Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night Page 4

  (This is the Meraud that Layla has always known. Hubristic, ambitious, unrepentant. Layla wishes he were here just so she could smack him around the head.)

  There's something else that Guy mentioned: whatever it is, this token, it can only be found by the beloved of whoever hid it. An odd term, which makes Layla's heart sink. She's afraid that just means Nat, who has been the partner of Meraud's adulthood. She wonders if a childhood friendship that only turned into something else later might not be what the nineteenth-century magician had in mind.

  Bugger the nineteenth-century magician. Layla checks his name on the spine for good measure. Bugger Ezra Pevensey. She flips through to the last pages of the book. Alongside the closing paragraphs, there's a lone annotation: a line from the Halsway Carol, which Meraud sang to Amy when she was in her Moses basket. Sing for the coming of the longest night. Layla glances up to the window. It's getting on for six o'clock, and the sky has been pitch black for hours.

  When she sets the book down she's still chilly and apprehensive, but a little tempered. Meraud is still here, in an indefinable but palpable way; there are traces of him in this world. He can't truly leave them yet.

  Then Nat runs in shouting: "I did not tell you to follow me" – and is nevertheless followed in by two tiny acolytes and a whole load more shouting. Layla had been on the verge of something: some revelation, some leap. It shatters with the silence.

  "Nat, what the hell?" she snaps.

  "Oh, good, you're here," Nat says. "Listen, I realised something. Seek and ye shall find. You two"—this to his companions—"why the hell did you come after me?"

  "You'd have probably fucked it up," says one of them composedly. "Hi, I'm Kay. They're Ari. You must be Layla."

  "Hi," Layla says, bemused.

  "Fucked what up, for God's sake?" Nat says irritably. He's going for Meraud's books the same way as Layla did, throwing them aside when they're not what he's looking for.

  "Whatever it is you're doing," Kay says, still unperturbed. "What are you doing?"

  "Seek and ye shall find," Nat says again, still throwing books. "It wasn't just Meraud being a dick. It's a clue. It's the first clue."

  "Yes," Layla says suddenly. "Nat, I looked it up in the books. It's a treasure hunt, we've got a month to find a whole sequence of them."

  "Less than a month," Nat says grimly. He puts the snowglobe on the table. Layla wishes fervently it were a stopwatch or an hourglass or something less bloody metaphorical. The uncertainty feels like a vice around her head.

  "What are you looking for?" she asks Nat, ignoring Kay and Ari, who seem to be fascinated by the books of magic. Ari in particular is picking them up and putting them down with wonder on their face.

  "These are brilliant," they say to Kay. "Like, I know, fraught situation, sorry. But how did he even get all these?"

  "He's been collecting them since he was as tiny as you," Nat says. "Meraud! I know you've got the whole religious mystery tour! Where?"

  "Over his desk," Layla says. She saw it earlier when she first started pulling out random volumes. Meraud is going to be furious when he sees the mess they've made of his books. Layla would give years of her life for Meraud to be here, furious about the mess they've made of his books.

  Nat reaches up to the shelf above the desk, avoiding a framed print of petrels gathering over a tide. He pulls down a Qur'an and a Gita and tosses them both on the desk. Layla is obscurely pleased to see the latter, not that she has a copy of her own at home.

  "Ari," Nat says, over his shoulder. "Look it up, will you? Seek and ye shall find."

  Ari has their phone out already. "Matthew 7:7."

  Nat finds the Bible and flicks through to the right page, but then just stands there confused, shaking the book to no avail.

  "I thought it'd be something in the pages," he says. "Something actually left for us to find. Ask, and you shall be given; seek, and you shall find."

  It clearly offends him to read it out to an echoing room, as though it were itself an incantation. Layla doesn't blame him.

  "But that's not the right one," she says, in sudden understanding. "Seek, and ye shall find. That's the King James version."

  Nat looks surprised, like the old biddy who thought it was weird that Layla knew that the Archangel Gabriel should talk about tidings of great joy. She resists the urge to say something about inevitable cultural assimilation and points out the right book.

