Chapter 1

Beyond the mist, it is possible to believe anything. Anything at all.

A fresh spasm of pain jolted Fran; an ocean of it flared through her limp body. Swimming through flames—Dante’s Hell. Upside down—wrong way up. She groaned. For a dizzying few seconds, she couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down. Then everything settled. Time loitered. The final sliver of sunlight vanished around her and shadowy chills crept up from the cold earth, sending a shiver through her shoulders. Eyelids flickered open in slow motion. One at a time. Her vision, submerged in salt tears, managed to glimpse shifting foliage before she closed them again. Drifting back into darkness did her back no good whatsoever. She forced her dull senses to focus once more, striving to disentangle herself from the cloying mist. Her head, lolled to one side, caused an ache in her neck. If she raised it, would it snap? Could she die? Burgeoning pain forced her to lift it anyway, bringing relief to her vertebrae and muscles. Held in place by the taut seatbelt like strong rope, she realised she was still in the car, canted, the crumpled remains of a wrinkled airbag right in her face. Fragments of broken glass prickled her thighs. Confusion hovered about her mind like a fluttering cobweb caught in a draught.

What happened?

Uncertain, her shaking hand reached up and shifted the airbag away. The car’s crumpled bonnet and shattered windscreen stared back at her as if to say, ‘Remember?’ That’s what all the glass was in her lap. Beyond her car the gathering darkness enticed the grey mist to prowl, to explore the broken metal of her car with its phantom touch. Its dampness stirred through her tangled hair and across her face. Tickling. Her face hurt. The vivid explosion of the airbag prodded at her memory. It had smashed into her nose and cheeks, leaving her skin burned and tender. The backs of her fingers feathered her cheek and she grimaced, choking back a sob.

It had been a wild, dark, strange sort of a day, not like any other. It had been a day that had stretched her, not in her body, but in her soul. It was close to Christmas, but so distant that roast chestnuts and steamed puddings weren’t thought of yet. Christmas shopping, that horrid task which plagued humanity at the end of each year, hadn’t entered her mind. Yet maybe some perfume for her mother this year, and a ticket to the theatre.

Perfume?

She caught a whiff of fuel. Urgency threaded its way into her battered mind like a red ribbon, its whisper of danger acute. Thoughts of Christmas spiralled away into the void where memories of things fade for good.

Get out of the car. Get out. Might explode.

Except for the mist ghosting past her windscreen, nothing else was visible. No trees. No sky. No road. No one to assist her. Silence mushroomed. She was alone. No one to call.

Get out of the car.Just hope nothing’s broken.

Trembling fingers found the seatbelt and it clicked, retracting quicker than a crab to its shell. Her body sagged forward. Pain from that, too, blazed across her shoulder and down her ribs to her hips. Everything felt bruised and raw like white-hot wire embedded in her flesh.

In slow motion, she tried the door handle and pushed it open to the thirsty mist. Thick and clammy, it crawled across Fran’s face, reached its wet clawed fingers for her bare throat, her eyes, nose, mouth, until the sensation of drowning made her gasp for air the way a fish gasps out of water. Despite her discomfort, she placed a foot out in empty space, then down into cold water. Panic made her drag herself upright, grasping the side of the car. She teetered for a moment in a crimson haze as pain stabbed her chest. The gnawing cold of the moors sheared through to her soul.

Uncertain of where she was, she took a hesitant step forward into thick, tar-black darkness, sinking up to her knees. She paused for a few seconds and then managed to drag herself out of a shallow, waterlogged ditch. It had rained all week.

Now her eyes stung from the chemical smell of fuel. It gave her legs the impetus to walk another step, and then another, across wet gleaming bitumen. Every step jarred her body. Every step sent a fresh jolt of pain shooting through her back. Shivering, she stumbled on, through the mist which thickened like a hodgepodge of jumble soup, its pale fingers swirling in front of her eyes. Her apprehension of it grew into a monstrous fear that taunted her weak efforts to walk. Would she stumble about for days with no one to help her? One could die a hundred horrible ways out on the lonely, bleak moors. Moisture trickled down the side of her face. Was it blood or tears?

Then, through the hazy twilight, a pair of golden eyes winked at her. She halted, swallowed her mounting fear and watched as the beast drew nearer. Closer and closer it paced; its enormous body swaying in the pale cloud shimmer. Its eyes were a glowing pyre of freshly devoured victims.

