by C. S. Pacat
The heat was immense, each of the pyres burning, huge flames to the sky. It scalded his own cheeks, his throat choked with the thick smoke, his eyes burning.
He was looking at the Elder Steward’s face as he lit the straw, and he made himself keep looking at it as he stepped back, at eyes reflecting flame, and then a face of flame, crinkling and then turning to blackened ash.
For hundreds of years, the Stewards had kept their watch. They had been the last of those who remembered, bearing the star across centuries of careful tradition.
Now their star was flame; their strength was flame; their fate was flame; and all that they remembered would flicker and grow cold.
We’re all that’s left. Will looked at the others: Sarah, her face streaked with tears and soot; Grace beside her, holding her hand; Violet, whose eyes had looked lacerated since she had found Justice; Cyprian, who had lost everything. None of them had the training to lead a fight against the Dark King. We’re all that’s left. And we’re not enough.
The fight they faced seemed immense. Not just Simon but all he could do, his power to take what was good in the world and turn it into ash and destruction. Now he had the Shadow Stone and the power of the Shadow Kings, and no Stewards to fight against him.
The Shadow Kings would be nothing like Marcus, a new-made shadow of weakened Steward blood. The Shadow Kings were far older and more powerful, the commanders of great shadow armies, and Will remembered how they had felt in that Stone. They had wanted to get out.
Was this how it had been in those ancient days? The lights in the world going out, one by one, as the Dark King’s forces marched towards victory?
The fire roared, dwarfing them as they stared up at its flames, and he’d never felt so small and alone against a fight that seemed vast and unending.
It was Cyprian who broke the moment, scrubbing an arm across his face and picking up one of the unlit torches. He stuck it into the closest pyre, letting the flames engulf its tip. When he drew his arm back, the funereal fire had transferred from the pyre to the torch. He took the flame and held it aloft as he set out determinedly for the wall.
Will exchanged a quick look with Violet and then followed him, with the others behind.
The wind was sharper and colder up on the wall, where Cyprian walked along empty battlements under a circle of orange light. He stopped at a huge iron receptacle six feet across, the inside blackened and charred. Will could smell the charcoal and ash of its extinguished fire, acidic, earthy and cold, the remnants of a perpetual blaze.
It didn’t need wood to burn; Will knew that from the Elder Steward’s stories, but also from some instinct deep inside himself.
Two Stewards had used to guard it, standing on either side of the iron dish, like sentries at their post, a vigil kept for centuries. For this had been the ancient beacon that the Stewards called the Final Flame.
Cyprian stood over it, holding up his torch. He was lit up in flame light, Will and the others gathered around him. In the reflected light, Cyprian’s breathing was shallow, but his voice was clear as he made his pledge.
‘I am the last of the Stewards,’ he said. ‘And this flame is my promise: while there is a single star, there is still light.’
And he threw his torch into the bowl of the beacon, and it came alight, leaping into flame that grew, brighter and brighter. Will imagined it visible across the marshes, a light that could be seen for miles, a message to Simon, and to the Stewards, past and future, guiding them home.
It was only much later that they thought to check the cells under the Hall, but James was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
TO FALL INTO darkness … it was his greatest fear. And I left him alone with that.
Violet pushed out onto the battlements, Justice’s words ringing in her ears. She had wanted to get out, to be alone on the cold, high wall, but she found herself drawn to the Flame, its immense heat and its light. A burst of sparks lit up the empty-toothed crenels, and she found a place at one of them, looking out at the black marshes with its heat to her back. One thought had driven her out here, to stand on the edge of the wall, her breathing fast, her hands fists.
I should have been here.
She was strong. She was fast. There must have been something she could have done, something to help, something—
The others were in the gatekeep, the four of them in one room on makeshift pallets, sleeping as best they could. They had agreed they ought to be near the gate in case of a further attack, but the truth was that no one wanted to spend the night in the empty Hall. Even in the gatekeep, she hadn’t been able to close her eyes, lying wide awake before pushing herself up to stalk out into the night.
