Last Stand in Lychford Read online

  Autumn couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at her boyfriend. “Did you?”

  * * *

  Lizzie had allowed Cummings to lead her to where they could see the vision of Lychford in more detail. She got the feeling she was looking at the equivalent of a tactical map, because in whichever direction she looked, the view obligingly opened up to her extra senses to show whatever was around the corner. It was like a magical Google Street View. It was also, now she could see close up, full of a jumbled mass of letters and numbers, in which she could pick out the odd familiar address. She could see people moving around in the map, too, but they were jumbled masses of information that changed every moment. Elements of who they were were suddenly deemed to be important by the map and leapt out: post sender . . . oh, that person was in the post office. That was how rough the underlying data was. This visual assault of alphabets and number systems must be how magical beings from other realms saw human civilisation, much as Cummings had described it. This display spoke of an attempt to make sense of that jumble. Individual addresses and house names would loom out of it when she turned her attention to them. So this was a very awkward first attempt at getting to grips with the territory Cummings’s side were preparing to attack. Cummings himself must see things more clearly than this, surely? But perhaps that was only when he was in her world. So was this weird world where she’d woken up the headquarters of Cummings’s boss? No. Surely he wouldn’t have brought her there? She tried moving from side to side a little and confirmed what she’d just noticed: there seemed to be a slight disconnect between the view of Lychford and the world where they stood, a gap between the two. “How do I get back home?” she asked, hoping that would sound despairing enough to seem like a real question. Actually, she was hoping he’d tell her more about this display.

  “You can’t get there from here. No more than you could leap into a television and visit Coronation Street. I’ve only put this here for my own convenience, so I can keep track of what’s going on.”

  Ah. That was it. So perhaps the boss, wherever he was, was looking at a bigger version. Lizzie could feel with her extra senses that the vision in front of her was, in some sense, the real Lychford, that what she was seeing were real people in real time. What else could she feel around here? It wasn’t all dull emptiness, was it? Not quite. There was something a way off behind her. It reminded her of . . . what she’d felt on the few occasions she’d been close to the border of the land of fairy. She let her extra senses have a bit of a wander back there. She felt . . . oh. She turned and looked but couldn’t see anything. “Who’s out there?” Again, she hoped she sounded scared. That hardly required method acting.

  Cummings grinned horribly. “Who do you think it is?”

  “Fairies. There are lots of fairies here. Only . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “They’re very quiet. Not entirely here.”

  She looked back to him. He was still smiling. Like he was a quiz show host and she’d just got a correct answer. There was a stillness about what was behind her. That was what she’d felt. If there were fairies here, they didn’t glow with possibility and wonder and scariness like the genuine fairy country on the horizon had, like those fairy warriors that had once threatened her and those lost ravers. It was the same sensation but . . . asleep. Like her own body was supposed to be. While her mind was here. “Your games are pretty meaningless,” said Cummings. “Escape being conceptually impossible, so—”

  Lizzie didn’t hear the end of his sentence. She was already running toward the fairies.

  * * *

  “Daddy . . . sorry, Dad, Father . . .” The being was slowly getting off the table.

  Autumn couldn’t help but wonder if its nakedness was leading to Luke making unfortunate comparisons. “It’s not a contest,” she said to him, without quite meaning to.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Does he need help?”

  “Nothing we could give him,” said Autumn. Luke was, she realised, seeing his first fairy. Because her extra senses were now yelling at her that that was what had formed out of the lump that Judith had left for Sunil.

  “Greetings,” said Luke, going over to awkwardly address the mass of growing flesh. “We are friendly.”

  “Thanks,” said the fairy. “Me too.”

  “Excuse me for asking,” said Autumn, “but why do you think he’s your father?”

  “Sorry.” The slowly forming being said. “Imp . . . imprinting? Is that a word? We just . . . sop up whatever influences are around us when we’re in this state, and I’m not used to being born in the . . . human world, is it? Charming as ever! Small but lovely! Ah, I have a name of my own, there it is. I’m—” He made a long, complicated whistling sound, like a flute doing a particularly complex piece of classical music.

