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After my trip to Herefordshire in the summer I had been relieved to be back in London and in no hurry to leave the city again in the near future, so I wasn't too happy when the phone rang on a rainy Monday in October and DS Rawls told me about a potential case in Kent. Rawls was a skinny white woman of an indeterminate age somewhere between 35 and 55, one of those terrifying petite women who made up for being half as tall and half as broad as most of the men they worked with by being the most competent, efficient and no-nonsense person in the room. I knew her from back when we'd worked the murders in the Underground tunnels. She'd only been marginally involved in the case, but she was too smart not to notice that something not entirely natural had been going on.
Apparently she had moved to Kent shortly after, where she now worked for the local police – officially for family reasons, but I couldn't help but wonder if maybe she'd only wanted to get away from some of London's weirdness. If the latter was the case, it hadn't really worked. As she told me over the phone, they'd had a case over the weekend so weird that nobody knew what to make of it, and she figured it might be Falcon-related. She'd sent me the file, and I agreed that it was at least worth looking into, especially since Nightingale and I hadn't had a proper case in over two weeks and, as much as I wasn't really looking forward to a rainy trip to the countryside, I could use a break from days consisting of nothing but Latin and magic lessons.
I thought I'd have to go and check the whole thing out on my own, but Nightingale was surprisingly eager to get out of the Folly. I didn't blame him after he'd spent all summer cooped up in there keeping an eye on Varvara. For a moment I had worried that he'd insist on going alone and leave me back at the Folly in case of an emergency in London, but he didn't even suggest that.
We left while it was still dark on Tuesday morning, before seven o'clock. The drive to Kent was boring and uneventful, and I ended up dozing in the passenger's seat for most of the morning. Nightingale was quiet the entire time, and I knew it wasn't the case that was on his mind. He'd been distant over the past few days, more formal than he had been in a long time. I would have liked to pretend that I didn't know what the hell was going on with him, but I couldn't have managed that if I'd tried. He'd been like this since Wednesday night, when I'd found him sitting in the small garden behind the Folly, smoking that one cigarette he still allowed himself every day despite Dr Walid's best attempts to make him quit. I'd joined him and we'd sat there in silence, closer than we really needed to, and we both pretended that I wasn't staring at him, at his lips wrapped around the white paper of his filterless cigarette and his cheeks hollowing whenever he breathed in. When he'd almost finished it I had taken the cigarette from his hand, my fingers brushing against his for a few moments too long, and taken a drag from it myself. I didn't pretend not to notice that he was staring at me when I did, didn't try to hide that I was staring back.
And I'd thought for about three seconds that he was actually going to kiss me then (finally, and when had Nightingale kissing me become something that I was expecting to happen with such certainty, like it was just a matter of time?). Before I blew it with a sudden coughing fit. I should have known better, since I had never managed to finish even a single cigarette in my life. He'd laughed then, soft and gentle, but the tension hadn't dissipated, certainly not when he'd patted my back in a way that should have been nothing more than comradely, but his hand lingered as indulgently between my shoulder blades as mine had on his fingers. He didn't look me in the eyes when he said good night a few moments later and left, and he'd been withdrawn ever since. Maybe getting out of the Folly would do him some good.
Our first stop after checking in with DS Rawls to see if there had been any new developments since her phone call (there hadn't) was to the psychiatric ward of the local hospital. We didn't really expect to get any new information from the suspect, but it never hurt to check twice for, as a certain choleric DCI of my acquaintance likes to put it, “weird bollocks” (maybe someone should suggest moving to Kent to him). Especially the kind of weird bollocks any normal police officer would overlook.
Nobody except maybe overenthusiastic med students likes hospitals, but I had developed a pretty strong dislike for them since that time Nightingale had got shot and I'd spent the night by his side, worrying whether he'd live or die. It seemed simultaneously like a lifetime ago and like it had only just happened. There was something uniquely depressing about the omnipresent smell of antiseptic and the pale pastel colours of hospital walls. It didn't help that Nightingale looked unusually tense – not that anyone else would have noticed, but I'd known him for long enough to recognise the tension in his neck for what it was. I didn't know if he too was thinking of the last time he'd had a bullet dug out of him, or if his mind was on older memories. Seeing him suppress a flinch when we heard a loud scream from one of the rooms made me suspect the latter.
It took a few polite, but stern words from Nightingale for the officer on duty to let us talk to our suspect alone. Except for the bars at the window, the hospital room looked like any other – no padded cell or other fun things to go with the blood-curdling scream we'd just heard from down the corridor; by all accounts she'd been very calm and cooperating since her arrest. Susan Wright was a middle-aged white woman with a faded red dye job and a waxy pallor that made her look ten years older than she was. She seemed weak and exhausted, and for all that I'd seen my share of skinny drunk teenage girls trying to scratch out the eyes of men twice their size, I found it hard to imagine this woman taking a flat iron to her husband's face for no apparent reason.
Nightingale stepped close to shook her hand when he introduced us. Hardly common practice with an assault suspect, but it gave him an excuse to get close enough to her to spot any residual vestigia. I was about to follow suit, but Nightingale shook his head minutely. Despite all assurances that Mrs Wright hadn't shown any signs of violence since her arrest, Nightingale subtly kept himself between her and me. The look on his face was easy enough to read – he had sensed nothing from her. That in itself wasn't really surprising, though. Living matter retained vestigia less well than just about any other substance, and it had been over two days since the event. If something magical was behind this, it wasn't around anymore.
I asked her to once again describe what had happened last Sunday. I'd read up on the details of the case before we'd left London, and Susan Wright recounted them with the confused patience of someone who was as desperate for an explanation as we were. She'd come home on Sunday afternoon, started ironing her shirts because it needed to be done before Monday. At around 4.30, her husband Stan had come home – except that Mrs Wright claimed to have no recollection whatsoever that he was her husband and, panicked about a complete stranger entering her house and trying to kiss her, bashed him over the head with her iron. After that she herself had called the police and an ambulance. Mr Wright was still in critical condition – it looked like he was going to live, but it was uncertain yet whether he would ever wake up again.