  "Dammit," Nat says, a moment later. "There's nothing here. I was so sure—anyway."

  He shakes it to be certain, and starts hefting down the other translations, just in case whatever-it-is-if-anything might be there. The disappointment in his eyes is painful to look at. Ari and Kay have gone quiet, no longer looking through books like kids in a sweetshop.

  "Wait," Layla says, a ghost of a thought trying to make itself known. For a moment she feels like she did before Nat, Ari and Kay crashed in, as though Meraud is somewhere close by, just out of sight. "There's another one, I think. He's had it a long time."

  She starts scanning shelves, trying to bring to mind not this white-walled high-ceilinged space but Meraud's childhood room, messy with the things of magic. "Small. Green cover, I think."

  They all start looking, book by book, shelf by shelf. Even with four of them it takes a long time. Layla eventually finds it – not on a shelf but on Meraud's bedroom floor, half-hidden by the fall of sheets.

  She opens it with the others breathing down her neck. "Ask, and ye shall be given," she says, and out of the pages fall a pressed rose and a snarl of some green stem.

  Layla puts them down next to the snowglobe. Ari puts the book back on Meraud's bedside table while Nat flumps on the sofa with relief. Kay starts fussing over whether Meraud has anything resembling tea or sugar and why anyone would unplug a kettle. And it's okay, for a minute. Peaceable. When the tea is made – surprisingly, Meraud's kitchen cupboards are up to Kay's exacting standards – they return to the question of what to do next.

  "Okay, a rose," Nat says, turning it over in his hands. "And – what is that, grass?"

  "Lucerne," Ari says unexpectedly. "Farmers use it to make hay. It's… ah." They're frowning, clearly trying to think of something, anything to help. "Er. Kay, do you remember what he said about this?"

  "I probably wasn't even there," Kay says. "You know I don't get this stuff, right? You're the one who wants to be a magician."

  "You do?" Layla says – that would explain their fascination with the books – just as Nat asks:

  "What who said?"

  "Meraud," Ari says. "It's… okay, let me get this right. It's a spell. He gave them to me, the three bits, said I should be able to put them together myself. The rose is pretty traditional, it's just true love enduring."

  Oh, just that, Layla thinks, amused at the carelessness of youth.

  "The lucerne is…" Ari pauses again; this is clearly the sticking point. "He did tell me this. Sabhal – that's a barn, where you bring in the hay. Sabhàilte. Safety. From a bit of poetry, I think."

  Layla wonders if that's Cornish. Meraud has no Cornish blood whatsoever, but takes an interest in the language out of sheer embarrassment at what his parents named him.

  "So there you go," Ari says, more confidently. "Lucerne, for hay in winter, for coming in out of the cold. And then you need found driftwood, for the last thing. That's – ah. Drifting, I guess? Wandering. I wish I'd made notes."

  "What does the spell do?" Nat asks, in a tone that suggests he's only looking for confirmation. Meraud taught this spell to Ari and Nat has clearly heard of it before. Layla feels left out.

  "Protection on a journey," Ari says, pleased that they've finally got there. "It's a wayfinder, to keep you in the right direction. Love, safety and permission to wander."

  "All right," Layla says. "What do we do? Complete the spell?"

  "I don't know." Nat shakes his head. "Ari? What do you think?"

  "You could, I guess?" Ari looks equally confused. "What would that do?"
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  Nat shrugs. "No idea. But say we try it. Where would we get some driftwood?"

  "By the sea," Kay says, in a Captain Obvious tone, and Layla has a sudden, horrible vision of traipsing all the way down to Cornwall with Nat. She wouldn't put it past Meraud to engineer that.

  "I know Meraud's been out looking for ingredients close to London before," she suggests, remembering this with relief. "We could find out where exactly?"

  "Sure," Nat says, still sounding doubtful. "Ari, thanks for your help. Really appreciate it."

  "Told you you'd have fucked it up without me," Ari says, then goes quiet again. Kay has picked up the snowglobe, presumably just for a closer look, but now they're all staring at it. Another flurry of leaves hits the miniature bank, an addition to a rotting pile. The little scene looks cold, bleak, unmistakably like time has passed.

