“No,” said Adrian.
“No, no, no.
You’re doing it like you’re trying to kill me.” “I’m doing it like you showed me.” “I showed you a waltz.
You’re doing a waltz the way a tank does a waltz.” Adrian stepped back, and threw up his hands, and nearly hit Noah, who was sitting on the sofa behind him reading a newspaper and pretending not to watch.
“Again.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
You’re not marching.
You’re gliding.
Think of water.
Think of a swan.” “I’ve never seen a swan.” Adrian stared at him.
“You’ve never seen a swan?” “I grew up in Manchester.” “They have swans in Manchester!
There are swans everywhere!
There are swans in—” Adrian stopped, and looked at Magnus’s face, and his own changed.
“Right,” he said quietly.
“Right.
Of course.
Sorry.” He cleared his throat.
“Think of something else, then.
Think of—Lyra, what’s a graceful thing that everyone’s seen?” “A screensaver,” said Lyra, from the kitchen.
“Thank you, that’s very helpful.” It was the twentieth night.
They were in the living room of the wine cellar, with the mismatched sofas pushed back against the walls and an old gramophone on the table playing Strauss, scratchily, the needle skipping on the same bar every third time round.
Adrian had decided, on the fifteenth night, apropos of nothing, that Magnus needed to learn to dance.
“Every vampire court in Europe runs on waltzes,” he had said, over a breakfast of blood and toast that only the ghouls could taste.
“It’s a known fact.
Seraphine Valemont has a ball every month.
Isabella Moretti has two.
Even Sokolov has them, though from what I hear, the dancing is mostly people being thrown into walls.
If you ever have to go to one, and God help you, you might, you’ll need to know how to waltz.
Otherwise they’ll know at once you’re not one of them.” “I’m not one of them.” “Exactly.
Which is why we need to make sure they never find out.” So now there were dancing lessons, every night, at midnight, in the living room.
Silas came to watch, and sat in an armchair with his stick across his knees and laughed until he wheezed.
Irina came, and sometimes danced with Adrian herself, slowly, with a dreamy, faraway expression, as though she were remembering a ballroom somewhere a long time ago.
Kit came once, and insisted on being taught too, and was even worse than Magnus.
Lyra never came, but the door of her vault was always open on dancing nights, just a crack, and sometimes, from far down the stairs, Magnus thought he heard her laughing.
And Noah sat on the sofa, every night, with his newspaper, and never turned a page.
“One, two, three,” said Adrian.
“One, two, three.
Better.
Much better.
Now don’t look at your feet.
Look at me.
The whole point is to look at your partner.” He grinned.
“That’s what makes it so dangerous.” Adrian Vale had been born in 1815, in a great cold house in Northumberland, the second son of a family so old and so grand that it had stopped bothering to be either.
His father had died when he was six.
His mother, Lady Cordelia Vale, had been a vampire for three hundred years.
“She married my father for his land,” Adrian said.
“And his name.
And to have children.
She couldn’t have any herself, of course.
So she married a man who could give her heirs, and when he’d done it, she let him die of a fever and kept us.” He said it lightly, the way he said everything.
“She turned my brother Julian when he turned twenty-one.
She turned me when I turned twenty-three.
Coronation year.
Hence the T-shirt.” He plucked at it.
I SURVIVED THE CORONATION OF 1838.
“I was at Westminster Abbey for it.
Watched the little Queen go up the aisle.
Went home that night, and Mother was waiting in the library, and that was that.” They were on the riverbank, sitting on the stone edge of the quay with their feet dangling over the black water.
It was the twenty-second night.
The lessons had stopped for the evening because Magnus had trodden on Adrian’s foot so hard he’d broken a toe, which had healed in four seconds but which Adrian insisted on complaining about for an hour.
“Did you want it?” Magnus asked.
“To be turned?” Adrian was quiet for a moment.
Down the river, on one of the bridges, a fiddler was playing something fast and sad.
“I don’t know,” he said at last.
“Nobody asked me.
That’s the honest answer.
I was twenty-three and stupid and I’d known since I was a boy what Mother was, and what Julian was going to be, and what I was going to be.
I’d grown up with it.
Like inheriting a title.
You don’t ask whether you want to be the Earl of something.
You just are.” He shrugged.
“Julian loved it.
Took to it like a duck to water.
He’s Mother’s heir now.
He’ll run House Vale one day.
He’s very good at it.
He’s very good at all of it: the politics, the balls, the feeding, the ghouls.
He has forty of them.” A pause.
“I was never any good at any of it.
I kept wanting to talk to the ghouls.
I kept wanting to know their names.” “So you left.” “Eventually.
