The walls of the room felt too close, and his face throbbed. Robert had known, probably for a long time. He might have wrapped his forehead in cloth, but in ten years, he would have pushed his hand across his brow, or tilted his cap at the wrong angle, or rested his head on the back of an armchair for a nap. The lump beneath the cloth would have shown, under the white hair, under the line of the cap.
Robert was an expert in the ivory that made its way across the continent in ceaseless trade, in bins of horns and tusks, in cameos, in spinet keys, in carved frames, in billiard balls, and the handles of women’s parasols. And Robert was a hunter; and sometimes you rode down your prey, and sometimes you offered your prey an unlooked-for kindness, and, wounded and exhausted, it bowed its head for the silken rope.
‘I’ve worked with ivory my whole life,’ said Robert quietly. ‘I know when something different comes along.’
His breathing felt strange. He wondered if Robert had picked up the horn, had handled it, at the same time that he knew with perfect surety that Robert was too much of a gentleman to have opened the box.
He knew, in the same way that he knew that Robert did his best work in the morning, that the mark on Robert’s cheek was the imprint of the eyeglass he used to inspect ivory, that he liked to take a brandy to his study after dinner while he went over the inventory, and that he was stubborn and considerate, and human, in the end.
He felt himself moving. His grip on the horn changed. It felt wrong to wrap his fingers around its middle, a way that he would never let anyone else touch him, the way they had held him down in the moment before they brought out the saw.
His grip on the horn changed; then he drove it into Robert’s unprotected body.
The tip was sharp and could puncture armour. Cloth shirt and waistcoat were nothing. It went in, pushing Robert backward, in and angling up, the point seeking for what it could find, easily.
Heart.
There were a few awful moments of struggle, the last spasming kicks of a drowning man fighting for air. Robert’s eyes were wide and shocked. Robert’s hands were over his, clutching at them. He felt the warm pulsing wet between his fingers. A second later, he put his hand over Robert’s mouth to stifle the words: ‘Devon, please, Devon, I care about y—’ He didn’t want to hear what came out when Robert could only tell the truth.
And then everything went still.
He was on all fours on the bed above Robert’s still body, panting. The covers were disarrayed, a red plume spreading slowly into the bed. With a yank, he pulled the horn out and pushed backward. His legs felt unsteady, so that his step back was uneven, before he stilled himself. In the silent room, he answered the question that Robert hadn’t asked.
‘You thought you knew what a unicorn was,’ he said, his breathing still shallow. ‘But you were wrong.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
WILL WOKE WITH a jerk to the sound of hoofbeats. Grace and Sarah were still sleeping, soundless shapes under blankets in the small room in the gatekeep tower. A light sleeper, he rose quietly and looked out from the gatekeep window. Cyprian was on watch on the high walls, having just opened the gate. In the courtyard below, Will saw Violet returning from an excursion that had had her out half the night. He went down to greet her.
It was the early hours of the morning, and the light was still grey and blue. Will had dozed and woken throughout the night, snatching rest where he could. Most of his alertness had centred on Cyprian, silent and closed off since he had lit the Flame. But it was Violet who had pushed out of the gatekeep in the dark and ridden out of the Hall.
He approached her in the grey light as she dismounted. She looked like she’d had no sleep, her face drawn and her knuckles bruised, her tunic covered in blood.
‘Did you kill anyone?’
He asked it steadily, holding her gaze as she turned to him with dark, hollowed eyes. She didn’t deny it at first, just drew a breath and looked away to one side.
‘I didn’t kill him. I wanted to.’
‘Him?’ She didn’t answer. He watched her loop her horse’s reins through an iron ring in the courtyard holding area, then stop, resting her hand on its white neck as if drawing from its strength. ‘Who?’
Another silence.
Then: ‘After we found the horn, I asked Justice about unicorns. He told me they survived the war, but were hunted by humans until there was only one left. He said humans found the last unicorn, chased it down with dogs, hobbled it, and cut off its horn and tail. The Horn of Truth … it came from that unicorn.’