‘Are you all right?’ was all Mrs Dupont said. ‘I thought I saw—’
‘I saw it too,’ said Katherine, glad for her shawl to hide that her hands were shaking. ‘A strange flash of light. I thought a streetlamp had exploded.’
Mrs Dupont instantly turned in the direction of the street. ‘Go inside. I’ll check for any sign of fire. Mr Johns!’ She called for the groom.
Katherine nodded. Whatever that light was, it doesn’t have anything to do with me, she thought, walking past Mrs Dupont over a cold ground pale with dead petals towards the house.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THERE WAS A difference between guessing and knowing, between believing and seeing.
After weeks in a small room with a dark, dead stone tree, to look up and see a hawthorn tree breaking into flower—
What are you? she’d said, staring at him in horror. What are you? What are you? What are you?
He couldn’t think about that. He couldn’t think about the light or what it meant, the way it had felt suffusing his skin, spilling out around them both, all of it tangled up with his feelings about her, the beautiful glow of the trees, the fall of white petals, the soft muslin of her skirts, the flutter of her breath as her lips parted against his—
The brilliant burst of it reflecting on her frightened face, looking not at the tree but at him.
The worst thing that could have happened.
An explosion of power, and the trumpeting of identity … He should never have gone to her. He should never have talked to her the way he had, so openly, about Simon. About his mother. And now she was in danger, more danger than before. If Simon knew what had happened – if he found out – heard—
Violet and Cyprian were waiting for him at the rendezvous point with the horses. They both turned towards him as he approached.
‘Well?’ Violet’s voice was expectant.
They were waiting for him to tell them his plan, the chance he had promised them to get into Ruthern. A way to rescue Marcus that avoided a slaughter.
‘I couldn’t get it done.’ He kept his voice steady. ‘I’m sorry. I thought I had another way for us to get into Ruthern. I don’t.’
They were in a dirt laneway on the edge of the city, and it was late enough that there was no sound beyond the distant bells and calls from the river. Violet was holding the horses, Valdithar a shadowy shape, the two Steward horses pale glimmers in the dark.
‘Then it’s the attack.’ Cyprian’s voice was matter-of-fact, as though he’d known from the start that Marcus’s rescue would cost them. ‘We ride on Ruthern with the Stewards.’ He moved towards his horse. Before he could, Violet stepped forward.
‘It was Miss Kent, wasn’t it?’ said Violet. ‘That’s who you were going to see. You thought she could get us into Ruthern.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Will. What happened?’
Katherine’s frightened eyes staring at him, a bright glow all around them as petals swirled and fell like snow. What are you?
Don’t think about that.
‘Will?’
‘There was a light.’
‘A light?’
‘Like the one I’ve been trying to conjure with the Elder Steward. It scared her off.’ He turned and took up his horse’s reins, placing one hand on the saddle.
Violet’s voice beside him was confused. ‘But – I thought you couldn’t conjure the light—’
‘I couldn’t.’
There was a scooped-out feeling in his chest, like he had felt when he had failed to light the Tree Stone, worse now that he had seen it shine.
‘What made you call it now?’
He couldn’t answer that. But the silence gave him away, and it was as if Violet guessed everything that had happened in the garden just from the way he wouldn’t look at her face.
‘Will. She’s Simon’s fiancée.’
‘I know that. I know. I know that I shouldn’t have—’
He shouldn’t have. It had left her in more danger than before. He wanted to go back to her, he wanted to bring her to safety, and he couldn’t. She wouldn’t go with him no matter how much he pleaded with her.
He expected Violet to be furious with him for his foolishness and his failure. For kissing Katherine Kent under a tree in a garden. It’s not what you think, he wanted to say. Except that he was remembering the way he’d felt when he’d met Katherine, how drawn he had been to her, and somewhere deeply buried there was an awful awareness of what had happened. What he had let happen.