‘STEWARDS,’ SAID TOM, the same way Cyprian had once spat, Lions. ‘You’re like cockroaches: just when we think we’ve stamped you out, you crawl back out of the cracks.’
Violet jerked around and saw him. He was staring right at Cyprian.
‘Tom?’ said Violet, her eyes wide with shock.
It was her brother, stepping over the rubble, Sinclair’s men holding torches behind him, creating an island of light.
‘Violet?’ Stopping the moment he saw her, as shocked as she was. ‘What are you doing here?’
All she could do was stare. It couldn’t be real, could it? He couldn’t be here.
He looked just like he had when she’d last seen him at home in London, the same auburn hair cut to reach his collar, the same scattering of freckles on his nose. He was so out of place in this monstrous underground palace – it was like opening the door to the throne room and seeing instead the parlor of her London home.
As her shock receded, it was replaced by rising tension and the speeding up of her pulse. She’d missed him so much, and for so long.
Now all she could think about were Mrs Duval’s words. That she and Tom were fated to fight.
‘I escaped from Sinclair,’ she said. Mrs Duval trained me to kill you. She didn’t say it. Tom wasn’t her enemy. She hated that Mrs Duval had put these thoughts in her head. Though somewhere a voice whispered that the one who had first insinuated the thought was not Mrs Duval. It was her father.
Tom can’t come into his true power without killing another like him, her father had said.
‘I was a prisoner.’ Did you know that? she wanted to ask him. Do you know what Father plans to do with me?
‘These people are dangerous, Violet. Step away from them.’ Tom was looking at her friends as though they were a threat. But she found a new and unsettling question rushing into her head.
‘How are you alive?’ She was staring at Tom and the armed men with him. It didn’t make sense. ‘How did you survive the white death? The army must have passed right through you.’
It was Visander who answered. ‘He bears the Dark King’s brand. It marks him as the Dark King’s servant, and protects him from possession.’
The smell of burning flesh, and Tom refusing to bite down on leather. She wanted to be sick – she knew Tom had the Dark King’s brand. Her stomach turned at the idea that it had saved him. That he was safe from the shadows because he was already the Dark King’s creature.
She looked at the men around Tom with their torches and pistols. They must all have the brand. The army of the dead had been released, and she was looking at their modern-day equivalent: the army of the living, sworn to the Dark King, and led here by her brother.
She knew her family worked for Sinclair, but she hadn’t ever truly thought of Tom as the Dark King’s soldier. The Dark King’s Lion.
She stepped back in front of her friends instinctively.
‘You don’t understand what’s happening,’ Tom said. ‘You’ve been away too long. But I can keep you safe until there’s time to tell you.’
‘You’re too late, Lion,’ said Cyprian to Tom. ‘Sinclair will never control that army. I’ve destroyed the brand.’
‘Steward,’ said Tom. ‘Get out of my way.’
Tom had killed Stewards with a crowbar on the Sealgair. She’d seen him do it. Only Justice had been strong and skilled enough to fight Tom to a standstill.
And here was Cyprian, the most talented novitiate in a generation, Justice’s natural successor, challenging her brother.
There came the slow, horrifying realisation that if they fought, she’d have to stop them.
Tom will come to kill you eventually, Mrs Duval had said. Either you’re trained to fight him or you’re not.
‘He’s let that army loose,’ said Will to Tom. ‘If you want to stop them, we’ll need to work together.’
‘The Dark King commands his Lion,’ said Visander.
Violet swung back to look at Will. With his hands tied behind him and his face smudged with dust, Will still somehow managed to command attention. Will had always been able to make people listen to him, and Tom was no different, turning on Will.
‘You,’ said Tom.
‘That’s right. The boy you chained up on the ship,’ said Will.
They recognised each other. Will had been a prisoner on the Sealgair. But Will had never talked about his time in captivity. Now she realised – of course Tom must have been in charge of it. Tom had ordered Will chained in the ship’s hold. Did Will know a side of Tom that she didn’t?
