Prologue
Long ago and far away, the Moth King, known for his jealousy, uncertain temper and melancholy, courted the frivolous Butterfly Queen. They were very different. He was nocturnal; she loved the sun. He was sullen and taciturn; she was filled with merriment. Even so, they fell in love, and their wedding was held at sunset on the edge of a bramble wood, with all of their folk in attendance, and with dancing throughout the night and day.
But the qualities that had caused the Moth King to fall in love with the Butterfly Queen soon incurred his displeasure. She was flighty; she danced too much, laughed too often; drank nectar to the point of giddiness. He tried to reason with her, but the Butterfly Queen only laughed at him. Then, when laughter failed to melt the Moth King’s stubborn heart, she retreated to the company of her friends and secretly hoped he would join her.
And so the Moth King brooded alone, while the Butterfly Queen spent her days with her friends in the treetops, rocking on a silver swing woven for her by the Spider Mage, who had always loved her, and whose webs reached as far as the Ninth World. The Spider Mage was loyal, and had never declared his love, knowing that the Butterfly Queen was born for higher, nobler things, but his heart ached when he saw her lord so cold towards his lady.
Time passed. The rift between the King and Queen grew deeper. While the Queen laughed and danced with her folk in the sunlight, the King would keep to his chambers. At night, he roamed the moonlit woods with his retinue of pale courtesans, while the Queen slept alone in her bed of spider silk beneath a quilt of woven thistledown, with crickets chirping at her side. Only the Spider Mage knew how unhappy this made the Queen; for during the day, she was always as bright and giddy as ever, sipping her nectar and rocking in her silver swing. And no one but he knew how little the King cared for those courtesans, or how he sometimes sighed to himself as he lay upon his silken couch under its canopy of leaves and listened for his lady’s voice above him, in the trees.
More time passed. The King and Queen pined for each other in secret. But each was as proud as the other, and neither would yield or compromise. The King grew more taciturn than ever; the Queen grew more impulsive. The King disappeared from his chambers the moment the sun set over the hills; the Queen was always safe in her bed as the last rays kissed the treetops.
The Spider Mage grieved for them both. Looking into his web of dreams, he combed the Nine Worlds for a way to bring the Moth King and the Butterfly Queen together again in harmony. Finally, he found what he sought: a rare conjunction in the sky. In six months’ time, so he observed, the Sun and Moon would intersect, so that night would fall at noon and all the stars awaken. Surely, thought the Spider Mage, this would be the time to bring the pair together. And so he wove his web of dreams, and by subtle means ensured that King and Queen were both at hand at the moment of the eclipse.
At last, the day came. The Sun in the sky yielded to the Moon’s embrace, and in the midday twilight, the Moth King and the Butterfly Queen were reunited in love. Only for a short time – but enough that their child was conceived; a boy of both light and shadow, a prince of sun and starlight. The Moth King and the Butterfly Queen made ready to go their separate ways; but when the Prince was born, each tried to claim him for their own.
The Queen taught him to fly high, drink deeply and laugh at his enemies. The King taught him the secrets of the night-time forest: the way of the fox, the cry of the owl, the gleam of the moon on the water. Both
taught him how to change Aspect: how to break from his human form into a cloud of butterflies; how to hide among the trees like a moth in the dappled shade.
The boy – living between their worlds – learnt his lessons faithfully. But his parents, who loved their infant son far more than they had ever loved each other, were jealous and greedy for his love. The King did his best to teach his son to despise his mother’s frivolity, while the Queen did her best to teach him to mock his father’s melancholy moods. Thus, the young Prince spent his infancy in a state of constant confusion. But the Spider Mage befriended him, and taught him the ways of his people, hoping all the while that the child might reconcile the King and Queen.
As he grew, the young Prince became very dear to the Spider Mage. He had his mother’s charm and grace, without her volatile nature. He had his father’s intellect, without his anger and sullenness. And he had a kind and loving heart, which longed for one thing only: for his parents to love each other, as he loved them both. The Spider Mage longed for this, too. But the situation seemed hopeless.
Finally, he went back to his web and combed it again for a solution. He searched all the Worlds of the Honeycomb, consulted every Oracle, sent his spider servants out to every point of the compass to look for a way of bringing together the Butterfly Queen and the Moth King. He spun his webs into every world, stretched his threads of spider silk into every place and time. Then he slept, exhausted, leaving his web of dreams untended, its filaments reaching out into every world in existence.
And while he slept, the young Prince crept into the Mage’s chamber, and, seeing the gleaming spider threads leading into the many worlds, took hold of the nearest thread tightly in his small hand. The Spider Mage slept on, unaware, as the child pulled on the silken thread shining in the moonlight. And when the Spider Mage awoke, he found his web in disarray and the young Prince nowhere to be found.
The Moth King’s rage was terrible. So too was the grief of the Butterfly Queen. The Mage soon guessed where the boy had gone – but the world into which he had disappeared was one of untold terrors.
‘Not Dream,’ said the Queen, her dark eyes wide.
