by Vic James
Luke sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the books. What were these, the only items Crovan chose to have close to him in his most private space? He tipped them sideways to examine the spines. The first was a history of Scotland, in which Crovan’s family no doubt featured extensively. Might it contain any clues about the Wonder King? The second was a copy of Powrie’s Peerage, which proclaimed itself the official genealogy of Scotland’s Equals.
The third, startlingly, was a book that Luke recognized: a swoony classic novel in which an orphan girl fell in love with the master she went to slave for, only to discover that he was a raging alcoholic with a mad wife locked in the attic. It was one of Abi’s favourites. Luke couldn’t imagine it was Crovan’s sort of book at all, but the copy was well worn. He flipped it open, and there in the front was a date, more than twenty years earlier, and an inscription: To darling Rhona, with all my love, Arailt.
Repellant though it was to think of Crovan calling anyone ‘darling’, this proved it: he had been married and had a wife. This book must have belonged to Coira’s mother. She would want to see it, he was sure.
It was with a sense of triumph that Luke tucked the book under his arm. Silyen might be showing Coira how to use her Skill, but Luke had something even more precious – a clue to her family. Because one thing was for sure, whatever Coira hoped, Luke was certain Crovan wasn’t going to spit out the story of her birth and upbringing just because she asked nicely.
He swiped the history and genealogy books, too, because Rhona sounded like a Scottish name, so maybe these pages would hold more clues. He fanned through the tissue-thin, close-typed sheets, and sighed at the scale of the task.
Then gaped as something fell out and wafted to the floor. A photograph. Luke snatched it up – and the elation he felt at seeing a female face that looked just like Coira’s drained away in an instant as he realized what he was looking at.
The picture showed four figures posed formally on the great staircase of Eilean Dòchais. The girl looked a little older than Daisy. The young man beside her was perhaps a decade older, in his early twenties. Stood behind were an older couple: she wore a sash to which was pinned a brooch in the shape of a lightning-struck boat; he a kilt, in the tartan that was all over the castle.
It had to be a family portrait. The young man was Crovan. The girl at his side, who looked so much like Coira, was far too young to be a wife or fiancée. With shaking hands, Luke turned the photograph over and there it was. The date was twenty-five years earlier. The inscription: Lord Fionnlagh Crovan; Lady Fenella; Heir Arailt, aet. 21; Rhona, aet. 12. Luke didn’t recognize ‘aet.’, but it had to mean ‘age’.
Horrified, Luke clutched at the very last straw. Perhaps this was some sort of creepy arranged marriage set-up. Rhona was a girl from another family, brought to Eilean Dòchais to meet the man she would one day marry. But the straw twirled from his grasp as his eyes darted frantically around the picture. Family resemblances blended between all four: the father’s mouth on the daughter, the mother’s nose on the son, both children with their mother’s cool grey eyes.
Coira’s mother was Crovan’s sister.
Sickened, Luke put down the books. Much though he knew Coira yearned to discover her family, he hoped she never found this out.
They needed to get away from here right now. Coira’s intention to stay and wait for Crovan was a monumentally bad idea. Luke had always thought that, but given what he knew now, it was doubly so. He hurried out of the bedroom to go and break up whatever Skillful love-in she and Silyen were conducting, glancing out of the window en route to check on the chopper again.
And saw that where one helicopter had been sitting on the distant helipad, there were now two.
Luke’s heart lurched. He hurtled into the corridor and collided with Dog, newly dressed in Crovan’s clothes, the glove laced back onto his hand.
‘I heard – a chopper,’ the man rasped. ‘Ours?’
Luke shook his head. ‘His.’
Under other circumstances, the scene that greeted him in the sitting room – Silyen so close to Coira that their knees touched, his fingers against her cheek as if he was moving in for a snog – would have been the last thing Luke wanted to see. But it barely registered in the urgency of Crovan’s return.
‘He’s back – Crovan. His helicopter’s out there. We need to go. Hide while he comes in, then make a run for it.’
The two broke apart. Silyen’s eyes were shining. Coira looked up.
