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This was written (somewhat hastily) for a prompt on the kink meme, which I have just discovered and which makes me very happy. This was possibly not exactly to the prompt, as I never got as far as the Raven King's return, but I hope it's not too far wrong.
Title: The King's Roads
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (TV)
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Emma Pole, John Segundus, Stephen Black, John Childermass, Arabella Strange, Mr Honeyfoot, Vinculus, Colquhoun Grant, Walter Pole, mention of Jonathan Strange, Gilbert Norrell, the Raven King, original faeries, original monsters
Summary: More than magic has come through the mirrors, and England has fallen to terror and ruin in the spaces between the worlds. In Last Hope, the last free citadel in the North, the survivors search for some means to push back the monstrous armies, and may have found it in the charnel house that was once London
Wordcount: 4540
Warnings/Notes: Post-Canon, Future Fic, Post Apocalypse, Dimensional Shifting, Magic, Plague, Demons, Monsters, Undead, Safe Places, Sieges, Last Cities, Spies, Magicians, Team, Hope, Hopeful Ending
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: The King's Roads
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (TV)
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Emma Pole, John Segundus, Stephen Black, John Childermass, Arabella Strange, Mr Honeyfoot, Vinculus, Colquhoun Grant, Walter Pole, mention of Jonathan Strange, Gilbert Norrell, the Raven King, original faeries, original monsters
Summary: More than magic has come through the mirrors, and England has fallen to terror and ruin in the spaces between the worlds. In Last Hope, the last free citadel in the North, the survivors search for some means to push back the monstrous armies, and may have found it in the charnel house that was once London
Wordcount: 4540
Warnings/Notes: Post-Canon, Future Fic, Post Apocalypse, Dimensional Shifting, Magic, Plague, Demons, Monsters, Undead, Safe Places, Sieges, Last Cities, Spies, Magicians, Team, Hope, Hopeful Ending
Disclaimer: Not mine
The King's Roads
All of Man’s works, all his cities, all his empires, all his monuments will one day crumble to dust. Even the houses of my own dear readers must –though it be for just one day, one hour be ruined and become houses where the stones are mortared with moonlight, windowed with starlight and furnished with the dusty wind. It is said that in that day, in that hour, our houses become the possessions of the Raven King. Though we bewail the end of English magic and say it is long gone from us and inquire of each other how it was possible that we came to lose something so precious, let us not forget that it also waits for us at England's end and one day we will no more be able to escape the Raven King than, in this present Age, we can bring him back.
The King's Roads
When the mirrors of England were broken, when the King's Roads were opened once more, it was more than magic that came flooding back into the realm. It was more than magic, too, that was pulled the other way, out beyond the veil. For the Raven King had conquered in more than Faerie, and it was more than Faerie to which his Roads travelled, and there were things beyond the reaches of them that stewed in bitter hatred for all that he had wrought. When England's mirrors were broken, and England's borders laid open, and the Raven King himself still nowhere to be found, those things saw that opportunity had come. They realised that here was an opening, and here was a gate, and here was vengeance close at hand.
And so they came. Demons and monsters and stranger, alien things. They came from the lost spaces beyond the King's Roads, and they drew their death and their decay behind them. Indeed, they sent it ahead of them, for it was their decay that England knew first, long before it realised what they were or why they had come.
It began as a plague. An illness, spread from the King's Roads, creeping out from shattered mirrors all across the kingdom and striking down all who came across it. Where its victims fell, the veil grew thin, and houses, villages, towns and cities began to fall between the worlds. The King's Roads came to England, and England fell to the King's Roads. She became a wasteland, caught between many worlds, a spiderweb of decay and horror in which death and disease plied their trades at leisure. England's fields became graveyards, her towns charnel houses, her roads webs of magic, all of them fading between one world and the next such that at any moment one might walk from sunshine into horror, and never see it coming. England fell. Almost all at once, within only months, England fell, and there were none who knew to stop it.
And then, when all the realm was cut off from the outside world, when England lay wholly caged between the realms, a ravaged wasteland of decay ripe for the plucking, then the monsters came. Then they marched, to finally ensure their victory and their vengeance, and fell upon that which their old enemy had loved. Their armies crossed the blackest portions of the King's Roads, crawled out of an endless night, and came to finish what their plague had not.
They did not, however, come wholly unopposed. Though their power had been too great to halt, and their plague too sudden to understand, England had regained her magic before they struck. England had fought by magic first, for the first time in three hundred years, and she was not wholly as defenceless as she seemed. In the midst of her sudden horror, there were those who tried to stem the tide and, when they realised that they could not, who tried to save whoever they could, and make a safe space for them to dwell.
The greatest of these champions was a faerie king. Not the Raven King, who to the rage and the dismay of many had not yet come to England's aid. This man, who had once called London his home, had only newly come into his power and his kingdom. A man of duty and regard, he came to England's side as soon as he perceived her distress. He stretched his faerie realm across the North, used it to bind the land to faerie instead of the spaces between worlds, and laid his protection across all that he had power to reach. He sent out word, to those magicians and champions yet remaining in England, to bring survivors to him, that they might be sheltered behind his walls and shielded by his power. Though he was not the Raven King, by the time the monsters came he was King in the North, and king of all that remained of England.
