Sarcean.
He saw again a shadow reaching out of the past, spreading out over London, over Europe, over a world that had no defences because it had forgotten. In his vision, then as now, the lights went out one by one until all was dark and still.
He’d stop it if he could, he thought. He’d stop it from happening again. He’d prove to his mother that he—
‘What do I have to do?’
The Elder Steward didn’t answer him at once, just looked at him with searching eyes.
‘You said Simon was close,’ said Will. ‘You said my mother stopped him in the past, but that now he was almost at his goal. How?’ He could see in her eyes that there was something she didn’t want to tell him, and he was suddenly desperate to know. He focused on Simon as someone he could fight, something he could do.
‘Simon has acquired something,’ said the Elder Steward after a pause. ‘Something he’s needed for a long time. Call it the last piece of a puzzle that he is trying to solve … We are working to get it back before he can.’ She would not say more. ‘The Stewards are here to stop Simon. At all costs, we will fight to prevent him from returning the Dark King.’ Her eyes on Will’s were steady. ‘But if we fail, you must be ready.’
‘Ready.’ Will felt a cold understanding settling in him, a terrible truth that he couldn’t push out of his mind. Will, promise. For that was the last part of it, the final realisation in his mother’s eyes. ‘You mean to kill him. That’s what you think I have to do. Kill the Dark King before his new reign ends this world.’
‘Ready to face an enemy unlike any you have ever seen,’ said the Elder Steward. ‘One who will seek to turn your mind to darkness, to sway you to his cause, even as he ends this world to make way for his own. A relentless force seeking out any who oppose him, extinguishing every last spark of light and hope, unto the very ends of the earth.’
The Elder Steward picked up the wall torch. ‘Look. I know you can read the words they wrote.’ She held the torch aloft, illuminating the dark above the giant doors. High above, there were words crudely chiselled in the stone.
Will turned cold, only half hearing the Elder Steward as she spoke.
‘These doors mark the entry to the inner fort. It is the oldest and strongest part of the Hall.
‘But these words were written above every door in every fort, in every town. These are the words the people saw as they barricaded themselves in when their outer walls were breached. As they waited in the dark … their last cry, their greatest fear … even as their doors broke open, and they faced what was on the other side.’
Will could almost feel it, the fear as the people huddled together. The torchlight flickered over the words.
He knew what it said. He could read the ancient script that the people of the old world had carved in rock as they huddled together in the dark.
He is coming.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘YOU’RE LOYAL TO him, aren’t you,’ said Justice.
He meant Will. Violet flushed. ‘He saved my life.’ A stranger saved my life the day I learned my family planned to kill me. Will might be a stranger, but he was the only one here who knew what she was. He knew, and he had stood by her side.
After a long, studying look: ‘Come with me,’ said Justice, seeming to make a decision. ‘There’s something I want you to see.’
Violet’s palms felt clammy as they made their way towards the eastern side of the Hall. Being alone with Justice made her nervous. It was the powerful strength of his presence, and the omnipresent danger of what he would do if he found out she was a Lion.
Rounding a corner, she heard the same faint metallic sounds of sword fighting that had drifted into her room this morning. They drew her forward, past a row of columns to a wide-open arena.
She saw perfect rows of young fighters. There were perhaps two dozen novitiates. They all wore the same silvery-grey tunics Violet and Will had been given, embroidered with the Steward’s star, and skirted to mid-thigh. They all moved in unison, a pattern of sword movements that flowed one into another, identical. She watched, entranced, as their swords lifted gracefully, then arced to the right.
One boy was astonishingly better than the others, his long hair flying around him as his sword sliced the air. She thought she recognised him. Cyprian. The novitiate who had accompanied Will into the great hall.
She couldn’t take her eyes off him. He was strikingly handsome, the way a statue is handsome, nose, eyes and lips all in faultless symmetry. But it was the way he moved, embodying the ideal Steward, that made her yearn to be like him, to fit somewhere as well as he fit, to find a place where she—