‘Halt!’ called Cyprian.
The novitiates instantly stopped, their sword tips held out with unwavering precision. She was the interruption, she realised suddenly. They were all looking at her. She fought the instinct to take a step back.
‘What are you doing here, outsider?’ Cyprian’s voice was cold. He crossed the training courtyard to confront her, his sword still in his hand. ‘It’s that girl,’ she heard one of the novitiates say behind Cyprian. ‘That girl who came from outside.’ ‘Are you here to spy on our training?’
She flushed. ‘I heard you from the corridor. I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to watch.’
‘Steward training is private,’ said Cyprian. ‘Outsiders don’t belong.’
‘I brought her here,’ said Justice, arriving behind her. ‘She is our honoured guest, and there is little harm in her watching you practise.’
‘Shouldn’t you be out looking for my brother?’
That stopped Justice completely.
‘It is the Steward way to offer aid to those in need,’ Justice began, his voice gently chastising. Cyprian was uncowed.
‘You’re barely half a Steward, walking around without a shieldmate. You’ve made a mockery of our Order with your mistakes and your recklessness.’
‘That’s enough, Cyprian,’ said Justice, his voice hardening. ‘You may be foremost among the novitiates, but you do not yet have the authority of a Steward.’
Cyprian accepted the reprimand without lowering his eyes.
‘Justice might think you can be trusted, but I don’t,’ he said, his eyes holding Violet with a cold look. ‘I’ll be watching you.’
‘Do not let Cyprian disturb you. He has striven his whole life to please his father, and High Janissary Jannick does not take well to outsiders.’
Justice had brought her to a room that had the look of a disused training hall, its walls hung with old arms and armaments. He spoke kindly, but standing alone in a room with Justice was not reassuring. Instead, the tense sense of danger returned tenfold. In his white livery, Justice was a fighter in a place made for fighting, part of this space filled with the ghost of battles from an ancient past. Cyprian’s words jangled in her head.
‘Why did you bring me here?’ Violet tried to keep the tension from her voice.
She could still hear the sounds of the novitiates training, though they were distant. They were a reminder that she was here under false pretenses. She had the sudden fear that Justice was going to tell her that she couldn’t stay in the Hall. Will’s insistence that she was his friend – that he wouldn’t go anywhere without her – had only brought her so far.
Sent back to London, she would have nowhere to go. She waited tensely. But Justice didn’t answer her question directly.
‘This is the room where I trained for many years when I was a boy.’ Justice walked forward with an air of nostalgia.
‘You trained here?’
‘I practised the drills here whenever I had time to spare,’ said Justice. ‘That was when I first came to the Hall.’
‘Came?’ said Violet.
Justice nodded. ‘Cyprian is one of the few born to the Hall. Most Stewards are Called. It happens around the age of seven, sometimes earlier.’ She remembered him saying that those of Steward blood were Called from across the world. Cyprian’s parents must have been janissaries, since Stewards took a vow of celibacy. ‘For those of us who are Called, the Hall is like a place we’ve always known, and everything here makes a kind of sense,’ said Justice. ‘Your friend Will felt that way too. He is Blood of the Lady, as I am Blood of the Stewards. We share a connection to the old world. You, on the other hand … You are the first true outsider to come into the Hall.’
Outsider. Cyprian had called her that. He thought she was an ordinary girl brought here from London. He was wrong. She had her own connection to the old world. Just not one that she could ever tell Stewards about.
‘Is that why you showed me those fighters?’
‘I showed you the fighters so that you could see our mission,’ said Justice. ‘Relics of the old world still exist. The Corrupted Blade, the Shield of Rassalon … Stewards scour the world for any surviving objects from those times,’ said Justice. ‘Pieces kept by unknowing collectors, excavations that uncover fragments of the past … Where we find his Dark artefacts, we destroy them or lock them away to prevent them from doing harm. When we must, we battle evil unleashed from such objects, or awakened in archaeological digs that delved too deep into the past.