‘It’s all right,’ Will said to her, and then he looked at the others. ‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Violet. Stop it. She isn’t a threat.’
‘She’s Simon’s fiancée,’ said Violet.
‘Simon!’ said the boy on horseback next to her, and he was drawing his sword too, a clear warning.
Her heart jammed in her throat. Will stepped out in front of her, facing down the sharp steel.
‘I told her to come,’ said Will. ‘She’s not a threat. She’s alone. She came here for help.’ And then he was coming towards her, putting his hand on Ladybird’s neck, and he said quietly, ‘Didn’t you, Katherine.’
‘I wasn’t followed,’ she said, remembering the slow, creeping escape from the house with Elizabeth, avoiding cobblestones to muffle hoofbeats and praying the horses wouldn’t whicker. ‘I wasn’t – Lord Crenshaw doesn’t know I’m here – I wasn’t—’
‘You did the right thing,’ said Will with a warning glance back at Violet and the boy. ‘First let’s get you and your sister inside.’
Katherine was wet and cold, but there was nothing here, no sign of civilisation. The empty marsh seemed to stretch out in every direction. ‘Inside?’
‘If Cyprian allows it,’ said Will. He turned to the boy. ‘You’re the only one who can let them through the wards.’
‘I don’t trust her,’ said Violet.
The boy – Cyprian – seemed to look her over, weighing the decision. Sitting straight-backed on his white horse, he looked like a paragon of some bygone era. She wished she weren’t wet and shivering. She wished her teeth weren’t chattering and her curls weren’t sodden. She tried her best, despite all this, to look respectable.
‘My father wouldn’t have let her in,’ said Cyprian. ‘He thought of the Hall as a fortress that we had to protect.’ Looking at her, he seemed to remember words someone else had spoken. ‘But in the old world, the Hall wasn’t only a fortress. It was also a sanctuary.’ He sheathed his sword and gave her a nod. ‘If you truly need our help, then you are welcome in our Hall.’
Will rode alongside her. His huge black horse with its arched neck dwarfed Ladybird, but he reached down and took her gloved hand in his, holding it as her heart thundered in her chest. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said.
But she was afraid; she was terrified.
Ahead of her, Cyprian and Violet rode through the broken arch, and simply disappeared. ‘Will?’ She said his name as a cry for help. His hand squeezed hers. I don’t want to go. He urged them both forward.
She felt a lurch, and the marsh was suddenly gone, and in its place there was the black outline of a bleak castle, its beacon the last ember in a dead fire. She shivered looking up at it. Where were the lights and the servants and the warmth of a welcome?
What had happened here? She remembered the light Will had conjured in the garden. Some part of her had thought Will would lead her to a place of light. A place of safety. But this place was dark and terrible. She looked at Will as he swung down from his horse in the courtyard. This was the world that he had come from?
‘Is th-this – where you live?’ she asked Will.
‘It’s where I’ve been staying,’ said Will.
‘It’s horrible,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Like it’s dead.’
‘Elizabeth!’ said Katherine.
‘It’s all right,’ said Will, looking around at the courtyard grimly. ‘She’s right. It’s not where I would have hoped to bring you. But it’s where we’ll be safe.’
With the castle behind him, he looked different, changed from a handsome young gallant to a fey, unknowable young man. Her old life was falling away, as if it hadn’t been real, as though the event that had brought her here had shattered an illusion, revealing a reality that was as dark as it was true.
‘Come,’ said Will, holding out a hand to help her down from her horse.
Katherine sat in her drying skirts on a three-legged stool by the fire and tried not to think about why she had come.
Will hadn’t taken her into the castle but into a smaller tower at the wall that he called the gatekeep. But the thought of the castle’s black outline still hung over her, an ominous shape that made her shiver.
The room itself was nothing like a parlour. It was more like a barracks, cut out of stone that was darkened and cracked with age. Up the short stairs was a room filled with five makeshift sleeping pallets, as if Will and the others were all camping together in this bleak ruin. Two girls in blue tunics had come out of the gatekeep to greet them. Will had defended her presence to them, before leading her in to sit by the fire.