CHAPTER SIX

‘IT’S A GIFT she’s been brought back.’

‘It’s unnatural. It’s the Devil’s work.’

‘It’s the Lord’s mercy. You saw her, Mrs Kent. The way her body was petrified like stone. It was an illness, some kind of malady we mistook for death. And God’s grace has restored her—’

Visander’s eyes opened.

Voices. There were voices coming from beyond the room where they had brought him, weak and barely able to stand. His captors huddled together outside the door and whispered about him in tones of apprehension and fear.

He remembered his arrival here in snippets. The grey-haired man who had found him had shouted for help, calling himself uncle to this body. They had fed him some kind of drink, coaxing it down his throat. He had coughed it up, and it had come up grainy with mud and dirt from out of his gullet and stomach.

In a tiled room two women had washed him, scrubbing him down, his mind revolting at the body that was not his, while the dirt sloughed away from his skin and hair. The room was foreign, full of strange furnishings and objects he didn’t recognise. Even the white robe they had dressed him in was a style he had never seen before.

Waking now, he saw he was on a bed stuffed with the feathers of dead birds, still wearing the white robe. Above him, fabric hung in a draped canopy of light green. His head felt dizzy, his thoughts thick and his limbs wrong. But his eyes fell upon the muddy garments that had been stripped from him. It was not a dream. He had returned, to a place he did not know, into a body that was not his own

‘Where is the Queen?’ he had demanded as they had first manhandled him. ‘You must take me to her.’ His voice had come out harsh with disuse. It had not been his voice, girlish and thin, dizzying him.

‘What language is that? What is she saying?’

‘I don’t know – she looks sick, like she’s—’

He had been able to understand them. But they had not been able to understand him. How? How did he know their language when he had never heard it before? Her language, he thought, with a shuddering, revolted feeling towards the flesh that he wore and could not operate. He had the sudden urge to tear it off and find himself underneath. Why had he come back in this woman’s – Katherine’s – body? Where was his own body?

Where was his sword, Ekthalion, and his steed, Indeviel? He was a champion without a blade and a rider without a mount. He thought, Indeviel, I swore I would return and I will. I will find you and fulfil the oath we swore on the Long Ride. And with you at my side and Ekthalion in my hand, I will strike down the Dark King.

‘Mr Prescott,’ he heard now, the words coming from outside his room. ‘I’m so glad you came. We didn’t know what else to do.’

‘Sinclair was happy to send me, Mrs Kent. He thinks of your daughter as family. Had her wedding to his son taken place, it would have been so.’

‘She’s not herself. She speaks in tongues, it’s as if she doesn’t know us—’

‘May I see her? Where is she?’

‘Through here—’

Visander pushed himself up on the bed just as the door swung open.

The man who entered was an older human, dressed in a black jacket that gave him the shape of an elongated triangle, wide shoulders tapering to a thin waist and long legs. His hair was grey, cut short with long sideburns. He had an air of authority, peeling dark gloves from his fingers as he entered.

‘Who are you?’ said Visander, and then felt a wave of dizziness, unsure if the words had come out in Katherine’s language or his own.

But the human appeared to understand him, his expression changing the moment Visander spoke. He halted for an instant, and then he came forward more slowly. He didn’t stop until he reached the edge of the bed, where he sat, disturbingly close, the mattress dipping at his weight.

‘You don’t know me?’ said the human.

Should I? Visander wanted to spit at him. He felt vulnerable in this bed, barely clothed while the human wore heavy fabrics. He wanted to reach for his sword, and had to remind himself that Ekthalion was missing. It made him feel naked, more so than the thin white robe: no weapon.

‘I am Mr Prescott, a solicitor to the Earl of Sinclair,’ said the human, when Visander didn’t answer. ‘His eldest son, Simon, was engaged to the daughter of this family. Her name was Katherine.’ The human – Prescott – kept his eyes on Visander and his question mild. ‘Who are you?’

I am Katherine, Visander knew was what he was supposed to say, to preserve his secret. He did not know who here was enemy and who was friend. Yet something about the way this human looked at him made him speak the truth.

‘I am Visander, the Queen’s Champion, returned to this world to kill the Dark King.’

Prescott smiled.

