‘WELCOME TO THE Bull’s Head, Lady Crenshaw.’
Visander looked around at the dirty inn, crowded and stifling, reeking of the barbaric human practice of searing animal flesh and consuming it. The floors were boarded and encrusted with grease. Bile rose in Visander’s throat. The flue of a chimney stood out from the bare wall, black all the way up with soot from burned trees. Men were grouped around the fire, throwing their heads back and laughing raucously. At the tables closer to the door, he saw beards shiny with splashed beer, of which the room also smelled strongly.
‘You expect me to believe a friend of mine waits in this stench and filth?’ He lifted his arm to cover his mouth and nose.
‘Be patient,’ said Prescott, beside him.
The obliviousness of these humans was surreal. Like lambs born in clover, they did not fear a threat. There was no lookout, no nearby shelter. They had no concerns beyond sating themselves, laughing and shouting trivialities. It set his nerves on edge.
He realised he was braced for war, for the sound of the black horn, and the winged death from above, the shadow attack that always came. He remembered the fields of Garayan, corpses rotting in their armour, the sky black with carrion birds as far as the eye could see.
And Sarcean, always Sarcean, whose dark whispers haunted his dreams.
A wave of uneasiness rolled over him. This world was thick with humans who seemed to know nothing of the war – who had never fled with the constant stream to the nearest mage because magic was the only thing that could hold back shadows, even as the mages themselves fell, one by one.
He had to believe that his Queen’s plan had worked, that he had awakened in a time and place to stop Sarcean, that there had not instead been some terrible misfire that had stranded him in a human world in a frail human form. Yet with every grimy human sight, his choking, claustrophobic panic grew, stifling dirt filling up the small, cramped space in his coffin.
‘I believe a friend of ours is waiting?’ said Prescott.
‘That is my cue to drink,’ muttered Phillip, peeling off towards the beer, as the innkeeper directed them to the third door at the end of the hall.
The room was small and dark, as if humans were a race that cleaved to dim caves. It was meant to be slept in: there was a bed, a small desk, a fireplace. The fire was consuming the last of its single log, its glowing embers providing the room’s only light, along with a small lamp.
Inside he saw a human boy with a cap pulled low on his forehead, sitting on a padded chair in front of the fireplace, reading a book with a blue cover that he closed, turning and rising when he heard the door open.
He was young, perhaps fifteen, thin-limbed, with sharp features. His hair was white despite his youth. His skin was very pale.
He was no friend. He was no one Visander knew. Visander opened his mouth to say that.
Their eyes met. He watched the pale boy frown at him as at a stranger, then stop, his eyes widening in shock as he seemed to look past Visander’s body to see the essence of him.
And it was something in his eyes – those colourless eyes with their hint of blue – that Visander recognised in turn, though he’d only ever seen them with a horizontal pupil.
It was him. Visander would know him anywhere. In any place. In any form.
Visander was striding across the room before the door even closed, his arms around the boy in a hard embrace.
‘Indeviel.’
He was here. Warm, flesh and blood, real and here. The relief was extraordinary; it crashed over him like a wave. He was speaking words of happiness, of gratitude; they spilled from his lips without thought. ‘You’re alive. You’re alive.’ He could feel his world restored in the warmth of Indeviel’s body against his own. ‘I found you, and we are whole again.’
The boy made a stifled sound, and with a violent spasm of movement flung him off.
Shocked, Visander just stared at him, as the boy stared back at him with pupil-dark eyes.
‘Indeviel—’
The boy’s chest was rising and falling rapidly, his body tensed for flight. He was staring at Visander with an expression Visander had never seen on him before.
‘Don’t call me that,’ said the boy. ‘That’s not my name.’
‘Not your name?’
‘My name is Devon. And you – you’re not—’
The boy – Devon – was standing off from Visander as though he might bolt.
‘Indeviel, it’s me, Visander,’ he said. ‘Your rider.’
Devon’s pale eyes stared out of his face, his white skin blanched to a shocking shade, pale as a ghost.
‘I know I must look strange to you, as you do to me, but—’
It was true Devon’s form was strange, standing on two legs and speaking human words, but there was some essence of him that was the same, like wrapping arms around a curved white neck.
‘You died,’ said Devon.
It was the first acknowledgement that Devon recognised him, and he ought to have felt a burst of relief.
‘And returned, as I promised,’ said Visander. ‘This place – it was terrible to awaken here and think myself alone. So it must have been for you here without me for dozens of years—’
Instead of speaking, the boy started to laugh, an awful sound. He said, in a voice of utter disbelief, ‘Dozens of years?’
‘Devon.’ Visander said the unfamiliar name, and it felt so wrong, like the physical distance between them. Slowly, carefully, he said, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
‘What’s wrong?’ The sound of that terrible laugh rang in Visander’s ears. ‘Years? You think that’s all it was? You think you were gone like a man who steps out for a moment and is greeted as a long-lost friend on his return?’
