Arrow (Knife) (31 page)

Her feet dragged to a stop, her body turning to face the cliffside. The wave-and-circle symbol shone out to her from the rock. She raised her hand towards it…

‘
Don’t do it, Rhosmari.
’

She froze, fingers poised in midair. The command was quietly spoken, but impossible to ignore – and it had not come from the Empress.

‘Why do you hesitate?’ demanded the Empress. ‘Open the door!’

Automatically Rhosmari’s hand lifted for the second time. But once again the urgent whisper told her, ‘
Don’t
.’

She heard it with her ears, not her mind. Somehow, impossible as it seemed, Timothy was here. He had raced across England and Wales to be with her, and now he was hiding somewhere among the rocks, determined to keep her from opening the secret door.

Jasmine seized Rhosmari’s shoulder. ‘Why do you not obey? Tell me at once!’

The words came out before she could stop them. ‘Because Timothy said not to. And he knows my name, too.’

‘Find him!’ snapped the Empress at her followers. ‘Bring him to me!’

Before she had even finished speaking, Martin changed into his bird form and flew straight up the cliffside. He loosed a spell that lit the whole slope, and all at once a scrabbling noise came from the rocks above them, flakes of shale tinkling down. She heard a small voice cry, ‘Timothy!’ and the answering shout, ‘Don’t worry about me! Go!’

And all at once there he was, pressed against the rock with his feet braced on a narrow ledge, chest heaving with panic. Trapped and helpless, in full view of the Empress and her whole army. Martin swooped towards his eyes, Timothy flung up a hand – and at the same moment his left leg trembled, spasmed and gave way.

He tumbled hard and fast down the cliffside, and landed with a thump on his back. His eyes stared wildly at the sky, mouth gaping open and closed as he fought to get his breath again. Rhosmari started towards him – but then Martin landed between them in faery form, hauled Timothy up against a nearby boulder, and laid a glittering knife against his neck. He hissed a few words in Timothy’s ear, and the young man froze.

‘There will be no more interference from this one,’ Martin announced to the Empress. ‘If he speaks again, I will kill him.’

‘Well done,’ she told him, and turned back to Rhosmari. ‘Now open the door.’

Tears streaked her face, yet she moved without hesitation. Both Timothy and the Empress had an equal power over her, and whichever one of them spoke to her was the one she must obey. She stretched out her hand for the third time…

‘
Don’t
,’ Timothy croaked. And with that, Martin’s knife flashed across his throat. Eyes wide and staring, a line of blood vivid against his skin, he toppled behind the boulder as Martin pushed him away.

Rhosmari’s heart turned inside out. The wind howled in her ears, echoing the anguish within her, and in that moment everything else – the moon and stars, the sand and waves, the Empress and all her army – ceased to exist.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Timothy.
No
.’

And then the world rushed in upon her, and she realised that she had dropped to her knees and was clawing at the sand like an animal. Two faeries seized her arms and wrestled her upright; she hung limp between them, her hair a wild tangle across her face, sobbing.

‘Your Majesty,’ said Martin, sheathing his knife and making the Empress a little bow. ‘I apologise for the interruption.’

Jasmine gave a delighted laugh. ‘Martin! I have underestimated you, indeed.’ Then she turned to Rhosmari and said, ‘Enough folly. Show us the entrance to Gruffydd’s Way.’

Even now, with her soul shattered and her mind in chaos, she had to obey. Rhosmari staggered forward, step by step, her eyes on the thin tracery of light that would open the secret door. Her fingers crept across the rock…

‘Rhosmari.’

Timothy was struggling back to his feet, leaning on the boulder for support. Sand caked his hair and the scratch across his throat was still bleeding, but his eyes were clear and alive. ‘I command you not to listen to the Empress, or obey her any more. From now on you must listen only to your own conscience, and do nothing but what you choose of your own free will. Forever.’

The words sang through Rhosmari’s mind and loosened every muscle in her body, plunging her for an instant into a blackness cold as death and then filling her with warmth and light. She whirled away from the Empress, and flung herself into Timothy’s arms.

‘Kill them!’ the Empress raged, and Byrne Blackwing drew his knife and started towards them – only to jerk backwards and crumple with an arrow through his shoulder.

‘Do that,’ said a woman’s crisp voice from the rocks above them, ‘and I’ll kill you.’