The expression filled his eyes with gratification. He looked at Visander the way a man might look at a bounty that has fallen into his lap when he expected nothing.

But before Visander could speak, Prescott rose from the bed and moved back to the doorway. There he spoke to the woman in the hall.

‘I have excellent news, Mrs Kent. Sinclair’s younger son, Phillip, will honour Simon’s engagement with your niece.’

‘Mr Prescott—!’ the woman said.

‘Let them be married at once. She will recover better at Ruthern. We’ll move her there for her convalescence. Sinclair has an exceptional physician, and the country air is greatly restoring.’

‘But the strangeness of her words,’ said the woman, ‘the manner of her return; are you not concerned that she—’

‘Not at all,’ said Prescott, looking back at the bed and meeting Visander’s eyes. ‘To return from the dead – is that not a blessing?’

The bedroom was crowded with humans. The older man and woman who called themselves Katherine’s aunt and uncle were present. The aunt’s eyes were wide with concern, the uncle’s face stern. And there was a priest, a seamy, unsavoury man who behaved obsequiously towards Mr Prescott. A younger man with a shock of dark hair arrived last, looking harried and on edge. Prescott greeted him with the name Phillip. There were a great many humans, more than Visander had ever stood among before.

Katherine’s uncle supported Visander’s weight as he rose out of bed, still wearing the white bed robe. Visander’s head swam, his mind barely present. There was a hushed, hurried atmosphere, as if these were subterranean dealings.

Phillip came to stand next to him nervously. A man of average height with dark hair falling into his eyes and a white-cheeked, pinched expression on a fine-boned face, he kept looking towards Prescott as if for approval. ‘But are you sure?’

‘She is a bride worthy of you,’ Mr Prescott said. ‘A bride worthy of Him. I believe He would approve heartily of all we are about to do.’

Bride?

The walls of the room seemed to close in, the gathering suddenly sinister. He tried to get free, but his body was still weak and would not obey him. His limbs were not under his control, his hold on this body faltering at hazy intervals. He couldn’t move, held up by Katherine’s uncle. This room was not his prison; this flesh was. His grip on the human language flickered in and out, and his head was foggy.

The priest spoke quickly, as if nervous and hurried, glancing at Mr Prescott often. When he was done, Phillip cleared his throat, lifted a ring, and spoke. ‘With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.’

He stepped forward, sliding the ring onto Visander’s finger, and then put his hand on Visander’s cheek and leaned in as if he was about to –

Visander took him by the throat. ‘Do not touch me, human.’

Phillip choked, and the room became chaotic; the people crowded in it tried to prise Visander’s hand away from Phillip, shouting words Visander didn’t bother to listen to. They finally succeeded, and Phillip staggered back, clutching his throat.

‘Do not presume that because this body is weak I will not kill you if you touch me again,’ said Visander.

‘I don’t understand what she’s saying,’ said Phillip.

‘I’m sure she’ll warm up to you,’ said Mr Prescott.

‘To those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,’ said the priest, quickly.

He came to at night, in a moving carriage with black rectangles for windows. It jolted and bumped, and a jerk on his arm made him realise he was tied by the wrist to an interior rail. His clothes had changed, heavy skirts and a vice around his waist that constricted his breathing. He jerked on the restraint, looking up to the two humans in the carriage with him.

Phillip sat across from him with a sulky expression, his arms folded, his head turned moodily to one side. He had the look of one who was greatly put upon, although he was not the one tied up, nor was he wearing a waist bind, as far as Visander could see. A memory of the priest conjoining him to this human in a bonding ceremony made something dark and risible claw up in him.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Mr Prescott carefully. ‘We are taking you to a friend.’

‘I am not afraid.’ Visander’s head for the first time felt clear. ‘If you and this trifling wish to live, you will release me from these bonds and take me to my Queen.’

‘You must know that isn’t possible,’ said Mr Prescott gently. ‘You were – dormant – for a long time. A lot has changed.’

Something uneasy stirred in him then, a thought he did not want to face. The terrible satiny enclosure of the carriage was jumbling together with the padded satin of the coffin, as if dirt would soon start pouring in—

‘Let me out,’ said Visander.

Mr Prescott shook his head. ‘I told you, that isn’t possible.’