Justice had saved her life. It was the first thing he had ever done for her, taking a bullet for her before they even knew each other.
Maybe we can watch for each other.
The last words she’d said to him. Then she’d left him to face his greatest fear alone.
She felt his absence like a gaping hole. Justice had been a rock, holding everyone steady. If he’d been here, he would have known what to do. She had looked up to him like—
A brother. She could feel the irony of that, like a painful band around the heart. Her brother was a Lion, who bore Simon’s brand and had killed his share of Stewards.
A Lion should have been here. A Lion should have been fighting for the Light. You have Lion blood on both sides, the Elder Steward had said. What good was a Lion if she couldn’t fight?
The crunch of a footstep behind her made her turn, heart pounding. But it was only Grace, a blanket wrapped like a shawl around her shoulders to shield her against the cold. She came to stand beside Violet, leaning her forearms on the battlements, her pendant hanging away from her chest.
‘Couldn’t sleep?’ said Grace.
It wasn’t a question. Violet could see Grace’s profile in the light from the Flame, her high, smooth brow, and her long, elegant neck. There were creases under Grace’s eyes, but they had been there since the morning. Grace’s voice was dulled with more than exhaustion.
‘You saw it, didn’t you?’ Violet asked her.
It. There was no need to explain what she meant. It hung over all of them. Grace said nothing for a long while, but Violet had seen Grace and Sarah both avoid the dark and shadow in the gatekeep in favour of the light.
‘You can ask me,’ said Grace after a long moment.
‘Ask you?’ said Violet.
‘What it was like.’
Violet shivered. Grace had seen something no person had seen in centuries, and when Grace turned to look at her briefly, it was there in her eyes. Grace was the one who spoke.
‘You want to know if there’s a way to fight it. If it could be tricked. If it could be trapped. If it had any weaknesses.’
‘And did it?’
‘No,’ said Grace.
Violet stared at her, feeling the oncoming terror of it, an implacable enemy that could not be fought. She didn’t think Grace was going to say more, but then:
‘It was cold, like the air was frozen,’ said Grace. ‘We saw a dark stain spreading on the door, black, like a hole. But it didn’t crawl through the hole, it was the hole. The Elder Steward stepped out in front of us, telling us both to stay back.’
A muscle moved in Grace’s jaw, though she kept her eyes on the sky beyond the battlements, her voice steady.
‘They grappled hand to hand like two dark whirlwinds. I’d never seen her fight before, nor seen this side of her come out. For a moment, it was as if two shadows fought. She forced it to the wall as it thrashed and shrieked. She held it there until it gave a final scream, and vanished, leaving only its burned imprint on the wall. And then she fell.’
Violet felt her mouth dry, her hands curled into fists again. I should have been here. I would have fought.
‘I thought in their darkest hour the king was supposed to appear. Isn’t that what Stewards believe?’ said Violet bitterly. ‘That they’ll call f
or the King, and the King will answer?’
Grace was looking back at her strangely, as if the words sparked something internal. But: ‘I asked the Elder Steward that,’ was all Grace said. ‘Sarah was with me. She cried and begged. The Elder Steward said it was not yet time to raise the call.’
‘Why not?’
The flame light on the empty battlements leaped and fell, high and red. But beyond it the night stretched out, endless shadow that covered all the land.
‘Because this is not our darkest hour,’ said Grace. ‘That is still to come.’
A huge, wordless emotion swelled in Violet, its edges painful. She heard the Elder Steward in those words, and generations of Stewards, dutiful in their service. All these people were dead, and for what? For Simon’s own power and greed?
She wanted to shout, to scream, her anger growing until it overwhelmed almost every sense, feeling powerless in the face of the enemy but needing, above anything, to fight.
She pushed herself away from the wall.
