Bright Ruin

by Vic James

  ‘It was you, Luke.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘It’s your . . .’ Sil waved a hand. None of the treatises in English had words for it that didn’t sound incredibly naff. His favourite was from a bonkers memoir by a nineteenth-century Bavarian Equal, but that might be because clever things usually sounded even cleverer in German. ‘Your Selbst-Welt, you could say. It means self-world. A “mind-scape”, if you like, but philosophy of mind is frightfully muddled – I blame Wittgenstein and his steaming pot.’

  Luke’s eyebrows were halfway up his forehead.

  ‘Do excuse my lack of education,’ the boy drawled, in a voice that had better not be a rubbish impersonation of Sil. ‘My schooling was regrettably interrupted by my enslavement. But – what the bloody hell are you talking about?’

  ‘I can take you there again.’

  Luke stood up so abruptly that Silyen nearly toppled off the arm of the chair. The boy headed to the fireplace, almost as far from Sil as he could get without leaving the room, and hunched over, hugging himself.

  ‘Luke?’

  Silyen recoiled at the expression on his face, half fear, half hate.

  ‘Forget it, Silyen.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I remember when he did it. Crovan. It was so excruciating that I almost broke my back straining away from his hands. It felt like my brain was melting. And you were just watching with your chin in your hand like it was something fancy at the ballet. So no, you can’t take me there again.’

  What was Luke talking about? Yes, Silyen could remember the boy gasping and twitching. And yes, repeated Silencing broke brains – he had told Luke as much. But not this sort of Skillwork.

  ‘It might feel strange, but it shouldn’t hurt, Luke. Was it painful when we did the boundary wall yesterday? Or when I first bound you to the Kyneston Estate?’

  ‘With Crovan,’ Dog rasped, ‘it hurt. Always.’

  Silyen’s glance darted between the two of them. Dog’s ribs were heaving, and Luke was actually trembling.

  Sil had always thought anger was almost as pointless as regret. He’d look on with contempt as his father and brothers vented their rage. But he dug his fingers into the armchair’s yielding leather, wishing it was Arailt Crovan’s neck.

  Yes, he knew the man did ghastly things in that castle, but only to people who deserved it – either for their crime, or for their stupidity in making a powerful enemy.

  Skill, though, was almost a miracle. The greatest wonder of this world. Granted, certain acts were intrinsically harmful: the Silence, and anything intended to cause pain, like Gavar’s showboating in Millmoor. But to inflict agony gratuitously, in the mere exercise of Skill, was obscene. It was like crafting a flower out of razorblades, or making belladonna jam.

  He looked at Luke and the boy held his gaze defiantly. What he had endured was plain in those wide blue eyes. And Silyen found that there were words on the tip of his tongue. Words he’d not been able to bring himself to say when they’d argued in the gatehouse.

  He thought he could get them out now.

  ‘I’m sorry, Luke. I really am.’

  At that, something seemed to go out of the boy. His arms fell to his sides. His whole body loosened. He shook himself like a horse when you took off its saddle.

  ‘Words I never thought I’d hear.’

  Dog stirred on the rug. ‘How touching.’

  ‘Oh, go chase a bloody stick or something,’ Luke said, and Silyen snorted.

  ‘No apology – for me?’

  Silyen studied Dog warily. He was still dangerous. Not merely damaged, but without any desire to be repaired. The people who truly owed Dog an apology he had killed long ago – and he had then committed crimes that more than merited his punishment.

  ‘I gave you freedom – and you’ll have the other thing you want, too.’ Dog held his gaze a beat too long, and it was Silyen that looked away first. ‘Luke, I want to take you back to that golden place, your self-world. And it won’t hurt, I promise. If it does, if you say “ouch” even once, I give Dog full permission to sharpen his claws on me.’

  ‘What’s so special about the inside of my head?’

  ‘Because we met someone there who died one and a half thousand years ago – if he ever lived at all.’

  ‘The king. But if the place is only my imagination, surely he’s something I dreamed up?’

