passed and a raven again perched on the tip of the London Bridge starling, watching the elephant crossing the frozen Thames down by Blackfriar’s Bridge.
For over 500 years, the inheritors of Thomas Rowan and William Hawk had come to do this duty – the rebinding of Hoor.
‘I thank you for coming,’ said the raven to the man and woman behind him.
They were all three watching the fair taking place on the ice. Sheep were roasting with a sign declaring them “Lapland mutton”. Two men were charging sightseers to watch the spectacle, plus a shilling for a slice. Elsewhere on the ice, gambling huts and tents for drinking houses were making the most of the novelty. A printing press was turning out terrible poetry on thick paper, boys were playing skittles, and a swing named The Sky Lark was filled with giggling courting couples. The spectacle was new to the eyes of the man and woman with the raven, though they’d read of such things.
The raven had seen it all before.
‘You humans can’t resist dancing on ice,’ it said, ending the pronouncement with a caw made of equal parts admiration and impatience. ‘Your Kings and Queens especially. That fat Henry the Eighth, and then his red-headed daughter. And now here is your paunchy Prince Regent, poking at the ice with no care for what’s beneath it. Anyone would think Erra Pater’s prophecy had never been printed, eh Lily?’
‘We were never sure that was a prophecy,’ said Lily Thorn, drawing her thick winter coat more closely about her. In her left hand she gripped a bundle wrapped in soft leather. Erra Pater’s ridiculous lines of poetry, scribed in 1684, were often analysed in her family’s journals, but no conclusion had ever been reached.
Lily’s companion, equally snugged against the cold, crouched on the broad base of the starling, which created a bulwark for the pylon and foundation of the bridge. A fiddle and bow were tucked under his arm. ‘The lines “and now the struggling sprite is once more come, to visit mortals and foretell their doom” suggests knowledge of the HoorFrost.’
‘Not all songs are magic, Guy, and not all doggerel claiming to foresee is a prophecy,’ countered Lily.
‘Yet here we are again,’ said Guy Hawk drily, ‘trying to keep an ice god asleep in a jar.’
The raven gave the ice below the starling his full attention. ‘Lady Greenteeth doesn’t mean to regurgitate the thing,’ it said,
‘It’s not easy to swallow a god and keep it down. And these two bridges’ – it meant London Bridge and Blackfriars, where the elephant was stepping back onto the banks – ‘slow the river’s flow too much in winter, so it freezes, and frost is Hoor’s element. Makes the runes burn on the vessel. It’s a combination for indigestion.’
There, beneath several feet of ice, was the suggestion of movement. Scales and a sinuous body. Trailing green weeds. Lily wasn’t sure how she could see such a thing, or even if she had. Yet the knowledge was certain. She had inherited more than Thomas Rowan’s minstrel voice and his pipe through the preceding generations.
Guy rose to his feet and brought up the fiddle. Not long ago, he and Lily had been playing out there among the Londoners on the Thames, but only in part for the coin. Coin was good for bread, but applause was good for magic.
His bow across the strings asked a question of the creature below.
The creature moved, rolled. Granted grudging permission.
Lily had unrolled the package and lifted the pipe to her lips. It was made of yew, a wood said to aid witches to speak with other realms. She’d found it useful in quieting ghosts and banishing demons. Guy’s fiddle, birds and vines carved into its body, wasn’t made of anything magical, but magic had been played through it for two hundred years. Magic had been sung into it when Gideon Hawk had made it after the 1608 frost fair, replacing the one broken by that year’s binding.
Gods were indeed hard to keep bound.
Lily, Guy and the raven all saw then how the creature of the mere rolled under the ice, among its coils a glowing thing. Amber light and silver, and runes pulsing. Hoor was waking up.
Lily played the pipe. The raven called a rhythm with its “tok tok tok”. Guy’s fiddle sang around Lily’s fluting notes, the raven’s croaking ones, and he sang.
Hush thy heart, Great Hoor
Tis not yet time to wake
The fate of Asgard waits for you
Sleep on, for London’s sake.
The words changed every time the Thames froze, but the melody persisted, and Hoor was bound afresh. They sealed the cracks in the rune-marked jar that held him. The river’s guardian grudgingly opened her maw and re-swallowed Hoor’s prison, then sank again down through icy waters to burrow into the mud at the foundation of the bridge.
When the verses were sung and the creature with a god in its belly subsided, Lily and Guy put their instruments away. Walking carefully on the ice, they followed the raven back to the banks.
‘We should warn these people off the river,’ Guy noted. ‘The journals say the ice always melts quickly after Hoor’s put back to sleep.’
‘We should get this bridge knocked down so it doesn’t slow the water to ice and keep waking the old bastard,’ croaked the raven.
‘Can we do that?’ Lily asked.
The raven’s feathers ruffled in a shrug. ‘I heard talk of rebuilding the bridge, last time they were clearing ravens from the Tower.’
‘Heard talk or suggested it?’
The raven let loose a sly cackle. ‘Perhaps it’s as you say. Perhaps I’m suggesting other things too. It’s annoying and inconvenient when they clear the ravens out. The Tower is my best view of Hoor’s prison, after all. It’s not a lie to say England may fall if the ravens are made to leave.’
Lily stamped her feet on the banks to shake the snow off her boots. She didn’t look at the raven when she spoke. ‘Are you the same raven all our ancestors write about? Are you Heimdal?’
The raven laughed again. ‘What makes you think I would be?’
She bravely raised her head to look at it. ‘Nothing makes me think you aren’t.’
The raven only laughed again and took flight, returning east to the Tower.
Guy stamped his feet too, seeking warmth. ‘If it’s Heimdal, he’s over 550 years old.’
‘If it’s not Heimdal, it knows a lot about all the other times our family has been called to bind Hoor again.’
‘Perhaps ravens have journals, like we do.’
Lily finished wrapping the pipe in the soft leather again then adjusted her bonnet. ‘Don’t be foolish, Guy.’
Guy only grinned at her. ‘It’s in my nature to be a jester, Lily Thorn.’ He offered her his elbow, though. ‘Let’s go call to these ice- mad revellers to beware of the thaw, and then find a place for supper, shall we?’
Lily, having pulled her gloves on, slipped a hand into the crook of his elbow. ‘Oh
