VIOLET WOKE TO the creak of wood and the slapping of waves, and to the distinctive ridges of planking under her limbs and head. When she tried to move, she realised that her hands were manacled with the same strength-sapping metal that the Stewards had used to restrain her.
A wave of panic crested over her. She could smell the sea. It must be the sea, because it lacked the nauseating fumes of the Thames, and there was a briny salt smell, fresh and clear. And she had never felt a ship move like this on the river. There was deep water on all sides, lifting the ship up, then smacking it back down.
With each second that passed, she was sailing further and further away from Will.
She had to get out. Forcing herself past the dizziness that the Steward manacles always produced, she pushed herself up only to find herself in a large metal cage with bars. She swung her manacles at the cage bars. The clang rattled her bones, but the bars did not budge and the manacles did not spring open. Letting out a furious sound, she rammed the bars with her shoulder as hard as she could.
It did nothing. Bruised and breathing hard, she looked out at the hold. It was smaller than the Sealgair, but she could see the crates and tied stacks that were the ship’s main cargo, herself merely an afterthought. Closer to her, she saw bins full of armour, several of them emblazoned with a star. She realised that she was looking at crates full of items from the Hall of the Stewards, and that she was part of a shipment of looted cargo sailing towards an unknown destination.
The hatch swung open.
Striding confidently in her long boots, Mrs Duval came into the hold. She wore a different cloak, as if at least a day had passed since Violet’s capture. At her side was the man from the courtyard, the one with his face carved out by three claw marks. He still carried a cane, his limp even more pronounced than it had been before Elizabeth had stabbed him.
Violet’s eyes fixed on the metal object Mrs Duval held in her hands.
In the next moment, she flung herself up and over to the bars. ‘You give that back!’
‘Now, now,’ said Mrs Duval. Their eyes met, and Violet’s limbs seized up. Just as she had been in the Hall, she was being held in place. Her hands were on the cage bars, but she couldn’t move them.
‘You care about this quite a lot.’ Mrs Duval held up the Shield of Rassalon, turning it over speculatively. ‘It’s broken.’
‘You don’t deserve to touch it!’ spat Violet.
‘I’ll confess, I don’t care about an old shield,’ said Mrs Duval. ‘But a Lion is big game.’ She kept her eyes on Violet, with the hypnotising power of the snake, as Violet was unable to look away. ‘The biggest game I’ve ever brought down.’
Violet felt a violent hatred of everything that was happening. She hated the cage. She hated being frozen, unable to move. She did not want her shield in the hands of that lady.
‘Where are you taking me?’ said Violet.
She wanted to get out of the cramped hold of this ship. She couldn’t be here, so far from the courtyard in the Hall of the Stewards. To have been ripped from the others, to know she was being carried further and further away with every passing breath—
‘Step back from the bars,’ said Mrs Duval.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘I said step back,’ said Mrs Duval, and to her horror, Violet found herself taking a step back. She stared in shock at her captors through the bars. Oh God, James was right: Mrs Duval could make her do things. Not just freeze, but move, do her bidding. She had to force herself to think, to reason, though her heart was racing.
‘You can’t control me all the time,’ she said slowly, ‘or you wouldn’t have to use these manacles.’
‘Smart, aren’t you,’ said Mrs Duval. ‘But I expected Gauhar’s girl to be smart.’
The name seemed to drop into her like a stone into deep water. ‘Who?’
‘You don’t know your own mother’s name?’ said Mrs Duval.
Violet couldn’t move, yet she felt something inside her open that made her feel very young and small. Gauhar. She’d never heard that name. She’d never heard any name like it. Was it her mother’s first name? Surname? Was that even how they did things in India? She didn’t know, had never been told.
That woman, Louisa Ballard had only ever called her. Don’t you talk about that woman. A memory worked its way free from that deep place inside her. A woman’s voice, a wide river, steps leading down to the water where people were bathing, kindness and laughter. Gauhar. She clamped down on it, as if it threatened her safety.
