by C. S. Pacat
Tom.
She was scrabbling down from the crates the instant she saw him.
Staying out of sight, she manoeuvred through the dredged cargo, glimpsing Tom greeting the Sealgair’s Captain Maxwell. As the two men walked, she followed the distinctive glint of Tom’s hair.
They stopped on the far side of a few stacks of cork. There was no one else around, just her brother and the captain talking in low voices – perfect for an inconspicuous homecoming.
Violet stepped out, opening her mouth to say Tom when she heard—
‘—thirty-nine dead in the attack, but there are no more bodies in the water. The boy is missing.’
‘And the girl?’
The auburn-haired man wasn’t Tom. It was her father.
Some child’s instinct stopped her in her tracks, the sight of her father’s back and shoulders conjuring up guilt, as though she might be in trouble. Hastily, she stepped back, finding a shadowed space between the piles of cork.
‘Where is Violet, Maxwell?’ Her father’s shoulders were taut, his voice clipped in the way it became when he was controlling himself.
‘There’s no sign of her,’ said Maxwell.
‘Search again. She has to be found.’
‘Mr Ballard – I saw her jump back onto the ship – I don’t know how anyone could have survived—’
‘She can’t be dead,’ said her father. Violet was taking a step forward, opening her mouth to say I’m right here, when her father said, ‘I need that stupid mongrel back alive.’
Violet stopped, the words like a slap. She felt everything go very still and soundless, as if every particle of air had been sucked away.
‘Tom may be of Lion blood,’ her father said, ‘but he can’t come into his true power without killing another like him. I haven’t kept that bastard girl in my house, humiliating my wife and jeopardising my social standing, only to have her die before time.’
Violet felt her back hit the cork before she realised she had moved. Her fist shoved hard into her mouth to hold back the sound that tried to get out. She was staring at her father.
‘We’ll keep looking,’ Captain Maxwell was saying. ‘If she’s out there, we’ll find her.’
‘Then do it. And for God’s sake, don’t alarm her. Tell her that her brother has been asking for her. He’s sorry he had harsh words for her, he misses her. She’ll do anything for Tom’s approval.’
She was stumbling back blindly. Barely aware of her surroundings, she wasn’t thinking about being caught. She was just trying to get away, her limbs clumsy with horror.
She pushed through the stacks of cork and didn’t hear the voices approaching, footsteps coming right for her – when a hand grabbed her and pulled her to safety behind some crates.
Scant seconds later, her father and Captain Maxwell rounded the corner, passing right by the spot where she had been standing.
In the dim space between crates, she was staring at Will’s shocked face.
‘Let go! Let go of me, you don’t have any right—!’
‘I heard,’ said Will. ‘I heard what they said.’ She felt hot, then cold. He had heard. He had heard the words that made her shivery sick. The feeling of exposure was horrible. ‘You can’t go back to them.’
He was holding her by the shoulders, pressing her back into the crate. She could push him off, shove him away easily, if she could just stop shaking. She was strong enough. If she could just—
‘Why are you here?’ she said thickly. ‘If they find you—’
‘They’re not going to find me.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘If they do,’ said Will, ‘we’ll go together.’
‘Why would you—’
‘You saved my life,’ said Will.
He said it simply. She remembered that Simon had spent years tracking him down, then had chained him to a post on a ship filled with unnatural cargo. Yet he had followed her here.
‘Everyone who has ever helped me is dead,’ said Will. ‘I didn’t want that to happen to you.’
She stared back at him. He had come all the way back into Simon’s stronghold. And he’d heard. He’d heard the words that had turned her life into a lie. Tom can’t come into his true power without killing another like him. Her father wanted to kill her. And Tom – did Tom know? Did he know what their father planned to do?
‘Come with me,’ said Will.
‘He’s my father,’ she said. If she could just stop shaking – ‘And Tom. Tom’s my brother. The Lion.’
As children, she and Tom had done everything together. Their father had always encouraged their closeness, as he’d encouraged her presence in the house. She’s the same blood as Tom, he’d say. She felt sick.
She remembered how normal the day had seemed, before her ordinary world had been shattered, Stewards and Lions and a sword that spewed black fire.
No, not normal. Tom getting Simon’s brand burned into his flesh. The smell of it like cooked meat, and a boy beaten and chained in the hold.
‘What Justice said—’ She made herself ask it, through chattering teeth. ‘Do you think it’s true?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Will. ‘But whatever’s happening, we’re both part of it.’
‘Is that why you want me to come with you?’
‘I want answers, like you. And I tried running. The things that are happening … I couldn’t get away from them. I couldn’t run from what was part of me. Neither can you.’
‘They’re my family,’ said Violet.
Will said, ‘Simon took my family from me too.’
She didn’t know him. With the bruising mostly faded, he looked different – like a clerk, if a clerk were all cheekbones and intense eyes. His dark hair and too-pale skin were half-hidden under a cap, and his faded blue jacket was torn at the shoulder.
‘Stewards hate Lions. You didn’t hear them, on the ship.’ On the ship, before Tom killed them. ‘Whatever I am, I’m not welcome.’
‘You don’t have to tell them what you are,’ said Will. ‘No one knows what you are except you.’
