Faerie Lord

Sixty-Seven

There was a rocky apron outside the cave mouth. Blue stopped when they reached it. ‘You don’t have to come in,’ she said.

‘Humph,’ said the charno cynically.

‘What humph?’ Blue asked crossly. ‘Why humph?’

‘You’ll need the hammer.’

Blue looked at him blankly, then remembered. ‘Oh, the war hammer! Yes, I will.’ The Purlisa had insisted a hammer was the only effective weapon against the Midgard Serpent and the Abbot had produced an antique used in ancient battles. It was an odd thing to have in a monastery and another reason why she was suspicious about their whole story.

‘Can’t carry that yourself,’ the charno said.

‘Of course I can,’ Blue told him.

‘Tried, have you?’

In point of fact she hadn’t. The Abbot, or his monks, or somebody had loaded up the charno. She’d hardly done more than glimpse the hammer. It looked quite large, but she assumed if she was meant to use it against some monster, they wouldn’t give her something too heavy to carry.

It occurred to her suddenly how mad this whole thing was. If there really was a serpent in the mountain, she was about to face it like a mythic warrior, armed with an ancient weapon supplied by men she’d only met a day before. But she wasn’t a mythic warrior, wasn’t any sort of warrior at all. She was only a princess – she still thought of herself as a princess, even now they’d made her Queen – and in the myths it was the princess who was rescued, not the other way around.

She realised two things then. The first was that she didn’t entirely believe the Purlisa’s story about the serpent, however much she liked the little man. The second was that she would do anything for Henry, anything at all. She would fight a serpent for him if there really was a serpent. She would cross a desert for him. She would follow any clue, however slight, in the hope of finding him. That had to be love, hadn’t it?

‘No, I haven’t,’ she said, answering the charno’s question.

The charno reached round and flipped open the catch on his backpack. He drew out a bulky bundle, undid the linen wrappings and revealed the war hammer the Abbot had supplied. It was a substantial weapon with an ornately carved oak shaft and the sort of battering that comes with ancient battles. The charno handed it across to her.

Blue took the weapon and immediately dropped it to the ground. The thing weighed a ton! Although the charno handled it as if it were a feather, it was literally too heavy for her to lift.

‘See?’ the charno said.

There was a simmering anger in Blue that had nothing at all to do with the charno, but she took it out on him just the same. ‘What’s the point of that?’ she demanded. ‘What’s the point of giving me a weapon I can’t use? Are they trying to kill me?’

It was a rhetorical question but the charno said soberly, ‘Told you they were conning you.’

That brought her up short. For the first time it occurred to her that what Charno said might actually be true. Not in some light-hearted and amusing way, but literally, seriously, in a way that might be harmful to her. She liked the Abbot, liked the Purlisa, so her whole instinct was to trust them. But wasn’t that the very essence of the problem? You had to be likeable if you wanted to fool people. Nobody was going to trust some shifty-eyed scoundrel. Had the Purlisa and his Abbot conspired to send her to her death?

But why?

‘But why?’ Blue asked the question aloud.

‘Search me,’ said the charno, shrugging.

Frowning, Blue said, ‘But they must have known I’d discover the weapon was useless to me.’

‘Weren’t meant to find out until you were inside the cave.’

Blue looked at him. ‘When it was too late?’

The charno nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘You would have carried the hammer and handed it to me when I was facing the serpent?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I’m not that loyal,’ said the charno. ‘Serpents eat charnos.’

It made complete sense, except that it didn’t make any sense at all. Why would the Abbot and the Purlisa want her dead? They’d met her only a day before. She’d stumbled on their monastery by accident. ‘You think there really is a serpent?’

‘Probably,’ the charno said.

They stood looking at each other on the rocky apron, Blue still dressed like a young man, the charno’s soulful brown eyes on a level with her own. Behind them loomed the entrance to the cavern, ominous and dark.

The trouble was she didn’t really trust the charno either.

The trouble was, for all the lies, Henry might still be in there.