  "What just happened?" Nat says, quietly.

  Layla's figured it out from Ezra Pevensey. "No one's supposed to help," she says, softly. "By those beloved – that means it's got to be just you and me who find the token."

  "So if someone helps us it speeds up the clock?" Nat says, horrified, and looks around him at Meraud's books again, as though there might be some focus at which to aim anger and despair. "Fuck."

  That's all Layla wants to say, too. Ari looks stricken. As they watch, another leaf drifts down, tiny and perfectly formed and glittering with frost.

  ___

  Nat spends much of the night on the internet, thinking about driftwood. If it's a token they need, then it has to be something meaningful to Meraud, not any old driftwood from any old beach. Layla has that vague idea that Meraud has gone on specific ingredient-gathering trips out of London, which makes sense: it's something every working magician has to do eventually. You can't buy found objects, and you can't rely on bartering them. If you're a beginner, you might not even know what you're looking for. And if you're not Meraud, who can take basically any object and draw a galaxy's worth of symbolic meaning from it, you go on Reddit.

  Reddit, it transpires, has a lot of thoughts and feelings about driftwood.

  In the comments to a post titled "Driftwood hlep??", u/MagicMicheleXXL and u/suckmywand24601 are having a pitched battle about the different uses of flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict. The mods have deleted half a dozen comments for "personal attacks of an inflammatory nature", including the only two in which Michele and Wand actually name any locations.

  Clicking through Wand's posts and comments gets Nat to a subreddit dedicated to nautical symbolism, where he learns there are half a dozen traditional spots for gathering driftwood all within a couple of hours' train journey of London. He also learns that Wand has been banned from this sub for "uncivil language", and that two of the sub's long-time contributors have just started dating. Both pieces of news seem to have been greeted with good cheer.

  So that's nice for the sub, and nice for u/SeamanStaines and u/19flowers91, long may they continue to nerd out about nautical symbolism together, but none of it really helps him. Six sites for driftwood is too many to go to on spec, and there's not one that stands out as any more or less Meraudish than the others.

  At some point in the early hours, Kay meanders in with a late-night microwave pizza and a kiss for Nat's forehead. The next time he looks up, they've gone, but there's a fresh glass of water by his elbow and he's eaten most of the pizza.

  He goes to sleep at 3am, wakes up again a little after five with an aching bladder – see, Kay, he can stay hydrated – and the clear memory of Meraud getting home from Margate at a similar hour a couple of years ago, muttering something about TS Eliot never having to deal with stag parties before tumbling into Nat's bed.

  He fumbles with his phone and pulls up the map with the suggested sites carefully marked out. And there it is, thank you Reddit for your glorious bounty: North Foreland, Kent, right next to Margate.

  The 08:19 from Stratford is too crowded for him and Layla to sit together, thank goodness, but not so packed they can't both get seats. He spends the journey fiddling around with an agency commission – they want something floral, reliable and friendly to play in the background of an ad for air freshener. He had something together before this whole thing with Meraud kicked off, but it wasn't quite right, and tweaking it now isn't helping. He's got something floral and friendly, but reliability is eluding him. He tries not to read into it.

  Reddit was clear on the location, at least. A lighthouse on the headland, half an hour's silent walk from Broadstairs train station. Reddit didn't specify the silence – that's just a gift Layla and Nat have decided to give each other. To add to their collective mood, it's not-quite-drizzling the whole walk over, that special kind of coastal dampness that soaks into your bones.

  "Love, safety, and permission to wander," Layla says when they finally get to the shore. She's got the pressed rose – love – and the sprig of green – safety – in some tupperware, making them perhaps the only dry things they have with them.

  She hands the tupperware to Nat.

  Right. Great.

  There's driftwood everywhere on this sandy beach by its grey sea beneath its greyer sky. That's good, possibly, or perhaps it's bad? What if they need some specific piece of driftwood? What if they're too late already? Meraud's tree isn't lost to winter yet, but what if someone else walked off with the one bit of driftwood they need while Nat was on a train composing the background music for an air freshener ad?

