AUTUMN LAY ON THE FLOOR, panting. She looked to where the . . . arrow, yes it was an arrow, or at least it was a transparent shaft with blue liquid inside . . . was embedded in the wall. It glowed in her extra senses, with the malice of a vicious snake. Another, exactly the same, but without its contents, was in Lizzie’s shoulder, where she was lying on the ground, completely still. From where Autumn was, she couldn’t even see if she was breathing. Her face now had a tinge of blue to it. Poison arrows. Shit.
She looked to the windows and found no holes, certainly none in the direction the arrows had come from. So these bloody things had come straight through the wall. She wasn’t safe wherever she was. But presumably they still needed a line of sight to locate her, or—
Two more arrows shot close over her head and hit the wall beside the first.
Right. They were firing blind. And there were at least two archers. She reached out a toe toward the inner door and kicked at it, so hard it hit the frame and quickly rebounded back to close itself. A flurry of arrows went through the wall and the door and, she could hear, embedded themselves somewhere in her work room. Autumn stayed put. A few moments later, there were more distant thuds. They’d heard the sound, thought she’d gone in there, and moved round the building to fire blind into that space with no windows.
They obviously could decide which surfaces their arrows went through. Bloody hell.
She had a few moments now. What could she do with them?
She slid over to Lizzie and found that yes, she was breathing, just about. Regularly too. This had always been Autumn’s nightmare: having to get medical attention for a supernatural problem.
So, save the vicar, save the world. In that order, probably. But first Autumn had to save herself. What would Judith have done? Complain. Yes, thank you, brain, but after that? All of Autumn’s major resources were in her work room. She needed to put up some sort of protection around the shop. Something strong. That would need the calling down of power. That was going to require sacrifice.
Okay, who was the most beloved and powerful entity that Autumn could think of right now? Oh. Oh shit, this felt like blasphemy. Lizzie might well see it as that, though she distantly remembered Lizzie saying something about how she didn’t believe in blasphemy. Which made no sense. Well, anyway, Lizzie wasn’t conscious right now. So . . .
“Judith, I call on you as an intercessional presence,” Autumn whispered, putting every ounce of emotion she had into the words. And that was plenty. All she had to do was look at Lizzie and it was plenty. “I call on you as a god made of my need, my desperate need. Please Judith, mother to us all, see us and help us today and focus this sacrifice.” And as she said the words, she found gestures, born of her research and her emotion, that let her shape what she was willing into being out there into something that was in here. The shape of the sounds, the shape of her hands, the emotional content of the phrases, it was all working, she could feel it was, to make her will real in the world. But now she had to commit. Now she had to find something to give to her higher purpose, to this higher power she’d conjured up from the depths of her imagination, which were also the depths of reality.
What could she give that Judith would ever approve of? Not blood. Too messy. Too vital to continuing life, and Judith had always been about that. It couldn’t be anything dark either. Judith had always been a hedge witch, the local wise woman. She’d used the power of the dark once, in that she’d pursued selfish and aggressive ends, and she’d regretted it enormously. The goal here was fierce maternal protection. Of which Autumn didn’t have much personal experience. The sacrifice had to be something that had fondness to it.
She knew what it had to be. She slid quickly across the floor again, got to the counter, and pulled out a drawer from underneath, brought it to the ground as silently as she could, because the noises of impact had ceased from the other room and the assassins must be trying to work out where she was.
Why hadn’t they come straight in through the door?
Because they were being cautious. They must think she had some way of hurting them. Well, she wished she knew what they were worried about. But in the meantime . . . her hands found the emergency tea bags.
She ripped them open, threw the leaves onto the floor, and made them into a protective pattern that matched the intensity of her emotion and the flavour of the being she’d called up, this gorgeous Judith who had none of the awkward side to her that . . .
No.
Autumn made a tiny adjustment to her pattern, to her thoughts, and to the words she’d started whispering again. There couldn’t be any lies in this fond device. “Judith, you tough old bat, bring protection to us now. You never really told us, but I know you loved us, and we love you now. By the power of all you were to us, Judith—”
She heard the door open. She could feel who it was without having to chance looking. Killers. Intent and calm. They were taking a risk now. Or maybe wondering if they’d brought their prey down. They felt like something out of a story, in a way which she’d never felt about Finn. There was something . . . dreamlike about them. But also they were death that would be upon her in a second.
If she wasn’t a badass witch. “Get out of my house!” she bellowed. And she completed the pattern in shape and sound and thought as she did so.
