The Ravenmoor townhouse. Shortly before the third hour.
Lucian could not sleep.
He lay in the wide bed in his room on the second floor, stared at the ceiling, where the moonlight painted a pale rectangle, and counted. The cathedral bells had struck the first hour, then the second. From the street, laughter still drifted up now and then, the clatter of heels on cobbles, a song someone was singing badly and with great enthusiasm. Crownhaven did not stop celebrating just because a ten-year-old boy was tired.
But he was not tired at all. His head was far too full.
There was the fountain. The ice that had crept across the water in fine white veins. The girl’s face as she turned round, proud and happy, and then, a second later, startled and offended.
I’m a Winterhall. I don’t need help.
And then there was the king. The smile that did not reach his eyes. The brief look across the table, to the man with the face of wax. The nod.
Lucian did not know what it meant. He only knew that his father had not said a single word in the carriage. That his mother had held his hand the whole way. And that Desmond had posted double guards in the courtyard before the horses were even unharnessed.
He turned onto his side. Then onto the other. Then he gave up, threw back the blanket and padded barefoot to the window.
The inner courtyard lay below him, silvery in the moonlight. Two guards stood at the gate, a third at the stable door, and on the wall that separated the courtyard from the lane a fourth walked slowly back and forth. Lucian did not know all of them. He had never seen the two at the gate before. New men, presumably, whom Desmond had hired in the city, because the Ravenmoors had brought only twelve of their own guards to Crownhaven.
One of the two looked up at the window. Lucian stepped quickly back into the shadow.
You’re being silly, he thought. They’re guarding you. That’s their job.
All the same, he did not go back to bed.
He found Desmond in the entrance hall.
The captain sat on the bottom step of the great staircase, his sword across his knees, his eyes closed. Lucian would have thought he was asleep if Desmond had not said, at the very moment Lucian’s bare foot touched the top step: “You should be in bed.”
“So should you.”
“I’m not ten.”
“That’s not an argument. That’s just a number.”
Desmond opened one eye. Then he sighed and shifted over a little. Lucian sat down beside him on the cold step. For a while neither of them said anything. The remains of a fire still glowed in the hearth, and the shadows of the ancestral portraits on the walls seemed to move in the red light.
“Desmond?”
“Hm.”
“The king doesn’t like Father, does he?”
The captain did not answer at once. He turned the sword on his knees a little, so that the glow of the hearth was reflected in the blade.
“The king doesn’t like anyone who’s louder than he is.”
“Father wasn’t loud at all.”
“No. But the people in the street were.”
Lucian thought of the cheers. Ravenmoor! Ravenmoor! Of the little girl on her father’s shoulders who had nearly fallen off with excitement. Of the king’s smile.
“And Duke Winterhall?”
This time the silence was longer.
Desmond did not look at him. “Go to bed, Lucian. We leave at sunrise. In a few days we’ll be home, in Ravenhold, and then all of this will just be a story you can remember to bore your tutors with.”
“Will you tell me the story about Hollis and the bucket then?”
Desmond snorted. “If you go to bed now.”
Lucian stood up. He had already climbed three steps when he heard it.
A sound from the courtyard. Not a loud one. A dull thud, like a heavy sack falling to the ground. And after it, very softly, a clink.
Desmond was already on his feet.
Lucian had not seen him get up. A moment ago he had been sitting on the step, and now he stood in the middle of the hall, sword in hand, his head tilted slightly, listening.
Outside, something else fell. Then a muffled sound, half groan, half gurgle.
And then, quite clearly, the creak of the gate.
The great gate to the courtyard. The gate that could only be opened from the inside.
“Lucian.” Desmond did not turn round. His voice was calm, as calm as in the yard during training when he said Again. “Run upstairs. Wake your parents. Tell your father: the gate is open. Then go to Agnes in the kitchen and hide in the storeroom cellar. Do you understand?”
“What …”
“Run.”
Lucian ran.
