by C. S. Pacat
Will could almost feel it, the fear as the people huddled together. The torchlight flickered over the words.
He knew what it said. He could read the ancient script that the people of the old world had carved in rock as they huddled together in the dark.
He is coming.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘YOU’RE LOYAL TO him, aren’t you,’ said Justice.
He meant Will. Violet flushed. ‘He saved my life.’ A stranger saved my life the day I learned my family planned to kill me. Will might be a stranger, but he was the only one here who knew what she was. He knew, and he had stood by her side.
After a long, studying look: ‘Come with me,’ said Justice, seeming to make a decision. ‘There’s something I want you to see.’
Violet’s palms felt clammy as they made their way towards the eastern side of the Hall. Being alone with Justice made her nervous. It was the powerful strength of his presence, and the omnipresent danger of what he would do if he found out she was a Lion.
Rounding a corner, she heard the same faint metallic sounds of sword fighting that had drifted into her room this morning. They drew her forward, past a row of columns to a wide-open arena.
She saw perfect rows of young fighters. There were perhaps two dozen novitiates. They all wore the same silvery-grey tunics Violet and Will had been given, embroidered with the Steward’s star, and skirted to mid-thigh. They all moved in unison, a pattern of sword movements that flowed one into another, identical. She watched, entranced, as their swords lifted gracefully, then arced to the right.
One boy was astonishingly better than the others, his long hair flying around him as his sword sliced the air. She thought she recognised him. Cyprian. The novitiate who had accompanied Will into the great hall.
She couldn’t take her eyes off him. He was strikingly handsome, the way a statue is handsome, nose, eyes and lips all in faultless symmetry. But it was the way he moved, embodying the ideal Steward, that made her yearn to be like him, to fit somewhere as well as he fit, to find a place where she—
‘Halt!’ called Cyprian.
The novitiates instantly stopped, their sword tips held out with unwavering precision. She was the interruption, she realised suddenly. They were all looking at her. She fought the instinct to take a step back.
‘What are you doing here, outsider?’ Cyprian’s voice was cold. He crossed the training courtyard to confront her, his sword still in his hand. ‘It’s that girl,’ she heard one of the novitiates say behind Cyprian. ‘That girl who came from outside.’ ‘Are you here to spy on our training?’
She flushed. ‘I heard you from the corridor. I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to watch.’
‘Steward training is private,’ said Cyprian. ‘Outsiders don’t belong.’
‘I brought her here,’ said Justice, arriving behind her. ‘She is our honoured guest, and there is little harm in her watching you practise.’
‘Shouldn’t you be out looking for my brother?’
That stopped Justice completely.
‘It is the Steward way to offer aid to those in need,’ Justice began, his voice gently chastising. Cyprian was uncowed.
‘You’re barely half a Steward, walking around without a shieldmate. You’ve made a mockery of our Order with your mistakes and your recklessness.’
‘That’s enough, Cyprian,’ said Justice, his voice hardening. ‘You may be foremost among the novitiates, but you do not yet have the authority of a Steward.’
Cyprian accepted the reprimand without lowering his eyes.
‘Justice might think you can be trusted, but I don’t,’ he said, his eyes holding Violet with a cold look. ‘I’ll be watching you.’
‘Do not let Cyprian disturb you. He has striven his whole life to please his father, and High Janissary Jannick does not take well to outsiders.’
Justice had brought her to a room that had the look of a disused training hall, its walls hung with old arms and armaments. He spoke kindly, but standing alone in a room with Justice was not reassuring. Instead, the tense sense of danger returned tenfold. In his white livery, Justice was a fighter in a place made for fighting, part of this space filled with the ghost of battles from an ancient past. Cyprian’s words jangled in her head.
‘Why did you bring me here?’ Violet tried to keep the tension from her voice.
