Bright Ruin

by Vic James

  Was that how the Equals saw history, too? Or were they honest, among themselves, about what they had done? How they had stolen a country from its people.

  ‘Ahh!’ Something fizzed in Luke’s veins.

  It wasn’t electricity. Not quite. Though maybe it was a little like a school experiment – the one where a current was passed through a bowl of water and the teacher invited you to stick your hand in. The hair tingled on his scalp and the blood throbbed beneath his toenails.

  Luke was a conduit. Whatever this was, it was passing through him.

  It was Skill, of course. Was this what Silyen had stored up inside himself, like some kind of magical battery? No wonder the boy was permanently wired, his knees perpetually jiggling, feet and fingers tapping.

  The sensation wasn’t unpleasant. It was strangely intimate – like being resuscitated, with someone else’s breath inflating your lungs. Dog wasn’t enjoying it much. A low growl came from the man’s throat, and he ground his teeth together. Was he reliving years of Skillful manipulation by Crovan? There were times Luke was glad he had no memory of Rix’s possession of his body. He remembered his interrogation by Crovan and Whittam Jardine in the aftermath of the Kyneston ball, and that was horrendous enough. Skill could twist you up from the inside. Could scour out your thoughts and leave you filled with nothing but pain.

  But this was . . .

  This was over. The current switched off. Silyen raked a hand through his messy hair, and frowned at the wall.

  ‘You can step away.’

  ‘What did you – just do?’ said Dog hoarsely.

  ‘I’ve made sure that the wall knows you, obviously. This will ensure that you’ll be able to see the wall and pass in and out of the gate, even if you’re not with me.’

  Silyen’s definition of ‘obvious’ was different from most people’s. Rather like his definition of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. A Concise Silyen Dictionary would be a handy thing, Luke thought.

  ‘We saw it before,’ Dog pointed out. ‘When we arrived.’

  ‘Indeed. There was nothing special about the boundary under Rix’s stewardship. He wanted this estate to be accessible. I don’t, and I’m going to make some changes. I did something like this for Gavar’s London apartment a few years ago, when he had about three girlfriends too many. The problem was, none of his staff could find the place. When the cook never showed he ordered a takeaway, but of course the delivery guy never made it either. The way Gavar tells the story, it’s a miracle he didn’t starve to death.’

  ‘You’re going to . . . hide it?’ said Luke. ‘An entire estate?’

  ‘Just the wall, which has the secondary effect of hiding the estate. And it’s not so much hiding, as making people forget that they’ve seen it. There’s an element that’s like a Silence, but instead of being laid onto a person, I’m weaving it into an object.’ Silyen patted the brickwork. ‘The act will be lodged right here in these bricks.’

  ‘So, all the people leaving – the staff – they won’t be able to find their way back?’

  ‘No. And if my father sends someone when he finds out what I’ve done, they won’t be able to disturb us either. You two can come and go, but you won’t be able to bring anyone else in – only I can do that. You did say you wanted privacy, Luke. Well, now you’ve got it.’

  The smile that slid across Silyen’s face was the least reassuring thing Luke had ever seen.

  No one had seen Luke and Dog leave Gorregan Square with Silyen Jardine. And none of the slaves had seen the pair of them at Far Carr. The only people who knew that Luke was here were the two standing right next to him. One of them a deranged killer, the other an Equal who had traded Luke’s pain for answers to his research – and still had him inexplicably, Skillfully, tethered.

  For everyone else, Luke had effectively disappeared.

  The thought was disturbing. And yet Silyen had promised that he was free to leave. Instead of feeling threatened by the concealment of Far Carr, shouldn’t Luke be thinking about its potential? A whole estate that no one could find.

  Yes, Abi could hide out here. He’d get Silyen to contact Gavar just as soon as they were done with this boundary. And Coira would be safe here, too. The two girls were his priority.

  But why stop with them? Mum and Dad could be smuggled out of Millmoor and brought to Far Carr. Renie could come. Their other friends from the Millmoor Games and Social Club, too, if Luke could find them. Hilda, Tilda and Asif could bring in their tech. What about stockpiling guns? Because even Equal reflexes couldn’t prevent something they didn’t see coming, like a bullet.

