‘THE DEVIL,’ SAID the Hand, ‘will only deal with one person.’ Cyprian knew before she pointed the stump at him. ‘Him.’
They had entered the osteria quickly through the back, only to find her waiting for them, sitting with her knee up and the point of her knife sticking out of a table. She looked just as Cyprian remembered: dressed in the torn waistcoat and kerchief that these bandits favoured, in clear command of the men sitting around her. He saw at least one musket resting on the thighs of one of the bandits, who stared at him with hostile eyes.
‘He’s not going anywhere alone,’ Will began, but Cyprian was already speaking.
‘I’ll do it.’ Cyprian lifted his chin. ‘Where is he?’
Behind him, James snorted. Cyprian kept his focus on the Hand.
‘No,’ Will said, stepping up beside him. ‘We all go. That’s reasonable.’
Will didn’t back down. His insistence had the adamantine quality it had had when he had brought James into the Hall. The Hand looked at him for a moment without much interest. Then she looked back at Cyprian. ‘You go alone, or any deal is off.’
‘Take me to him.’ Cyprian stepped forward before Will could speak again.
The Hand stood, pulled her knife out of the table, and said simply, ‘This way.’
The osteria had a set of narrow stairs leading up to a poorly lit mezzanine and a few rooms where patrons could sleep off their wine. The Hand led him up, taking the stairs with a purposeful stride. She had sheathed her knife in her belt, on her right hip. Cyprian only glanced briefly.
‘Ask me,’ she said.
Cyprian flushed to have been caught looking.
‘Or are you too much of a poltrone?’
Very well. ‘What happened to your hand?’
‘The Devil,’ she said, ‘cut it off.’
‘And you follow him?’ Cyprian jerked back, revolted.
‘It’s why I follow him,’ she said.
Sickened, he just stared at her, his stomach churning. She looked back at him with a dry, amused look, as though at a child with no understanding of the world.
‘In there.’ The Hand rapped on the door with her leather-bound stump, then simply left. Cyprian forced his eyes ahead to what awaited him. Seconds passed.
There was no answer to her knock, so Cyprian pushed the door open. It was a low wooden door that he had to bend to enter. Straightening inside, Cyprian saw that there was a single lamp on a rough-hewn stool providing the only light in the dim interior of a room with curtains drawn over its small window.
The Devil lay heavy-limbed on the room’s bed, his muscled torso an expanse of olive skin scattered with black hair. He was watching Cyprian’s entrance with satisfaction. As Cyprian’s eyes adjusted, he saw that there was a figure in the bed with the Devil. A woman, sloe-eyed and satiated.
And then he saw what she was wearing.
The last tatters of Ettore’s Steward tunic. It was deliberate. He was being provoked, and a part of his mind knew it. But the disrespect was too great.
‘How dare you—’
‘Now, now, Twinkles,’ said the Devil. ‘I thought you were here to make a deal.’
A deal, when the Stewards were dead and this bandit was dressing his bedmate up in their clothes, like wearing the skin of an animal you have killed, like dancing in it. Anger rose in him, thickly.
Steward, hold to your training. Cyprian forced his eyes away from the tunic.
‘We are here to make a deal. We want to know everything you can tell us about Ettore,’ said Cyprian. ‘Who was he, where did you find him, what was his mission.’
‘He’s dead,’ said the Devil. ‘What does it matter?’
He gritted out: ‘We’re looking for something.’
‘Something valuable?’ said the Devil.
The venal quality of the man was repellant. But these scraps of tunic were not all that was left of the Stewards. What was left was the mission, the task that the Elder Steward had entrusted him, and the way he stayed true to their memory.
He made the plea in the only way he knew how. Honestly.
‘There’s an army under that mountain,’ said Cyprian. ‘An army of the dead that for thousands of years has slumbered. If it wakes, it will overrun this village, this province, this country. Ettore knew how to stop it.’
‘He did? How?’
‘He was part of an order sworn to protect this world.’
Saying it in this stained and soiled room, he felt the Stewards already passing out of life and into story, one that he was unprepared to tell.
‘Not much of a protector if a few of my men could take him out.’
The Devil said it with a mixture of pride and amusement. Cyprian felt fury and disgust overwhelm him.
‘Ettore gave his life in service, he was noble and self-sacrificing. That’s something a mercenary like you wouldn’t understand.’
‘You’re right, I’m too busy doing other things.’ The Devil pulled his bedmate in towards himself. ‘You can stay and watch if you like.’
He didn’t. The Devil’s laughter followed him downstairs as he turned and stalked out of the room.
His friends were waiting, along with the Hand and a few tables full of bandits, who were not quite trapping them inside, but were certainly in an uneasy standoff with James, hands on muskets, muttering in Italian.
‘What happened? Did you speak with him?’ Will rose immediately Cyprian returned.
‘He won’t help us,’ said Cyprian. ‘It’s pointless talking to him.’ He had told Will as much on the mountain. Now here they were in a village in the middle of nowhere, having wasted a day on this fruitless journey. ‘I told you—’ Cyprian began, stopped.
The Devil had emerged from upstairs, ostentatiously tucking in his shirt.
Cyprian flushed. Instead of greeting them, the Devil took a flask of spirits from one of his men, then chugged it, then went to the seat in front of the osteria’s hearth fire and threw himself down on it, a grimy king sprawled on a grubby throne.
