Druids Sword by Sara Douglass Page A

be as sure of her as Noah thought he was.
    “Jack, you are home. Oh, please, gods, we cannot be at odds like this. Everything is wrong. The land suffers, its people suffer, Catling—” she said the name with such vehement loathing that Jack’s face stilled “—looms over us with such menace that each dawn increases our burden of dread. And we don’t know what to do about it. We don’t know how to stop it, save by destroying the damned Troy Game.”
    “But you can’t, can you?”
    “No,” she said, “not without you.”
    “And even then, how, Noah? Shall we destroy your daughter, as well? That should do it…but, oh, I forget, if we do Grace to death then we destroy the Faerie, and most of us—although I’m not sure that I’m included in that curse, am I?—and likely London and all of the land as well.”
    He saw then just how badly Noah suffered. Her beautiful eyes became so agonised, and her lovely face so drawn, that he instantly took one of her hands and held it as softly as he could.
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    She pulled her hand from his and dashed away the tears that threatened to spill over. “You have no idea what it has been like, Jack.”
    “No, but you somehow want me to make it instantly better, don’t you? Well, I’m sorry, Noah, I really am, but I don’t know how I can do that. I have no bloody idea. When Catling trapped Grace with her hex, she trapped all of us. What the hell am I doing back here?”
    He walked away, standing staring into the vast interior of the hall, hands on hips. After a long moment he turned back to look at Noah. “What if I said there is nothing I can do?”
    “I can’t accept that, Jack,” she said. “I won’t. ”
    He sighed, sat in one of the chairs and gestured to another. “Sit down. Tell me about the state of the Troy Game.”
    “It is unbelievably strong,” she said, sitting on the edge of a chair. “You can feel that, surely.”
    He hesitated, then gave a small nod. He remembered that momentary impression of the shadow hanging over St Paul’s, but thought it more likely a figment of his nerves at that point than of anything else.
    “You know what powers I command, Jack,” Noah continued. “I am Noah, goddess of the waters. I am also a powerful Mistress of the Labyrinth. And I am a Darkwitch. I have three strengths and powers at my command and I can combine all three of them into something so powerful, so lethal, that, if I so choose, I could probably murder the entire world. But I can’t murder Catling. I can’t murder the Troy Game. It is too cunning for me now. Too deep. Too dark.”
    “But you are also Eaving, the shelterer,” Jack said, calling Noah by her goddess name. “Wouldn’t that contra-indicate any and all of these murderous ambitions?”
    She studied him, then laughed softly, realising that he was attempting a small jest. “Oh, aye, you areright. My Eaving nature would probably preclude any attempt at using my Darkwitch and Mistress of the Labyrinth powers to ‘murder’ anyone. I can’t think why Catling hasn’t asked me for shelter already.” Because her goddess name meant shelter, Noah was forced to shelter and protect any who asked it of her, no matter what she thought of them, or how she feared them.
    Now Jack smiled, and the tension between them relaxed a little. “Tell me,” he said, very softly, and Noah didn’t need any more words to know exactly what he meant.
    “I thought I was being so clever,” she said, “burning London. I thought it would stop the Troy Game—Catling—in her tracks for a while, give us enough time to prepare. But Catling had already trapped us.”
    She stopped, and both remembered that terrible day when Jack, in his form as Ringwalker, had battled with Weyland within the Idyll as Noah watched helplessly on. While they’d been so stupidly, pointlessly engaged, Catling had sent her two dark imps into the Idyll to twist the red wool hex about Grace’s wrists, thenceforth binding