That’s not what happened, he wanted to say.
‘She wasn’t my mother,’ Will said.
It had taken him months to find his way to London and learn the name of the man connected to the attacks. He had taken on dock work for Simon, planning to find a way to get close to him, and learn what he could about himself and his past. The past had come for him instead. But his mother had hidden her secrets too well. Her old servant Matthew and the Stewards had both mistaken Will for her real child.
The Stewards would never have helped him if they had known what he was. No one who knew the truth could be trusted. He’d learned that with his mother’s hands around his neck.
A voice behind him said, ‘Will?’
It was like seeing a ghost from his past, his mother standing in the doorway of the house. The dawn light was behind her, her hair in a long blonde plait and her blue eyes like those eyes that had looked at him from the mirror. He blinked.
It wasn’t his mother. It was Katherine.
She was standing there pale and terrified. She had dirt streaked across her face, and her skirts were grimy from hem to knee. She must have ridden all day and all night, as he had. She was staring at him.
The world was tilting out from under him. She’d heard. She’d heard. How much had she heard?
‘Is what he said true?’
‘Katherine—’
‘You killed all those people?’ Her voice was small and shocked, and she looked afraid the way his mother had looked afraid.
‘I didn’t kill them, I—’
He saw Katherine look past him, to the place where Simon lay sprawled out on the ground. Around him the earth was blasted, torn up by the Blade, so that he lay almost at the middle of a crater. Katherine made a small sound.
Simon was dead, unequivocally. A man she had known – had walked with; had taken tea with; had believed that she would marry. Now he lay dead on scoured earth by Will’s hand. Will could see all of that in her face, the disbelieving horror as she looked back at Will.
‘He killed my mother,’ said Will. Those were the words that came out, when he could have said, He killed the Stewards. He tried to kill me.
‘So you killed him?’
‘Yes.’
What else could he answer? He felt sickly exposed, almost shivering at the thought of what she might have overheard.
‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t kill someone. You’re not—’
The Dark King.
The name hung between them, a splinter from the past. Katherine looked at Devon, and Will knew what she had heard. She had heard everything.
‘He would have hurt you,’ said Will. ‘He would have hurt the people I care about.’
Katherine’s face was pale and frightened. ‘You said the Dark King had to be stopped. That he had to be defeated, and that you were the one who was going to do it.’
‘I meant it,’ said Will. ‘I meant that, Katherine—’
That creature from the past that he felt – that he could still feel – trying to control everything. The Dark King like a hand reaching out of the dark, setting in motion his unstoppable plans, and Will trying somehow to believe the Elder Steward that he could be the one to—
A terrible sound cut through the dawn: the scream of an animal; the shriek of a nightmare. It echoed off the peaks, coming from everywhere and nowhere. The sky began to grow darker, as if something was putting out the dawn.
No—
‘What is that?’ Katherine’s head jerked towards the trees.
No, no, no. It was Devon who answered, Devon who had heard that sound before, long ago. Will could see it on his face, a primal, ancient fear. Devon looked like he was keeping himself in place only through an effort of will.
‘A Shadow King,’ Devon said. And then: ‘Tell her.’ In his eye, the hard glint of one determined to see things through to the end.
The truth, laid bare between them.
‘It’s come to kill the Blood of the Lady,’ said Will.
Promise.
Sent by Simon on its single mission, to seek out his mother’s children and end her line.
Will, promise.
‘I thought you said that you weren’t the Blood of the Lady,’ said Katherine. ‘That you were—’
‘It’s not here for me,’ said Will. ‘It’s here for you.’
She didn’t understand. She looked frightened and out of place, her world one of drawing rooms and elegant clothes and fine manners.
‘What do you mean?’ said Katherine. ‘Will, what do you mean?’