by C. S. Pacat
Will remembered the Stewards driving back the darkness as they galloped in a line of white across the marsh. They had been assured in their power on their own lands, the Remnants cowering before them.
Justice had told him about this place. The lights of the world went out one by one, until there was only one light left, the Final Flame. There, those on the side of Light made their last stand. A light that had stood against the dark, at the very end of the world.
This was it, Will realized with an awed shiver as he looked around at the giant ancient columns and the four empty thrones. Still standing centuries later, when its people were dust and silence, and its stories were forgotten.
But if this was the last stronghold, that meant all that Justice had said was true, and he was standing in a hall that had seen the final battle. The one place the Dark King couldn’t conquer. That thought flickered through him.
“It feels familiar to you, doesn’t it,” said the Elder Steward. “As if you’ve been here before.”
“How did you know that?”
“New Stewards feel like that sometimes too,” she said. “But Stewards are not the only ones who have walked these halls.”
Will felt again the overwhelming sense that he was surrounded by the ghost of a place he knew but that no longer existed, as if he looked upon the bones of a great ancient beast that would never roam this world again.
“Why do I recognize it?” he said, the crowding of his mind with half memory almost painful. “The Lady with the medallion—who is she? It has something to do with my mother, doesn’t it? Why was Simon chasing us—chasing me?”
The Elder Steward’s eyes were on him. “Your mother never told you?”
His heart was pounding, as though he were back at Bowhill with his mother’s eyes staring at him. Will, promise.
“She told me we left London because she was tired of it. Each time we left a place she said it was just time to move on. She never told me about magic or a Lady.”
“Then you don’t know what you are.”
The Elder Steward was looking at him with such a searching gaze that he felt as if she could see into him. As if she could see everything. As if she could see Bowhill, his stumbling run through the mud, the accident on the docks in London, Matthew giving him the medallion, and the moment on the ship when he had reached for the Corrupted Blade.
When he had entered the great hall, Will had felt as if he was on trial. Now it was as though his very self was being weighed by the Elder Steward, and he was suddenly desperate not to be found wanting.
Please, he thought, not even certain what he was pleading for, only knowing that her approval was important to him.
Finally, the Elder Steward sat back on her stool.
“We have not taken in an outsider since magic first warded the Hall,” said the Elder Steward, seeming to make a decision. “But I offer you sanctuary here if you wish to take it. If you stay with us, you will find the answers you seek . . . though you will have much to learn, and you may come to wish you had never sought the truth. Dark times lie ahead.” And then, after another long look, her eyes warmed. “But even in the darkest night, there is a star.”
Will looked at the grandeur of the Hall around him, with its honor guard of snowy Stewards. Outside, Simon waited, the relentless chase, the howling dark, no person to be trusted, no hiding place safe. He looked up at Violet, who was standing tense and nervous, with her hands still bound. And he drew in a breath.
“My friend too?” said Will.
“Your friend too,” said the Elder Steward, with a half smile.
“Elder Steward, you cannot believe that this boy may be—that he is—” The High Janissary had stepped forward in protest, but the Elder Steward held up a hand and stopped him.
“Whatever he is, he is just a boy. The rest can wait until he’s rested.”
“This is a mistake,” said the High Janissary.
“Kindness is never a mistake,” said the Elder Steward. “Somewhere in the heart it is always remembered.”
Violet scrambled up as Will approached, and he found himself looking at her and Justice, their familiar faces in this unfamiliar place.
“I’m glad you made it,” said Violet.
“You too,” said Will.
“Justice almost sprained something trying to get to the Hall after you.”
In all the time Will had been running, there had never been anyone who cared if he made it. He looked at Violet’s boyish face, her young man’s clothes, and the new tense way she held herself.
There was so much he wanted to ask her, about her own escape with Justice and how it was to be here so far away from her family. But he couldn’t do that with Justice himself standing beside her. She seemed to understand that, glancing briefly at Justice and then back at Will, and nodding slightly. Will turned his own gaze to Justice, to whom he owed so much.
“Thank you,” said Will, “for arguing for me.”
“I told you that you would find welcome here,” said Justice, with a small smile. “The Elder Steward has asked the janissaries to escort you to your rooms.”
“Rooms?”
“I think you are tired,” said Justice, “and still bruised from your capture, and you have gone a long time without rest. Let us offer you the protections of the Hall.” He gestured.
Two girls wearing robes of the same blue as the High Janissary’s were waiting. Like the Stewards, they had a noble, otherworldly look. One was pale and freckled with hair the color of a dry wheat husk. Her name was Sarah. The other girl was taller, and her skin was a darker brown than Leda’s. She had the sort of profile that looked sculpted, and wore a blue pendant around her neck. It was she who spoke.
“I am Grace,” she said. “I am a janissary to the Elder Steward. She has ordered rooms prepared for both of you.”
Will looked back at Violet. Both of them were covered in mud, and he realized Justice was right: they were both exhausted. When Violet nodded, he also gave his assent.