And so Lost Hope became Last Hope, the Great Redoubt, the Silver Citadel of England Remaining. So Stephen Black became a king in either world, and held the last of England's survivors safe within his power.
Yet he was a new king still. Even with those faerie kingdoms that had become his, he was not a powerful king. Not as Faerie measured such things, not as Hell measured them, not as the worlds beyond the King's Roads measured them. Not as the monsters, those creeping authors of decay, had measured them. So they came for him. So their armies came, marched from blackest night unto his door, and the darkness laid siege to all that was left of England.
And within the walls of Last Hope, in the face of all despair, those champions yet remaining began to search desperately for some means of driving them back.
---
"Where is he? He's never been this late before. Not unless something's happened. Did something happen? Do you think something happened? Where is he?"
Emma Wintertowne watched John Segundus as he paced in flurried agitation around the Council Chamber. In truth, the room was more in the way of an informal meeting room, looking more like a strange combination of an English parlour and Faerie court than anything else, but they'd found that people clung to formality in distress. The population sheltered in Last Hope preferred to think of it as a Council Chamber, and so a Council Chamber it had become. Although, at present, it was mostly an obstacle course for one very tired, very stressed magician, and a theatre for those who must perforce watch over him.
She looked around at them. Stephen, sitting exhaustedly by the fire with all his weary dignity, the prophet Vinculus sprawled on the hearth rug at his feet. Arabella, John's partner in scrying, who stood by the bookshelves and wrung her hands in sympathy as she watched him, Mr Honeyfoot at her side in equal distress. Sir Walter Pole, Emma's erstwhile husband, erstwhile Government Minister, and now advisor to the King of England Remaining, who had seated himself at one of the small tables and seemed to be trying not to be noticed. Thistlewitch, a faerie of what had been Lost Hope, now Stephen's seneschal, who seemed to regard John's distress with some distant bemusement. And herself, standing guard beside the door, her bandolier of pistols hung across her shoulder even now.
They were an odd group, she supposed. A desperate scattering of faeries, magicians, kings and scholars, survivors of the return of England's magic, and now most of those who held what was left of her together. Or most of those who tried, anyway. There was a face missing, now. There was someone missing, and it was they who drove John's dismay. Childermass had not returned from his mission beyond Last Hope's walls, many days after he had been due, and no-one much was taking it well. John Segundus, very obviously, least of all.
"He shouldn't have gone alone," the magician said, stopping suddenly in front of Stephen, staring down at him desperately. Stephen looked back with weary pity, and John held out his living hand as though pleading with him. "Stephen. We shouldn't have sent him alone. Anything could happen out there. All of us know it. Why did we send him alone?"
Stephen's eyes closed, etched lines of pain and worry creasing the skin around them, and abruptly Emma had had enough. She understood John's worry and anger, she did, but she would not stand to see it directed at Stephen. He didn't need it, nor did he deserve it, and certainly not on Childermass' account. That man did just about everything in his own time, and if anyone was responsible for his delay, it was almost certainly himself. John should know that. By now, there was not a one of them there who should not.
"Oh, don't be ridiculous, John!" she said, rather loudly if Arabella's little squeak was anything to judge by. Segundus turned to her, wilting a little under her stern gaze, but he was too distressed to back down completely. Emma stalked forwards, glaring at him, and he glared back.
"It's not ridiculous!" he said, standing firm before her, both his hands held trembling at his sides. Well, the living hand trembled. The silver-and-leather one merely shook vaguely with the tremors in his arm. "You know what's out there, my Lady. What if he ran afoul of one of their patrols? Or if he stumbled into one of the Hollows and can't get out? What if ... what if ..."
He stuttered to a stop, his face going stiff and white with fear. What if. They all knew what if. There were a thousand of them, and in some places death only the least. A man, a living man abroad in the horror that England had become, might stumble onto any number of terrible fates, and no-one who loved him any the wiser. If Childermass was dead, if he had died in the wrong place or realm, then none of them would ever know about it. He would simply not come back, now or ever. He would be gone, and there would be nothing any of them could do about it.
That had always been true, though. From the moment England had started falling between the worlds, after the plague had hit, there had been no safe way to try and cross it. Anyone who had fought their way across country to Last Hope had found that out. They all knew, and they had all known when Childermass set out. Anyone who went out into the darkness knew what risks they took. That was why it had been him. Because Childermass, of all of them, was the most likely to take those risks in stride.
"... We had to send him alone, John," she said, somewhat more gently. He shook in front of her, her brave and terrified magician, and she wished so dearly that she might be gentle with him. He had to listen, though. He had to be made to listen. "Childermass walks in shadows. He's the best of any of us at illusions and secrecy. He's the one with the best chance of making it through. You know that. You have to remember it. There was a reason we sent him out alone."
"I know that," he said. He looked away. He bit his lip and looked down at the carpet, raising his living hand to wipe shakily at his mouth. "I know, my Lady. I do. But he's not ... He's not invincible. The magic affects him almost as badly as it does me, and you know how that ended!" He held up his false hand, a mute and explicit testimony. "If I had been alone, I wouldn't have survived. If Mr Honeyfoot had not dragged me from the spell's reach, I should have lost a great deal more than my arm. Who is ... Who is going to drag him out, should one befall him?"