“And you're saying that you didn't know him? Not just that you were startled?” I was taking notes and asking most of the questions – Nightingale usually preferred to leave that part of the job to me.
“I told you, I've never before met him in my life. The police said – I mean, the other police officers, they said he's my husband, but … surely I'd remember my own husband, don't you think?” There was a pleading note in her voice, and for all that her story sounded absurd, I didn't get the impression that she was lying. If only because any woman who had actually tried to murder her husband would have come up with a more believable story than “I forgot who he is and thought he was a stranger breaking into my house”.
“Did anything … unusual happen to you in the days before?” It was a stretch, mostly because people rarely admitted even if something unusual had happened – don't want the filth to think you're crazy, right? – but I still tried. It wasn't like we had much to go on. I'd seen the hospital's report after her admission – no sign of any drugs in her system, nor any brain tumours or neurological diseases that would explain the sudden memory loss.
“Not that I can think of.” She looked like she'd been thinking about it a lot. I exchanged a glance with Nightingale, but his expression was blank. He didn't have any more of a clue what was going on than me.
“Do you remember what you did on Sunday before you came home?”
“I went to brunch at my neighbour's, Mary. Mary Jacobs.” The name rang a bell from the initial police report, but I still made a mental note to double check it later. “I think I was there until about half past 12, maybe. And it was such a beautiful day, so I decided to go for a walk. There's this nice little forest nearby, I don't really know why we never went there when I was a child, it's so pretty, and I … I don't remember why, but I wanted to clear my head, so I went there. And then I was home at around 3.”
A few more follow-up questions revealed nothing more of interest, and ten minutes later Nightingale and I left the hospital with not much more to go on than when we'd arrived. He still looked tense and unhappy, we still had no idea if this was even our kind of crazy and not just normal human kind of crazy, and I just hoped we hadn't driven all the way out here for nothing.
“What do you think, sir?” I asked when we got back into the Jag, but Nightingale just gave a small shrug.
“I think we should follow up on those other possible cases you found.”
After DS Rawls had called me the night before, I had already done a bit of research of my own, while Nightingale had been going through the library to look for previous cases of people claiming memory loss after attacking someone (he'd found nothing that didn't sound like bad excuses people gave the police when they hadn't had time to come up with a better story – and even then people usually claimed not to remember the incident, not that they had no idea who their cheating husband or their nagging wife or their filthy rich uncle was). I'd logged into HOLMES to find any similar cases in the area or even just other oddities in assault or murder cases and come up empty. Kent was a disturbingly peaceful area compared to central London. I wondered what coppers there did all day. Find missing sheep? Help nice old ladies cross the road?
Not wanting to go back to Nightingale empty-handed, I'd expanded my search – and found out that quite a few other weird things had been going on in the area. Nothing criminal, nothing that had been reported to the police, but weird enough to warrant a local newspaper article that I stumbled across. A middle-aged shop owner seemed to have forgotten that his mother had died the week before, despite the fact that he had been at her deathbed. Like Mrs Wright, he was perfectly healthy and had no history of substance abuse. I kept looking and found several blog entries, tweets, and facebook posts with similar stories. A teenage girl who suddenly insisted to have no recollection of being dumped by her first boyfriend. An accountant who showed up for work despite having been fired two days earlier. A waitress who couldn't remember the screaming row she'd had with her parents after her coming out. All in all I found over half a dozen cases like that – small things that, on their own, would have just looked like people being confused or lying or deluding themselves, but put together in one county in the span of a less than three months, they added up to a pretty odd picture.
To make it worse, the people in question seemed to have nothing in common at all. Most of them lived in neighbouring towns, and while some of them even knew each other, there didn't seem to be any common feature that even half of them shared. They only similarity I could find was that, in all cases, they had forgotten about something unpleasant. I wasn't entirely sure how Mrs Wright fit into that, until I went through the initial interviews again and saw that one of her friends from the Sunday brunch had said that she'd been thinking about getting a divorce. So something did fit neatly together – I just had no idea what to make of it.
Nightingale and I spent the next two hours talking to a few of those witnesses – or possibly victims, although it felt weird to call them that without knowing what they'd been victims of – but again we found no clear sign of magic. No noticeable vestigia, no magic paraphernalia or books that I could find (snooping around was incredibly easy when Nightingale did the talking – he was always engaging, but he could really crank up the charm when he wanted to). But after the first two witnesses both mentioned a walk in that same forest Mrs Wright had told us of, we also asked the others about it – and, eureka, every single one of them had been there just before their brains had suddenly deleted the sorrow of the day. My first thought was that it sounded like a pretty sweet deal. I could think of a thing or two I'd rather forget (mostly things related to murderous tiger boys, evil wizards, and getting tasered in the back), except that whatever had happened had unfortunately failed to make everyone else forget about it, too.
Eventually we stopped for a late lunch at a tiny pub our last witness had recommended, both because I was starving – Nightingale probably too, not that he'd ever say that – and because we needed to talk about how to proceed from there.
“I'm guessing that if you had ever run across a magic forest that makes people forget things, you would have said so by now,” I asked around a mouthful of fairly terrible kidney pie. Either the last witness knew the owners of this pub or he considered this appropriate punishment for the two coppers who'd interrupted his self-loathing now that the world had reminded him that he'd lost his job. Nightingale shot me the look reserved for bad table manners – I was seriously good these days at recognising the minute variations of Nightingale's exasperated expressions – so I swallowed quickly and grinned at him.
“I can't say that I have.” He gave his plate a last sceptical look, poked with his fork at something brown that was probably meat, then decided to give up and dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “I understand that there are sometimes perfectly mundane reasons for memory loss, as a consequence of psychological trauma, but that hardly seems to apply in these cases.”
That was an unusually modern thing to say for Nightingale. I wasn't sure I'd ever heard him use the words 'psychological trauma' before, and I was just about to ask him where he'd read about trauma-related memory loss when I realised that he probably didn't have to. I thought of his flinch at the hospital, of Hugh Oswald's story about David Mellenby's suicide (“he wasn't the only one, come to think of it”), of Nightingale's vague words that not all those who returned to England had truly survived Ettersberg. Somehow I had grown to imagine the post-war Folly as an empty place with no one but Nightingale in it, but now I wondered how many of his colleagues, his friends, had returned with him only to fill the Folly with screams and nightmares. I wondered just how much psychological trauma Nightingale had seen first hand, and I did my best not to think about how much he knew from his own experience rather than his friends'.