It took me a hundred and fifty years to get up the nerve.
I’m a coward, you understand.
A very charming one.
I stayed in Paris and went to the balls and was a disappointment and drank too much and let Mother tell me what to do.
And then one night in 1997 a woman with a fire axe walked into Seraphine’s court and asked for justice, and Seraphine laughed at her, and Mother laughed, and Julian laughed, and I found I couldn’t.” He looked at the water.
“So I stole a Peugeot.” “Lyra says you still owe her for it.” “Lyra is a liar and a thief and the best friend I have ever had.” Adrian smiled faintly.
“Don’t tell her I said that.
She’ll be insufferable.” They sat in silence for a while.
The fiddler on the bridge finished his tune and started another.
“There was a girl,” Adrian said.
“Before.
Human.
In Paris.
In the 1920s.
She sang in a club in Montmartre, and she had a laugh like a car crash, and I was in love with her for forty-one years.” He was looking at the water.
“She knew what I was.
She didn’t care.
She asked me to turn her, once, when she was thirty, and I said no.
I couldn’t do it.
I didn’t want her to be what I was.
I wanted her to have a life.” A long pause.
“She did have one.
A good one.
I was there for all of it.
I was there when she was seventy-one, in a hospital bed in the Sixth, and she held my hand and told me I hadn’t aged a day, and that it was very rude of me.” He stopped.
Magnus didn’t say anything.
He found that he had put his hand on Adrian’s shoulder.
He didn’t remember deciding to.
“Anyway,” said Adrian, after a while, in a slightly different voice.
“That’s why I do this.
The Holešovice raids.
The strays.
All of it.” He shrugged under Magnus’s hand.
“Because I spent a hundred and fifty years being a coward, and somebody has to make up for it.” Silas found work on the twenty-fourth night.
It was at the bakery.
Of course it was.
The free ghoul who ran it was a big, slow, cheerful Moravian called Jiří, who had been a ghoul since 1938 and a baker for longer, and who had seen Silas standing in front of his window on the first night with tears running down his face.
On the twenty-fourth night, Jiří came out from behind his counter and asked Silas, gruffly, whether he knew how to knead dough.
“I was a shepherd,” said Silas.
“Or a soldier.
Or a schoolteacher.
I forget.” “Well, now you’re a baker,” said Jiří.
“Wash your hands.” He went every night after that.
He came home to the wine cellar at dawn white to the elbows with flour, smelling of yeast and wood smoke, with his old shoulders straight in a way Magnus had never seen them in the Ashen Court.
Ghouls could still taste a little, it turned out, if the food was strong enough.
Bread, fresh out of the oven, with salt.
Silas would come in and sit at the kitchen table with a hunk of it and eat it very slowly with his eyes closed, the way some people pray.
“Seventy-three years,” he said, the first time.
“Seventy-three years since I tasted bread.” He opened his eyes and looked at Magnus.
“Kid.
Kid, I’m—” He couldn’t finish.
He didn’t need to.
Irina found work too, of a kind.
She went down to the Archive every night and sat with Lyra, and Lyra taught her to scan documents, one page at a time, on a flatbed scanner, and Irina did it with total, absorbed, careful concentration for six hours straight without a break.
She had good hands, Lyra said, grudgingly.
Patient.
She didn’t rush.
On the thirtieth night, Lyra let her handle the parchment with the white gloves, and Irina came upstairs afterward glowing as if she’d been knighted.
And Kit found Magnus a football.
There was a pitch.
Of course there was a pitch.
It was in a side cavern off the main valley, a long, flat, sandy-floored chamber that had been a quarry once, with goals made of scaffolding poles and fishing nets and lines painted on the sand in luminous paint.
On Sunday nights, the young vampires of the Hidden City played there, fledglings and commons and a few of the free ghouls, two teams of eleven with no referee and no rules except that you weren’t allowed to bite.
Magnus had not kicked a football since he was fifteen.
He had been good at it, once.
In the children’s home in Wythenshawe, there had been a concrete yard with a hoop at one end and a painted goal at the other, and he had spent every hour he could out there, alone, kicking a ball against the wall.
It was the only thing that had ever been just his.
Kit dragged him onto the pitch on the thirty-first night, and for the first ten minutes he was hopeless.
He was too strong.
He kicked the ball so hard it burst.
He was too fast.
He ran past it.
He forgot to pull in his aura, and the opposing team’s goalkeeper, a nervous Slovenian fledgling, dropped to his knees in the middle of the goalmouth and had to be helped up.
And then, slowly, he found it.
He pulled the aura in.
He pulled the strength back.
He started, for the first time since the night he killed Veyr, to hold his whole self in on purpose, not to hide, but to play.