Grace took them up steps worn from centuries of footsteps, a slow, spiraling journey upward through a section that felt oddly uninhabited. He saw only glimpses of strange courtyards, corridors, and chambers, many of them fallen to ruin. Around him, the faded beauty of the Hall was like the long red of sunset, before the last of the light goes out of the world.
Grace had an assurance of belonging as she escorted them up. Noticing that the wall was curved, Will wondered if they were now inside one of the towers he had seen when they rode through the gate. He felt again that sense of entering a world that was bigger than he had imagined. Grace stopped at a landing, in front of a door.
“They say that in ancient times guests used to stay in this part of the Hall,” Grace said. “But Stewards do not take in outsiders, and this wing was left empty. The Elder Steward asked for it to be opened up again. This will be your room.” She nodded to Violet as her counterpart stepped forward with a bristle of iron keys on a chain, producing one to fit into the lock.
Violet hesitated on the threshold, turning back to look at Will. He imagined that she’d be looking forward to sloughing off the mud of her trek over the marsh, even as the prospect of staying the night with the Stewards felt momentous. Instead, she was delaying. “Is Will’s room nearby?”
“Right alongside yours,” said Grace.
“All right, then,” Violet said, drawing in a breath and giving a thank-you nod.
Will said, “Until morning.” And with a last look back at him, she disappeared into her room.
Will turned back to Grace, who gestured to the other janissary to proceed up the stairs. The three of them moved on, around the curving wall.
“And this room is yours,” Grace said.
They had come to an oak door silvered with age that swung open with the key. “The Elder Steward bids you to rest and recover,” said Grace, and with that the two janissaries left him to step into his new room alone.
It couldn’t have been more different from his ove
rcrowded lodgings in London, where boys slept on the floor with barely space to stretch out in. Despite the Elder Steward’s kind words, Will had half expected a prison cell, or a wintry, abandoned ruin. He walked in disbelieving as the door closed behind him.
Above his head, the stone ceiling arched in ribbed vaulting, each panel colored with faded blues and silvers as though it had once been painted. The arches met at a carved stone star. There were large windows that looked out on the walls, and a huge stone fireplace with a high mantel.
Someone had lit the fire and left a lamp glowing on the small table beside an old-fashioned bed. The bed looked soft and warm, and there was a sleeping shirt for him to change into. A flannel, a basin, and a silver ewer of warm water were laid out by the fire for him to wash if he wished, and when he went to pick up the lamp, he saw that there was a small stool on which lay a plate of supper: fresh brown bread, soft white cheese, and a tumble of ripe grapes.
His mother must have yearned for a place like this, where she would be safe from the men who were chasing her. Where the Stewards were there to drive the dark back. She’s the one who should be here. But she had never made it inside these walls. She had chosen to take him and run instead, until she couldn’t run anymore. He lifted his hand to the medallion that he wore around his neck.
A glimmer from the window caught his eye.
Walking over to it, he saw again the gleam of that giant flame on the far-off walls, shining like a light in the window, promising home. It was the beacon, tended by Stewards even through the night. The Final Flame, the Elder Steward had called it. Kept lit for centuries, it had burned to the last, when it was the only light left.
For a moment he could almost see it, the armies of the Dark converging on the Hall and the single light on its walls, shining, defiant.
Will stood looking out at it for a long time.
Later, when he had washed, put on the sleeping shirt, and eaten the small repast down to the crumbs, he lay in bed with the Lady’s medallion skin-warm against his chest. After a while, his thoughts became a dream in which he walked these halls long ago, with the Lady beside him. She turned to him with his mother’s eyes, but her face warped and changed.
And where the Hall had been, he saw nothing but a great darkness, and above it rose a pale crown and burning eyes of black flame. They drew closer and closer, and he couldn’t run. No one could run. The black flame rose to consume him, and then to consume everything.
Gasping, Will woke and lay staring up at the carved stone star, and it was a long time before he managed to go back to sleep again.
Chapter Ten
VIOLET WOKE TO the sound of bells and a drifting morning chant. The chant was melodious, a monastic choral weaving in and out of her sleep. But something about it didn’t make sense. The language was unfamiliar. It wasn’t Latin. It sounded older. And why could she hear monks instead of the shouts and calls of London traffic? Then in a rush it all came back to her.
Tom can’t come into his true power without killing another like him. Her father’s cold, matter-of-fact voice, and her decision to trek at night across marshes with the Steward called Justice, who hated Lions and had tried to kill her brother.
She was inside the Hall of the Stewards.
Pushing up in bed, she saw a strange, high-ceilinged stone room, with a carved mantel fireplace and arched windows set deep into the stone. The occasional calls she could hear were from outside, where Stewards patrolled the walls. The chants drifting in the windows were Stewards in some morning ritual.
She was surrounded by Stewards, and every single one of them wanted to kill her.
In London, the kitchen would be preparing breakfast: hot porridge, bacon, eggs, or buttery fish. Her father would be the first down to the table. And Tom—
Did Tom know she was missing? And then, more frightening: Did Tom know? Did he know why her father had brought her to England—what he had planned to do?