The door slammed shut, and she felt two beings go flying. They landed too far away for her to sense. Maybe all the way out of this world. Maybe not.
Autumn leapt to her feet, made herself take a moment to thank Judith, then went straight to Lizzie and started to make her comfortable. There wasn’t much point in dialing 999. The paramedics wouldn’t get through the wall. And even if the local first responders got here, there wouldn’t be much they could do for Lizzie. No, that was going to be down to Autumn, and whatever she could find out about the blue stuff in that arrow.
* * *
Lizzie woke up.
She wasn’t in Autumn’s shop anymore. Oh God. She had opened her eyes and she was somewhere completely different. She had woken up from her life. Did that mean she was dead?
She sat up and looked around. She was in an oddly simple space, a black void that had . . . angular areas, places of light and shade, as if she was in a dense forest of shapes that went not up and down like trees, but in all directions.
She got to her feet and found that gravity wasn’t exactly where she expected it to be. She stumbled, nearly fell, managed to right herself at what felt like a new angle from where she’d been lying. Her eyes were adjusting now. The shapes around her were getting better defined. She reached out and touched one of them. The black surface stretched high off above her, lost in darkness, and also somehow below her as well. It fell like there were precipices all around.
Shit. What was this place?
She took some hesitant steps forward, wary of falling, but found, somehow, a surface all around her. What were her extra senses saying? That they couldn’t offer her any more help than her regular ones could. This place felt very dull to them, very empty. Oh. If hell was being kept from the presence of God . . . no, she mustn’t think like that. If this was hell, it was at least at body temperature, she wasn’t in pain, she could breathe, and the air smelled like . . . no, she had no point of reference for whatever that smell was. That frightened her in a way she’d never experienced before. So there were even new experiences to be had.
There was a vague light ahead. She came to some sort of gap and realised she was looking at something she recognised.
She was looking down on Lychford. It was night down there. No, it was something like night. None of the buildings had lights on. However, something dark and oppressive lay on the town, something unnatural. This was the other sort of darkness. The sort she’d always denied the existence of, as a vicar, and didn’t quite believe the hype of now. The darkness that gave the word “dark” a bad name. Because all sorts of things that were dark, including the night, including people, were natural and good.
“Good afternoon,” said David Cummings, stepping out of nowhere to stand beside her.
* * *
Zoya Boyko lived at 19 John Whittingham Road, which landlord Mitch said he’d got cheap, because of the address. Zoya shared his pain. She was sure she only got half of her mail. She was always missing official letters about Jas. She’d only learned about this problem from the neighbours after she’d moved in. John Whittingham Road had been named after a beloved town mayor. Except the county council had got his name wrong. It was actually “Wittingham” without the first “h.” But by the time John Wittingham himself had noticed and complained, the signs had gone up, the budget spent. So John Whittingham Road, spelled wrong, had become a thing. But the county council had then felt that this might be a bad look for them come election time, or that was how the neighbours had put it, so when the next phase of building had started, a few months later, the council had had another ceremony, in an entirely different location, and had unveiled John Wittingham Road, correctly spelled. John Wittingham Road was placed on the other side of town from John Whittingham Road, which the county council had probably thought would help avoid confusion, but that meant in practice that visitors who’d picked the wrong one still had quite a walk ahead of them and that post office and delivery people didn’t hedge their bets and try both addresses. The post office in the marketplace had special pigeonholes set aside for all those affected, including one for Zoya and one for those who lived at the other address. Zoya was always saying she should go and talk to whoever that was, but had never had the time to do so. To add insult to injury, even the postcodes were only one digit apart.
This was where Zoya had found herself in England, in a deluded town in a flat she couldn’t afford in a street named after nobody. Now she went quickly inside, changed out of her work uniform, and left again in the direction of the school. The streets were still remarkably deserted. She’d taken a look on her phone at the town’s Facebook group. Everyone was so scared of “them” who were “coming.” Just the same as always, then, for English people. This lot must think all their worst tabloid fears were coming true.
As she passed one house, she saw a curtain twitching violently. The old lady inside was gesturing at her to get indoors.
Zoya waved back. “Hello, mad granny!” She wanted to call something rather ruder, but this had been a nice impulse on the part of the lady, deluded as she was. However, Zoya was not going to be lured into shared cuckoo land. She was going to get her daughter, thank you very much.
