“Blast,” said Edwin, aggrieved, and hurried off in Dufay’s wake. The Grimm was moving with such rapid strides and an air of such purpose that Alan found himself, along with everyone else, following along like children in the wake of a street parade.
So Alan avoided having to be swallowed up by Jack’s ancestral home for a while longer, as he was taken on a strange little tour of the grounds. They passed through a paved area twice the size of Alan’s house, with trees like absurd lollipops in huge pots, and then across a moss-furred bridge and through a small forest of slender trees that towered green above them. Then up a grassy hill that was topped with a single tree almost too large to comprehend. It must be a trick somehow. Magical.
Alan had not planned to go for a brisk and confusing walk in nature. He was not sure nature approved of him any more than grand magical houses did. But he was damned if he’d fall behind. He hastened his steps to keep up with Jack, who gave Alan a look that wasn’t exactly a comment about his height but had all the trappings of it, as if Jack no longer had to open his mouth for Alan to know when he was being teased.
Alan glared and did not open his mouth in return. He was too busy breathing through it.
When they caught up to the others at the top of the hill, Maud was red-faced with exertion and most of them were puffing at least a little. Robin wasn’t. Robin had a swing to his arms and a light in his eyes like he was about to suggest a brisk jog down the other side and then a nice, bracing swim. It made him absurdly attractive and also made Alan want to slap him.
Dufay was walking in circles around the tree, fingers trailing on the bark. Each circle took some time. It really was enormous. Perhaps the same magic—or country air, or whatever it was—was responsible for Jack’s size.
“Oh for—Hawthorn,” said Edwin, exasperated. “Can you shed any light on why the Grimm of Gloucester is so enamoured of this oak? I can’t get a sensible word out of him. And I seem to remember it has a name, so I assume it has a story.”
“The Lady’s Oak,” said Jack. Dufay shot a look at Jack on his most recent circuit, frowned—at the ground this time—and disappeared around the trunk again. “It’s a family legend. Apparently an acorn was planted here by the wife of the first lord to be granted the land, and she asked the tree to grow into a long-lived guardian who would look after the family forever.”
“Oaks grow very old,” said Edwin. He craned up at it and touched the single low branch as thick as a man that looped down nearby. “This one could be several centuries. Or more, or less, if magic went into the life of it. Was she a magician, that woman?”
Jack shrugged. “One assumes so. I can’t even remember her name. Something classical. Phoebe, or Phyllis.”
“Phyllis died for love and became an almond tree,” said Robin. “What’s that look for? I did read Classics at Pembroke, you know.”
“No. No, widdershins on all counts. No magic worth speaking of in an almond. Better to stick with oaks. And you were supposed to guard it, not the other way around.” Dufay’s light, throaty voice came around the tree first, and then he appeared again.
Alan blinked a few times as if that would make sense of what he saw. Was there an illusion there, being perturbed? Nothing melted or wavered. The features were the same, even if their delicacy now looked distinctly feminine. Same eerie height; same layers of flapping, flowing clothes; same yellow-white hair, gleaming like whipped butter in spots where sunlight snuck through the oak’s leaves.
And eyes the exact same heartrending blue as those that stared back at—him? her?—from the face of Jack, who’d turned pale as clean smoke.
“And I’ve never died yet,” said the Lady.
21
It was a long, long conversation.
In fact, it could only be described as a conversation in the loosest sense. The terms shouting match, interrogation, game of riddles, and recitation of a fairy tale were all about as correct as one another. Half of it took place beneath the Lady’s Oak, where the sun was diving slowly down the sky and the wind was picking up, and they probably looked from afar like a raucous picnic crossed with a debate session in Parliament.
The other half of it, at Violet’s insistence once Maud’s teeth began to chatter in the wind, took place in one of the smaller dining rooms in Cheetham Hall. Not because anyone had appetite. Simply so that they could all sit, and the half-complete story could be rapidly recited for the benefit of Lady Cheetham. And then picked up again with a renewed onslaught of questions.
At least Dufay’s oblique and rambling manner of speech began to straighten itself out, as time passed, like someone tumbling back into the lost accent of their youth when encountering it spoken as an adult. Even so: Jack kept losing the thread of things, his mind whiting out, as he stared at her. Dufay’s appearance shifted eye-wateringly between that of a scarecrow carved from a particularly severe turnip and an eerie, wintry almost-beauty. Or perhaps Jack’s nerves were desperately seeking the beauty as a way to cope with the knowledge that a possibly immortal member of the fae was sitting in his house, shedding dirt and grass all over the furnishings, and claiming to be one of his ancestors.
His emotions gave up entirely when Dufay turned to him and said, “So you never bothered to ask what the name Alston means.”
Polly’s hand crept onto his and gripped hard.
A long conversation and a tale like a thorn bush. Some of it had the echo of a half-remembered story from childhood. When all the pieces had been held up to the light, brushed down thoroughly, and put together in a shape that made sense, the Tale of the Three Families and the Last Contract went something like this:
When the land was only slightly younger, and the fae kept one foot of their domain planted here, mortals had a choice. They could draw from the magic that was inherent to all living things, finding more of it in places where the renewing ley lines ran and crossed. Or, if they wished for more magic, or magic directed to a difficult purpose, they could approach a member of the fae and offer to make a bargain. An individual contract. The amount and direction of the magic clearly defined—as well as the cost.
And then the fae announced their decision to withdraw, to move the foothold of their realm into other lands and other worlds, and so one final contract was made.
It was made in silver. Not just any silver, but elf-silver: a piece that was ancient even by fae standards, its origins a story old enough to have shifted several times in the telling. The allstone was split into three objects to symbolise the contract made with the Three Families.
This apparently explained a lot of things that made Edwin very excited, such as why the contract pieces couldn’t be detected by magical means—why they had such an effect on the ley lines—and why they could be so magical in the first place, when usually metal was much harder to imbue with power than something that had once been alive.
The cost of the contract was straightforward. The Three Families would be left with the ability to use this magic, which because of its fae nature would lend itself well to spells based in structure and contract. And in return, they agreed to be leaders of mortals when it came to responsibility towards the land on which they lived. Guardianship and stewardship. That, the fae considered, was what human leaders were for.