  Yes, you could plan an entire revolution from behind these hidden walls.

  If their lord could be made to agree.

  3

  Silyen

  At Silyen’s back, Luke was brooding in silence. What was going through his head?

  The boy just seemed to care so much. About his family, his friends – especially the late lamented Meilyr Tresco, aka Doc Jackson – and about quaint notions of freedom.

  Was that some kind of commoner thing, caring so intensely? Was it something they developed to fill up their otherwise empty lives, in the absence of Skill and power?

  Or was it, perhaps, that the Skill and power possessed by the Equals had squeezed out their ability to care about much else?

  It was an interesting question. Luke was an interesting boy. There were layers to him that it might be intriguing to peel back – and not only the ones he was wearing.

  Silyen smirked, and let the fraying threads of Far Carr’s wall enchantment run through his fingers as he tested them, weaving the strands together into something stronger, more complex. He closed his eyes to the everyday world, and opened them into the bright-and-dark realm of Skill to inspect his handiwork.

  And gazed, astonished, at the sight. It looked as though he was braiding fire. Spitting, fizzing, flickering fire.

  He blinked it away again. It was less daunting to do it by sense alone, as he had his whole life.

  But the sight made him think of the fine, bright thread that had stretched between him and Luke at Eilean Dòchais, when Crovan had attempted to destroy Rix’s Silence. The three of them had been in a golden land, lofty and open, with wide plains and forests and rivers – Luke’s mind, although he doubted the boy had realized that was what it was. (The mountains had been a little over the top. Silyen wondered where Luke had dreamed those up from.)

  Sil’s connection with Luke wasn’t the simple constraint that, as Kyneston’s gatekeeper, he laid on all the Jardine slaves. The standard binding merely prevented them harming family members. He enacted it on each person individually at the gate. And when they left the household – as Luke, his elder sister and their parents had done – the act was dissolved. It wasn’t about keeping people in or out. That wasn’t necessary, as at Kyneston you needed both Jardine blood to wake the gate, and Skill to open it.

  What he was doing here at Far Carr was entirely different. Both simpler and far more ambitious. Forcing an act applied to people – an act of forgetting – into an inanimate structure.

  It was hard to explain to others the sensation of crafting Skill. The only person he knew to be interested in such things was Arailt Crovan, plus Sil’s ancestor Cadmus, whose journals he’d studied. Sharing an interest with a psychopath and a dead man sadly offered few opportunities for discussing new ideas and intriguing theories.

  And what of the figure Luke had spoken to, in that amber-lit world? The man with the crown and the stag.

  Mindscapes were malleable. You could raise and level mountains. Make gardens grow and bloom and die. If you wanted a castle or a horse, a hammock or a cup of tea, then one would appear. They were spaces of pure imagination.

  But you couldn’t dream up people.

  Crovan had pushed himself into Luke’s mind, and Silyen had slipped in after, to observe. Luke himself was present in his own head. But there was no reason for a fourth person to be there.

  And how had it
been him? Because there was only one person that figure could be, crowned with twigs and accompanied by a stag: the Wonder King.

  Myth. Legend. Forgotten folktale.

  The only monarch – ever – with Skill.

  Silyen staggered as someone grabbed him from behind.

  ‘Woah!’ That was Luke, his breath warm against Silyen’s neck. ‘Unless you were planning a dip?’

  They had reached the beach. Silyen looked down. The sea was licking his boots. He’d been so absorbed in his thoughts, and in the painstaking craft of his hands, that he’d lost all sense of where they were.

  The wall ran out at the seashore and the beauty of the expanse before them stole Silyen’s breath away. He inhaled deeply, letting the salt air sting his nostrils and throat.

  The North Sea was notoriously dismal, but the alchemy of the late afternoon sun had transmuted it into shining metal. An immense gravel spit jutted parallel to the coast, and the water trapped between it and the shore gleamed like a polished blade.