  Layla is watching him expectantly. He's the one who dragged them there. He's the one who knows some magic, even if it's just the same handful of spells over and over again. He feels a rush of irritation with her for looking at him like that, even as he's annoyed with himself for being annoyed with her. It's not his fault Meraud's sent them on this ridiculous scavenger hunt. He doesn't have the answers any more than she does, and it's not fair that she should be waiting for him to make the next move.

  The not-quite-drizzle blurs up his glasses as quickly as he can clean them – though after half an hour of this, it's not like he's got a dry piece of clothing to wipe them on. He does it again anyway, just to buy himself a few more seconds of not having to admit defeat.

  Despite the general misery, he kind of wants to say something companionable to her. Some remark about how Meraud would have charmed his own glasses clear, but only if he could find them first. But she's not making it easy on him, and he doesn't have it in him to make it easy on her, not standing here in the wet and the cold failing to save the life of the one person they have in common.

  "His glasses," Layla says.

  It's close enough to Nat's thoughts to startle him into looking at her directly. She's chewing on her hair, frowning down at a piece of driftwood much like all the others.

  "Can you—" She cuts herself off. "The thing he does, to find his glasses. Could you do that?"

  "I told you, it never works," Nat says. "It works in space but not time. It only shows you everywhere a thing has been."

  "For goodness' sake," Layla says. "We want where he's been. He was here, on this beach. Where exactly?"

  Nat gets it. Even if Meraud has been here more than once, it's not like London where his presence is everywhere; they'll see individual traces of him here. "Okay, but—"

  "What?" Layla snaps.

  Nat grits his teeth. "I don't know how to do it."

  "We've got to try," Layla insists, which, great, what an awesome idea, Nat would never have thought of that. He remembers Meraud giving him the spiel about why the spell doesn't work; maybe that means he can remember an instance of Meraud actually trying it.

  "You need something that belongs to the person you're trying to find," he says, tentatively. "Or something else of theirs, if it's a thing and not a person you're looking for. But we're looking for a person."

  "All right, whatever," Layla says. "Do you have anything?"

  She stares at him expectantly again and Nat wants to ask what she thinks he might have, if he might be wearing Meraud's socks or carrying a b
ook Meraud lent him. Which, okay, isn't completely unreasonable, but it feels intrusive anyway.

  Not just something of theirs, Meraud says inside Nat's mind. Not a biro or a jam jar. Something that's intimately theirs, something that's touched their skin.

  Nat's hand slips in his coat pocket, and there they are: Meraud's bloody reading glasses, for once exactly where someone left them.

  "Lucerne," he says. He might just be imagining a memory of Meraud attempting this with a sprig of green, but Ari said it was a wayfinder, and that would make sense. Layla gets it out.

  For the third element, Nat does have a real memory: Meraud, restless, with the things of his magic strewn over Nat's bedroom floor, talking about lost things. A stone off the sand by Nat's feet will do, as a found object. Any old found object, to symbolise this place, right here.

  Things that are lost are all equal, Meraud says, in Nat's memory. Lying there quoting God-knows-what, happy. Nat wants to go back in time and shake him and tell him that's bollocks. Losing your glasses is one thing; losing your lover, who tumbles into your bed in the small hours and does magic on your floor, is another. Another awful thing that has brought Nat to this derelict-scattered desolation of a place.

  Nat does the spell as best as he can, and at last something goes right. Tracks appear: footprints on the sand with shimmering outlines so they're clearly visible along the beach. Only two lines of them, there and back, so maybe Meraud was only here once before. Maybe there are other sets of footprints around the headland and out of sight. For a moment Nat wonders if Layla can see them or they're only visible to the casting magician, but Layla is already moving to follow the trail.

  They follow the footprints down to where the sea meets the shore. It's a spot indistinguishable from any other on the cold beach, indifferent waves lapping at their feet.

  He's not sure what he was expecting. Not for Meraud to suddenly appear. Maybe for the spell to find the right piece of driftwood, though what the right piece even means, he doesn't know.