CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Three Challenges and a Betrayal

Edie had got her legs back under control, but she was still sitting on the pub floor, absorbing what had happened to her. Finding herself in the midst of World War II at the height of the Blitz had been quite different from the sharp pain of merely seeing slices of the past when she glinted.

Being in the past rather than just seeing it wasn’t painful as such. It just left an overwhelming feeling of nausea and a kind of empty horror inside her. Maybe it was being there and coming back so suddenly that did it, she thought, concentrating on this idea rather than the twisted overcoat and hand she’d seen sticking out from under the tipped omnibus. Perhaps this was like jet lag only worse—time lag, in fact.

The Friar watched her from the bar, which he was leaning against, still getting his breath back. He pushed George’s coat to one side and heaved his great bulk up on the bar, bare legs and sandals dangling out of the bottom of his cassock, somehow startling in their powerful nakedness. He looked as if he were sitting on the side of a river, about to paddle. He lacked only a fishing rod to complete the illusion. Instead he looked at Edie and flicked a question over her head like a fly.

“And the second question.” The Friar spoke in a voice so honeyed and solicitous that, despite the shock flushing through her body, Edie felt her hackles begin to rise.

“Second question?”

“Apart from the mirrors and how they work. You said you had a second question.”

Though it had been only minutes ago, it felt as if she’d asked that question in a different life. She shook her head to clear it.

“Yeah. Right. The Hard Way. You said if George didn’t make his sacrifice by putting the broken head on the Stone, then he would have to do things the Hard Way.”

“Indeed,” he purred, and sat there with the kind of smugness that, in Edie’s book, would have been asking— in fact begging—for a slap. Somehow in her present state, she didn’t have anything approaching a proper slap in her—real or verbal. She took a deep breath.

“What exactly is the Hard Way? Is it why he just vanished off the face of the earth?”

The Friar twirled George’s coat around on the bar top. Then hung it neatly on one of the beer handles.

“Maybe.”

Somehow, having been dragged back from what very possibly was, and certainly had felt like, the end of the world hadn’t put Edie in a mood for maybe’s.

“I need you to tell me a little bit more. Please.”

The please stuck in her throat, but she got it out with a good attempt at a smile as sugarcoating. And to her surprise he told her. He told her that George must stand and fight the three duels, and that they all had to be fought above or below ground, in the air or in or on water. He explained that this was so because the challenge of three contests was one of London’s forgotten rituals, but that just because it had been forgotten didn’t mean that it didn’t underpin the city in an important way.

“After all, my dear, who remembers the keystone that was laid beneath the cathedral or the church? But they are there, and though forgotten, it should be remembered that the whole edifice would tumble without them.”

“You mean it’s like tradition,” she said.

“It’s nothing like tradition. Tradition is like giving votes to the most obscure class of people, namely your ancestors. My word, no. Tradition is the democracy of the dead. No, this is part of the living warp and weft of the city itself. Nothing dead about it at all. He has to fight three duels to earn his place in the fabric.”

“What if he doesn’t fight?”

The Friar’s eyebrows rose and fell, one after another in a small ripple of outrage at the very thought.

“He has to. To refuse a contest is a failure. To fail is to become a Stone Servant and walk in thrall to the power of the Stone for eternity.”

Edie absorbed this carefully.

“So that’s bad.”

“So that, as you so perspicaciously put it, is bad.”

“But if he doesn’t know this, if he doesn’t know the Hard Way is the way of three duels, he might refuse a challenge. He might. I would. I’d run away unless I couldn’t avoid it!”

“Then you’d better find him and tell him, had you not?”

“But how can I find him?”

“Look.”

Edie spluttered with frustration at the enormity of the task he was outlining for her. “In this city. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack!”

“Then don’t waste time”—he hooked his thumb and jerked it toward the door—“be on your way. The first step in finding a needle in a haystack is to start.”

She sat tight. “Will you help me?”

“I thought I just did.”

“Help me find George,” she added.

“Why would I help?”

“Because you’re a spit.”

His expression didn’t change by a flicker.

“Okay, then,” she amended, “because you’re not a taint.”

Maybe something ticked under his eye, but even if it had, Edie was pretty sure it had been irritation. He sighed shortly.

“Absence of hostility does not mean presence of benevolence, my child. It can also mean indifference, and I, uncharitable and uncharacteristic as it may be to admit, find that I am sublimely and ineffably indifferent.”

“But why?”

He looked over her shoulder. “‘Why,’ she says. Why?”

There was a little needling “Tchah” of disbelief from behind her as Little Tragedy tried to express how extraordinarily dense she must be not to know why the Friar was suddenly, inexplicably changing tack.

“I mean it,” she said, hating the plaintive note that had crept unbidden into her voice. “I don’t know why you’ve gone all like this, why you won’t help.”

The Friar deliberately scooped George’s coat off the beer pump handles and let it fall to the countertop with a distinct and giveaway thunk.

Little Tragedy scuttled out of the shadows and nimble-fingered his way into the pockets. In an instant, he pulled out the broken dragon’s head like a conjuror producing a rabbit, eyes wide as soup plates.

“Ooooh,” he said. “Look at that. It’s little George’s little dragon. Blimey.”

“Blind you, indeed I should, You Imp, if you don’t stay where you ought,” barked the Friar, snatching the carving from his hands. “Blind you, indeed I should, were my heart not so damnably soft and sentimental.”

Sentimental and soft were the last two words Edie would have used to describe the look on the statue’s face as his eyes locked on hers across the dragon’s head.

“Why? Because it appears that the boy did not trust me, and neither do you. And trust, milady, is a two-way street. That street is now closed. I cannot abide a liar.”

He glared at her with an intensity she found hard not to blink at. She wanted him to turn back into the Friar who had shielded her from certain death and then run her to safety through the Blitz. But that Friar was gone. Too late, she realized, she hadn’t thanked him for following her into the mirror and saving her life.

“Look, I’m sorry, and I should have thanked you—”

A tap at the window stopped all conversation. Edie followed the Friar’s gaze. Three figures were outlined against the night beyond. Two of them had noses pressed to the frosted glass, so close that it was clear their eyes were black raven eyes. The figure behind them was less distinct, but he was tall and seemed to be wearing a hood.

“Tallyman!” piped Little Tragedy. The Friar cut him off with a look and slid off the bar, landing on the floor with an ominous thud. He paused to put the dragon’s head back in the pocket of George’s coat and then walked to the door.

“Keep her out of sight until I tell you,” he hissed over his shoulder.

Edie felt Tragedy tugging at her urgently. “Come on, Glinty. Time to be somewhere else.”

She let him pull her into the shadows behind the arch. They could see the bulk of the Friar blocking the door as he opened it, and then he stood like a roadblock, whispering earnestly to whoever was on the outside.

Edie’s blood ran cold, in a way she’d heard talked about but never felt. If the figure on the outside was who she thought it was—the Walker, the man who’d sent the Minotaur after her, the man who’d calmly threatened to slit her belly and spill her guts on the floor like a bag of peas—if it was he who she’d glinted and seen drowning the girl at the Frost Fair, then her blood had every reason to turn cold.

Because if it was he, then Death had come to call.