Bright Ruin

by Vic James

  The roof and upper parts of the House had been entirely destroyed. The walls still stood, at half their previous height. Their broken remnants were wreathed in a miasma of golden mist.

  ‘You see,’ said Midsummer’s voice. ‘It can be done. Four hundred years of cruelty and oppression can end, here and now. Because all are Equal! All. Are. Equal!’

  Those assembled took up her cry. It began as a low rumble, as the crowd found its rhythm, then swelled as it spread up Whitehall. The crowd continued as far as Abi could see – all the way back to Gorregan Square. And it chanted in one voice. All. Are. E-qual. The rhythm of it drummed in Abi’s brain, and she found herself silently mouthing along.

  The dragons writhed, crossed, swooped again – and the walls of the House were levelled beneath the rake of their wings.

  Half the crowd cheered. The other half kept up the chant.

  How on earth were Lord Whittam and Bouda going to respond to this?

  Abi strained her eyes to look at Midsummer. She’d done it. She had achieved what Abi had thought was almost impossible: a peaceful act of destruction, an unignorable protest. And she hadn’t compromised her ideals in the process. She should be exulting right now.

  She probably was, inside. But on the outside, she appeared to be struggling. Her arms were jerking, no doubt under the strain of controlling her creatures. This was more, even, than she’d attempted at Fullthorpe.

  ‘Here they come,’ said Dog, bent low over his rifle. His eye was trained on the two Jardines, unable to see what was happening on the stage.

  The dragons turned, coiled and climbed again. Midsummer’s gestures had become frantic. Abi’s heartbeat went off the scale. Something wasn’t right.

  The creatures plummeted a third time: side by side, emitting a horrible screech of triumph. And they didn’t fall upon the ruins of the House, but towards the stage. The protestors gathered nearest to it began to stampede, but there wasn’t time for them to get away.

  They weren’t the target, though.

  As the paired dragons lifted upwards again, a single struggling body could be glimpsed clamped between two sets of needle-sharp metal jaws. And as their sinuous bodies arced away from each other, the pitiful figure tore in two, spraying blood and gore over the onlookers.

  Through the microphone, inhumanly loud and inhumanly awful, Layla’s scream went on. And on. And on.

  What had happened? What had just happened?

  That tiny, torn figure had been Midsummer.

  Abi felt as though the dragons had fastened their claws in her heart and ripped that apart, too.

  The double gates of Westminster swung open. The crowd on the pavement immediately in front somehow found room to scramble back. In the space revealed stood Whittam Jardine. A short way behind him was Bouda Matravers.

  There was no doubt about it, thought Abi. Whittam had somehow caused Midsummer’s dragons to turn on her. How, she had no idea. But she was as certain of it as she’d been of anything in her life.

  He deserved this. It was right.

  ‘Now,’ she told Dog. ‘Jardine. Do it now.’

  Dog’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  But maybe the gun was damaged, or perhaps Dog had failed to release some catch, because it made a dull, thwarted sound and no shot came.

  24

  Gavar

  From where he stood at the edge of Parliament Square, Gavar saw it all.

  He listened to the testimony of those who had suffered in slavetowns, and found himself wiping his eyes. He hadn’t cared for all the commoner girls who had warmed his bed over the years. There were plenty whose names he hadn’t even known. But he’d cared enough for some of them that to imagine them enduring shattered bodies, lost babies and wrecked lives filled him with anger.

  He’d seen Millmoor, of course. Twice. He’d convinced himself that it was particularly nasty because it was the oldest slavetown, and because Mancunians were a bunch of troublemakers who brought it on themselves. But the tales he’d heard when among the men of the Bore, and from those rescued at Fullthorpe, made it plain that Millmoor’s atrocious conditions were the norm, not the exception.

  He listened to Midsummer’s passionate denunciations of the Equals, and found himself unable to deny a single thing that she’d said.

