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The Arabella Strange who had leant over the little fountain in Santa Maria Zobenigo in Venice and told her husband that if he did not return to her she would come and find him, was not the same Arabella Strange who stood in the courtyard of Westfall Keep.
It was not that she was older, although she was by three years - it was that those three years had changed her quite profoundly. Her mouth was as wide and her smile was as pretty, but she had developed the habit of canting just one corner of her lips, rendering her smiles more secretive and rather more sharp than they ever had been before the Pillar of Darkness stole her husband away. Her hair was as dark and curling as ever, although there were two long streaks of silver in it now, and she tended to pin it not in fashionable London styles but with sprigs of rowan covered in little red berries. Her eyes were as clear and as capable of sparkling as they ever had been, but they saw further these days and had acquired a gleam of shrewd mistrust which leant a steely quality to her gaze.
This Arabella had lost her husband and new-born child to the maliciousness and caprices of magic - both English and faery. For a while she was so tormented by what the enchantments had stolen from her that she could not even hear the word ‘magic’ voiced without fearing she would be sick. But she took comfort and council from her friends. Flora told her that she was safe and that she must not be afraid of things that could no longer do her harm. Emma told her to become mistress of her fears and in turn give them something to worry about!
(This was typical of Emma’s fierceness: her trials had made her quite resolute to never fall into such traps again. If that meant she need carry a pistol in her fox-fur muff or - distasteful though it was - study magic so she might protect herself, then by God she would. She had regained her independence and thought no task too small to perform in the keeping of it.)
Arabella was certain they were both quite right, but for a long time she found it very hard to contemplate acting upon their advice. To own the truth there were many days when she found it hard to rise from bed, so heavy about her shoulders had her sorrows become.
In the summer of 1818, Arabella received a letter from Miss Cassandra Parbringer. They had met some years ago when Arabella’s brother Henry was the rector at Grace Adieu. Miss Parbringer invited Arabella, Emma and Flora to come and stay at Winter’s Realm. Arabella’s instinct was to refuse; she remembered there were some peculiarities surrounding Miss Parbringer and her two friends, Mrs Field and Miss Tobias. (There was something about Miss Tobias especially; Belle had remarked to Jonathan that if there was a muse of studiousness and quiet disapproval it was certain to be Miss Tobias. Strange had disagreed, “No - that’s Norrell!”)
Emma had in her usual indomitable way set about changing her friend’s mind. “You cannot be forever in this house without company - you will go quite mad.”
“I have you and Flora.”
“And we indulge you and allow you to hide away like a mouse in your room...”
“I was in the drawing room only yesterday,” she protested.
“Yes. And you stared out of the window or at the fire and said barely a word. Belle my dear,” she said more softly, “things have been very hard on you - you’ve suffered monstrously - no one sees that more clearly than I and no one feels it more keenly on your behalf. But you cannot allow your sorrows to bury you. You are living - and so you must get on with the task of it!”
Arabella’s eyes stung; she bit her lip. “I... I’m not certain I quite know how to any more.”
Emma clasped her hands. “And this is why all three of us should visit Grace Adieu. I’m certain that the change and the company will do us good.”
They had proposed to stay for two weeks at Winter’s Realm, but stayed instead a year, forming a sorority of magicians which was just as learned (although not as vocal) on matters magical as the Second York Society. They thought it best to leave to men the task of debating magic back and forth in periodicals and congratulating or condemning each other on some new spell they had discovered. The women got on instead with finding how they might do the magic that suited them each best, and do it as simply and as well as they might. In short, they were singularly intuitive and the most practical minded of Practical Magicians.
Arabella left in September of 1819 and walked the King’s Roads into Faerie with the sole intention of (as she usually did) rescuing her husband. That had been just over a year ago (the month no longer being Stone Ember but Crisping, a parcel of time which aligned somewhat imperfectly with November.)
The lords of Westfall Keep had in their counting house a very great array of treasures, as their household was a very ancient one and many of their ancestors had been adept at not embroiling themselves in lifelong and expensive feuds. (Quite a rarity for a Faery House.) Many folk argued as to whether the Mundane Egg, the Banner of the Host or the Circlet of the Illyrian Rose was the greatest of these treasures, but Arabella didn’t bother to form an opinion on the mater, as none of those were what she was after. She required Valenae’s Gauntlet. It was a finely made leather riding glove, jagged into flounces at the cuff in French medieval style. It had a cunningly concealed pocket amidst the flounces, just large enough to hold a small scroll - which indeed it did. This scroll when unfurled would show a map illustrating the true path to whatever one named, be it place, person or thing. As soon as Arabella had heard of it, she’d known it was her key to finding her husband again.
