CYPRIAN LOOKED LIKE vengeance, all in silver. He’d crested the bodies and stood atop them, staring down at Will. How could Cyprian be here? How could he be alive when everyone else who had tried to take this power had died?
Will could feel his own guilty exposure, clasping the brand, Kettering dead, and himself revealed by Visander as the Dark King.
‘I know how it looks,’ Will said. ‘But—’
‘Give that to me,’ said Cyprian.
‘I can’t.’ Will instinctively took a step back, clutching the brand. ‘Cyprian. I can stop what’s happening. I can stop Sinclair once and for all.’
Cyprian just kept coming, sword in hand.
‘You lied to us. We let you into our Hall, thinking you were there to save us. We’d survived for thousands of years,’ Cyprian said. ‘Until you.’
Cyprian had pulled Will from his horse that first day he’d arrived in the Hall, tearing his shirt half from his body, looking for a brand. Cyprian hadn’t wanted to let him inside the walls. He’d said Will was lying to them. He’d been right. He’d been right, the whole time.
‘That’s not who I am.’ Waves of denial and fear were making his stomach cramp. He needed to get away, to get out. But there was no way out of this dark pit. ‘I helped you against Simon. I helped you against the Shadow Kings!’
‘And Katherine. She died chasing you. Did you kill her too?’ Cyprian’s green eyes flashed.
‘The sword killed her.’ There was nowhere to step back. ‘That warrior out there whose words you believe killed her!’
‘God, you brought James into the Hall,’ said Cyprian. ‘Does he know? Were the two of you laughing at us the whole time?’
‘No,’ said Will, rejecting it violently. ‘He doesn’t know. He’s innocent. Cyprian—’
‘Visander said you’d say anything to take power,’ Cyprian said bitterly.
Visander, who wore Katherine’s body like a pelt. Visander, who Sarcean had seduced and tricked, and who had borne the grudge across centuries, a hatred greater because it was humiliatingly personal. The Lady had known when she sent him that Visander would not stop until the Dark King was dead in whatever form Visander found him.
As she had known when she returned Visander into a body so like her own that it would feel to Will like she was killing him, just as she had promised.
Her eyes, staring at him across time.
Mother, stop. Mother, it’s me, Mother—
‘He’s a soldier from a war I never fought in.’ Will was shivering. It was hard to breathe, as though there were hands around his throat. ‘He remembers a person that I never was.’
‘But you were. You were.’ Cyprian spoke with awful certainty. ‘Everything’s turned out the way you planned.’ Cyprian’s eyes were like green poison, looking at him the way his mother had looked at him: as if he was something so terrible it could not be allowed to live. ‘But not this time.’
Even with his teeth chattering, he couldn’t stop the strange laugh that bubbled up. ‘You think I planned this?’
Cyprian said, ‘Didn’t you?’
He was clenching his upper arms to stop himself shaking. His mind catalogued desperately. He’d lost Cyprian, of course. He’d lost Elizabeth. He’d lost Grace. James he’d lose as soon as he found out. Had he lost Violet?
‘If I don’t take control, that army will kill everyone above ground.’ Will was surprised he could get the words out. His teeth chattering had worsened.
‘You make it sound so reasonable,’ said Cyprian. ‘Just let the Dark King have his army … This is how you do it, isn’t it? Take away all our choices, so that the only choice left is yours.’ Cyprian’s hands tightened on his sword. ‘But it isn’t. We have the Lady – the real Blood of the Lady, and she’s up there right now. Maybe we have to fight a war. But at least we have a chance, if you’re not the one in control.’
He’d known. He’d known how it would be. It was why he hadn’t told them – why he’d never told anybody. To be seen was to invite the violence of destruction.
But now that it was here, he found he couldn’t swallow it, a deeply buried kernel within him rebelling.
‘You’d rather let that army loose than trust me,’ said Will.