There wasn't really an answer to that. Not a good one, anyway. None of them were easy with sacrificing even one life to save many, and Emma less than most, given her own experiences. She met John's eyes, the helpless pain in them, and struggled for an answer.
Stephen did not. He did not look at them, speaking mostly to the fire, but speak he did. Soft, and quiet, and somehow all of them found themselves listening.
"He asked for no-one," the King of Last Hope said, staring blindly into the flames. "He said it was an effort for him to mask other presences besides his own, and that he would need all his focus for himself. He could travel by himself in shadows, or with a larger group openly across the King's Roads, but only one or the other." He looked up, and his weariness really was plain for all to see. "There was no group we might have sent that would have survived open travel. Not with their armies so close at hand. We can send spies and thieves to sneak around them, but any small force we might send in the open would be destroyed completely, and we do not have a larger one. All my fairies must pour their energies into maintaining Last Hope. He said he would take none or all, John. I could only offer none. I'm sorry."
... That was not entirely true, Emma thought. Oh, that Childermass had said it, she had no doubt, or that Stephen had made the choice he had been offered, as little as he had wanted to. All of that she believed. It was that Childermass would really have found it so impossible to mask a companion that she doubted. He could have. She was almost sure of that.
It was just that the only people he would have trusted enough to watch his back were in this room, and there were none of them that he would willingly take into such dangers as awaited him. How could he? John had almost died the last time he had ventured out there. Arabella and Mr Honeyfoot were tougher now than they had once been, but they were not suited to combat should it come. Neither Stephen nor Vinculus could be allowed to fall into enemy hands. That left only herself as even a possible companion, and their relationship was ... tempestuous still. In that sense, at least, she would have caused him effort in his magic, distraction. He walked into untold danger. Distraction was something he could not at all afford.
So he had gone alone, by his own choice. He had walked beyond the reach of Stephen's protection, slipped through shadows into darkness and madness in an effort to see how great they were and what remained that might waylay them, and now he was late. Now he was late by two days, and there was nothing any of them could do about it.
In front of her, in the wake of Stephen's visible pain and Childermass' own determination, John Segundus wilted completely. He bowed his head, and she could see tears pressed desperately behind his eyelids. She couldn't bear them, and went the last steps to stand before him, to pull him to her arms and cradle him as he wept. In the silence of her mind, she cursed John Childermass for being the only magician among them with both the skill and the determination to be their spy. John could ill-afford to lose him. None of them could afford to lose him, not in their hearts. Yet he was the only one with power to go that would not cause Last Hope to fail should he be taken. He was, in effect, the only one expendable enough for the job.
"If only we had an army," she whispered viciously, holding her magician close. "Or those great and powerful magicians of legend. Or the thrice bedamned Raven King, for that matter! If only we had means to fight them. Magic is not worth the ruin of all. If it had to come back, bringing ruin behind it, it might at least have brought a solution also!"
"... Funny you should mention that," said a voice from somewhere behind her, a voice that had not been there a moment ago, and Emma had spun to face it even as it spoke, a pistol primed in her hand and John Segundus held securely behind her. She pointed her pistol at a patch of empty air in the shadows of the eastern bookshelves, and watched as a figure resolved itself from out of them. Battered, singed, and with something that might have been blood on his boots and smeared across his coat, but seemingly whole. Seemingly safe.
"Childermass!" John cried behind her, the moment the man became clear, shock and desperate relief in his voice. The rest of the room had stood in the same moment, and Emma knew there would be that same relief on every face around her. For her part, though, there was mostly anger. Relief, yes, even joy, but also anger. How damned long had he been standing there?! How long had he been listening to them mourn?! God damned magician!
He raised an eyebrow at her. Childermass. He cocked a brow at the pistol staring him in the face, a wealth of weary amusement and perhaps even some shadow of remorse in his expression, and spread his hands placatingly towards her.
"I should be grateful if you would not fire that, my Lady," he said, with a rueful smile tucked in the corner of his mouth. "Once between us was enough, do you not think?"
Emma snarled at him. "If you do not wish to be shot," she growled, "then you should enter a room normally, and announce yourself as you do so! You should not sneak into shadows and listen to the distress of others and speak only when it is your desire! If you would have me put this pistol down, then you will make a note of that for the future, and make a promise to me in good faith. Do I make myself clear?!"
He blinked. He was very pale, she noticed absently, exhausted and slightly hunched. He was not well, for all that it seemed he was not dying. He did not flinch from her, however, and neither did she from him. That much, at least, they would always grant each other now.
"... Forgive me, Lady Wintertowne," he said at last, and inclined his head stiffly in her direction. Stiff from pain, she thought, not reluctance. "You are correct, of course, and I am sorry. Shadows have become my habit, and I could not think of a correct moment to lower them until just now. It was wrong of me to leave you in distress, and I apologise for it, to all of you. I shall do differently next time."
He met her eyes, held them across the barrel of the gun, and there was such exhausted sincerity in them that Emma could not keep her anger. It had been a dirty trick. He should not have stood there and let them think him dead for even a moment longer than necessary. Yet he was tired, she could see it, and he had spent three weeks sneaking from shadow to shadow while avoiding every horror that the outside world had to offer. He might truly have forgotten how to lower them, she thought. A person might forget a great many things, in that wasteland. She could not keep a grudge against him for that.