  ‘Are we done? There’s no more wall.’ Luke’s feet slid on the shingle bank.

  Silyen looked around for Dog, but he wasn’t there.

  ‘He got bored and went hunting in the woods,’ Luke said. ‘Said we’d need some rabbits for dinner. I presume he was joking. I hope he was joking.’

  ‘He wasn’t joking. Personally, I’m hoping my departing servants left without emptying the refrigerator.’

  ‘I could do you my Millmoor Special,’ Luke said, scrubbing his fingers through that short, exasperatingly blond hair. ‘Spaghetti on toast. Authentic cuisine of the working classes.’

  Silyen laughed.

  ‘I’ll see your spaghetti on toast and raise you a frozen ready meal, if you can show me how to operate a microwave.’

  ‘Unbelievable. You really can be normal sometimes. When you’re not being all-powerful and super-creepy.’

  Silyen drew himself up to his full – superior – height.

  ‘I refuse to dignify that with a response. But to answer your earlier question: Are we done? No, we are not. There’s no more wall, but there is more boundary.’

  Silyen pointed out to sea, blinked – it was as easy as that now – and the world flipped from light to dark.

  Not entirely dark. The water gleamed faintly. The land, too. He’d not noticed that initially. After that first day at the House of Light, and then later at Orpen, all he had discerned were the brightly burning traces of human-wrought Skill. Now, more accustomed to this strange alternate vision, he perceived the truth of the world. Skill suffused every part of it, as integral as carbon and oxygen.

  Far Carr’s Skillful boundary extended far into the water – the coastline must have eroded since its creation, leaving it lying offshore. Weak golden ripples marked the outline beneath the waves. It had been abysmally maintained for at least a century.

  Well, there was nothing for it. Silyen started into the water, the crunch of pebbles giving way to the smush of sand beneath his heels.

  ‘You’re going in?’

  ‘We are,’ Silyen corrected. He put two fingers to his mouth and whistled for Dog. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t get wet.’

  ‘Will it be like Crovan’s loch?’

  And gone was the humour of just a moment ago. Luke sounded subdued, maybe even scared. And dammit, Silyen had thought he’d made it clear that Luke wasn’t to be harmed at Crovan’s castle. Not in any way that Crovan couldn’t repair. What had happened there, to produce this sort of reaction?

  ‘Not like Crovan’s loch,’ he said firmly. ‘It will be less sparkly, definitely less painful, and you’re a guest here, not a prisoner. Now come on, I want to finish this boundary by nightfall.’

  He checked that Dog was following, then turned his back on the pair of them and walked into the sea.

  Stepping into another person’s mind was nothing remarkable. Silyen had been doing it from childhood, when he had found his way into the rose garden of Aunt Euterpe’s memories. But to push aside the sea and walk into it? To hear the susurrus of Skill in the air. To see the glowing outline of a boundary laid down hundreds of years before you were born, and which would persist hundreds of years after you were gone, your own Skill now blended into it. It was astonishing.

  People claimed love was the supreme human experience. Silyen begged to differ. The greatest gift was wonder.

  He reached into the wall of water, aware, as he never had been before, of the Skill within it. Dragging his hand through as they walked, the salt stung his skin and the sea’s tingling power flowed over it. His kind had once commanded the sea. The women who had wrecked Napoleon’s fleet at Gorregan had rolled up the waves before the French navy as it sailed to invade England.

  There was nothing like war to make the Equals remember what they were capable of.

  He hadn’t wanted war, of course, when he had engineered Zelston’s abolition proposal a year ago. Just . . . trouble. With a pinch of mayhem.

  Though Meilyr’s uprising in Millmoor had fizzled out, Father’s ambitions were presenting all sorts of opportunities for the vigorous exercise of Skill. Look at Gavar, incinerating things left, right and centre, plus detonating a bomb and hunting down the culprit who’d thrown it. Silyen highly doubted that before that day, his eldest brother had used his Skill for anything more consequential than seducing women and cheating at cards. Now, thanks to Silyen’s intervention, Gavar was discovering the true extent of his powers.

