CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

THOSE WILLING TO fight took up pitchforks and sickles alongside cutlasses and old pistols. They had no concept of strategy. In living memory they had never fought off an attack on their town. So Cyprian taught them how to dig ditches, how to make use of the stream as a line of defence, how to barricade streets and retreat through the town up the motte.

Even if it was no longer used as a fort in these modern times, the bones of the town’s old purpose were still there. Set high on a hill with a tower at its summit, it was easy to imagine the signal flames going up as they would have centuries ago. The beacon defiant in the night.

Climbing to the town’s tower himself with Rosati and the Hand, Cyprian looked down at the stone houses and rolling slopes of the nearby hills, and thought of the armies of the Dark swarming across the land and reaching the outskirts. He realised with a chill how much of the training he’d received from the Stewards had been about defending a small outpost from an impossibly large force. This was what the Stewards of old had known, the onslaught of the Dark, while they fell back and tried to hold out.

‘And if they attack with magic?’ said Rosati.

‘Then you’re f—’ the Hand began, and Cyprian said, shocked, ‘Hand!’ He said quickly to Rosati, ‘If they attack with magic, we find a way to fight it. And if we can’t, we fall back as we planned.’

It was Will who had planned all the contingencies, insisting on a path of escape if overrun, as well as the need to warn neighbouring towns. Cyprian didn’t like planning for failure, but he recognised that his Steward instincts to dig in and fight to the death would not help if this town did fall to the Dark. He imagined Sarcean’s army planting its first flag here, then marching on the unsuspecting neighbouring townships, and then to the larger cities, Terni, then Rome.

‘It’s funny to think how many descendants with magic may have been born here,’ said the Hand. ‘They could have helped fight if they hadn’t been killed.’ It was too much like James’s words, spoken to him nights ago at the river.

‘You think they would have?’ Cyprian said, unnerved.

‘Why not? It would’ve been their town too,’ said the Hand.

That thought stayed with him.

Returning to the main square, Cyprian saw Ettore sitting outside the osteria on an overturned crate, eating meat cuts and bread and drinking from a glass of red wine.

His stubble was dirty, his grimy jacket and waistcoat hung open. He was not working or preparing, his glass of red wine looked to be his fourth or fifth, and he had that slightly glazed look of one who had drunk too much in the midafternoon sun.

How could this man be a Steward? Cyprian thought of the training, the willpower and the discipline it took to earn the whites. He saw nothing of it in the slovenly man on the wooden stool, munching on salami.

Cyprian felt his frustration in his teeth. ‘Why are you here, if you’re just going to drink?’

Ettore squinted, chewing. ‘There’s a palace to loot, remember?’

‘Money,’ said Cyprian in disgust.

‘We’ve risked our lives for less,’ said Ettore.

‘Of course.’

‘Besides, it’s personal for Mano.’

‘Just not for you.’

Every other person in the town was working on fortifications, transforming this place of narrow cobbled streets, crooked rooftops and uneven stone steps into a last stand, because they cared about it.

‘You’re no help to us. You’re a liability. I think you should leave.’

Ettore gave an amused snort and kept eating. He didn’t seem perturbed, just spoke around the bread.

‘You need pistols and muskets. That’s your best chance. If that army rises, it won’t have seen modern weapons. Even then, you’re better off using bandit tactics in the hills. Smaller sorties, traps, raids … You’re not going to win at siege warfare against an army that took every citadel in the old world. And with untrained villagers?’ Another piece of bread popped into his mouth. ‘If you really want a land war, you ought to go north and find some of the Piedmontese who fought Napoleon.’

Cyprian stepped forward. Ettore’s words made sense – even sounded a little like Will’s words of this morning – but his casual attitude made Cyprian furious.

‘Do the others know? What you are? What you’ll do?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You drank from the Cup.’ Anger burned in him, hot and bright. ‘You might act like a bandit king, but you’re not. You’re a shadow. You’ll kill everyone around you. It’s only a matter of time.’

He felt a flash of satisfaction as Ettore put down the wineglass after stopping mid-swig. But all Ettore did was lean back and look at Cyprian, a long, assessing look with another snort at the end of it.

‘Like Marcus, you mean?’ said Ettore, spreading his arms over the back of his seat. ‘Your brother told me what happened.’

My brother? But how could Marcus tell Ettore anything? He stared at Ettore blankly, wrong-footed. And then sudden understanding. ‘He’s not my brother.’ He said, ‘He killed my brother.’

To his surprise, Ettore laughed, a loud, hearty laugh.

‘High and mighty, aren’t you? You’re like every kid before they drink from the Cup. A fool. They put you in a room, and they tell you to drink, and you think you know how bad it’ll be, but you don’t. You have no idea what that darkness is. No idea what you’re about to take inside you. What you’ll be for the rest of your short life. You should thank your brother for saving you from that fate. He killed the Stewards? Good riddance. If you were smart, you’d spit on their graves.’