‘The Stewards exist to stop you,’ said Cyprian. ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’
Cyprian took another step forward, and in that moment the ground plunged, then bucked upward as if the very palace was trying to throw him back. The earth tore, a black crack forking across the ground between them. Cyprian threw out his hand for balance, and Will stumbled, the brand tumbling from his hand as the widening gap between them became a chasm.
Regaining his footing, Will saw that he was now on one side of an open crevasse, with Cyprian standing on the other – ironically, it was Cyprian who had kept his feet with extraordinary balance. But Cyprian now had no way to reach him. Vertiginously deep, the black rift seemed to plunge into the heart of the earth. It was easily twelve feet across, separating him from Cyprian by a great distance.
Miraculously, there had been no cave-in. The structure of the cavern was intact. Will looked around for—
The brand was there, only a few paces away. It was on his side of the chasm.
‘This place …’ Cyprian saw the brand too, and looked at Will across the gap. ‘It’s trying to protect you. But it won’t work.’
‘Why not?’
In an impossible leap, Cyprian jumped the crack, landing in front of Will and rising to look right at him.
‘Because I’m strong now.’
With a terrible wrench, Will understood. There was only one way that Cyprian could have made it through the shadows, only one way that he could approach the brand. The one thing he had sworn never to do.
‘You drank from the Cup,’ said Will.
He stared at Cyprian, seeing the dark pain of acknowledgement in his eyes, and remembering the boy who had vowed to remain pure. That’s how badly he wants to stop me. Anharion. Visander. The Lady … Sarcean had twisted them all, re-formed them into distorted shapes. And Will was doing the same: first to Katherine, and now to Cyprian—
They both looked at the brand at the same time. Cyprian was closer, and stronger. He was going to take the brand and smash it, and there would be no way to stop the Returners from taking thousands of bodies, then marching their way across the land.
Will had to stop him. He knew how. It was the one thing Cyprian would never forgive.
The circle of people Will had spent time with in his life was small. His mother, who had kept from him a horrifying secret. The men he’d worked with on the docks, those relationships made while always conscious of his status as an infiltrator. He’d been play-acting with them, as he had been with Katherine, until she’d spilled out into real when she’d kissed him, and he’d realised, jerking away, who she was.
But in the Hall of the Stewards, he had let himself become friends with others for the first time. Tentatively, knowing he could never tell them what he was, knowing he built on rotten foundations, but hoping he could be what he pretended. For them.
Cyprian, he knew, had come to trust him. First, as a lieutenant begins to trust a new leader proving himself slowly in the field. Then, perhaps, as a friend. That might have been their future, though Will’s idea of that kind of friendship was vague, not having had it before.
But that future was shattered. And it would never be repaired. Not now.
As Cyprian began to move towards the brand, Will said, ‘No.’
Cyprian froze. The shocked confusion on his face when he found he couldn’t move turned furious with betrayal as he realised that the shadow inside him was following Will’s command.
It obeyed Will just as the Shadow Kings had obeyed him at Bowhill: because it was sworn to him, in the same unholy bargain that the three Kings had once made. Power, at a price.
For a moment they stared at each other, Cyprian panting with impotent effort, desperately fighting his shadow. His body was trembling with exertion, but held in place by his shadow’s unrelenting grip.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Will. ‘I didn’t want to do this. I just – I can’t let you stop me. This is the only way to save the others.’
To save everyone. To stop the unfolding plans of his former self. To stop Sinclair.
Cyprian looked at him as if he would kill him. ‘You are him. You really are him.’
His own trapped body seemed to nauseate Cyprian. It was awful, watching him throwing everything he had at the shadow and failing, a tortured statue unable to move.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Will again. ‘I have to do this.’
Cyprian’s face changed. Instead of struggling again like a man throwing himself uselessly against chains, Cyprian stopped fighting. He closed his eyes, almost seeming to centre himself. Then he drew in a breath, as though calling on something deep inside him. ‘I will hold. I will not falter. In darkness—’
‘Cyprian—’ said Will.
