Druids Sword by Sara Douglass Read Free Book Online Page A

into nothingness; fireplaces sat in walls with great chasms plunging just beyond their hearths. Mice nested in the drains, and foxes in the cellars.
    Smudges of soot left over from a disastrous Sunday morning fire in 1917 still besmirched the turrets.
    Once, long, long ago, Copt Hall had lived.
    Now it was a broken shell.
    Once, deer had trodden softly through the gardens.
    Now deer gathered again. One or two at first, moving nervously across the still-gravelled but weedpocked drive. Then two or three more, emerging from the shadows of derelict outhouses. Then a dozen, trotting apprehensively forward from the overgrown Italianate garden at the rear of the hall.
    The night grew even more still than it had been, and the ears of the deer twitched as they stared at the iron gates.
    Then, as one, they started and wheeled away to the right, away from the hall and towards the forest.
    At its edge they stopped, and stared once more to the gates.
    A man stood there. He was dressed in a greatcoat with a military cap pulled down low over his brow, a holdall in his hand.
    He stared at the hall, then took off his cap so that his face became clear in the moonlight.
    The deer, as one, let out a great sigh.
    “Well,” said Stella, sitting herself down in a chair and crossing her elegant legs. She had lit a cigarette and was looking at the others, smoke drifting lazily about her face. “I think that all went rather well.”
    “For gods’ sakes, Stella,” Noah said, “it was awful.”
    “Well, for you maybe,” said Stella, “but then he and I didn’t part on such bad terms in the last life as you and he. What did you think, Grace? Brutus returned. You’re the only one here who hadn’t met him.”
    Grace had her legs curled under her in the chair, and she gave an indifferent shrug in answer to Stella’s question.
    “Are you tired, darling?” Noah said. “Do you want to go to bed?”
    “Oh, Noah,” Stella said, “she’s not a child!”
    Noah flushed, and might have said something, save that Weyland shot her a cautionary look. He poured Grace an inch of whisky and handed her the glass without a word, ran his fingers lightly through his daughter’s loose curls, then went and sat on the sofa, accepting a cigarette from Stella.
    “He’s angry,” Weyland said, as he drew deeply on the cigarette.
    “He’s only just arrived back,” said Silvius. He was now leaning on the mantelpiece over the hearth. “What did you expect? That he’d walk in here, grin easily, and say, ‘All is forgiven and I’m your man’?”
    “I think,” said Harry, “that we should be damned glad he’s back at all. Noah, with all respect for your reasons, you tore his world apart in 1666. Frankly, for decades I was worried that he’d abandoned us so completely we’d never see him again.”
    There was strain in his voice, and for a long moment no one else spoke. For a very long while, no one had expected him back.
    “If he can’t help Grace,” Weyland said very quietly, “then I for one shall wish he had never returned.”
    Jack Skelton walked slowly towards the front door. Rather, he walked towards the gaping hole that had once held the door. He had known about this hall from when he’d been Louis de Silva, transforming into Ringwalker and running the forest paths. Epping Forest was the remnant—the heart—of the great forests that had once covered this land, and Copt Hall itself had been built on a patch of ground where the barriers between the world of the mortal and the world of the Faerie were so thin as to be almost nonexistent.
    Like as not, it was the reason a hall had existed on this site for eight hundred years. It served as agatehouse between worlds, although the majority of the mortal inhabitants of the hall had probably never had any idea of what came and went through door and window, and what wafted through its spaces.
    Jack’s pace slowed even further as he came closer to the hall. He had no idea why it had burned: what had