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When a second round began shortly after the first, the milkmaid’s enthusiasm clearly audible through the flimsy wooden walls, Childermass gave up. He gave the adjoining wall a last, futile thump of protest, then went to find his shoes. Vinculus and his current paramour would be outraging the sensibilities of everyone within earshot for another hour at least; Childermass had grown remarkably adept at predicting the frequency and duration of Vinculus’ nocturnal adventures after a year and half spent in the man’s company.

They had left York after a week spent with the Learned Society of York Magicians. In all truth, Childermass had decided to approach them less out of a desire to gain their aid in translating the new Book of John Uskglass and more to see Dr. Foxcastle and his ilk confronted by a naked, capering Vinculus. Their reactions had been all he had hoped for. It was lucky that this had been his primary aim, however, for they were singularly useless when it came to examining the actual lettering of the book.

However, now that he thought back on it, he could not be entirely sure that his decision to approach the York magicians had entirely been his own. Throughout the entirety of the ride from Starecross Hall, the two men had been buffeted by the insistent flutter of newspapers. That so many copies of the York Chronicle had come to be blowing about in the snowy wilderness, catching upon their feet and on occasion even flying into their faces, had not at the time seemed odd in the slightest. His desire to unsettle the proper and prim upper class gentlemen of the York Society by posting an ad available to all with the penny to purchase a copy of the Chronicle and the wherewithal to read or have it be read to them had, at the time, seemed to be entirely his own.

The week he had spent at the Old Starre Inn had been spent not in perusal of the impenetrable tangle of words writ blue upon Vinculus’ filthy skin—the man retained a medieval conviction that bathing was an insidious and dangerous habit, which made his ability to coax so many females into his bedsheets all the more perplexing—but rather in arbitrating a number of disputes that had arisen between the ancient impractical magicians and the new members of their number. This included a number of bright-eyed children, unmarried young women, bemused and obstinate farmers, and young noblemen whose sole pursuit before this week had been cards and heavy drinking.

There had, perhaps not unsurprisingly, been a considerable degree of discord engendered by the close proximity of these groups, and where normally Childermass would have watched the chaos unfold with a smirk, he found himself oddly compelled to sally forth and attempt to impose some semblance of order among the mob of magicians.

His attempts had not as such been hugely successful. Miss Redruth had at one point managed to convince the wigs of the more obstinate members of the Society to act as snakes, and these would then whip forth and bite their owners on the nose whenever they spoke.

Still, he had managed to leave the town after achieving some sort of uneasy stalemate – at the very least, the wigs no longer hissed whenever the people they were perched upon opened their mouths to speak.

That had begun the first stage of what had been a very long, arduous, and trying journey, spent primarily in the sole company of Vinculus. Surprisingly, the man made a pleasant travelling companion more often than not, although Childermass was occasionally forced to go to some lengths to render the fellow palatable to the nose.

Their first month of wandering had also failed to result in Childermass translating so much as a knuckle of the Book, and instead had taken them in an odd, seemingly aimless path through some of the nearby towns, where Vinculus and Childermass were compelled to teach a young coven how to effectively wall off a nearby fairy road, that no more children might be lured away and lost. The road gave off an intoxicating scent of wild magic, very like summer berries and fresh mountain air, and it drifted through the village in a rise and fall with the ebbing of the moon.

Mere brick or stone had not been enough to deter the children, and some adults, from making their way to the road and being lost, and Childermass had helped them work out a tangle of spellwork and gardenry that finally served to hold the wind of Faerie at bay.

Then they’d been off again, this time stumbling upon two warring families of water spirits and millers. Oddly, this time Vinculus had acted as arbiter. The blue-gray undines, with their pebbled skin and milky eyes, would tolerate no one else to speak with them and responded only with an intolerable wail that made all those within earshot vomit an odd, frothy liquid. Childermass had had to rely on Vinculus as an intermediary. The very memory of that time set Childermass’ eye to twitching again.

Yet somehow the mediation had succeeded. They had heard recently from a passing alderman that the two different families had against all odds become great friends, and there was no more talk of uncontrolled and unseasonable flooding among the Raile Valley folk.

It was around then that Childermass had begun to wonder.

Vinculus let out a particularly exuberant noise at that moment, jolting Childermass from his thoughts. The sound had been extremely reminiscent of the great bullfrogs which could be seen in late summer ponds. Childermass redoubled his efforts to fumble on his boots and escape the room with all haste.

“Should you not bring your scarf with you, John Childermass?” a dry voice said from behind him. Childermass pulled on his left boot as he looked over his shoulder. The Raven King was stretched out amidst his disordered bedclothes, staring thoughtfully up at the ceiling. He was wearing his boots in bed, shedding bits of bright red dirt about the sheets. There was a circlet of wintery metal on his brow that glinted icily and cast strange shadows that seemed to be part of another larger, grander room entirely.