It was a two-hour ride to London, but she knew where to find Devon, the warren of streets and alleyways where he did his backroom dealings, chasing down leads on objects in collections for Simon, part of the net Simon used to drag artefacts to himself from across the world.
Violet was waiting when the door opened, and Devon came down the shallow stone steps into the alley, pulling his cap down low over his stupid flop of hair with a characteristic dip of his head. He didn’t see her until he was two steps into the alley, and by that time, the door had closed behind him.
‘Where is it?’ said Violet.
The alley was a crack between buildings, and it had started to rain. She was only half aware that she was wet. The closest gas lamp was on Turnmill Street, but she could see the night gleam of the wet cobbles, the darker shapes of the rotting boxes on her right, and she could see him, could see the pale fringe of hair that hung down like a valance under his cap. Devon took a single step backward. His heel slid on the muddy slush of a cobblestone.
She said, ‘Where is the Shadow Stone?’
‘Why don’t you ask your friends the Stewards?’
She hit him.
He went sprawling onto all fours in the wet mud, his white hair tangled in his eyes under the cap, which had survived the brief journey. Ridiculously, he clutched it to his head with a lifted hand. Then he raised his chin, blood blossoming on his lips, and looked right at her.
‘Oh, that’s right.’ His teeth were red when he smiled, sickly. ‘What was your story again? They kidnapped you? Then you’ll be glad they’re dead, won’t you? All that Steward self-righteousness rotting in the ground—’
Violet’s vision blurred, and she was grabbing him by the shirt collar, dragging him up, and hitting him again, knuckles against flesh. The impact was a reverberation, sickly satisfying. It snapped his head to one side, knocked the cap from his head, and finally – finally – he was struggling against her, bareheaded as she’d never seen him, his eyes huge and dark as he scrabbled on the muddy cobblestones. Her fists were in his shirtfront; she had followed him down into the mud. Her body was above his, pinning him down with her weight.
‘Shut up. They were good. They were good and you killed them—’
‘I knew you were one of them,’ Devon sneered up at her. ‘Your brother didn’t believe it, even after you ran out on him. He kept saying you were loyal—’
‘You did this,’ said Violet. ‘You and my father, you dragged Tom into it. Got your hooks into him. He’d never be a part of it if he knew—’
Devon’s cap was gone, but under it he was still wearing a dirty bandana, and she snatched at it, furious at him, instinct acting to deprive him of possessions, of composure, of dignity. And suddenly he was really fighting her, grabbing desperately at the bandana, trying to hold on to it and looking for the first time truly afraid.
‘Stop it, let go of me, let go—’
She ripped the bandana away from him, threw it to the side, and Devon let out a terrible cry, as if the sound had been ripped from him too.
Devon was staring up at her, horror in his wide eyes, his forehead totally exposed.
There was a deformation right in the centre, a lumpy thing that had been hidden by the bandana. For a moment, she didn’t understand what she was looking at.
She stared at it – at the wrongness of it, a grotesque artefact under the wet hair; it protruded half an inch. A ruined pearlescent stump, growing from the middle of Devon’s forehead.
The alleyway seemed to fade from view, and her hands opened, releasing him.
She remembered lifting it from its lacquered black box: a long, straight wand of ivory, spiralled from end to tip. She remembered holding it in her hands, the reverence of it, the way it changed the beat of her heart and shallowed her breath. Long gone. Long gone now, the last of them bright. She recalled the tactile, physical sensation of it, the wide base rougher at one edge, as though it had been partway sawn and then snapped off. She had touched that jagged wick with her thumb, like testing the sharpness of a blade.
The horn all seek but never find.
She was staring at its mutilated fit now, sawn like bone, an amputated limb. ‘You – you’re—’
She felt sick. She was going to be sick.
Devon was trying to get up, get away from her, but he couldn’t; he was too hurt, something wrong with his ankle and shoulder, lank white hair plastered to his head more steel than silver in the rain, blood sliding slowly down his face.
