A Long Day in Lychford (Lychford #3)(22)

The fairies had been silent. Then they’d just taken another threatening step forward. And those shadows had once again lashed out with a sort of internal visual . . . roar.

“This isn’t happening,” Stewie had whispered beside her. “This is some . . . hallucination!”

“Then we’re all having it,” the bearded boy had whispered. He’d looked to her. “Who are they? What can we do?”

“They won’t even tell us the rules!” the DJ had yelled.

Because, Lizzie had thought, there was something a bit stagey about all this. Was what happened here going to be related back to Finn’s father, the king, as some sort of border incident, perhaps something Finn, as the go-between, should have prevented? The most worrying possibility was that if they were going to be portrayed as an invading horde, then their deaths might be a useful part of that portrayal. Not that the court were ever going to hear their version. Could this incident be used, even, to start a war? That was something the whole human race was unprepared for, never mind the three of them who supposedly guarded Lychford and now had not much in the way of boundaries to help with that.

She spoke up, aware that, following the lad’s lead, more and more of these kids were looking to her. “We need to work out how to get out,” she called to them. “How about we start by backing up to the edge of this?” She pointed to the ground where the circle of woodland soil and mulch around the barn, with trees still standing inside it, was a plain indicator of the area that had been in the knot, now not wrapped back around itself, but obvious against the shining green of fairy grassland.

They ran together, away from the fairies, to the edge of the circle. Lizzie quickly stepped across it. Nothing. There must be a way, a way which would be obvious, probably, from the fairies’ own point of view, because otherwise how could they characterise this as an aggressive action?

She walked round the boundary, the others following her, hoping clearly that at any moment something magical would happen. Stewie was shaking his head, yelling that whoever had done this to him would pay, but the bouncers who’d come with her had serious looks on their faces. Those guys knew when they were in trouble.

Lizzie felt a vibration on her wrist. She looked at her exercise monitor. “Congratulations!” a tiny scrolling text read. “You’ve doubled your target!”

What? But she couldn’t have gone further than . . .

She quickly stepped back over the same spot. Her wrist vibrated again. This time the device was ecstatic with the news that she’d trebled her target. If she did it again, the thing would probably give her the number of the nearest hospital. Whatever else happened to her today, she could die happy in the knowledge that she’d almost certainly beaten every other vicar in the weekly Diocesan Steps League. “Here,” she said. “There’s something wrong with space just here. I think this is the way out.”

They all gathered round, eager and hopeful. But, given that she hadn’t immediately vanished home, what could she do with that knowledge?

*

Judith suddenly realised someone was talking to her, talking to her like she was a bloody idiot. It was Rory Holt. He was staring into her face. “My wife went like this. Couple of years before she passed on. I know there’s no getting through to you, but I have to try. Now’s not the time for you to be away with the fairies.”

Judith bridled at the expression, grabbed his shoulder, and hauled herself to her feet. It wasn’t his words that had brought her back; her brain chemistry had just happened to sway in the right direction. She fought down a tremendous surge of panic. How much smaller had the bubble become? Oh no. Now it was like standing in a greenhouse. The sprites were clustered near them; soon they’d all be crushed into each other. What was the spell she needed to recite to get them out? She was so stressed she still couldn’t think how it started. She reached into the pocket of her cardigan for some more of that dust that would at least let her see the threads here, but she’d thrown it all at Autumn. “Stupid woman,” she whispered. “I’m so stupid!”

“It’s not your fault. It’s that girl who sent us here.” The sprites reacted with sudden light as the wall lurched in on them and Rory followed that with the nastiest words about Autumn that Judith could possibly imagine, all about her colour. “All her fault!” he spat again as the sprites rushed in fear around him. Heaven knew what he could see of them. Judith didn’t want to know.

If it was the end now, Judith realised, she wanted to say summat true. Summat she’d only just started in this moment admitting to herself. “It’s not her fault,” she said, “it’s mine. Mine a long time back. She made one mistake, I did exactly the same, and I was cursed for it, cursed for it so I suffered so long it took its toll on my noggin, and that’s why you’re stuck here, Rory Holt, because I made one mistake, and maybe you made a few too!”

The sprites cried out in light as the roof of the world fell in on them all.

*

Autumn had tried to think as the material that made the borders of the worlds . . . what this place was pretending was that material in order to scare her . . . had flooded over her. But she’d quickly become lost under it, her world just chaos, nothing her flailing hands could grab hold of. No baseline to put her feet on, no rules.

But, she realised, that was what this place was trying to tell her, to scare her with, wasn’t it? There were rules, she just had to dig deep and find them. For the sake not only of herself, but for helpless Marcin, who she could feel as if at a distance, shaking with his own fears. She even had to do it for the sake of that thing that had followed them. She had to do it for the sake of Luke, for everyone who . . . cared about her.