So she did not. She lowered and holstered her pistol, and took such steps forward as were necessary to stand before him. He watched her warily, the whole room watched her warily, but she only looked up at him and held out an imperious hand.
"Come sit down," she said, as welcoming as she ever was with him, and even as she said it she saw relief soften the line of his shoulders, and exhaustion come only more visibly to the fore. She took his hand, gloved and filthy in her own, and tugged him gently towards the nearest chair. "How dead are you? Do you need one of Stephen's fairy healers?"
He blinked up at her, much bemused, and then he smiled faintly. "No," he said, shaking his head carefully. He pulled his hand from hers, not without pressing her fingers gently in gratitude, and reached up to shove dust-covered hair from his eyes. "There's naught wrong with me that some time to rest won't cure. That's the least of concerns now, though. I have news, my lady. Your majesty. I have what may be some very good news indeed."
They looked at each other. All of them. Stephen looked warily hopeful, Walter alarmed and interested, Thistlewitch curious, John and Arabella and Mr Honeyfoot mostly too relieved to be worried. Vinculus she could not interpret at all. Yet they all looked at each other, and Emma thought there was something of the same cautious optimism and latent dread in all of them.
"Well?" she said after a moment, when nobody else seemed about to. She looked down at Childermass, since she yet stood above him, and gestured impatiently for him to continue. "Are you going to give us this news, or would you prefer that we guessed?"
He blinked again, a flash of startled humour, and then he shook his head. He turned away from her slightly, waving his hand back towards the shadows he had emerged from, and when he looked back there was weary mischief in his gaze once more.
"How about I show you instead?" he said quietly, and behind him a creature emerged from his shadows. A man, or what had once been one. A handsome man in a British Army uniform, now gaunt and bearing that translucent complexion that marked him as the undead. They had seen a few of those on their fraught journey to Last Hope. This one did not seem like the others, though. He looked less degraded, less corrupt. When he looked at them, he seemed ... still sentient. Still knowledgeable of who he had once been, and what he now was. He moved with a careful soldier's gait into the room, and they might not have immediately known what to make of him had Arabella not gasped in sudden recognition.
"Major Grant!" she cried, moving forward to join Emma in the centre of the room. "Oh, but ... But you were lost, sir. I thought you fell in London, when the plague first came!"
Major Grant, since that was apparently who he was, shared a brief and wary glance with Childermass, but turned to bow to Arabella in recognition almost immediately. He smiled crookedly as he straightened, and nodded to confirm her statements.
"I was, Mrs Strange. I was killed, along with a great many others. I would be dead still, were it not ..." He paused, struggled, and then forged ahead. "Things have changed in London, ma'am. A great deal. Your ... Merlin has returned to us, you see. Merlin came and brought us back."
They blinked at him, none of them quite understanding. "Merlin?" Stephen asked cautiously. "You mean King Arthur's magician?" Grant did not answer him, though. Grant had eyes only for Arabella, and the look of dawning shock and understanding in her eyes.
"... Jonathan?" she asked, very quietly, not quite daring to be hopeful. "You mean that Jonathan has ...?"
"Aye," said Childermass, with a certain tired satisfaction. "And Norrell too. It would seem that their Dark Tower has finally wandered back our way. England shall have her great magicians once again, or some of them at least. And since your husband seems to have taken a turn for the necromantic in the process, Mrs Strange, we may have an army out of it as well. There are enough corpses in what is left of England to match any horde out of the darkness, and Strange brought Wellington back first. If they can pull something together between them, then we may have means to drive the demons back from Last Hope yet."
Emma sat down. Slowly, carefully, she pulled the chair beside him and sat down in it. Around her, she saw the others grip the backs of chairs or sink down onto the carpet themselves. An army. An army, and magicians of enough power to do more than sneak off into almost certain death. That was ... God. That was hope, more of it than any of them had dared to entertain in such a very long time. Even if it was Strange, even if it was Norrell, it was still ...
"We could break the siege?" John asked, very carefully and very quietly from where he had sat down almost at Emma's feet. It was Childermass he looked towards, though, in bleak and desperate hope. "Childermass. Do you think we could break it?"
Their spy stared down at him. For a moment, something very black and fierce altogether crossed his features, a hard and bitter determination in a thin face. Childermass met his gaze with eyes that had seen all the very worst of what England had become, and in that expression there was not a single inch of surrender. It was not a comforting expression. It was not gentle at all. Emma did not wish it to be. It was a wild face. It promised blood and war and magic, it promised victory whatever the cost and never a hope of surrender, and since those years she had spent a helpless slave, there was no expression that might comfort her more, and no promise that might better reassure her. Victory or death, victory in death, and never more to bow to an enemy's whims. Yes. She would have that promise above all others. It suited her very well indeed, and not only her.
"We will break it," Childermass said, soft and vicious in the Council Chamber of Last Hope. "We will break their siege, and drive them back from the lands that are not theirs, and we will show them the price for having ruined them. This land belongs to the Raven King, this land is none of theirs and we shall show them what it costs to have taken it. When our King returns, when he bloody gets up off his arse and comes back to us, he will not find his lands infested by those things. I'll not allow it. I'll be damned first."