And it was the strangest thing: once he did that, once he made himself small enough to fit, it came back.
The footwork.
The touch.
The way the ball felt against the inside of his foot.
In the fortieth minute, Kit sent a long ball over the top, and Magnus ran onto it, and took it on his chest, and turned, and put it in the top corner past the Slovenian fledgling, who threw his gloves down and laughed.
Kit was on him in a second, screaming, jumping on his back, the whole team piling in on top of them, and Magnus went down under them all in the luminous sand, laughing.
Really laughing.
He did not remember the last time he had done it.
He could not stop.
At the side of the pitch, on an upturned crate, with a bag of crisps, Adrian Vale watched him, and smiled, and didn’t say anything at all.
They did the blood-oath on the thirty-third night.
It was Adrian’s idea.
They were in the kitchen of the wine cellar at four in the morning, the two of them, after the others had gone to bed.
Adrian had been quiet all evening, which was unusual.
He had been looking at Magnus, across the kitchen table, in the strange, unreadable way he had looked at him on the embankment in Prague, with the sunlight behind him.
“There’s an old custom,” Adrian said at last.
“In the courts.
Older than the courts, really.
When two vampires swear friendship.
Brotherhood.
They share blood.” He turned his mug round and round on the table.
“Just a little.
A few drops each.
It’s not a binding, not like a sire or a master.
It doesn’t give anyone a hook.
It’s more like…
a promise.
A way of saying, I trust you enough to let you in.” He glanced up.
“Julian and I did it, when I was turned.
It was expected.
Brothers.
Mother was very keen.” A faint, wry smile.
“I don’t think it took.” Magnus looked at him.
“You know I’m not normal,” he said.
“Whatever I am.
My blood.
It does things.” “I know.” Adrian met his eyes.
“I’ve known since the embankment.
Since you stood in the sunrise.
I don’t know what you are, Magnus.
I’m not going to pretend I’m not curious.
But I don’t need to know.
That’s rather the point.” He held out his hand across the table, palm up.
“I’m not asking because I want something from you.
I’m asking because I’d like you to be my brother.
If you’ll have me.
And I would very much like to have one who took.” Magnus looked at the hand for a long time.
He had never had a brother.
He had had foster brothers, a dozen of them, in a dozen houses, who had come and gone like weather.
He had had Tobias, for three months, and lost him.
He had had Silas and Petra and the ghouls of the Ashen Court, and lost most of them.
He had had a whole life of people coming into rooms and leaving them again, and he had learned, very early, not to hold on.
He took Adrian’s hand.
They did it with a silver penknife, which stung, because Adrian said that was traditional.
A small cut on each palm.
Then they clasped hands, palm to palm, the cuts pressed together, and held on.
Magnus felt Adrian’s blood come into him.
It was very different from anything he had ever drunk.
Not power, like Veyr, or ice, like the Northerner, or wine, like Ferrante.
It was warm.
Light and bright and quick, a little sad, a little wild, like a summer evening in an English garden, like champagne, like music heard through a window.
He felt it go into his veins, and spread, and settle.
And as it settled, he felt something open in him.
Not a power, exactly.
A sense.
He could feel Adrian.
Not his blood, the way he felt everyone’s blood now.
Him.
His fondness.
His worry.
His loneliness, old and deep and well-hidden, like a stone at the bottom of a pond.
And his hope, bright and terrified, that this would take.
And then Adrian gasped.
He jerked back his hand, and stared at it, and stared at Magnus.
His eyes had gone wide and very bright.
The color had come up in his face, which vampires’ faces did not do, a flush of pink across his cheekbones.
“Oh,” he said.
“Oh.
Oh, my God.” “Are you all right?” “All right?” Adrian laughed, a little wildly.
He held up his hand.
The cut on his palm had closed.
Not healed.
Closed, instantly, without a scar, the way Magnus’s did.
“I feel— Magnus, I feel like I’ve had about four hundred years of sleep.
I feel like I could run up the walls.
I can run up the walls, I’m fairly sure.” He flexed his fingers.
“What did you do?” “I don’t know.” “And I saw something.” The laughter went out of Adrian’s face.
“Just for a second.
When it went in.
I saw a room.
A white room.
With a chair in the middle.
And a man with glasses.
Smiling.” He looked at Magnus, and his bright eyes were suddenly very gentle.
“Was that yours?” Magnus didn’t trust himself to speak.
He nodded.
Adrian looked at him for a long moment.
Then he reached across the table and put his hand, the one with the healed cut, over Magnus’s.
“Then he can’t have you back,” he said simply.
“Whoever he is.
He’ll have to come through me.” It took.
