“Well, it is not as if you have not earned a half holiday and more,” she replied, taking his hand in hers, and holding it against her cheek for a moment, then letting it go.
“And so have you. We are having tea on the terrace, away from the children, and then we are going for a walk on the grounds, you and I and no one else. And we are going to talk of nothing but commonplaces.” He bestowed a look on her that told her he was accepting no arguments. But then, she was not inclined to give him one.
By dinnertime all was back to normal, except that she felt as rejuvenated by the afternoon as if she had spent a week at the seaside. Her good humor spread among the children; for once there were no quarrels, no outbursts of temper, scarcely even a raised voice when there was contention over the last jam tart. That pirate of a raven, Neville, was on his best behavior, and Sarah’s parrot Grey did not even indulge herself in her own favorite bit of mischief of sorting through the bits in her cup and dropping what she didn’t care to eat on the floor.
The children went off to baths and bed with scarcely a moment of fuss. The youngest, now at the “escape from the bath and run through the halls naked, shrieking,” stage, for once did not indulge themselves. It was the perfect ending to a perfect day.
Until, as the oldest were settled into their beds, and Isabelle finished the rounds of “good night hugs,” she and Frederick stepped out onto the terrace—
—and the perfect day shattered.
One moment, they were holding hands, gazing at the stars and listening to the nightingales and the occasional call of an owl.
The next, they were clutching each other, half-deafened by the thunderclap, half-blinded by the lightning bolt that had delivered Robin Goodfellow to the foot of the terrace. A very angry Robin Goodfellow, who was nothing like the merry lad who had strutted his way across their improvised stage, playing himself with gusto and glee.
No, this was a tall and terrible creature, dressed head to toe in black, features inhumanly sharp and feral, with a face full of wrath and a sword in his hand.
“Woe be unto ye, son of Adam and daughter of Eve!” he cried, in a voice that echoed hollowly. “Your friend would not heed my warning, nor thine, Eve’s daughter, and he and his leman seek to unleash that which has no place here!”
And with another bolt of fire and explosion of thunder he was gone. But a cold, angry wind sprang up in his wake, sending storm clouds racing from east to west, plastering Isabelle’s gown to her legs.
“—what—” Frederick began, having to shout to make himself heard over the tempest.
But Isabelle had no doubts. “Alderscroft,” she shouted back. “David Alderscroft is—invoking something. I don’t know what, but—”
“But we need to put a stop to it,” Frederick shouted back, and as one they turned—
To find Nan and Sarah behind them, birds crouched down on their shoulders against the wind—and behind them, Agansing, Karamjit, and Selim.
The girls both wore expressions of fierce determination, and faintly glowing auras that looked incongruous on two youngsters dressed in schoolgirl pinafores.
Isabelle’s entire nature went into revolt at the sight of the children. Whatever needed confronting, they had no place there!
The three men were overlaid with their aspects of Warriors of the Light; Agansing in the garb of the Gurkha, enormous kukri at his belt, Karamjit in the tunic and turban and bearing the sword of the Sikh fighter, and Selim, also in turban and tunic, but with a spear to Karamjit’s curved sword.
“The avalanche has begun, Mem’sab,” Agansing said, eyes glinting. “It is too late to make a choice among what will fall. The children summoned us; they in their turn were summoned.”
Isabelle looked down at the girls, and her heart sank.
Agansing was right as often as “Doomsday” was wrong.
***
Nan was dead asleep one moment, and wide awake in the next.
She woke with the absolute certainty that something was horribly wrong. It was like the same feeling she’d had back in Berkeley Square, though different in that the threat was not directed at her or at Sarah. But a threat there was, a deadly one, and she had to meet it. She glanced up at Neville’s perch above her bed to see the raven looking down at her. She felt him in her head, calling something; felt that “something” waking up.
She leaped out of bed, to find Sarah also scrambling up.
“Wot is it?” she asked, feeling shaky and scared, but also, another part of her, galvanized and energized and—eager?
“Don’t know,” Sarah replied, pulling her dress over her head, “—but it’s—”
“Bad!” Grey cried, every feather sticking out so she looked like a gray pinecone. “Bad, bad, bad!”
That was all she had time for when the whole building shook beneath a cannonade of thunder.
And it was as if some uncanny telegraph connected them, for the same information flashed into both their minds.
“Robin!” cried Sarah, and “Puck!” shouted Nan at the same time, while Neville called alarm and Grey uttered a high-pitched, growling shriek.
“He’s angry!” Sarah added, her face white in the light of the candle Nan lit.
“He’s more’n that,” she said grimly. “He’s gone for killin’.”
Difficult as it was to imagine friendly, funny Robin Goodfellow prepared to kill something, she had no doubt in her mind at all that this was what he was prepared to do. And she also had no doubt in her mind that it was her job to prevent it, if she could.
And not just for the sake of the potential victim, either—
“Oh, Nan—” Sarah turned round eyes on her. “If he does that—”
Nan nodded. She knew, and knew that somehow the knowledge came through Neville, that if Robin Goodfellow, the Guardian of Logres, was to spill human blood, he would be banished from the Isle for all time. And if that happened—much, if not all, of the magic would go with him. She sensed a future stretching out from that moment, bleak and gray and joyless, and shuddered.
Around them, the other children, startled out of sleep by the thunder, were calling out, the babies crying. The ayahs were busy calming them, and no one paid any attention as Nan and Sarah, with Neville and Grey clutching their shoulders, slipped out and downstairs.
No one that is, until they ran right into Agansing, Karamjit, and Selim.
A wave of dismay swept through Nan as she winced back, sure that she and Sarah were going to be rounded up and sent back upstairs.
But instead, Agansing held up his hand and peered at them. That was when Nan realized there was a kind of ghostly, glowing “other” version of Agansing superimposed on the everyday fellow.
“We will need these fellow Warriors, my brothers,” he said solemnly. Karamjit peered at them and nodded. Selim sighed with resignation.
“I bow to your superior experience, brother,” Selim said reluctantly. “But I cannot like it. They are too young.”
“Younger than they have taken up arms, and they have unique weapons none of us can wield,” Agansing replied, and turned to Nan. “We go to join Sahib and Mem’sab. We are needed.”
“Yessir,” she said, feeling oddly as if she ought to be saluting.
All of them moved swiftly in a group to the doors leading onto the terrace, the two girls having to trot to keep up. A vicious wind howled around the windows, and in lightning flashes from outside it was obvious there was a storm raging—wind, but no rain as yet.