He did not have to wake his parents. When he reached the corridor on the first floor, the door to their chambers was already flying open, and his father stood in it, in shirt and breeches, sword in hand. Behind him his mother appeared, a dressing gown over her nightdress, her fair hair loose over her shoulders.
“The gate,” Lucian gasped. “Desmond says the gate is open …”
His father looked at him, and Lucian would never forget that look. It was not a surprised look. Not a frightened one. It was the look of someone who had expected something and had hoped to be wrong.
Aldwyn turned only halfway. “Evelyn.”
“I know.” His mother was already beside Lucian, kneeling in front of him, taking his face in both hands. Her fingers were warm. “Lucian. Listen to me. You’re going to the kitchen now, to Agnes. And you’re staying there, no matter what you hear. Do you promise me?”
“What’s happening?”
“Do you promise me?”
Down in the hall someone screamed. Then steel clashed on steel, loud and hard, and the sound echoed through the whole house.
“Yes,” Lucian whispered.
His mother kissed him on the forehead. Then she rose, and when she turned, her face was no longer the face that had laughed at breakfast that morning. It was calm and clear and very, very serious.
She followed his father to the stairs.
Lucian stood alone in the corridor. He heard footsteps down in the hall, many footsteps. He heard Desmond’s voice roaring an order, and the voices of the guards answering. He heard men he did not know.
The kitchen lay at the other end of the house. He only had to run along the servants’ corridor, down the narrow stairs, through the pantry. He knew the way. He had promised to take it.
Instead, he went to the stairs.
For the record, this text was copied without the author's consent from where the story is published, and reading there supports the writer.
Only as far as the balustrade. Only to look. Only for a moment.
The hall was burning.
Not entirely, not yet. But someone had thrown a torch into the curtains at the windows, and the flames were eating their way up the heavy fabric, orange and greedy, bathing everything in a flickering, restless light.
Lucian saw the men. There were more than he could count. They wore dark clothes, without crests, without colours, and cloths over their faces, so that only their eyes could be seen. Some already lay on the floor. Some of the Ravenmoor guards too. Lucian recognised Rowan, the young guardsman who had taught him in the summer how to skip stones across the pond at Ravenhold. Rowan lay face down beside the hearth and did not move.
Desmond was fighting three men at once at the door to the inner courtyard. He moved differently than in training, much faster, much harder, and every one of his blows had a target. One of the three fell. The other two fell back.
And in the middle of the hall, at the foot of the stairs, stood his parents.
Lucian had never truly seen his father fight. He had seen him on the training ground at Ravenhold, with Desmond, with the guards, calm and controlled, as if he were playing chess. This was something else.
Aldwyn Ravenmoor fought like a thunderstorm.
His sword flashed through the air, faster than Lucian’s eyes could follow, and where it met a blade, sparks flew. But not only from the steel. White-blue lightning danced around his left hand, crackling and hissing, and when he stretched out his hand it shot forth, leapt onto the attackers, flung them back, sent them twitching to the floor. The air smelled of thunderstorms and smoke.
That morning Lucian had seen a single spark between his father’s fingers, in secret, in the library. One day.
This was no spark. This was a storm.
And beside him, back to back, his mother fought.
She had no sword. She did not need one. Where the men rushed at her, the wind struck them like an invisible fist and hurled them back against the walls. When an arrow flew at his father, and arrows were flying, from the entrance, out of the darkness, a sudden gust turned it aside so that it struck harmlessly into the wood panelling. Her fair hair whirled around her head as if she stood in the middle of a storm, and the dressing gown fluttered around her legs.
She moved as if she were dancing.
Lucian forgot to breathe.
He forgot the promise. He forgot the kitchen and Agnes and the storeroom cellar. He stood at the balustrade of the stairs, his hands clawed around the railing, and watched his parents fight side by side against a dozen men, lightning and wind, and he thought, with the strange, clear certainty of a ten-year-old: They can’t lose. No one can beat them. No one.
He only looked ahead.
He did not hear the footsteps behind him. He did not hear someone step out of the dark corridor, the servants’ corridor he himself should have taken. He did not see the sword being raised.