They all looked up – and there stood Peri, with her crossbow levelled at the Empress. Her face looked strained and her hands shook a little, but the bandages were gone. ‘This bolt is iron-tipped,’ she said. ‘And so are the arrows that Broch and Thorn are aiming at your soldiers right now. You’re surrounded, Jasmine. It’s over.’

‘Quick!’ Linden’s whisper came out of nowhere, startling Rhosmari and Timothy apart. ‘While she’s distracted.’ Sparkling heat washed over Rhosmari as the faery girl extended her own invisibility glamour to cover the two of them. ‘This way – up the rocks.’

Timothy’s hand closed around Rhosmari’s, warm and reassuring. ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here.’

The three of them had picked their way up the cliffside, and were nearly to the top, when Timothy’s foot slipped out from under him again. But this time Linden and Rhosmari were there to catch him and haul him up the rest of the way.

‘Stupid spasms,’ he said bitterly, collapsing onto the grass. ‘I knew they’d be the death of me one day. It’s just a good thing Martin was smart enough to step in before the Empress could kill me herself.’

‘Is that what happened?’ Linden exclaimed, landing beside them and making herself human size again. ‘I flew as fast as I could to get help, but…for a moment I thought we’d come too late.’

‘He made it pretty convincing,’ said Timothy. ‘At first I thought he’d really cut my throat, but the knife he used on me wasn’t even sharp. I don’t know why he saved my life, but he did.’ He shifted closer to Rhosmari and took her hand. ‘Are you all right?’

Rhosmari nodded, her heart too full to speak. Only a few minutes ago she had believed Timothy dead and all hope gone, and now here they were together, safe and free. It seemed like a dream too wonderful to be real – except for the Empress and her army still standing on the beach below.

By now there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Peri had not been bluffing. The Empress’s people were indeed surrounded, with Llinos and the other Children of Rhys in exile stationed along the promontory in front of them, while Rob and his fellow rebels blocked the lone exit from the beach behind. The Oakenfolk formed part of the larger group as well: Thorn and her archers, Queen Valerian, Campion, even Mallow – the only familiar face Rhosmari did not see among them was Wink. Without making a sound or giving the least hint of their presence, they had been closing in on the Empress and her followers – and now they had revealed themselves at last.

‘You cannot escape, Jasmine,’ said Queen Valerian, in a voice clear enough to carry across the beach. ‘Our numbers may not be as great as yours, but our people are strong and well rested, and, unlike you, we have humans on our side. If you have any compassion for your followers, you will not ask them to fight us again.’

The Empress lifted her chin, defiant. ‘I have nothing to say to a half-breed traitor.’

‘Traitor to what?’ demanded Peri, her crossbow still trained on the Empress. ‘Every one of your followers has human blood in them somewhere, whether they want to admit it or not. It might be a few generations back, but it’s still there. It’s the Oakenfolk who are the purest faeries in existence, because they all hatched out of magical eggs that
you
created. And for the first sixteen years of my life, I was one of them.’

She shifted her stance on the ledge, the moonlight shining white on her hair and glittering in her black eyes in a way that made her look more fey than ever. ‘I chose to become human out of love for my husband Paul, but I never forgot what it was like to be a faery.’

My husband Paul.
He was missing too, Rhosmari noticed with a prick of anxiety. Had something happened to him? It didn’t seem like Paul to send his newly healed wife to drive Timothy and a carful of faeries to Wales alone.

‘You, on the other hand,’ Peri said to the Empress, ‘were born human – but you’ve spent nearly your whole life trying to deny it. So who’s the real traitor to their race here, Jasmine of the Oak?’

A hiss went up from the Empress’s followers, and some of them began edging away. But Jasmine cast them a warning look, and they all stiffened back to attention. ‘Say what you will,’ she said. ‘And perhaps some of my more simple-minded subjects will believe it. But no one has fought harder or sacrificed more for the sake of my people – my true faery people – than I have.’