She realised it then. She was going to follow him, this boy she’d barely met. ‘He’s here, isn’t he? Justice.’ Justice, who hated Lions. Justice, who had fought her brother and almost killed him. Justice, who might kill her too, if he knew what she was. ‘You’re going with him to the Stewards.’
Justice, who had taken a bullet for her in the confusing crush on the ship.
Justice, who thought she was Simon’s captive and Will’s friend.
Will nodded once. ‘I have to know. What I am. What Simon wants with me.’
Will had lied to Justice for her. Will had come back here to help her. They had stumbled into this together, and he was right. She wanted answers. Violet closed her eyes.
She said, ‘Then I’m going too.’
Darkness had fallen, but there were lights on the river, and lamps and torches flaming on the banks where the work of salvage was still going on. It gave them both cover to creep around in.
Will was good at hiding. Slipping in and out of shadows and gaps, he had a skill born of necessity: discovery for Violet had only ever meant a box on the ears; discovery for him meant capture and death. He knew how to move, where to put his feet, when to stay still.
They had to reach the other side of the pier, through stacks of crates, and stuffed sacks and long lines of lumber. There was no sign of her father, but twice she heard voices that sent her heart into her mouth, and once they had to cram themselves into a space between bins while Simon’s men patrolled.
Justice was waiting, a cloaked figure indistinguishable from the shadows until Will pointed towards him with a silent tilt of his chin. He had stayed back to deal with Simon’s guards while Will came in to find her, she realised. He was likely the reason they had seen so few patrols: he had cleared them out.
As he emerged, Violet felt a shiver of fear, remembering Justice’s strength on the ship. He had thrown Tom around like he weighed
nothing, then survived a blow to the head that had set him floating facedown in the water. Even now his hand rested protectively on his sword, an old-fashioned weapon like his old-fashioned clothes and his old-fashioned way of speaking.
If he knew what I was—
‘Good,’ was all Justice said, with a nod. ‘We must go.’
He didn’t ask her where she’d been, just seemed glad that she was safe. They set off with Justice in the lead. She found herself staring at him, at his jet-black hair that was straight where hers was curly, his upright posture that seemed to radiate authority, the seriousness of his warm brown eyes.
‘It’s dark enough now that we can try to cross without being seen. If we can make it past Simon’s patrols—’
There was a sudden commotion from the bank, and all three of them jerked their heads towards it.
‘Something’s happening,’ said Will.
The clatter of a carriage, the sound of voices from the river – but more than that, there was a shift in the air that she felt but couldn’t quite name, like the build-up before a storm. She could almost taste it, dangerous, electric.
Justice’s expression changed. ‘James is here.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
WILL TURNED.
James. He didn’t recognise the name. But he could hear the tension in Justice’s voice. Simon’s men seemed to feel it too, waiting in tense clumps on the bank. James is here.
The carriage was arriving like a processional, announcing itself with the sound of hooves, wheels and the clink of harnesses. There were three men riding before it, each wearing a single piece of broken armour atop their riding clothes. It gave them an unnatural look. They felt wrong, their sunken eyes unblinking, their faces death white. They cantered ahead of the carriage, like the obverse of Stewards.
The carriage itself was black, high-gloss lacquered wood, drawn by two black horses with arched necks and flared nostrils, their eyes hidden by blinkers. On the doors and carved into the wood were the three black hounds that were Simon’s coat of arms. The curtains were drawn; you couldn’t see inside.
Driving right down into the crowd, it only stopped where packed dirt became the pebbled foreshore. Two carriage men leaped down from their seats with a spring. They opened the carriage door as for some lord in the high street, and that was when James stepped out onto the riverbank.
The air changed, lifting like the breeze in a long-ago garden.
It’s you, Will thought, as though they knew each other.
Palaces fallen to ruin, grass grown over the fields where armies fought, a world with all its wonders gone, except for fragments, glimmers that left you breathless.
He was beautiful. A golden beauty, he might have been carved from fine marble by some master, but there was no one in the world who looked like this.
A shiver of fear rippled across Simon’s men – a strange reaction to James’s young, lovely face. His youth itself was a small shock: James was a boy of about seventeen, Will’s own age.
Will found himself moving closer, ignoring the reaction of Justice behind him, until he was right at the edge of the wet crate. Will heard one of the sailors say, ‘It’s him. Simon’s Prize.’ Another answered, ‘For your life, don’t let him hear you call him that.’ The fear among the crowd winched tighter.
James strolled forward.
All activity had ceased with James’s arrival. The men who had gathered around the carriage fell back, opening up a path for him. Will recognised one or two of them from the hold of the Sealgair, and realised with new fear of his own that there were no lingering bystanders. Those few who remained were Simon’s men down to the last. There were brands under those shirtsleeves.
The crunch of James’s boots on the pebbles of the foreshore was loud.
The riverbank was illuminated near the carriage by a row of torches that flamed on poles and lanterns that men held aloft, their faces flickering. The river behind them was black, with a choppy glinting path of moonlight on its surface from the high three-quarter moon above; the sky was clear. The occasional sound was distant: a muted splash, the far-off ring of a bell.
