A Long Day in Lychford (Lychford #3)(21)

“You!” the lead figure bellowed, the word seeming to twist into a translated version as it got to Lizzie’s ear. “This is our land now! You are inside! We want you out!”

*

Rory had been gesturing angrily at the sprites. “You send gods home, or gods get angry, gods strike you down, capeesh?”

Judith had wanted to ask what language, exactly, “capeesh” came from, but she’d suspected he didn’t know. The sprites had been twisting in urgent conference. Rory had kept trying to get through to them on his own, limited, terms.

She’d been hoping the sprites might offer her some power she could use to get out of here. She’d been putting that off until she absolutely had to do it, because, though the spell she had to cast was clear in her head, she was terribly afraid of how much of her strength it would use. But no, these poor things could barely feed themselves, and no other solution was going to present itself, and she was feeling weaker rather than stronger, so . . .

What had she been thinking about? She put a hand to her brow.

Why had she been hoping the . . . whatever they were called . . . why had she been . . . ?

Oh God. Oh God. What were all these . . . things?! Where was she? Was she having a nightmare? Who was this old man? Where was her family? “Dad?!” she called out. Was this Dad? No, he didn’t look anything like . . . but what did Dad look like? She should be able to remember!

The old man was looking at her in horror.

*

Autumn had heaved her way through a glowing web of colour, rushing through it, grab and run, grab and run, one-handed, holding Marcin with the other, pushing all her rage and frustration into just getting past something she could finally connect with, something she could finally . . . rip through!

And then she was through it.

She stumbled out onto a . . . grey, empty expanse. She looked around. It wasn’t quite a world. Distant . . . mountains? No, they faded again. They kind of shied away. It was like they were asking if she wanted to have mountains there, and when she’d mentally questioned that, they’d shyly retreated.

Marcin was gasping. She looked to him. He was looking round in horror. “Work,” he said. “Work, all, nothing else, all life.” She had no idea what his eyes were seeing. The expression on his face was that of someone who was in their own personal . . .

Suddenly, walls sprang up around them. Bare walls with peeling paintwork, a smell of stale beer that made her once again want to vomit, a bar overflowing with ale pump signs for unreal brands all about bulldogs and Spitfires, and everywhere around her, Union flags and the cross of Saint George, and red, white, and blue bunting and suddenly hemming them in on every side, fat, white men in Union Jack waistcoats, wearing flat caps, laughing their heads off as they chinked their handled beer mugs together, the foam splashing over her in great waves. Their laughter urged her to join in, join in, join in.

She pulled Marcin, who was looking up and down at where to her there were gaps, seemingly in an entirely different world, to the door. She flung it open, but outside there was just more of the same. A television was on in here, and an ecstatic posh-voiced commentator was shouting, “It’s us against the world now! The sun will never set on the land of hope and glory!”

Autumn slammed the door. She mustn’t lose control. She had to think. That moment of mountains had been this place sizing her up, testing out her mind before finding out what sort of world she didn’t want to be in and then flinging it at her. This was . . . oh God, this was actually hell, right? For anyone who came here. A hell, anyway. But how could there ever be anything more definitively hellish than torments that immediately suited themselves to you personally?

She looked back to the exact place they’d been when they entered, and now, to her shock, a new figure was squeezing its way through the laughing men, the thin white shadow that had pursued her earlier. It must have been so close behind them it had come here, too. It was cringing, its fingers clenching and unclenching, staggering, spinning around as if looking for release.

Oh God. It was suffering in its own private hell too. Whatever surrealism that involved, Autumn couldn’t imagine.

She gathered all her courage, and heaved Marcin along to stumble toward it. Okay, it was time to make use of the rage she felt at everything that was crowding in around her here. She concentrated again on seeing the threads that underlay everything, while she still could, and sure enough, there they were, and seeing them made her stop in shock for a moment. Here they’d been twisted into a web that looked expertly woven, that wrapped round the heads of all three of them, that looked like they were the captives of some enormous . . .

She locked away that thought before this world realised how terrifying it was and made the fear real. She grabbed the threads and heaved.

And heaved . . . and heaved . . . and now she was simply pulling more and more of the stuff out of the air, building it up around her, wrapping it around her, trapping them more and more every second, and now it was billowing out of where she was pulling it, uncontrollably, and she realised that this place had latched on to that part of her fear too.

*

“Okay!” Lizzie had shouted to the leader of the fairies. “We’re all for that! We want to get out and get back to our world as soon as possible!” Because, after all, this wasn’t usually the problem with humans and fairies. The problem was usually that the fairies wanted the humans to stay. “But how do we do that?”