Jack of Ravens

9

Jerzy raised his flagon. The Hunter’s Moon was as packed as ever. ‘Well, then, Tom-’

‘Thomas.’

Jerzy’s grin was challenging. ‘No, I think it has to be Tom.’ He winked at Church. Tom shook his head wearily. ‘I raise my glass to a hero in the making. A legend.’

‘I think,’ Tom said pointedly to Church, ‘your monkey has had more than enough lessons in irony.’

Church raised his own flagon ironically. ‘You are, then, Thomas Learmont.’

‘Yes.’

‘And it happened as the story said: you were taken by the Faerie court-?’

‘The queen of the Court of the Yearning Heart entertained me until she grew bored with my ways.’

‘And she gave you the two gifts?’

‘Curses, not gifts. It was an act of punishment.’

‘Punishment for what?’

‘For not being … entertaining enough. The gods grow bored easily.’

Jerzy’s mood dampened. ‘Though it irks me, I fear we have much in common. The Golden Ones like to act as patrons, sometimes friends, even lovers, but they are cruel masters and they have only their own best interests at heart.’

‘But being able to see the future-’ Church began.

Tom shook his head. ‘To see the misery of growing old, the indignities, the countless occasions of pain and suffering that lie ahead for yourself, your loved ones, your friends? To see your own death? To know when and how and have it haunt your dreams? There is a reason why man was made to drift through his days in ignorance.’

Church could now understand the bitterness he sensed in Tom. ‘What incentive is there to do anything if you know exactly what’s going to happen?’ he asked.

‘Ah, it is not as simple as that, as if anything is. I see static images laid out before me, not live in all their multifaceted glory. It is like walking through an endless gallery where each painting shows a different scene of something that lies ahead. I have no idea how they relate, how any of them come to be. I know not if they are true representations or a warped perspective of what is yet to come. Yet they haunt me still.’

‘But what you saw led you to seek us out?’

‘To seek you out.’

Church weighed up whether he really wanted to ask the question. ‘What did you see?’

Tom weighed his reply just as carefully. ‘A stark choice: between humanity being freed of its shackles, or being confined to the mud for evermore. A war that could destroy men and gods. And you as the deciding factor.’

‘That’s the big picture. What did you see for me?’

For the first time there was a glimpse of sympathy in Tom’s eyes. ‘I think you know the answer to that,’ he said.

The lull that followed was heavy, and it felt as if the whole of the bar had grown still. Jerzy clapped an arm around Church’s shoulders. ‘Hope, good friend, is the key that unlocks many a door, and we carry it around with us always.’

‘All right,’ Church said to Tom. ‘You’re the man with the answers. What do we do now?’

‘Now,’ Tom said, ‘we prepare to take the upper hand in the coming war.’