‘—I will be the light,’ said Cyprian, and Will’s skin prickled as he recognised the words he’d chanted with the Elder Steward, the words Carver had used in his ceremony. ‘I will walk the path, and defy the shadow. I am myself and I will hold.’
His word were firm, his breathing was steady.
With a look full of calm victory, Cyprian’s eyes opened.
And he began to move.
He had beaten his shadow. Will tried to exert his own will again, only to feel the shadow inside Cyprian shrieking in frustration, banished to a small space deep inside. In two steps, Cyprian was on Will, thrusting Will sideways and snatching up the brand.
Will hit the ground just as Cyprian drew the Executioner’s axe from a strap on his back. Cyprian lifted the axe and brought it down hard, shattering the brand into a thousand pieces.
‘No!’
The explosion rocked the chamber, throwing them both backward and sending them sprawling. Will had the breath knocked out of him, his skin scraping away from the base of his palms as he thrust out his hands to break his fall.
He barely registered the pain, instantly pushing himself up, scrabbling desperately for the brand. Oh God, was there anything left? Any part of it they could reassemble?
‘It’s gone,’ said Cyprian, watching this and letting out a breathless laugh. ‘You can’t use it.’ He was laughing. He was laughing.
Searing anger and disbelief churned in Will, even as he stared up at Cyprian. ‘Don’t you understand what you’ve done?’
‘I’ve stopped you,’ said Cyprian, triumph in his voice. ‘I’ve stopped the Dark King from taking up his army.’
The threat unleashed was a horror beyond description, a world remade in darkness, and fear spiked in Will at what might now happen to Violet and the others. Beneath that, his anger was hardening into something like cold fury, stony and unyielding.
‘So you can take a shadow,’ said Will, ‘you can pledge yourself to darkness, but I can’t be trusted with my own power, even when I want to use it to do what’s right?’
Cyprian didn’t answer, taking Will in an iron grip by his arm. Will tried to resist but was yanked up, Cyprian dragging him forward. Stumbling over Kettering’s body, Will only realised after a few seconds that Cyprian wasn’t killing him. Cyprian was tying his hands and pulling him back through the bones and armour to the others.
That was worse. That was—
‘The others are going to see you for what you are,’ said Cyprian.
Will could see the circle of light shining down in the distance, like a far-off sun. He was struggling, and it had no effect on the hard, corded muscle of Cyprian’s body at all. The newly ripped-open chasm was no obstacle either, Cyprian leaping it again, gracefully.
‘Visander will kill me,’ said Will, but that wasn’t what was making his mind almost white out. It was the thought of Violet looking at him with betrayal in her eyes.
His mother, Katherine, Elizabeth, Cyprian, Grace—
Not Violet, not Violet, not Violet.
Cyprian ignored him, strong enough to climb the rope later while lashed to a prisoner. Half-rigid with panic, Will was thrown over the lip of the pit to sprawl onto the flagstones of the throne room above.
The torrent of shadows had gone, leaving the chamber shockingly quiet. Violet and the others were clustered together in a slowly fading sphere of light.
It was Violet he looked at first, Violet whose eyes locked with his, widening at the bonds he wore, and that he was obviously Cyprian’s prisoner. She was standing with the others, and all Will could do was stare back at her and think, She knows.
She knows, she knows, she knows—
He felt sick, to be exposed, to be seen, Violet’s eyes on him like the cutting off of air, the crushing of his throat. Primal panic, that he couldn’t be known like this. Not you, he wanted to say. Not you.
He was so focused on Violet that it took him a moment to see what was happening behind her.
Armed with pistols and knives, Sinclair’s men were appearing out of the darkness, their leader an auburn-haired boy who Will had last seen on the Sealgair, fighting and killing Stewards like it was nothing.
‘We’ll take it from here,’ said Violet’s brother, Tom.