Wharton sat up wearily, starting to pay attention. “Go on.”
“They said . . . each of them said . . . a sort of prophecy. As if they could see the future. And then just before you lot turned up, I saw them again on the bomb site. This time I asked them who they were.”
“What does it . . .”
“They said We are Janus.”
Wharton’s eyes widened. Then his gaze flickered to the door, as if somehow he had sensed the jolt of shock that had made Sarah clamp spread fingers over her mouth.
“Janus? But Venn killed Janus . . .”
“Venn killed a replicant of him. But in that weird future Sarah never talks about, Janus controls the mirror. So who knows what he can do with it? Or how many copies of himself he can make? Anyway, that’s what the kid said. And then he . . . it . . . laughed.”
Wharton shook his head. He opened the bedside drawer and took out a jumbo bar of fruit and nut chocolate, and snapped some off. Cramming it into his mouth, he muttered, “Great. As if we didn’t have enough problems.”
At the rustle of the silver paper Horatio dropped like a stone from the chandelier in a shower of dust; he sat on Wharton’s stomach, huge eyes wide.
“Get that thing off me.”
Jake took the chocolate, pulled out a nut, and gave it to the marmoset.
“Hey! My secret stash!”
“It makes you fat, George.” Jake snapped off a generous chunk for himself. “It’s for your own good.”
They ate in silence. Sarah decided to try and get closer. She reached out a hand.
Horatio’s eyes went straight to her.
She froze.
The monkey chattered and shrieked.
“That’s all, greedy.” Wharton threw it a raisin. “Okay, so these Janus-children told you things. What things?”
Jake pulled the bedside chair over and sat in it, feet on the patterned quilt. “The first one said: The Black Fox will release you.”
“And what sort of nonsense—”
“Not nonsense.” He took the greasy key fob out of his pocket and threw it on the pillow. “That was Allenby’s. The key unlocks the handcuffs. The prophecy came true.”
Wharton, after a moment, picked up the keys. He ran a thick thumb over the worn emblem. “Coincidence.”
“No.” Jake stared straight through Sarah, unseeing. “And if the first one came true, the others might as well.”
Wharton drew his knees up under the bedclothes. “And they were?”
“The second kid said: Find the Man with the Eyes of a Crow. And the third: The Broken Emperor lies in the Box of Red Brocade.”
Wharton sucked a nut. “Sounds like . . . Hang on. The Broken Emperor. Do you think that might be something to do with the Zeus coin? The broken half of it Sarah gave Summer? That can . . . you know . . .”
Jake stared. “You know about that?”
“Venn told me.”
Sarah put her hand carefully down on the worn carpet and inched forward. A board creaked under her weight.
“Turns out leaving it with the Shee was such a bloody stupid thing to do!” Wharton stared gloomily. “If Summer finds out the mended coin has the power to destroy the mirror, then BOOM. End of all of us.”
Sarah’s heart gave a great jolt in her chest She wanted to cry out with the shock.
“Keep quiet. It’s not safe to talk about.” Jake got up and paced to the window, staring out at the fleeting moon over the Wood. He had intended to tell Wharton all of it—the children’s stupid rhyme that kept going around and around in his head.
But something made him keep that treacherous offer locked tight inside him. He folded his arms, annoyed, staring at his own reflection, the rain running down his glassy face. “So what does it all mean?”
“Search me. Maybe we should tell Venn . . .”
“Not yet.” Jake turned. “Horry. Come back here.”
The marmoset had skittered to the door. It was scrabbling at something nearby, on the floor, and then with a small spiteful grin it screeched, loud in the still house.
Jake dived over and snatched it up. “Shut up! You’ll wake the place.”
Then he noticed the door was unlocked.
“Hell!” Very quietly, he opened it and peered out. The corridor was a long silhouette of silent shadow.
He stepped back. “I was sure I locked that.”
Wharton lay down and rolled over. “Place is the draftiest hole in the world,” he muttered. “Go to bed now. Talk tomorrow.”
For a moment Jake was still. Then he went out, and padded silently down the corridor. Above him the recesses of the ceiling showed faint watery reflections of the rain, pattering loudly down the drainpipes outside.
At Sarah’s room he paused. It was unlikely, but . . . Very carefully he tried the handle.
It wasn’t locked.
He opened it and peered in.
She was lying in a curled huddle, her blond hair on the pillow. Moonlight caught her closed eyes, her easy breathing.
For a while he stood still there, holding Horatio, watching her. He was tempted to say something, to stand there and say, Was it you? Were you listening? But then tiredness came over him, and a sort of sadness, as if he didn’t even want to know, and he backed out and closed the door with the softest of clicks.
Sarah did not open her eyes.
She lay in her curl of bedclothes and listened to the thud of her heart, the drag of her breath. Her hands and feet were numb with cold, and so was her mind. All she could think of was one phrase.
The coin has the power to destroy the mirror.
What a fool Janus must think her.
What a fool she was!
