WHEN THE SHADOWED figure crept out of the village, Will was ready.
Good at hiding and staying out of sight, Will slipped silently from the nighttime cover of the trees out onto the path in front of him.
‘Will!’ said Kettering. ‘I was just—’
Will looked at Kettering’s well-brushed hair and his neat sideburns, his glasses and his mismatched professorial clothes.
‘You’re one of them,’ said Will. ‘A Returner.’
Kettering pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, an agitated habit. ‘What? My dear boy – we’re all on edge, we’re all – but this is—’
‘The barracks,’ said Will.
‘What?’ said Kettering.
‘In the palace, you knew the way to the barracks. But you’d never been there. Not in this life. No one had. No one knew the layout of the palace. But you led your men to the throne room directly. And you were the only one who didn’t die of the white death when you got there.’
Kettering was staring at him.
‘At the dig, you were trying to stop them from burning the bodies,’ said Will. ‘I didn’t understand why, until I learned what the white death was. To you, it wasn’t just burning bodies. It was—’
‘Killing my countrymen,’ said Kettering.
His face had changed while Will spoke. Will’s heart was pounding. It was one thing to guess, but another to have it confirmed. Will spoke steadily.
‘You’re one of them,’ said Will. ‘And you’re going to the palace to wake them up.’
To his surprise, Kettering gave a sharp laugh. ‘Them! I don’t care about them,’ said Kettering. ‘I only care about her.’
Her?
Before his eyes, Kettering was shaking off the identity of the harmless historian. He wasn’t denying it, as Will had expected. Maybe there was a part of him, alone with his secret, that wanted to be seen. Will knew what that felt like.
‘I woke up on a pyre,’ said Kettering. ‘In the body of a seven-year-old. They burn Returners here, but you know that. They burn anyone who dies of the white death. They wanted to burn me. But they waited too long. I woke up, and a woman started screaming at them to stop. She was this body’s mother. In the confusion, I got free and ran. I didn’t know then that I was lucky … the only one of my kind to have survived. How many dozens of us have opened our eyes in flame? How many hundreds? Awakened into the screaming pain of an inferno?’
The heat of it, Will thought, the blast of it like a furnace. The binding of rope, sweating in the heat, then burning. He’d seen bodies char and crisp in the Hall of the Stewards, when they’d burned the dead.
‘What was the boy’s name?’ said Will.
‘The boy?’
‘The boy whose body you took over.’
‘How should I know?’ said Kettering.
‘Maybe his mother was screaming it,’ said Will.
‘That was thirty years ago,’ said Kettering, dismissively. ‘I left this place, this backwater. I went to England to study history, only to learn my people were forgotten. Forgotten! The whole world was a backwater. These people think they know what death is. They haven’t the first idea. They only imagine their own death … they don’t imagine everyone they know dead, everyone in their city dead, everyone in their era dead, millions of lives swallowed by a black hole of forgetting. Until it was as if none of it had ever happened at all.’
‘Who is “her”?’ said Will.
Kettering’s expression flickered. ‘She was my … she was important to me. We swore we would return together. And she’s still down there, in the dark.’
He’s still caught in the past. As every Returner would be, thought Will. Every grudge, every passion, they would open their eyes in their new bodies feeling it all. And being fully of the old world, they would care nothing about this one.
Just as Kettering cared nothing for the boy whose body he had stolen – whose life he had overwritten with his own.
There was a darker, uneasier thought. Kettering clearly had not recognised Sarcean or Anharion. Perhaps he’d been a mere soldier, too low ranked to have laid eyes on the king and his consort. But the generals in that Dark army would, like Devon, know them both on sight. The moment they were released …
‘I’m going to wake her, and I’m not going to let you stop me,’ said Kettering. Will drew in a breath.
‘I’m not here to stop you. I’m here to go with you,’ said Will. ‘The Dark King’s staff … you know where it is, what it looks like. I want us to go there together.’
He’d surprised Kettering. He saw it in his eyes. Just as he saw himself in Kettering’s estimation: a boy, a mere youth, a single life just begun in this new world, like a sapling with no knowledge of the extent of the great forest.