What did her mother’s books say about situations like this? They were odd books, full of wisdom, a sort of philosophical system that Zoya hadn’t even begun to categorise. Ah yes. “You will see the line to your objective. You will read the map when others are lost in it. You will end up where you need to be.”
Well, that sort of applied. So many things in those books sort of applied. Lychford had, just sometimes, when she’d had a few moments to go and walk in the woods, felt like where she was supposed to be. Then the love she’d felt so distantly seemed to make sense. The trouble was, it had this awkward, conflicted, angular modern British town on top of it, getting in the way.
Zoya saw several other curtains twitching as she marched past. She ignored them as she always had.
* * *
Lizzie had managed to control her breathing and had turned to look at David Cummings. This “man” was a supernatural being of some kind, who she’d initially encountered when she’d first got involved with Autumn’s shop. He’d been posing then as the representative of a supermarket chain. He still wore the same business suit. Back then, Lizzie had denied him his victory and exiled him from her church by burning an enormous sum of money, something that, now the whole town knew about magic, Lizzie had been absurdly worried about her treasurer discovering.
“I’ve got nothing to say to you,” she said. She was sure he was here, wherever this was, to interrogate her. Or if this was hell, then he was here as the thing she least wanted to meet. If he did ask questions, she decided, she wasn’t going to answer with anything useful. That attitude might give her a shot at not quite revealing how terrified she was of him.
“I’m quite surprised to see you up and about,” he said. Which not only ignored what she’d said but made no sense. “Why are you awake?”
“Am I . . . not meant to be?” And now she’d engaged with him, damn it.
“I suppose you’re the first human we’ve tried this on.” He took a few steps nearer to the vision of Lychford and seemed to peer down into it. “Wow. You’re out cold down there instead. Not what we expected at all. Still, this is fine. We’ve got you here, at least.”
“Where is this?”
“Do you like it?” Cummings gestured around him. “All my own work. They say the sign of something is the thing itself. But that’s a human idea that’s crept into magic. A lot of the people on my side don’t credit stuff like that. They don’t like to think we’ve been polluted by you. But we have been. That will all be over soon, though, of course.”
“Not going to happen.” Could she feel her usual sense of the presence of God in the world, even here? She wasn’t sure. It was the most subtle of flavours at the best of times.
“I mention that because this place is definitely the sign of something. But it’s easy to see that it isn’t a thing itself. I made it to look like nothing much at all. Deliberately. Because fuck all these worlds of yours with all their fucking clutter.”
“Charming as ever. You still talk like you own the place.”
“In this case, I really do.”
“But I always had the feeling you were the monkey, not the organ grinder.”
“Oh, I’ve ground a few organs. Nothing? Not even a little smile? Come on, it wouldn’t kill you, would it?”
“You tell me.” She had the wonderful feeling she was actually getting under his skin, by the simple method of treating everything he said like a trap. Or was that sense of power on her part the actual trap? Was he hoping that she’d get overconfident and start talking? What did she even have to reveal?
He stepped closer to her and reached out to put his hand on her face. She did her best not to flinch. It felt exactly like a human hand. “Disruption is the most important thing. You take the rules, and you rip them up, and in ripping them up, you show everyone that the so-called rules are just polite conventions, just manners. After you rip them up you can create your own manners, your own rules. If you want to.”
“You really took onboard what you heard at all those human business seminars. What would stop anyone else ripping those new rules up? How is this not just a chain reaction of . . . wrongness?”
“Oh, you would think it’s wrong. It’s your reality we’re about to rip up.”
“Nope.”
“What do you mean ‘nope’?”
Lizzie had thought of something to say that might get him to reveal even more about what was going on. “I’m safe at home in bed. This isn’t real. It’s just a nightmare.”
He slapped her across the face.
The blow was so hard she fell to the ground. Before she could even cry out, he’d stepped forward to stand above her, shouting. “No, you are not fucking dreaming! This is more real than anything you have experienced in your pitiful life, you fucking deluded cow!”
Lizzie slowly hauled herself back on to her feet. She made herself say words through her bruised lips. “I’m not afraid of you. You can get behind me.”
“I’m only a representative, not the boss. But my boss isn’t Satan. Or he only is because you all said he was.”
“Really?” Lizzie tried hard to sound like she didn’t believe him.
“Millions of years ago, he made a mistake, that’s all. He tried to work with the underpinnings of all existence. And it’s not like there was a higher authority to judge him, as your tales say, because of course you’ve all heard about this and jumped to the wrong conclusions. This was just an accident. But what he did . . . created this extra world—this extra universe, to use your word for it—which you all came to inhabit.”
