JAMES’S REAL FINGERS brushed his skin, and Will jerked back, pushing up and out of the long seat.
Perfect lips curled unpleasantly. ‘Don’t want to get Dark magic all over yourself?’
‘That’s not it.’
‘What, then?’
He couldn’t answer, caught in a trap. His heart was pounding, the snared animal seeing the hunter approaching. The dark, glittering potential of magic was seductive. The idea that he might have it, might use it. And the touch, a way he wasn’t used to being touched, and liked too much.
A dawning realisation in James’s eyes.
‘You’re afraid of it.’
He wanted to laugh. He couldn’t. Something inside him was trying to wake up.
‘You shouldn’t be,’ said James.
Mother, it’s me. Mother, it’s me. Mother—
‘You weren’t afraid of yours?’
Another of those unpleasant smiles. ‘I was eleven. I didn’t know what was happening.’
‘You mean your power—’
‘Just came out.’
James didn’t say more than that, but Will could see the loathing in the High Janissary’s eyes as he looked at his son, because he had seen it in the eyes of his mother. My mother thought I was too dangerous to live, too. But he couldn’t tell James that.
‘“Strong emotion,”’ quoted Will, softly.
James’s nod was so slight it was almost imperceptible. ‘When I’m angry. Or when I’m afraid. Or when I …’ He broke off. ‘I had to learn how to control it. So that I could command it, rather than letting it run through me, wild. You need to learn to use yours too.’
Will remembered his early lessons with the Elder Steward. All her methods had been about control, perhaps because the only magic she’d seen had been James’s, explosive and ungovernable.
No one alive knows how to do magic, she’d said. It is a lost art that perhaps we can find together.
But that hadn’t been true. James could do magic, and the sisters could too, Katherine and Elizabeth.
And if they could, then shouldn’t Will be able to as well?
With the feeling of a man taking a first step along a path from which there was no turning, Will closed his eyes and admitted, ‘Mine is the opposite. It isn’t wild. It’s trapped. It won’t come out.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The Elder Steward tried to train me.’
‘The Elder Steward?’
Will nodded, and saw James’s expression contort briefly.
‘Of course. That’s just like the Stewards. Use magic when it suits them. Eradicate it when it doesn’t.’
Kill one boy, train the other. A fatal misstep that had led to the ruination of the Hall.
‘So how does a Steward train someone to use magic?’ James turned back to him, his mouth a sneer.
‘We worked from old accounts. We used Steward chants to focus the mind.’ Control and concentration. ‘I spent hours trying to light a candle flame.’ His own mouth twisted. ‘I couldn’t even make it flicker.’
How hotly embarrassing to say that in front of James. Under the heat in his face ran the seam of true shame that he had felt during each of those sessions, unable to do what the Elder Steward asked him to do to save the Hall. She had poured time into him, thinking he was her saviour. Her last days, spent watching him fail.
‘Stewards. They read about power in dusty books. But they don’t really know what it’s like. Not the way I do.’
He was circling Will as he spoke.
‘James—’
‘Here,’ said James again, this time from behind him, his voice at Will’s ear. ‘Let me show you.’ His hand dropped to Will’s hip, as if to hold him in place.
‘Can you feel it?’ James said, and Will was parting his lips to say no when power arced and sparked.
Will’s mouth flooded with saliva as the tang of James’s magic hit. It was wrong. It was so wrong, an exhilarating rush of power and potential. He had always known it, felt it. When James had used his magic on the docks, Will hadn’t been able to take his eyes off him.
‘Yes,’ he said, or thought he said. Yes, yes, yes.
James slid his fingers into Will’s and lifted both their hands, pointing them towards the outcrop of granite.
‘What do you feel?’ said James.
You. Anharion in an amphitheatre, performing a demonstration for the Sun King. Sarcean watching from behind the throne. Anharion had offered, Sarcean. Shall we have a match? Sarcean had only smiled and demurred. No, my friend. This is your moment in the sun.
Anharion’s power had been a glorious, exhilarating display of wonder that had always called to him. James pressed against him was a youthful version, bringing him in, close, where he’d never been. You, you, you.
In front of them, a slab of granite lifted out of the ground, gigantic, the size of a cart. Even to drag it would have taken a team of oxen, ropes, whips, and a driver. Defying reality, it lifted slowly up into the air, rotating gently.
Against him, James was trembling.
‘You’re close to your limit.’ The revelation was a surprise. ‘You have to concentrate to lift something this heavy.’ Will had known that before, had even used it against James, breaking his concentration to disrupt his power on the docks, and again at Gauthier’s house at Buckhurst Hill. But to feel it – ‘Gestures help you, but you don’t rely on them.’ He could feel that too, from James’s outflung hand. And—
‘You can feel the rock.’ The words a breath of revelation. Just as Will had felt James’s invisible touch, James was aware, in a ghostly way, of the rock, its rough surface, its weight, as if his magic was another skin, sensitive to what it rubbed against. It meant, when James had touched him—
‘My power is a kind of touch,’ said James. ‘Elizabeth – she conjured light. I can’t do that.’ James’s words curling into him. ‘Maybe you can’t either.’
