‘I’ll find him.’
‘No. I’ll find him,’ James said.
The gathered men were uneasy, shifting in the repressed silence. The three too-pale men swung silently down off their horses, their single black pieces of armour faintly repelling. Those left on the banks were shooting nervous glances from them to James and back again. Will felt it too, a strange pressure growing in his chest.
James merely peeled off his gloves.
The three men took up positions around James, as if guarding him from interruption. Their livery was emblazoned with Simon’s three black hounds, but it was the single piece of armour they each wore that made Will queasy. The pieces were different, as if the three men had scavenged different parts from the same armour suit. Pitch-black and metal-heavy, they emanated wrongness, like the chalk-white faces of the men and their staring, sunken eyes.
One of the gathered dockmen handed James something – a patch of frayed blue fabric. James closed his newly bare fist around it. Will realised with a shiver that it was a bloodstained scrap of his own jacket.
Then James went very still.
It was so quiet now that Will could hear the flaming of the torches. Behind him, Tom’s father yanked Tom off his knees and pulled him backward as if out of the way of danger, and the watching men were shrinking away from James as well, like singed paper curling back from a flame.
Will could feel – something happening. Like words whispering, I will find you. I will always find you. Like a metal gauntlet closing around flesh. Try to run. Behind him the flame light illuminated the faces of the men. They were terrified.
‘Will,’ said Justice.
It jerked him out of the moment, his heart pounding. He heard the urgency in Justice’s voice and was surprised to see fear in Justice’s eyes, reflecting that of the men on the docks, as if they knew what was to come.
‘We have to go. Now.’
The stirrings of a breeze were kicking up dust and scraps in whirls of air by James’s feet. The torch on the pole closest to James flickered and went out like a snuffed flame on a wick. The wind rose; it wasn’t the wind. It was something else.
‘We have to go. We have to leave before—’
Before James gathers his power.
He could feel it, a tang in the air. He felt an almost mesmerised desire to stay and watch James do it. And a desire to see if he could stop him.
Was there a way to stop magic?
Will looked past Justice to a winch crane that stood out near the river, repurposed to haul goods from the water. Those manning it had paused their work when James arrived. The crate it held was dangling in the air, still dripping.
It was dripping quite close to James.
Beside Will towered the pile of salvage from the Sealgair, a high stack of beams, which included long thick interior logs and two sections of the main mast. Tied with rope to prevent them rolling.
Will put his hand on the rope knot.
If the beams rolled, they would knock the brace from the winch crane and send the crate crashing down to hit James, or close enough to distract him.
Will’s heart was pounding. He knew how to tie ropes and untie them. He knew how to alter knots to make them slip.
Before Justice could stop him, he tugged at the fibrous knot of rope and pulled it open.
‘What are you doing?’ Justice grabbed his hand back from the rope, but Will was barely aware of it, his eyes on James. Show me what you can do.
The first beam swung out before it rolled, missing the crane and splashing into the river. It was the second beam that hit, knocking the brace from the crane winch, which spun violently, releasing the whole length of its chain in a tumbling crash and rattle of noise.
High above, the crate plummeted.
James’s head jerked around towards it – as the released chain flew upward – as the crate plunged – James flung out his hand and the crate abruptly stopped, frozen unnaturally in midair by his gesture.
It was a display of power beyond anything he had dreamed. For all Justice’s talk of magic, the sight of a boy holding a ton crate suspended in midair with nothing more than his will stole the breath out of Will’s lungs. He had wanted to test it – to see it. Now he had.
Got you, Will thought with a twist of excitement. James was visibly struggling to control the crate, his chest rising and falling, his outflung arm trembling.
Everything had stopped: the wind, the sense of rising danger – it had all cut off the instant James’s concentration had swung to the crate.
Simon’s men were stumbling back, frightened of the crate above them, the open, unnatural display of power. A second later James swept his hand sideways, and the motion flung the crate violently away, smashing it into a thousand harmless splinters on the bank.