Sitting by the fire in the downstairs common room, he began to write a letter painstakingly to her aunt and uncle. Tomorrow he would find a man of the local parish and tell him where to find her. She would still be there. The body was horrifically preserved like stone. Petrified. Her black marble eyes staring open forever. When he had brought her into his mother’s house, she had been heavy like stone too, and cold.
He had sat with her for a long time.
They would find Simon dead. And the three men who had once been Simon’s Remnants. And every bird, plant and animal close enough to be touched by the black fire.
Will tried not to think about the dead.
His room was up narrow stairs of dark wood. Thick stone walls covered with plaster and wash gave it a sturdy, enclosed feeling. At one end was a bed with a wooden frame, and a fire burning low beneath the mantel; at the other end a small table and chair, and a curtained window cut thickly into the stone. Its normalcy was surreal, like his conversation with the innkeeper. Thruppence for cold meats and ale and Weather’s holding and Our boy put horse in field in back. The soft dialect of the Midlands seemed to belong to a different world. Will stripped off Simon’s jacket and looked blankly at the bed with its coverings of clean linen.
A footstep – but before the sound came the feeling: insubstantial, a shift of air. A figure was emerging from the billowing of the window curtain. Katherine, Will thought. It ought to be her, but she was lying cold in a ruined house, and the vital shiver that went through him was a response that he’d only ever had to one person.
‘James,’ said Will.
He was a pale gleam in the dark, with his brushed blond hair over the fitted jacket Simon had bought him, and the face that was like nothing else left on this earth. Will felt the ache of something wrenched out of its time: something that shouldn’t be here, alongside his own terrible feeling of gladness that it was.
‘You did it,’ said James, in a quiet voice laced with disbelief and wonder at his own burgeoning freedom. ‘You stopped Simon from returning the Dark King.’
He didn’t know.
The choked feeling that pushed into Will’s throat wasn’t a laugh. James didn’t know. He didn’t recognise Will, didn’t see in his face the master that he had known long ago. And then came the darker thought: James didn’t know but was drawn to him anyway; maybe he felt what Will felt, a helpless fascination, an oiled danger, sliding through reluctance and desire together. Both of them Reborn. Both of them brought here by a Dark King who couldn’t let go. All Will could do was look at James and feel that same acquisitive shudder. The desire to step towards him was one that hit him in the throat.
‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ said Will.
In a different world, he had put a collar around James’s neck and forced him to kill his own people. He had made James do his bidding. And then there were the darker whispers, the accusation that the High Janissary had thrown at him, and that Gauthier had spoken of almost covetously. That James had been the Dark King’s plaything. That James had been in his bed.
The Dark King brought you here, thought Will, feeling the knowledge of it trickle through him. He wanted you, and he made sure that he’d have you.
That I’d have you. That thought was darkly dangerous.
‘It’s not a good time to be around me,’ said Will.
When he looked up, James was closer. James was looking at him like he knew what Will was feeling, and was here with him anyway.
But he didn’t know. Not really.
‘I know you killed Simon,’ said James. ‘I don’t think you’ll hurt me.’
The light from the fire lit the planes of James’s face. The trust in his blue eyes was for a saviour who he had started to believe was real.
Will wanted to laugh. He had hurt him. He had driven an ivory spike into his shoulder, then killed the man who had raised him. And that was only a pale shadow of what he’d done to him before. Once upon a time, he had been a man who had taken what he wanted, and maybe that was easier than this painful ache he felt. ‘Won’t I?’
The curve of a smile. ‘I’m more powerful than you are, remember?’
Will felt the whisper of invisible hands against his skin. James was showing off his power. Look what I can do. Of course: James’s sense of value had always relied on what his abilities were worth to someone else.
It uncurled something in Will, a desire to say, That’s right. Show me. Earn my attention. He bit down on it, forcefully ignoring the feel of James’s ghost touch against his skin.