The next morning was filled with domestic concerns. Jamie rose early, Magorian sometime later, and when they were both at the kitchen table, Jamie pushed a paper notebook toward me. “I’ve made a list of a few things we might need here, if we’re staying more than a week—and Ben seems to think we might be.”
I gave Magorian a sharp look, but he calmly ate the last of my Weetabix. “I’ll pay for it,” he added, between mouthfuls.
I shook my head. “I’m the only one earning a salary out of all of us. Unless you’re going to trawl for wizardry clients while you’re here and break the terms of your tourist visa?” I raised my brow at him.
He grimaced.
“I’ll earn my keep,” Jamie said firmly. “Literally, I suspect. You’re not a housekeeper, Michael. I’ll keep things running on the homefront while you and Ben and Ketill take care of business.”
“First of all, just because you’re the one adult woman in the house—” I began.
“Actually, Diedre just had her nineteenth birthday,” Jamie said calmy. “So I’m not the only one. But what you and Magorian do isn’t something I or anyone else can do. But I do know how to sweep a floor, at least. So I will do that.” She said it firmly.
“You’re military trained…” I pointed out helplessly.
“When there’s a call for my military training, I’ll be ready,” she assured me. She tapped at the list. “This isn’t for you to purchase. It’s for you to add what you think we need, as you know what is already here.”
“Don’t argue with her,” Magorian said softly.
I gave up, took the notebook, and added Weetabix to the list.
Jamie and I moved around the house as quietly as possible, while I pointed out where everything was and added to the list.
Jamie had a few ideas of her own. “Does the room Ketill is using have black out curtains?” she asked.
“I doubt it. I rented a furnished house, but ‘furnished’ is a minimal standard. It was enough for me, but…” I realized I was looking at her directly, and not being distracted by her beauty. “Magorian is yet to explain anything to me. Does he really think it might be more than a week?”
“I think Ben is hoping you’ll help him figure that out.” Jamie’s smile was small. “He really was quite lost without you to work things out with him. Aurelius’ raid on the house scared him…although he said nothing.” Her smile grew bigger. “He just made immediate plans to get the shield and us out of the house and the smaller children somewhere safe, then acted on it. I didn’t know we were heading for Britain until the minibus pulled up in the hospital parking spot and Ben waved me over.”
“Aurelius tried for the shield that recently?”
“We left Toledo by ten the morning after the raid.”
Magorian hadn’t hesitated. Not for a second. I admired that. “Where is the shield now?” I asked. “He didn’t leave it out in the bus, did he?” I didn’t think Aurelius’ people were hiding behind the privet hedges, but in this economic climate, petty theft was rampant.
“It came in with your monitors last night,” Jamie said. “And now it’s under the bed, with some very powerful warding spells over it. We’ll know if anyone but me or Ben tries to get near it.”
“I’ll make sure not to wander into the danger zone,” I said.
Jamie tilted her head. “It will let you through without harm, Michael, and anyone in the house, but Ben wants to know if anyone touches it. Personally, I wouldn’t want to try touching it if the warding spells didn’t exclude me.” She shivered.
“I’d prefer it was locked in a basement strongroom at the Bank of England,” I muttered.
“Strong rooms and their guards can be overcome,” Jamie said, her tone flat. “Ben’s spells can’t be negotiated with or cancelled. They can’t be extorted, either.”
“Is that what happened when Aurelius tried to raid the house? Someone touched the warding spells?”
She shook her head. “The outer proximity alarms I rigged around the borders of the property went off, around two a.m. Ketill and Euclides were already up, of course. They picked up cudgels and ran. Ben and I were ninety seconds behind them. There were twelve creeping toward the house, all Old Ones, and Ben recognized some of the faces. We beat them off and Ben threw up a temporary shield that shunted everything and everyone aside, birds, beasts and people.”
“Aurelius wasn’t among the raiding party,” I guessed, because Jamie would have said so, if he had been. Aurelius and she had a history, and it wasn’t a good one. “He never did like doing his own dirty work.”
“No, he wasn’t there.” And she shuddered. Then she said crisply, “They weren’t expecting human style security. It foiled them. This time.” She looked around. “But I think I’d still like to add some security to the house and the property…if you’ve no objections?”
