by Vic James
Silyen shook his head, to get his thoughts straight. Given the Crovan family history that was unravelling right here on the shore, there was a reason why that person could be looking for Coira: because he was her father. But there was also a reason why that was impossible: because he had died more than a thousand years ago.
It was just as well that Silyen had never taken the division between possible and impossible too seriously.
‘You know what?’ Luke was saying. ‘I don’t really care who her parents are. We just need to get her back.’
‘Back?’ Crovan’s lip curled. ‘Why on earth would I want her back? My sister died giving birth to her, and I’ve had to endure her presence for seventeen years. I sent her below-stairs so I didn’t have to see Rhona in her face every day. Now she’s gone through the door. Good riddance.’
And you could see Luke putting it together himself, patching up the holes in what he knew with these scraps of information.
‘When you told her she’d committed “the worst crime”,’ the boy said, ‘you meant her mother’s death. You let an innocent girl grow up thinking she was as bad as everyone else in your castle, just because she was motherless. You made her live as a servant, cooking and cleaning and waiting on those scumbag prisoners.’
‘I did my duty by her. While she lived, I protected her, for Rhona’s sake. You know that none of the Condemned could lay a finger on her. But now that she is dead . . .’ Crovan opened his empty hands, a conjurer relieved that his dove has disappeared.
‘She’s not dead.’
Luke was practically howling, and he really needed to stop before Crovan lashed out again. The boy didn’t know how much danger he was in. If Luke took a step out of Silyen’s protection and the Equal struck in that instant . . . Sil gripped Luke’s wrist tightly to restrain him, and conversationally changed the topic.
‘I initially thought you used the collar to lock away her Skill,’ he remarked. ‘But you didn’t, did you? You drained it. I might have guessed that your showstopper with Meilyr wasn’t the first time you’d attempted that. You wouldn’t have risked your peers seeing you fail.’
‘She neither needed nor deserved to have Skill,’ Crovan snapped.
The lord of Eilean Dòchais was going to throw them off this island any minute now – or try the fuss-free option of incinerating them again. This called for desperate measures. Flattery.
‘A remarkable thing to do,’ he said. ‘Unprecedented. I’d love to know how you managed it.’
Crovan’s expression turned wolfish.
‘Common belief is that you are already well acquainted with how, Silyen. There is the curious case of your Skilless middle brother – though your sister-in-law was asking me only last night if I thought that might be remedied. And the sad demise of your Aunt Euterpe, who could have had her Skill destroyed and, once defenceless, been murdered. The only people present, of course, were you and your hound there. One of you rumoured to have stripped Skill before, the other with a talent for killing. Strange coincidence.’
Silyen’s neck prickled. As far as Sil knew, the man couldn’t take Skill, only destroy it – and he evidently believed Silyen to be capable of the same. It would be unwise to get into a contest with him. Sil doubted that Crovan could touch him or his power, but the man might discover that he actually retained what Skill he took. Silyen didn’t want that to be common knowledge. He was well aware that his fellow Equals tolerated him as an eccentric. But if they knew the truth, how could they not regard him as a threat?
No, risks were all very well, but only when the reward was worth it.
But Sil wasn’t going anywhere without discovering what Crovan knew of Coira’s impossible paternity. Which was when Luke opened his big gob, and Silyen – even more so than usual – could have kissed him.
‘But who was her father? Please. She spent her whole life wondering. And if she really is dead, then there’s no harm in us knowing.’
Crovan regarded Luke coldly, the lenses of his glasses reflecting only the blank grey-white of the cloudy sky.
‘I have no idea. The only man I ever saw was some tramp I spotted her walking with out on the moors one day. The arrival of a child was an unpleasant surprise. Its possession of Skill even more so.’
‘A tramp? With Skill? Are you joking?’
‘He wore a ragged cloak.’ Crovan’s lip thinned. ‘It would have been a disguise, of course. Someone she’d met at one of the debutante balls in Edinburgh – perhaps an inappropriate second or third son, rather than an heir. Rhona was eighteen and our mother was launching her into society. All the daughters of the old mormaer clans were there, trussed up in virginal white – though that colour may have been a lie from the moment my sister put it on. It certainly was by the time she lay bleeding nine months later.’