One of theHounds—?

The shock was so great, for an instant she felt the jagged edge of anxiety below her retreating feet. The mist muffled the scream wrenched from her throat and her hands bunched into tight fists to fight it off. At the edge of the bitumen, she collapsed. Darkness and mist rolled over the top of her, as well as the far-off sound of a baby crying…

*****

Elaine clasped her baby to her bosom as she urged her stricken husband along through the damp mist that crept up from the swamp. Scarlet rivulets trickled over his fingers as he clutched the wound at his side and the pallor of his skin had turned ashen. She noticed how his steps faltered as he grew weaker and his knees often gave way under him. He would pitch forward, struggling to rise again. She reached out her hand to assist him, and they continued, hobbling on bruised feet, their limbs and bodies aching from the effort. The urgency to find someone who might offer them aid coursed through her. 

She glanced at Bran’s sweaty brow, at the strained look on his face, at the brightening stain of his tunic where the Saxon sword had pierced him. It set her heart pounding in fear. She knew death was not far off—for either of them. What hope did an injured man, a woman and a baby have out there in the wilds? The hungry swamp knew and expected death. Dead things wallowed in its stagnant pools. It held an odour of wet frogs and decaying things that burgeoned as their boots lifted the black mud. 

Fortunately, her baby had stopped crying a while back and lay sleeping against her. She stole a swift glance at him, at his angelic face, and drew the small wrapping cloth about his tiny body as Bran stumbled in the water and fell on his face. Elaine hastened to his side, grabbed the back of his coat with her hand and wrenched his face up so it was out of the water. His eyes were still closed.

‘Wake up, Bran,’ she pleaded. ‘Please get up.’

Her baby began to cry again, but her attention was on her struggling husband. She had nothing to bandage his wound with and the pressure he himself had applied to it with his hand hadn’t been enough. Now he just shivered uncontrollably as a fever took hold of him and he floundered amongst the weeds. If she knew of any god that might assist her, she had prayed to them all, but all had forsaken her. There was just one more, the god of the Christians. She didn’t know him, but had heard he’d performed miracles when he had walked the earth. Elaine could hardly put her faith in tales of a god who walked among his people, let alone in miracles. Gods didn’t do that. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t put her faith in him before, since the tales sounded too outlandish to be true. 

But what if—?

The sound of people moving through the water made her place her finger in her baby’s mouth. She bobbed her head up over the top of the reeds and noticed half a dozen Saxon warriors searching the swamp. Her baby whimpered and she covered his mouth.

‘Hush, little one,’ she whispered.

If they moved on now they’d be heard, so she crouched as low in the water as she dared, holding her baby, down beside her trembling husband, pulling the weeds about them. Panic coursed through her as one of the Saxons waded close beside their hiding place. She held her breath until he moved past. At one point, he had ventured so close, she could have reached out her hand and touched his scabbard.

Not until she was certain the Saxons had moved on did she stand and peek over the tops of the reeds. She grasped Bran’s arm, urging him onto his feet. After some effort, he struggled to rise and they continued through the cold water and onto dry ground where they collapsed and rested. Elaine’s ears strained to listen for tell-tale sounds of approaching Saxons.

Lifting her face to the warm sun as it peered through the branches, she prayed to the god of the Christians that he might at least save her baby. Then she sank down beside Bran and pulled aside his ripped tunic to look at his wound. Her breath caught in her throat at the sight of the ugly gash that left his flesh jagged and weeping with blood. She removed the cloth from her baby and wound it about Bran, though it did little to stem the flow of his blood. He’d lost so much already since the Saxon marauders attacked.

She struggled to her feet and looked around. That’s when she glimpsed a lake shimmering through the swirling mist, and on the lake, a small green island. If they could just reach its shores, they could drink some of its water. But as she gazed down at her sleeping husband, she realised his life had emptied out of him and his spirit had departed. Still holding her precious baby, she lay down beside him, wrapped her arm about his cold body and wept in bitterness. And she, too, fell asleep, leaving her baby crying.

The slender, delicate figure of a girl stepped from the mist and crouched over the baby. She picked it up, cradling it in her arms. For a few moments, she stared at the dead couple lying on the crushed grass. They appeared reposed in slumber, their cold hands clasped together, their faces smooth and unfettered with the world’s troubles. The girl took a tiny gold ring from the folds of her pale gown. A flash of fiery red revealed a stone embedded in gold.