The Moth King took her hand. It was day, but the crisis had roused him from his bed and he looked pale and drawn.
The Spider Mage shook his head. ‘No, not Dream, Your Majesty. But to a world almost as dark. A world in which our people are weak, and magic works poorly, if at all.’ His voice fell to a whisper, and he said to the Queen, with tears in his eyes: ‘Your Majesty, somehow the young Prince has entered the World of the Sightless
Folk.’
For a moment, the King and Queen looked at each other in horror. Both Courts – the Moths in their dark finery, the Butterflies in their merry madness – held their breath, and hoped that perhaps this crisis might lead to a reconciliation.
Then the Queen began to weep. ‘This is your fault,’ she told the King. ‘You taught our son to love the night, and to hunger for secrets and mysteries!’
The King said: ‘My fault? You taught the boy to disobey, and to defy my authority.’
The Queen went pale. ‘How dare you blame me? When, for all you know, our son may already be in the hands of the Sightless Folk!’
‘If he is,’ said the Moth King, ‘then your tears are unlikely to help him.’
The quarrel went on between the pair, becoming ever more bitter. Each blamed the other for the loss of the Prince. The Moth King grew colder in his rage; the Queen’s anger more heated. Finally, she fled the Court, swearing an oath that no Butterfly would ever fall in love again. Instead, they would prey on love, she said, and feed on it like nectar, and drain the hearts of lovers without ever loving in return. The Moth King, grieving, left his throne and hid himself in World Below, letting his kingdom fall to ruin.
And in their absence there came war between the Moths and the Butterflies, a conflict that will never cease until the day the lost Prince is found, and a Butterfly falls in love with a Moth once again.
Only the Spider Mage, crushed by guilt, believed the lost Prince could be found. Forgotten by almost everyone, despised by both warring factions, he watched the worlds through his web of dreams, hoping for an answer. But his web remained dark, and his wretchedness grew. One night, despairing, he spun a thread into the World of the Sightless Folk and crept through the door into that world, and let it close behind him.
Some say he remains there to this day, driven mad with guilt and grief, unable to return to his world, still searching for the lost Prince.
Some say that’s only a fairy tale.
Part 1
Vanessa
1
In a city of magical things, of buses, and plastic, and concrete, and trains, there lived a young man called Tom Argent. This was in the old days of the great, lost cities of the Folk, cities with strange and beautiful names, filled with palaces and parks; tunnels that stretched for miles underground; markets, museums and gaming halls and gleaming towers of grasshopper glass.
This marvellous city was London. Tom’s neighbourhood was King’s Cross, though long ago it had once been known as Battlebridge. Tom had never asked himself why; as far as he knew, it was just a name. But names are secret, powerful things, not to be given lightly. And cities are curious places, where the skin between the worlds rubs thin, and sometimes things (and even kings) can cross from one side to the other.
Tom Argent worked in a little shop just off the Caledonian Road. The shop sold second-hand cameras and film; lenses, tripods, enlargers; books of glossy black-and-white photographs. All of these were magical things: boxes in which to trap memories; shutters that could stop Time; lenses that could turn light itself away from its directed course. But Tom was no believer in fairy tales and miracles. He could walk through a bluebell wood and not see a single fairy – not that there were any bluebell woods in London, but there were parks with ancient trees, and markets filled with spices and fruits from countries a thousand miles away, and people of all races and types, and cobbled alleys that echoed with ghosts, and ships that only appeared by night, and secret plague pits under the ground.
But Tom never saw these things. Instead, he saw litter, and traffic and smoke; and people on their mobile phones who suddenly stopped in the street when he was walking behind them; and angry cab drivers, and riotous drunks, and cyclists who never looked where they were going.
Tom Argent did not even see the magic at his fingertips. Instead, he saw the death of film, and the advent of the digital age, and the power of social media; and he worried about paying the rent, and about making art in a world in which artists are paid with exposure. He was no blinder than most, of course, but cities do that to people. They dull the senses; kill curiosity; make people look inwards instead of out. And the Folk are especially susceptible to this kind of numbness – which is why the Faërie scorned them, and called them the Sightless Folk.
The only time Tom Argent felt as if the world was truly real was when he could see it through a lens. Photography was his passion, and he spent most of his spare time around King’s Cross, taking pictures of the streets. He saw the homeless people; the houseboats on Regent’s Canal; the dogs; the vehicles; the railway trains; the station with its great glass roof and its faded, powdery, red-brick facades. Through the lens of Tom’s camera, the everyday became magical; the commonplace, extraordinary. His camera brought forgotten things into sudden focus. Garish colours shifted to a crisp, nostalgic black-and-white, and Tom glimpsed the world as it really was, as if the camera’s lens were an eye that saw beyond the everyday. And it was only then that he was ever truly happy.
He developed and printed his own work in his attic darkroom, which was the closest to magic he ever got – or, at least, as far as he knew. Sometimes he displayed his work, although he never sold it. He lived alone above the camera shop in a tiny, one-room attic flat with a view of the rooftops. His parents had died in a house fire during his first year at university, and he had no family, no friends – except for the kind of friends you greet without ever actually knowing their names. He had black hair, and thoughtful dark eyes, and a face that was pale from being too long indoors. He was twenty-nine years old, and he had never been in love.