Anger rose in him. Because Ettore was wrong. He was wrong about the Stewards. ‘A star is light in the dark.’

Ettore didn’t say anything, just shrugged, as if arguing with fanatics wasn’t worth his time. As Cyprian watched, he picked up the salami and tore off another chunk with his teeth, chewing. It infuriated Cyprian in a way that he didn’t understand. He wanted to get something out of Ettore. An admission. A reaction. Anything.

‘Are you turning?’ He flung the accusation at him.

For the first time, he saw something hard and genuine in Ettore’s dark eyes. A moment later, Ettore wiped his mouth, then stood and wordlessly picked up the wooden rake by its little pile of stones against the stone wall. He swung it.

A beautiful, familiar arc. The first triten; the pain in Cyprian’s chest swelled. He’d never thought he’d see the Steward forms again. He knew the movements as if they were carved in his bones: the memory of performing them as part of a group of novitiates in the Hall; the ache of how it felt to do them each morning alone. Ettore’s rake cleaved the air, then stopped, perfectly still in the final position. Not a single tremor.

‘Looks like I’m steady.’

The pain became anger again, at the debasement of the last vestiges of all he held sacred, the triten done with an old rake by a man who spat in the face of the Order.

‘You’re an oathbreaker! You deserted when you swore to defend the Hall! You ran,’ said Cyprian, ‘when the Stewards needed you most.’

‘Sounds like if I’d stayed, I’d be dead.’ Ettore sat again on the wooden crate. Cyprian stared at him. He was refilling his glass of wine. ‘So that worked out well for me.’

‘You traded your sworn duty for drink and prostitutes,’ said Cyprian.

‘Don’t judge them until you’ve tried them.’ Ettore tilted the glass at him in a little salute.

‘You—’ Cyprian broke off.

Around them, the hewn stone houses that faced onto the town square threw out afternoon shadows that would lengthen as the night approached and they drew another day closer to Sinclair’s arrival. This messy life in the village might be nothing to the forces of the old world, this grubby humanness that was forged out of the rocky earth. But it meant something to these villagers; it was what they were fighting for.

‘Why don’t you say what you really want to say to me?’ said Ettore, and Cyprian felt the words burst out.

‘How can it be you! How can my brother and father be dead and you’re still alive? How can you be the last Steward!’

Ettore just sat there in the afternoon sun, his arms spread in a careless gesture, as if the army under the mountain affected him not at all.

‘Because life isn’t fair, kid,’ said Ettore. ‘That’s why you take what you can.’

‘Why do you follow him?’

He couldn’t hold the question back any longer, planting his shovel in the dirt. The Hand paused alongside him, the two of them digging a trench with six men from the village. They were doing the work that Ettore was shirking. Ettore, as far as Cyprian was aware, was still drinking at the osteria.

‘He cut off your hand, didn’t he? He doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t care about anyone. Why follow a man like that?’

It was not a childish demand. It was a need to understand; a need for there to be some reason to it all. And maybe the Hand realised that. She looked at him in silence, as if she was weighing something.

‘I worked for Sinclair.’

She said the words in English, a language she rarely used. Her accent wasn’t Italian, lacking the lilting emphasis and rich vowels. She sounded like a Londoner.

‘What?’

‘I worked for Sinclair.’

Shock; looking at her, her clothes bandit-style, her face dirt-smudged where she had rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead, she seemed a thousand miles away from Sinclair’s empire in England.

‘And what? Bandits were an improvement?’

She just stared at him, a steady stare with her dark eyes.

‘My parents owned a malt house on the London docks, but died of cholera when I was eleven. I had no money to support myself. I tried my luck on the docks … I was lucky, in truth. The man who approached me wasn’t looking for what dock girls were selling. He was an overseer, he managed Sinclair’s stevedores, and he was looking for a runner.’

None of this made sense. Her story didn’t connect to this remote Umbrian town. Somewhere deep inside Cyprian a voice whispered, James was eleven when Sinclair found him. The same age as the Hand, he thought.

‘At first, the work was good. I rose up the ranks, from runner to assistant. I knew the work from my parents, and I was good at it: warehousing, inventories, distribution. I could read and write, and Sinclair gave me every opportunity. I was sixteen when I was asked to be overseer of his London warehouse. But there was a catch. I had to take the brand.’

‘Did you know?’ said Cyprian. ‘Did you know it was the mark of the Dark King?’

The Hand shook her head. ‘The truth is, I was proud. Excited, too. Everyone said the brand opened doors, offered chances for advancement … man or woman, African, Irish, Egyptian, French, if you were loyal, Sinclair didn’t care. I drank a lot and celebrated and ignored the pain in my arm. I thought I was lucky. Then.’

‘What changed?’ said Cyprian.

‘It started small. The first time, I woke late, but I wasn’t rested. When I arrived at the warehouse, I learned that I had slept through four whole days. That’s what everyone told me, slapping me on the back and joking with me for being gone. That I’d slept.