He couldn’t. He knew that. James’s body was warm behind him. James’s voice low in his ear: ‘Maybe you can do something else.’
Something stirred, deep in his gut, a shivering sensation.
‘I can feel it inside you,’ said James. ‘It’s there. Under the skin. Let me try to coax it out.’
‘Coax it out?’ said Will.
Behind him, James seemed as caught up as Will felt, his power drawn to Will just as headily as Will felt drawn to him.
‘It’s responding to me,’ said James.
‘I don’t think—’
‘Shh,’ said James, the hand that was not tangled with Will’s sliding up across his chest. ‘Let me.’
Will shuddered, something inside himself raising its head, a dangerous, newly awakened sense.
‘James—’
Soft lips brushing his ear. ‘That’s it.’
James’s magic was flowing over his whole body in warm, slow, rippling oscillations, the gentlest pulsing. It was causing a corresponding ripple in him, somewhere in a deep, closed-off place inside.
A door. A door inside that wouldn’t open.
‘I can feel where it’s blocked,’ said James. ‘It’s so deep inside.’
His own voice had a hint of revelation. His questing power slid over the surface of it, a slow, rubbing touch, and Will bit back a sound.
‘Can you feel it when I—’
‘Yes,’ said Will.
‘How do you open a closed door?’ said James.
You can’t, you mustn’t. He knew what he should have said. Stop this. We can’t. His mind flashed with the memory of James opening the gate, pouring all of himself into it until he was spent, and the gate itself flaring open.
The Leap of Faith.
‘Push magic into it,’ Will said.
The hot, sweet feel of James blazed through him, and he cried out. His veins lit up with power; he lost hold of his surroundings. He was barely aware that they had stumbled together, Will hitting the nearby table, James panting behind him, forehead pressed to Will’s back, hand still clutched to Will’s.
‘I can feel it,’ said James. ‘I can feel—’
Not enough. ‘Push harder,’ said Will.
He was pushed painfully into the edge of the table, and he felt the clutch of James’s fist in his hair, James unconsciously pushing at him as his power pushed inside. It flooded every crack, raced along every slit, looking for a gap, a weakness, a way in.
‘There—’ He could feel it, an almost imperceptible point, smaller than a hairline fissure, where James’s power was questing, sinking, drilling. ‘There—’
As if his core was responding, as if every closed part of him would let James in, no matter the danger. Except it wouldn’t; some last defence held tightly closed, even if whatever lay beyond was stirring.
‘Aragas,’ commanded James.
Open. And James’s magic connected to something inside him, like a thread of fire touching an endless underground pool of gas and setting it alight.
Everything exploded.
Pain tore through him and he cried out. A primal force unleashed to destroy, it blasted out of him with obliterating violence. It was raw, pure power and it hit with a shattering wave, annihilating everything in its path.
And then it stopped, as suddenly as it had begun. The blast had thrown James back. And without James as a conduit, the door inside him was closed again.
Will came to in the rubble, panting and bruised. Vision blurred, he levered himself up into a sitting position. James. He looked around for James desperately.
What he saw was destruction.
The granite was dust, the ground cratered and black, with sloughed rock like melted glass. If the blast had been directed towards the barracks, everyone would be dead. Sarcean. Shall we have a match? Anharion had offered, and Sarcean had smiled and waved him off.
He turned. James was sprawled a way off, his shirt half torn from his body, bruising and cuts on his face healing right before Will’s eyes.
‘I felt it,’ said James. ‘Inside you. I felt—’
‘Felt what?’ said Will.
He could hear the shock in James’s voice. He could see the new way that James was looking at him. As though he’d never seen anything like it before.
‘God, I see why Sinclair wanted you. Why everyone wanted you. You’re—’
He was staring at Will, his eyes full of awe.
‘With that much power,’ said James, ‘you really could kill the Dark King.’
Will stifled the awful sound that might have been a laugh, except for the way it threatened to come up out of him, harshly.
‘Yes, that’s what I’m for,’ he said. ‘Killing people.’ He dragged his arm over his face, wiping off the blood.
‘I didn’t mean—’
The cratered rock smelled acrid, like the remnants of a fire.
‘Does that excite you? Want me to lay waste to Sinclair’s people? Hand you a palace filled up with the dead? We can look out over desolation and ruin together.’
He bit down hard, forced himself to stop the words, to cut off what crowded thick into his mouth.
James was staring at him, eyes dark as if Will wasn’t acting like himself.
‘You’re not just a weapon,’ said James.
‘Is that what Sinclair used to say to you?’
James flushed and didn’t answer, and maybe that wasn’t fair, but it could have been worse, it could have been so much worse, with how much Will felt like breaking things.
‘We can’t do this again,’ said Will, pushing himself out and away from the rubble. ‘Not ever.’
It was clear something unusual was underway as soon as he stepped outside.
The men who usually hung about outside their rooms doing a poor job of looking inconspicuous were gone. There was no sign of Sloane’s watchers. Their rooms were completely unguarded.
