Wintercraft: Legacy (5 page)

Kate broke away at once. Their connection lasted only a few moments, but her absence left a feeling of emptiness
within Silas as he let her go. Kate stared through the window, her face gently blurred by the glass, and there was recognition there. After everything Silas had shown her and everything he had done, she remembered.

The inn’s sign squeaked back into motion as the living world dominated Silas’ senses once again. Kate looked back into the inn’s main room and stepped away from the glass, while Edgar made his way towards Silas, crossing the street and sticking closely to the shadows.

‘That Blackwatch officer looks like he’ll be sitting there for a while,’ he said, completely oblivious to what had just happened. ‘Have you seen any sign of Kate?’

‘She is inside,’ said Silas. ‘Under guard.’

‘So, why aren’t you going in?’

‘Dalliah has not remained free all these years without being cunning,’ said Silas. ‘If we take Kate now, she may still find a way to go ahead with her plan. She would hunt Kate down. Kate would never be safe.’

‘But she would be back to normal. With us.’

‘Dalliah has affected her mind once,’ said Silas. ‘It would not be difficult to do so again.’

He studied the scene that Dalliah had created by choosing to stop in that place. The well-populated village, the positioning of the guards, even her apparent separation from Kate, had all the markings of a subtle plan being put into action. Experience had taught him that Dalliah did not do anything without thinking many steps ahead. She was a strategist who served her own very personal agenda, with five hundred years of persecution and pain to help shape her decisions. There was no way to predict her
methods, or how she would react when under attack. With this enemy, ordinary rules of engagement did not apply.

‘We have done all we can here,’ said Silas. ‘Get the horse.’

Edgar glanced over at the empty window. ‘We can’t leave her there.’

‘Kate can look after herself,’ said Silas. ‘She is more use to us where she is.’

‘You said we can’t let her and Dalliah reach the city.’

‘I said we had to reach it first.’

Edgar would have argued further, but Silas’ demeanour warned him that his orders were not to be questioned.

The two of them left the village the same way they had entered it, climbing over a cracked section of fencing that leaned against a storehouse. No one saw them arrive, but everyone in the village felt them leave. Silas’ frustration leached from him like a poison, infecting the village with a sense of dread that made sleepers stir in their beds. The air grew still. Whispering sounds not caused by the wind spread between the buildings and shades moved across the ground like creeping smoke. The guards were suddenly more alert, raising their lanterns to inspect the surrounding trees, and the few people out on the streets stood still with fear, feeling the creeping sensation of eyes watching them from the dark.

When Silas and Edgar turned their backs upon the inn, they did not see Kate standing in the doorway with her hood laid back across her shoulders. Her link with Silas had stirred old shades up from the land, but it had also
cleared her mind like a breeze blowing down a leaf-filled lane.

The battlehorse carried its two riders away at a racing pace, while Kate’s silver-tinged eyes saw every shade that drifted through the village, each one caught in a cycle of repetition, their essences pressing through the surrounding buildings, reliving aspects of their lives that had been passed in that place. She no longer recognised Dalliah’s influence over her and knew her ‘mistress’ for exactly what she was: an enemy, and easily the most dangerous creature to set foot upon Albion soil since Silas himself.

Kate let the cool bite of the air clear her lungs of the inn’s once welcome heat. She wanted to be out in the open, to claim her freedom and leave Dalliah far behind. The memories she had regained bled into one another and together they unlocked thousands more, letting her see the entire balance of her life with complete clarity. Her hand went immediately to her necklace. She had not even noticed it on her journey there, yet now she could not imagine herself without it. Her fingers grasped the familiar shape of the oval gemstone that had once belonged to her mother, and she remembered. Everything.

She would not let Dalliah take that away from her again.

Kate stepped back into the inn to a spate of grumbles from a man disturbed by the cold from the door. He was about to complain to her directly, but one look at the figure in black was enough to make him think again. The girl standing by the door was not the same as the one who had stepped out of it. She held her head a little higher,
her eyes were a little sharper, and one look at them made people feel exposed, as if she could peer into the well of their deepest secrets.

The man lowered his head and pulled his collar up around his neck, while Kate sensed Dalliah’s presence descending the staircase before the woman stepped into view, no doubt to check upon the girl whose life she was so willing to trade in order to reclaim her own. The remnants of Silas’ influence still clung to the air, and he had left Kate with far more than just his memories. He had stoked the fire of rebellion within her, but she knew enough to take care around the woman. Silas had left her with a warning.

‘What are you doing, Kate?’

Looking at Dalliah with veil-touched eyes was like looking at a phantom. Her living body was strong, but inside the little that was left of her spirit was withered and worn, like a tree too often bent and twisted by the wind. Her soul was broken, but that alone should not have been enough to distort her essence in such a violent way. She had caused that damage to herself, during decades of experimentation and desperation. Dalliah’s will to survive had carried her for far longer than her physical body should have been able to endure, even with her connection to the restorative energies of the veil. Kate was surprised by the twisted sight before her, but she did not flinch, focusing instead upon Dalliah’s living form.

‘Someone thought they saw a warden outside,’ said Kate. Since Silas had been in the village, there was just enough truth in her words to be convincing.

‘The wardens have no reason to waste their time on a place like this,’ said Dalliah. ‘Do not get dragged into these people’s superstitions. Leave them to their useless lives and sit down.’

Kate twisted her fingers into fists, but she did as she was told.

‘Something has changed,’ said Dalliah, looking out of the window where the crow had been. ‘The dead are restless.’