Will stepped forward, youthful in the light from the hearth fire. His build was boyish, and he didn’t carry any weapons. Cyprian was conscious of the rough men here with their muskets and long knives, utterly outmatching him.
‘If we find what we’re after, you can take everything in the palace,’ said Will.
And suddenly he had il Diavolo’s full attention.
‘Will, what are you doing?’ said Cyprian.
‘You know what’s inside,’ said Will. ‘Or you think you know. You’ve been trying to get in since we arrived here. Gold armour encrusted with jewels, gold chains as thick as your arm, gold cups and plates and mirrors. You’ll have it all to yourself.’
The Devil didn’t say anything. After a long moment, he took another swig of the spirits, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, then gestured at Cyprian with his chin.
‘Make that one ask nicely.’
Cyprian didn’t have to turn to know Will’s eyes were on him.
‘Please,’ said Cyprian, flatly.
The Devil let out a snort of breath through his nose. He looked at Cyprian in the firelight, a long look overbrimming with sadistic satisfaction.
‘On your knees.’
Humiliation heated his cheeks, hotter than the flame from the hearth fire. He could feel the eyes of the banditti on him, hungry with amusement and mockery. The point was to see a Steward besmirched. He knew that.
But what made him a Steward was his duty, and he knew that any Steward would give his life to stop the army that lay under the mountain.
Deliberately, he dropped to his knees, ignoring the hot spill of shame in his stomach. He ignored everything, keeping his eyes on the floorboards, notched and sticky with years of spilled wine.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘help us. You are the only one who can.’
The shocked silence made it clear that the Devil hadn’t expected him to kneel. Cyprian braced for a round of laughter and mockery, expecting to have his request demeaningly refused. But when the seconds passed, he looked up, only to find the Devil staring back at him with a strange, helpless look in his eyes.
‘There was a place … on the white peak … your friend Ettore was searching for something. I’ll take you there in the morning,’ said the Devil, the expression shuttering as he acceded to their request. ‘Tonight, I get drunk.’
Everyone got drunk.
Cyprian left the osteria as tin mugs clanked together, sloshing red wine over the rims. Behind him, one of the bandits played a pipe and others danced. Others spilled out into the small town square, laughter and whoops and shouts ringing out over the valley at the thought of the palace spoils that lay ahead of them.
He was in no mood to join them, or to think about how differently the Stewards would have prepared for a morning mission. Instead, he found a place to himself outside the village, near the river, where he could keep watch, in case Sloane’s men came.
Hearing footsteps behind him in the cold outside air, he expected Grace, seeking her own calm over the debauched chaos of the osteria.
But when the figure came to stand beside him, it was James.
Cyprian braced himself again for ridicule, the kind he had expected in the osteria. He looked over, only to find James watching him with a complicated expression on his face.
‘I made Marcus kneel,’ said James. ‘On the ship.’
‘Good for you,’ said Cyprian.
For once, James didn’t answer right away. Cyprian looked at him and wished him gone. Wished he had never existed. Wished that he could exchange James for the world of the Hall, which James had destroyed forever.
‘I kept him in chains,’ said James. ‘We sailed the Channel. He fought the whole time. When we docked in Calais, he—’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
His words stopped James in his tracks. A look of surprise flickered on his face, as if he didn’t know himself why he had spoken.
‘I don’t know,’ James said, after a long moment. ‘I didn’t like watching you kneel for that bandit.’ As if he was pushing the words out. ‘I don’t like being reminded that Stewards can be—’
‘What?’
James didn’t want to answer. Cyprian could see that in his eyes. ‘Selfless.’
That was too much. ‘I wish Father had killed you. Marcus would still be alive.’
‘And if he’d never tried, I’d be a Steward,’ said James.
‘What?’ said Cyprian.
‘You think I didn’t have all the same dreams as you, little brother? Take the whites and defend this world from the Dark?’
‘It’s not the same,’ said Cyprian.
‘Why not?’ said James. ‘Because I’m a Reborn and you’re a Steward?’
Anger, fuelled by pain. The Stewards were gone, and James was still here. The unfairness of it gripped him. He drew in a breath of cold mountain air.
‘Because you killed them,’ said Cyprian. ‘You killed all of them. You probably dreamed about it, about the day you’d kill us, you probably—’
‘The Stewards,’ said James, ‘spent my whole life trying to kill me.’
‘Marcus didn’t,’ said Cyprian. ‘Marcus spent all his time trying to talk Father around. Even when you started killing for Sinclair, he thought there was a way to bring you back into the fold.’
James just stared at him.
‘And I—’ I thought for years there was some mistake. I spent years in your shadow after. He wouldn’t tell James that.
‘You what?’ said James.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t want to bleed like this in front of James. He didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
‘I’m your unfinished business,’ Cyprian said. ‘I was meant to have died that day with the others, and I didn’t.’ The promise was calm and steady. ‘I’m going to make you regret that.’
‘You really are just like Father,’ said James. ‘You can’t believe I’m on your side.’
‘Until Sinclair collars you. Or until the Dark King returns. Then you’ll go running back.’ Cyprian stared him down. ‘You’re the Betrayer. I’m just waiting for you to turn.’
‘Like a shieldmate?’ said James.
The gall of that left him breathless. ‘Is there nothing you won’t mock or tear down?’
‘Go do your exercises,’ said James. ‘Go take up your sword and practise the empty forms and the chants and the ceremonies, perfecting them endlessly for no one.’