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By Root 939 0

stows in the pocket of his flying jacket, every mission, his compact with the forces of nature. He swings her round, begins the approach. Does he feel the slightest bit uneasy? Does he see, for a second, the contempt in his uncle’s eyes through the leather mask, that afternoon in the house in Swindon when cocky young Donald couldn’t get it in, and panicked, and disgraced the rite? Does he hear Mr Keiller’s bellow, the night he stole Charlie’s skull? Does he hear through his earphones, Davey shouting in triumph, as the fragile wooden Mosquito comes in and bellies, not on a concrete runway but on uneven farmland, the plane slewing and bucking as Donald wrenches the controls to steer away from a stand of trees that shouldn’t be in the middle of an airfield? He still thinks he’s going to make it, of course, until a wheel hits a sarsen jutting out of the ground and breaks off, the nose tilts, the plane cartwheels and finally ploughs into the side of a Bronze Age barrow.

For a moment, there they are, the fuselage smashing around them like black matchsticks, two young men locked together like driver and pillion passenger on a motorbike bouncing over the hillside. The fuel tank ignites, a slash of orange fire tears apart the unnatural dusk, and thunder rolls across the hills.

CHAPTER 57

‘Missed you, Indy,’ Keir says, after a bit.

He always could best me at wrestling, even though he was smaller than me when we were kids. And his den, his stupid den on the Downs that he wouldn’t show me that summer–that would have been the Long Barrow, wouldn’t it?

‘You didn’t know I was India?’ This suddenly seems important. ‘Not when I jumped your fire in Tolemac. You’d have said.’

I’ve been stupid, yes, not realizing Bryn was the boy I played with as a child, but why should we recognize each other? It’s seventeen years since we last met: two lifetimes, for eight-year-olds. But I don’t want that night in the Long Barrow to have been…knowing. Because, looking back, I can understand why it felt so wrong and awful at the time.

‘My skin knew,’ he says. ‘My head didn’t. I understood when I read your note. Why didn’t you tell me your name before? We’d’ve been together sooner.’

Didn’t tell you my name because my skin recognized something: how weird you’ve become. Another long silence has fallen, giving me time to turn over the full, ridiculous awfulness of it. If only I had told him my name, by his campfire on May Eve…Well, I thought I was protecting myself.

If only I could see his face…But all I have is a view of the carpet, and the soft northern voice, the warm, damp breath on the side of my face. I picture him gazing dreamily over my shoulder into the embers of the fire, seeing his Goddess visions and all the other bonkers stuff he’s piled up in his head as his barrier against the world. And, oh, my God, did he–?

‘Did you mean to hurt Frannie?’ The words are choking me. ‘You said the Goddess had to be held, didn’t you?’

‘The Crone shifts shape in your arms,’ he says.

My stomach clenches. ‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning I love the Goddess.’

His voice sounds a million miles away, through the throbbing in my head. I’ll kill him, I swear I will. I’ll–

His arm tightens on my throat the moment I pitch myself back in an attempt to break his grip. He’s as steady as a rock behind me as he whispers: ‘And you, Ind.’

Another long, long silence in which that idea turns and spins in the candlelight. My breath scrapes through my constricted windpipe, making me more and more panicky. Eventually he slackens his grip enough to allow me a normal breath, still keeping a tight enough hold to remind me that these are carpenter’s arms, strong and muscled and capable of snapping a neck as easily as a discarded length of dowel.

‘I want us to be together,’ he says. ‘Here, in the Goddess’s place. In the circle.’

‘Keir…’ Better to call him Bryn? Are there two personalities, one rational and the other not? ‘Bryn, I mean…Was that what your foster-parents called you? You were fostered, weren’t you?’

‘Adopted, eventually. They didn’t like Keir, so they called me Dean,