‘I am sorry for your loss, child. Your name I know not, but I claim you as my own with this ring of dispel,’ she said, then she slipped it onto one of the baby’s tiny fingers and kissed his brow. ‘There, now you are mine, and I name you Lancelot, my heart’s joy. In days to come, you shall save many who find themselves in peril.’

She turned and walked back through the white mist, back to the lake where a white boat shaped like a swan sat moored on the stony shore, waiting to bear her and the infant away from the place of death.

*****

One eye opened; the other felt too lumpy and resisted Fran’s efforts to lift it. Consciousness returned and with it a fresh awareness of pain. She groaned. The dream faded, dissolved in the swirling mist—no,it was just her blurred vision playing tricks on her. Both eyes flickered open. She lay in a huge bed in a spacious room. Someone had brought her there, and looked after her. Reaching up, her fingers pressed against a band of cloth—a bandage. Someone rescued her from the Hounds. How long had she been there? Her gaze roamed. It didn’t much look like a hospital, so where was she? And what happened? 

From the vantage of the bed, she surveyed her surroundings. A flickering fire in a small stone hearth enabled her to see dark furniture and full-length oyster-grey curtains that hid the windows. Against a wall stood a quaint, old-fashioned dressing table and two wardrobes in a style she hadn’t seen since she and her mother cleaned out her grandmother’s house when she passed away a month ago.

Dim scatterings of memory ebbed and flowed through her mind. She recalled being carried through the mist toward a two-storey house and later, muffled voices inside asking questions, but the details were clouded in shadows. She remembered nothing more before she woke up in the bed. Images of her crumpled car bonnet flashed through her mind. Somehow, she’d been involved in a crash. A mist had risen off the moors, but it hadn’t contributed to her running off the road like that. Something else had gone wrong. Her brakes. Yes, her brakes had failed. Frowning, she tried to remember. She recalled her attempts to depress the brake pedal. It went straight to the floor of her car. 

The brakes had failed on a bend, causing her car to nosedive into the ditch. Swift and sudden. Her life had flashed before her eyes yet she couldn’t remember what she had seen. All she knew was that she had stared Death in the face, masked as Robert Winter, her ex-boyfriend, and had survived. Maybe she ought to ring her mother and let her know she was all right so she could come and get her, except—she glanced around for her phone. Where was it? And her handbag? She sat up to see if they were on the chest of drawers beside the bed. Nothing. Not seeing her possessions anywhere sent fresh panic racing through her. 

Her fingers clutched the gold ring on the chain about her neck. Her mother, Delora, had given it to her after she had discovered it amongst her grandmother’s possessions. With difficulty, she unclasped the necklace, took off the ring and slipped it on her middle finger on her right hand. She stared at it. The ring was old and made of yellow gold, scratched and aged by time. It had a red stone embedded in it and possessed sentimental value, so she was grateful it hadn’t been stolen.

The door opened and Fran started as a girl strode in, clad in a knee-length black skirt beneath a frilly white smock with black stockings on her thin legs. The small white cap bobby-pinned to her short hair made her look like a maid from long ago. She held a silver tray with a floral teapot, a cup and a plate of sandwiches cut in quarters, which she placed on the chest of drawers beside Fran.

‘Good morning, miss,’ she said in a happy voice. ‘Glad to see you’re awake at last. A nice hot cup of tea and some food will do you wonders.’

‘Where am I? What is this place?’ Fran asked. 

The girl came alongside the bed and smiled at her. ‘Why, don’t you remember, miss?’

Fran sat forward as the girl plumped up her pillows. ‘No.’ 

‘Well, you’re at the Perilous Lands, miss, the estate owned by Mister Fisher. One of his groundsmen found you wandering about in the mist, all cut up and bruised. He brought you here because he said you had an accident on the moors.’

‘A car accident,’ Fran corrected.

‘A what?’ The girl looked confused.

‘I was in a car accident,’ Fran repeated, but still the girl appeared no clearer.

‘Don’t know ‘bout cars, miss. Maybe you hit your head and can’t remember what happened to you.’

Fran frowned at her. ‘I remember the car accident. My car is in the ditch on the side of the road with its bonnet all smashed up.’

‘Yes, miss.’ 