  He watched, as stunned and awed as the rest of them, as she ruined the House of Light. The gout of Skill-light made him shudder. No less so the golden mist that settled over the wrecked remains. He thought of Meilyr Tresco, broken and howling on the floor of the House. His Skill ripped from him by Crovan and flung upwards, to evanesce through the roof into that pulsing world of light.

  He held his breath for a moment, wondering if something more might happen. Something like Aunt Euterpe’s destruction of the Kyneston ballroom, that had warped the air itself. But no disaster came. The world wasn’t sucked through a wormhole into some glittering and cruel alternate dimension.

  But this one was cruel enough. He saw Midsummer’s alarm, then her panic and fear. Her arms were moving awkwardly. Unnaturally.

  As the dragons turned on her, Gavar watched, horrorstruck. The creatures fell in perfect unity, as if harnessed to a chariot. Angling their jaws sideways as they neared the ground, they snatched at her legs and shoulders. This was no attack that Skill could repel, because it was her own malfunctioning Skill controlling them.

  He heard Midsummer scream as she was taken up, and looked away from what he knew would come next.

  Then the Westminster gates swung open, and Father was there. He had that look of easy authority that only left his face when drunk or furious. The man tugged at his shirt cuffs, as if he’d just performed a trifling task and acquitted himself well. As he made his way to the stage, Bouda clipped after him in heels. She’d spent the night Skillfully saving some of London’s most priceless assets from arson. But she hadn’t been able to – or wanted to – save Midsummer.

  That tweaking of the cuffs nagged at Gavar. It was one of father’s little mannerisms, indicating self-satisfaction. Why was he so pleased with himself?

  The answer to that was immediately and gut-churningly obvious.

  Father stepped up to the stage. His face was grave but calm. As the terrified protesters looked up at him, they quieted under his gaze. He radiated reassurance.

  And something more, too. Skill.

  No one had ever considered Father especially Skilled – which was, of course, curious in a man of such eminent lineage. Gavar supposed that until the country had started going to hell, none of them had really had much cause to display what their Skill could do. Gavar broke windows when infuriated. Mother tended to her garden and grew flowers that took the cup every year at the Kyneston Village fête. Silyen could be found lying floppy and blank-eyed as he ‘visited’ Aunt Euterpe. Father had done none of those things.

  So what had he done, over the years? He had won political power, despite being a cruel and unpleasant man. He had bedded women without restraint, despite being both a drunk and nothing like as good-looking as his son and heir. Both of those things could be attributed to awe of the Jardine name, of course.

  But they could equally be attributed to Skill. Specifically, that quality the scholars had labelled ‘persuasion’.

  Father was up there on the stage, speaking quietly. The crowd hung on his every word. He appeared to be eulogizing Midsummer much as he had done Dina Matravers. She was a brave, big-hearted young woman, wickedly led astray. (Father was surely running out of culprits to do the misleading.) She was impressively Skilled – but had overreached herself. Had lost control of her monsters and suffered a tragic accident trying to bring them back under her mastery.

  If Father was gifted at persuasion, a lot of things suddenly made sense. Such as why Mother, who had been famously spirited in her youth, was so perpetually compliant. Why Zelston’s abolition proposal had been so decisively defeated, when Gavar knew – as Meilyr Tresco must have known, when he campaigned for it – that there were other commo
ner-sympathizers in the chamber. Why no one had yet pushed to end Father’s emergency chancellorship and elect a new incumbent. Or had raised a voice in opposition to the elevation of the Jardines to the position of First Family.

  Why Gavar had never renounced his inheritance and run away with Leah.

  Although that could simply have been because Gavar was a coward.

  Well, he was through with blaming his own mistakes on his Father, but he was damned if he wasn’t ready to lay everything else at the bastard’s door. That was why Midsummer had looked terrified. Father must have been persuading her to call her dragons down upon herself. He’d been close enough for it to work – just behind the Westminster gate.

  And now look at this. A crowd that only minutes earlier had been shouting angrily about Equal abuses, that had cheered as the dragons ruined the House of Light, that had chanted All. Are. E-qual with one voice. Now listening raptly as Father offered false sympathy and empty promises.