‘You want it for yourself,’ said Kettering, figuring it slowly. ‘The power to control his army.’ And then he laughed. ‘You can’t reach it. Only a creature of the Dark can even get close. A boy like you won’t stand a chance.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Will.
‘You really want to accompany me to the palace?’
Kettering’s expression had turned sly, assessing. Will could see Kettering’s calculation: he would need at least one body for this lady of his to inhabit. He could use Will, he was thinking. Perhaps noting especially Will’s youth, which would give his lady as long a life as possible.
‘By the time we reach the pit, the village will be evacuated,’ said Will, who had planned it carefully. ‘You can release your lady, and I’ll take up the Dark King’s staff.’
With the mountain empty of people, he could use the staff to stop the army before it found its way into living hosts.
‘All right,’ said Kettering, with the new lightness of one who thought he had found a dupe.
‘Sneaking off?’ said Violet.
His stomach dropped as she stepped into the middle of the path. That word again, part of him thought distantly, as panic hit and he had to force it down. It was too much like the night he’d set out for Bowhill, only to find Elizabeth blocking the stable door.
Violet wasn’t alone; Cyprian and Grace were with her.
Violet said, ‘You’re going after the Dark King’s staff by yourself, aren’t you?’
His body locked with tension. His heart was pounding. ‘And if I am?’
‘Last time you fought alone,’ she said. ‘This time we fight together.’ She hefted the shield on her arm. ‘We’re coming with you.’
‘You can’t,’ he said, a blurt that sounded panicked, even to his own ears.
He had to get rid of them. He couldn’t stop the army while his friends were watching. He imagined how it would be – the swirl of black across his eyes as he took up the staff, his friends realising what he was and falling back from him as Katherine had done.
He was so close. So close to the edge, his plans in danger of tipping.
‘Violet, you can’t. You’re not immune to possession. If the armies get out, they’ll go right for you.’
‘I can handle a few shadows,’ said Violet. ‘Besides, you might not be immune from possession either. You need a Lion to protect you.’
The steadfast, unwavering goodness of her made everything worse.
‘Only a Lion can stand against what lies beneath Undahar. And I’m your Lion.’ She was prepared to stand against shadows to help him. Even as he drew in a breath to speak, she said, ‘There’s nothing you can say that will stop me coming with you.’
She smiled, Cyprian and Grace flanking her on either side. The three of them stood arrayed in front of him in awful solidarity.
There wasn’t time to make another plan, not with Sinclair’s men closing in on the mountain. He felt the impossible difficulty of it: no way to dissuade Violet, no time to turn back himself … a handicap, to do this with his friends present, but he didn’t have a choice.
‘Follow me,’ Will said.
It was disconcerting to reach the palace and to find it unguarded. Sloane’s soldiers were missing. The entrance was utterly deserted.
Violet, who had never seen the palace before, was wide-eyed at the sheer scale of it as they entered the crevasse, then passed through the huge doors.
Within a few steps, they discovered why there were no soldiers: dozens of white bodies lay on the marble just beyond the entrance. Sloane’s guards had all fallen to the white death, and now lay in that disturbing paralysis. It confirmed Will’s theory that the process was accelerating, the Returners continuing to leak out of their chamber.
‘More deaths,’ said Grace.
‘Do you think they’ll wake up?’ said Violet uneasily.
It was her first time seeing the white death. It was his first time to see it knowing what it was. Knowledge gave him new eyes, the marbled flesh a disquieting cocoon from which a new creature would arise.
‘They will awaken,’ said Grace. ‘But the process takes several days.’
‘Let’s hope they haven’t been dead for that long,’ said Violet.
He imagined Returners beginning to stand up throughout the palace. Burn them, no one said – but everyone was thinking it. Will glanced at Kettering, who showed nothing on his face.
The double doors opened onto the throne room, its pale throne gleaming in the dark. Its majesty beckoned, and its sinister promise. He had sat here and brought realms of the world one by one under his control. But the throne wasn’t his destination.
