A Hero's throne

But it was heavy, solid, like it was cast in steel. He tried to close it into a fist, but only the barest twitch of the fingers was perceptible. After a long period of exhausting thought and concentration, he could do no more than turn it. Then he was able, after a time, to tilt it downward and brush the fingertips against the grass, which he could see moved, but which gave no sensation of touch.

He gave up his thoughts of his hand and tried instead to think of his feet. This felt more successful at first, and he was able to plant two feet firmly on the ground and experienced the feeling for the first time of being anchored to his environment, but that was it. He could not, for any desire or effort of will, make them move. He tried to visualise them moving, to feel what it was like to move them up and down. Nothing.

Exhausted, he gave up and concentrated just on being. Focusing on the song, which he repeated like a mantra in his head-his lifeline to sanity.

How was he going to get out of this now? How had he come here? Was he dead? He definitely wasn’t dreaming-everything felt hyper-real. Certain emotions or moods were often heightened during dreams and nightmares, but there was never such a flood of reality, however out of joint, such as he was experiencing now.

So he was dead. But killed by what? Perhaps shot or crushed by something unseen. That was a sad thought. What would happen to everyone he’d left behind? What was he going to do now?

The world around him had come back into bright focus again, out of the dim shades that concentration on his body brought. He gazed placidly at the treeline and remembered the first time he had made the journey across the endless plain.

The more he looked at it, the larger it grew, and for a moment he thought that was because his “vision” was still clearing, but then he realised, with a thrill, that he was moving. The memory of having gone this way before was doing it.

He was flying now, the ground blurring beneath him. Although he couldn’t feel in the old, familiar sense, he was aware of a rushing wind going through him. He was starting to think of himself as a sort of cloud, a phantom.

He was going faster now, and just when he wondered how he was going to stop-if he even could stop, or if he would just fly through the woods, trunks, branches, and all-he was there at the treeline, and completely still. This is where he met Kay Marrey, the messenger from the Elves in Exile. He could almost see him standing before him. The Elves in Exile-that was a thought. Perhaps they could help him.

Then, with dawning awareness, he found that Kay was standing before him, but not as he had last seen him. Kay was draped in a blood-red robe, and his face was bone-white.

“What did I tell you not to do?” Kay asked.

Daniel made to reply but had no voice. And then the apparition was gone, leaving him puzzled and alone.

He stayed there for a time, pondering what he had just seen. Was it the ghost of Marrey that he’d summoned to him? Or was it a projection that he himself had made? Or an extension of this dream world, if it was a dream world?

Who could help him? He thought of K?yle, the woodburner, and the clearing where he had lived for several months and suddenly, with a blur of green and black, the view shifted to that same place.

The scene was very much as he remembered it, but the burning pits were unused and overgrown, being neglected for some time.

“Daniel?”

He turned, pushing against the instinct to move his body and instead concentrated on the image at his periphery.

K?yle’s wife, Pettyl, was standing in the doorway of one of the small dirt huts. She was looking at the space that Daniel occupied. Again, he tried to speak but couldn’t. Instead, he thought the words at her.

What am I doing here?

At the same moment, Pettyl also asked, “What are you doing here?”

You can see me?

Pettyl stared at Daniel a moment longer and then said, “Why have you come back?”

Back?

The memory of standing on the cliff overlooking the elfish campsite made the scene shift again, and in an instant he was standing up there again. Except now it was in the daytime, and so slightly unfamiliar. The fantastic tents and booths were missing. Was it all still a hallucination, or could he actually be in Elfland? If it was all just in his head, then why was it so different than he remembered? Still, he clung to any small piece of evidence he might not be dead.

He saw a black form on the field below him, where the grand elfish bazaar had once stood. As he watched, it separated into three equal-sized forms and moved apart from itself. They were human-actually elfish, Daniel corrected himself-shapes. Although distant, they looked in his direction, and he had the impression they’d been expecting him.

He took a step forward and then realised with a shock that he actually had taken a step forward.

“Oh, thank God!” Daniel’s breath rushed out of him in a grateful, disbelieving breath. He dropped to his knees and spent a few moments running his hands up and down his body, feeling his face, wiping away tears of relief. He was dressed in the clothes he had been wearing back in the tunnels-his sort of modified armour and survival gear.

The black shapes approached him. He rose and started toward them as well, delighting in each step he took, but gradually becoming more fearful as they neared.

As emotionally tumultuous as the past hours had been, it paled in comparison to the tidal wave of fear he experienced as he recognised the bloodless faces. Daniel did not know the first; his bloodless face was finely chiselled and regal, even for an elf. He wore a trailing cloak that indicated an imperious dignity and funereal solemnity.

It was the other face that drew Daniel up short. Agrid Fiall, the shady financier he had assassinated in order to leave this place the first time around. His bloodless face was screwed up in a wrathful sneer, and it looked as if he would spit poison daggers if he could.

The third form was in the shape of Felix Stowe-the elf who had imprisoned Freya, and whom he had killed.

“Oh man,” Daniel murmured. “I really am dead.”

V

Alex was in a bit of a bind, and he frantically searched his memory.

“Uh. . reveillez-vous, chevaliers dormant, et. . et. . um, bataille avec l’Anglais. No, sorry, I mean, uh, l’Angleterre. That is-hold on, bataille pour l’Angleterre. . POUR l’Angleterre.”

Seven bearded, ancient French faces stared back at him blankly. They were in a sleeping chamber that was not adjoined to any tunnels. They’d had to resurface in the French countryside and follow some ancient markers to a burial ground near a place called Carnac. It wasn’t the cold, dry environment they had come to expect, but warm, slightly damp, and earthy. They had left the others at the cave exit-they were far too conspicuous to be travelling aboveground.

They had found the chamber, entered it, and Alex, excited to see a full chamber of slumbering knights, went to the horn that was hanging on the wall and blew it.

“Prys difuna yw?” the nearest knight asked.

“Vous. . parlez pas Francais?”

“Pytra?”

Ecgbryt leaned in toward Alex. “How goes it?” he asked.