I swallowed and pushed my plate away, drowned out the bitter taste in my mouth with a gulp of water. I didn't realise that I still hadn't answered until Nightingale said my name, softly, with more concern than I could stomach.
“Yes. No. That really would be too much of a coincidence, sir, and most of these cases don't sound dramatic enough to cause actual memory loss,” I said. Nightingale nodded briefly; clearly he'd been thinking the same thing. “You've never had a similar case?”
It wasn't a particularly subtle attempt to get him to talk, but I did have a good excuse (I'd used far worse excuses to try and get some Folly stories of yore out of him, which usually ended with him telling me to stop distracting myself from my studies, most of the time after making a cryptic comment or two that only served to intrigue me more). He considered my words for a minute before answering, even though he'd clearly been thinking about just that since we'd arrived.
“I remember a few cases that involved altered memories, caused by elaborate glamours or potions.”
“Potions?” That was the first time I heard anything about potions. “You never said anything about magic potions. Tell me we didn't skip the potions lessons just because you wanted to escape the Hogwarts jokes.”
He looked so exasperated that I almost felt a little bad, if it wasn't for the mental image of a bunch of posh old wizards in bespoke suits standing around a cauldron and getting green goo on their immaculate white cuffs.
“Potions aren't used in Newtonian magic.” I tried not to look too disappointed and failed, judging by the irritated frown on Nightingale's face. “To my knowledge there has never been any evidence that any of them actually work. That doesn't mean that there haven't been countless quacks trying to convince the world otherwise.”
“You just said that there were cases in which potions caused altered memories.”
“There was this old woman I met in India,” and I hadn't known before that Nightingale had ever been to India. I put it on the already endless list of things to ask him about if he ever owed me a favour and couldn't answer my questions with 'have you finished your Latin homework? If you have, here's some more.' “She claimed to sell love potions, but we were rather sure that they only contained some sort of hallucinogen that made it easier for her to glamour people.”
“Didn't you analyse the potions?” Not that I could imagine Nightingale doing something like that, but surely he'd had some colleagues whose interests lay more in the scientific area rather than in learning how to speak every single language known to man. With the exception of Klingon, maybe. Probably. He would have had to use the internet for that.
Nightingale shrugged. “It wasn't a major priority, I'm afraid.”
I didn't ask what their priority had been because I had a feeling I wasn't going to get any more answers, not as tight-lipped as he still was about his past. And for all my curiosity, I didn't really like to pry. It didn't take much to remind Nightingale of things he very obviously didn't want to remember.
“All right, so what's our working theory here? Probably not that an old Indian woman is sitting in that forest and messing with people's heads.”
That got me a small smile, and I hadn't seen him smile all day. Nor the day before, now that I thought about it. A few months ago I would have been uncomfortable with how much I missed it, but I'd grown used to far more uncomfortable thoughts these days. Like how soft his neck looked right above his stiff collar and that I could see blue veins shining through his pale skin. Although the most uncomfortable thing about that was that those thoughts had gone from random, really weird observations caused by insomnia and spending too much time with one person to regular everyday thoughts while having lunch with my governor.
“No, but whatever – or whoever – is causing this either is or was at some point in that forest, so I'd say that's where we go next.”
“That's our plan? We waltz in there and hope that whatever's in there won't get us, too?”
Nightingale seemed to think about that for a moment, but then he nodded.
“Yes. If you were on your own, I'd suggest caution while I try to find out more in the Folly's libraries, but since we're both here, we might as well go ahead.”
“You must have got bored in those months you spent cooped up in the Folly,” I said. It hadn't escaped me that Nightingale was out and about a lot now that Varvara had been sent back to Russia. Except for the past few days when he'd all but avoided me, we'd barely had dinner at the Folly since our resident ice witch had left. I'd noticed Molly pouting – although pouting was the wrong word, she just gave us looks and made us twice as much food for breakfast, as if she didn't believe that we were fed properly when we went out for dinner – but Nightingale had, rather ungentlemanly, ignored her silent objections.
“I did get to brush up on my Russian – and added an impressive amount of swearwords to my vocabulary – but you're right,” he said. He was smiling again, or still, and there was something almost adventurous in his eyes. “I suppose I'm not used to that much peace and quiet anymore.”
There was a world of unspoken words in the way he looked at me, words I couldn't bring myself to think about in the middle of the day in the middle of nowhere, so I opted instead for the adult reaction of signalling for our waiter.
The drive to the forest took us about twenty minutes on rather scenic, narrow roads. The sun had come out while we'd been at lunch and had turned this into one of those dazzlingly bright autumn days that made the world around you look photoshopped. I didn't say that, of course. Nightingale would have just commented that I needed to get out of London more. Probably after asking me what a shop for photographs had to do with beautiful days. He blinked a couple of times into the sunlight, frowning.
“Peter, would you hand me my sunglasses, please? They're in the glove compartment.”
I'd never seen Nightingale with sunglasses, although the fact that he kept them in his car was probably a pointer that he didn't really wear them as a fashion accessory. I reached down to fish a black case out of the glove box, opened it to find a pair of seriously stylish round sunglasses with a slender metal frame. The lenses were dusty, so I carefully wiped them on my shirt before handing the glasses to Nightingale. They made him look like some Golden Age Hollywood star, combined with his old-fashioned haircut and his fine-boned features.
“Those are really fashionable, sir,” I said, and I even managed to make it sound teasing rather than too admiring.
“Are they?” He gave me a surprised glance over the rim of the sunglasses. “I can't imagine that; I've had them for years.”
“Nothing new under the sun,” I said wisely and grinned at him. “Everything that goes out of fashion eventually comes back, right?”
He laughed, evidently flattered, and I wondered just how much of his style was really just him being old-fashioned and how much was actual vanity that he covered up with being posh. I tried to focus on the scenery so I wouldn't stare too much at his face or at his gloved hands on the wheel, but there was only so long I could look at various trees – even pretty trees with red leaves – without getting bored.