“As it helped hold off one attack already? Why would I object?”
“It won’t hold off another,” Jamie said grimly. “But it will give us early warning, at least. Aurelius will have learned from the botched job. He’s not a stupid man.”
I had to be content with that, although I still preferred the idea of a strong room buried somewhere deep and inaccessible, preferably with a dozen lethal security measures covering the door.
We continued our tour through the house, which took longer than I thought. “I hadn’t realized how minimalist it was in here,” I confessed, as Jamie kept adding to the list.
She glanced at me. “You haven’t spotted what I’m doing, then?”
I shook my head. “Making a shopping list?”
“I’m planning for a siege,” she said flatly. “Because it’s entirely possible we might end up in one.”
And she sailed on into the cramped back door area, leaving me flat-footed and voiceless.
•
Jamie’s breathing over the nocturnals in the house was evidently good enough to keep them sleeping long into the morning. “I learned a lot from Sabine,” Jamie confessed when she came downstairs shortly before eleven, looking satisfied. “Ketill didn’t move when I hung the blanket up over his window.”
“Is Magorian up there?” I asked, for I had not seen him all morning. For a big man, he could disappear far too easily, even in a cramped little Welsh house.
“He’s outside,” Jamie said. “I spotted him through Ketill’s window.” Her nose wrinkled. “He has the green tub.”
“It’s gone ten and I can’t smell his burnt coffee in the air. That means he’s probably low on caffeine. I’ll take a cup out to him,” I told her.
Even as a tea-drinking Welshman, I could make better coffee than Magorian, who had grown up drinking it. While Jamie set up a laptop on the kitchen table and started her shopping, I poured Magorian a mug, made tea for myself, put on my coat and headed outside.
The day was crisp and cool. My breath didn’t fog the air, although those colder days weren’t far off. The leaves had turned, but had not yet all dropped. It was still and quiet, so that I could hear people three houses down talking about getting their bulbs in for the winter, or if they should buy garlic and onions and other cold crops, instead. The discussion turned into an argument, with the woman pleading for a spot of prettiness in the yard and the man stoutly insisting they grow food this year, and nothing else.
I imagine conversations like that were taking place all over the Isles and Western Europe, this autumn. The pity of it was that it likely didn’t matter what they planted, it wouldn’t thrive. I looked up the sky. It wasn’t cloud covered, like it would be on a rainy day. Instead, the sky that should be blue was, instead, a dull yellow-brown colour, thick enough to hide the sun, so that we cast no shadows. The light that did make it through made everything look odd. My neighbour’s peonies would look brown, if she got to plant them this year. Skin tones took on a yellow tinge. Colours were not vibrant and clear.
This was the way the sky had looked when I arrived in July, and every day since had been the same.
Scientists were saying that the ash from the eruptions in Scotland, and even the smoke and ash that Snowdon was blowing, had made it into the stratosphere and would likely linger in the sky for over two years. This was contributing to the health crisis Britain faced.
I turned away from contemplating the sky. It was what it was. Things could be so much worse….
Magorian had the lid of the green container off and standing on one edge against the container itself. He was turning in a slow circle, contemplating the little back yard.
I caught a whiff of the contents in the container and stepped around it so I would be upwind. “Looking for a place to bury it?” I asked and held out his coffee.
He took the mug absently. “Looking for somewhere to hang it.”
“Hang it? You’ll have everyone on the street banging on our door, protesting over the smell, just to start. The carcass will draw rats for certain. Maybe even weasels and foxes.” I was thinking of the open area beyond the back gate.
“It’s only for a day or two. I think.”
“Why hang it at all?” I asked.
Magorian sipped his coffee, then looked into the cup with a surprised expression. He took another sip. “When we hit the lynx, when I was pulling it off the road, I saw Morris, overhead. Vultures are drawn by a rotting carcass.” He looked around the yard once more, his gaze moving back to the stunted apple tree by the back gate.
“You’ll have to fill in a few steps in your logic,” I said gruffly. “I can’t read your mind.”
Magorian grinned, his face lighting up. “Save time if you could. Morris can distinguish interesting smells from a very long way off. And a rotting lynx in England—”
“For god’s sake, don’t call it England,” I said quickly. “Not unless you like insults and rudeness in return. We’re in Wales. If you have to use a different name, use Britain, which most Welsh can live with.”