Luke’s breath was coming fast and angry, while Crovan stood immobile, as if turned to stone.
‘You made Coira live like a servant, and took her Skill to punish her for how you felt about her mother,’ Luke said. ‘And now she’s gone, too. What’s broken inside you that you could do that?’
‘My parents ran their car off the road hurrying back here, when Rhona’s labour started. So my whorish sister’s bastard child killed my entire family. The brat and her mother got what they deserved.’
Silyen reached back a warning hand, to keep Luke where he was. He could feel the boy’s chest rising and falling as he struggled to control himself.
‘Charming though this has been,’ Sil said, once satisfied that Luke wasn’t going to try something really stupid, ‘I think we’ll get going. If you don’t say a word about our visit, we won’t say a word about the disorderly state of affairs that we found here. Is that fair?’
Crovan’s lips twitched. His thin little moustache really was horrid.
‘Your father wouldn’t care if I tossed every prisoner in this castle off my battlements wrapped in chains. No, I think you’ll find he’s rather more interested in what you’re up to at Far Carr, on an estate that’s now without a single slave. You can’t imagine that he and your sister-in-law approve of your recent actions.’
‘Not in my wildest dreams. Well, goodbye, Arailt. I daresay our paths will cross again soon.’
Sil extended a hand, and wasn’t offended when Crovan didn’t take it. The man huffed, an arid sound with no mirth in it.
‘We can’t go and leave her behind!’ Luke was resisting Silyen’s efforts to prod him towards the jetty steps.
‘We’re not “leaving her behind”. She’s not here.’
‘And you’re each just letting the other walk away?’ Luke looked between Sil and Crovan in disbelief.
‘Zero-sum game,’ growled Dog.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Stalemate. Mutually assured destruction. Python eats alligator.’ The man gave that batshit laugh that was really starting to get on Silyen’s nerves.
‘What our friend is trying to say, Luke, is that if the lord of Eilean Dòchais and I were to allow things to turn nasty, neither of us could feel assured of victory, and therefore we are choosing to avoid conflict. Well, give or take a lightning bolt or two, eh, Arailt? Please don’t strike the boat while it takes us back across, there’s a good chap.’
Luke looked like he was going to keep on fighting this every step of the way, so Silyen touched his forehead and sent him down into unconsciousness. Dog scooped up the boy and carried him in a fireman’s lift to the boat. Crovan watched as the vessel crossed the loch to the shore, and he was still there when Dog, grumbling, dumped Luke into the cabin of their helicopter.
It wasn’t until the craft had lifted off the ground that Silyen leaned over Luke and brought him round.
The boy looked between the pair of them, then out of the chopper windows, where Eilean Dòchais had already disappeared. He gave Silyen what he doubtless intended to be a furious glare, but which was obviously the verge of tears, then hunched over in his seat.
Silyen wasn’t in touch with his ow
n emotions, let alone anyone else’s, and it was tiring just looking at Luke. But then, he did still want to keep looking.
‘She can’t be dead,’ Luke burst out. None of them wore the headsets, so the pilot couldn’t hear what they said, and the noise of the engine and rotors was almost deafening.
‘She isn’t,’ said Silyen. ‘If you go out of that door without permission: dead. She went the other way: not dead.’
Luke was red-eyed and suspicious. ‘Now’s really not the time to be dicking about. You may not have noticed, but I’m finding what happened back there rather hard to deal with. Coira’s amazing. Of course I want to believe she’s not dead. But if she isn’t, then where is she?’
‘She’s somewhere else. And, no, I’ve no idea where.’
‘No body,’ rasped Dog. ‘When the Last Door kills – there’s always a body.’
‘Precisely. Thank you, Dog.’
Luke fell silent, trying to process it all.
If Silyen was honest, he was still trying to work through the details, too. They had seen a living girl simply step into thin air – and disappear.