In the ship’s hold, Will had been bloody and bruised, having endured at least one severe beating, likely on Tom’s orders, maybe even at Tom’s hands. What else had passed between them? Will had never talked to her about any of it … had never even told her he knew her brother. Why?
What else had Will never told her? It wasn’t the first time that she had felt like Will was a stranger, or noticed that for all their closeness, Will shared very little. How well do you really know him? a voice whispered.
‘You killed Simon,’ said Tom.
‘Among other people,’ said Will.
Tom immediately gestured protectively for her to come to his side, a motion that she knew so well it hurt. ‘Violet, that boy – these people are dangerous. Come with me, and we can talk after.’
‘Come with you?’ She said it in disbelief.
‘You’ll be safe. Just come over to our side.’
‘Safe! Don’t you know what your father wants to do with her?’ Will said.
No, she thought, her stomach cramping. She couldn’t bear to hear the answer. She’d never asked Tom herself, because as long as she didn’t ask, she didn’t have to know.
Tom’s face showed no sign that he understood. ‘Do with her? He wants her home.’
‘He wants her dead.’ Will’s words felt like they were splitting her brain, the truth out in the open. ‘Don’t you understand anything that’s happening? While we talk, that army is killing everyone for miles. They’ll fall down in the white death, and when they wake up, they’ll take over our world. We don’t have time. We need to stop them.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Tom. ‘My father has been searching for Violet for months. And if the army’s a danger, it’s because your Steward set them loose. Sinclair was meant to have wiped the Stewards out.’
He didn’t see, she realised. He’d been taught all the wrong things. By Sinclair, by Father …
She’d wanted to be like him for so long that it was disconcerting to see his limitations. He’d been her whole world, but for the first time she saw him as a small cog in the larger machinery of Sinclair’s plans. Father killed my mother, she wanted to say. Father wants you to kill me.
‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand,’ she said. ‘Sinclair isn’t what you think. None of this is what you think. Tom—’
He was shaking his head. ‘Violet, step out of the way. I’ll deal with the Steward.’ It was all happening too fast.
Cyprian, with a shadow newly in him. Cyprian, with the Executioner’s axe in his hand. She heard herself say, ‘I’m not going to let you hurt my friends.’
‘We don’t have time to fight,’ said Will. ‘There’s only a handful of days when a Returner is dormant inside the body they’re possessing … we only have until they wake up to stop them. You need to stand down.’
Later, she’d remember that Will had been the only one talking about stopping the army, while the rest of them were caught up in old feuds. But at that moment, she barely heard him. All she could see was Tom. ‘Tom, please, you don’t have to—’
Tom wasn’t listening. ‘Take the boy. Shoot the Steward. Leave the girls alive.’
She flung up her shield to take what bullets she could, running towards Cyprian even before Tom finished speaking. But she was too far away. She braced, knowing she wouldn’t be in time.
The sound of shots never came.
As the seconds passed, she lowered her shield, expecting at every moment the crack of a shot. What she saw instead was so horrifyingly unnatural it chilled her to the core.
The man closest to her was frozen, his eyes glazed over and his pistol arm outstretched. Statue-still, he wasn’t moving. None of Sinclair’s men were moving, each halted in the middle of an action, one of them even arrested mid-step.
And Tom …
Tom was frozen in the same rictus, his mouth half-open, about to speak. His arm, upraised in an unfinished gesture, revealed his brand, glowing on his wrist. Burning. She could smell the burning flesh, the memory of his branding on the ship choking her nostrils.
‘I said, we don’t have time,’ said Will, and every man in the chamber said it with him in deadened uniformity.
Violet turned slowly. Having believed the horror to be in front of her, she saw it was behind her.
Will’s eyes were black, the entire surface of each eye showing neither iris nor white, like windows into an endless dark. His hair and clothing streamed back from him, as if wind whipped around him. He crackled with dark power, a young god crowned in dark glory.
Magic. Will’s magic – and it was not a warmly lit candle, not a tree bursting into flower, or a life-giving explosion of light. It was a cold, dark exercise in raw strength, as Will overrode the humanity of those around him and took their bodies in absolute control.