James’s cool blue eyes surveyed the damaged chaos of the bank. His elegant silhouette embodied the fashion of the times: his golden hair brushed in a fashionable part, his jacket with its taut waist, the fine fabric of his trousers with their glove-like fit, his long shiny boots.
‘Mr St Clair,’ Captain Maxwell of the wrecked ship greeted him, bowing deferentially, even nervously, though James was likely more than thirty years his junior. ‘As you can see, we’ve dredged almost all the cargo. Some of the larger pieces can be salvaged. And of course the—’
‘You lost the boy,’ James said.
In the pin-drop silence, his voice carried. Will felt his stomach flip at the confirmation that they cared more about him than about the ship or its cargo.
‘Who was in charge?’
James’s mild question was met with silence from the men. The only movement was the lapping of the water on the foreshore, a soft in-and-out, like the waves of the sea.
‘No, Tom, you don’t have to—’ said a voice, and Tom was ignoring it, pushing past the men in the crowd to step out and stand in front of James.
‘I was,’ said Tom.
Violet’s brother. Will hadn’t seen him since the attack, Violet dragging him unconscious out of the hold. Tom looked recovered, and even wore a new set of clothes, though his good brown waistcoat did not match James’s exquisite tailoring and his sleeves were pushed up roughly, as if he’d been doing the kind of physical labour that was beneath his station. In front of the men, Tom dropped to one knee, so that James was looking down at him. James’s eyes passed over him, a long, unhurried look.
‘Bad kitty,’ said James. His voice was not quite pleasant.
Humiliated red flooded Tom’s face.
‘I accept any punishment Simon wants to give me.’
‘You let Stewards board the ship,’ said James. ‘You let them kill your men. And now the one thing Simon wants is in Steward hands.’
Another voice cut across the riverbank. Will saw Tom’s father stepping forward. ‘The boy’s only been missing a few hours. He can’t have gone far. And as for the attack – if it had just been Stewards, Tom could have fought them off. It was the boy who – you saw what he did to the ship. We weren’t warned. We had no idea that the boy was – that he could—’
‘Your son’s best quality,’ said James, ‘is that he doesn’t make excuses.’
Tom’s father closed his mouth with a snap.
On one knee, Tom looked up, his hands fists, his face determined as he made his pledge.
‘I’ll find him.’
‘No. I’ll find him,’ James said.
The gathered men were uneasy, shifting in the repressed silence. The three too-pale men swung silently down off their horses, their single black pieces of armour faintly repelling. Those left on the banks were shooting nervous glances from them to James and back again. Will felt it too, a strange pressure growing in his chest.
James merely peeled off his gloves.
The three men took up positions around James, as if guarding him from interruption. Their livery was emblazoned with Simon’s three black hounds, but it was the single piece of armour they each wore that made Will queasy. The pieces were different, as if the three men had scavenged different parts from the same armour suit. Pitch-black and metal-heavy, they emanated wrongness, like the chalk-white faces of the men and their staring, sunken eyes.
One of the gathered dockmen handed James something – a patch of frayed blue fabric. James closed his newly bare fist around it. Will realised with a shiver that it was a bloodstained scrap of his own jacket.
Then James went very still.
It was so quiet now that Will could hear the flaming of the torches. Behind him, Tom’s father yanked Tom off his knees and pulled him backward as if out of the way of danger, and the watching men were shrinking away from James as well, like s
inged paper curling back from a flame.
Will could feel – something happening. Like words whispering, I will find you. I will always find you. Like a metal gauntlet closing around flesh. Try to run. Behind him the flame light illuminated the faces of the men. They were terrified.
‘Will,’ said Justice.
It jerked him out of the moment, his heart pounding. He heard the urgency in Justice’s voice and was surprised to see fear in Justice’s eyes, reflecting that of the men on the docks, as if they knew what was to come.
‘We have to go. Now.’
The stirrings of a breeze were kicking up dust and scraps in whirls of air by James’s feet. The torch on the pole closest to James flickered and went out like a snuffed flame on a wick. The wind rose; it wasn’t the wind. It was something else.
‘We have to go. We have to leave before—’
Before James gathers his power.
He could feel it, a tang in the air. He felt an almost mesmerised desire to stay and watch James do it. And a desire to see if he could stop him.
Was there a way to stop magic?
Will looked past Justice to a winch crane that stood out near the river, repurposed to haul goods from the water. Those manning it had paused their work when James arrived. The crate it held was dangling in the air, still dripping.
It was dripping quite close to James.
Beside Will towered the pile of salvage from the Sealgair, a high stack of beams, which included long thick interior logs and two sections of the main mast. Tied with rope to prevent them rolling.
Will put his hand on the rope knot.
If the beams rolled, they would knock the brace from the winch crane and send the crate crashing down to hit James, or close enough to distract him.
Will’s heart was pounding. He knew how to tie ropes and untie them. He knew how to alter knots to make them slip.
Before Justice could stop him, he tugged at the fibrous knot of rope and pulled it open.
‘What are you doing?’ Justice grabbed his hand back from the rope, but Will was barely aware of it, his eyes on James. Show me what you can do.