  He even had his arm around Midsummer’s girlfriend, Layla. Her head rested on his shoulder, as if his strength was the only thing keeping her up. Gavar saw the swell of her stomach. Another baby that, like Libby, would grow up missing a mother.

  And that thought decided it.

  Gavar Jardine the marksman – that was how he’d been taunted, when Leah’s death had been passed off as a hunting accident. (And how had so many people swallowed that absurd story, Gavar suddenly thought? Had that been Father’s persuasive Skill, too?)

  The nickname had been considered amusing because Gavar really was a marksman. The best shot in Hampshire, able to take down songbirds in flight.

  He reached beneath his leather coat for the gun he always carried. It had taken Leah’s life. This wouldn’t bring her back, but it was long, long overdue. He kissed the cool metal and whispered her name.

  Gavar offered up a silent apology to Midsummer Zelston – that he was doing this too late to save her, and promising to do everything in his power to protect her unborn child. Then he named Dina and Meilyr, too, and the men dead at Fullthorpe, for all of them had died at his father’s behest. So very many of them.

  He lifted the gun. Sighted along its barrel.

  You bastard, he thought. I’m through.

  And he pulled the trigger and saw his father drop.

  It was chaos, of course. With his father’s hold over them broken, and a second death right before their eyes, the crowd started screaming again. Midsummer’s girlfriend collapsed to the ground, spattered with bloody pulp. Bouda stood on the stage, her head turning this way and that.

  This would be the moment for Gavar to hide. To draw his Skill about him like some cloak of invisibility. To whisper in people’s ears as he passed them: I am not here. Look away.

  Instead he stuffed his gun back into place, fastened his coat, and moved towards the stage. People parted in front of him and he ascended the steps. Bouda was there, watching him. It was like their wedding day in reverse – except Gavar felt calmer walking to his doom today.

  He paused to crouch down at the girlfriend’s side. She was being supported by the scrappy kid, who managed to look both fierce and absolutely broken.

  ‘I’ll watch over you,’ he whispered to the sobbing woman. ‘You and your baby, I promise.’

  What about his own baby? Whatever happened to Gavar, Libby needed to be safe. He would have to be on his guard.

  He picked up the microphone from where it had rolled on the stage, and stood up, glancing at Bouda. She appeared as outwardly composed as ever, but he could detect her confusion and uncertainty.

  She was a cold bitch, but was she a monster? He’d sensed her vulnerability the night he’d paid her that impromptu visit. Perhaps together they could do what they’d never yet managed, and wrest something good out of this utter fucking mess.

  And then at last, because he could ignore it no longer, he looked at his father’s dead body. The force of the bullet had taken off the top of his father’s skull, and with it, his lion’s mane of red-gold hair. His face looked somehow naked without it, as if he was the old man he’d never lived to be. Death had relaxed his features, smoothing the scowl-lines that Gavar had seen – and no doubt caused – all his life. He bent and closed his father’s eyes.

  Gavar supposed he should feel sorry. And he did. Sorry that his father hadn’t been a better father, and that he, Gavar, hadn’t been a better son. But the only regret he felt was that he hadn’t done it sooner.

  Drawing in a breath, he turned towards the crowd. He was about to own up to murder in front of the world’s cameras.

  ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘You’re all safe – please stay calm.’ He drew in a deep breath, because his chest felt as if his lungs had turned to lead. How did politicans do this every day: addressing crowds, explaining, persuading, justifying? Who in their right mind would want to?

  ‘I’m so sorry any of you had to witness what you just did. Those who have children here with you, I can’t apologize enough. I shot my father.’

  The crowd heaved with something that could have been revulsion or relief, Gavar could hardly tell which.

