In fact, it could only be described as a conversation in the loosest sense. The terms shouting match, interrogation, game of riddles, and recitation of a fairy tale were all about as correct as one another. Half of it took place beneath the Lady’s Oak, where the sun was diving slowly down the sky and the wind was picking up, and they probably looked from afar like a raucous picnic crossed with a debate session in Parliament.
The other half of it, at Violet’s insistence once Maud’s teeth began to chatter in the wind, took place in one of the smaller dining rooms in Cheetham Hall. Not because anyone had appetite. Simply so that they could all sit, and the half-complete story could be rapidly recited for the benefit of Lady Cheetham. And then picked up again with a renewed onslaught of questions.
At least Dufay’s oblique and rambling manner of speech began to straighten itself out, as time passed, like someone tumbling back into the lost accent of their youth when encountering it spoken as an adult. Even so: Jack kept losing the thread of things, his mind whiting out, as he stared at her. Dufay’s appearance shifted eye-wateringly between that of a scarecrow carved from a particularly severe turnip and an eerie, wintry almost-beauty. Or perhaps Jack’s nerves were desperately seeking the beauty as a way to cope with the knowledge that a possibly immortal member of the fae was sitting in his house, shedding dirt and grass all over the furnishings, and claiming to be one of his ancestors.
His emotions gave up entirely when Dufay turned to him and said, “So you never bothered to ask what the name Alston means.”
Polly’s hand crept onto his and gripped hard.
A long conversation and a tale like a thorn bush. Some of it had the echo of a half-remembered story from childhood. When all the pieces had been held up to the light, brushed down thoroughly, and put together in a shape that made sense, the Tale of the Three Families and the Last Contract went something like this:
When the land was only slightly younger, and the fae kept one foot of their domain planted here, mortals had a choice. They could draw from the magic that was inherent to all living things, finding more of it in places where the renewing ley lines ran and crossed. Or, if they wished for more magic, or magic directed to a difficult purpose, they could approach a member of the fae and offer to make a bargain. An individual contract. The amount and direction of the magic clearly defined—as well as the cost.
And then the fae announced their decision to withdraw, to move the foothold of their realm into other lands and other worlds, and so one final contract was made.
It was made in silver. Not just any silver, but elf-silver: a piece that was ancient even by fae standards, its origins a story old enough to have shifted several times in the telling. The allstone was split into three objects to symbolise the contract made with the Three Families.
This apparently explained a lot of things that made Edwin very excited, such as why the contract pieces couldn’t be detected by magical means—why they had such an effect on the ley lines—and why they could be so magical in the first place, when usually metal was much harder to imbue with power than something that had once been alive.
The cost of the contract was straightforward. The Three Families would be left with the ability to use this magic, which because of its fae nature would lend itself well to spells based in structure and contract. And in return, they agreed to be leaders of mortals when it came to responsibility towards the land on which they lived. Guardianship and stewardship. That, the fae considered, was what human leaders were for.
Violet said that in her version of the story the contract was made with three sisters of one household who then went on to found the Three Families. In the version Edwin knew, each family was from a different corner of the Isles and returned there with their magic after the fae left.
Dufay herself was supremely uninterested in nailing down a single truth. She did say that the families were the ones who insisted on making the contract on behalf of their bloodlines. Fae, who seldom bothered to reproduce, considered contractual inheritance far more important. Blood was what the humans brought to the bargain.
That, said Adelaide dryly, rang unfortunately true. The history of men was the history of them trying to acquire and hold property and power for their sons, and obsessing over a pure line of inheritance.
It made Jack think in a new way about the fuss and discomfort that Walter and the Assemblymen had shown over Edwin and Violet’s inheritance of Sutton and Spinet, which had been inherited by contract law and choice. And in Edwin’s case, no blood tie at all, beyond that which he made directly with the land beneath a hedge maze.
And so: the fae left. The Last Contract was hidden away in a place deemed unlikely to be disturbed, given the weight humans placed on symbol and belief. The Lady of the Allstone stayed behind, and planted an oak tree in the path of a deep-running ley line, and gave her name as both promise and reminder to the human man she wed.
And fae magic had been the heart and the root of British magic ever since.
“Which was not the intent,” said Dufay irritably. She looked around the table like a nanny who’d woken from her nap to find the children imbuing their dolls to fight one another. “Of course our magic is superior and more elegant. But having the gifts of the dawn is no excuse to lose touch entirely with what you already had. Careless. Irresponsible.”
Robin had produced and unfolded the letter that the Grimm of Gloucester had sent to his office. He ran his finger under a line, and Edwin, sitting next to him, looked sharply at Dufay.
“The gifts of the dawn and the wages of the dusk. That’s what you were talking about?”
“And you wrote the poem,” said Violet. “The song. Didn’t you? Under the name Alfred Dufay.”
Yes, it turned out. She had been various Dufays, male and female, for centuries, killing one identity in favour of the next. No wonder Maud hadn’t had any luck in the cemetery. Alfred Dufay had never died, just as he’d never truly lived.
The poem, along with the spell-game for children, had been Dufay communicating her annoyance in the way that fae knew best: putting words into the world to be repeated and kept.
“I even made it rhyme,” she said rather sulkily. “You like rhymes.”
“So you had the ability to make sense in writing at some point,” muttered Edwin. “Why become the Grimm? Why didn’t you just come and tell us—magicians, I mean—that we were losing knowledge?”
Dufay gave Edwin a look that cast clear aspersion on his intelligence. Edwin coloured.
“I prefer,” said Dufay, “to be left alone. Not to fix other people’s mistakes for them. But”—she waved at the letter—“one day a magician told me there was a place to write, if you had complaints or suggestions about the way magic was intersecting with the non-magical world. So I did it the mortal way.”
“And you had a lot of suggestions,” said Adelaide.
Dufay gave them all the displeased-nanny look again.
Jack’s mother removed her hand from his. His skin tingled coolly when she withdrew her grip. The cast of her face was troubled, but she gave Jack a firm smile.