And that changed everything. Not everything that Silyen had thought about, because he had sent his mind into every dark corner of the unimaginable and improbable. But it went way beyond what he had experienced.
‘Hear me out,’ Luke said beside him, as quietly as the rotor noise permitted. ‘I know I’ll sound like an idiot to you, but I’m trying to understand.’
That’s fine, it was on the tip of Sil’s tongue to say. Everyone sounds like an idiot to me. But he stopped himself.
In the past year, this boy had been on a learning curve far steeper than any Silyen had undergone, with his life frequently in danger along the way. Sil not only had never faced such risks, he also had the security of the Skill that thrummed through him. A power that could attack, defend and heal. Without it, he would be as vulnerable as if he ran barefoot in the dark across a floor of knives. And that was how Luke lived, every day. In that state of vulnerability he had joined Meilyr’s uprising in Millmoor, and survived Crovan’s castle.
He wasn’t an idiot. In his own earnest way, Luke was remarkable.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ Sil said.
‘The way I see it,’ the boy began, ‘some aspects of Skill are how the body works, just done better, like your physical strength, or ability to heal. The mental stuff is freakier, but also understandable. Persuasion, or influencing people? The rest of us can do that, too. As for examining or hiding memories, well, scientists say that one day we’ll be able to store our thoughts digitally, or erase them, so again, I get it.
‘Even the weirdest thing – those mindscapes, mine and yours? Mine didn’t just look like the setting of one of my console games, it’s kind of the same thing: a world you create with your imagination and spend time in. Having you there with me, or Crovan building walls within it, it’s like a multiplayer game. I can accept all that, just about.
‘But when we’re in my mindscape, or yours, our bodies are still right here in the real world. Coira disappeared, Silyen. She went through a doorway and didn’t come out the other side. And I’ve no idea what that means, and I’m actually kind of terrified that I don’t know what anything means any more. Crovan’s interrogations in that place scrambled my brain. It was getting difficult to make sense of things, so I had to write stuff down, like a journal. And now I’m afraid I’ll wake up any minute and find that I’m back there, slobbering into my pillow, with only half a brain.’
Luke’s hands were shaking. Silyen took them and squeezed until he heard the bones click. Then he pulled Luke’s head against his shoulder and held the boy there while he drew in great heaving breaths.
‘I don’t have all the answers,’ Sil told him. ‘But I do have the next best thing, which is questions.’
‘Questions?’ the boy mumbled against his jacket.
‘Do you believe in fairy tales, Luke?’
He huffed. ‘Would you, if you were me? I don’t know. Maybe when I was little.’
‘I think I’ve done it all backwards. When I was younger, my aunt and I used to read The Tales of the King to each other. They were about the king battling monsters, working wonders, and walking in strange worlds, and I knew they were just stories. But the older I’ve grown, the more I’ve come to believe they were real.
‘I wanted a peerage so I could get inside the House of Light – that was my price for staying hush about what Rix did to you.’ Silyen felt Luke pull away from his side, and knew he deserved it. ‘Here’s why. When you’re outside the House, you see Skillful brilliance pulsing within the chamber. I needed to know what you see from the inside. Turns out it’s exactly the same: radiance on the opposite side. The parliamentarians talk about a “world beyond”, but it’s not beyond – it’s always on whichever side you’re not.
‘Except when Rix adopted me, a great flare of Skill burst through the glass walls. It went straight into my heart, like someone had stuck jump-leads in me, or as if Crovan’s lightning bolt had hit. They all saw it. I heard Gavar and some others freaking out.’
‘So it goes both ways, too,’ Luke said, straightening up.
‘What?’
‘The Last Door. Crovan always said it only went one way. But it doesn’t – we just saw that. Coira went the other way. The night we both discovered Coira could command the Last Door, she’d found me staring out of it. I was sort of sleepwalking, and was convinced I could see somewhere else. Not Loch nan Deur at all, but another place – and I thought the king was in it. Don’t laugh at me for wishful thinking, but what if the door is like the House of Light, and there’s somewhere else on the other side, whichever way you go? What if she’s there, just waiting for us to find her?’
