Free Druids Sword by Sara Douglass

crown.”
    “Aye. Do you dare the crowning, Walter?”
    “Do you?” Walter whispered, and Jack smiled, and the power abated.
    “ Will you do it, Walter?”
    He nodded. “If you will let me go.”
    Jack looked at Harry. “Well, my Lord of the Faerie? Is that possible? Can Walter be given his freedom from all demands of this land, freedom to go to Christ, if he does this for me?”
    Harry had been looking at Jack, a little awed by the power he’d just displayed and thinking he had used his time running the forests of the New World very effectively indeed, but now he switched his gaze to Walter.
    “Yes,” he said, and his appearance shifted subtly, so that for a moment it was not Harry Cole who sat at the head of the breakfast table, but the Lord of the Faerie wearing his crown of twigs and red berries. “Yes, I agree. If that is what you want, Walter, then do this one last thing for both Jack and the land, and you have your freedom to walk away. If you can.”
    Walter breathed out, patently relieved. “Thank you. Jack, when?”
    Jack gave a grin and it was almost feral in its nature. “Not just yet. But soon. At a time and place of my choosing.”
    At the far end of the table Grace looked between Jack and Harry, then dropped her eyes before any noted the look.

E IGHT
Faerie Hill Manor and London
Sunday, 3 rd September 1939
    W alter left after breakfast, using one of Harry’s cars to return to London. Late in the morning,
    the others gathered in the drawing room around a small side table, on which sat a large wireless. Harry sat closest to it, fiddling with the knobs to finetune the signal coming through.
    Then, just as everyone’s nerves could barely stand the scratchy static one more moment, the voice of a broadcaster filled the room with last-minute news before the Prime Minister’s announcement: a lorry had turned over in Highgate, spilling “food too good to be wasted” over half the road; the American Ambassador had been seen leaving the residence of the Prime Minister at No. 10 Downing Street late the previous night. A woman had been murdered, quite vilely (although the broadcaster gave no details), and her corpse left sprawled under the porch of St Magnus the Martyr.
    The broadcaster paused, then announced the PM, and the voice of Neville Chamberlain sounded.
     
I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clockthat they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.
    I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, this country is now at war with Germany.
     
    There was little reaction at the words. No one had expected anything else.
     
You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more, or anything different that I could have done that would have been more successful.
     
    “There never is, really, is there?” Silvius said softly.
    Chamberlain continued speaking about Britain’s obligations to the Polish people, and how he expected the British would bear the burden of war with their usual fortitude.
     
Now may God bless you all and may He defend the right. For it is evil things we shall be fighting against — brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution — and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
     
    Harry and Jack exchanged a long, meaningful glance. In previous lives both of them had led the armies of a nation into war, and neither envied Chamberlain his forthcoming experience.
    “Evil things we shall be fighting against,” Noah said. “He has no idea how evil.”
    They ate a light lunch—most eating as little at lunch as they had at breakfast—and then Weyland brought his car round to the front to take his