‘Let me out!’ Visander jerked at the railing with his bound wrist. ‘Human worm, you dare make me your prisoner?’

‘You are not a prisoner,’ Prescott said. ‘But there are certain—’

‘I don’t understand you when you speak that language.’ Phillip’s sullen voice cut into their exchange.

Prescott answered mildly. ‘Then you should have learned it, as your father asked of you.’

A derisive breath. ‘Learn a dead language? What’s the point?’

‘For one, you could speak to your lady wife.’

‘She’s not a lady. She’s some sort of lunatic soldier from a dead world.’ Phillip turned to regard Visander with an irritated expression. ‘Besides, she came here, didn’t she? Oughtn’t she to learn English?’

A dead language? A dead world? The satin walls of the carriage were closing in, and it was hard to breathe, Visander’s head swimming.

‘You’re the heir now. In a few weeks, you’ll be sailing for Italy. Your duty there is to—’

‘Simon’s duty,’ said Phillip in a bored voice, reciting it like a litany: ‘Simon’s duty, Simon’s ship, Simon’s bride—’

‘Let me out.’

‘Your brother took his role seriously—’

‘Let me out—’

‘She’s talking again,’ said Phillip.

Another wave of dizziness. His comprehension of their human words was unsettling in its own right, like a last gift spat out from the mind of this dead girl.

‘If you hold me here,’ Visander made himself say, ‘my people will not rest until they have hunted you down and killed you both.’

A long pause followed, and Prescott was looking at him oddly. Then:

‘Very well,’ said Prescott. ‘Stop the carriage!’ He gave a sharp rap to the roof of the carriage. Outside, a faint ‘Whoa there’ from the driver as Prescott pulled out a set of keys and moved forward towards Visander.

‘What are you doing?’ Phillip sat up in an alarmed posture.

‘Letting her out.’

‘Are you mad!’

‘No,’ said Prescott. ‘She needs to understand.’

And he cut the ties that restrained Visander, with a small blade he drew from his coat.

Visander was already half stumbling, half falling out of the carriage, legs tangled in his heavy skirts. At first, he just gulped in air, released from the confined inner space. Free. Free. Collapsed, his fingers curled into the dirt, grateful for its steadying presence. He finally pushed himself up, sitting back on his heels and feeling the fresh air on his face.

Then he looked out at the world around him.

His carriage was one of a train of four carriages riding in a small convoy at night. Men atop each of the carriages were pointing long tubes of metal at him, while Prescott disembarked holding up a hand, as if to ward them off.

They had stopped on a muddy cobblestone road clustered with unfamiliar structures, dark and stifling, reeking of smog and refuse. Thickly crowded, they were houses, hundreds of houses, a suffocating mass stretching endlessly from his vantage on the sloping hill, spewing burned tree smoke out into the air, loud with grubbing, grimy misery. He was looking out at a world filled with humans, living their short lives with no fear of the shadow, neither fleeing towards a mage, nor looking up with nervous dread for the death that came when the sky turned black.

The realisation was rising in him like bile. He hadn’t seen a single mage since he woke here, hadn’t felt a single spark of magic, and that was its own stifling darkness, a terrible thought clawing its way up his throat.

‘How long?’ he demanded.

He hadn’t seen anything he knew, not the soldiers on the long march into battle, not the winged creatures in the air, not the spires of the towers still not taken, nor the glories still remaining, defiant and unbroken, the strength of their last defenders blazing out into the night.

‘How long?’

Galloping with his Indeviel, wind whipping his face, exhilarating in his bond with his steed. You will have to leave everything here behind, the Queen had said. He had made that sacrifice, with no time to say goodbye. He had not even had the chance to throw his arms around Indeviel’s white neck and embrace him for the last time.

His Queen’s hand on his face that had made him shiver. He had sunk to his knees. You will Return, Visander. But first you have to die. A sharp pain in his abdomen, and he had looked down to see her sword in his guts, closing his eyes and opening them in—

—a coffin—

He had fallen to his knees in the dirt of the road, his skirts flaring out around him. ‘How long since the war?’

He was aware of Prescott coming up behind him as his flesh shivered uncontrollably, his hands splayed in the dirt.

‘I told you,’ said Mr Prescott, looking down at him. ‘We are taking you to a friend.’