His skin prickled. ‘Look at her clothes.’
Cyprian turned with a quizzical expression that changed as he looked at Leda. It was like a picture coming into focus, the way she was leaning, the oddly angled line of her neck, her open mouth, and her tunic, wet and red.
Will’s whole body came alive with danger.
Cyprian was swinging down off his horse, running towards her through the mud. Will saw a marsh insect crawl across the corner of Leda’s right eye, barely disturbed when Cyprian took hold of her shoulders. ‘Leda?’ Cyprian’s face was full of disbelief. His hands, which had grasped her clothes, came away red. ‘Leda?’
No. Will looked at the marsh around them, his blood thundering in his veins. There was no sign of an attacker, just the empty landscape of water and grass.
Leda’s lifeless body had been here long enough to attract insects, with no Steward coming to her aid, and no sign of a struggle or a fight. And her attackers weren’t here. With a terrible feeling of foreboding, Will lifted his eyes to the gate.
‘We need to tell the others,’ Cyprian was saying. ‘We need to warn them, so that they can send out a patrol—’
‘Cyprian—！’ said Will, but he was too late, Cyprian was running through the gate and into the courtyard. ‘Stop him,’ he said to Violet, but the sickly blank look on her face said that she didn’t understand. ‘Stop him.’ She seemed to snap out of it, and even if she didn’t understand, they were both dropping down off their horses and racing after Cyprian, in time to pass through the gate with him.
They stopped where Cyprian had stopped, three steps into the courtyard, and even Will’s fears had been nothing like this.
It was a massacre.
A battlefield where no one fought. All the Stewards were just shapes, piles of lifeless nothing, as if the emptiness of the marshes had penetrated the walls. Nothing moved except the banner with its single star, lifting and dropping in the wind.
His eye was repelled; his gorge rose. The closest body was two steps away; torn open, it was not recognisable, just another horrifying shape spread out across the stone.
You’re safe here, the Elder Steward had said. No one can challenge us inside these walls.
‘No,’ said Cyprian, and Will’s mind snapped back to the present. He saw Cyprian’s contorted face, and beyond that, the walls rising overhead, the windows that faced them, a hundred arrow slits and crenels trained on them.
‘Hold him back,’ said Will quickly, because they weren’t safe. Nowhere was safe, and the attackers might be anywhere in the Hall. ‘Violet, hold him back before he—’
Violet grabbed Cyprian by the tunic, right before he started to run towards the Hall.
‘Let me go. I have to – have to help them. Let me go—’ Cyprian was struggling desperately against her, but she was stronger than he was, crowding him until his back hit the wall, then pressing him into a small, shaded space between jutting blocks of stone, and holding him there.
Will followed, ignoring the voice in his head screaming at him not to turn his exposed back to the courtyard. The voice from nine months of hiding. The voice that said, Run.
‘Listen to me. Listen.’ Will kept his own voice low, trying somehow to get through to Cyprian, who was glaring at him furiously, panting. ‘We don’t know who did this. They might still be here. We’re in danger. We can’t just rush in.’
‘My home has been attacked.’ Cyprian spat the words out. ‘Why should I care about danger?’
‘Because you might be the only Steward left,’ said Will, and he saw Cyprian go white.
And then he saw him take it in: the silence of everything; the palpable, pressing, silence; the walls unmanned; the doors at the top of the steps open. Above their heads, a banner was flying like a horror over the dead that no Steward had come to claim.
Like a brace of butchered rabbits that a hunter had tossed to the ground, three Stewards lay in contorted shapes a step to their left. Cyprian started to crack right in front of him.
‘They’re not dead. No one can get inside the Hall. No one can—’
Will took him by the shoulders. ‘Steward, hold to your training!’ Cyprian’s eyes, meeting his, were blank, as if Cyprian himself was barely there.
Months with the Elder Steward doing meditations had never helped him. But now Will spoke her words to someone else. ‘Breathe, centre your mind.’ And then, ‘Again.’
Cyprian took one breath, then another. He had always been the perfect novitiate, more dedicated and more disciplined than anyone else. Now he called on that Steward training, and Will watched him physically reassert control over himself.