  ‘When you’re talking about Skill, there’s no such thing as “only imagination”. That place is real, just not in the same way that this hall or this furniture is real. And he is, too. Here, let me show you something.’

  Sil snatched up a candelabra and with the lightest caress of the air above it, five flames flickered into existence.

  Most of Far Carr’s furniture had been under dustsheets when they arrived, Rix having preferred the smaller rooms of his house – or, even better, the hospitality of other people’s. Suits of armour stood bagged in each corner, like the victims of a particularly thorough kidnapping. But Sil had peeked beneath the covers of two huge canvases, one on either wall.

  ‘Have a look at this.’

  He lifted one drape to reveal a fanciful nineteenth-century depiction of the construction of Stonehenge. The book Sil had just put down informed him that the artist – whose signature was painted carefully in the corner – was the younger brother of the twenty-second Lord of Far Carr. In his vivid brushstrokes, a Skill-worker clad in druid’s robes marshalled an airborne array of megaliths into their famous circle.

  Luke tipped his head to examine the painting.

  ‘I never saw you rebuild Kyneston after your aunt blew it apart,’ he said. ‘But I heard what you did. Moving blocks of stone. It must have looked a bit like this.’

  Oh. That was a comparison Silyen hadn’t considered before. Rather a gratifying one.

  ‘Would you call this scene history – or myth?’ he asked Luke.

  ‘Um, we don’t really know, do we? I mean, Stonehenge got built, but we’ve no idea how.’

  ‘Indeed. So, what about this one?’

  He led him to the opposite side of the hall and unveiled the second canvas. It was a large, luminous landscape by the same painter, but compared to its dramatic companion piece, it was oddly bare of detail and event.

  It depicted dawn, somewhere by the sea. Silver-barked trees thinned out amid wide reed beds that stretched to the shore. The artist had chosen a palette of washed-out colours: pale brown stalks, pale blue sky, pale grey water. The world was radiantly threadbare, like old cloth that the light shone through.

  It was only when Silyen moved the candelabra that the others noticed the figure, and Luke gasped.

  The king stood at the shoreline, his tattered red robe as fine as shadow, his hand resting on the scruff of the beast at his side. Their silhouettes on the brilliant water were made jagged by branching antlers and a crown of twigs. The man appeared to be speaking softly to his creature – or perhaps only to the air.

  It seemed as though at any minute the thin sky might tear and they would step through it.

  ‘It’s him,’ Luke breathed. ‘But I’ve never seen this picture before, so I couldn’t have imagined . . .’

  Dog was bending over the label at the bottom of the frame.

  ‘There’s no title,’ he growled.

  ‘It’s been gilded over. But if you squint, you can make out the original letters underneath. It’s called The King’s Farewell.’

  ‘This picture looks like the beach here, but we saw him at Eilean Dòchais,’ said Luke. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He was the only Skillful monarch this country has ever had.’

  ‘I didn’t think there were any at all.’

  ‘Exactly. So, you see why I want us to find him again – if you agree?’

  Luke leaned against the table that took up the length of the hall, staring at the painting.

  ‘Why does he matter? You said earlier that this was more important than my family’s safety, or my friends, or your father’s murders
, or anything else that’s going on out there.’

  Silyen’s throat was absurdly tight as he set down the candlestick. He’d always pursued his researches alone in the library, or in the woods. Scholarship was a solitary act.

  And yet . . .

  ‘There are two things I’ve always wanted to know,’ Silyen replied. ‘Where does Skill come from? And why were there ever unSkilled queens and kings, rather than my kind ruling from the beginning? I think the answer to both lies with the Wonder King – as he’s known in tales.

  ‘There are traces of him, here and there. I showed your sister the Chancellor’s Chair at Kyneston – there are carvings on it that I believe depict parts of his story. And my aunt and I used to read to each other from Tales of the King, a beautiful medieval poem-cycle about his deeds. There was a copy in the lost library at Orpen, but I’ve never found another complete one.