  Midsummer’s lions in the square had also been impressive, though Silyen was certain they had been mere automata, rather than endowed with any kind of life. In all his experiments, including the deer and the cherry tree, the creation of life – or its restoration to a thing dead – remained beyond the reach of Skill.

  And then there was his sister-in-law, Bouda. He’d initially wondered if her hunger for political power masked weak Skill. But he’d sized her up during her visits to Kyneston – and of course, he’d examined Abi Hadley after Bouda’s brutal Silencing all those months ago. No, the woman was strongly Skilled. And with her spectacular command of the Gorregan fountains, she’d finally had a public opportunity to display that strength. He fully expected her to find other opportunities soon.

  He wondered if even Bouda knew how impressive her Skill was. Those fountains drew on London’s deep watercourses. His sister-in-law had reached into a vast source and controlled it. Yes, with Skill that powerful and ambition that naked, Father would do well to keep an eye on Bouda. Sil doubted the man had any idea what she might be capable of.

  And Silyen certainly wasn’t going to tell him.

  As they continued walking, one slow step at a time, the water rose high above their heads. They had been at this for hours, and night was drawing on. Above them, the black walls of water revealed only a shining strip of sky, thick with stars. On this wild coast, they were far from the light pollution of any city or slavetown. The evening air had been mild on the beach, but here, deep within the sea, it was damp and chill. Dog was grumbling and growling to himself discontentedly. Luke had remained entirely mute, perhaps lost in memories of Eilean Dòchais.

  Their progress was painstaking. Silyen’s mind whirled with everything from Gavar’s unexpected interruption of the Blood Fair and Father’s next move, to what Luke’s hair would feel like to touch and whether the Far Carr pantry would contain anything appetizing. He forced himself to still the distracting maelstrom. Such thoughts were all so unnecessary.

  Superfluous.

  This was the only thing that mattered. This song of Skill in his blood – and threading its melody into the boundary of his ancient estate.

  His violin had lain untouched at Kyneston all year. He no longer needed it. This music was all there was.

  The seabed beneath their feet was sloping upwards now, as they neared the shore. The fine sand coarsened to gravel, then the grudging slip of small stones on the beach. The shallows eddied and sucked around his boots, chilling his feet where water flowed over the leather. At his ba
ck, Luke gasped, and Silyen turned.

  ‘What?’

  But he could tell what it was, from the glow that bathed Luke’s face. Silyen looked down at his hands. His skin gave off a faint miasma of light. Wonderingly, he stroked the fingers of one hand along the back of the other. Brilliance flared in their wake, and subsided.

  The expression on Luke’s face was almost fearful. ‘Are you okay? Should we stop?’

  ‘Stop?’ Silyen felt more than okay. He had never felt better.

  ‘It’s just you look like . . . him, when Crovan . . .’

  Him? Then he realized. Meilyr Tresco.

  ‘When Crovan removed his Skill?’

  ‘He didn’t remove it,’ Luke cried. ‘You make it sound like something surgical. Something clean. He bled it out of him. It was dripping . . . oozing out of his pores. His eyes. Silyen?’

  Silyen had pushed the sleeves of his hoodie up to his elbows. His forearms gleamed with the same gentle phosphorescence. He lifted the hem of his T-shirt to inspect his stomach and really, he knew his complexion tended towards the ‘pasty’ end of the spectrum of ‘pale and interesting’, but he had never been quite so luminous.

  ‘Your eyes,’ rasped Dog.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Gold,’ said Luke. ‘They’re gold. Is it coming out of you? Have you been pouring too much of your Skill into the wall? I mean, I know you rebuilt the Kyneston ballroom, and you told me about Orpen Mote. Those were huge things. But you’ve been working on miles and miles of this, for hours now. You must be exhausted.’

  Silyen turned his hands over, palms up. The veins in his wrists shone. But the glow of his skin was already fading.

  ‘It’s not coming out of me,’ he said slowly.

  He blinked, exchanging the dying evening light of the world around him for the bright-and-dark of Skill. And he saw it, falling towards him like snow. Like ash. Infinitesimal specks of pure light.