The newest Lord of Westfell Keep, Elethan Samphire Westfell, alas was not able to hear her petition, as he was gravely ill. He was a young lord; he was also handsome, arrogant and rash as many young lords are wont to be. Exploring the Keep one day, he came across an iron-bolted door in a tiny, ramshackle courtyard. Wishing to know what was within, he summoned the keys from his Seneschal’s belt, unlocked the door and went inside.
No one knows precisely what befell him, but he emerged three days later looking haggard and wan, his eyes weeping black tears. He had fallen down upon the stones of the little courtyard and not risen again.
The Seneschal and Master of Court had scoured every book, text, scroll and tablet that could be found within the walls of the Keep, seeking some clue as to what was in the dungeons beyond the iron door and how their Lord might once again be made well - as no spell had been of the slightest benefit to him when cast.
After a sennight of searching, they found an old pickled herring barrel full of scrolls in the northern tower. One of the scrolls told how the first Lord of Westfell had cheated against a common faery in a game of Napdraw. However, this person was of Draughir blood and cursed the lord to forever lose any game he played. The lord laughed and paid the curse little mind - it was so small a malediction as to be beneath his notice: it was little matter never to play Napdraw, Thirty-six Acorns or Up-Jump-Thursday again. The lord might have gone on to live a very long and uneventful life, had he not one day found a nest of Things with Games in an old dungeon under the Keep. (Things are a diminutive and malicious sort of pixie: they are considered vermin in Faery in much the same way we would consider the nuisance of rats.)
In an attempt to persuade them to leave, the lord became embroiled in a game and lost his name, his magic, the Keep and his shadow to the Things before he was able to escape. This terrible outcome was only rectified when his favourite court minstrel (an Irish Christian woman called Eithne) went down into the dungeon and somehow outwitted the Things, thereby regaining all the Lord had lost. He married her after that, which shows he was not entirely stupid.
Neither the Seneschal or Master of Court wished to go and challenge the Things behind the iron door, and there were no minstrels at the keep that season as Elathan was more of the hawking and hunting sort of lord than the listen to music and poetry sort of lord - which was a great pity all things considered. There were no servants of great wit and cunning who might be ordered to deal with the Things, and no courtier could be persuaded to take such a risk.
There was however, Arabella.
The Seneschal and Master of Court stood at the archway that marked the entrance to the courtyard: such was their dislike of the Things that neither of them would set foot in the courtyard proper. Arabella held out her hand for the key of the door: the Seneschal handed it to her with distaste - it was squat and black and iron, just like the portal it secured. She unlocked the latch with a wrench - the mechanism was very stiff - and opened the door a crack.
“Wait!” The Master of Court called out, his voice sounding thin and reedy.
She looked at him, her chin tilted in curiosity.
“The key, lady?”
The thinnest and sharpest of smiles graced her lips. “And have you lock it behind me? I think not. You shall have the key when I return with a cure for your lord.”
“And if you don’t?” fretted the Seneschal quietly.
“Have you heard of the Market of Miseries at the foot of the Deeply Citadel?”
“Darkling lands,” the Master murmured.
The Seneschal shuddered. “Yes lady, everyone’s heard of it.”
“Well,” she told him brightly, “I returned from there. I had tea with King Defling himself…” And whilst the two courtiers were trying to wrap their minds around the horror of that, she slipped into the gloom of the passageway beyond the door.
The corridor was carved of stone and had a flagged floor, it curved lazily to the left: past the first curved horizon the corridor became a staircase that flowed round and round, down and ever deeper down. Arabella descended the spiral by the simple expedient of not being on it; her feet did not echo on the steps, rather they glided an inch or so above them.
Arabella’s feet had not touched the ground since her encounter with the Pale Girl and her shadow of knives. The girl had never given her name, but everything about her was so remarkably ashen - even her eyes were pearl white and her hair the colour of falling snow. In contrast, her companion - a Mr CheeseApple - could have been made of Whitby jet, his skin was so black and polished. Mr CheeseApple had an alarming quantity of needle-sharp teeth, so many that it was a wonder they all fit in his head. He also had shears the length of sabres in place of hands.