  ‘Which begs the question: why is there so little trace of him? I used to think he’d been deliberately suppressed, because we’ve not forgotten the rest of the monarchy. Yes, we mock it in bedtime storybooks, and deface it, like the poor old Last King’s statue with its face chiselled off. But every schoolchild can name the kings and queens.’ He caught Luke grimacing, and corrected himself. ‘Every diligent schoolchild can name them. But someone as unique as the Wundorcyning? All we have are echoes and fragments, like this painting, or the poem, or the chair.’

  Luke had been listening hard. He swallowed, and Silyen saw his throat bob.

  ‘And you think that the answers might be somewhere in my head?’

  ‘It’s where we saw him. More than that – we met him. You spoke to him.’

  Silyen hadn’t forgotten a moment of it. Luke asking the king if he was dead, or imagining their encounter, and the king telling him: Neither. Luke asking where they were, and the king saying: Right here. The door outlined in light, through which they had seen themselves in Eilean Dòchais. The king’s promise: You see how close we are. Then his command: Go now.

  It had been the most astonishing moment of Sil’s life. He had dreamed of it ever since.

  Luke was absorbed in thought. Judging from his expression, Silyen would swear the boy was . . . scheming?

  He was.

  ‘If we do this, then you need to do something for me. I have to get back to Eilean Dòchais to check on a friend – you might be interested to meet her, too. So when you’ve done looking in my head, I want you to call your family and find out if Crovan is still in London. If he is, we go to Scotland.’

  ‘Anxious to introduce me to your friends, Luke? How delightful.’ He grinned as the boy flushed bright red. ‘Deal.’

  So many promises. So many bargains. People and politics. Motives and manoeuvrings. It was all such fun.

  And yet, compared to the perfection that was the practice of Skill, all such utter dross.

  ‘Right,’ said Luke, pale but determined. ‘Let’s do it.’

  As the boy settled back in the armchair, Dog curled up on the rug to watch the entertainment. He’d find it rather dull. Their bodies would fall comatose, as if in a deep sleep. Their eyes would roll up. (Sil knew this from repeated requests from Mama that he not go into his own mind when the staff were around, because it frightened the maids.)

  Sil pressed his fingers to Luke’s forehead, closed his eyes –

  – and opened them.

  The first thing he saw was a golden thread, spider-fine, that spun out of him. The second thing, as he lifted his head, was the sunlit grasslands that stretched endlessly away on all sides. The third, the eagles that circled overhead.

  At the other end of the thread was a boy, kneeling. Luke’s clothes were different: a pair of American-brand jeans and a T-shirt with the tour logo of a Canadian band. The band was a good one, if a little too grime for Silyen’s tastes. Luke wouldn’t have been able to buy either item in Britain – they would be things he coveted. Sil checked himself to see if the boy had put him in anything prattish, but no. It wasn’t his hoodie and trainers, though, but his riding jacket and boots. The boy plainly still saw him as an Equal, but hey, it was a good look.

  Luke got to his feet and the golden thread that joined them disappeared. He frowned, and reached for it. Under his touch, brightness streaked between them. When he removed his hand, it vanished again.

  ‘You’re a person,’ Luke said, evidently surprised. ‘You look like yourself.’

  ‘What on earth was I last time?’

  ‘To me, you were . . .’ The boy shaped something vague in the air. ‘Light. You were just light. Skill, I guess.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Lord of the manor.’

  ‘That’s me.’ Sil raked back his hair and stared around them.

  Broken up by cloud, thick bands of sunlight passed across the plains, which changed from bright to dark and back in an instant. A distant mountain range was creased blue and gold between the ridges. Snow glittered on its peaks. As birds wheeled overhead, their eerily magnified shadows fell blackly on the ground beneath. The colours were saturated. Intense. The air rippled as if in a haze, though it wasn’t hot.

  Luke was gazing in astonishment at the endless grasslands, the bubbling river, the cloud-heaped sky.

  ‘And you say that my mind created this? The way it looks? Because it’s epic. Reminds me of my favourite games, like Age of Awe. I would have expected more cars and girls, to be honest. Something more . . . mundane.’

  ‘I think a lot of people would find if they looked, really looked, inside themselves, that they’re more than they imagine, Luke.’

  ‘Now you’re sounding like Jackson.’