... Not how she would have put it, Emma thought absently. She had no care for the Raven King herself, not even the somewhat embittered, tarnished care that Childermass and Vinculus still kept. He had gone, and he had not come back even as England was torn apart, and she could not be moved to care for him at all. She would not begrudge him as Childermass' motive, though. Whatever the man needed to keep himself fighting, he could have, and with her blessing. For the ferocity in his voice, for the determination that had let him walk alone through tortured paths to the charnel house of London and back again, bringing some measure of hope along beside him, he could have any damned thing he pleased.
And he was not wrong, she thought. Whatever his motives, he was not wrong in his determination to fight. Looking around her, looking at Stephen and Arabella and Vinculus and desperate John Segundus, looking at every grim and determined face that remained in England, she knew that Childermass was not wrong.
The siege would be broken. They would have only ruins left in its wake, but they would be clean ruins, they would be English ruins, and none of the creatures that had ravished them would be left to look upon them. That was a thing worth fighting for. That, before all else, was a promise Emma Wintertowne thought worth keeping.
Well then, she thought. Let them come. Let all of them be damned and come to die. The darkness would find no surrender here.
Not now, and not ever.
All of Man’s works, all his cities, all his empires, all his monuments will one day crumble to dust. Even the houses of my own dear readers must –though it be for just one day, one hour be ruined and become houses where the stones are mortared with moonlight, windowed with starlight and furnished with the dusty wind. It is said that in that day, in that hour, our houses become the possessions of the Raven King. Though we bewail the end of English magic and say it is long gone from us and inquire of each other how it was possible that we came to lose something so precious, let us not forget that it also waits for us at England's end and one day we will no more be able to escape the Raven King than, in this present Age, we can bring him back.
The King's Roads
When the mirrors of England were broken, when the King's Roads were opened once more, it was more than magic that came flooding back into the realm. It was more than magic, too, that was pulled the other way, out beyond the veil. For the Raven King had conquered in more than Faerie, and it was more than Faerie to which his Roads travelled, and there were things beyond the reaches of them that stewed in bitter hatred for all that he had wrought. When England's mirrors were broken, and England's borders laid open, and the Raven King himself still nowhere to be found, those things saw that opportunity had come. They realised that here was an opening, and here was a gate, and here was vengeance close at hand.
And so they came. Demons and monsters and stranger, alien things. They came from the lost spaces beyond the King's Roads, and they drew their death and their decay behind them. Indeed, they sent it ahead of them, for it was their decay that England knew first, long before it realised what they were or why they had come.
It began as a plague. An illness, spread from the King's Roads, creeping out from shattered mirrors all across the kingdom and striking down all who came across it. Where its victims fell, the veil grew thin, and houses, villages, towns and cities began to fall between the worlds. The King's Roads came to England, and England fell to the King's Roads. She became a wasteland, caught between many worlds, a spiderweb of decay and horror in which death and disease plied their trades at leisure. England's fields became graveyards, her towns charnel houses, her roads webs of magic, all of them fading between one world and the next such that at any moment one might walk from sunshine into horror, and never see it coming. England fell. Almost all at once, within only months, England fell, and there were none who knew to stop it.
And then, when all the realm was cut off from the outside world, when England lay wholly caged between the realms, a ravaged wasteland of decay ripe for the plucking, then the monsters came. Then they marched, to finally ensure their victory and their vengeance, and fell upon that which their old enemy had loved. Their armies crossed the blackest portions of the King's Roads, crawled out of an endless night, and came to finish what their plague had not.
They did not, however, come wholly unopposed. Though their power had been too great to halt, and their plague too sudden to understand, England had regained her magic before they struck. England had fought by magic first, for the first time in three hundred years, and she was not wholly as defenceless as she seemed. In the midst of her sudden horror, there were those who tried to stem the tide and, when they realised that they could not, who tried to save whoever they could, and make a safe space for them to dwell.
The greatest of these champions was a faerie king. Not the Raven King, who to the rage and the dismay of many had not yet come to England's aid. This man, who had once called London his home, had only newly come into his power and his kingdom. A man of duty and regard, he came to England's side as soon as he perceived her distress. He stretched his faerie realm across the North, used it to bind the land to faerie instead of the spaces between worlds, and laid his protection across all that he had power to reach. He sent out word, to those magicians and champions yet remaining in England, to bring survivors to him, that they might be sheltered behind his walls and shielded by his power. Though he was not the Raven King, by the time the monsters came he was King in the North, and king of all that remained of England.
And so Lost Hope became Last Hope, the Great Redoubt, the Silver Citadel of England Remaining. So Stephen Black became a king in either world, and held the last of England's survivors safe within his power.
Yet he was a new king still. Even with those faerie kingdoms that had become his, he was not a powerful king. Not as Faerie measured such things, not as Hell measured them, not as the worlds beyond the King's Roads measured them. Not as the monsters, those creeping authors of decay, had measured them. So they came for him. So their armies came, marched from blackest night unto his door, and the darkness laid siege to all that was left of England.
And within the walls of Last Hope, in the face of all despair, those champions yet remaining began to search desperately for some means of driving them back.
"Where is he? He's never been this late before. Not unless something's happened. Did something happen? Do you think something happened? Where is he?"
Emma Wintertowne watched John Segundus as he paced in flurried agitation around the Council Chamber. In truth, the room was more in the way of an informal meeting room, looking more like a strange combination of an English parlour and Faerie court than anything else, but they'd found that people clung to formality in distress. The population sheltered in Last Hope preferred to think of it as a Council Chamber, and so a Council Chamber it had become. Although, at present, it was mostly an obstacle course for one very tired, very stressed magician, and a theatre for those who must perforce watch over him.