“What happened to the Indian woman with the potions?” I asked eventually. I know, I hadn't wanted to pry, but I was curious.
“Oh, I'd imagine she was told in no uncertain terms that the unauthorised use of magic in the Empire is frowned upon,” he replied, and like always it boggled my mind that Nightingale had not only been alive, but already working at a time when India had still been part of 'the Empire'. “Although I suppose that nobody would have cared much about the whole affair if her potions hadn't been involved in a scandalous little story about the daughter of a local administrator. I don't quite know what happened in the end, though. I was recalled to England shortly after; I'd only been there to stand in for a colleague who'd had some family business to take care of.”
At least I had the good sense not to ask what had become of that colleague. Past conversations had already taught me that the answer was usually a flinch and a pained expression that meant “Ettersberg”. I'd always assumed that not knowing what had happened there made me imagine the worst, but what Oswald had told me hadn't really made it better, either.
Nightingale parked the Jag by a narrow path that led up to what looked from the outside like an unremarkable little forest, really just a small crop of trees. He stored the sunglasses and his driving gloves in the glove box again, but he did take his silver-topped cane from the backseat before he left the car. I wasn't sure if that meant he expected trouble or that he just wanted to be prepared for anything.
As we approached the forest the path became increasingly uneven and muddy, still wet from the previous night's rainfall. I saw Nightingale frown and knew he was probably wishing he'd packed his serious business lace-up boots instead of the handmade dress shoes he was wearing, but it wasn't as if he had a short supply of those. At least he was wearing a sturdy tweed suit, which was obviously as well tailored as every other piece of clothing he owned.
I was just about to ask Nightingale if he was sure that we were in the right place, because this looked nothing like the “magical”, “enchanted” forest our witnesses had described. But then the path ended, right between two large trees that even I recognised as birches, and it was as if we'd stepped through a portal into another world. Not really, since we could still see where we'd come from if we turned around and there weren't any weird distortions in the air like you'd get in a film, but it still felt like it.
The trees seemed much higher than they had from the outside, but they let in more sunlight than should have been possible. And the sunlight was literally golden, mirrored on wet leaves and grass. The air itself smelt cleaner, somehow, like spring rather than autumn, and I didn't need Nightingale to tell me that the feeling of peace that washed over me was some kind of vestigia.
Next to me Nightingale stood as straight-backed as ever, his fingers gripping the cane tightly, his eyes scanning our surroundings, and in that moment there was something distinctly military about his posture. We exchanged a brief glance before we slowly made our way deeper into the forest. There wasn't anything frightening about it, it was more like falling into a dream or a fairytale, and it made my skin crawl. I could see now why everyone had described this place as peaceful, except unlike all our witnesses I noticed that something was not quite normal here.
We crossed a small, purling stream, and our steps sounded far too muted on the wet leaves. The light rippled through the trees, and once my eyes had adjusted a bit to it, I thought I saw something like mirrors in the treetops, unless those were just leaves shining in the sun. I was squinting and staring and trying to make out details when I heard a muffled groan to my right, the squelching slide of leather on mud as Nightingale slipped for a second before he caught himself. My hand instinctively went for his arm to steady him, and I was about to tease him when I felt the forceful, elegant twist of his signare, a high order spell I didn't recognise. Part of it reminded me of the shield he'd taught me, but it was combined with several other formae I didn't know yet.
I had a feeling I was going to get a lecture later for getting distracted on the job, but even now that I was paying attention, I couldn't actually see or feel anything. Nightingale's jaw was clenched, he almost looked as if he was in pain, and I felt that he was still maintaining the spell, that it wavered occasionally under whatever seemed to be attacking him. Us? I couldn't tell if it was only targeting Nightingale or if Nightingale's spell was protecting us both.
“Inspector?” My hand still rested on his elbow to steady him, even though he probably didn't need me to anymore. “What's going on?”
He frowned at me.
“You don't feel anything?” His voice was tense, his tone even more clipped than usual.
I shook my head, expecting him to be disappointed, but instead he seemed relieved. I took that to mean that whatever was happening wasn't happening to me. Or at least I hoped that's what it meant.
I saw pain flash through his eyes as the spell wavered again, a bone-deep, weary sorrow that made my chest ache. The light around us flickered – it didn't dim, but it moved, the reflections from the trees ever changing even though there was barely any wind to move the trees. If I thought I'd felt helpless cowering behind a car while Nightingale ripped buildings apart, this was worse. Then at least I'd felt like he had the situation under control. Now I was just getting anxious, not knowing what was going on or how I could help, and more importantly, not knowing if maybe he needed help.
“Stop that,” he growled after another minute, his usually controlled voice turning rough.
This time the light also moved right ahead of us, and then something – someone stepped into our field of vision. I didn't know where it had come from, there was no stone or tree it could have been hiding behind. One moment there was just wavering light, the next it stood there. I blinked a few times, squinted to make out details. The creature was small, maybe half as tall as me, and while it was vaguely humanoid, it didn't really look human at all. Its skin looked much like the bark of the surrounding trees, covered in some places with what seemed to be brown fur. Woven into the fur were small mirrors or maybe glass pearls, countless of them, that broke the light over and over again. I glanced up into the tree tops, and now that I knew what I was looking for, I saw shapes moving there. What I'd thought to be wet leaves were more little glass pearls.
Nightingale was as tense by my side as before, although I couldn't tell if it was because he didn't recognise what we were facing or because he knew them to be dangerous. Either way I thought it smartest to stay close to him.
The creature stepped closer and watched us with large, curious eyes. They were an odd mixture of green and yellow with no visible pupils, but they were clearly intelligent. There was no threat in them either, as far as I could tell, but then again the forest itself felt almost disturbingly safe as well. Maybe this was some sort of glamour, too.
“Stop it,” Nightingale repeated, his voice calmer this time, but his teeth were still gritted.
“Why?” The voice sounded like a whistle, breathy and light and more melodic than the gnarled appearance would have led me to expect, as if the creature's vocal chords weren't really designed for our kind of speech. I wondered if it had vocal chords at all or if it used magic to mimic our language.