But his mother saw it.
Lucian saw her lift her head. Saw her gaze slide up the stairs, to him, and then past him. Saw her eyes widen.
“Lucian!”
She broke off her fight, in the middle of a movement. Lucian saw it as if in a dream where everything moves too slowly. She simply left the man she had been fighting standing there. She turned. She ran up the stairs, and the wind carried her, faster than any person could run, three steps at once, five, ten.
She could have cast a spell. A gust of wind, a barrier. Lucian had seen her cast a hundred of them that night. But a spell needed a breath, a single one, to gather the mana, and that breath she no longer had.
So she did the only thing left to her.
She shoved Lucian aside, so hard that he fell against the wall, and placed herself between him and the sword.
It was not a loud sound. That was what Lucian would never understand afterwards. It was not loud. Only a dull sound, and a short intake of breath, as if his mother had been startled by something.
Then her knees buckled.
The man behind her, tall, masked, with eyes that gleamed in the firelight, drew his sword back and raised it again. This time towards Lucian.
He never got to bring it down.
A bolt of lightning struck him full in the chest. No spark, no flicker, but a glaring white beam that shot up the stairs from the hall below, so bright that for a moment Lucian saw nothing but white. When he could see again, the man lay at the far end of the corridor, and smoke rose from his clothes.
Lucian crawled to his mother.
She lay on the top step, on her side, and her pale dressing gown was turning dark. He did not know what to do. He pressed his hands on it, the way he had once seen it done for one of the huntsmen at Ravenhold when a boar had caught him. It was warm and wet and would not stop.
“Mama.” His voice sounded strange. High and thin. “Mama, get up. Please. Get up.”
She looked at him. Her eyes were perfectly clear.
“Are you …” She had to draw breath. “Are you hurt?”
“No. No, I’m not hurt, you have to get up, you have to …”
She raised her hand. It cost her effort, Lucian could see it, but she raised it, and her fingers found his collar. The collar of his nightshirt. She tugged at it, smoothed it, pulled it up a little.
“Looks,” she whispered, “as if you’d … slept in it.”
And then she smiled. Exactly the way she had smiled at breakfast that morning, when she had stolen his bread.
One last, faint breath of air brushed across Lucian’s face. Warm, like that time he had fallen from the apple tree.
Then it was gone.
Later Lucian could not remember how long he had sat there. Perhaps only a few heartbeats. Perhaps much longer. The world around him was far away, muffled, as if someone had stuffed wool into his ears. He heard the fire crackle. He heard screams, steel, footsteps. But none of it reached him.
Until someone seized him by the shoulder.
“Lucian!”
His father was kneeling beside him. His shirt was torn, red at the side, and blood ran down his face from a wound on his forehead. Lightning still crackled around his hands, smaller now, restless, as if it did not know where to go.
He looked at Evelyn.
Lucian would remember that face for the rest of his life. His father said nothing. He did not scream. He did not weep. He only looked at his wife, for a long, long moment, and something in his eyes broke, as quietly as ice breaks when you do not hear it.
Then he passed two fingers over her eyes and closed them.
“Des!” he roared over his shoulder. His voice was rough and strange. “Des!”
Desmond came storming up the stairs. His armour was smeared with blood, his face grey with smoke, and he was bleeding from a wound on his arm. He saw the duchess lying on the steps, and for a moment he stopped, as if he had run into a wall.
“No.” Only that. “No.”
“There are too many of them.” Aldwyn rose. He pulled Lucian up with him, so abruptly that Lucian almost stumbled. “The guards at the gate were bought. At least two. They let them in. And more are coming from the lane.”
Down in the hall something crashed. A burning beam fell from the ceiling and struck the marble in a shower of sparks. New figures were pushing in through the open gate, dark, masked, blades drawn.
Desmond pointed back with his sword. “The servants’ passage. Through the kitchen to the stable. If we go now …”
“You go.”