Magorian paused. “Right,” he said. “Wales. A rotting lynx in Wales has to be unique. Lynx aren’t native, or common here. Or are they?”
“They’re extinct, here,” I said, thinking of the long-term discussions about reintroducing Eurasian lynx back into Britain. That debate had been shelved after the eruptions, along with a great many other positive, future-oriented projects. “You really think Morris can find you here?”
“They’re marathon flyers,” Magorian said. “Maybe.”
“You couldn’t just stuff him into the van with you?”
“It was cramped as it was, and there was no way to keep him quiet at the border stops—you know he likes to hiss at strangers.”
Morris was very protective of Magorian and the household.
“You’d best use the apple tree,” I said at last. “Someone must have taken to it with a blunt saw, once. There are stumps of branches you can use as hooks.” I was also thinking that the tree was at the very back of the yard. Maybe it would spare the neighbours a little.
Magorian nodded and put his coffee mug down on the seat of the old plastic garden chair he had been using last night to wait for me. He picked up one handle on the side of the container.
I sighed and put my tea beside his coffee and picked up the other handle, breathing shallowly and avoiding looking at the contents.
We carried the container to the back fence. Magorian shrugged off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and donned the blue rubber gloves that had lived beneath the kitchen sink until now. He lifted the carcass out very carefully and draped it over two dead branch stumps that were close enough together to make a shelf of sorts.
I waved my hand in front of my nose and stepped away. “We can only leave it a day or two. I’ll be fined or arrested or something.”
“In a few hours, the smell will be next to nothing,” Magorian said absently, carefully making sure the carcass wouldn’t slide off or fall.
“Then Morris won’t catch the scent, either?”
“If he did follow us, he will. I have no doubt of that.”
I had huge doubts about it, but kept my mouth shut. “Two days, and we bury it,” I said firmly, instead.
“Okay,” Magorian said easily, stripping off the gloves with a moue of distaste. As he unrolled his shirt sleeves, he nodded at the back gate. “Is that why you rented this house? For the shortcut to the clinic?”
“Among other things.”
“Things like what?” The direct question, put bluntly, was Magorian’s way of trying to get a conversation going. As a classic introvert, he was bad at it. But when he was speaking about the matters of his profession—history, magic, the Old Races who had become entwined with his life and career, he was one of the most eloquent speakers I’d ever heard…unless he was aware a stranger was listening to him. Then he stuttered and ground to a halt.
The shirt he was wearing was one I’d not seen before, and I had seen all of his limited wardrobe in the past. The shirt fit well. It wasn’t a business shirt, but a more casual button-up shirt made of a soft-looking cotton. It was an improvement over tee-shirts. I wondered if Jamie had picked it out for him, then said, a touch too quickly, “Did you find this house using Google Maps?”
Magorian nodded. “You taught me how to use it. Useful thing.”
“And around the house…did you study that?”
Magorian tilted his head. His sandy blond hair lifted as a small cold wind touched the thick locks. “It was a long three days in the car, and I didn’t drive all the way. I navigated for whoever was driving.”
When I’d first met him, he hadn’t known he could get email on his phone. Now he was using cloud apps on a laptop to drive across western Europe.
“So you saw what lay around the house?” I asked.
“There was nothing around the house.” He pointed toward the south. “A hospital in a park that way, with a road between.”
“Saint David’s Hospital, which isn’t a hospital anymore. That’s where my clinic is, on those grounds. Come here a minute.” I moved to the gate, unlatched it and stepped through quickly, to move past the lynx.
Magorian followed me.
I moved out onto the path that had been worn smooth in the wild grasses. The path took one to Ffordd Pendre. My yard was not the only one with a convenient gate in the back.
But I didn’t head for the road. I instead turned to look to the west. Magorian stopped beside me.
“This was all open farmers’ fields, when I got here,” I said, “except for two oaks standing together on the ridge. The locals said the oaks hadn’t been there, a few months before.”
“Holy cow bells…” Magorian breathed, looking upon what was open countryside on Google Maps.