The Pale Girl had given Arabella a disconcertingly shrewd look, as if she could read all of her past, present and future in the curl of her hair and the brown of her eyes. “I can’t lend you CheeseApple,” she’d said, apropos of nothing, regretful and matter of fact, “because the Margrave is trying to kill me. It’s very tiresome of him.” And then she’d grinned, leaving the other woman with the impression that it wasn’t tiresome at all but in fact rather entertaining. “So instead, I shall have to give you a present.”
Arabella had protested that this wasn’t necessary and had got another piercing look for her trouble.
“Yes it is,” the girl announced. Her head tipped to the side as if her neck had been snapped. “Otherwise you’ll end up all dead and boring amidst dice and Mahjong tiles,” her voice held a sing-song quality. “The haughty man in the black tower will go in a rage to Pandemonium and pick a fight with Samael. He’ll die of course. But not before the nevercold brass silver seal is broke and Anhelios awakes. That’s the beginning of the end.” She spoke calmly, like a Grecian Sybil. A blink, and her head came back to its correct angle.
There was a slight shimmer to the air around them like a sunlit sigh, and the Pale Girl suddenly held a shallow pot in her hand; it was the colour of serpents and the dreams of Eastern Emperors. “It’s ash from a kitsune’s tail.” She stuck one fingertip into the pot and brought it out coated with a powder that looked like crushed opals and rubies. “It’ll last a year and a day - you’ll be back on the right side of the mirror by then.” She traced a sigil on Arabella’s forehead.
Arabella felt incredibly light and dizzy for a moment and struggled to regain her balance as if someone had just tried to pull the ground out from beneath her feet. In the few seconds it took her to recover herself, the Pale Girl and her disquieting shadow companion had disappeared.
(In the intervening months, she had been unable to find out who the Pale Girl was; the closest story she had heard had been of the Witch Queen of Never Never and Not and her demon Knight Khezapeth. Both were closely associated with eternity, madness and death, and were not considered safe dinner companions.)
Under the Keep, Arabella passed loops and coils of staircases. Sometimes they levelled out for a brief space to become colonnades inhabited by shapes and shadows, and sometimes they didn’t. There were many alcoves along the outer wall of the spiral; some of these held urns or chests, or mirrors or unusual statues. Some of the alcoves had windows, but the glass was always black and impossible to look out from. A few of the alcoves were bricked up and, as she paused by one, she could hear something on the other side scratching to be let out.
The light fled as she descended and the candles and marsh lights that had been prevalent in the upper levels became scarcer and scarcer until the last flame Arabella could see was in a wall sconce flickering some many turns above her. Down in the lowest levels all was gloom, with the rock itself giving out just enough phosphor-grey light to see by.
At last the spiral ended – or at least appeared to end – but Arabella knew the ground in such places was treacherous and could suck one down to a lower catacomb if so much as a toe was put wrong. Arabella glowered at the floor; strewn as it was with black grave-dirt and the thin white bones of tiny dead things and was very glad that currently her slipper'd feet were a span above ground.
There was a strange skittering scuffle to her left; the noise of something thin and dexterous but stiff, like an arthritic spider. “Whaaat’ss thisss?” The voice was dry and airy. “Little messsed up pretty walllllking in sssspacesss far from home?” The thing, whatever it was, moved closer. “Up there, oh up thhhhere where the sun ssssmilesss they like you… but down here, hhhhhhere, where no one likesss to come – down hhhere we can do what we like…”
Arabella’s eyes narrowed as she caught the shine of grey light on curved, sharp teeth. She adjusted her grip on her imaginary skillet and aimed a backhanded swipe at the fangs. Magnesium-purple sparks flew as the skillet connected with resoundingly satisfying force.
There was an indistinct howl from the thing as it rolled and scrabbled away into the darkness, gibbering unhappily to itself.
Arabella waited for a moment to see if anything else fancied making her acquaintance. Nothing stirred. She nodded, satisfied, and continued on her way to find the Things with Games and ask them what they were playing at.
The skillet spell was one of Emma’s: it turned willpower and fury into a weapon that was quite insubstantial, yet effectual for all that. They’d found the trick of it was one needed to imagine a weapon they could truly believe in. Flora could manage a fencing foil - but the other two women put this down to her being younger and rather more romantic and flamboyant. Emma could quite easily manifest a flintlock pistol; it took a moment longer to become, but it was effective at range. Arabella had great difficulty with the spell: she hadn’t been able to imagine she would ever hold a gun or a blade, let alone wield one. Until one day, quite without meaning to, she had imagined holding her grandmother’s small iron skillet, the thick worn wood of the handle smooth in her hand. She’d become quite proficient with it after that and it had proved invaluable in Faery.