Silyen didn’t laugh. Nothing killed an idea faster than mockery. And this was a good idea.
But everything was jumbled up: the Wonder King, Skill, other worlds, doors that went both ways, and Silences that were centuries old.
Coira, Luke and Silyen.
He knew the connections between some of these things. Guessed at others.
But the bigger picture was still just out of reach.
‘When I was in Coira’s mind – which looked like the castle, but a jollier version of it,’ he told Luke, ‘I felt as though the king was right there, just out of sight.’
‘They’re connected,’ said Luke. ‘Aren’t they.’
It wasn’t a question.
The two of them stared at each other, uncertain. Silyen took a breath. Luke had shared his thoughts, although fearful of being thought an idiot, so Silyen would, too.
‘Crovan mentioned seeing his sister with a tramp in a ragged cloak. We’ve seen that cloak, you and I. Yes, I’m pretty sure the king is Coira’s father – and he’s been looking for her. But somehow, he found us instead.’
‘Maybe if we find him,’ Luke said, ‘we find her.’
Silyen nodded. He couldn’t care less about one of them.
But finding the other?
He cared about that very, very much indeed.
14
Abi
They took the time they needed to get it right, with a degree of planning even Abi couldn’t fault. The changeover cycles of the Fullthorpe secure unit were watched around the clock, to ensure that it tallied with the schedules Tilda had found. Another team worked on the logistics of getting the rescued prisoners away to safety, once they were free, then out of the country.
Every connection that those already signed up to Midsummer’s movement could draw on was utilized. The jail was sixty miles north of Lindum. The nearest major slavetown was in the shadow of Leeds – Hillbeck, reputedly the roughest in the country. But someone there knew someone who knew someone with the right sort of business based close to Fullthorpe, and so three lorries pulled up at Lindum’s back gate with the words ‘Bloomin’ Lovely – Creating Gorgeous Gardens’ painted brightly on the side.
‘Here for your stonework,’ said the driv
er of one, a hard-faced guy with a soft moors accent. ‘Each van’s good for twenty-six tonnes. I hear you’ll have no problem loading them in?’
‘No problem at all,’ Midsummer said, smiling, as Abi unbarred the gate and the Equal swung them open for the lorries.
The guy’s reaction was priceless as first Leto the wolf, then Tom, Dick and Harry, the three-headed gryphon, then even more outlandish members of the stone menagerie trotted, stomped or slithered up the lorry tailgates and lay down inside, turning back into innocuous stone. They would be driven up to the garden centre depot and parked overnight, until Midsummer and the assault team arrived the next day.
That was the last time Abi smiled, because next Renie appeared at her elbow to take her to Hilda and Tilda.
‘There’s something they need you to check,’ the kid said.
The ‘something’ was a freeze-frame image scaled up from the prison’s own CCTV cameras.
‘So, hen,’ said Tilda, pointing out two blurry shapes among a huddle of prisoners. ‘Is that your ma and da?’
Hilda was ready with a chair as Abi sat down in shock. She had known they were in Fullthorpe. Bouda’s words that day at the cottage had threatened it, and Asif’s trawl of the prisoner records had confirmed it, when ‘Hadley, S.’ and ‘Hadley, J.’ were there on the list. But to see them like this . . .
Her fingertips brushed the fuzzy pixels as she strained to make out details. Mum’s bob had been shorn up to her ears – the sort of cut she’d said she would never have, because it made her feel ‘old and sensible’. That bright spot was light gleaming off Dad’s familiar receding hairline, which Daisy would tease him about while Luke anxiously checked his own hair in the mirror. Dad looked stooped while Mum, always trim (‘keeping healthy is part of a nurse’s job description,’ she’d say, as she urged Abi out for a mother-daughter run) had shrunk and become birdlike.
Abi was heartstruck. What were they doing in there? Being held as leverage for their lawbreaking children was what. If Abi had gone meekly to Millmoor with them, after Luke’s Condemnation, this wouldn’t be happening. The guilt was overwhelming, and anxiety stuffed its fingers down Abi’s throat again, blocking her airways and making her gag.
