For a moment he could almost see it, the armies of the Dark converging on the Hall and the single light on its walls, shining, defiant.
Will stood looking out at it for a long time.
Later, when he had washed, put on the sleeping shirt, and eaten the small repast down to the crumbs, he lay in bed with the Lady’s medallion skin-warm against his chest. After a while, his thoughts became a dream in which he walked these halls long ago, with the Lady beside him. She turned to him with his mother’s eyes, but her face warped and changed.
And where the Hall had been, he saw nothing but a great darkness, and above it rose a pale crown and burning eyes of black flame. They drew closer and closer, and he couldn’t run. No one could run. The black flame rose to consume him, and then to consume everything.
Gasping, Will woke and lay staring up at the carved stone star, and it was a long time before he managed to go back to sleep again.
CHAPTER TEN
VIOLET WOKE TO the sound of bells and a drifting morning chant. The chant was melodious, a monastic choral weaving in and out of her sleep. But something about it didn’t make sense. The language was unfamiliar. It wasn’t Latin. It sounded older. And why could she hear monks instead of the shouts and calls of London traffic? Then in a rush it all came back to her.
Tom can’t come into his true power without killing another like him. Her father’s cold, matter-of-fact voice, and her decision to trek at night across marshes with the Steward called Justice, who hated Lions and had tried to kill her brother.
She was inside the Hall of the Stewards.
Pushing up in bed, she saw a strange, high-ceilinged stone room, with a carved mantel fireplace and arched windows set deep into the stone. The occasional calls she could hear were from outside, where Stewards patrolled the walls. The chants drifting in the windows were Stewards in some morning ritual.
She was surrounded by Stewards, and every single one of them wanted to kill her.
In London, the kitchen would be preparing breakfast: hot porridge, bacon, eggs or buttery fish. Her father would be the first down to the table. And Tom—
Did Tom know she was missing? And then, more frightening: did Tom know? Did he know why her father had brought her to England – what he had planned to do?
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Justice had said to her last night, misinterpreting her expression as she had stared up stunned at the lights of the Hall. ‘No creature of Simon’s has ever set foot inside our walls.’ She had instinctively put her hand on her wrist, remembering her longing for Simon’s brand only that morning. No creature of Simon’s …
Escorted in past walls ablaze with flaming torches, she had found the Hall already buzzing with an outsider’s arrival – Will’s. They had reacted in shock to Violet too – the second interloper. Overwhelmed, she had been only dimly aware of High Janissary Jannick, demanding, ‘What of the others?’
Justice had dropped to one knee, head bowed, right hand a fist over his heart in a formal, old-fashioned pose.
‘There was a Lion,’ Justice had said. ‘The others are dead.’
They hate Lions. She had seen the High Janissary’s look of detestation at the word. And the cold, chilling thought in this strange place: What would they do to me if they knew I was one?
She pushed out of bed. Her small room didn’t have the grandeur of the great hall, but the strange, faded beauty of the place was more visible than it had been last night: the remnants of frescoes; long ribs of the curved ceiling; the archway leading to the balcony.
From outside, she could hear rhythmic calls and disciplined responses of a large group moving through military exercises in perfect unison.
And then she saw something that made her stop, her heart speeding up.
A Steward’s uniform was lying out on the chest at the end of her bed. Not the surcoat and chain mail that Justice wore, but a silvery-grey tunic with a similar cut, and the star blazon on the chest, along with wool leggings and soft boots – the clothing that the Stewards wore when not armoured for battle.
It had been laid out here for her, like the bed shirt she had put on last night. She looked over at her own clothes, a dank pile of dried mud by the fireplace. She couldn’t wrestle back into them and didn’t particularly want to. But—
She picked up the tunic. It was clean and light to the touch, made of some fabric she’d never encountered before, with embroidery around the star blazon. She could see the tiny, exquisite stitching, and when she pulled it on over her head, she found it fit her perfectly. Cinching her belt and pulling on the leggings and the boots, she was aware of an ease of movement that even trousers and a jacket didn’t offer. It felt like putting on clothing made just for her.