She looked around at them. Stephen, sitting exhaustedly by the fire with all his weary dignity, the prophet Vinculus sprawled on the hearth rug at his feet. Arabella, John's partner in scrying, who stood by the bookshelves and wrung her hands in sympathy as she watched him, Mr Honeyfoot at her side in equal distress. Sir Walter Pole, Emma's erstwhile husband, erstwhile Government Minister, and now advisor to the King of England Remaining, who had seated himself at one of the small tables and seemed to be trying not to be noticed. Thistlewitch, a faerie of what had been Lost Hope, now Stephen's seneschal, who seemed to regard John's distress with some distant bemusement. And herself, standing guard beside the door, her bandolier of pistols hung across her shoulder even now.
They were an odd group, she supposed. A desperate scattering of faeries, magicians, kings and scholars, survivors of the return of England's magic, and now most of those who held what was left of her together. Or most of those who tried, anyway. There was a face missing, now. There was someone missing, and it was they who drove John's dismay. Childermass had not returned from his mission beyond Last Hope's walls, many days after he had been due, and no-one much was taking it well. John Segundus, very obviously, least of all.
"He shouldn't have gone alone," the magician said, stopping suddenly in front of Stephen, staring down at him desperately. Stephen looked back with weary pity, and John held out his living hand as though pleading with him. "Stephen. We shouldn't have sent him alone. Anything could happen out there. All of us know it. Why did we send him alone?"
Stephen's eyes closed, etched lines of pain and worry creasing the skin around them, and abruptly Emma had had enough. She understood John's worry and anger, she did, but she would not stand to see it directed at Stephen. He didn't need it, nor did he deserve it, and certainly not on Childermass' account. That man did just about everything in his own time, and if anyone was responsible for his delay, it was almost certainly himself. John should know that. By now, there was not a one of them there who should not.
"Oh, don't be ridiculous, John!" she said, rather loudly if Arabella's little squeak was anything to judge by. Segundus turned to her, wilting a little under her stern gaze, but he was too distressed to back down completely. Emma stalked forwards, glaring at him, and he glared back.
"It's not ridiculous!" he said, standing firm before her, both his hands held trembling at his sides. Well, the living hand trembled. The silver-and-leather one merely shook vaguely with the tremors in his arm. "You know what's out there, my Lady. What if he ran afoul of one of their patrols? Or if he stumbled into one of the Hollows and can't get out? What if ... what if ..."
He stuttered to a stop, his face going stiff and white with fear. What if. They all knew what if. There were a thousand of them, and in some places death only the least. A man, a living man abroad in the horror that England had become, might stumble onto any number of terrible fates, and no-one who loved him any the wiser. If Childermass was dead, if he had died in the wrong place or realm, then none of them would ever know about it. He would simply not come back, now or ever. He would be gone, and there would be nothing any of them could do about it.
That had always been true, though. From the moment England had started falling between the worlds, after the plague had hit, there had been no safe way to try and cross it. Anyone who had fought their way across country to Last Hope had found that out. They all knew, and they had all known when Childermass set out. Anyone who went out into the darkness knew what risks they took. That was why it had been him. Because Childermass, of all of them, was the most likely to take those risks in stride.
"... We had to send him alone, John," she said, somewhat more gently. He shook in front of her, her brave and terrified magician, and she wished so dearly that she might be gentle with him. He had to listen, though. He had to be made to listen. "Childermass walks in shadows. He's the best of any of us at illusions and secrecy. He's the one with the best chance of making it through. You know that. You have to remember it. There was a reason we sent him out alone."
"I know that," he said. He looked away. He bit his lip and looked down at the carpet, raising his living hand to wipe shakily at his mouth. "I know, my Lady. I do. But he's not ... He's not invincible. The magic affects him almost as badly as it does me, and you know how that ended!" He held up his false hand, a mute and explicit testimony. "If I had been alone, I wouldn't have survived. If Mr Honeyfoot had not dragged me from the spell's reach, I should have lost a great deal more than my arm. Who is ... Who is going to drag him out, should one befall him?"
There wasn't really an answer to that. Not a good one, anyway. None of them were easy with sacrificing even one life to save many, and Emma less than most, given her own experiences. She met John's eyes, the helpless pain in them, and struggled for an answer.
Stephen did not. He did not look at them, speaking mostly to the fire, but speak he did. Soft, and quiet, and somehow all of them found themselves listening.
"He asked for no-one," the King of Last Hope said, staring blindly into the flames. "He said it was an effort for him to mask other presences besides his own, and that he would need all his focus for himself. He could travel by himself in shadows, or with a larger group openly across the King's Roads, but only one or the other." He looked up, and his weariness really was plain for all to see. "There was no group we might have sent that would have survived open travel. Not with their armies so close at hand. We can send spies and thieves to sneak around them, but any small force we might send in the open would be destroyed completely, and we do not have a larger one. All my fairies must pour their energies into maintaining Last Hope. He said he would take none or all, John. I could only offer none. I'm sorry."