His employer, the owner of the shop and of many others along the road, was called Mr Burnet. Tom had only met him once, the day he’d been
given the job; after that, he’d only been in contact via email, and through intermediaries. Mr Burnet lived in a house on the far side of Regent’s Canal, and was never seen without his long, dark overcoat, with only the flash of his grey-gold eyes visible under a broad-brimmed hat. Tom found him disturbing, although he didn’t quite know why, and he was secretly rather glad he didn’t see him more often. But Mr Burnet was by far the most generous employer Tom had ever had, never seeming to care how much money Tom made, or what (if anything) he had sold. The hours were short, the salary good, and the flat above the shop, though small, had a darkroom in which he could work. And Tom was doing what he loved most: working with cameras and photographs. It was the job of his dreams, and Mr Burnet never interfered.
On the morning this story begins, Tom had risen early and taken his camera and his bag in search of things to photograph. It was early April, when the light was at its sweetest, and on those sunny spring mornings, Tom sometimes felt the skin of the world ready to peel away at a touch, revealing beauty underneath – beauty, and sometimes horrors. A dandelion clock, growing between the cracks in the pavement. A girl, coming back from a night on the town, caught in an unguarded moment. An old homeless man with a bundle of books, packing away his cardboard bed and muttering darkly to himself, unaware that the morning sun had given his head a corona of fire.
Tom reached for his camera. People usually realised quite quickly when they were being photographed. Sometimes they posed, which was bad – or, worse, became hostile, or ran away. But the old man was too preoccupied, and Tom, using a long lens, was able to rattle off a few shots before he became suspicious.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ said the man, as he finally noticed.
‘I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind,’ said Tom. ‘It’s just that … you have an interesting face. I’m a collector of interesting people.’
‘Interesting,’ said the homeless man. ‘Yon Collector says we’re interesting.’ His voice was soft and hoarse, as if he didn’t use it often. His accent was not that of London, or of anywhere else that Tom could identify. Behind his little round spectacles, his eyes were a clear and luminous grey, with a skein of gold running through them like a piece of kintsugi.
He grinned at Tom, who saw now that he was younger than he’d first assumed – not
yet out of his fifties, with unruly white hair which gave him the look of a mad king.
‘I’ll tell you what’s interesting, Collector. Breakfast.’ He indicated a nearby café. ‘That is, if you’re minded to pay for the pieces of my soul you took without permission.’
Tom nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you something. A sandwich. All right?’
‘And some tea, please. Two cups. Sweet. One for me, one for Charissa.’
Tom looked around, but as far as he could see the white-haired man was alone. He must be a little disturbed, thought Tom. The challenges for those who were homeless were rife.
He went into the café and came back with two paper cups of sweetened tea and a bacon sandwich. The man sat down on his parcel of books – neatly tied with coloured string – and ate the sandwich carefully, making sure not to drop any crumbs. Tom took a few more pictures of the man as he was eating. Now he reminded Tom of the feral cats that lived on his street; the way they took what food they could from the overturned rubbish bins, but delicately, like exiled queens forced to become cats at night and to fight for their food with the foxes.
‘Don’t mind Charissa,’ said the man, finishing the sandwich and starting on his cup of tea. ‘She don’t much care for your regular food.’ He paused to address the second cup, which he had balanced on a wall, and sat there with a cup in each hand, alternating mouthfuls.
Tom took a couple more pictures.
‘Charissa sez she don’t like that,’ said the man. ‘Cut it out, Collector.’
‘Sorry,’ said Tom, putting the camera back in his satchel.
‘That’s better,’ said the man. ‘You don’t want to make them nervous. They get angry when they’re nervous. They say it steals their soul away, although, of course, they never had any in the first place.’
Tom thought better of asking who the mysterious they might be. Instead, he said, ‘What’s your name?’
The homeless man looked wary. ‘I’m not telling you that,’ he said, as if Tom had suggested something too crazy to contemplate. ‘We don’t give our names to strangers. Give them away and anyone can use ’em, day or night. Names are for keeping to yourself, if you know what’s good for you.’
Tom was taken aback. ‘OK.’
The madman nodded. ‘You weren’t to know. Tell you what, Collector. There’s daylight names and midnight names. Daylight names are safe enough. A spider brings good luck before midnight, but bad luck after. And you look to me like the kind of young man who needs good luck, and to keep out of dark rooms. You can have my daylight name. You can call me Spider.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Spider,’ said Tom. ‘Hope you enjoyed your breakfast.’
‘Thank you, Collector,’ Spider said. ‘And remember what I said about luck, and keeping out of dark rooms.’
And, at that, picking up his parcel of books, Spider began to walk purposefully down the road, a river of light at his ragged heels, his spindly shadow beside him.
2
On a normal day, Tom Argent would have developed his film after work. But this was not a normal day. This was the day that Tom Argent would finally, ...
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