Some of the inn patrons looked at her and the woman with the baby dared to speak up.

‘What’s that you’re sayin’ about the dead?’

‘Wait a few days,’ Dalliah said, glancing coldly at the child. ‘You will see.’

She sat down beside Kate and the people in the room gradually sought comfort in their drinks, their dreams, and the quiet crackling of the fire.

Kate did not have the luxury of ignorance any longer. Silas and Edgar were gone and Dalliah Grey was a force beyond anything she had encountered before. Silas’ unspoken warning hung heavily within her thoughts.

Face Dalliah with care. Overt disobedience will end in death
.

Silas’ battlehorse pounded through the forest, thundering along a maze of overgrown smugglers’ trails and snapping through a wall of never-ending trees. The wilds raced by in a crackle of twigs. A waxing moon illuminated the stony sky, eventually giving way to the rising sun of a new day, and still the horse kept running. Silas rode with one hand on the reins and the other resting against his mount’s powerful neck, channelling the veil’s energy into the running beast. If its muscles tired, Silas’ influence kept them pumping, lending the horse a burst of new life, replenishing its ageing bones and returning its old heart to the pounding strength of forgotten youth.

Edgar gradually became used to the rhythm of the hooves striking the earth and the movement of the horse’s body as it broke out of the forest and into an open patchwork of what had once been ancient fields and hedgerows.
Nature was already reclaiming what people had left behind. Neat boundary hedges had long since outgrown their straight lines and now spread outwards into webs of evergreen touched with tips of white.

The few times they stopped during that second day, it was for only a few minutes at a time, allowing the horse to drink and giving Edgar time to forage for food while walking off the pain in his legs that came from riding for so long. Sluggish clouds blotted out what little sun the winter had to offer during the short day and rain fell like a constant mist, clinging to their skin.

Silas did not speak. Any questions Edgar asked were left unanswered, and they rode on, until the sun slipped once again towards the horizon and the high walls of Fume spread like a chain of black pearls in the distance.

With the fiery sun behind it, the city looked like a dark crown upon the landscape. Its curved walls reached further than the eye could see. Black towers bristled against the sky, silhouetted by burning clouds as their spires blotted out the light of the setting sun, and a wide river encircled it all like a fiery slick reflecting the orange clouds above.

The road was exposed enough to be dangerous to anyone daring to ride so close to the ancient city. Watchposts bulged from Fume’s walls at equal intervals, and any gate guards on duty had orders not to let anyone inside without direct permission from the High Council itself. Travellers were almost always turned away, and those who challenged that decision often met their end at the point of a warden’s arrow.

Once people set up home in the capital, few ever had reason to leave the safety of its boundary again, yet it appeared that people had done so recently. Silas slowed the horse to a steady walk. He would have expected to see one or two trails, but the road was churned into a mess of hoofprints, wheel tracks and bootprints, every one of them heading away from Fume. Many of the tracks were fresh. People had been leaving, this time in their hundreds.

Edgar was dozing lightly behind Silas, staying just alert enough to keep himself from sliding off the horse. The crow had spent the entire journey shadowing them from high overhead, and when Silas stopped it fluttered down and strutted across the ground, hunting for food in the dirt.

Silas turned. ‘Wake up.’

Edgar sat up, half asleep. ‘Why have we stopped?’

‘Something has happened in Fume.’

Silas edged the horse forward a few steps and inspected the walls far ahead. He could not see anyone standing upon the watchposts. It was sundown. The guard should have been changing and the sentry lights should already have been lit. Silas knew every inch of that city. Every alleyway, every patrol route, every rhythm. Just weeks ago, he had been responsible for the movements of each warden within those walls. To him, any change in routine was significant, no matter how small.

‘We will walk the rest of the way,’ he said. ‘A horse like this will be noticed out here.’

Edgar clambered down, remembering the last time he had seen the city from a distance, when he and Kate were
being carried away from it against their will. He had seen too much during the past few days. All he wanted was for it to be over.

‘What’s the plan?’ he asked, as Silas unbuckled the saddle and pulled it loose.

‘We are going to find a way in.’

Silas slid the bridle from the horse’s head and patted its flank. Remembering its training, the old battlehorse took that as a signal to rest and wandered a little way off, into the night.

The gates of Fume stood as imposing webs of ancient iron that reached even higher than their towering walls. Beyond those gates, the city was a haunting place. The windows of the memorial towers stared down like sunken eyes watching over a maze of stone streets. Gas lamps flickered and flared, illuminating roads that wound in upon each other, twisting between buildings that had been there since the city’s first days, and along past the newer houses of Albion’s richest families and their servants. The new veined deeply into what was left of the old, but the essence of the city remained just as it had been for centuries. Immovable. Eternal. A city of secrets.

Fume was a place built for the dead, not for the living. It was the country’s capital and Silas should have been there, protecting it. The day he turned away from the High Council, he had been forced to abandon the place he had sworn to protect. Enemies had already spread into the arteries of the city. Dalliah Grey was not far away and the wardens were making mistakes. It was time to put things right.

One by one, the watchposts came to life. Guardrooms swelled with light and silhouettes of wardens moved along pathways on the wall tops. Silas passed Edgar his dagger. ‘We will infiltrate one of the watchposts,’ he said. ‘Make our way in over the walls.’

‘
Over
them? It would be easier to go under them.’

‘We do not have time for foolish ideas,’ said Silas.

‘Maybe you don’t know as much about Fume as you think you do.’

Silas regarded Edgar carefully.