They had returned to the White Hart, reasoning that if Justice had brought them here, it would be a safe place for Will to stay while Violet searched for Marcus. A boy took their horses with more deference than she had expected. Looking at Will, she was surprised to realise that he looked different. The Stewards had always had something otherworldly about them, and Will had that quality now too – the way he carried himself, his posture straight, his movements purposeful, as though the squalor of London didn’t touch him. She glimpsed herself in the inn window and was shocked to see that she looked just like him: knightly, even in her London clothes.
A woman threw a bucket of slops out of a window and Violet sidestepped, Steward-fast. Her stomach twisted as she realised what she had done – would instincts like that give her away to her family? Would they see a Steward when they looked at her? Would they know?
As she had hidden her Lion self from the Stewards, would she now have to hide her Steward self from her family?
New sounds and smells hit her as the inn door opened, a wave of shouts and bellowing laughter, and the smell of thick gravy, mouldering straw and stale beer. She walked into a loud, raucous scene, hard to make out in the dim haze of the interior.
‘This way, good sirs,’ the innsman said, and she had never had a ‘good sir’ or ‘good miss’ before. She and Will ordered two mutton joints with gravy and received a little bob of the head from the innswoman. It wasn’t just her reflexes; it was a difference in bearing. Something in her was changing the behaviour of others.
She chose an out-of-the-way table where she and Will could sit without being seen, and kept one eye on the door, alert for the possibility of danger.
‘People never call me sir,’ said Will, leaning in to whisper across the stained wooden table. In the dimly lit corner of the inn, they were seated across from one another.
‘Me neither. They call me boy, or scamp.’
‘Wastrel.’
‘Wretch.’
‘You there.’
Or worse. ‘London – it’s … different than I remember.’ She couldn’t quite bring herself to say what gnawed at her: I’m the one who’s different. London hasn’t changed. It had been three months in the Hall. Only three months? How could three months have turned her into a stranger in her own city?
‘Louder and more crowded, with no morning chants,’ said Will. She managed a weak smile.
Two mutton joints were plopped down onto the rough wooden table in front of them. She looked down into the greasy, congealing mess and felt sick. It smelled rank, grey and brown, the plate encrusted with grime. She forced herself to take a bite and it was thickly tasteless, its different textures unpleasant, this part gluggy, this part chewy, this part rough. She forced the swallow down. She didn’t feel the wondrous revitalisation that came after a bite of Steward food, the crunch of a fresh pea pod, or the sweet tang of an orange plucked from the tree. It just made her stomach heavy.
A burst of raucous laughter to her left made her head jerk around, a group of men slamming their tin mugs down on the table. Behind them two men jostled each other, unwashed, unshaven figures slopping beer onto the blackened straw. Her eyes darted from them to the figure near the door, shouting for the innsman. She felt jumpy, on edge. She looked back at Will uneasily.
‘We haven’t been recognised,’ he said.
‘It’s not that. It’s—’ She struggled to put it into words.
‘They don’t know,’ said Will, and she nodded slowly as he cut to the heart of it. ‘They don’t know about the old world, about the shadows, about any of it. They don’t know what’s coming.’
Her skin prickled, because that was it: the unnerving part, all this chaotic life, it was unknowing, and therefore vulnerable. ‘No one’s warned them,’ she said. ‘No one’s told them a fight’s coming.’ They were just living their ordinary lives. But worse than that: ‘Even if someone told them—’
‘They wouldn’t believe it,’ said Will.
She nodded. These people – there was a battle raging and these people didn’t even know it. They didn’t know the truth, just like she hadn’t known it. In the whole inn, only she and Will knew about the Dark King’s threat.
She felt the loneliness of the Steward mission for the first time: to be the only watchers, the only ones who remembered the past, who knew the dangers of what was coming …
More than that. The Stewards had always seemed so detached – so separate from the world. They kept to the ancient ways in the Hall, and it kept them in the ancient world, as if they had never really left it. Year by year, the world outside changed, but they stayed the same, growing more and more apart from people’s lives beyond the Hall.