Darkwitch Rising by Sara Douglass Page B

connection with Eaving herself. Eaving needed protection, and, together with Charles and Louis, Eaving’s Sisters were to provide it.
    It was, Charles had discovered years ago, the Game’s means of counteracting Asterion’s malevolence.
    The women had done with washing and now Louis and Charles took their turn. Although the sexual intimacy the four shared further cemented the ties that bound them, to work the Circle they needed to come to it clean and naked, as they had been born. All the sexual tension that had permeated the room now dissipated; the four worked silently, the women stripping and remaking the bed with clean linens, the men sponging down before drying themselves. Their nakedness was no longer arousing, but binding and solidifying.
    Once the bed was made, and the men dry, Charles stood in the centre of the chamber and held out his hands. Marguerite came to his right hand, Louis to his left, Kate took Louis’ and Marguerite’s other hands.
    “We must name ourselves,” said Charles, and thus they did, using the names of their first lives, to bind themselves not only to the past, but to wherever the Game and the land needed them to go. Brutus, Coel, Ecub, Erith . Even now, after all of these lives, it felt strange to the others to accept Brutus among them, but then…he had changed, hadn’t he? More than any of them.
    They dropped their hands, and moved to the bed. There they sat cross-legged on its vast expanse, forming a circle in the same order that they had named themselves when they were standing, and sitting at an equidistance.
    “What is it we wish to view?” asked Marguerite quietly. As she had with Charles and Louis when they had made the first Circle together so many years ago, she took the lead here.
    “We wish to view Eaving,” the others whispered, as one.
    “What is it we wish to accomplish?” Marguerite said.
    “To send Eaving our love and support, to let her know that she is not alone.”
    Marguerite reached behind her and lifted something from a box she had earlier put on one of the pillows. It was the same lump of turf and dirt that Charles had torn from the Cornish coast on the night he and his mother had fled the land.
    Now even more browned and crumbly than it had been when Marguerite first held it, it nonetheless stayed in one piece as Marguerite hefted it in her hand.
    “The land,” she whispered, then threw the piece of turf high into the air. It hit the ceiling plaster with a distinct thud, then fell back towards the bed.
    As it did so, it changed.
    The watchers gasped in wonder, as they never failed to do. Even Kate’s baby twisted a little in the womb, awed at what she saw through her mother’s eyes.
    The crumbled piece of turf and dirt shimmered, then in the blink of an eye flattened and spread out, its very nature changing as it fell (slower now, as both its nature changed and the magic which bound it took hold). It turned from turf into a large circle oflustrous emerald silk that rippled and glimmered in the candlelight as it continued to fall.
    It settled to the bed in the centre of the Circle with a sigh, and as it did so once more it changed its contour, this time into the shape of the island that was the land. Its form undulated as it settled against the linen sheets, and mountains rose and moors spread out, and the lie of the land was revealed.
    Llangarlia, the ancient land to which they were all bound by magic, murder and love.
    “Noah,” said Charles, and as he spoke, he moved his hand so that it pointed towards Woburn Abbey to the north of London.
    The emerald silk flattened, as if it had become a great lake, and then it clouded, and shapes began to form within its centre.
    But not of Noah or Woburn Abbey, as it normally did.
    The watchers gasped, and might have broken the Circle had not Charles held out a stern hand in warning. “ Watch ,” he commanded. “Whatever appears is for a reason. Watch! ”
    The view within the circle of silk resolved into that