‘Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you tell us—’ Her words scraped out. ‘That you – were—’
‘Why?’ Devon’s voice was thick with blood. ‘So you could put the rest of me in your collection?’
‘We wouldn’t,’ said Violet, ‘we wouldn’t have.’
His cap was tight in his muddy fist; he’d clutched for it as if it could help him, or keep her back. Half rising, as if he had been shot, he pushed away from her, stumbling slightly. She let him go, still kneeling herself, wet seeping through the knees of her trousers.
She had asked Justice about the horn, and he had told her, humans used boar spears, they tied them down, chased them with dogs, hobbles and ropes and horseflesh, screaming.
The alley was filthy. The rain had spilled over the contents of the gutters to cover the pathway, filling its hollows, a compost of mud and clay. Devon was smeared with it, his chest rising and falling under his torn shirt. She looked at him and saw a tapestry on a wall, its colours faded, the white curve of neck and mane still visible against the dimmed red.
Long gone now. They say this one was the last.
‘Then give it back,’ he said.
He’d pushed himself to the steps of the building he’d exited, but no further. He said it in a voice too steady for coax or plea. He said it like he meant to prove a point. She remembered that he’d lied to Will. She remembered what Simon had done to the Stewards.
Simon has it, she didn’t say. Did it matter? If she had the horn, would she give it back to him? She realised that Devon’s steady tone exposed the truth, and she answered in the same level voice.
‘I can’t give you the horn,’ she said.
By then, Devon, with a kind of brutal persistence, had pushed himself upright. She had risen too. She was the one holding back now, like she had when she had first looked inside the black lacquered box and seen what was inside. She hated that Devon realised it.
‘Then what? You drag me back to the Hall with a chain around my neck?’ It was so reminiscent of what had happened to her when the Stewards had found out she was a Lion that it stuck in her throat.
‘If I let you go,’ said Violet, ‘will you go back to Simon?’
‘Yes.’
Her hands were fists. ‘How could you? How could you serve him, when you’re—’
‘How could I?’ Devon laughed with a mouth full of blood. ‘It’s the Lions that fought for him. A field full of Lions. Now you fight for an Order who digs through our bones and
puts them under glass. Who else have the Stewards put in their collection?’
‘They’re not like that. You twist everything.’
‘You’re like me,’ said Devon. ‘We’re the same. You’re more like me than you are like them. It’s in your blood.’
‘I’m nothing like you. I will never fight for the Dark King.’
He laughed again, the sound a breath that was helpless and unconstrained, weight given up to the wall behind him, his eyes glittering beneath his white lashes. ‘You will,’ he said. ‘You’ll betray every person you love to serve him. You’re a Lion.’
She was going to hit him again. ‘Do it,’ he said. His body was a taunt. ‘Do it. If you let me walk away, I’ll go back to Simon, and he’ll kill you. He’ll kill all of you like he killed the Stewards.’
She didn’t hit him. She felt the anger crest and transform into something hard and implacable.
‘Crawl back to him, then. Crawl back to Simon and tell him, the Lion and the Lady stand against him, and as long as we draw breath, he will never conquer the Light.’
He didn’t crawl back to Simon. He went home, to Mayfair.
It took time, his hands shaking, to rake his fingers through his hair, drawing it down over his forehead. The bandana was a useless strip of muddy wet. Devon refused to wring it out, scrape the muck off, as he did with the cap. He replaced the cap with slow, careful movements, one shoulder against the wall. He shoved the bandana into his pocket, the end trailing.
The journey from the alley to the house near Bond Street was one of dogged determination. He entered the house through the side door and went to his room without attracting attention, as he often did when he came and went on some errand. In his room, he dragged off his jacket, a crumpled puddle on the carpet. He sat on the edge of the bed.
He knew he should wash his face; he should bathe and clean the mud from his skin, peel off the rest of these clothes. He did none of those things. His shirt hung open, bloodied and torn.