... That was not entirely true, Emma thought. Oh, that Childermass had said it, she had no doubt, or that Stephen had made the choice he had been offered, as little as he had wanted to. All of that she believed. It was that Childermass would really have found it so impossible to mask a companion that she doubted. He could have. She was almost sure of that.
It was just that the only people he would have trusted enough to watch his back were in this room, and there were none of them that he would willingly take into such dangers as awaited him. How could he? John had almost died the last time he had ventured out there. Arabella and Mr Honeyfoot were tougher now than they had once been, but they were not suited to combat should it come. Neither Stephen nor Vinculus could be allowed to fall into enemy hands. That left only herself as even a possible companion, and their relationship was ... tempestuous still. In that sense, at least, she would have caused him effort in his magic, distraction. He walked into untold danger. Distraction was something he could not at all afford.
So he had gone alone, by his own choice. He had walked beyond the reach of Stephen's protection, slipped through shadows into darkness and madness in an effort to see how great they were and what remained that might waylay them, and now he was late. Now he was late by two days, and there was nothing any of them could do about it.
In front of her, in the wake of Stephen's visible pain and Childermass' own determination, John Segundus wilted completely. He bowed his head, and she could see tears pressed desperately behind his eyelids. She couldn't bear them, and went the last steps to stand before him, to pull him to her arms and cradle him as he wept. In the silence of her mind, she cursed John Childermass for being the only magician among them with both the skill and the determination to be their spy. John could ill-afford to lose him. None of them could afford to lose him, not in their hearts. Yet he was the only one with power to go that would not cause Last Hope to fail should he be taken. He was, in effect, the only one expendable enough for the job.
"If only we had an army," she whispered viciously, holding her magician close. "Or those great and powerful magicians of legend. Or the thrice bedamned Raven King, for that matter! If only we had means to fight them. Magic is not worth the ruin of all. If it had to come back, bringing ruin behind it, it might at least have brought a solution also!"
"... Funny you should mention that," said a voice from somewhere behind her, a voice that had not been there a moment ago, and Emma had spun to face it even as it spoke, a pistol primed in her hand and John Segundus held securely behind her. She pointed her pistol at a patch of empty air in the shadows of the eastern bookshelves, and watched as a figure resolved itself from out of them. Battered, singed, and with something that might have been blood on his boots and smeared across his coat, but seemingly whole. Seemingly safe.
"Childermass!" John cried behind her, the moment the man became clear, shock and desperate relief in his voice. The rest of the room had stood in the same moment, and Emma knew there would be that same relief on every face around her. For her part, though, there was mostly anger. Relief, yes, even joy, but also anger. How damned long had he been standing there?! How long had he been listening to them mourn?! God damned magician!
He raised an eyebrow at her. Childermass. He cocked a brow at the pistol staring him in the face, a wealth of weary amusement and perhaps even some shadow of remorse in his expression, and spread his hands placatingly towards her.
"I should be grateful if you would not fire that, my Lady," he said, with a rueful smile tucked in the corner of his mouth. "Once between us was enough, do you not think?"
Emma snarled at him. "If you do not wish to be shot," she growled, "then you should enter a room normally, and announce yourself as you do so! You should not sneak into shadows and listen to the distress of others and speak only when it is your desire! If you would have me put this pistol down, then you will make a note of that for the future, and make a promise to me in good faith. Do I make myself clear?!"
He blinked. He was very pale, she noticed absently, exhausted and slightly hunched. He was not well, for all that it seemed he was not dying. He did not flinch from her, however, and neither did she from him. That much, at least, they would always grant each other now.
"... Forgive me, Lady Wintertowne," he said at last, and inclined his head stiffly in her direction. Stiff from pain, she thought, not reluctance. "You are correct, of course, and I am sorry. Shadows have become my habit, and I could not think of a correct moment to lower them until just now. It was wrong of me to leave you in distress, and I apologise for it, to all of you. I shall do differently next time."
He met her eyes, held them across the barrel of the gun, and there was such exhausted sincerity in them that Emma could not keep her anger. It had been a dirty trick. He should not have stood there and let them think him dead for even a moment longer than necessary. Yet he was tired, she could see it, and he had spent three weeks sneaking from shadow to shadow while avoiding every horror that the outside world had to offer. He might truly have forgotten how to lower them, she thought. A person might forget a great many things, in that wasteland. She could not keep a grudge against him for that.
So she did not. She lowered and holstered her pistol, and took such steps forward as were necessary to stand before him. He watched her warily, the whole room watched her warily, but she only looked up at him and held out an imperious hand.
"Come sit down," she said, as welcoming as she ever was with him, and even as she said it she saw relief soften the line of his shoulders, and exhaustion come only more visibly to the fore. She took his hand, gloved and filthy in her own, and tugged him gently towards the nearest chair. "How dead are you? Do you need one of Stephen's fairy healers?"
He blinked up at her, much bemused, and then he smiled faintly. "No," he said, shaking his head carefully. He pulled his hand from hers, not without pressing her fingers gently in gratitude, and reached up to shove dust-covered hair from his eyes. "There's naught wrong with me that some time to rest won't cure. That's the least of concerns now, though. I have news, my lady. Your majesty. I have what may be some very good news indeed."
They looked at each other. All of them. Stephen looked warily hopeful, Walter alarmed and interested, Thistlewitch curious, John and Arabella and Mr Honeyfoot mostly too relieved to be worried. Vinculus she could not interpret at all. Yet they all looked at each other, and Emma thought there was something of the same cautious optimism and latent dread in all of them.