The first trees started fifty meters from the gate. They weren’t mighty oaks or hardwoods, but smaller trees like dogwoods, juniper, even lilacs. All of them were fully grown, some standing only ten meters high. I could trace a smooth progression from the tops of these first trees, as the canopy rose to the height of fully matured large trees—with some California redwoods thrusting up even higher.
The forest, like the one on what had once been the La Mancha Plain, did not bother conforming with local growing conditions, or pay attention to what trees thrived in the local climate. It grew what it wanted and what it grew was thriving, unlike the ailing domestic gardens and market gardens in the rest of Britain.
Magorian blew out a long breath. “It looks the same as home…but it doesn’t.”
“Different directors,” I suggested. “Different needs, so different trees.”
He shook his head. “No, it looks…forbidding. The trees at home, they crowd up against our fences, none of this green strip and little trees on the edges, like human enclaves might contaminate the forest if it gets too close. There’s no careful separation at home.”
As I said, Magorian is eloquent when he’s discussing his craft or matters that impinge upon it. And I wasn’t a stranger. He’d nailed the difference in sixty seconds. It had taken me a week to figure out what bothered me about this forest.
Magorian turned to me. “We could hide the shield in there.”
I felt my jaw go slack. “No, that’s not…I don’t think that would be possible.”
Magorian’s gaze met mine. “Jamie told me you didn’t like the idea of the shield being in the house.” He pointed to the trees. “Tucked away in there, it would be just as safe. Safer. You know the qualities of the people who would guard it. Aurelius would never attack an Old Race forest. He knows better.”
I shook my head. “You don’t understand. I’ve never stepped foot in the forest. I don’t know anyone who lives in there.”
“No one at all?”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen Old Ones moving through the trees from time to time, but they’ve never engaged. The Old Races here are not like they are in Spain. I don’t know why. Both countries treat Old Ones more poorly than they do their pets, but in Spain it doesn’t seem to matter to the Old Races. They mix and mingle anyway. Here, the Old Races stay apart. You don’t see them in the streets, not in human buildings, either.”
Magorian considered me. “You don’t know why it’s different in Spain?” he asked, sounding amused.
“I should know?”
“It’s because of you, Michael. You were the bridge between the Old Races and humans in Spain. You made them work together and treat each other nicely. The effect has lingered and spread, because it works so well.”
For a moment I just stared at him, utterly speechless. Then I found my tongue. “Well, perhaps. Maybe,” I hedged. “But the point is, I haven’t been here, and the Old Races remain segregated. I would no more step into that forest uninvited than I would step into Buckingham Palace without an engraved invitation. And neither should you.”
“Because I’m human?”
“Yes.”
Magorian considered it for a moment, then nodded. “Jamie can go. She’s the perfect ambassador. She will talk them into it, and they’ll love her for it.”
I jumped a little at the casual metaphor. I was tempted to turn and step back through the gate and put the conversation behind me. But the forest was non-human territory, a place where I had lived for years now. Even this Welsh version felt a little like home, so it seemed easy enough to speak of intimate subjects. I stripped all curiosity out of my tone, for that would shut Magorian down, and said, “When you say her name, it glows in your voice the way she does.”
Magorian kept his gaze on the trees. “Probably. Yeah.”
“That bad, hmm?”
He didn’t move. “I can’t marry her, because humans don’t recognize her as a legal person I can marry. And the Old Races don’t marry. They just know who is with who and how deep it goes. If there is another way to tell the world how I feel, I haven’t found it yet.”
Sound beat and throbbed in my ears, in waves of pressure that matched my heart as it rammed against my chest. I’d had no idea about the degree to which this had progressed…
I made myself speak, fighting for the same casual tone we’d been using all along, which was, pathetically, about the only way either of us could talk about intimate things. “Does it matter what the world thinks, as long as Jamie knows?”
“Of course, it matters,” Magorian said sharply. “That’s the whole point.”
I realized I was looking at him, instead of the trees. “You might have to settle for the Old Races intuitively understanding and humans remaining ignorant. You’re with an Old One now. You can’t straddle two worlds forever.”
“Why not?” Magorian shot back. “You do.”
“Not anymore,” I said bitterly and headed back into the yard to collect my cup and go inside.
My tea was stone cold.