“You stole the memories of the people who came into these woods.” Nightingale didn't bother to make it sound like a question.
“Stole?” the creature echoed, and there was a soft whistling sound from the tree tops, like the murmur of a crowd. “Not steal. Take.”
There was an odd emphasis on the “take”, like it meant something profoundly different.
“Whatever you want to call it, you will cease doing it,” Nightingale said. “I don't know for how long you have been gone from this world, but the old laws and arrangements still hold. I will not tolerate any interference with human matters.”
His voice was harsh now, threatening, and whatever other language these creatures usually spoke, they understood this the way any animal understood a predator's growl. The one who'd been talking to us edged backwards, I saw the light flicker again, like when it had appeared. We weren't going to resolve this if they just ran off until Nightingale had gone, so I quickly stepped forward.
“Wait, wait.” I felt more than just one pair of eyes on me now. “We should talk about this. He's not going to do anything while we talk. Right, sir?”
I glanced back at Nightingale, who didn't stop frowning, but he didn't stop me either. The light around the creature stabilised – I decided that meant it had relaxed.
“I'm PC Peter Grant, this is DCI Thomas Nightingale. We're from the Folly.” No reaction. “Wizards.”
Another soft whistling went through the trees, but I couldn't tell if it was approval or not.
“What's your name?” I asked. Always had to get a name and address from a witness, right? Even if in this case “creepy magic forest in Kent” would have to do for an address. The reply was a high, melodious whistle that I couldn't have repeated even if I knew how to whistle. I looked back at Nightingale again, questioningly.
“They're fae,” he explained. “There are various kinds of nature spirits, but we know only little about them, mostly because they're rarely ever seen. It's commonly assumed that they don't usually dwell in our world, and decades or centuries can pass between sightings.”
At least that explained his comment about them having been gone for a long time. I thought back to the fae I had met in the summer, and although they were nothing like these creatures, they had the same eerie supernatural aura. That and, I remembered, 'fae' was basically a generic term the Folly had been using for 'every supernatural creature we don't really know anything about and can't otherwise classify'. I turned back to the one I'd been talking to. In summer I'd known that I was speaking to a queen, but now? Was this their leader? A spokesman? A sort of ambassador? Somehow I doubted I'd get a satisfying answer if I asked.
“What did you mean, 'take'?” I asked instead.
“Turn into light,” it replied, and there was an almost cheerful whistling from the tree tops. “We take the sorrow and turn it into light.”
The pieces fell into place – people forgetting about unhappy marriages, about arguments, about break-ups. They hadn't been robbed; these fae had been trying to help them. And since none of these people had been familiar with magic, they hadn't even noticed what was happening to them, unlike Nightingale.
Nightingale. Of course they'd gone for him rather than for me. There probably wasn't a single person in the world with more unhappy memories than him.
As if it had read my mind – and maybe it had, maybe mind-reading was what these creatures did, sorting through memories and ripping out the bad ones like a gardener tearing out the weeds – the creature turned to Nightingale and said, “If you had come earlier, we would have made it stop. Take the darkness, turn it into light.”
Nightingale didn't react, the look in his eyes still haunted, so I replied quickly, “We don't … we don't want that, you see? We want to keep our memories. Even the bad ones.”
I actually wasn't sure if that was true. I had spent nights lying awake, wishing I could forget about Lesley tasering me in the back, about the Faceless Man making Skygarden collapse underneath us, about falling off the tower with him. Looking at Nightingale, thinking of all the evenings when I'd seen him sit in the dark, sometimes listening to quiet jazz from on old gramophone, more often in silence, I wondered if there weren't things he'd rather forget, too. If a man who'd spent seventy years surrounded by the ghosts of his dead friends wouldn't yearn for just that.
But the thing was, forgetting wouldn't actually solve anything. Lesley would still be gone, the Faceless Man would still be out there. If anything, us forgetting about them would just cause more trouble, just like Susan Wright forgetting she had ever met her husband hadn't in fact made her life happier.
“Why?” the creature asked again. “He suffers.”
Even though it was hard to detect any clear emotion in that whistling tone, I could sense that this caused actual anguish all around us. Maybe they read minds, or maybe they felt our thoughts the way I could feel vestigia. I didn't want to imagine what Nightingale's memories did to someone who could feel them.
“They suffered, too,” Nightingale replied before I could think of something to say. His voice was softer now, all grief and sorrow, echoed by a pained whistling from the trees. “If I don't remember them, nobody else will.”
Those yellow-green eyes looked at us, and as different as the creature looked, I still recognised that expression of blank confusion. In a weird way it reminded me of how Nightingale looked at me when I made Harry Potter references, except this was a whole worldview that made no sense to them rather than just a few jokes.
“You want to help, yes?” I asked.
“You need our help,” the creature insisted.
“Ah. Well, you see, we suffer more if you help us,” I tried. “Not immediately, but later.”
I received a look that was about as sceptical as my mother's when I'd lied to her as a child. The light flickered again, moving through the trees. I wondered if those words had been literal, if the golden light around us was made of memories turned into something else. I couldn't see how that was scientifically possible, but if I'd learnt anything it was that just because I didn't yet know the scientific explanations for the magic I had witnessed didn't mean that there wasn't one. It was a pity that I probably couldn't convince the creatures to explain to me just how the hell they “turned memories into light”, but the whole thing gave me an idea.
“The thing is, we need to do that ourselves. Turn the sorrow into light. We're just -” I thought about it for a moment, about the almost patronising look the creature was giving me, “- slower. And when you do it too fast, it confuses us. We don't like being confused.”
Nightingale's face next to me was still a mask of tension. I wondered what he'd do if talking didn't work. So much in what he called the demi-monde seemed to rest on arrangements and unwritten rules, but they had to have been established at some point, and the fact that even someone like Nightingale was always quick to rattle his metaphorical sabre made me wonder just how those arrangements had come about. I didn't want anyone else to get hurt just because these earth fae didn't seem to understand why humans so stubbornly clung to things that pained them.
Minutes passed, soft whistles that had to be some sort of deliberation between them. It was like listening to a song, accompanied by quiet plings when the glass pearls moved against each other. Nightingale was leaning on his cane and trying not to show it. I leant in to whisper, “What happens if they won't stop?”