Magnus knew it, the moment Adrian touched him.
Something warm and quiet and sure had settled in him, alongside everything else.
Not a hook.
Not a thread.
Just a sense, always there afterward, faint and steady, of where Adrian was and how he felt.
And on the other end of it, he could feel, Adrian was feeling the same.
He would come to rely on it more than he could ever have imagined.
He would come to know, in the dark, in the middle of a fight, in the worst moments of his life, that his brother was there.
He would come to know what it felt like when Adrian was afraid.
Mara came to the Hidden City on the thirty-fifth night.
She came in the train of a Lord’s man: Baron Matthias Kessler, of the Crimson Court, a vassal of House Valemont, who had come down from Paris to negotiate with the Warden over the price of bank blood.
That was what the Baron said, anyway.
He arrived at the Sanctuary Gate in a long dark coat with a silver-headed cane and a retinue of six: two vampire secretaries, two vampire bodyguards, and two ghouls, carrying his luggage.
The gate said NEMO HIC SERVUS.
No one here a slave.
But the Night Laws allowed a Lord’s household ghouls within a sanctuary, so long as they were not sold or harmed there, and the Warden could not turn the Baron away without insulting the Crimson Court.
So the Baron came in, and his ghouls came with him, and they went to the best hotel in the Hidden City, a grand old warren of rooms carved into the rock above the main square, and the Baron sent word to the Warden that he would be pleased to meet at his convenience.
He also sent word, much more quietly, to anyone in the Hidden City who might know about a young fledgling who had arrived three weeks before, with two ghouls, after some trouble in Prague.
“He’s not here for blood prices,” Lyra said.
She had hacked the hotel’s guest register within an hour of his arrival, and his phone within two.
“He’s here for you.
Seraphine sent him.
She wants to know what killed Veyr and made Ferrante run.” “Then I’ll stay away from him,” Magnus said.
He meant it.
He saw Mara on the thirty-sixth night, in the market.
The Baron was walking through it, slowly, with his silver-headed cane, looking at the stalls with the bored, amused interest of a rich man in a poor neighborhood.
His secretaries walked a little behind him.
His bodyguards walked behind them.
And behind them all, with her arms full of the things he’d bought, walked a ghoul.
She was young.
That was the first thing Magnus saw.
Twenty, perhaps, small and slight, with dark curly hair tied back and a thin brown face and flat, glassy, frightened eyes.
She was wearing a gray dress like a maid’s uniform.
Her arms were full of parcels, more than she could easily carry, and she was struggling to keep up, half running, her eyes on the Baron’s back.
And there were bruises on her wrists.
Dark ones, yellow-green, the kind that took a long time to come up on a ghoul.
Old bruises.
And under them, newer ones, still purple.
Magnus stopped walking.
Beside him, Adrian, who had been talking about whether Silas would let him have the heel of the next loaf, stopped too.
And through the new warm sense between them, Magnus felt his brother go suddenly, completely still.
“Don’t,” Adrian said quietly.
The ghoul in the gray dress stumbled.
One of the parcels slipped from her arms and fell onto the cobbles and split open.
Something spilled out.
Glass.
Little bottles of scent, from the perfumer’s stall, a dozen of them, shattering, filling the air with roses.
The Baron turned round.
He looked at the broken glass on the cobbles.
He looked at the ghoul.
And without any change in his bored, amused expression, he lifted his silver-headed cane, and brought it down across her face.
She didn’t cry out.
She went down onto her knees in the broken glass and the spilled perfume, with her hands over her face, and stayed there, very still, the way Magnus had once stayed still in a hall in the Ashen Court, the way Silas had, the way all of them had.
Waiting to see if there would be another.
The market had gone quiet.
Every vendor, every shopper, every vampire and ghoul and human within twenty yards had stopped and turned to look.
And not one of them moved.
NEMO HIC SERVUS.
Magnus took a step forward.
Adrian’s hand closed on his arm.
Hard.
“Magnus,” he said, very low, very fast.
“Listen to me.
The Warden’s rules.
No fights.
You promised.
He’s a Lord’s man, a Crimson Court baron, and if you touch him, Seraphine will have the excuse she needs to bring the whole of the Crimson Court down on this city.
Do you hear me?
That’s what he wants.
That’s why he did it here, in the market, in front of everyone.
He’s testing.
He wants to see who moves.” Magnus looked at the ghoul on her knees in the broken glass.
He could feel Adrian’s fear, through the new sense between them.
Bright and sharp and real.
Not for himself.
For Magnus.
For the city.
For all of them.
And under his ribs, very softly, the second heart began to beat faster.
“I hear you,” Magnus said.
He did not step back.