She walked towards Valerian and the rebels, her army moving in tandem with her strides. ‘If at times I have seemed harsh with them, it has only been for their greater good. It is for their sake, not my own, that I am here tonight. And if I command them to fight by my side until every one of us has fallen, it is only because I believe that death would be a greater kindness than the degradation you offer—’

‘The only degradation here,’ said Queen Valerian, the gentleness in her tone cutting across Jasmine’s rising voice, ‘is the yoke of bondage you have put upon your followers, and wish to put upon us and the Children of Rhys as well. But as Rhosmari and Timothy have just proved, there is a way that all of us can escape your influence forever, a solution simpler and more powerful than any Stone. To keep you from stealing our true names and using them to control us, we have only to find one person – be it faery or human – that we trust, and give our names to them instead.’

Exclamations burst from the faeries on both sides: shocked, angry, disbelieving. Veronica looked murderous, and Bluebell nauseated. But at the back of the crowd where Byrne lay bleeding in his twin brother’s arms, his fingers lifted feebly to grasp Corbin’s collar, and the two of them began whispering to each other.

Jasmine’s face contorted with rage. ‘Kill the half-breed,’ she snapped at her soldiers. ‘Kill them all!’

Swords rasped from their scabbards, and arrows went on the string; birds zoomed away across the beach, darting so low and fast that nothing could stop them. Veronica drew her dagger, and Martin his knife—

‘
Stop
.’

The command reverberated among the rocks and filled the air around them, ominous as thunder. Every faery froze and every head turned, as Lady Celyn stepped away from the edge of the water and strode over the sand towards them.

But Rhosmari’s mother had not come alone. The other Elders flashed into visibility beside her, and then Lord Gwylan and Lady Arianllys, and in tens and twenties and finally hundreds the Children of Rhys revealed themselves, a great unbroken line of them stretching from one side of the beach to the other, outnumbering both armies twice over.

The Children of Rhys had come to join the war.

‘No,’ breathed Rhosmari. Before Linden or Timothy could stop her, she shrank to Oakenfolk size and leaped over the edge of the low cliffs, spreading her wings to break her fall. She landed on the shingle, caught her balance, and changed back to her usual size again, running across the sand towards her mother.

‘Empress!’ called out Lady Celyn. ‘As you can see, you and your followers are outnumbered. I offer you one last chance to surrender.’

Jasmine stood still as the Lady Elder approached, the sea wind lifting her blonde curls and making her look like a tragic heroine in some ancient tale. Then she spat, coldly and accurately, into the sand at Celyn’s feet.

‘Stay back,’ warned Rob, stepping to block Rhosmari as she pushed her way to the front of the rebel lines. ‘You will not help your people by exposing yourself to danger.’

‘But that’s my mother,’ she said. ‘I have to talk to her. I have to explain—’

‘Seems to me she’s got a pretty good grasp of the situation already,’ said Thorn. ‘If I were you, I’d leave her to it.’

‘You will not fight,’ the Empress was saying contemptuously to Lady Celyn. ‘You cannot touch me or my followers without breaking your most sacred oath. Do you think that by merely standing here, you can frighten me into submission? You may talk of last chances and peace treaties until the end of time, but I will
never
submit.’

‘You underestimate us,’ said Lady Celyn. ‘Yes, we have sworn not to shed blood. But that does not make us weak.’ And with that she nodded at her fellow Elders, and they all raised their hands.

Magic blazed from their palms and arced towards the Empress. But before the light could touch her, Jasmine leaped back and flung up a magical shield to protect herself. The Elders’ power rippled over and around her, but it could not penetrate that barrier – and as the struggle intensified, the Empress’s army began to stagger.

Intent on their spell-casting, the Elders did not notice. All the other faeries on the beach seemed equally unaware, or perhaps did not realise the seriousness of the threat. But Rhosmari remembered how she had felt when the Empress was drawing on her power, and she sensed that what was happening right now was much, much worse. Jasmine had said that she would rather see her people die than let them be ruled by anyone else – and obviously, she had meant it.

Rhosmari glanced around, panic rising. What could she do? Martin had just sunk to his knees, and even Veronica was swaying now. Soon all their strength would be gone, and their hearts would stop beating.

And yet…would that be such a bad thing? Martin might have saved Timothy’s life, but Rhosmari could never forget how he had betrayed her. And she already knew how cruel Veronica could be. Knowing the Empress was evil, they had still chosen to side with her – and now it seemed only just that they should pay the price.

But if she let Martin and Veronica die, then at least two hundred other faeries, many of whom had not wanted to serve the Empress any more than Rhosmari did, would die with them…