‘I need to talk to him, Luke.’
‘You can’t. He won’t let you go. There’s a reason you’ve been locked up here all your life.’
‘Which is? What have you found?’
She was up on her feet, her expression both fierce and pleading, and Luke could see that she wanted more than anything to know who she was. But how could he tell her like this?
‘Please, let’s just go to Far Carr. I’ll explain there, and then you can arrange to meet him in London perhaps. But if you confront him here, now, it’ll be disastrous. Will you trust me?’
Coira thought for a moment, then nodded.
‘And you?’ Luke asked Silyen. ‘You’re being suspiciously quiet. No objections?’
‘Oh, my investigations have been most rewarding.’ The Equal smirked. ‘We’ll have to compare notes on our theories. In fact, I’d love to ask Arailt about them, but if you’re going to insist on this running-and-hiding thing . . .’
‘I’m insisting,’ Luke said firmly. ‘If we hide near the Last Door, once we’ve seen him come inside, we can leg it out.’
He pulled them down the apartment hallway, and stuck his head out first once Coira opened the door, checking that none of the prisoners from earlier were going to try and bar their way.
‘I could – kill him,’ rasped Dog.
‘No! Not an option.’ Coira shook him by the arm. ‘I know where we can wait.’
As they reached the ground floor she directed them through a doorway to one side. It was some sort of boot and broom room, filled with household cleaning items. A couple of tarnished silver candlesticks sat on a sideboard, and on a narrow shelf above lay two halves of a broken rifle. It was the rifle used to kill Jackson, Luke realized, feeling it like a fresh blow – and would there ever be a time when thinking of the man didn’t hurt?
Coira was peering through the crack in the door, and Silyen was listening intently with those superfine Equal senses. But Luke didn’t need either to know when Crovan arrived. A roar of disgust told them he’d discovered Devin’s gutted corpse.
The scene of chaos he saw as he made his way into the central atrium and stairwell of his castle must have infuriated him further, and as he mounted the stairs his voice could be heard bellowing for Coira.
‘Now!’ she whispered, and they slipped from the boot room. Devin’s pooled blood made the floor sticky beneath their feet as they hurried to the Last Door. Coira stood in front of it, her breathing tense and shallow.
‘We know it works,’ Luke said, touching her arm. ‘We did it before. You’ve done it again since. I’ll go first.’
Coira nodded, and her hands smoothed out her skirt. Then she reached for the door and pulled it open. Beyond the still water, they could see a solitary helicopter on the rise of the heather heath. Theirs. Crovan’s had departed to wherever it went when he didn’t need it.
‘Luke, I give you permission to leave.’
He stepped over the threshold and into the warm, clean air. But Crovan’s yell from the floor above was so loud that Luke heard it even outside. He must have sensed Skillful activity at the door.
‘Dog, I give you permission to leave.’
Dog’s lips drew back from his teeth – was he remembering the last time he crossed this threshold? Had he been chained and naked and on all fours? He hesitated a moment. But they didn’t have moments to spare.
‘Come on!’
At Luke’s urging, the man stepped through. Silyen was already waiting, toes on the threshold, as Co
ira spoke his permission – but over his shoulder Luke saw Crovan appear, pale and furious.
Silyen made it out and Coira followed, but as she stepped through, her feet hitting the rock outside and the sun falling on her face, Crovan reached through after her and grabbed her sleeve –
and pulled her back into the castle –
and Coira stumbled and staggered backwards through the door into –
nothing.
She fell into nothing.
Crovan’s hand dropped uselessly to his side. Luke stared at the open, impossibly empty doorway. For a moment, it shimmered in a colour that Luke couldn’t name. He heard a cry that wasn’t Coira’s voice, but wasn’t anything else he could identify. Gentle warmth bathed his face – then it was gone.
He blinked and saw Crovan standing in his bloodstained hall, shaking with something more than fury. Dog had fallen entirely silent, not even his blades scraping.