Further on Arabella could see a figure seated against a rock in the gloom. As she neared she thought him very like the youths of Westfell, for certainly they shared the same thinly-chiselled features, and the same love of well-tailored coats; his clothes were rather more antiquated though and his hair was very long. Something in the shape of his face and the angle of his eyes suggested that he was - or had once been - a Christian. Gathered around him like treasure from a tomb were a hundred different caskets and trinket boxes, a hundred different sealed pots and amphorae and a hundred other stone or bejewelled containers Arabella had no name for. The youth sat amidst them, his gloved hands held together in contemplation as he watched the oddments.
“Good day. What are you doing?” Arabella asked – for it seemed only polite.
The young man’s dark-hollow eyes flicked up in acknowledgement. As he spoke his tone made it clear that he had been doing something, make no mistake of that, only a fool would have believed he sat still through forced inaction or indecision… “Ah, mistress! It is a matter of great thought. These things always are.” He gestured to the oddments.
“What are they?”
His tone was grave. “A state of mental agitation or disturbance that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort.”
“I see,” Arabella said slowly. She wondered how many decades or centuries he’d been down here, staring at the wretched things. “And… you have to choose one to open?”
He looked somewhat stricken, panic burning in his hollow eyes. “Good God and all His saints! Do you know what you’re suggesting? Do you have any notion what the effect of such an action could be? Sweet mistress, it could be the ruin of me – of everyone!”
Arabella’s eyes turned dark as the Widowmaker Sea. “Yes,” she said, for she had worked out what the casks contained, and that he would never be free until he opened one. “Yes, I know very well what would happen. But if you’re not going to open one of them…” She watched his gloved fingers twitch, aching and fearing to even touch the caskets. “If you won’t open any, why do you sit here?”
The youth looked at his gloved hands and at the floor, defeated. “I need time. She may refuse me! The Lady of Winchester told me to choose very carefully. These matters take a lot of thought,” he mumbled. “Tomorrow. I’ll have chosen by tomorrow.”
“Or the day after tomorrow,” Arabella re-joined sadly, and walked further on.
Deeper into the greyness she went, walking on the cold mist that coiled out of the stone and swirled fitfully on the ground. Something glinted strangely to her right, an odd flicker like a magpie’s horde and so she went towards it.
A tree grew from a crevice in the stone of the spiral; a sorrowfully limb-twisted thing, dark, but somehow majestic for all that. From its bows hung uncountable little sharpnesses, glinting as they swung this way and that, and from the darkness of its trunk spilt out black briars with thorns as long as barn-nails. A wind from nowhere rustled in the branches and the briars, sounding to Arabella like all the beautiful songs that only ever made sorrow worse.
It was then she realised that there was someone other than her by the tree, and they were humming unerringly to the tune of the wind. The humming stopped as a quiet voice said, “Your tree must be very grand indeed, lady…”
Arabella looked around her and round again, trying to see who had spoken - she recognised the voice, it was so achingly familiar. The briars swayed like a sea, some of them rising in a spray – and suddenly Arabella saw. By the foot of the tree stood a boy in dark breeches and a white linen shirt; he had green eyes and unruly, curling chestnut hair. He looked as insubstantial as a kiss and as silvered as a scar - and exactly like Jonathan when she’d first met him at fourteen.
The sea of thorns had swept across, swamping him to his knees and climbing up around his hands as well. “You bear the marks upon you, lady,” said the boy to explain his greeting.
Arabella spared a glance for her arms - they were twined around with the ghosts of thorns and dead moths. She shivered and looked back at the boy; he seemed less silver and more substantial now, as if the more the thorns dug into his flesh, the more real he became. She scowled and desperately wished she had mastered the manifestation of a blade – for what good is a skillet at cutting thorns? She knew, quite instinctively, that she must not try to pull the thorns from him with her hands. “I am a lady,” she agreed. “But I’m also a magician,” she informed him tartly. “And even were I not, any fool can tell Misery Trees are bad for you.”
The not-Jonathan with the oak-green eyes smiled at her as the thorns continued to wind their inexorable way along his frame, drawing blood now at every touch. “We bleed just to know we’re alive…” The black briars swarmed lazily across his shoulders and wound themselves in his hair. “It occurred to me to wonder… If one stops bleeding, does one die?”
“No!” Arabella shouted. But the boy could no longer be seen; there was just the murmur of the wind in the thorns as they subsided once more in waves, looking sleek and well-fed.