‘Do you not know what you are?’ said Mrs Duval. ‘Or do you only know what the Stewards have told you?’
‘Keep your mouth off the Stewards,’ said Violet.
‘Then tell me, in your own words.’
She stayed stubbornly silent. She half expected Mrs Duval’s power to drag the words up out of her throat. When that didn’t happen, she said defiantly: ‘You can’t make me talk! Your power’s not strong enough!’
‘I can make you do this,’ said Mrs Duval. ‘Leclerc, open the gunport.’
Violet found her body made marionette, a horrendous feeling, walking forward against her will to stand at the bars in front of Mrs Duval. With a short, sharp gesture, Mrs Duval tore the star from the front of Violet’s tunic. Then she gave an unpleasant smile and opened the front of the cage.
‘Fetch,’ she said, and tossed the fabric out the gunport.
Violet tried to stop herself moving. She tried with every bit of strength and will she had. She was at the open gunport, and then she was climbing out of it like a hatch, staring down at the churning ocean water beneath where the ship’s wood sliced it.
She threw herself over – almost. Suspended, her limbs wouldn’t move as she teetered over the drop. She wanted to scream, knowing she hadn’t saved herself. It was Mrs Duval who had stopped her, frozen, on the edge of leaping.
‘Shall I make you jump overboard?’ said Mrs Duval. ‘Lions aren’t good swimmers.’
Held rigid, she could make no gesture of defiance, her heart pounding. The ship rocked with the sway of the ocean, whose wet depths had so recently sprayed into the Hall through the gate. She remembered its ghostly underwater tower.
It was true that Violet couldn’t swim, having never learned. She had grown up on the London docks, but no one swam in the thick molasses of the river. She imagined throwing herself over, not even struggling, just blindly jumping off. The water would close over her head, leaving only a foaming swirl, and even that would be swallowed up by the next wave.
‘You won’t. You need me alive.’ She made herself say it. ‘After you’re done with me, you’re going to give me to my father.’
Mrs Duval only smiled, a gleam of teeth. ‘Little Lion. You really do have no idea what you’re caught up in.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘You think your destiny is to fight alongside. But it’s not.’ Mrs Duval’s eyes stayed on her, the unblinking stare of a reptile. ‘It’s to be eaten.’
Her blood drained while she couldn’t move. She thought of her father saying he planned for Tom to kill her. Her father had built a cage in his house to hold her, and she had only just escaped in time.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ said Mrs Duval.
A stringless puppet, she was marched back into the cage, and behind her the cage door was relocked. She stared impotently under Mrs Duval’s cold eyes, until Mrs Duval turned to the door. A release; the compulsion vanished.
Instantly, Violet was throwing herself at the immovable bars. But she found herself shaking, her legs barely able to hold her. Violet realised with a shock that she was exhausted: her muscles had been stiffened in a spasm the whole time Mrs Duval had been controlling her.
‘You won’t get anywhere if you make my sister angry,’ said a man’s voice.
She scrabbled around. With a shock, she saw that the man with the scarred face was still in the hold, standing back in the shadows, watching her. She had forgotten he was there.
‘I’m Jean Leclerc,’ he offered. ‘You’ll be in my charge until, well. Until our work is complete.’
‘What happened to your face?’ said Violet. ‘Get too close to a cage?’
He flushed and the scars reddened. ‘You should count yourself lucky that you’re not being taken to your friends.’
‘What do you mean?’ she said with a cold stab of apprehension. ‘What do you know about them?’
‘You should count yourself lucky,’ Leclerc said, ‘that you’re—’ Leclerc broke off, blinked, and his face almost rippled. ‘Violet?’ She stared at him. He took a step closer. ‘Violet—!’
She stepped back instinctively, cleaving deeper into the cage. Leclerc blinked again, and shook his head. He said, with a little confusion, ‘You should count yourself lucky.’ He shook his head again.
Then he turned and limped his way out of the hold.