Like he was a monster. Like he’d hunt a woman down and kill her. Like he served a dark power, and did it willingly. A horror rose up in her. Simon’s creature. It’s in his blood. She remembered Tom splattered in blood driving an iron bar through a woman’s chest on the Sealgair. Long ago, there was a world that was destroyed in its battles against a Dark King …
A burst of laughter to her left. A cluster of young men in rough-spun shirtsleeves passed her, still slapping each other on the back at the tail end of their joke. Violet let out a breath and shook her head.
The street was just a street. There were no men out searching, no shadowy figures sent by Simon. Of course there weren’t. Those stories were just stories. This was England, where everyone knew magic wasn’t real, and there wasn’t any King except George.
She hurried on.
Her brother would be at Simon’s warehouse. He’d insist on working with his first coughing breath, still dripping river water. He would see her and throw his arms around her, as glad to see her as she’d be to see him. He’d ruffle her hair, and things between them would be the way they used to be.
No one needed to know that she had helped Will escape.
She slipped skilfully through a piece of broken boarding into a loading yard. She had grown up on these docks, where she had often scavenged odd jobs for herself. Some nights, she had snuck out of her house to sleep high up among stacked crates, or just to sit, gazing out at the ships, their lights bright. Now, clambering up a stack of cargo, she looked out at the river that was like a second home.
And went cold.
It looked like the site of an explosion. Great tracts of riverbank were gouged and burned where they’d been lashed by ropes of black fire. Ruined, dripping cargo lined the foreshore. The pier was smashed and twisted, the lapping water clogged with splintered wood.
On the bank, dockers strained at a winch crane. A team of men had roped four draught horses in heavy collars and were calling ‘Heave, ho!’ as they hauled. A wave of horror passed over her.
They were dredging the river for the Corrupted Blade.
No, no, no. The thought of that thing back in Simon’s hands made her stomach churn. The cold, trapped terror of the hold swept over her as she remembered Simon’s man vomiting up black blood.
They were going to find it. The search spanned the full length of the docks. Simon’s men were manning barges with nets and long poles, and somewhere down there the Blade was waiting, the corrupted horror of its presence barely held back by its sheath.
—black fire tearing a hole in the hull, the men around her rotting from the inside out—
Staring out at the wreckage now, she saw the scale of what the Blade had done. Simon collected objects, she recalled sickly. She thought of Simon’s archaeological digs, his trade outposts, his empire spread across the world all to drag things up out of the earth and back to London. Like the Blade, full of dark power that could tear a ship in half.
I don’t think the two of you have any idea what you’re caught up in, Justice had said.
‘Capsized,’ she heard from the gathered crowd on the bank, trying to fit natural explanations to the sight, when nothing natural had done this. ‘Burst pump’ and ‘Freak weather.’
She tore her eyes from the wreckage. The bank swarmed with onlookers held back by Simon’s dockers. She glimpsed a few distinctive jackets, quay guards from the Thames River Police. A flash of auburn hair amid the crowd on the bank—
Tom.
She was scrabbling down from the crates the instant she saw him.
Staying out of sight, she manoeuvred through the dredged cargo, glimpsing Tom greeting the Sealgair’s Captain Maxwell. As the two men walked, she followed the distinctive glint of Tom’s hair.
They stopped on the far side of a few stacks of cork. There was no one else around, just her brother and the captain talking in low voices – perfect for an inconspicuous homecoming.
Violet stepped out, opening her mouth to say Tom when she heard—
‘—thirty-nine dead in the attack, but there are no more bodies in the water. The boy is missing.’
‘And the girl?’
The auburn-haired man wasn’t Tom. It was her father.
Some child’s instinct stopped her in her tracks, the sight of her father’s back and shoulders conjuring up guilt, as though she might be in trouble. Hastily, she stepped back, finding a shadowed space between the piles of cork.
‘Where is Violet, Maxwell?’ Her father’s shoulders were taut, his voice clipped in the way it became when he was controlling himself.