Arabella stood shaking for a moment with her fists clenched and little waves of agitated violet-white light shimmering like a halo to match the anger simmering in her heart. But she counted to ten and told herself very sternly that the boy had not been Jonathan - not even a ghost or memory of her husband - it had simply been a lure for the thorns that hoped to feed upon her.
She knew from experience that Thickets of Misery were all very easy to spot from the outside, but when you were in their embrace they seemed important somehow, real and powerful and darkly comforting in a way the rest of the world was not. She sighed, and with a silent promise to come back later with a pot of Wyld Fire, she walked on.
She had not gone far when she heard mutterings and mumbling ahead: there she found a group of Things with Games (and indeed they had many) sitting in the lee of the spiral, jabbering excitedly at one another. Silence fell at her approach and then the jabbering came again with greater haste and volume. The Things were strange with a feline gate and dark-flashing eyes, rag-tag clothes and grabbing hands.
“What is it? What does it want?”
“What is it doing? It visits?”
“Lady lady lady, it’s a lady!”
This time Arabella merely smiled her private, lopsided smile - and said nothing.
“What’s it doing here?”
“Does it matter? We can just make it…”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
The Things with Games went into a brief huddle with much muttering and gesturing in her direction. One Thing came forward from its fellows as spokesman. “Would you like to play a game?”
“What games do you have?” she asked.
“Snakes and Ladders!” There was nasty sniggering at that.
“What the Whispers Say!” More hidden laughter.
“Mirror Mirror!”
“Wick or Flame!”
“That one.” Arabella pointed at a burnt chessboard that sat on the ground set with twigs and stones, mouse-skulls, fisheyes and words cut from old journals in the stead of playing pieces. There was a silver ring there too that had caught her eye - it shone with an odd significance.
The Things seemed a little put out that she had not chosen their suggestions, but they recovered their enthusiasm in an instant. “Oh that? That one! Very good that, oh yes…” They bundled around her, amicably pushing her to the space beside the board.
“Sit there, sit there…”
“No, there, not there, there!”
“Yes, yes…”
Arabella sat gracefully and neatened her skirts around her. She smiled at them all as if she was at a high tea in a Grande-dame’s house. “What is the game called?” she enquired.
Looks were exchanged. “Lamb to the Sl-!” one began gleefully, before another piled on top of it and stuck their foot in its mouth.
“Eh, what it called? What it called!”
“Trapdoor!” shouted another before clapping its hands over its maw, worried it had said the wrong thing.
But the others seemed to like this suggestion and burbled their agreement. “Trapdoor, yes, foolish heads for forgetting names…” They scrabbled and scampered onto rocky perches around and above where they looked down at her with their oil-slick eyes. “Now we tell you how to play,” said the spokesman, as he and his pack smiled down at her with neat pointed teeth. “You move a piece on the board.”
“Any piece?” asked Arabella, her fingers hovering tantalisingly over a mouse skull.
“Any piece, any piece yes,” came the murmured reply and myriad agreement.
“Why any piece?” she demanded, her fingers closing thoughtfully instead on the silver signet ring.
The Things with Games smiled wider. “Because it doesn’t matter.”
The black grave-dirt that had been the ground suddenly fell away into a danker, darker nothingness: a deeper level to the spiral. The earth and the little ivories, the boards and the pieces, the dice and the broken toys all fell away in a maelstrom, all to be spat up again later, with or without their hapless player.
Crouched safe on their rocks the Things with Games snickered, but then the snikkers turned to howls of rage.
Impossibly Arabella sat cross-legged in the place where they had put her, right over the middle of the abyss. She had not fallen, she had not even sunk - although she had lost one of her slippers. With a sharp little smile of her own now upon her lips Arabella got carefully to her feet and gave the Things a ragged curtsy. “Thank you for your instruction. I came down here to see what you were playing at, and now I know. I came too for what the lord of the Keep had lost.” She held up the little shining ring with its device of a tower above a waterfall of stars. “I think I shall be going now.”
The Things hissed their ire at her and jabbered questions and accusations.
Arabella looked up above her to where the upper levels of the spiral arched, her head tipped to one side. “You called me a lady,” she said calmly as she began her ascent. “You failed to note I am also a magician. So if any of you or those shadow things hiding behind you try to waylay me, I’ll knock off your heads with a skillet!”
The curses of the Things and their threats and screams followed her upwards, but as the gloom lessened and the light returned they became quieter, and by the time she had reached the first lonely torch in its sconce upon the stair, they couldn’t be heard at all.