her skirts, Will swept her into his arms without missing a step.
‘How dashing a protector,’ she teased, flicking her hair away from her face.
‘Even in the face of death, Meg?’
‘Especially then.’
As they reached the edge of the courtyard, the night cracked in two. Fire blazed across the sky, the earth shook and the thunderous explosion sounded like a hundred cannon. The force of the blast flung the spies down the incline from the courtyard. Chunks of masonry rained about them. Ahead of a wave of smoke and dust, fire-flakes of wood and parchment spun by.
Coughing, Will staggered to his feet, throwing one arm against his face as protection against the choking fog. He found Meg, leaning dazed against a tree, and dropped beside her, taking her slender hand. He felt his fears subside as her eyelids fluttered open. She smiled when she saw his face. ‘The angels have come to claim me,’ she said wryly.
The spy pulled her to her feet and she half fell into his arms. ‘Our lives are hard fought, Meg, but the richer for that,’ he said. Blowing a strand of auburn hair from her face from the side of her mouth, she rolled her eyes, feigning aloofness, but Will sensed the warmth between them.
As the smoke and dust cleared, they searched in the gloom among the trees until they had rounded up everyone and gathered at the end of the courtyard. From somewhere in the trees, Courtenay’s bellow assured them that he too was hale and hearty. Will turned to survey the wreckage of the tower. The wavering torchlight revealed a jagged stump licked by flames beneath a plume of black smoke reaching up to the lowering clouds. Of the Unseelie Court and the Mooncalf, there was no sign, nor did he expect one.
Courtenay strode into the circle of torchlight with Dee and Grace by his side. He raised an eyebrow when he saw Will’s accusing glance and said, ‘She insisted on coming ashore. Filled with fire, that one.’
‘I am glad to see you well,’ she said as blithely as if she had met him in the palace gardens.
‘Grace,’ Will sighed, ‘you are a fine bundle of trouble. Can you not stay out of harm’s way just once?’
‘I can well look after myself, Master Swyfte,’ she snapped, stepping past him to tend to Strangewayes, who sat on the low stone wall with his head bowed. ‘A fine thing to be scolded for worrying about close friends and loved ones,’ she called back.
Will shook his head wearily and turned to Dee, who seemed to have recaptured some of his vitality along with his wits. His back was straight, his eyes flashing with intelligence, his stride purposeful, but still Will worried that he might slip back into insanity. ‘I have had enough of cowering away like a whipped cur,’ the alchemist exclaimed, jabbing a finger at the spy. ‘My blood is up, and I am ready for the fight with those pale-skinned bastards back in England.’ He paused, then added, ‘If Elizabeth will have me, and if that hunchbacked plotter Cecil isn’t whispering in her ear to have me sent away to the darkest parts of the realm.’
‘We need you, doctor. And the Queen needs you,’ the spy reassured him.
Dee nodded curtly, satisfied. ‘I need the sun on my face.’ Glancing up at the clouded night sky, he spun on his heel. Off to work his magics, Will guessed. The island mirrored the alchemist’s mood.
While Courtenay’s men took the captured pirate Jean le Gris, still limping from the wound in his thigh, back to the
‘At last,’ Carpenter muttered. ‘I thought this night would never end.’
Launceston pursed his lips, watching the light shade to gold. ‘Four hours, I would say.’
‘Four hours until what?’
‘Until I have to listen to you bemoaning the oven heat that beats you down to the deck and wishing it was night again,’ the Earl sniffed, walking away.
Carpenter hurled a stream of abuse at the other man’s back. Laughing to himself, Will stood and went in search of the sorcerer. As he walked, he sucked in a deep breath, relieved that this long night had ended far better than he could have hoped when he first set foot upon the island. Along the path to the beach, he found Dee resting beside a moss-draped statue of a nymph. ‘You have completed your ritual, then, doctor?’ he asked.
‘That business came so much easier when I was hiding behind the walls of my madness,’ the old man grumbled.
To the west, the lightening sky flickered with folds of a rainbow of illumination. Will felt reminded of the green lights he had seen in the northern skies in Scotland. ‘What is that strange display?’ he asked, his brow creasing. ‘More of your magics?’
Dee glanced up, the odd radiance playing in his eyes. ‘This island stands on the boundary between the world we know and whatever lies beyond.’
‘The place where the dead go?’
‘Some call it such. Since our most ancient times we have always looked to where the sun sets . . . the light fades . . . and thought it the home of those who have moved on. When I was a boy, my father told me about the boat that waits by the shore to ferry the souls of the newly departed across the great wide ocean for judgement. And then, on the night he died, I saw the boat waiting and his own pale shade walking the lane from our house.’ He shook his head as if to dispel the memory, and looked away. ‘It is the home of the Unseelie Court,’ he said in a quiet voice.
Will sensed a confusion of thoughts in the old man. Dee had spent his days probing the great mysteries that enveloped life, and here was one of the greatest, a puzzle that wrapped up life and death and grief and yearning, the promise and threat of greater powers than man’s, and all man’s fears about the purpose of life.
‘What if,’ Dee had said to him once, staring deep into the blazing fire in the Black Gallery, ‘man was only placed upon this world as sport for higher powers?’
Without another word, the old man trudged down the path towards the shore. Will was about to follow, but heard Courtenay calling him. With a sigh, he returned to the courtyard where a few men had been sifting through the wreckage of the tower for anything that could be salvaged.
‘Le Gris’s men have been released from their torment and can now face their just rewards in Heaven or Hell,’ he said, cracking his knuckles. ‘Another triumph for England’s finest. By noon I will have charted a course for the island of Hispaniola to take on fresh water and supplies. And if we encounter any Spanish dogs, it will be a joy to despatch them after the things we have battled these past weeks. And then to fair Albion. With a good wind, Dee can be rebuilding our defences with his cursed sorcery before the bluebells have gone from the woods in Kent.’
‘May good fortune watch over you, Captain Courtenay,’ Will said, clapping a hand on the other man’s arm. ‘You and your crew have earned the Queen’s gratitude, and a joyous release in the stews of Bankside.’
Courtenay’s eyes narrowed. ‘You speak as if you are not sailing with us.’
The spy glanced back to the dancing lights in the western sky. ‘It was never my intention to return to England. I am a lost soul, captain, and I must find my way to the land of the dead. This morning I will take le Gris’s ship and a skeleton crew and sail to the home of the Unseelie Court. Nothing shall stop me finding the answers I seek. And then I will bring the walls of that fortress crashing down, though it cost me my life.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
THE RIBBON OF white sand glowed in the morning sun. Sparkling blue sea lapped in the cove and a cooling breeze rustled through the woods as the two men wandered along the shore. The intoxicating scent of the large pink flowers on the spiky-leaved shrubs along the treeline drifted down to meet the salty air.
‘You are a fool,’ Dee growled. The skirts of his purple robe swept a wide path along the beach.
Will felt an unfamiliar lightness now he had finally given voice to the inevitability of his destination. ‘If it is foolishness to want an end to the torment of unanswered questions, then so be it.’
‘The answers may be worse. Have you thought of that?’
Will shrugged. ‘It is a gamble I am prepared to take.’ If only the alchemist knew how much he had risked, he thought. How long it seemed since that night in the Liverpool rooming house when he had first started to form his plan. The sight of Jenny in the obsidian mirror had let loose a rush of desperate emotions and thoughts, as if the dam holding back all those years of misery had suddenly broken. He still felt surprised how little it had troubled him to put the Queen, and all England, up as his stakes in his great gamble. Never would he alone have been able to