  ‘I did it, because he was responsible for what we just saw – the appalling death of an amazing woman who was brave enough to defy her own class and fight for what she believed in. I did it because my father has killed many others. He reinstated the Blood Fair – abolished more than a century ago for being too inhumane even then. That “violent uprising” at Fullthorpe prison you all heard about? There was no such thing. It was a breakout of the innocent and falsely accused, in which the only people harmed were those my father murdered to tar his enemies.

  ‘Who led that breakout? The young woman who just lost her life – Midsummer Zelston. I know. I was there. I went to her at my father’s request, to spy on her plans. What I found was a woman of principle and courage, and I will always regret deceiving her.’

  Gavar paused to collect himself. He wiped the sweat from his brow. At his side, he could almost feel Bouda quivering. She had been complicit in some – perhaps all – of what he had just mentioned. Should he try and bring her down, too? Or could she be trusted to act in the country’s best interests?

  What even were those? Gavar didn’t know any more. The end of Equal rule? Some kind of power sharing with elected commoners and Equal advisers? Speaker Dawson was up on the stage with Midsummer’s crew – she’d doubtless have some opinions. Alongside was her son, Jon Faiers. Gavar had thought that weasel-boy was part of Bouda’s clique. Whose side was he really on?

  Gavar gave up. He’d just shot and killed his father. The man he had spent his whole life simultaneously hating and yearning to be loved by. He couldn’t figure out his country’s future on the spot. In fact, he had zero right to do so.

  He could only speak from his heart.

  ‘As my father’s eldest child, heir of the Founding Family, I was told from the moment I was born that I would rule this country one day. My daughter, though, is common-born. No one in my family ever said the same to her. I don’t want Britain to be a country where one child’s opportunities are greater than another’s, simply because of their birth. I take no pride in being the son of a man who thought that’s how it should be.

  ‘I’m not a good person. And what I just did certainly wasn’t a good thing. But it was necessary.’

  He turned to Bouda and handed her the microphone.

  ‘Please get it right,’ he said. ‘Because I don’t know how.’

  Then he bent down to the girlfriend and the kid – Layla and Renie – and helped them up. Others of the Fullthorpe get-out team were there, too. Meilyr’s Millmoor friends.

  ‘You can come with me,’ he said. ‘If you want. You need somewhere to recover from all of this. I’ll keep you safe.’

  ‘Where?’ Renie asked sceptically. The kid had plainly never trusted anywhere to be safe in her entire life. It wasn’t as though experience had proved her wrong.

  ‘My house,’ said Gavar. ‘It’s not far. About a ten-m
inute walk, in fact.’

  He nodded away across Parliament Square towards St James’s Park. At the far end of it – the flags just visible above the trees – was Aston House.

  ‘Doesn’t she live there?’ Renie jerked a thumb at Bouda.

  ‘I’ve a feeling she’ll be playing down her connections with my family, after what I just did. Her family has its own place in Mayfair. Or knowing Bouda, she’ll take over the Chancellor’s suite. Layla, may I?’

  When the poor woman simply nodded, Gavar picked her up with infinite care and made his way down the steps. The crowd parted to let them through.

  ‘I can promise a full investigation,’ Bouda was saying behind him. ‘All those found to have a case to answer from what has happened in recent weeks will be held to account. I will consult with key members of the Justice Council and other advisers, including the Speaker of the Commons, whose son is a member of my own personal team. Together we will find a way forward for Britain after these shocking events.’

  Held to account, Gavar thought grimly. There wasn’t a single one of them, in any of this, who didn’t have something to answer for.

  ‘Wait! Gavar, wait.’

  Someone was pushing slantwise through the crowd. Abigail Hadley. He hadn’t noticed her absence from the group around the stage. She had a Security escort. Had she been arrested, and wanted him to assert her innocence?

  Then Gavar noticed the identity of the uniformed officer, and nearly dropped Layla.

  ‘You.’

  His late great-aunt’s dog bared his teeth in what could have been either a threat or a smile – and was probably both. Gavar noticed that he had somehow acquired a sniper-class gun, slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Nice shot,’ the man rasped. ‘You beat us to it. Here, let me – clear the way.’