  “Terrific,” said Autumn. “Easy to shout in dangerous situations. I’m going to call you Trill.”

  “Like the bird seed,” said Luke. “A novelty name. We are terrible parents.”

  “So that’ll be my name here,” said Trill. “Thanks for sorting that, Mum.”

  “Please could you stop that?”

  “He said ‘parents,’” said Trill, indicating Luke. “That took my imprinting to maximum.”

  His accent, Autumn realised, and his speech habits, sounded quite a lot like Luke. “Do you know what you are, Trill?”

  “I’m a fairy. In the service of King so-and-so whose name I’m not even going to bother trying to adapt to your senses, because I think I might be offended by what you’d boil it down to.”

  “Would that be the same king who’s the father of Finn?”

  “Finn? Oh. Yes, that’s the name the prince took when he came here.”

  Autumn wondered what long-ago encounter had caused Finn to take that name and sound Irish. But there was no time for that now. “What was that you grew from? Was that your heart?”

  “Might well have been. Thanks for that.” He started to experimentally walk around the room. “The last thing I remember . . . I was in a storm. At the edge of the woods. There was lightning. Oh. I know. A tree fell on me. Right at the border with the human world. I’d just been to visit a lovely English girl.”

  “Maybe some clothes?” suggested Luke.

  “Oh, thank you.”

  Luke’s expression said that he hadn’t expected to be the one to actually provide them, but now the thought had occurred he nodded. “I’ll see what I can find.” And he went to head upstairs.

  “So,” said Autumn, “you don’t remember how you came to be just a heart?”

  “No. But it must be thanks to someone who really knows how my people work. A great deal of magic would be required to save my essence before I popped my clogs.”

  “It might have been my friend Judith who saved you.”

  “If you say so. I gather she’s not here for me to thank?”

  “No. Oh.” Autumn had had a sudden, hopeful thought. She went to a cupboard, opened it, and produced Finn’s head. “Could you perhaps help me with this?”

  Trill yelled and leapt back a few feet. “What the hell? Why have you got the prince’s head in a . . . cupboard?”

  “I didn’t hurt him! I just . . . put him in . . . I’ve been trying to heal him, okay?”

  Trill was now fully formed and not at all gooey anymore and really very naked. He performatively took a deep breath and went to take the head from Autumn. He stopped, obviously realising something. “Oh, this was deliberately done to the prince. Someone wanted to stop him from being healed. I’d heard about it in old stories, but never seen it done. It would take great power to make him grow again. More than it took to keep me safe in the form of a heart.”

  “But it is possible to heal him?”

  “Maybe. Who did this?”

  Autumn did her best to get him up to speed with what they knew about the situation, trying not to look directly at him, or his bits, as she did. He looked pained to hear about it. “Who . . .
who would oppose the king?”

  “If your world is anything like ours, there are a lot of people who’d oppose any sort of inherited monarchical system with a built-in power imbalance.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry,” said Autumn, “just saying.”

  “Our system isn’t like that. You just think it is because you lot copied it off us and filled it up with loads of your own nonsense and basically got it wrong.”

  “Oh, because usually I hear it’s you who copy us.”

  “Over the millennia there’s been a lot of cultural exchange. Both ways. Our king is formed from, influenced by, all our . . . wishes, our desires. He’s an individual fairy, yes, one who’s found at birth, but one who, through his blood, creates and broadcasts a consensus of what our society is. He’s the collective spirit of the fairies.”

  “So fairyland is sort of a democracy?”

  Trill sighed. “You’re still trying to pin your words on us.”

  “I note it’s a king rather than a queen.”

  “I suppose most fairies wanted a father.”

  “And now we’re in the comments section.”