Lizzie didn’t, of course, believe the creation stories of the Bible to be the literal truth. She did, however, believe that God had been responsible for the creation of the universe, probably through all the fine detail that Professor Brian Cox liked to describe on TV. “They used to give Lucifer credit for giving humanity knowledge or fire. Now he’s bigged himself up to the point of creating the universe. When what you’re actually talking about is the Fall.”
“Reality is nothing like your stories.”
“Would your boss even know, seriously, if there was anyone above him? Or does he know there is, and is still scared of the managing director? Hence all the lies.”
Cummings seemed to decide to ignore this new tack of hers entirely. Which Lizzie found both indicative and pleasing. “We of all the original worlds, all of whom knew of each other, all of whom had been mucking along together without any big bangs or anything like that, forever, were quite surprised, following the boss’s accident, that now there was an extra world, with a weird new sort of time in it that we couldn’t really get our heads around. But okay, we thought, more stuff, great. However, by the time we started to colonise the place, there you all were, evolving, with your science, and all your other shitty ideas.”
“Still not nodding along. But do go on.”
“And by the time we’d got our heads around that, because of this weird time of yours, you were full-on established and had made pets of the fairies, and then you suddenly had nuclear weapons and plagues and stuff and woah, the boss woke up from where he lies underneath all things and started thinking it was time to tidy up this error, to reel it all back into the mainstream. Hence today.”
“What?”
“You’re all going to finally meet the big man from head office. And you’ll find he’s terribly persuasive.”
* * *
Autumn had decanted the blue liquid from the arrows into several beakers and was now trying to work out what she could do to test it. Damn it, she was only just starting to learn how to apply science to this stuff. This was a poison, right? So it had to be biologically active. So how did you test that? She had no internet to look it up on.
As she was stirring one of the beakers, trying to think, something also stirred in her coat pocket. Her extra senses were feeling something. She took out the thing wrapped in newspaper that Judith had sent to Sunil. She could see it pulsing. It wasn’t just emanating the potential for life now but also . . . need. She held it closer to the beaker. The need increased. If it could move, it would have moved toward the liquid that had been shot into Lizzie.
That was weird. Why did this thing want poison? Was it part of some evil creature? Why would Judith have given that to Sunil? Why would she have given anything magical to Sunil, rather than to them?
She had nothing else to work with. She didn’t want to cut this thing up, in case integrity was important for whatever it did. She took a dripper, sucked up a tiny sample of the liquid, and dripped it on the organ. The flesh visibly grew newer, more like something that should be inside a living body. This . . . poison . . . was feeding whatever this was. Like this was the blood it was used to being supplied with.
Why would an enemy try to inject them with another creature’s blood?
Okay, all in or not?
She decided. She poured the whole beaker over the organ, then grabbed another one. The meat started to pulse with life. She could actually see it growing now. She emptied the next beaker. She only had three left. Should she use them? What was it growing into?
To her amazement, as she watched, the organ started to grow vestigial arms . . . and then a head. Oh God, this was all getting a bit John Carpenter.
Which was when the shop bell rang, urgently, insistently, as if the person ringing it was being chased by something.
And she’d left Lizzie in the shop, on two chairs shoved together, covered by a blanket.
She put down the remaining beakers and ran to the door.
She immediately saw that outside stood Luke. She let him in.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Are you all right?” Then he looked to where Lizzie lay, and his expression grew even more concerned. “Shit. Is she okay?”
So she told him the details of what he’d heard already as garbled rumour. As she did so, she became aware of a sound coming from the back room. A sort of . . . mewling. “Oh dear,” she said.
“You’ve got . . . something in there, right? Again.” He’d put a hand over his crotch, Autumn realised, obviously remembering what had happened last time. He saw her looking and moved it away again. “If so, I’m once again here to put my groin between you and danger.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Autumn. She went to the inner door and hesitantly opened it. Luke, even more hesitantly, followed.
Something was lying on the table, something that looked vaguely like a human body. As Autumn and Luke watched, it reached out a thin, half-formed bundle of spindly fingers, grabbed the next beaker full of blue liquid, and sat up to drink it. Shape and form pulsed into its body as it did so. It was becoming, every moment, more and more of an adult male. It was looking at them curiously. Not, thankfully, with any aggression. It seemed to be thriving on the very stuff that Autumn had been thinking of as a poison.