The oubliette was still open, a gaping pit of black. The ropes and rope ladders they had thrown over its edge were still in place. Had no one been here in their absence? Will looked down into the lightless hole and wondered if Howell’s corpse would still be there.
He took Kettering by the wrist, holding him at the edge of the pit.
That was where he had to go – deep into the earth under the throne. Then past those rows of figures ready to awaken, until he reached the staff. And he had to do it quickly.
‘You three guard the entrance,’ Will told his friends. ‘I go down with Kettering and retrieve the Dark King’s staff.’
‘You’re going to go down there just the two of you?’ said Violet, looking at the gaping mouth of the pit.
She looked sceptical, but she didn’t try to stop him. He nodded, readying himself.
‘I have to,’ Will said. ‘I have to be the one to do it.’
‘You can try,’ said a voice that made the hair on his body stand on end. ‘But I’m going to stop you.’
His stomach dropped. Cold, he turned to face her. Because he knew that voice, even if it wasn’t her. It wasn’t the girl who had stood on the Dark Peak, and picked up Ekthalion to kill him.
It was a soldier who had run him through with a sword.
A soldier whose presence meant the end of everything. You, he’d said as he drove his sword into Will’s gut only a day earlier.
But the face was so identically hers, standing there as she had stood on the Dark Peak, like a ghost from a past he couldn’t escape.
Here to stop him; here to stop Sarcean.
‘Katherine?’ said Violet.
‘That’s not Katherine,’ said Will.
He took a step towards the pit. The others reacted with the same shock as Violet. But understanding slowly began to dawn on each of their faces.
‘It’s one of them,’ said Cyprian shakily. He drew his sword. ‘A Returner.’
‘I am Visander, the Queen’s Champion,’ said the soldier in Katherine’s body. ‘And I am here to kill the Dark King.’
Will took another step towards the pit. He had to stop the army. He had to reach the staff. Yet he wasn’t here. He was back in Bowhill: with Katherine drawing a sword; with his mother’s hands around his neck.
Violet was frowning. ‘The Dark King – what are you talking about?’
‘Has he lied? That’s what he does.’ Visander drew a sword, just as Katherine had done. ‘He’s here to take command of his army.’ Visander’s eyes were cold, determined, an expression he had never seen on Katherine’s face. ‘And I am here to kill him.’
‘Violet, take care of it,’ Will heard himself say as his hand opened, releasing Kettering from his grip.
‘I don’t know who you are, but if you’re here to stop the Dark King, we’re on the same side.’ Violet stepped forward, bracing her shield on her right arm.
‘Lion!’ Visander reacted to the Shield of Rassalon with fury. ‘I kill your kind where I find them.’
Violet drew her sword.
If seeing the shield had made Visander furious, the sight of her sword seemed to hit him like a blow, staggering him before he focused on her with complete attention. ‘You – dare – to wield Ekthalion? You foul creature of the Dark, I will strike it from your hands and run it through your heart!’
They clashed, as Kettering dashed for the pit.
Violet was Lion-strong, and she had been trained by Justice. She had skill born of hard work and dedication alongside the kind of dominating strength that had held back wave after wave of Sinclair’s men. It was an impossible combination of gifts that had allowed her to kill a Shadow King.
Visander inhabited a body that was not his own, that was untrained and weak, and that before Bowhill had never even held a sword. He looked like he ought to be dancing a quadrille with a dainty hand atop that of his dance partner. Not fighting to the death with a two-handed sword.
It didn’t matter. Within a handful of seconds, Violet was bleeding from the arm, where he’d flicked a knife at her, and then from the leg, looking shocked that any blow had landed on her at all. Cyprian leaped towards him with a cry, only to be disarmed and sent sprawling. Visander kept his attention on Violet.
‘Did you think I hadn’t fought Lions before?’ Visander said, with a strike so hard it knocked Violet on her back and sent the Shield of Rassalon clanging from her hand to the ground. ‘You’re not even a true Lion.’ He lifted his sword.