She could still hear the sounds of the novitiates training, though they were distant. They were a reminder that she was here under false pretenses. She had the sudden fear that Justice was going to tell her that she couldn’t stay in the Hall. Will’s insistence that she was his friend – that he wouldn’t go anywhere without her – had only brought her so far.
Sent back to London, she would have nowhere to go. She waited tensely. But Justice didn’t answer her question directly.
‘This is the room where I trained for many years when I was a boy.’ Justice walked forward with an air of nostalgia.
‘You trained here?’
‘I practised the drills here whenever I had time to spare,’ said Justice. ‘That was when I first came to the Hall.’
‘Came?’ said Violet.
Justice nodded. ‘Cyprian is one of the few born to the Hall. Most Stewards are Called. It happens around the age of seven, sometimes earlier.’ She remembered him saying that those of Steward blood were Called from across the world. Cyprian’s parents must have been janissaries, since Stewards took a vow of celibacy. ‘For those of us who are Called, the Hall is like a place we’ve always known, and everything here makes a kind of sense,’ said Justice. ‘Your friend Will felt that way too. He is Blood of the Lady, as I am Blood of the Stewards. We share a connection to the old world. You, on the other hand … You are the first true outsider to come into the Hall.’
Outsider. Cyprian had called her that. He thought she was an ordinary girl brought here from London. He was wrong. She had her own connection to the old world. Just not one that she could ever tell Stewards about.
‘Is that why you showed me those fighters?’
‘I showed you the fighters so that you could see our mission,’ said Justice. ‘Relics of the old world still exist. The Corrupted Blade, the Shield of Rassalon … Stewards scour the world for any surviving objects from those times,’ said Justice. ‘Pieces kept by unknowing collectors, excavations that uncover fragments of the past … Where we find his Dark artefacts, we destroy them or lock them away to prevent them from doing harm. When we must, we battle evil unleashed from such objects, or awakened in archaeological digs that delved too deep into the past.
‘But the real fight is coming,’ said Justice. ‘Your friend Will stands at the centre of a great battle. He may be all that can hold the Dark King back.’
‘What does that have to do with me?’
To her surprise, Justice went over to one of the racks, took out one of the long silver swords, and held it out to her, hilt first.
‘Here.’
A sword. Like the ones the novitiates had been using when she had watched them training. Her heart began to beat faster at the purposeful way he was proffering the sword.
He meant for her to take it. She did, gingerly testing its weight. She had never held a sword before and was surprised at both the solidity and the heft of it.
And then, disconcertingly, she was looking at him over its length.
‘You heard the word shieldmate,’ said Justice. ‘Stewards do everything in pairs. We take a partner when we take our whites. Someone to fight beside and protect.’
‘That’s what Marcus was to you? A shieldmate?’ said Violet.
‘That’s right.’
She looked into Justice’s warm brown eyes, remembering how desperately he had looked for Marcus on the ship.
‘You could be that for your friend,’ he said.
Violet curled her hand around the hilt and lifted it. She shivered with the same sense of destiny she had felt when she had put on the Steward clothes, a connection to the past, as if she held a swor
d in an ancient battle.
She thought of Will, then of the sequence she had seen the novitiates practise. She tried to replicate it, stepping forward and arcing the sword to the right. She could feel how awkward it was: new to her body, the motion did not flow easily. This was a crude copy. She didn’t have the grace of the Stewards. She finished the first movement frowning, knowing she could do better.
But when she looked up at Justice, she saw that she had surprised him.
‘You did that from memory?’
She nodded.
‘Try the second movement.’
This time, as she began the slow arc, he brought his own sword up to meet hers in a countermovement, as if they were clashing in a stylised battle. ‘Now the third.’ His sword met hers again, this time on its downward stroke. Then he began a slow, sweeping attack that aimed at her neck, and she found herself lifting her sword into the fourth movement – which was somehow a perfect block to his attack. It was her turn to show surprise.