Luke and Crovan had stood like this before, on either side of this door – the night Luke had worked out Coira’s secret. Except that night, Crovan had caught her inside and kept hold of her. When Luke had tried to go back through the door, it had been impossible.
What had Crovan said about the Last Door, the day Luke arrived? It only goes one way.
‘Where is she?’ he heard himself scream at Crovan, because he didn’t want what he suspected to be the truth. ‘You said this door only goes one way, so where has she gone?’
‘This is the door between life and death,’ Crovan said tightly. He looked as disbelieving as Luke felt. ‘You can’t go the other way.’
Luke trembled, trying to calm himself, when he noticed Silyen’s beatific smile.
‘I love the word “can’t”,’ said Silyen Jardine. ‘I find it the most stimulating in the English language.’
13
Silyen
You can meant that a thing was permitted, or known, or done before. None of those things held the slightest appeal for Silyen.
You can’t was the beginning of everything worth attempting.
Luke was having a meltdown. Crovan, disappointingly, looked tense and furious rather than thrilled at the small miracle that had just taken place at his own front door.
Silyen’s day, though, had gone from fascinating to absolutely incredible.
Crovan surged across the threshold and grabbed Luke by the throat.
‘What. Has. Happened. Here?’
The boy struggled, dropping the books he’d been clutching. Silyen had taken the opportunity to inspect them while they waited in the boot room: a history of Scotland, Powrie’s Peerage, and a rather intense novel that Silyen had enjoyed enormously when younger, even though the hero reminded him of Gavar.
Crovan had noticed the books, too, and Luke choked as the man tightened his grip.
‘Where did you get those? How dare you!’
At Sil’s side, Dog rasped his knives together, but their threat was impotent given that Crovan’s Skillful reflexes would be primed for any attack.
Silyen bent to inspect the books. Something was protruding from one of them – a photograph. And, oh goodness, it was interesting. He turned it over and couldn’t suppress a grin as he saw the names inscribed on the back. Out of the several hypotheses Sil had constructed to explain what had just happened at the door, what he’d discovered in Coira’s mind, and the existence of Coira herself – one of them began to coalesce from theory into fact.
A ghastly gurgling noise from Luke interrupted his thoughts. The boy’s eyes bulged at his former jailer. It was hard to say which of the two of them was redder in the face.
‘Devin’s guts are leaking all over my hall,’ Crovan hissed. ‘Half my servants are nowhere to be found. And now this. The girl is gone.’
‘Girl?’ Luke tried to yell, but it barely came out as a wheeze. ‘Don’t you mean your daughter? And with your own sister. You sick bastard.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’
‘Is he talking about this?’ Silyen said innocently.
He held up the photograph.
‘Don’t touch that. Give it back.’
‘Well, I would, but you have your hands full. It would be terrible if – whoops!’
The photograph slipped from Silyen’s fingers and did a breezy zig-zag towards the loch, even though the air was as still as if the world held its breath.
Crovan lunged for it and in the same instant, Silyen grabbed Luke and pulled him behind him. For someone without Skill, the boy’s lack of self-preservation instincts was deplorable. With Luke safe, he tugged Dog to his side, too. It was a lord’s duty to protect his retainers.
The picture was now in Crovan’s hands. He retrieved the three books and tucked the photo back between the pages.
‘Do you think I would treat my own daughter like that?’ the lord of Eilean Dòchais sneered at Luke. ‘She’s no child of mine.’
‘She has to be – she’s your heir,’ Luke said. Silyen could feel the boy behind him radiating anger, and held out an arm to keep him back. ‘She can give people permission to leave through the Last Door. That’s where your servants have gone. She released all those she didn’t think deserved to be here. The castle obeys her because she’s a Crovan.’
Luke spat out the last word as if it tasted disgusting. The pair of them stared at each other, breathing hard. It would all be rather entertaining were Crovan not so dangerous and Silyen not so invested in Luke remaining unharmed. Time to try civilized conversation instead.