‘I put it down to drink. I went about my work, and I might have forgotten it. But it happened again a week later. And then again six days after that. I began to wake up in strange places, not knowing how I got there. Hours of my days and nights were missing. Once I woke with blood on my dress that wasn’t mine. Later I learned that a woman had been killed nearby. As I washed the blood out, I started to think that maybe I wasn’t just sleeping.

‘I talked to my landlady. She said she’d seen me. She said, You weren’t yourself. Mr Anders the publican had seen me too. And so had the street sweep. And every time I woke, the S on my wrist was burning.’

‘Sinclair,’ said Cyprian. The thought made him shiver.

‘I tied myself to my bed at night. I told others to watch me. To no avail. It didn’t always happen at night, but at times and places I couldn’t anticipate. I didn’t know what was happening.

‘And then I saw Captain Maxwell of the Sealgair talking to one of the stevedores in the warehouse one night as I was working late. Except that it wasn’t Captain Maxwell. His posture. His manners. His voice … He was talking with Sinclair’s voice.

‘And I knew. I knew that as Sinclair was puppeting him, so too had he puppeted me. He had used my body as though he had it on a string, to do his bidding.

‘Maxwell turned and our eyes met. I saw Sinclair in him. And he saw me. He saw me, and he knew I saw him. He knew that I knew everything.

‘I ran. I ran as fast and far as I could. I booked passage on a ship to Calais. I travelled south through France. Then I found a carriage to take me through the mountains into Italy. I hoped that if I just ran far enough, I could escape him.

‘It’s a terrible feeling, knowing someone else has been in control of your body. Knowing they could take you over at any moment. I thought maybe … if he didn’t know where I was … if the mountains were between us … if no one knew my name and I kept running …

‘But then he came. Into me.

‘I blacked out, as I always did, but this time I fought it, and because I fought it, I felt it. It was as if I was falling into a dark pit. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t speak. I screamed and no one heard me. I was trapped in darkness, choked, paralysed and muted. It was like being drowned, for hours, in cold thick water with no way to get to the surface of myself.

‘And then I woke up.

‘I was tied to a tree in front of a campfire. And Ettore was there, eating stew.

‘He said, “Oh, you’re back.”

‘“Who are you!” I demanded. “Let go of me!”

‘He didn’t let me go. He just kept eating. I called him every name under the sun. “You’ll run out of names before I run out of stew,” he said. I did run out of names, but not until he went for his second helping.

‘“What do you mean, ‘You’re back’?” I asked him finally.

‘He said, “You were someone else for a while.”

‘My heart jammed into my throat. “You kidnapped me! You tied me up!” I tried not to show how much his words disturbed me.

‘“Because he’s going to come back,” he said.

‘I went cold. He knelt down in front of me and pushed up the sleeve of my jacket to show the S. It was burning, red and raised as it always was after one of my turns. Ettore said, “You lose time. You wake up in strange places. People say you’ve done things. Things you don’t remember. Don’t you?”

‘I wanted to curl in on myself, away from him. “How do you know that?”

‘“Because I know Sinclair.”

‘I was really afraid now, and struggled in my bonds.

‘“Who are you?” I said. “What do you want with me?”

‘All he did was shrug. “Around here, they call me the Devil.”

‘“A devil who knows the Earl of Sinclair.”

‘“You must have really done something to piss him off,” he agreed, sitting back down opposite and starting in on the new bowl of stew.

‘“Why do you say that?” He didn’t answer, and an awful premonition passed over me. “What did I do?” I said. “While I was – While I was—”

‘“You tried to kill yourself,” he said.

‘I leaned over and was sick. Still roped to the tree, my stomach heaved. I was repelled by my own vomit on the ground next to me, but the waves of nausea wouldn’t stop.

‘I thought, There is no way out. I could run, but there was nowhere to run. Wherever I went, Sinclair would take over my body. And he would end my disobedience by making me die by my own hand. He will push me back down into that dark pit, and I will never reach the surface again.

‘Ettore just watched me from the other side of the fire.

‘“No stew until you stop throwing up,” he said.

‘I laughed weakly. With my hands tied, I couldn’t wipe my mouth. “It’s the brand, isn’t it? That’s how he does it,” I said. “That’s how he takes control of me.” Ettore nodded.

‘“And there is no way to stop him.” I said it aloud.

‘“There is one way,” Ettore said.’

The Hand stopped, staring at him again.

Cyprian realised he was supposed to glean something from her story. But he didn’t. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Ettore said there was a way to stop him, and there was,’ said the Hand.

She held up the stump.

It was as if the mountain rearranged itself around him. He looked at the stump and felt sickly naive. He looked over at Ettore, drinking in the sun.

‘Why are you telling me this? To prove he’s a good man?’

‘He’s not a good man,’ she said. ‘But he helped me.’ She shrugged, pushing herself away. ‘And we’re helping you, though the Stewards never did anything for any of us.’