It was too fast for Violet to dodge Visander’s sword swinging towards Violet’s unprotected neck—
A small whirlwind flew out of the shadows and threw itself in front of the sword.
‘Stop it! Don’t hurt her, don’t hurt Violet! Stop!’
Elizabeth stood right in Visander’s way, her hair mussed and her dress dirty and torn, panting with effort and urgency.
His blade had stopped. He was staring at the young girl in front of him. Elizabeth stood with both feet planted wide, staring back at him.
But it was Will who stood rooted in shock. Of course she was here. Of course Visander had told her not to come, and she had ignored him, and followed him doggedly over the mountain on her pony.
There was a rumbling from the direction of the pit.
‘Elizabeth!’ said Violet. She closed her hand on her shield and pushed herself back up onto her feet as Visander said, ‘My Queen. Get out of my way.’
‘No. Violet’s my friend!’
‘Your friend is a Lion. She serves the Dark.’
‘If I’m your queen, you have to do as I say,’ said Elizabeth, ‘and I say leave her alone!’
With a brief, bitten-off snarl, Visander lowered his blade, the ten-year-old prevailing over the Champion.
Violet, quick to use any advantage, no matter how strangely it was created, was instantly holding the sharp edge of Ekthalion to Visander’s throat.
‘It’s over, Returner,’ said Violet.
Only to find Elizabeth dragging at her arm with her full weight. ‘No, let him go!’
‘He tried to kill Will!’ said Violet.
Elizabeth said, ‘Will is the Dark King.’
Everything stopped; a twisting, terrible sensation as his friends turned to look at him, to look at him and see him. He needed to speak, to open his mouth and deny it, and he couldn’t. It was like sensation of falling. Or maybe he’d been falling since Bowhill and it was the moment when everything hit.
‘Will?’ said Violet.
The pit exploded as a violent pressure from the depths was released, sending them all flying. Huge chunks of marble plunged like meteors, slamming down around them as the ground itself split. Half crack, half eruption, it collapsed the chamber in a burst of dust and rubble.
Will couldn’t see anything at first, coughing out the dust, his arm over his mouth. Wide-eyed, he looked around in the haze, needing to see from which direction the attack would come. From Visander. From Elizabeth. From Cyprian. From Violet … please not from Violet.
As the brutal shaking of the earthquake stopped, the dust began to clear.
The throne room was in ruins, chunks of ceiling collapsed between shattered columns. The pit had widened, part of a new crack that ran all the way through the floor. Slices of the ground had reared and tilted. Like icebergs grinding against one another, the sound of their occasional movement was an ominous groan.
He saw the others. Visander had thrown himself over Elizabeth, protecting her. Violet was pushing a fallen stone column aside with strength that didn’t seem real. Behind it, Cyprian and Grace were emerging from where they’d been trapped.
Grace said, ‘Where’s Kettering?’
‘The pit,’ said Cyprian, staring past Will, who turned to face the oubliette.
Like a nightmare, the first Returner came rising from the crack. It didn’t have a stable form, but seemed to flicker, a face appearing and disappearing in its amorphous darkness.
The army that had seemed like an endless chamber of horrifying statues was rising, not as figures but as spirits – no, as shadows – ready to possess the first body they touched.
Violet immediately thrust herself in front of the others, swinging her shield.
‘Get behind me!’ cried Violet. A second Returner was rising from the crack. This one turned its sightless eyes on the others and shrieked, a sound that turned the blood cold.
Shadows, thought Will, that could possess people. No one alive could fight them. Except Violet. She had killed shadows before. She killed this one, decapitating it with her shield, then swung at the second, pushing it back.
Will didn’t get behind her.
‘Will,’ she said urgently.
He walked forward towards the pit, where another Returner was rising, a monstrous shadow. He saw the fear in Violet’s eyes at where he was going, now that there was no choice left at all.
Will said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s the only way to stop this.’ He took the rope.
And dropped down into the pit, where the shadows whirled. ‘Will!’ he heard her scream behind him, and then he was too deep inside to hear anything.