"Well?" she said after a moment, when nobody else seemed about to. She looked down at Childermass, since she yet stood above him, and gestured impatiently for him to continue. "Are you going to give us this news, or would you prefer that we guessed?"
He blinked again, a flash of startled humour, and then he shook his head. He turned away from her slightly, waving his hand back towards the shadows he had emerged from, and when he looked back there was weary mischief in his gaze once more.
"How about I show you instead?" he said quietly, and behind him a creature emerged from his shadows. A man, or what had once been one. A handsome man in a British Army uniform, now gaunt and bearing that translucent complexion that marked him as the undead. They had seen a few of those on their fraught journey to Last Hope. This one did not seem like the others, though. He looked less degraded, less corrupt. When he looked at them, he seemed ... still sentient. Still knowledgeable of who he had once been, and what he now was. He moved with a careful soldier's gait into the room, and they might not have immediately known what to make of him had Arabella not gasped in sudden recognition.
"Major Grant!" she cried, moving forward to join Emma in the centre of the room. "Oh, but ... But you were lost, sir. I thought you fell in London, when the plague first came!"
Major Grant, since that was apparently who he was, shared a brief and wary glance with Childermass, but turned to bow to Arabella in recognition almost immediately. He smiled crookedly as he straightened, and nodded to confirm her statements.
"I was, Mrs Strange. I was killed, along with a great many others. I would be dead still, were it not ..." He paused, struggled, and then forged ahead. "Things have changed in London, ma'am. A great deal. Your ... Merlin has returned to us, you see. Merlin came and brought us back."
They blinked at him, none of them quite understanding. "Merlin?" Stephen asked cautiously. "You mean King Arthur's magician?" Grant did not answer him, though. Grant had eyes only for Arabella, and the look of dawning shock and understanding in her eyes.
"... Jonathan?" she asked, very quietly, not quite daring to be hopeful. "You mean that Jonathan has ...?"
"Aye," said Childermass, with a certain tired satisfaction. "And Norrell too. It would seem that their Dark Tower has finally wandered back our way. England shall have her great magicians once again, or some of them at least. And since your husband seems to have taken a turn for the necromantic in the process, Mrs Strange, we may have an army out of it as well. There are enough corpses in what is left of England to match any horde out of the darkness, and Strange brought Wellington back first. If they can pull something together between them, then we may have means to drive the demons back from Last Hope yet."
Emma sat down. Slowly, carefully, she pulled the chair beside him and sat down in it. Around her, she saw the others grip the backs of chairs or sink down onto the carpet themselves. An army. An army, and magicians of enough power to do more than sneak off into almost certain death. That was ... God. That was hope, more of it than any of them had dared to entertain in such a very long time. Even if it was Strange, even if it was Norrell, it was still ...
"We could break the siege?" John asked, very carefully and very quietly from where he had sat down almost at Emma's feet. It was Childermass he looked towards, though, in bleak and desperate hope. "Childermass. Do you think we could break it?"
Their spy stared down at him. For a moment, something very black and fierce altogether crossed his features, a hard and bitter determination in a thin face. Childermass met his gaze with eyes that had seen all the very worst of what England had become, and in that expression there was not a single inch of surrender. It was not a comforting expression. It was not gentle at all. Emma did not wish it to be. It was a wild face. It promised blood and war and magic, it promised victory whatever the cost and never a hope of surrender, and since those years she had spent a helpless slave, there was no expression that might comfort her more, and no promise that might better reassure her. Victory or death, victory in death, and never more to bow to an enemy's whims. Yes. She would have that promise above all others. It suited her very well indeed, and not only her.
"We will break it," Childermass said, soft and vicious in the Council Chamber of Last Hope. "We will break their siege, and drive them back from the lands that are not theirs, and we will show them the price for having ruined them. This land belongs to the Raven King, this land is none of theirs and we shall show them what it costs to have taken it. When our King returns, when he bloody gets up off his arse and comes back to us, he will not find his lands infested by those things. I'll not allow it. I'll be damned first."
... Not how she would have put it, Emma thought absently. She had no care for the Raven King herself, not even the somewhat embittered, tarnished care that Childermass and Vinculus still kept. He had gone, and he had not come back even as England was torn apart, and she could not be moved to care for him at all. She would not begrudge him as Childermass' motive, though. Whatever the man needed to keep himself fighting, he could have, and with her blessing. For the ferocity in his voice, for the determination that had let him walk alone through tortured paths to the charnel house of London and back again, bringing some measure of hope along beside him, he could have any damned thing he pleased.
And he was not wrong, she thought. Whatever his motives, he was not wrong in his determination to fight. Looking around her, looking at Stephen and Arabella and Vinculus and desperate John Segundus, looking at every grim and determined face that remained in England, she knew that Childermass was not wrong.
The siege would be broken. They would have only ruins left in its wake, but they would be clean ruins, they would be English ruins, and none of the creatures that had ravished them would be left to look upon them. That was a thing worth fighting for. That, before all else, was a promise Emma Wintertowne thought worth keeping.
Well then, she thought. Let them come. Let all of them be damned and come to die. The darkness would find no surrender here.
Not now, and not ever.