Luke put a hand on Autumn’s shoulder. “Did you . . . make him?”
Before Autumn could answer, the creature raised a thin finger and pointed it, shaking, toward Luke. “Daddy,” it said.
Autumn couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at her boyfriend. “Did you?”
* * *
Lizzie had allowed Cummings to lead her to where they could see the vision of Lychford in more detail. She got the feeling she was looking at the equivalent of a tactical map, because in whichever direction she looked, the view obligingly opened up to her extra senses to show whatever was around the corner. It was like a magical Google Street View. It was also, now she could see close up, full of a jumbled mass of letters and numbers, in which she could pick out the odd familiar address. She could see people moving around in the map, too, but they were jumbled masses of information that changed every moment. Elements of who they were were suddenly deemed to be important by the map and leapt out: post sender . . . oh, that person was in the post office. That was how rough the underlying data was. This visual assault of alphabets and number systems must be how magical beings from other realms saw human civilisation, much as Cummings had described it. This display spoke of an attempt to make sense of that jumble. Individual addresses and house names would loom out of it when she turned her attention to them. So this was a very awkward first attempt at getting to grips with the territory Cummings’s side were preparing to attack. Cummings himself must see things more clearly than this, surely? But perhaps that was only when he was in her world. So was this weird world where she’d woken up the headquarters of Cummings’s boss? No. Surely he wouldn’t have brought her there? She tried moving from side to side a little and confirmed what she’d just noticed: there seemed to be a slight disconnect between the view of Lychford and the world where they stood, a gap between the two. “How do I get back home?” she asked, hoping that would sound despairing enough to seem like a real question. Actually, she was hoping he’d tell her more about this display.
“You can’t get there from here. No more than you could leap into a television and visit Coronation Street. I’ve only put this here for my own convenience, so I can keep track of what’s going on.”
Ah. That was it. So perhaps the boss, wherever he was, was looking at a bigger version. Lizzie could feel with her extra senses that the vision in front of her was, in some sense, the real Lychford, that what she was seeing were real people in real time. What else could she feel around here? It wasn’t all dull emptiness, was it? Not quite. There was something a way off behind her. It reminded her of . . . what she’d felt on the few occasions she’d been close to the border of the land of fairy. She let her extra senses have a bit of a wander back there. She felt . . . oh. She turned and looked but couldn’t see anything. “Who’s out there?” Again, she hoped she sounded scared. That hardly required method acting.
Cummings grinned horribly. “Who do you think it is?”
“Fairies. There are lots of fairies here. Only . . .”
“Yes?”
“They’re very quiet. Not entirely here.”
She looked back to him. He was still smiling. Like he was a quiz show host and she’d just got a correct answer. There was a stillness about what was behind her. That was what she’d felt. If there were fairies here, they didn’t glow with possibility and wonder and scariness like the genuine fairy country on the horizon had, like those fairy warriors that had once threatened her and those lost ravers. It was the same sensation but . . . asleep. Like her own body was supposed to be. While her mind was here. “Your games are pretty meaningless,” said Cummings. “Escape being conceptually impossible, so—”
Lizzie didn’t hear the end of his sentence. She was already running toward the fairies.
* * *
“Daddy . . . sorry, Dad, Father . . .” The being was slowly getting off the table.
Autumn couldn’t help but wonder if its nakedness was leading to Luke making unfortunate comparisons. “It’s not a contest,” she said to him, without quite meaning to.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Does he need help?”
“Nothing we could give him,” said Autumn. Luke was, she realised, seeing his first fairy. Because her extra senses were now yelling at her that that was what had formed out of the lump that Judith had left for Sunil.
“Greetings,” said Luke, going over to awkwardly address the mass of growing flesh. “We are friendly.”
“Thanks,” said the fairy. “Me too.”
“Excuse me for asking,” said Autumn, “but why do you think he’s your father?”
“Sorry.” The slowly forming being said. “Imp . . . imprinting? Is that a word? We just . . . sop up whatever influences are around us when we’re in this state, and I’m not used to being born in the . . . human world, is it? Charming as ever! Small but lovely! Ah, I have a name of my own, there it is. I’m—” He made a long, complicated whistling sound, like a flute doing a particularly complex piece of classical music.
“Terrific,” said Autumn. “Easy to shout in dangerous situations. I’m going to call you Trill.”
“Like the bird seed,” said Luke. “A novelty name. We are terrible parents.”
“So that’ll be my name here,” said Trill. “Thanks for sorting that, Mum.”