“I can't let them keep doing this, even if they think they're helping,” he said.
I startled when the creature I'd been talking to – at least that's what I assumed, since I hadn't seen any of the others up close – suddenly stood much closer to us than it had before.
“We cannot stay here if your kind brings suffering. We cannot make light if you keep the darkness.”
I couldn't be sure, but I was almost certain there was disdain in its voice; the whistling sounded much sharper now before, and the eyes still reminded me of my mother. I wondered if this fae was female; if they even had males and females. Either way I felt like a scolded child who just didn't know what was good for him.
“We need to know if you're going to stop,” Nightingale said. If he was bothered by the disdainful tone, he didn't show it.
“We cannot stop,” the creature said. “But we leave.”
Before I could say anything else, the light around us flickered again, not just around this creature, but in the trees as well, gold turning into a dark bronze before it faded completely, and then it was dark.
It took me a moment to realise that it was actually just a normal day in a thick forest with some pale rays of sunlight seeping through the foliage; it was only the bright light before that made me feel like night had suddenly fallen. I looked around, but I already knew that they were indeed gone.
“They don't usually dwell in our world, you said. So did they go back to where they came from?” I asked Nightingale. He looked even worse than before in this light, pale and tired.
“That's what I assume. I'll have to read up on it, but there are many accounts of rather volatile kinds of fae that barely ever leave their own realm. I'm assuming they only came here recently, which would explain why there is no record of similar cases until a few months ago.”
“I wish I could have spoken to them for longer. To find out where they're from, why they came here now.” I sighed. “What's to stop them from coming back?”
“Nothing, I'm afraid.” Nightingale rubbed his forehead briefly, as if he had a headache. “There are certain wards to discourage the passing between different worlds, but that would only keep them from coming back right here. But I don't think we need to worry. From what I understand, time passes differently for most fae. Slower. I remember an account of an air spirit who turned up at a village one day and didn't understand why the people it had talked to five hundred years earlier weren't there anymore.”
Between this and the events in the summer, I decided that I really needed to spend some more time in the library and read up on whatever I could find about the fae. It was getting frustrating, knowing so little about them. I understood the Rivers, or even the Quiet People, and compared to her kinsmen even Molly seemed downright normal. Most supernatural creatures I had encountered seemed to be the same as people, with some particular quirks and powers, but all in all surprisingly similar. Dealing with these fae felt a lot like what I imagined talking to aliens would be like.
“So we just hope they won't be back?” I asked. I was looking around us, trying to find anything unusual about our surroundings, but with the fae gone, the forest seemed completely ordinary.
“Well, you did convince them to stop altering memories,” Nightingale said. His voice was still soft, I thought from pain, but I realised a few moments later that it had been a compliment. “I suggest we check back again in a few weeks to make sure, but for now we should go home.”
The way back out of the forest seemed a lot farther than it had going in, and after a few steps on the uneven ground Nightingale started limping. He was still leaning heavily on his cane, his face a mask of concentration. He must have slipped worse than I had noticed while I'd been distracted by the lights in the trees. I almost offered him my help, but he glared at me before I could.
“I'm quite all right, Peter,” he said before I could open my mouth. “It's nothing but a sprained ankle.”
“You don't look all right, sir.”
He really didn't. In fact, he looked far worse than anyone should because of a sprained ankle. Nightingale didn't reply, and I thought he was going to leave it at that, but he spoke up again once we'd stepped out of the forest, into bright sunlight without any supernatural glow, nothing but a beautiful autumn day.
“Did you ever play with catapults as a child?” he asked.
“Probably?” I couldn't really remember. I mostly remembered footballs and lego, but then again most children had probably shot pebbles at passing adults at some point in their lives.
“You know how the cord snaps back, and if you're not careful, it can hit your fingers? What they were doing was very much like that. Like they were trying to pull thoughts out of my mind that snapped back into it when I resisted.”
I wasn't really sure that comparison worked, but I still got what he meant. Nothing like painful, sudden reminders of things you'd been trying really hard not to think about.
“Like living them again?” I asked.
“Not quite as vividly, no, but like a a very detailed dream.”
I had been having those more often recently, the kind when you woke up and it took you a minute or two to remember where you are, to realise that you were only imagining the pain in your limbs from falling down a tower or being buried under rubble. Nightingale was as much of an insomniac as I had become in recent months, and the look on his face wasn't too different from the one I'd seen on those nights when we met in the reading room and shared a cup of tea in silence, or those when he came into the coach house at three in the morning while I was trying to distract myself on the internet and sat down next to me, reading a book or watching TV or sometimes just sitting there until he dozed off.
“I'm sorry,” I said, because there was really nothing else to say. I could pry again, of course, and it wasn't like I wasn't curious, but that would only make it worse. I could speculate about whether he might have been happier without the memories of countless dead friends, but I knew that even if he'd truly wanted to forget, he would never allow himself to. I could fret and fuss, but that would have made me at least as uncomfortable as him.
“It's a good thing you were there, Peter,” Nightingale added when I didn't say anything else. He sounded a little awkward, but that might have just been his generally strained tone. “I might not have had the patience for this kind of solution.”
I took that for the thanks it was and nodded.
“Sure, sir, that's what you've got me for.” I gave him a smile I hoped was uplifting. “Modern community policing and all that.”
We walked back to the car, slowly, despite the fact that Nightingale was trying his damnedest not to limp. When he'd got shot and insisted just a week afterwards that he was perfectly fine, Dr Walid had snapped at him that his stoic stiff upper lip would get him killed eventually. Nightingale had replied dryly that a lot more dangerous things had already tried to kill him, he'd survive his own stubbornness, thank you very much.
Still, I wasn't going to let him drive back to London in pain just because he didn't want to admit that he was hurting. Maybe I couldn't help with him having to deal with a stark reminder of his worst memories, but I could at least help with his ankle. I touched his elbow carefully when we reached the Jag and led him to the passenger's door.
“You're not driving, sir.”
“Is that so?” He sounded almost a bit amused, but that was better than the way his voice had broken before. “You really do jump at every opportunity to drive my car.”