“It is nearly June,” Childermass said, watching his King with a jaundiced eye. “I do not need a scarf.”

“June, is it?” the Raven King said disinterestedly, tapping his foot idly against a bedpost and sending a shower of dirt upon the rough wooden floor. Childermass sighed and trudged over to the bag of belongings he’d stashed behind the wardrobe. His winter things were naturally wadded at the very bottom and could not be reached without upending everything else in the bag. Childermass found his tattered woolen scarf and wrapped it irritably about his neck. It smelled of mildew, long days, and cold, sodden weather.

In the next room, the milkmaid made a sound which was remarkably similar to that of a boar in heat, and John Uskglass looked faintly impressed, raising an inky eyebrow at Childermass.

“Vinculus will get a son off of her,” he said, and stretched, yawning lazily.

Childermass pressed the heel of his hand to one eye.

“Does your Majesty require anything else this evening?” he inquired as he stomped towards the door. It was the kind of door that had warped sullenly over the years and required digging in one’s heels and pulling with all one’s might to convince it to open, and only a good solid kick could thereafter force it closed again. Childermass gave it a firm yank. It creaked unhappily and moved perhaps a candlewidth.

Childermass hated this inn, and this door, and a good deal else about his life at the moment. He was tired – he had spent the better part of the day convincing a toddler to transform the town mayor back from marzipan into florid, outraged politician, and when it had all been over Childermass had rather felt more sympathy with the grumbling infant. Also, his hair still smelled of almonds, and while it was a pleasant smell in small quantities it had begun to make him feel rather sickly. Fresh air, he thought. Fresh air and a pipe and then, God willing, sleep.

“No,” the King said, watching Childermass wrestle with the door, his voice faintly amused. “I require nothing. I only came to see how you fared on your journey, John Childermass. Do you fare well?”

“You are maddening,” Childermass informed the man, and wrenched the door open. He viciously kicked it shut on his smirking king.

Being the king’s man, he thought, moving through the common room of the inn like a thundercloud and sending its patrons skittering in his wake, was rather more palatable as a lifelong goal than as a goal achieved.

Perhaps if he had left well enough alone, he thought wistfully, the king would have remained a mysterious enigmatic figure. A distant, mysterious enigmatic figure.

Childermass was not well-known for his propensity to accept bizarre coincidences at face value, or for his tendency to restrain his fingers from prying into secrets. When he had begun puzzling over the events of that day he and Vinculus had reunited, and the Book had been rewritten, he had come up with several irresistibly intriguing inconsistencies.

The first problem was how Vinculus had returned to life, for Childermass distinctly recalled cutting the man down from where he hung on the tree and pondering how best to transport his corpse. The time between that moment and the moment when he had watched Vinculus draw a rasping, indignant breath was muddled, like viewing something resting on the bottom of a deep spring. He recalled the sensation of a damp finger on his eyelids, his lips, the skin above his heart. The fall of his pistol from his nerveless fingers, the sound it had made as it hit the snow, that too he remembered. Nothing else.

More puzzling still was that Childermass had not thought of any of this until months later. He had quite calmly administered a bottle of claret to the wheezing, outraged hanged man and then pondered only how best to preserve the knowledge in the missing Book. The sudden healing of the terrible cut upon his cheek, too, had given him not the slightest pause, whereas it later began to plague his thoughts constantly. Stroking a finger along the faint, pale ridge had become somewhat of a nervous twitch, in fact.

Other strange happenings had begun to attract his attention after he’d started mulling over Vinculus’s resurrection and the coinciding events. The way the wind nudged them down a particular fork in the road. How the blades of grass bent in the direction of a particular stone-encrusted town full of marble inhabitants. The queer way his hand seemed to sketch signs in the air over an enchantment he had no conscious conception of how to break.

All he had to go on was the memory of a fingertip upon his skin, but he had studied among magicians for well over twenty years, and he rather considered that he could tease an answer from the glassy blankness in his mind with that alone.

It had been the height of midsummer, and Childermass had left Vinculus dozing in the arms of the baker’s wife and had assembled the haphazard ingredients he thought necessary to bring to life his own memories. A silver scrying bowl (purloioned from a market stall earlier that morning), an attar of wild roses, and a black skein of thread.

He had stared down into the bowl beneath the summer moon, holding it cradled carefully in one hand. Then he had spoken the words of Strange's Revelation and carefully dabbed the rose-scented oil over his eyelids with the other, looking down into the bowl with some trepidation. His hands had trembled at the boiling blackness that had appeared, glossy and almost flying from the bowl.

