His cap was tight in his muddy fist; he’d clutched for it as if it could help him, or keep her back. Half rising, as if he had been shot, he pushed away from her, stumbling slightly. She let him go, still kneeling herself, wet seeping through the knees of her trousers.
She had asked Justice about the horn, and he had told her, humans used boar spears, they tied them down, chased them with dogs, hobbles and ropes and horseflesh, screaming.
The alley was filthy. The rain had spilled over the contents of the gutters to cover the pathway, filling its hollows, a compost of mud and clay. Devon was smeared with it, his chest rising and falling under his torn shirt. She looked at him and saw a tapestry on a wall, its colours faded, the white curve of neck and mane still visible against the dimmed red.
Long gone now. They say this one was the last.
‘Then give it back,’ he said.
He’d pushed himself to the steps of the building he’d exited, but no further. He said it in a voice too steady for coax or plea. He said it like he meant to prove a point. She remembered that he’d lied to Will. She remembered what Simon had done to the Stewards.
Simon has it, she didn’t say. Did it matter? If she had the horn, would she give it back to him? She realised that Devon’s steady tone exposed the truth, and she answered in the same level voice.
‘I can’t give you the horn,’ she said.
By then, Devon, with a kind of brutal persistence, had pushed himself upright. She had risen too. She was the one holding back now, like she had when she had first looked inside the black lacquered box and seen what was inside. She hated that Devon realised it.
‘Then what? You drag me back to the Hall with a chain around my neck?’ It was so reminiscent of what had happened to her when the Stewards had found out she was a Lion that it stuck in her throat.
‘If I let you go,’ said Violet, ‘will you go back to Simon?’
‘Yes.’
Her hands were fists. ‘How could you? How could you serve him, when you’re—’
‘How could I?’ Devon laughed with a mouth full of blood. ‘It’s the Lions that fought for him. A field full of Lions. Now you fight for an Order who digs through our bones and puts them under glass. Who else have the Stewards put in their collection?’
‘They’re not like that. You twist everything.’
‘You’re like me,’ said Devon. ‘We’re the same. You’re more like me than you are like them. It’s in your blood.’
‘I’m nothing like you. I will never fight for the Dark King.’
He laughed again, the sound a breath that was helpless and unconstrained, weight given up to the wall behind him, his eyes glittering beneath his white lashes. ‘You will,’ he said. ‘You’ll betray every person you love to serve him. You’re a Lion.’
She was going to hit him again. ‘Do it,’ he said. His body was a taunt. ‘Do it. If you let me walk away, I’ll go back to Simon, and he’ll kill you. He’ll kill all of you like he killed the Stewards.’
She didn’t hit him. She felt the anger crest and transform into something hard and implacable.
‘Crawl back to him, then. Crawl back to Simon and tell him, the Lion and the Lady stand against him, and as long as we draw breath, he will never conquer the Light.’
He didn’t crawl back to Simon. He went home, to Mayfair.
It took time, his hands shaking, to rake his fingers through his hair, drawing it down over his forehead. The bandana was a useless strip of muddy wet. Devon refused to wring it out, scrape the muck off, as he did with the cap. He replaced the cap with slow, careful movements, one shoulder against the wall. He shoved the bandana into his pocket, the end trailing.
The journey from the alley to the house near Bond Street was one of dogged determination. He entered the house through the side door and went to his room without attracting attention, as he often did when he came and went on some errand. In his room, he dragged off his jacket, a crumpled puddle on the carpet. He sat on the edge of the bed.
He knew he should wash his face; he should bathe and clean the mud from his skin, peel off the rest of these clothes. He did none of those things. His shirt hung open, bloodied and torn.
There was a shape in the doorway.
‘Hello, Robert,’ he said. His voice sounded blurred, as if he were drunk. He added, in the same blurred voice, ‘I didn’t think you were home.’
He said it without thinking. In the next moment he felt a sudden flickering sense that it might not be Robert after all. He looked up, feeling a startled spatter of heartbeats, as if rolling around in the mud with lions could conjure up a figure impossible and long dead.