Even stranger, there was no sound of digging. Work had stopped. Locals were congregating in groups on the other side of the dig. Huddled, they communicated in urgent whispers, glancing around to make sure they weren’t overheard. Every now and again a digger hurried across the site in response to an urgent call. The men looked on edge, even frightened.
It explained why no one had come rushing in after the magical explosion. Only one man even seemed to notice, slowing and blinking at the cracked stone as he passed. ‘Lovers’ spat,’ James said, emerging from the room behind Will. The man flushed and hurried on.
‘What’s happening?’ Will asked another of the men passing, only to recognise Rosati, the local frequently employed by Captain Howell as a translator.
But Rosati said nothing, just gave a single wary look, and that same warding gesture that Will had seen the workers use on the mountain.
With unspoken agreement, Will and James began to move towards the source of the disturbance.
They hadn’t gone far before they heard familiar voices coming from one of the tents.
‘This is wrong,’ Kettering was saying. ‘You can’t send anyone else in. Not after what just happened.’
‘We’ve broken through!’ said Sloane. ‘What happened, it’s a sign. We’re right on the edge of discovery!’
Will drew in a breath sharply. His eyes flew to James’s and they exchanged a look.
‘It was twenty-six men!’ said Kettering. ‘The locals are throwing down their picks and refusing to dig. They’re saying the place is cursed.’
Sloane had no sympathy at all in his voice. ‘If they won’t work, then find me men who will.’
Kettering’s voice grew even more unhappy. ‘And what are you going to do with—’
‘We burn them,’ said Sloane. ‘Just like all the others.’
‘You can’t,’ said Kettering. ‘You can’t keep—’
‘It’s Sinclair’s orders,’ said Sloane, opening the tent flap and gesturing to a nearby soldier who came musket in hand. As Sloane strode off to make arrangements, Kettering ran a hand through his hair. ‘This is wrong. This is—’ Kettering set off purposefully towards the place where the locals were gathering.
‘Follow him,’ said Will, pulling James along with him as he followed Kettering through the tents. In front of them was a red glow, and it was hard to see at night, but it seemed a thick black column of smoke rose from it. Will could smell it, acrid and familiar.
Kettering had stopped.
He was staring at a huge firepit, already burning. A wheelbarrow was being brought towards it by a group of Sloane’s soldiers. The wheelbarrow’s contents was dumped onto the fire. But there was another wheelbarrow behind it. And another. And another.
Kettering was staring at the fire with tears streaming down his face.
‘Whatever’s in those wheelbarrows, we need to get a look at it before they burn it.’ Before whatever Sloane was hiding went up in smoke.
Will was not naive. He could smell the fire. But if Sloane’s men really had broken through to some discovery in the palace, he had to know what had been found.
How easy it would have been if he could have scried into one of Sloane’s men – or Sloane himself – and simply walked up to a wheelbarrow in his host’s body. But he couldn’t, not while James was with him. Nor could he easily rid himself of James for the required time. And besides, the skill was frighteningly new, and he was aware how vulnerable the ability left him afterwards.
Will looked around himself for a diversion. ‘If we can somehow distract them, maybe—’
A support beam near one of the dig trenches exploded outward, the scaffolding surrounding it collapsing in a ruckus of crashing supplies and shouting men.
‘You mean like that?’ James said, lowering his hand, his smile breathtaking in the chaos he’d created, the cries going up, ‘Aiuto! Aiuto!’ And in English, ‘Oi! Come and help us!’, everyone running towards the collapse.
‘You don’t need to sneak around untying ropes,’ James murmured as he passed Will, that smile still on his face. ‘You have me now.’
A flutter at the words you have me. Will ignored it. They needed to be fast. He slipped over to the abandoned wheelbarrow while the men surrounded the collapsed trench.
He felt rather than saw James arrive, then go still next to him. His own eyes were on the shape in the wheelbarrow.
‘“Twenty-six men”,’ quoted James.
Will had moved bodies in a wheelbarrow in the Hall. This was smaller than most of them. A boy of perhaps ten or eleven, the same age as the scouts who had accompanied them into the palace. The boy’s jacket lay over his head like a shroud.
Rosati had made the warning gesture. Will had seen the fear in the eyes of the locals. He thought, They send the boys in first.
Will drew in a breath and pulled back the boy’s jacket.
He didn’t realise he had staggered back until he felt James’s hands on his shoulders, heard James’s voice. ‘Will. Will. Are you all right?’
Black veins travelling up her arms, her eyes wide and afraid. He’d begged her not to pick up the sword. Will, I’m frightened.
‘Will, what’s wrong? What is it?’
He looked back at the body in the wheelbarrow. It was like looking at a memory. The dead boy’s face was unnaturally chalk white, his veins ink black, like cracks. His open eyes were two black marbles. And Will knew without touching him that his skin would be cold and hard as stone.
A thousand miles separated them, but they were the same: locked in a dead rictus, as if whatever lay under the mountain was connected to her, dying in his arms on the hillside.
‘I’ve seen this before,’ said Will. ‘With Katherine.’