“Please could you stop that?”
“He said ‘parents,’” said Trill, indicating Luke. “That took my imprinting to maximum.”
His accent, Autumn realised, and his speech habits, sounded quite a lot like Luke. “Do you know what you are, Trill?”
“I’m a fairy. In the service of King so-and-so whose name I’m not even going to bother trying to adapt to your senses, because I think I might be offended by what you’d boil it down to.”
“Would that be the same king who’s the father of Finn?”
“Finn? Oh. Yes, that’s the name the prince took when he came here.”
Autumn wondered what long-ago encounter had caused Finn to take that name and sound Irish. But there was no time for that now. “What was that you grew from? Was that your heart?”
“Might well have been. Thanks for that.” He started to experimentally walk around the room. “The last thing I remember . . . I was in a storm. At the edge of the woods. There was lightning. Oh. I know. A tree fell on me. Right at the border with the human world. I’d just been to visit a lovely English girl.”
“Maybe some clothes?” suggested Luke.
“Oh, thank you.”
Luke’s expression said that he hadn’t expected to be the one to actually provide them, but now the thought had occurred he nodded. “I’ll see what I can find.” And he went to head upstairs.
“So,” said Autumn, “you don’t remember how you came to be just a heart?”
“No. But it must be thanks to someone who really knows how my people work. A great deal of magic would be required to save my essence before I popped my clogs.”
“It might have been my friend Judith who saved you.”
“If you say so. I gather she’s not here for me to thank?”
“No. Oh.” Autumn had had a sudden, hopeful thought. She went to a cupboard, opened it, and produced Finn’s head. “Could you perhaps help me with this?”
Trill yelled and leapt back a few feet. “What the hell? Why have you got the prince’s head in a . . . cupboard?”
“I didn’t hurt him! I just . . . put him in . . . I’ve been trying to heal him, okay?”
Trill was now fully formed and not at all gooey anymore and really very naked. He performatively took a deep breath and went to take the head from Autumn. He stopped, obviously realising something. “Oh, this was deliberately done to the prince. Someone wanted to stop him from being healed. I’d heard about it in old stories, but never seen it done. It would take great power to make him grow again. More than it took to keep me safe in the form of a heart.”
“But it is possible to heal him?”
“Maybe. Who did this?”
Autumn did her best to get him up to speed with what they knew about the situation, trying not to look directly at him, or his bits, as she did. He looked pained to hear about it. “Who . . . who would oppose the king?”
“If your world is anything like ours, there are a lot of people who’d oppose any sort of inherited monarchical system with a built-in power imbalance.”
“What?”
“Sorry,” said Autumn, “just saying.”
“Our system isn’t like that. You just think it is because you lot copied it off us and filled it up with loads of your own nonsense and basically got it wrong.”
“Oh, because usually I hear it’s you who copy us.”
“Over the millennia there’s been a lot of cultural exchange. Both ways. Our king is formed from, influenced by, all our . . . wishes, our desires. He’s an individual fairy, yes, one who’s found at birth, but one who, through his blood, creates and broadcasts a consensus of what our society is. He’s the collective spirit of the fairies.”
“So fairyland is sort of a democracy?”
Trill sighed. “You’re still trying to pin your words on us.”
“I note it’s a king rather than a queen.”
“I suppose most fairies wanted a father.”
“And now we’re in the comments section.”
“There may be some inequalities built into the system. Maybe you caught that from us, maybe the other way around. Mistakes were made. This is literally the first time I’ve thought about this.”
“Definitely the comments section.” But Autumn decided it was time she let him off the hook, before he decided, in the way fairies often seemed to, that he didn’t owe her any more favours. She took the head back from him, and, more gently than she perhaps would have in other circumstances, returned it to the cupboard. “This accident of yours. What year was . . . ?” She stopped herself, remembering that fairies didn’t have much time for human calendars. “The human world when you visited, what was it like? If Judith saved you, it could be any time in the last few decades.”
“It had changed a lot since the previous time I’d been here. There were lorries, bicycles, CD players . . .”
“Can you remember anything from pop culture? Did this girl you were seeing like any music?”
“Yeah. Something awful. What was it? Oh . . .” Trill tried whistling a few bars of what Autumn swiftly recognised as “Wonderwall” by Oasis.
“So Judith found you, changed you, saved you, and kept your heart all that time without reviving you. And then she left it to someone else rather than us. Any idea why?”