Despite his complaints he handed over the keys and sat down after I'd unlocked the door. I went to rummage through the trunk to find the first-aid kit – it was new, I'd replaced the old one a few months ago once I'd found out that Nightingale apparently hadn't bothered to do so in a couple of decades.
He gave me a long-suffering glare when I returned with the small red box in my hands.
“Peter, there's really no need for that.”
“Yeah, there is. You can either play along or I'll call Dr Walid once we're home, and he'll make a big deal of this and probably also lecture you on the dangers of smoking again, while he's at it.” I grinned at him, even more so when he grimaced a little. Better to have him focus on this than on other things. After a few seconds' deliberation Nightingale nodded and held out his hand.
He was right, of course. There was no reason why he couldn't bandage his ankle himself. I could have handed him the first-aid kit and been done with it; I probably should have. But the skin around his eyes was tight and the muscles in his neck were tense, and his right hand was still gripping his cane so firmly that his knuckles had turned white. If there wasn't much else I could do, I would at least do this.
The soft grass by the car had already dried in the sunlight, but I was still careful not to slip when I crouched down in front of him. I set down the first-aid kit and my hands went for Nightingale's, gently prying his fingers from his cane. He looked surprised when he let go of it, as if he hadn't been aware that he'd still been holding it this entire time. His hand felt cold as I rubbed his fingers gently – I was used to them being warm whenever he touched me, when his fingers brushed against mine while correcting my Latin translations, when he'd patted my back after my little coughing fit the week before, when he squeezed my shoulder. I didn't think I'd ever touched his hands for so long, or at least I'd never been aware of how soft his skin was, how delicate his knuckles felt under my fingertips.
“What was that spell you used in there?” I asked, both to distract myself and to distract him. “Some kind of shield?”
“Against more elaborate mental attacks, yes.” His voice sounded steadier already. “It's possible to build up a general resistance to something like a glamour over time, as you have, but that's not quite enough in all cases.”
“So it's like a spell to boost your will save on top of just having a higher will save because you're a wizard, huh?” I smiled up at him, laughed when he blinked in confusion.
“I have no idea what that means, Peter.”
“It's a D&D thing. Roleplaying games.”
Nightingale raised a very meaningful eyebrow. It took me a moment to catch on to what he was thinking and then I could feel myself blush. I quickly let go of his hand and busied myself with the first-aid kit, taking out a cooling gel and a bandage.
“It's a game, sir. That you play with friends. Not those kinds of friends. God, sir, get your mind out of the gutter.”
He laughed, only briefly and still a bit shaky, but it was warm and soft and it stopped him from looking so damn heartbroken. I considered explaining some more details to him, but I wasn't sure if that would cheer him up as much as make him feel even more like the world had turned into a very strange place. Instead I made him hold the small tube and the bandage, not meeting his eyes this time when our fingertips brushed. I knew I could have, should have simply asked him to take off his shoe, if I already insisted on helping him, but it was so rare that I got any excuse to touch him, so rare that he looked like he would let me.
So I untied the soaked laces and pulled off his shoe, careful not to hurt his ankle more than it already was. His eyes were burning into me, but he didn't object, didn't say anything when I took off his sock next. I was half surprised – and maybe just a little bit disappointed – that he didn't use those old-fashioned garters you saw in old movies, but I supposed modern socks were, like airwave and digital radios, among the rare inventions that Nightingale had deemed worthy of his time.
His ankle had already begun to swell up a bit, but not so much that it wouldn't have been obvious anymore that his ankles were as slender as his wrists. And yeah, there was something seriously Victorian about getting this excited about seeing someone's ankle, but in this case it was warranted. After all, it's not like I'd ever seen much of Nightingale's skin, not counting the time he'd been in hospital, because even ignoring the fact that I'd only known him for a few weeks then, there really hadn't been anything appealing about that.
I tried to focus on the task at hand. I had enough small cousins who managed to hurt themselves all the time, so I'd seen my share of sprained ankles. I knew the difference between “have a piece of chocolate and try not to run around too much for a few days” and “oh shit, this looks bad”. Nightingale, I guessed, was somewhere between those two extremes. I still carefully tested the mobility of his ankle, which was unsurprisingly rather hard with someone whose reply to “does this hurt?” was an unwavering “not too badly”.
“I guess we won't have to bother Dr Walid, but you should probably wait a bit before you go on another spontaneous walk through a magic forest,” I finally said. I still had both hands closed around his ankle, keeping my touch light so as not to hurt him.
“I could have told you that, Peter.” He was still trying to sound put upon, but both his voice and his eyes had softened too much for that. He also didn't tell me to hurry up already, which was really as good as telling me to keep doing what I was doing.
“It could have been serious, you know?” I said. My thumb drew a small circle just above his ankle. “And I already have to do all of the running around; it'd be a lot worse if you had an untreated broken ankle on top of that.”
I knelt so I could put his foot on my knee – which really shouldn't have done anything for me, not like I had some sort of foot fetish – and pushed the leg of his suit trousers up a bit. My fingers brushed over soft brown hair, his skin impossibly smooth underneath it, and Nightingale let out the quietest little sigh. My eyes still hadn't left his and he looked surprised at himself. Technically it wasn't quiet, not with the rustling of leaves in the wind or the nearby song of some bird I didn't recognise, but it felt quiet, quiet enough that I could hear him breathe. I looked down.
“I'll just …” I didn't finish the sentence, focused instead on applying some of the cooling gel to Nightingale's swollen ankle, and for all his attempts at looking like he hadn't been in pain, he noticeably relaxed now. I fumbled a bit with the bandage to get it right, loosened it a few times so it wouldn't be too tight and restrict his blood flow. There was approval in Nightingale's eyes; sometimes it seemed to me like he was always impressed when I actually knew something useful instead of a bunch of things he considered not all that essential to life (like knowing how the small intestine worked).
“There, that's better.” My right hand rested at the back of Nightingale's ankle, but my thumb and index lay just above the bandage. Nightingale still showed no impatience, and I didn't know if it was the look in his eyes or those weeks and weeks of waiting for something to happen while trying not to think too much about why I wanted it to happen, but I still didn't withdraw. Instead my hand slid further up to massage his calf, tense from limping, and I added “Nightingale has seriously nice legs” to the long list of things I never really expected to find out about him.