Her hand clenched tight under the sheets.
At least now she knew exactly what she had to do.
And who her only ally would be.
12
Her fury brought the lightning
her fury brought the rain.
Her fury took the buds of spring
and frosted them again.
She drowned the blackbird on the nest
the rabbit in the burrow.
Drowned all happiness and hope.
Turned all joy to sorrow.
Ballad of Lord Winter and Lady Summer
GIDEON LAY ON the grass and stared at the cloudless blue sky.
Outside, in the world, in Wintercombe, the rain had been falling for days, but it never rained here. The endless blue bored him; he longed for the sudden brilliant spark of an airplane to cross it. He loved to see those bright metal birds, with their arrow-straight trails of . . . what? Steam? Smoke? Sarah had told him people traveled on them, high above the world, and at first he had laughed harshly at that, because he was only too used to mischief, the torment of lies.
Jake said it was true.
He wished he could fly so high, so far.
Then he gave a gasp. Summer was smiling down at him.
“Did I scare you?”
He sat up quickly. “Of course not.” Never admit weakness, not to Them.
“You look tired.”
“I’m not.”
She touched his hair lightly. “It must be wonderful to be tired. To sleep. They say in human sleep there are pictures and visions. Is that true?”
“No.” She would never find out about his dreams. Dreams were the only place he could go where he was safe from her. Where They couldn’t touch him.
“Do you dream about your childhood? When you were small, in that cottage at the edge of the wood?”
He shook his head.
“I’m so pleased. It was so miserably dark and dingy. And yet you seem all not and no today, my sweet.” Her fingers carefully rearranged his hair. “All so quick and touchy. Are you hiding secrets from me, Gideon?”
He pulled his head away and stood up. “Of course not.”
“Again!” Summer’s small red lips sweetened to a smile. She sat back. “Answer me a question then, without no, or not, or never . . . can you do that?”
He recognized the trap. Hugging himself, he shrugged. “Summer . . .”
She held up a hand. “Did you bring something for Venn. Through my kingdom?”
“N— Would I do that?”
Fear. It made him clench his fingers tight. She saw that, her beautiful eyes missing nothing.
“Because if I thought you had, Gideon . . . If for a moment I thought you could do that, you see I would be so, so angry.” She tapped him lightly with a long white finger. “So . . . implacable.”
“Summer, of course I didn’t. What could I . . . ?”
“Something from some other time. Something in a small”—she tapped him again for each word—“black, velvet bag.”
He glanced down in horror. His right hand was shriveling. As he stared he felt it contract, the fingers merge, flesh meshing, bones knitting. Nails hooked to claws. The pain of shrinkage shot through him.
“No.”
Her finger on his lips. “Not that word, Gideon.” She kissed him, her lips soft.
His coat, green as lichen, rippled. The sleeve became feathers, dark and glossy. He felt his skin crack and sprout, his bones hollow out, become frail as twigs.
“I didn’t bring anything for Venn. I swear! Not Venn. Venn wouldn’t even . . .”
“Then who?” Her eyes were close against his, unblinking as an owl’s. “Who?”
“Jake. It was just . . . Jake . . . had journeyed.”
“What did you bring?”
He hated himself. He hated her. He wanted to die but there was no death. There would never be any death.
“The bag. There was some sort of plastic film inside.”
“And?”
“And . . . the bracelet.”
“Indeed.” Summer smiled, and her smile was cool and the terror grew strong in him. “So you helped them without telling me. Without asking my permission. Do you know what I will do, Gideon, for that?”
He knew. He had been a bird before, wind-blown, buffeted, pecked by the hosts of the Shee from one end of the Wood to another. He had been a fish, caught suffocating in a net; he had drowned endlessly in his own terror till he had torn himself free, and then the stabbing beaks of herons had caught him and thrown him and tossed him back. He had been a stone in the path, without a voice, without eyes, feeling only the pain of the Shee horses that rode over him. He had been trapped in the trunk of a tree, screaming in silent agony for centuries of no time.
He knew exactly what she could do to him.
He made himself stand tall. “Let me make up for it then. Tell me what you want, I’ll get it.”
His arm was a wing now. She stroked the feathers. “Anything?”
“Anything. Just . . .”
“I want the silver bracelet, Gideon.”
Gideon stared. “Venn wears it all the time.”
“Not when he comes here.”
Aghast, he said, “No. Then he leaves it locked in an iron safe. But . . .”
She leaned against him. “I want the bracelet. Iron holds no pain for you.”
Feathers broke out down his back, splitting the skin, tearing sinew, reworking his body. “Yes,” he gasped. “Yes, I’ll get it, please, just don’t . . .”
She stepped back, turned, her voice bored now, cold as stone, as the Shee descended in screeching flocks through the branches. “Until you do Gideon, no more sleep. No more dreams. Gideon shall sleep no more.” She clapped her hands.
“Come now, my people! Shall we hunt the wren? Shall we play?”