‘No,’ said Will, feeling unsteady. He made himself say, ‘But I’m a descendant. You’re a Reborn. You were there.’
They were staring at one another. The cell was quiet, heavy stone silencing any sound from upstairs, so that you could almost imagine that you heard the flaming of the torch in its sconce.
‘I don’t remember that life,’ James said. ‘I don’t remember who I was, or what I’ve done. The names, the faces … I only know them from Steward stories and Simon’s excavations. But there’s one thing I do know so well that it’s part of me. Him. The fact of him. The feel of him. It’s deeper than memory, deeper than self, carved into my bones. And I can tell you this.
‘Simon isn’t a tenth of him. Simon’s plans, his power, his ambitions are nothing … Simon can’t comprehend him, as the warmth of a single day can’t comprehend a night that lasts for ten thousand years.’
Will felt the dark and cold of the shadows in the obsidian cell close in around him. ‘You think he’s coming for you.’
James leaned his head back against the wall and smiled. ‘He’s coming for all of us.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
‘YOU ARE NOT in danger!’ Jannick was trying to make himself heard over the din in the Hall. ‘Your companions are not your enemy! No Steward has turned in all the thousands of years of the Hall!’
On the dais next to him, Violet looked out at the chaos, her stomach twisting. Shadows. The Stewards are shadows. Jannick was trying to hold the Order together, but there was a jagged rent between the Stewards, who had all drunk from the Cup, and the novitiates and janissaries who hadn’t, and who were frightened, shocked and angry.
‘Not in danger?’ she heard Beatrix call. ‘The Dark King’s shadows are inside our Hall!’
‘How many?’ It was Sarah, one of the janissaries who had shown Violet to her rooms on her first night in the Hall. ‘How many of you are there?’
Beatrix said, ‘Every single Steward is a shadow – or will be!’
‘You’re right.’ A familiar voice from the doorway cut through the ruckus. The Hall fell silent, so that the only sound was the rhythmic clink of a staff against stone as the Elder Steward made her way to the front of the Hall. ‘Those who have drunk from the Cup will all become shadows. Including me.’
Violet stepped back with the others to let the Elder Steward pass. There was something different about the way the hushed Stewards looked at her, a new, fearful awe. Her age … the only Steward with white hair, the only Steward with rheumy eyes and wrinkled skin. With a shiver, Violet understood that the Elder Steward’s age was a sign of her power: she had held her shadow back longer than any other Steward.
‘Now you know what the Stewards face,’ she said. ‘We fight on every front, without and within. We cannot ever abandon our duty. We cannot ever relax our guard. For what stands between us and the Dark is only our training, and the vow that we have taken to die before we turn.’
It was Justice who Violet looked at. His gifts would have marked him as a candidate for the Cup early. He would have spent his youth training for it. A childhood of ascetic self-denial: no child’s mischief, no teen’s rebellion, no flush of adulthood and first lover. He had sublimated all his body’s desires into mastery and control, without knowing what he was training for. The Cup will make you strong. The Cup will give you power. That’s what the novitiates were told.
When did they learn the cost of that power?
No one could agree to drink if they really knew the price, she thought – or would have thought, except that she could see the faces of the novitiates. Beatrix had straightened her shoulders. Emery had lifted his chin. They knew the price now. And they were deciding right before her eyes that they would drink. Just as Carver had drunk.
They had already been ready to give up their lives for the cause. The Cup was just one more step.
Was this how it happened? They trained for it, they learned the price, and then they drank? And then they watched in pairs for any sign, ready to kill their shieldmate, while their shieldmate watched, ready to kill them?
And if their training slipped even for one second—？
Violet drew in an unsteady breath. ‘What happens when you turn?’
The Elder Steward’s eyes were grave. ‘Bound to the Dark King, a shadow has no will of its own, but only follows the orders of its master. Barely resembling the man or woman it once was, it is an incorporeal horror that can pass through any door or gate or wall. And it cannot be fought. No mortal can touch its shadowy form. It kills and maims and rends, and all the while stays invulnerable.’