Desmond stared at him. “Aldwyn …”
“Someone has to hold them. Otherwise none of us gets out of here.” Lucian’s father spoke quickly, quietly, without taking his eyes off the hall. “Listen to me. They’ll say I was a traitor. They’ll find evidence they wrote themselves. And they’ll look for him.” He laid a hand on Lucian’s head, heavy and warm. “They mustn’t find him, Des. Ever.”
“I’m not leaving you here.”
“You are.” Aldwyn looked at him. “Because I’m asking you to. Not as your duke. As your friend.”
For a moment the two men stood motionless before each other, in the midst of the smoke, while beneath them the hall burned. Then Aldwyn pulled something from his finger. The signet ring, heavy and silver, with the raven on it, which Lucian had seen on his father’s hand for as long as he could remember. He pressed it into Desmond’s fist and closed his fingers around it.
“For him. When he’s old enough.”
Desmond closed his eyes. When he opened them again, there was something in them Lucian did not understand. Something hard, cold, final.
“Yes, my duke.”
“Father …” Lucian seized his father’s hand, with both of his, as tightly as he could. “Father, no. You’re coming with us. You have to come. Mama is …” He could not finish the sentence.
Aldwyn knelt before him. For the second time that day Lucian looked his father straight in the eyes, as he had that morning in the library, when the spark had danced between his fingers.
“Lucian. Listen to me.” His voice was perfectly calm. “You have your mother’s eyes, did you know that? Not mine. The king was wrong.” A small, broken smile. “Look after them. After her eyes. And after yourself.”
“I don’t want …”
“I know.” His father kissed him on the forehead, exactly where his mother had kissed him earlier. “Neither do I.”
Then he stood and turned towards the stairs.
Desmond seized Lucian round the waist and lifted him as if he weighed nothing. Lucian screamed. He kicked, he flailed, he clawed at Desmond’s armour, but the captain simply carried him away, along the corridor, into the dark servants’ passage, away from the stairs.
Over Desmond’s shoulder Lucian looked back one last time.
He saw his father standing on the top step, over his mother’s body, sword in one hand, the other hand raised. He saw the masked men coming up the stairs, five, six, ten. He saw how the air around his father seemed to thicken, how the hair on his head stood on end, how the lightning around his hand grew and grew until it wrapped his whole arm, his whole body, until Aldwyn Ravenmoor himself looked like a thunderstorm in the shape of a man.
Then Desmond turned the corner, and Lucian saw only the light.
A white, blinding light that filled the whole corridor behind them. And a thunderclap so loud that the walls shook.
After that, it was silent.
They ran through the kitchen. Agnes was not there. The door to the storeroom cellar stood open, and Lucian did not look inside. Desmond carried him through the pantry, through the narrow back door, across the little yard behind the house where the bins stood and it smelled of rotting vegetables. There he set him down.
“Can you walk?”
Lucian did not answer. He was staring at the house.
Flames were bursting from the windows on the first floor. Smoke rose in thick black columns into the night sky, in front of the moon, which looked down on the city indifferently. Somewhere at the front, on the street, someone was shouting for water. Bells began to ring.
And from the house, through an open window, came a voice. Calm, used to giving orders, a voice Lucian did not know.
“The letters into the study. Before the fire gets there. And find the boy.”
Desmond laid a hand on his back. It was trembling, very slightly. Lucian had never felt Desmond’s hand tremble.
“Lucian.” Barely more than a whisper. “We have to go. Now.”
Lucian looked at his hands. They were red. He had not noticed. He had not noticed the whole time.
I only looked ahead, he thought. The thought came quite calmly, quite clearly, as if someone else had thought it. I watched them. I only looked ahead.
And she saw it.
Desmond took his hand. The red hand, without hesitating. And pulled him along, into the dark lane behind the house, away from the flames, away from the bells, away from everything he had been.
Behind them the Ravenmoor residence burned, and the smoke rose over Crownhaven, over the lanterns and the garlands and the bright pennants of the name day, all the way up to the white towers of the palace.