balance it on the beam over the door from the kitchen into the rest of the house.
He turned to see us watching him. 'No offence meant.'
'None taken,' Blackbird responded.
He opened the door and yelled through the gap. 'Meg, get James down here, will you?'
'He's on PlayStation.' The reply came from up the stairs beyond the door.
'Tell him to come down.'
'He's on PlayStation.' She repeated it as if that explained why he wasn't coming.
'One minute,' he remarked, and went through the door, closing it behind him.
The kitchen was well fitted out with modern appliances and a big range cooker at one end, all lit by modern spotlights over the work surfaces. Jeff filled the kettle and set it on one of the rings to boil. He indicated the big kitchen table and we took a seat at one end. One of the dogs barked behind another door, presumably a utility room of some sort.
There was something about the house that made me uncomfortable. The kitchen was modern and well equipped without being at odds with the age of the house. It all looked very cosy and tasteful, but I felt I couldn't rest there. There was something about it that jangled my nerves and set my teeth on edge.
The door to the house re-opened and a sullen teenager in a black T-shirt illustrated with paint-splashed writing came through, followed by the old man.
'This is my grandson, James. James, this is Blackbird and that's Rabbit.'
'Funny names,' the boy remarked.
'Mind your manners, especially with their kind.'
The lad muttered something under his breath and went to sit down at the other end of the table.
'James here is a modern lad. He sees no use in spending time at the forge and learning how to make iron turn to his will. He likes computers, don't you, James?' This was clearly a long-standing dispute.
'Dad, let the boy be,' the father interrupted in a tired voice.
'Show him.' The old man's request was directed at Blackbird.
'You want us to show him the knife?' Blackbird asked.
'No. I want you to show him why the Highsmiths have been the High Smiths to the Seven Courts for nigh on a thousand years. Things have changed, I know, and the boy needs to go his own way.' He nodded an acceptance to his own son. 'But I want him to learn the ways of iron first and for him to know why he must learn them. I want him to have something to tell his grandchildren. Come to that…' He went back to the door. 'Just wait a second, will you?'
He opened the door and yelled through. 'Meg? Lisa? Come into the kitchen. There's something you've got to see.'
'Dad, I don't want the girls involved,' Jeff insisted.
'Don't you? Lisa's spent more time in the forge with me than James ever did. You say I've got to let the boy have his way? Well that's fine, but someone's got to carry on the line.'
'The women have never been part of it, Dad. You know that.'
'Not true. They just haven't been part of it for a very long time, but you keep telling me times have changed and we have to adapt. Well, I'm adaptin'.' He folded his arms across his broad chest.
The woman from the yard appeared in the doorway. Behind her was a girl about the same age as my own daughter, with fair hair tinted honey-blonde in a way that made you think it was the outdoors that had bleached it, not chemicals. She had a rangy quality you see in long distance runners. Against her mother's plumpness she looked lean.
Now they were together I could see that the boy took after his mother. He had the same down-turned mouth and thickness of hair. The girl took after her father and grandfather. She would be tall, lean and fair, though probably without the thickness of muscle.
'What's this all about, Ben? These people upset the dogs and yet you bring them in and set them at my kitchen table and then you pull us all in here. No offence meant, but I tell it like it is.' This last was addressed to us.
'I apologise for interrupting your evening, Mrs Highsmith,' Blackbird responded. 'And we're grateful for your hospitality, but our need is urgent.'
She acknowledged Blackbird's apology with a nod but then focused back on her father-in-law. 'Well, Ben?'
'The Highsmiths have been on this land for almost a thousand years, Meg. You joined the family fifteen year ago, and you've been a daughter to me, you know that. But there are secrets in this family that have been kept for all of that time.'
'What's he talking about, Jeff?'
The son looked helplessly at his wife and then his father, caught between secrets unshared and the events we had brought into the house. 'I'm sorry, Meg. It's about the land, the forge, the farm, all of it. You know the rent on this place is a pittance. Well there's another part to it. These people are from the landlords and they've come to collect the rest of the rent.'
'What do you mean, the rest of it?' Her voice was rising in pitch with her anger.
'I mean they want us to make things for them. Iron things.'
She looked from one man to the other and neither of them would meet her gaze.
Ben turned to Blackbird. 'You'd best show them. They won't believe you otherwise.'
Blackbird nodded. 'Rabbit, perhaps you could show them what you showed me in the Underground station this morning?'
'What, here?'
'Here, please, and now,' she insisted.
'Do you mind telling me what this is about? Jeff? What's going on?' Meg's voice was getting more edgy by the second.
'They're not 'uman, Meg, not like us.' He shook his head, unable to meet her questioning stare.
She looked at us, pulling her daughter to her, as if she was unprepared to believe what she was hearing but unwilling to risk that it might be true.
'What do you mean, not human?' she asked him.
I had done this before, but not for an audience and I wanted it to look good. Yet as soon as I started to focus I realised something was different. Something about how it felt reminded me of the moment out on the Way when I had become lost in the void. I had called it and it had answered. Now when I called, it answered as if I had never broken that connection. It was right there waiting for me, always present. The image flashed into my mind of being haloed in cold white fire, hanging in space, and I felt something tense inside me, something huge.
The lights in the room dimmed as I drew on it and at the same time the dogs in the next room started baying in long mournful howls. Everything went still. The hum of the fridge, the background noise of a TV in another room, everything just stopped, leaving the sound of the dogs isolated in the stillness. The electric lights flickered and died and gallowfyre flooded into the room.
'Shit! Shit!' The boy stood up at the end of the table and backed away, knocking the chair over in the process.
Just as in the vision Kareesh had showed me, a piece of mistletoe hanging over the door of the room with the dogs in it flickered into life, glowing green in the half-light in response to the magic building up like a thunderhead in the room. Cold white fox-fire danced into being on the worktops, bouncing like playful stars along the edges until the entire room sparked with it.
'Jeff?' Meg shepherded her daughter away from us towards the end of the kitchen where the old man and his son watched us with grim faces. 'Jeff, make him stop?'
'It's what they are, Meg. They're Fey. They won't hurt us. They need us.' His face looked grim in the swimming light.
I barely heard him. The void sang in my veins like a heavy chorus. I felt the hunger of it building. I felt its need swelling within me. The room burned with cold flickering fire and that fire knew me, sang to me.
A voice came though the swell of it.
'Rabbit? Can you hear me, Rabbit? Let it go. Let go of it now.' Blackbird coaxed me down like a policemen talking a jumper down from the ledge of a tall building.