“Well met, John Childermass,” a voice had said gravely then, and Childermass had reacted instinctively, throwing the scrying bowl directly at the Raven King’s head.

This, apparently, had not been the anticipated response, and for several seconds the two men stood staring at one another, one dripping and one drawing what he could only conclude were his final breaths.

“Less well met than I had expected,” the wet King had said, and Childermass had dropped to one knee and begged forgiveness.

The memory of this now caused Childermass no small measure of regret. It was not that he did not love his King, or that he did not feel a brightness and wholeness in his soul that had been absent his entire life prior to the Raven King’s return. It was more that he wished he had taken the time to appreciate dumping a bowl of cold, murky water on the man when he had had the chance.

What all the historians had failed to uncover and the texts of magic had skimmed over, Childermass had found, was that John Uskglass was damned annoying.

Outside the inn there was already a light snow falling, whispering down and tracing almost-familiar shapes on the cobblestones, swirling in the wintery night wind. Childermass sighed and patted his pockets.

“You forgot your matches, John,” the Raven King said and cupped a pale hand around Childermass’ pipe. There was a red glow behind his fingers, and then a tendril of smoke that stretched up lazily and brushed against Childermass’ cheek.

Small drifts of snow were gathering at their feet and forming insistent arabesques and arches, and Childermass couldn’t make out more than a word or two. He considered kicking the blasted things to pieces. If the King had a message for him, he could just bloody well deliver it out loud, instead of tormenting Childermass with Vinculus and frozen water.

“I could have lit the pipe myself,” Childermass said irritably. The King did not respond, only regarded the clear sky above, frowning slightly. Childermass sighed. “Why Lindisfarne? And what the devil do you mean, a time of rabbits?”

“Ah,” said the King with a crooked smile. “You are improving.”

 “Can you not just speak plainly?” Childermass said, puffing crossly on his pipe. “If you have a task to set us, you need only say so. You are right in front of me, after all. One would almost think you had nothing better to do.”

“Hmm,” said the Raven King, mouth quirking slightly. “But this way, you learn your Letters.”

That was another thing. Childermass did not mean to tell another man his own business, though he often found it necessary, but in all honesty, what use was having a Reader of the King’s Letters if said letters could only be comprehended after considerable mental turmoil and near-impossible amounts of concentration on such riveting subjects as the wind in the grass and the way the stones were ordered about the roots of trees?

The King laughed and said nothing as the snow picked up. Childermass blew a smoke ring in the King’s direction.

“It is not an understanding that comes from being taught,” John Uskglass told him finally, and there was a suggestion of movement in the depths of his eyes, something like a winter wave crashing down upon a rocky shore. It made Childermass dizzy to look at him for too long. “The language is yours, John Childermass. I cannot decipher it for you.”

“Helpful as always,” Childermass muttered. His tobacco had a different flavor than it had had that morning – it tasted oddly of the meadowsweet grass he had chewed as a small boy during high summer, spicy and not unpleasant. His gloveless hands seemed to be thawing. A few moments ago they had been stiff and clumsy with the cold.

“If you are not here to help translate your own book,” Childermass said crossly – he should have known better than to let the King touch his pipe. Now he felt flushed and pink, near to drunkness. “Then why the devil are you here?”

The King smiled.

“Childermass,” he said, raising both eyebrows. “You would find life very dull without me.”

Childermass managed to refrain from squawking indignantly, not that it mattered since between one blink and the next the dark, laughing man had disappeared in a swirl of snow that Childermass just knew was blowing something insulting against his cheek. Damnation.

He sighed and checked his watch. Nearly two hours off from dawn. Surely Vinculus would be sleeping by now.

He tapped out the embers in his pipe, careful not to shake loose any of the remaining tobacco, and settled it back in his pocket. He had a feeling he was going to need a taste of summer as they headed further north.

The common room of the inn was mostly empty now, but for a few lingering drinkers crowded around the hearth and muttering to each other in perplexed tones about the sudden shift in weather.

“John Uskglass does not pay attention to his business tonight,” one slurred knowledgably, and Childermass rolled his eyes to the heavens, shaking his head.

The hallway was blessedly silent, but for a low buzzing snore that had become a comforting white noise over the months, and Childermass began quietly kicking his door open. He was warm, his head felt pleasantly light, and he almost was thinking charitable, fond thoughts towards his king when he slipped into bed, whereupon he abruptly remembered the sheets were still filled with red clumps of dirt from said king’s boots.

He would seethe over it in the morning, he decided, and drifted off to sleep at last, the sound of snoring and faint laughter in his ears.