“To revive me, you’d need a supply of fairy blood. And she might not have known that’s what you needed. I mean, that’s sort of a secret for us? About the rest, no idea.”
“So that blue stuff was fairy blood? You’re literally blue-blooded?” Autumn was thinking quickly. “Is it poison to humans?”
“What? Of course not. We’ve taken on physical aspects of you as well. We couldn’t mate with you and have kids if we were poison, could we?”
“What are we talking about?” said Luke, coming back in, carrying clothes.
“Lizzie,” said Autumn. She looked back to Trill. “Our friend got shot with the same stuff you used to revive yourself. You’re sure it’s your everyday fairy blood, that it’s not poisoned for you as well?”
“I’m fine. That’s all I know.” He took the clothes from Luke and started putting them on.
“So why did it make Lizzie sick?”
“It shouldn’t. It should make her feel pretty damn excellent.”
“Can you do anything to help her?”
Trill nodded. “I can try. That’ll make us even. And then I should go home and fight for the king. Until that gets dull.”
* * *
Lizzie sprinted through the void, making herself not care about falling, wondering every moment if the structure of this world was such that David Cummings could just have it rear up and grab her. But no, this place didn’t feel random like that. It felt organised. Like one of her spreadsheets. Over there was Google Lychford, and this place itself was . . . a storage facility of some kind. Maybe it was just like all the other realities that bordered Lychford, that had existed, according to Cummings, forever, except this one was entered by minds rather than bodies. A sort of dreamland. A tamed and organised one. It certainly felt like she was getting somewhere, not like in one of those dreams where your feet are in treacle. But it was very Cummings to allow her hope in order to dash it away. So Lizzie was keeping all her faith and hope locked inside her.
She was running toward that low, dull feeling of fairies. As she ran, that feeling resolved itself into lots of individual sources. They were just . . . standing here. And then she could see them. Ahead of her were appearing rows of silent, immobile fairies, warriors and workers, men, women, and children, all of them staring into space, their arms by their sides, as if expecting something that wasn’t arriving. Lizzie slowed to walk through their ranks. There were hundreds of them here, maybe thousands. Row upon row of them went back into the darkness, beyond where she could see. Here was one with a lovely brooch pinning his cloak, here was another with jewellery in her hair that looked too fine to have been spun by human hands. They each still felt unearthly. All of them hit the uncanny valley full on, felt beyond human while toying with the idea of being human. Except that sounded artificial when her experience of fairies was that they somehow felt more authentic than humans did. She wanted to try to wake them, but with the depth of the sleep she could feel here, she knew that would be impossible. Also, frankly, she was scared to. Behind them, further back, she could feel a much bigger source of the same feeling, all concentrated in one place, one body. And with it there was also . . . yeah, there it was, enormous terror. The sort of fear that Autumn had described concerning her own first journey into the land of fairy.
That would be Finn’s father. That would be their king.
* * *
Autumn led the newly clothed Trill into the shop area, where Lizzie lay. The fairy was now dressed in Autumn’s own spare pyjamas, Wellington boots, and a jumper of Luke’s that he’d left in her bedroom. Autumn couldn’t sense the assailants nearby, so maybe she really had banished them from this world, but that didn’t mean there weren’t others. It occurred to her that she’d just discovered one way of getting past the barrier, but it didn’t feel like one where a human would survive the trip. “Hey,” she said to Trill as he bent to examine Lizzie, “do you know where other fairies are? I mean, can you sense them?”
“Like fae-dar,” suggested Luke.
“I can when we’re against the background of this world.” Trill seemed to consider, then stood up and turned like a weathervane, pointing. “There are two of them about nine hundred strides away. They feel . . . asleep. They’re heading toward where you used to keep all the . . . magnet . . . stuff, but now it’s all moved?”
It took Autumn a while and a few more questions to understand that he was talking about “north,” magnetic north having once, in the memory of Trill’s people, approximated to compass north, but now being something more like northwest. What was north of here? Nothing special that she could think of. The “asleep” bit seemed to square with how she’d felt about the assassins. Nine hundred strides, that was . . . actually quite a long way. “Okay, putting that aside for now, what can you do to help my friend?”
Trill frowned. “I can feel the fairy blood in her. It feels weird. Different. But I don’t know why it’s hurting her. It must have been . . . changed somehow, infected.”
“But you re-grew yourself using that blood,” said Autumn. “Wouldn’t it have poisoned you too?”
“I’m sure it would,” said Trill. “But I feel fine.”
