by Bakewell’s popular with tourists, but not so much in October, so rooms were plentiful. Except, of course, it was stupid o’clock and tiny country towns don’t have the kinds of places where you can get a room at any hour of the day or night.
So we couldn’t get in to Silvessen and we couldn’t get anywhere to sleep, either. So far, so disastrous.
Luckily, we had Emellana Rogan with us. If she isn’t the most well-travelled woman on the planet, it has to be a close contest.
‘Just a minute, then,’ she said, once we’d crossed Bakewell twice looking in vain for a “rooms available” sign with lights in the windows. She gestured in the direction of the dark and barren fields, bordered with drystone walls, that ringed the raggle-taggle cluster of buildings. ‘Plenty of space out there. Come on.’
I squinted, as though that might help me see farther into the darkness. ‘Space?’ I echoed. ‘For what?’
But Em had already set off, and the rest of us had to work hard to keep up with her long stride. She led us on a forced march for some two or three minutes, then stopped in the midst of what felt to my feet like reasonably soft grass.
‘We’re sleeping here?’ said Indira, doubtfully. ‘Just on the ground?’
I could sympathise with her obvious discomfort at the idea. Indira struck me as a fastidiously neat person; rarely had I seen her with so much as a hair out of place.
Me, I was more worried about the cold.
Emellana smiled enigmatically, and gestured again, a gesture I might have termed flamboyant if it had been anybody but self-contained Emellana who’d made it.
The air rippled, folded itself up, and became a tent. A glorious tent, expansive and inviting, wrought from some airy and ethereal fabric most pleasing to mine eye.
It was warm, too, as I soon discovered. We piled inside to find blankets and pillows laid out in five bundles, and not only did the tent protect us from the freezing wind, it also seemed to be gently heated.
‘Ms Rogan,’ I said fervently. ‘You are a queen amongst women.’
She actually laughed at that, a little. ‘I consider it a fair trade for spiced honey cakes,’ she informed me.
‘Ooh, good point,’ said Zareen, flopping down into a nest of blankets and extracting her boxes of goodies.
‘So you’ve employed this trick before,’ I surmised around a mouthful of Bakewell tart.
She inclined her head. ‘Only when there is no other choice. It is rather draining.’
‘Where did you learn it?’ asked Indira. ‘I’ve never come across such an art.’
Emellana finished her cakes and lay down, stuffing two pillows under her head. ‘I learned it from a silk-weaver in Hangzhou.’
Indira said nothing, but her face was hungry, like she’d eat the whole of Hangzhou alive if doing so would procure her its secrets.
‘Not yet,’ said Jay, shaking his head at his sister. ‘You haven’t got time.’
Indira sighed in agreement, and flopped into her blankets.
‘Time to sleep,’ I decided. ‘Big day tomorrow.’
Awfully sensible of me, wasn’t it? Right up there with all that going to bed early I’d tried to do earlier in the evening.
But despite the delicious comfort of my blankets and pillows — almost as good as a real bed, you’d hardly know you were lying on cold, damp grass — I couldn’t sleep. My mind turned and turned upon the problem of the Fairy Stone, and the foolish promise I’d made to solve it post-haste.
Promises are dangerous things. They’re only made of words, and I’ve been forming sentences for a while now. Too easy to make.
Keeping them is the harder part, but one rarely thinks about that while uttering grandiloquent oaths. Whatever confidence I’d felt an hour ago had disappeared somewhere.
I couldn’t sleep because I didn’t have time. My team were relying on me to get them into Silvessen, and whose fault was that but my own? I’d borrowed Merlin’s arts for exactly this reason, and now I had to work out what to do with them.
Stifling a sigh — it wouldn’t do to wake my compatriots as well as failing them — I got up again and crept out of the tent.
The clouds were clearing and the sky was a veil of stars. I stood looking up at them for some time, hoping some Muse of Magick would bless me with a flash of conveniently timed insight.
Nope.
‘Fine,’ I muttered, extracting my phone.
It may surprise you to learn that Ophelia owns a phone. It certainly surprised me. It isn’t that she eschews modern conveniences altogether, despite the antiquity of her cottage. But she rarely bothers with them, and you know why? Because she doesn’t need them. What do you need a fridge for if you’re Merlin? She’s got storage boxes that keep food chilled and they’re powered by magick, not electricity. Why do you need an oven or a gas-powered stove when you can summon as much fire or heat as you like with a flick of your fingers? Ophelia’s kitchen is marvellous because she’s marvellous.
Phones, though. She might be able to communicate over long distances in magickal ways, but most of the rest of us can’t. So she keeps a mobile.
In a drawer. I found it a few weeks ago, buried under a stack of papers and unrecognisable paraphernalia and clearly untouched in some time.
I took it out and quietly placed it somewhere a bit more obvious. I don’t know what premonition made me do that, but I blessed my accidental forethought now as I stood in a field in Derbyshire, half-frozen and out of ideas, and hoped she’d consent to answer the thing at three in the morning.
She did. Eventually.
‘Ves?’ she said, crisply. Not sleep-fuddled. Probably up late working on some new, brilliant potion.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I know it’s obscenely late.’
‘‘What’s the problem?’
‘It’s the gate into Silvessen.’ I gave her a speedy precis of the situation, then waited impatiently through a rather long silence from the other end.
‘It’s completely dead?’ she said at last.
‘Seems to be. I can’t find so much as a stray thread of magick in there, and I couldn’t get it to accept any of mine, either.’
‘It’s not like a battery, Ves. You can’t just recharge it.’
‘So I discovered.’
She was quiet again for a time. ‘It is a conundrum,’ she allowed. ‘The gate is inactive because Silvessen Dell is a dead enclave. Were the enclave revived, so too would the gate be, but you need to revive the gate in order to access the Dell.’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘Jay cannot assist you, I collect?’
‘If there is a Way-henge inside Silvessen, Jay can’t find it. Probably for the same reason.’
‘Hm. Then you’ll have to go back a bit.’
‘Back? Back where?’
‘Think of Farringale and Baroness Tremayne.’
Hm. Baroness Tremayne, a troll noblewoman who’d survived the death of Farringale by centuries. In a manner of speaking. ‘Between the echoes,’ I said. ‘I still have no idea what that means.’
‘It is about memory. And dream.’
‘I hate to keep being such a downer, but I have no idea what that means, either.’
‘You probably do, Ves. Didn’t you tell me you detected a memory of magick within the Fairy Stone?’
‘Yes…’
‘The Stone remembers what it once was. Somewhere, between the echoes of memory and time, there’s a thread you could use.’
‘All right, thank you, but how do I find it?’
‘Go deeper. Remember what I’ve been teaching you.’
Deeper. Hm. I thanked Ophelia with as much grace as I could muster (which was less than she deserved, but what can I say? It was three in the morning, I’d hardly slept, and I was badly feeling the pressure) and hung up.
Go deeper. Right.
Sleep being out of the question, I didn’t bother returning to the tent. Instead I sent a text to Jay’s phone. Meet me at the Fairy Stone, it said. Bring sustenance.
Then I trudged wearily out into the grassy field. When I judged I’d put enough distance in between me and both the tent and Bakewell, I retrieved my syrinx pipes and played Addie’s song.
My glorious unicorn Familiar answered promptly, as she usually does. I still had her bag of chips about me, even if they were cold by now. She didn’t mind. I admired her rippling, pearly mane and gleaming silvery hide as she devoured my offering of peace and friendship, and then I was up on her back and we were galloping away.
Two or three strides in, Addie spread her beautiful wings and away we flew.