‘We train for the opponent that we will face,’ said Justice, responding to her expression, ‘when the day comes that we are called on to fight.’
Justice in his Steward garb faced her with a sword in his hand. Their blades came together again as she executed the fifth movement, and Justice became that opponent. The beautiful, abstract sequence suddenly had a purpose. She found herself looking at Justice across naked steel. Her heart was pounding, and not from exertion.
‘Relax your hands. You don’t need to grip the hilt so tightly.’
It was unnerving to mimic fighting him, yet thrilling at the same time. You tried to kill my brother. Another movement. Stewards killed the first Lion. Another. She remembered her Lion brother, Tom, blocking a Steward’s sword with an iron bar. Right before he drove it through the Steward’s chest.
‘Less weight on your front foot.’
It felt terrifying, and right. She had dreamed of taking part in the battle, just never thought she’d be training to fight against Simon.
‘Blade tip higher. Hold it steady.’
The sequence was relentless. Her arms had started to hurt, and her tunic was damp with sweat. Cyprian had made this sequence look easy. Justice, moving with her in counterpoint, made it look easy.
Three movements left.
Why couldn’t a Lion fight for the Light? Why couldn’t she find a place here? She was as strong as any Steward.
Two movements.
‘Your friend carries a great burden,’ said Justice. ‘If he is what the Elder Steward believes him to be … When the darkness comes, he will need a protector. Someone who’ll stand by him. Someone who’ll defend him. Someone who can fight.’
One.
‘I can fight.’ She gritted out the words, and with a surge of determination she finished the final movement. Chest heaving, she looked over at Justice in victory.
‘Good.’ She felt a rush of success. ‘Now do it again.’
Justice stepped back, lowering his sword.
‘Again!’ she burst out.
He called a halt hours later. Dripping with sweat and trembling with exhaustion, she looked up at Justice. Her vision was hazy, her limbs at the edge of their endurance. She was barely able to lift her sword.
‘Your movements are crude. You are not a Steward. You do not have our training,’ said Justice. ‘But you have the heart, and I will teach you.’
She stared at him – he was a Steward, her father’s enemy.
But she didn’t have to follow her father. She could forge her own destiny. She tightened her grip on the sword.
‘Then teach me,’ she said.
Utterly exhausted, she was barely aware that it was evening. Training over, she wanted nothing more than to collapse, pouring herself onto the bed in her room. But she found herself instead walking back into the great hall.
At this time, there was no one else here, just those ghostly white pillars stretching off into the dark. Her footsteps echoed, too loud. The raised dais emerged out of the gloom, the four empty thrones staring down at her.
They had the look of a majestic tribunal, reigning supreme over all brought before them.
But they weren’t the reason why she was here.
The broken piece of shield hung on the wall. She stopped in front of it and looked up at the face of Rassalon, the First Lion.
The lion seemed to gaze back at her. His visage looked so noble. His great mane curled in proud metallic whorls around his face, his eyes serious above the triangle of his nose.
He almost seemed like he had something to say to her. What is it? she thought, suddenly wishing she could talk to him too. I’m not betraying you by training with the Stewards. It’s what you would do too, she thought. Isn’t it? How could something as honourable as a Lion have fought for the Dark?
As she had not dared to do before, she now reached out and touched the lion’s face.
A sound behind her. She whirled, heart pounding.
Cyprian.
He had come from late practice just like she had, still armed and wearing his fighting tunic.
‘Are you following me?’ she challenged him.
He’d been training all day too, but he looked irritatingly perfect, without a single hair out of place, as though hours of sword work was easy for him. She was too aware of the dirt smudged across her forehead and the sweat tendrils in her hair.
I’m stronger than you, she thought defiantly. But her heart was hammering guiltily. Had he seen her touch the shield?
‘What are you doing in our hall?’ His hand was on the pommel of his sword.
‘I’m just walking. Or isn’t that allowed?’
He looked over at the shield, then at her. ‘That’s the Shield of Rassalon.’