“Don’t be afraid,” Justice had said to her last night, misinterpreting her expression as she had stared up stunned at the lights of the Hall. “No creature of Simon’s has ever set foot inside our walls.” She had instinctively put her hand on her wrist, remembering her longing for Simon’s brand only that morning. No creature of Simon’s . . .
Escorted in past walls ablaze with flaming torches, she had found the Hall already buzzing with an outsider’s arrival—Will’s. They had reacted in shock to Violet too—the second interloper. Overwhelmed, she had been only dimly aware of High Janissary Jannick, demanding, “What of the others?”
Justice had dropped to one knee, head bowed, right hand a fist over his heart in a formal, old-fashioned pose.
“There was a Lion,” Justice had said. “The others are dead.”
They hate Lions. She had seen the High Janissary’s look of detestation at the word. And the cold, chilling thought in this strange place: What would they do to me if they knew I was one?
She pushed out of bed. Her small room didn’t have the grandeur of the great hall, but the strange, faded beauty of the place was more visible than it had been last night: the remnants of frescoes; long ribs of the curved ceiling; the archway leading to the balcony.
From outside, she could hear rhythmic calls and disciplined responses of a large group moving through military exercises in perfect unison.
And then she saw something that made her stop, her heart speeding up.
A Steward’s uniform was lying out on the chest at the end of her bed. Not the surcoat and chain mail that Justice wore, but a silvery-gray tunic with a similar cut, and the star blazon on the chest, along with wool leggings and soft boots—the clothing that the Stewards wore when not armored for battle.
It had been laid out here for her, like the bed shirt she had put on last night. She looked over at her own clothes, a dank pile of dried mud by the fireplace. She couldn’t wrestle back into them and didn’t particularly want to. But—
She picked up the tunic. It was clean and light to the touch, made of some fabric she’d never encountered before, with embroidery around the star blazon. She could see the tiny, exquisite stitching, and when she pulled it on over her head, she found it fit her perfectly. Cinching her belt and pulling on the leggings and the boots, she was aware of an ease of movement that even trousers and a jacket didn’t offer. It felt like putting on clothing made just for her.
Turning to the wall mirror, she was shocked by the transformation, the clothes giving her that same androgynous appearance of a medieval knight that the Stewards possessed. She was suddenly a fighter of the ancient world, proud and powerful. I look like one of them. She could almost hear the battle horn, feel the sword in her hand.
If her father saw her in these clothes—if Tom saw her—
“It suits you,” said a voice behind her, and she jerked around.
Will spoke as he swung onto her balcony, dropping soundlessly down from the railing. He was wearing an identical copy of the Steward livery. The clothes had the same androgenizing effect on him that they had on her, highlighting his striking bone structure, though his dark eyes were too intense for him to look pretty.
“I don’t usually wear skirts,” said Violet, with a tug at the tunic, which was skirted below the belt to mid-thigh.
“Me neither,” said Will, echoing her gesture. Tentatively, they were smiling at each other. The silver tunic suited him too, she thought. She didn’t tell him that. She didn’t tell him how glad she was to see him. She remembered him lying for her at the White Hart, taking her side against Justice though she barely knew him.
“Thank you,” she said. “For telling Justice that I was”—she felt strangely shy to say it—“your friend.” She drew in a breath. “If they find out Tom’s my brother, I don’t know what they’ll do.”
Will looked so different in the Steward clothes. They transformed him from the bruised, bloodied wastrel in Simon’s hold to a young man whose looks suited this strange, ancient place. It reminded her that he was a stranger, w
ho had called a sword to his hand.
She didn’t know him. She still felt wary. But he hadn’t turned her in to the Stewards. He had lied for her when he didn’t have to.
“So you’re really—like Tom?” said Will quietly. “A Lion?”
She said, “I don’t know. I’ve always been—”
Strong.
As children, she and Tom had done everything together. She even shared Tom’s cast-off boy’s clothing, a habit that Tom’s mother had disliked, but her father had thought of fondly.
Or so she’d thought.
Tom can’t come into his true power without killing another like him.
“I never heard the word Lion until yesterday. But you heard my father. He thinks one Lion has to kill another. That’s why he—” Why he brought me here from India. Why he raised me. Why he kept me in the house even though Tom’s mother hated me—
The full truth of it hit her, breathing sharply difficult. Her family planned to kill her, to sacrifice her for Tom to gain power, and she couldn’t ever go back to them.
She remembered when her father had sat by her bed for five days and nights when she’d gotten sick, telling the physician, Whatever it costs. I need her to recover. She thought of all the times he’d stood up for her to Tom’s mother, all the times he’d reassured her, told her she was special—
He’d brought her home to kill her. He’d kept her there to kill her. His caring, his concern, none of it had been real.
“The Stewards won’t find out,” said Will. “I won’t tell them.”
Shaken by her thoughts, she looked over at him. He said it with the same calm certainty he’d had on the docks, as if when he made a promise, he kept it. She might not know him, but they were alone in this place, the two of them. She drew in a steadying breath.
“You were right,” said Violet. “The Remnants—those three men on horseback—galloped right past us. They only wanted you. Justice and I waited until they were gone, then crossed the river on foot.”
