Chapter Three

Ursula opened her eyes and then shut them again. She could not make sense of what she saw. There was a lot of blue that wasn’t sky, and pinks, different shades of pink, and other colours too. There was a lot of electronic noise. Something was beeping and somewhere above her head a strip light flickered and buzzed. There was a powerful smell of disinfectant overlaid with the sweet, floral fragrance that she associated with her mother.

‘Sula, darling?’ It sounded like her mother’s voice. Only her parents called her ‘Sula’. She knew that her mother hadn’t been at the battle. She did not want her mother to know about the battles. She opened her eyes again. The blue colour resolved itself into the form of a curtain and the pinks into her mother’s face, red-eyed and exhausted. Somehow she was home.

Ursula tried to smile. Everything hurt and her mind felt slow as if some nutter had padded her skull with cotton wool. She was very thirsty.

‘Mum?’ It took an age to form the word and longer still to make her dry throat and numb lips work. Her voice when it finally emerged was little better than a croak, but it made her mother happy.

‘Sula? You’re OK. Oh, thank God! Thank God!’

It was good to be hugged by her mother. It was good to be alive. From what she remembered, there had been a long period of time when living had seemed unlikely. Dan had saved her, rescued her from the Battle of Camlann, where so many had died, where she’d killed so many. She didn’t want to think about that. She pulled herself away from those memories, though the general pain throughout her body suggested it wasn’t that long ago. She’d been caught badly by a spear that had sliced through the top of her leg. She’d all but passed out from the pain, but the Sarmatians she’d led had fought to protect her. There were gaps in her memory but she remembered that Dan had used his magic and lent her enough of his strength to get her through. They must have gone through the Veil, but who had directed it? She knew that Dan would not have had that skill.

Someone – Dan? – had brought her to what she now recognised as a hospital. So where was he now?

She didn’t ask then. She felt weak, and when she tried to hug her mother back she seemed to be tied to the bed by wires and tubes and it was hard to move. A nurse came in and did something and then she went away and Ursula found it impossible to resist sleep.

She woke briefly and slept for some time. There was a lot of pain and then there wasn’t. Someone filled her brain with cotton wool and she didn’t mind the cotton-wool feeling so much because it made the pain go away. People came and went. Her dad came and the new baby cried and would not be shushed and her mother told him off for bringing the child. She had been glad to let herself drift away from that row. The bad pain went away and then she merely felt uncomfortable: stiff and achy and weak, as if her muscles had melted away to water. She knew that time was passing, the days marked by her mother’s conversations and the changing of dressings and tubes, and then one day she woke up and felt OK. Not great, not normal, but OK.

It was only then that she was able to ask the question that had been bothering her for so long: ‘Where’s Dan?’

Her mother paused in her bed-straightening.

‘How are you feeling, darling? The doctors are amazed at how well you’re doing. They say you might be able to come home in a day or two and they are going to take the last of the tubes out today. I’m afraid the police are going to want to talk to you now …’

Ursula waited for her mother to finish, but she just let her sentence die away.

‘Where’s Dan?’ Ursula repeated. She was surprised he’d not been to see her. Surely all that had happened between them would still matter? Surely he wouldn’t abandon her just because they were back home and he was with his friends again? Dan was not that shallow, she knew that, and yet she couldn’t help feeling a little hurt and disappointed that she’d not seen him.

‘Dan? Is that the boy who was with you? The one who did this to you?’

‘Dan didn’t do this to me. He saved me.’

Her mother shook her head. ‘The police have taken him into custody. They’re saying that no one else was involved. Why are you protecting him?’

Ursula took a moment to make sense of this. Dan was in custody?

She tried to imagine what he might have said to explain her wounds – the state she was in. Would he have tried to tell the truth? She thought not. He wouldn’t want to be locked up as a madman any more than he’d want to be locked up as a criminal: there had to be another way.

‘Mum, I want to talk to the police now. They’ve got to let Dan go.’

Her mother plumped up her pillows.

‘I don’t know. You’ve been so ill. You’ve gone so thin. I can barely recognise you. I think you should leave it a bit longer. Even your father agrees that you shouldn’t talk to them until you’ve recovered. The police are being very understanding. They know you’ve been traumatised, that you nearly died, that you’ve been pumped full of painkillers and I don’t know what drugs …’ Her mother sounded tearful.

‘Dan is my friend. He didn’t hurt me. Tell the police I’m ready to talk to them.’ Her mother gave her a look of surprise. ‘Please, Mummy,’ Ursula added, suddenly aware that the old Ursula was never so forceful at home. She had grown used to command. It was going to be hard to be a child again. She washed her face and tied back her hair to face the police. Her mother did not seem to have noticed that her hair had grown five or six inches or that she had lost far more weight than could be possible in the brief period of her convalescence. Her sleeveless nightdress revealed arms that any athlete would have been proud of. How had her mother not noticed? When Ursula checked her face in the mirror, she barely recognised her own reflection. Her face was a completely different shape, sculpted where it had been chubby. Her eyes looked enormous in this new thinner face and there was a hardness, a toughness in them that hadn’t been there before. She didn’t look like a young girl any more. She had killed, had seen sights no one else alive but Dan could even imagine. How could her mother not see all that she had lived through etched on her face, in the new muscularity of her body and in the darkness in her eyes? Perhaps people did not see what they did not expect to see.

She was unimpressed by the two policemen who arrived to question her. She would not have had the younger of the two in any troop of hers, nor would she have fought willingly at his side. The older man was all right, but he didn’t really look at her. He treated her like a little girl.

‘Dan did not hurt me,’ she said without preamble. ‘He saved me. Why have you got him in custody?’

‘There are a number of very confusing aspects to this case, Miss Dorrington. No explanation has been given for the curious costumes that both you and Mr Jones were wearing. Your injuries were very severe, consistent with being violently hacked by a sharp implement – a long-bladed knife or some such. Whoever did it to you would have been covered in blood. The only other person present at the scene was Mr Dan Jones and both he and his costume were drenched in it. I believe that you are lucky to be alive, Miss Dorrington, and our only plausible suspect is Mr Jones.’

Ursula controlled her temper with difficulty. ‘I was there, remember, and I’m telling you Dan was covered in blood because he rescued me. My attacker was gone by then and I didn’t know him.’ That was true enough. In all the confusion of battle she could not be absolutely certain who had hurt her where, and many of the enemy had worn helmets … Was that near-fatal blow from the hand of Medraut, Count of the Saxon Shore in sixth-century Britain? She could not remember.

The policeman did not appear to believe her. ‘And what did he look like, this stranger who attacked you?’

‘He was older – middle-aged. I couldn’t see his face. He was wearing a helmet.’

‘A motorcycle helmet?’

‘I don’t know what to call it.’ That was true – she only knew its Celtic or Roman name; she did not know what the word was in English.

‘Dan wasn’t there when he attacked me. He ran to get me when he realised what was going on.’

‘And what happened to this middle-aged men with a helmet?’

Ursula thought she might have killed him, but she couldn’t be sure. It was hard to keep track of events when in a battle and she had been struggling to stay conscious at the time. She’d killed Medraut, but she was not certain that it was Medraut who had nearly killed her. She cleared her throat. ‘I don’t know. I think I passed out. Dan will tell you.’

The two policemen exchanged a look and Ursula found herself wondering what exactly Dan had told them. She had to trust that it wasn’t the truth.