Her heartbeat spiked higher. She couldn’t explain what had brought her here, the connection she felt to the ancient creature.
Violet flushed. ‘I don’t care about an old shield.’
Cyprian’s mouth curled unpleasantly. ‘Whatever you’re hiding, I’m going to find it out.’
It wasn’t fair. Born to the Hall, Justice had said, and he looked it; he fit here better than she had ever fit anywhere. Nerves transmuted into provocation. ‘Trying to toady up to your father?’
Instead of answering, Cyprian looked back at the shield, as if he was looking right back into the past, his posture straight and his eyes steady.
‘Lions are servants of the Dark,’ he said. ‘Do you want to know what Stewards do with them?’
‘What?’ she said, and his answer made her turn cold.
‘We kill them,’ said Cyprian. ‘We kill all of them we can find.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘JUSTICE SAID THAT you fought James,’ said Emery.
About sixteen years old, with long brown hair worn in the Steward style, Emery was a shy-looking novitiate Will had seen training with Cyprian. He had just approached Will with his two friends Carver and Beatrix standing behind him, and was waiting wide-eyed for Will’s reply.
‘Not – exactly,’ said Will carefully.
On his way back from requisitions, Will was carrying two extra tunics, a cloak and a pair of tall fur-lined boots. The tunics were light, but the cloak and boots he had been given were soft, warm, and made for winter. They each had astonishing artistry, as if spun from threads of silvery moonlight or the softest, most delicate cloud.
‘But you did see him?’ said Emery.
He was wearing a grey-silver tunic like the ones that Will held in his arms. He talked about James as if Will had encountered a mythical creature, like the Hydra or Typhon.
James is a Reborn, Will reminded himself. A living piece of the old world. The Stewards spent their lives studying the histories and trying to glean what was forgotten from the artefacts that they collected, keeping the ancient traditions as best as they could remember them. He could see the awe in Emery, like that of a researcher face-to-face with his subject.
‘What was he like?’ said Emery. ‘Did he talk to you?
How did you get away?’
‘Emery,’ said Carver, curbing the younger boy’s questions. Then, to Will: ‘I hope these questions do not plague you. We do not spend much time with outsiders. And the Reborn to us is a figure of legend.’
Carver was the oldest of the three novitiates, perhaps nineteen years old, with dark hair and the serious voice of one who did not talk much. Though he was taller than the others too, by almost a head, he had a quiet look.
‘It’s all right,’ said Will. Then, to Emery: ‘James was on the docks. I distracted him just long enough that we could get away. Justice told us to run, and he was right. Even with a head start we almost didn’t escape. But it wasn’t James who chased us; it was three men with pale faces and sunken eyes, each wearing a piece of black armour.’
‘The Remnants,’ said Emery, wide-eyed.
‘Then it’s true. Simon really is on the rise.’ Beatrix’s voice had the trace of a Yorkshire accent. Will knew that many novitiates were born outside the Hall, but it was still strange to think of them being Called from anywhere as ordinary as Leeds. ‘It’s why they moved up the date of your test.’ She said it to Carver.
‘There might be many reasons for that,’ Carver said.
‘Test?’ said Will.
‘To become a Steward,’ said Emery. ‘He’s going to pass his test and take his whites and sit with the Stewards at the high table.’
‘That is not certain,’ said Carver. It was his turn to flush. ‘The test is difficult and many fail. And there is no shame in becoming a janissary.’
‘And you? Will you be training with us?’ Beatrix’s attention was on Will.
‘No, I’m—’ Will hadn’t let himself think about the days ahead that had been planned for him, and it became real only as he said it. ‘I’m training with the Elder Steward.’
He saw the eyes of the novitiates widen. Training in magic. The unspoken words hung in the air. The way the novitiates reacted made him realise that magic was something out of myth to them too. They’d had the same look in their eyes when he’d talked about James.