“And if the idea is to poison you two with arrows,” said Luke, “why not just use actual poison rather than altered blood?”
“No idea. But you know, this stuff is a vital part of all fairies, our connection to the king.” He seemed puzzled by the lack of reaction on their part. “I mean, I can just take it back.”
They both turned to look at him at once.
* * *
David Cummings once again appeared beside Lizzie, making her jump. “You’re wondering why you’re not staring into space like they are,” he said, continuing the conversation as if no running away had been involved. “So am I. I think it must be because you’re human and they’re not.”
Lizzie took a couple of steps further along the rows of motionless fairies. “Is there that much difference between us?”
“We’re trying to keep part of the fairy minds conscious, the part that’s running the belief system we’ve infected them with, so their bodies can work for us. The reasoning part of them is here, the part that responds to personally adapted and endlessly morphing fantasies about freedom and eternal justice is out there in their physical brains. The boss can issue specific commands through the king, but our good fairies are perfectly capable of carrying out the mission without us micromanaging. Human minds are weaker, so you just got knocked out and came here entirely. Note to self: we’ll need to use a smaller dose on the rest of you.”
“A smaller dose of what?”
“Fairy blood. As produced by the king. We started out by infecting just a few fairies, whom we’d persuaded to listen to our point of view. They began the civil war in fairy. They infected more and more to their side, which was secretly our side by proxy, until we managed to land a blood arrow on the king, and then, bingo, he broadcasts the infection to the rest, war’s over, we won. A few of the stronger-willed fairies held out, like the prince, Finn. So we hunted those down and finished them off.”
Lizzie hoped her expression conveyed the disgust and anger she felt. “I know.”
“Oh, do you think we’re bullying the fairies?” Cummings pointed to the comatose examples around them. “These people, if they can be called that, are by their very nature traitors. They want somebody to love. As I said, they’ve always been soft on humans. As soon as that extra universe sprouted, fairies settled this world, but when you people arrived, they took one look at you and, well, I’d say ‘went native’ but they were the natives. It was Stockholm syndrome, I suppose. They came to identify with their oppressors. Which is a hilarious name for that condition, because let me tell you, the magical races of Stockholm don’t feel that way at all.”
“And neither do your people?”
“Correct.”
“Possibly because we exist because of a mistake made by your boss? Do you feel we’re your mess to clean up?”
She was pleased and scared to see she’d made him angry again. “It’s more about the persecution. Those of us who’d been used to roaming freely around this new world, those of us who didn’t want to become your lap dogs, we found ourselves cast in the role of devils and evil spirits and whatever your current dominant religious paradigm thought was icky. Even the fairies could never quite be submissive enough to earn your trust.”
“Most people these days don’t think any of you are real.”
“Oh, of course, you’ve forgotten, and that makes it all right. You’re not responsible for what your ancestors did. That’s what they all say. Most of the time for us it has indeed been a choice between evil and imaginary. There have always been exceptions, humans who thought we were charming, dangerously attractive, forbidden. They’ve often been useful idiots for us. And from time to time, before the boss woke up, I can’t deny it, our leaders have negotiated, hence the handful of agreements that led to some of the borders around Lychford. Most of those borders, however, were forced on our worlds, shutting us off in our . . . reservations. But we’ve been watching from them, learning about all your little cultural vulnerabilities. Now, across the realms, there’s a consensus, led by the boss now naptime is over. Your world is going to embrace reality. Become again part of our realities. By force.”
Lizzie was sure this was the same manifesto that Maitland Picton had talked about. Picton’s plan had been to pull the whole of the human world into the other realms at once. But Lizzie and Autumn had got the feeling that she was something of a rogue agent, completing her assigned mission, but in her own way. Still, despite being scared of Cummings, as well as deeply annoyed by him, Lizzie felt there was something she should say at this point. Because he had to hear this from at least one human. “Listen,” she said. “I agree about the historical wrongs done to your people.”
“Oh! Thank you so much! That makes it all so much better! There’s a ‘but’ coming up, though, isn’t there? As in ‘but we’d like to keep all the land we shut you out of, please.’”
“I agree we’ve done wrong. I want us to recognise that. I want us to do something about it. And I want you to remember that.”
“That’s the most passive-aggressive threat I’ve ever heard. From a position of no strength at all. What, you think the cavalry is coming?”
Lizzie made herself straighten up and look him in the eye. Accepting the truth about her own side gave her the strength to do that. “I know they are.”