‘I’d always wondered about the collars,’ Silyen said. ‘Everyone thinks they’re just a kind of shackle for your Condemned prisoners. But the necklace Fair Elspet wore wasn’t that, was it? It was her punishment, and it was personal. Seeing the tapestry helped me make the connections. Before the Condemned, and before Coira, you collared her mother for the same crime as Elspet: a love that her family didn’t approve of.’
‘Whatever you think you know,’ said Crovan coldly, ‘is of no interest to me. Now remove yourself from my island, Silyen. I may have tolerated your presence before, in the interests of research, but our collaboration is at an end. Hadley, get back inside.’
At Sil’s back, Luke flinched. Of course, Crovan had no idea that Luke had ever left the castle. Didn’t know that he had stood in Gorregan Square, or driven to Far Carr.
‘I said,’ Crovan growled, ‘get. Inside.’
Silyen reached for Luke’s throat. The boy’s skin was tantalizingly warm and beginning to bruise where Crovan had choked him. Sil drew down his fingers slower than was strictly necessary, and tugged open the neck of Luke’s sweater to show that he was uncollared.
‘You like controlling people, don’t you, Arailt? Except it’s not always possible, is it?’
‘Spare me the amateur psychology, Silyen. With or without a collar, the boy is Condemned and belongs in my custody.’
‘Oh, you know.’ Silyen shrugged. ‘You’ve mislaid so many prisoners that I can’t imagine you’ll miss one more. Tell me, did your sister manage to take off her collar to sneak out and meet her lover? Or did you only put it on her when you discovered she was pregnant? Did you consider the child’s father unsuitable – or is Luke on the right track, and you wished it had been you? Naughty Arailt.’
Crovan’s face contorted in fury. His hand slashed through the air – but when the lightning struck, Silyen let out a laugh that was one part fear to nine parts exhilaration. He had been braced for attack from the moment he had pulled Luke and Dog to him. The air hissed as the electricity crackled and dissipated, his Skillful wards protecting all three of them.
‘A nice touch,’ he crowed. ‘But you should have given us time to get in the boat if you wanted to uphold family tradition.’
‘Are you fucking nuts?’ Luke cried.
The boy was shaking violently – shock from near-incineration by lightning would do that. Silyen wasn’t sure if he meant Crovan, or himself. Possibly both.
Luke still hadn’t figured it out – which wa
s fair enough, given that he hadn’t seen what Silyen had, inside Coira’s head. Her mindscape was a version of Eilean Dòchais and its surroundings. But the castle had been transformed into an impossibly tall and airy version of itself. Its sparkling windows were alight with candles and lamps, and both doors stood welcomingly ajar. The pair of them had walked through room after room made bright and hospitable, the furnishings cheerful, the walls hung with paintings and photographs rather than weapons and stuffed animal trophies.
Aunty Terpy’s memory-Orpen was an exact reproduction of its original, because his aunt’s loving childhood had been everything she had wanted. Coira, though, had taken the only place she had ever known, and made it the warm, inviting inverse of its cruel reality. Her island, unlike the barren promontory on which the four of them now stood, was bursting with life. It was studded with rock primroses and tiny pink-petalled alpines; swifts and martins dived and spun around the castle walls.
It had been enchanting – and none of it had interested Silyen in the slightest.
There were two things that had captured his attention. The first was glaringly obvious: the loch around the castle was drained of its cruel, Skill-infused waters. Coira’s Eilean Dòchais stood ringed by a dry, stony bed. Silyen knew what that symbolized, and he had ached for Coira’s loss.
And the second thing . . . Ahh, what to make of the second thing?
Coira herself had been oblivious. But Silyen had been acutely aware of the presence – perhaps vaguer than a presence, perhaps merely the sensation – of a person just out of sight. Throughout his time in Coira’s mindscape, Silyen hadn’t been able to shake the notion that if he could cross the dry loch and peer over the rise of the heather moor, or scramble to the high battlements and look out, then he would see . . . someone else.
Someone searching for Coira’s castle, but unable to find it.
Someone he and Luke had met once before at Eilean Dòchais, that time in Luke’s mind, when he had been accompanied by an eagle and a stag. The king.