There were so many of Sinclair’s men now frozen in the chamber. And Tom – Tom was no ordinary man – Tom was a Lion, or had been a Lion, his blank, slack face now echoing those of the men around him. Once individuals, they were now puppets of flesh, subservient in every way to the twisted oath they had made to their master.
To Will.
‘You are the Dark King,’ said Violet, in horror.
Will didn’t deny it. He couldn’t, controlling Sinclair’s men with the dark brand. He hadn’t denied it before, she realised. He had just disappeared into the pit, seeking the means to control the Dark King’s army.
His army. It was like the pit was opening under her feet. Like she was the one falling into it.
‘I swore I’d never follow you,’ she said, feeling sick. ‘I swore I’d be different from Rassalon.’
Will said, ‘Violet, I’m Will.’
Except that they all said it, every man in the chamber, parroting Will’s words in that awful monotone, as though Will was all of them, a malevolent insect with a thousand eyes.
‘Let him go,’ said Violet. ‘Let my brother go!’
‘They see you for what you are,’ said Visander.
He was closing on Will with Ekthalion in his hands. She saw Will fixate on the blade, and as if that switch in attention broke his control, Sinclair’s men each instantly collapsed down into a dead faint.
‘Tom!’ she cried out, running to where he’d fallen, on her knees beside him, checking desperately for a pulse. His skin was cold. ‘Tom!’ Her fingers pressed into his neck and felt the slightest pulse – alive. He was alive. She clutched him to herself, as if she could protect him from possession with her body. She looked up blindly to see Will, half swaying, half staggering. Had controlling so many men left him weak? Will collapsed down onto one knee as Visander came to stand over him.
His eyes had returned to their normal colour when he looked up at Visander, and it made him look like the boy she knew.
But he wasn’t. She hadn’t known him. Hadn’t know who he was or what he could do.
‘How fitting that I should strike you down in the place where you once took everything from me,’ said Visander.
‘You gave him Ekthalion?’ Will said to her.
He sounded utterly betrayed, and as he looked at her, his eyes began to turn black again. He fixed them back on Visander. In a ghastly response, she felt Tom’s body begin to twitch under her hands. A moment later, several of the men on the ground lurched up onto their feet. Visander ignored them, even when they stumbled towards him.
‘You’re the same age now as I was when you killed my family,’ Visander was saying. ‘But I’m not you. I’m not going to kill your friends. I’m not going to kill the people you care about. I’m just going to kill you.’
Visander lifted Ekthalion, but the mountain was responding to Will, the ground shaking as Will’s black eyes flashed with anger, a huge rock crashing from the ceiling to smash down inches from Visander. He was going to destroy this place, Violet thought desperately, destroy Visander, destroy them.
‘Starting without me?’ said a familiar, drawling voice.
James strolled into the torchlight.
His arrogance had always been galling. He’d arrived like an idle dilettante to the final act of a play, utterly uncaring of anything that had come before his entrance. With the entitlement of its prince, he walked the length of the throne room. It was as if he believed courtiers bowed and scraped to him as he passed, and perhaps they had, once, long ago.
He stepped mincingly over a sprawled, unconscious body – one of Sinclair’s men. His eyes were fixed on Will.
It wasn’t until James stood side by side with Visander that Violet realised how similar they looked, both in colouring and in otherworldliness, beautiful and terrible, angelic and unearthly. Instruments of vengeance on the one who had hurt them the most, it was as if Anharion and the Lady stood together against Will.
On his knees in the rubble, Will said in a strange, terrible voice, ‘Both of you.’
But neither of them attacked. Visander was frozen. And it was not Will holding him in invisible bonds. It was James.
James said to Will, ‘Darling, I’m not here to kill you.’
James only had to gesture once, and Visander went flying backward, hitting a pillar and then the floor, his body slumped and slack. Cyprian took a step forward, and James merely glanced at him, and sent Cyprian careening across the floor.
Will was staring at James in shock. James looked down at Will and held out his hand. ‘Well?’
‘He’s the Dark King,’ said Violet.
‘And I’m his lieutenant,’ said James, ‘here to fight by his side.’