  “There may be some inequalities built into the system. Maybe you caught that from us, maybe the other way around. Mistakes were made. This is literally the first time I’ve thought about this.”

  “Definitely the comments section.” But Autumn decided it was time she let him off the hook, before he decided, in the way fairies often seemed to, that he didn’t owe her any more favours. She took the head back from him, and, more gently than she perhaps would have in other circumstances, returned it to the cupboard. “This accident of yours. What year was . . . ?” She stopped herself, remembering that fairies didn’t have much time for human calendars. “The human world when you visited, what was it like? If Judith saved you, it could be any time in the last few decades.”

  “It had changed a lot since the previous time I’d been here. There were lorries, bicycles, CD players . . .”

  “Can you remember anything from pop culture? Did this girl you were seeing like any music?”

  “Yeah. Something awful. What was it? Oh . . .” Trill tried whistling a few bars of what Autumn swiftly recognised as “Wonderwall” by Oasis.

  “So Judith found you, changed you, saved you, and kept your heart all that time without reviving you. And then she left it to someone else rather than us. Any idea why?”

  “To revive me, you’d need a supply of fairy blood. And she might not have known that’s what you needed. I mean, that’s sort of a secret for us? About the rest, no idea.”

  “So that blue stuff was fairy blood? You’re literally blue-blooded?” Autumn was thinking quickly. “Is it poison to humans?”

  “What? Of course not. We’ve taken on physical aspects of you as well. We couldn’t mate with you and have kids if we were poison, could we?”

  “What are we talking about?” said Luke, coming back in, carrying clothes.

  “Lizzie,” said Autumn. She looked back to Trill. “Our friend got shot with the same stuff you used to revive yourself. You’re sure it’s your everyday fairy blood, that it’s not poisoned for you as well?”

  “I’m fine. That’s all I know.” He took the clothes from Luke and started putting them on.

  “So why did it make Lizzie sick?”

  “It shouldn’t. It should make her feel pretty damn excellent.”

  “Can you do anything to help her?”

  Trill nodded. “I can try. That’ll make us even. And then I should go home and fight for the king. Until that gets dull.”

  * * *

  Lizzie sprinted through the void, making herself not care about falling, wondering every moment if the structure of this world was such that David Cummings could just have it rear up and grab her. But no, this place didn’t feel random like that. It felt organised. Like one of her spreadsheets. Over there was Google Lychford, and this place itself was . . . a storage facility of some kind. Maybe it was just like all the other realities that bordered Lychford, that had existed, according to Cummings, forever, except this one was entered by minds rather than bodies. A sort of dreamland. A tamed and organised one. It certainly felt like she was getting somewhere, not like in one of those dreams where your feet are in treacle. But it was very Cummings to allow her hope in order to dash it away. So Lizzie was keeping all her faith and hope locked inside her.

  She was running toward that low, dull feeling of fairies. As she ran, that feeling resolved itself into lots of individual sources. They were just . . . standing here. And then she could see them. Ahead of her were appearing rows of silent, immobile fairies, warriors and workers, men, women, and children, all of them staring into space, their arms by their sides, as if expecting something that wasn’t arriving. Lizzie slowed to walk through their ranks. There were hundreds of them here, maybe thousands. Row upon row of them went back into the darkness, beyond where she could see. Here was one with a lovely brooch pinning his cloak, here was another with jewellery in her hair that looked too fine to have been spun by human hands. They each still felt unearthly. All of them hit the uncanny valley full on, felt beyond human while toying with the idea of being human. Except that sounded artificial when her experience of fairies was that they somehow felt more authentic than humans did. She wanted to try to wake them, but with the depth of the sleep she could feel here, she knew that would be impossible. Also, frankly, she was scared to. Behind them, further back, she could feel a much bigger source of the same feeling, all concentrated in one place, one body. And with it there was also . . . yeah, there it was, enormous terror. The sort of fear that Autumn had described concerning her own first journey into the land of fairy.