“Peter.” His voice was thick with something I didn't dare to examine too closely. I swallowed and my hand dropped to my thigh, covering his foot.
“Sorry, sir.”
“No, it's quite all right. Thank you.” He raised his hand then, like he was about to touch my cheek, and I already cocked my head to the side to meet him halfway, but his hand just hovered an inch above my skin before he pulled back.
Whoever came up with all that “anticipation is half the fun” nonsense had clearly never had a thing for someone who was either seriously old-fashioned and repressed or very honourable and worried about taking advantage of their charge. Or probably a combination of both. Looking up at him in that moment, his hand so close to my skin that all I would have had to do to make him touch me was to lean in a bit more, I realised that Nightingale wasn't going to do anything, now not anymore than he had last Wednesday or the week before in the coach house when he'd dozed off and woken with his head on my shoulder.
“This is ridiculous, sir,” I said finally, and it must have come out harsher than I had intended because he flinched back, his hand returning to his side, his bare foot pulling back and coming to rest on the soft grass. He looked hurt, too, not the old, heavy grief I had seen on his face in the forest, but the fresh pain of an unexpected wound. I quickly continued, “No, I mean … I mean, we should go out for dinner. You and me.”
Which was probably not my smoothest line in a long history of not particularly smooth lines. At least Nightingale looked confused now instead of hurt.
“We always go out for dinner,” he pointed out carefully.
“Yes, but … we should go to a nicer place. I mean, one of these days, when your ankle is better.” I touched his ankle again, barely brushing his skin this time, but to my relief it was enough to bring my point across. This whole thing was awkward enough without having to use the word “date” in a conversation with Nightingale. And maybe I should have just kissed him, it wasn't as if we hadn't already spent most of our time together pretty much since the moment we'd met, but somehow it felt more appropriate to do this properly.
“Oh.”
There were worse reactions, I knew that, but it still wasn't exactly what I'd hoped for, at least not until Nightingale reached down to take my hand in his. He leant a little onto me when he stood up, his weight on one leg while he tried his best not to strain the other, and I got up quickly as well to steady him, ended up with my other hand on his side, fingers curled just the smallest bit into the tweed.
Nightingale's cologne had a warm, mossy kind of smell I'd loved since I'd first met him (even though back then I'd still just thought about what brand it was and where I could buy it and if it would be weird to use the same cologne as my governor, rather than about letting the scent rub off his skin into mine), his hair was matted with sweat and a bit tousled at the temples, and his fingers were finally warm again when they curled around mine. He didn't need a glamour to make me feel heady with him this close, and I'd almost forgotten that he hadn't actually given me an answer by the time he cupped my chin gently and said, “I would like that very much.”
I beamed at him, fairly sure that I didn't look any less excited than the first time I'd managed to conjure my own werelight, but before I could say anything he leant in and kissed me. He didn't really have to do much leaning, to be fair, only inclined his head so and turned my chin a little and then his lips were on mine.
I forgot to breathe for several seconds as if the tiniest flutter of air would startle him, just held still and closed my eyes. It could have almost been chaste, all lips and no tongue, if it hadn't lingered for so long, if it hadn't made me shiver and made Nightingale's breath hitch when he pulled back.
“Wow,” I said. What, I dare anyone to be eloquent after getting kissed by Thomas Nightingale, or I would if I was even remotely okay with the idea of anyone else getting kissed by him ever again.
He smiled, one of those rare smiles that made his eyes even brighter, and then he leant his forehead against mine. Remembering his expression when we'd left the forest, I decided that I was really pretty damn good at cheering him up.
When he didn't say anything, I added, “That was long overdue.”
A breath of laughter against my lips, and I thought about curling up in bed with him and making him laugh like this again, making him smile into my skin until his face hurt because nobody had bothered to in far longer than any man should ever have to be alone.
“It was hardly … inevitable, though,” Nightingale said, and the next look he gave me was more serious, worried almost.
“Yes, sir, I think it was.” His fingers moved from my chin to my cheek, fluttering over my skin tenderly. “Bound to happen. It just didn't because we …”
I shrugged. I didn't need to repeat the whole catalogue of reasons why kissing your governor-and-master or your subordinate-and-apprentice respectively was generally frowned upon and not something you'd do on a whim. We both knew. Hell, we'd spent months constantly reminding ourselves of all those reasons in an attempt to keep this from happening. At least right now, none of those reasons sounded all that sensible anymore.
“We should head back to London.” Nightingale mumbled the words against my lips, and I tightened my grip on his side, holding on to a fistful of fabric.
“Are you serious right now?”
“I'm not going to keep kissing you by the side of the road, Peter,” he said, with just enough mischief in his voice that I wondered if he couldn't be persuaded into doing just that sort of thing, except, right, I had decided to do this properly, and anyway we had to finish up our case and come up with a good explanation for the official police files, preferably one that made sure all of the victims wouldn't be branded as delusional for the rest of their lives. It sounded like a disappointingly dull plan for the day and the next, but I still forced myself to make a step backwards.
My hand stayed on his side, though, steadying him while he sat down in the passenger's seat again. I felt appropriately bad for it, but part of me kind of enjoyed it, being the one who helped Nightingale for once rather than needing him to help me. I was already thinking about whether he could possibly get up the stairs to his room without any help. Maybe he'd play along and pretend he couldn't.
After throwing the first-aid kit back into the trunk, I let myself sink into the soft leather of the driver's seat. It had been ages since Nightingale had let me drive the Jag, and as I pulled out onto the road, I caught his eye. On a whim I reached over and put my hand on his knee, and I wasn't quite sure if that made me feel even more like his slightly ethnic younger boyfriend or less, since I was driving for once. Nightingale laughed, his eyes gentle as he covered my hand with his.
“Eyes on the road, Peter, before you crash my car,” he said firmly, but he kept his fingers curled around mine. I did have to let go of him once we reached the next larger road, but I could still feel his eyes on me all the way back to London, and for once I knew it wasn't because he was worried about my driving skills.