‘How long?’ He remembered with a hollow, empty feeling the human world he had seen stretching out endlessly around him when he had stepped from the carriage. ‘How long have I been gone?’
‘You died,’ said Devon. ‘And then everyone died. And a great silence fell; the silence of rot and emptiness and decay. And in the long march of endless time, sands covered the great cities, seas swallowed the buildings, and humans choked every part of this world.’
The room felt too small suddenly, the walls seeming to press in on him, the lingering earthen taste of the grave filling his mouth.
He knew – he knew that he’d died and awoken. Yet the way Devon was looking at him … The crowding of time passing pressed at Visander. A world full of humans, oblivious to the dangers of the war. A world with no sights or sounds he knew, and no single spark of magic.
‘Then who is left?’
‘I’m left,’ said Devon. ‘I’m all that’s left.’
Visander remembered – kneeling by a sun-dappled stream, scooping up the refreshing water, sensing something behind him. Looking up, he had seen the shy creature watching, arched neck and silken mane, a young colt. Their eyes had met; startled, a flash of silver, and it was gone.
Weeks of glimpses, secret visitations, unable to think of anything else until the first momentous touch. He remembered the smooth white neck under his hands, his almost dizzy wonder at being allowed to touch something so pure, the way those white lashes had lowered with pleasure, that silken muzzle tickling his cheek, then nuzzling into his neck—
‘It can’t be.’
A pale boy in a small, dirty room, dressed in crude human garments, wearing animal hide on his feet. Devon had drawn back, pressing himself into the opposite wall as if by instinct.
Visander reached out to touch him. ‘My steed, I—’
‘Don’t,’ said Devon. ‘I am not that young colt I was, playing at love in a glade. I will not bend my head for your bridle, or take your bit between my teeth.’
Devon’s white face was cold as snow, his eyes like pale chips of ice. Visander felt dizzy.
‘But you work with these humans. Why?’
‘Because they’re going to bring the old world back.’
‘Bring it back? How?’
‘By raising the only one who can.’
‘No,’ said Visander.
It was as if the dark pit of the oubliette opened at his feet, a great abyss with no bottom. He remembered the shadows sweeping over the field at Garayan, the lights going out one by one. But he had always had Indeviel beside him. Now – there was a terrible new look in Devon’s eyes that had never been there before.
‘Who else has the power to remake the world in his image? To restore it to the way it should have been?’
‘No,’ said Visander. ‘I don’t believe it.’
Devon said, ‘He will rise, and drive every human from this land.’
As he spoke, he dragged his cap from his head, and Visander saw the misshapen stump in the middle of his forehead. He felt sick, a violent nausea, at a desecration even Sarcean had not dreamed to inflict. He imagined Indeviel downed, alone and afraid, as they held his head in place and sawed off the horn.
‘You saw the Sun Palace fall,’ said Devon. ‘I saw the world go dark, until only the Final Flame was burning. You think the war was the hard part? The war was nothing; it was the long dark that came after, the baying of the dogs and the hunt, our world turned to dust, until there was nothing left but humans, and I swore if I had my time again I would fight on the opposite side.’
A unicorn, fighting for Sarcean. Visceral horror climbing in his throat – was the room getting smaller? Smaller and darker, like the inside of a wooden box.
As if for the first time, he saw the boy in front of him, two legs instead of four, human clothes buttoned up to his chin where there had once been the pure white curve of neck, colourless hair instead of that long waterfall mane, and a ruined stump in the middle of his forehead where the long, pearlescent spear of his horn should be.
The sight was so wrong that Visander felt the room starting to fade.
‘Has it been so long that you’ve forgotten? What he was? What he did?’ He stared at Devon as at a pale stranger.
Instead of answering, Devon said, ‘You can’t fight him. You’re too late.’
‘Indeviel, what have you done?’
He strode forward and gripped Devon by his two slim shoulders. He found himself looking down into a beatifically passive face, pale eyes gazing back up at him with utter assurance.
Visander could think of only one thing that could have caused this: Sarcean’s cold, beautiful face, his eyes filled with terrible amusement.
He made a desperate plea. ‘You don’t have to fight for the Dark. You can come with me. You’re a unicorn.’
He saw his words have no impact. How could Indeviel be so far out of reach, an untouchable white-haired boy, who seemed a thousand years away?
‘There’s nowhere to go,’ said Devon. ‘It’s just humans, as far as the eye can see.’
Visander’s gorge rose, and suddenly the room was a small wooden casket, and he was choking, with the taste of the earth in his mouth.
‘Don’t you remember our vow to each other? The pledge we made before the Long Ride?’
Devon stared back at him, his eyes widening, as if the answer surprised him, when very little ever surprised him anymore.
‘No,’ said Devon. ‘I don’t.’