  That would be Finn’s father. That would be their king.

  * * *

  Autumn led the newly clothed Trill into the shop area, where Lizzie lay. The fairy was now dressed in Autumn’s own spare pyjamas, Wellington boots, and a jumper of Luke’s that he’d left in her bedroom. Autumn couldn’t sense the assailants nearby, so maybe she really had banished them from this world, but that didn’t mean there weren’t others. It occurred to her that she’d just discovered one way of getting past the barrier, but it didn’t feel like one where a human would survive the trip. “Hey,” she said to Trill as he bent to examine Lizzie, “do you know where other fairies are? I mean, can you sense them?”

  “Like fae-dar,” suggested Luke.

  “I can when we’re against the background of this world.” Trill seemed to consider, then stood up and turned like a weathervane, pointing. “There are two of them about nine hundred strides away. They feel . . . asleep. They’re heading toward where you used to keep all the . . . magnet . . . stuff, but now it’s all moved?”

  It took Autumn a while and a few more questions to understand that he was talking about “north,” magnetic north having once, in the memory of Trill’s people, approximated to compass north, but now being something more like northwest. What was north of here? Nothing special that she could think of. The “asleep” bit seemed to square with how she’d felt about the assassins. Nine hundred strides, that was . . . actually quite a long way. “Okay, putting that aside for now, what can you do to help my friend?”

  Trill frowned. “I can feel the fairy blood in her. It feels weird. Different. But I don’t know why it’s hurting her. It must have been . . . changed somehow, infected.”

  “But you re-grew yourself using that blood,” said Autumn. “Wouldn’t it have poisoned you too?”

  “I’m sure it would,” said Trill. “But I feel fine.”

  “And if the idea is to poison you two with arrows,” said Luke, “why not just use actual poison rather than altered blood?”

  “No idea. But you know, this stuff is a vital part of all fairies, our connection to the king.” He seemed puzzled by the lack of reaction on their part. “I mean, I can just take it back.”

  They both turned to look at him at once.

  * * *

 
David Cummings once again appeared beside Lizzie, making her jump. “You’re wondering why you’re not staring into space like they are,” he said, continuing the conversation as if no running away had been involved. “So am I. I think it must be because you’re human and they’re not.”

  Lizzie took a couple of steps further along the rows of motionless fairies. “Is there that much difference between us?”

  “We’re trying to keep part of the fairy minds conscious, the part that’s running the belief system we’ve infected them with, so their bodies can work for us. The reasoning part of them is here, the part that responds to personally adapted and endlessly morphing fantasies about freedom and eternal justice is out there in their physical brains. The boss can issue specific commands through the king, but our good fairies are perfectly capable of carrying out the mission without us micromanaging. Human minds are weaker, so you just got knocked out and came here entirely. Note to self: we’ll need to use a smaller dose on the rest of you.”

  “A smaller dose of what?”

  “Fairy blood. As produced by the king. We started out by infecting just a few fairies, whom we’d persuaded to listen to our point of view. They began the civil war in fairy. They infected more and more to their side, which was secretly our side by proxy, until we managed to land a blood arrow on the king, and then, bingo, he broadcasts the infection to the rest, war’s over, we won. A few of the stronger-willed fairies held out, like the prince, Finn. So we hunted those down and finished them off.”

  Lizzie hoped her expression conveyed the disgust and anger she felt. “I know.”

  “Oh, do you think we’re bullying the fairies?” Cummings pointed to the comatose examples around them. “These people, if they can be called that, are by their very nature traitors. They want somebody to love. As I said, they’ve always been soft on humans. As soon as that extra universe sprouted, fairies settled this world, but when you people arrived, they took one look at you and, well, I’d say ‘went native’ but they were the natives. It was Stockholm syndrome, I suppose. They came to identify with their oppressors. Which is a hilarious name for that condition, because let me tell you, the magical races of Stockholm don’t feel that way at all.”