much as she could. She wished Annelise had owned something less conspicuous — a Renault or a Citroën.
She’d never realised how big France was. She drove for hours, but when she checked her progress on the map she still had dauntingly far to go. Around 3 a.m. she almost dozed off — her eyes had closed without her realising it. The shock took her another few miles, but when she felt her eyes starting to droop again she had no choice but to pull over on a farm track and curl up in the back seat. A tractor rumbling past woke her at dawn.
Now she had a new worry. The fuel gauge on the car was edging inexorably down. She stopped at a small petrol station and spent the last of her euros on a few more litres. The needle barely budged.
She crossed into Britanny and kept driving. The main roads followed the coast, but she found one that cut straight through the middle of the peninsula, a winding valley overshadowed by a spine of hills. Even in France, she knew it was considered a wild region — a place with its own language, its own customs, its own ghosts and magic. The needle touched red.
She almost made it. On a road so minor she’d almost missed it, five kilometres short of where Doug had indicated on the map, the engine cut out. She coasted down the hill and nosed the Land Rover on to the grassy verge. After so many hours being carried along by its sound, the silence was eerie. She sat in the car for a few minutes, drawing up her courage. Then she got out and walked into the trees.
The forest was an otherworldly place. Whereas the Mirabeau forest had been dead and brown, this one burst with life. Green ivy hung from the trees and crept over their bark; moss carpeted the floor in a spongy mass that soaked up her footsteps. At first Ellie found it comforting, a glimpse of spring in the depths of winter, but the further she went the more oppressive it seemed. The colour became alien, not vibrant but poisonous, stifling everything.
Black clouds began massing in the sky. The forest darkened. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Soon the rain began to beat down, and the leafless trees were no protection. It drizzled down her neck and soaked her clothes. The pack on her back felt twice as heavy. She began to wonder if she’d ever get out, or if she’d die of exposure in this lonely forest. Sheets of rain washed over her face, blinding her.
The sky seemed lighter up ahead. She plunged on, slipping on the moss and the slick rock underfoot. She came out of the trees on the edge of a ridge and stared. Below her, a narrow valley plunged away like a scar in the forest. Few trees grew there. The entire valley was choked with boulders, a jumble of vast lumps of granite, each taller than she was, piled up like giant golf balls. A stream flowed around the rocks, sometimes dammed into pools, sometimes spilling over them and falling in cascades, sometimes disappearing into hidden channels below. Moss covered everything.
Something gave inside her. She sat down on the embankment, oblivious to the rainwater that seeped into the seat of her jeans, and stared down into the rocky chaos. She was too tired to cry. She’d been running for days — months, it seemed — and she was spent. Whatever might be down there, or near there, or perhaps not even there — she’d never find it.
She rubbed a trickle of water from her eyes and stared. In the wash of green and grey that filled the valley a bright flash of colour had appeared out of nowhere. A man in a red anorak stood in the middle of the boulder field, dwarfed by the stones, looking as if he’d always been there.
He waved, then scrambled down from the boulder and began climbing the slope. He could have been anyone — a hunter, a forester, a lost hiker — but Ellie didn’t think so. She didn’t have the strength to run any more. She sat there and waited.
Halfway up the slope, he paused and looked up.
‘Ellie Stanton?’
A dumb nod.
‘We’ve been waiting for you.’
A dozen men stand around a huge fire. They’re staring at an upright finger of stone on the far side of the knoll. The King’s tied to it, dressed only in a white linen tunic: he’s on the far side of the fire from me, so that the flames seem to lick around him. Between him and the fire stands a flat rock, like an altar — there’s something on it, but the flames hide it from me. Two men stand in front of it — one immensely tall and broad, suited in black armour; the other slighter and stooped, his head buried in the hood of his cloak. I can’t see their faces, but Malegant I’d recognise anywhere. The other, I think, must be the goldsmith with the sky-blue eyes and the silver hand, Lazar de Mortain.
Malegant picks up a black lance from the rock-altar and advances. The King’s eyes go wide with uncomprehending terror. Even now, he can’t really believe anyone would actually kill a king. Malegant levels the spear.