Fran could tell the girl had dismissed what she said—maybe even thought she was rude—and proceeded to open the curtains using a long drawstring. Sunlight dribbled through the branches of a tree that grew outside the window and created dappled light on the floral carpet and across the blue patterns on the wallpaper. Fran watched the girl bring the tray over and place it across her lap. She muttered her thanks.

‘I’ll be back later to collect it, miss. Oh, there’s a bathroom at the end of the hall if you need to use it,’ she said and then hurried from the room, closing the door behind her.

Fran glanced at the tray’s contents and realised she was indeed hungry. She poured some of the tea into the cup and sipped the hot liquid in between taking bites of the cheese and tomato sandwich. It didn’t take her long to consume what was on the tray, then she slid it off her lap onto the edge of the wide bed. Stomach full, Fran lay back against the pillows and drew the bedclothes up so they covered her shoulders. She needed to think about what had happened to her. All of a sudden, her eyelids slid shut with a will of their own.

And she was driving her maroon Subaru with little concentration on the road ahead, without seeing suburbia ending and the pasturelands at the edge of the city beginning. Her pounding head was a clutter of squealing students saying their goodbyes, parents wishing her a safe Christmas holiday and, of course, at the forefront of them all, ending a three-month old relationship with Robert Winter. He’d secretly been seeing her best friend, Jan, and the terrible argument Fran had with him the night before was repeating itself in her mind like an old record stuck in its crackly groove. She clenched her teeth as it played out in her mind. His hateful words had sealed the coffin’s lid—for good.

Jan and Rob. Two traitors, silent like spiders crawling behind her back. Pulling the rug out from under her feet. Wouldn’t she notice two serpents entwined in each other’s coils? She couldn’t invent words strong enough to use on the pair. They caused her lock jaw and, in her anger, all she wanted was to kick, scream and bawl all at once.

She had known for some time that their relationship was over; she had wanted an excuse to end it when she caught him whispering on his otherphone to someone whose identity he wasn’t willing to disclose to her. She had cornered him about it and when Robert hadn’t been forthcoming about his reasons for having two phones, Fran had ended it then and there. It had been a relief more than anything and it gave her the freedom to embark on this holiday at her grandmother’s holiday house alone. It was to clear her head of memories more than anything and to shake off the residual emotional pain of the breakup. She hoped to heal her broken heart.

They say time is the great healer, the great leveller, especially of brokenness, but would it heal a heart that had been dragged around in the mud for weeks, kicked like a football and then clobbered with a mallet? Maybe she was being over-dramatic, but matters of the heart where Robert was concerned made her feel nauseous. It was why she had felt like a zombie all day at school and why her lessons had been so appalling.

It was also why she didn’t notice the rising mist off the moors, or the bend in the road until it was too late.

Fran blinked at the mist. ‘Where did you come from?’

She flicked on her headlights, but she couldn’t see far ahead, so she slowed to a crawl. 

Scrubby coastal vegetation pressed about the road as it narrowed. Stray, long branches reached for her car through the mist. Her GPS had directed her along that road, but it was a lonely stretch of the English coast and one she hadn’t used before. No other vehicles had passed her for a good twenty minutes and she was beginning to think she had punched in the wrong co-ordinates. Just her luck for having her attention elsewhere.

Then a warning light flashed on her dashboard. She glanced down and noticed that it meant something was wrong with her brakes. Her foot slammed on the pedal but it went right to the floor. Her speeding car continued to race down the hill. She had no control. Frantic, she continued to deploy the useless brake pedal, pumping it while downshifting to a lower gear, all to no avail. In the end, she drove uphill for a few seconds which slowed the car a little. Not being able to stop, she was forced to make a split-second decision and drive off the side of the road, straight into a ditch full of water. The car had come to a bone-crunching halt. That’s when the airbag must have exploded in her face, since she had discovered it in her lap along with the shattered windshield.

For several giddy minutes, her fingertips massaged her throbbing temples as the terrible scenes rushed back at her like an unstoppable wave. Robert’s face appeared in her mind. Being mechanical, he knew all about car engines and how they functioned. He had left her apartment in a violent rage after their fight and she recalled having seen his shadow near her car. Did he—? No!She couldn’t bring herself to think what was lurking in the back of her mind, as much as it needled her. Could she believe that of him, that he would endanger her life because she had ended their relationship? Had he cut her brake line or punctured it with a knife on purpose? Taking a deep breath, she expelled visions of him from her thoughts.

She closed her eyes and lay back, moving her ring around and around on her finger. 

I’m truly losing it.