  Luke’s tone was wistful. That was quite enough of that.

  ‘I suppose we should start by looking for the wall – Rix’s Silence. That’s where we were last time, when the king appeared.’

  Silyen turned on his heel, surveying the expanse. Between the rippling plains and the moving shadow it was hard to make out anything. Except . . . was that a sinuous shape in the grass? The scale of this terrain was so vast that for a moment he couldn’t get a fix on what he’d seen. Could it be a snake? But it didn’t move, and he realized that he was looking at a wall, a long way away.

  It was low and somehow dappled, blending into the surrounding trees and grasses. You could barely see it was there. But something about it felt familiar.

  Luke had seen it, too. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  The waist-high grasses snagged Sil’s trousers and scratched the sleeves of his jacket as they walked. Glancing over, he saw that Luke had acquired a hoodie that covered his arms. Had the boy done that consciously? Was he learning that this space was his to shape? Side by side, they fell into a rhythm and Sil lost track of time. At one point, he glanced up to see if the sun had moved, then realized why everything here felt so bright and the shadows so strong and slanting: there were two suns in the sky.

  ‘Nice touch,’ he said, pointing.

  Luke looked thrilled as he shaded his eyes and glanced up. Sunglasses appeared on Luke’s nose, and Silyen blinked as his eyes acquired a pair, too.

  ‘We’ve still got ages to go,’ Luke complained, peering ahead to where the wall was becoming clearer, but not significantly closer.

  ‘You know, I think you could do something about that.’

  ‘Bring it nearer?’ Luke looked dubious.

  ‘Perhaps. Or maybe get us there faster.’

  ‘Oh. Woah!’

  Luke jumped back as a road unrolled at their feet, stretching away across the grasslands. Then grinned as a sports car appeared in the middle of it. Sil didn’t know the first thing about cars, but this one was shiny new and looked sickeningly fast. Gavar would have drooled at the sight of it. Silyen just felt queasy.

  ‘I’ll go slowly, I promise,’ Luke said, climbing in.

  And he was as good as his word, keeping the speedometer at a steady thirty miles an hour.

  ‘This is astonishing.’ Luke’s eyes travelled over the car’s sleek interior. The dir
ty beats of the grime crew were playing through the sound system. ‘Is this what it feels like to have Skill, back in the real world?’

  ‘I hate to break it to you, but I can’t create Lamborghinis out of thin air. More’s the pity. If everyone in Britain had one, maybe people wouldn’t moan so much.’

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ Luke said.

  ‘Get what?’

  Ugh, please, not another Meilyr-inspired sermon. Sil turned his head discreetly before administering side-eye.

  ‘Shall I tell you what I thought,’ Luke continued, ‘when I realized that I control how we appear in this place? I thought about putting you in something ridiculous. Humiliating. A bikini, or a gorilla suit – or even making you an actual animal, because if I can make you appear like a golden cloud, I’m pretty sure I could make you a pig or a dog.

  ‘But then I realized, no, that’s how you lot think – you Equals. That’s what it means to have power. Being constantly tempted to use it and abuse it. In fact, to not be able to tell where power ends and abuse begins. And then I had a really weird thought.’

  Silyen gritted his teeth for whatever judgy pronouncement was coming next.

  ‘I thought that in a way – and obviously with exceptions, like your father and Bouda Matravers – you could all be a lot worse.’

  Unexpected.

  ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

  ‘Sil, this Wonder King . . .’ Luke’s fingers were tapping the steering wheel and he was staring straight ahead. ‘When we met him, I felt awe. Felt respect. But what if there’s a good reason he’s been erased from history? What if he was dangerous, or ridiculously powerful? Perhaps we shouldn’t be looking for someone who’s been forgotten. I mean, isn’t he dead?’

  The hairs prickled up the back of Silyen’s neck. He thought it entirely possible that the Wundorcyning was all of those things.

  Which was exactly why Silyen wanted to find him.

  ‘Ahh!’

  Silyen jerked forward as Luke slammed on the brakes and the car screeched to a halt. They’d reached the wall.