eyes.
Norman and Allie shared a look.
“Where’s DeGray?” Norman said.
“My master was called away on urgent business with the council members. From what I hear, he’s preparing a presentation.”
“About what?”
“I try not to make a habit of prying. His temper …”
Norman couldn’t help smiling. “Beat him at chess yet?”
Master and apprentice had played a score-and-ten times every day for as long as Norman could remember. To his knowledge, Richard had never come close to defeating John DeGray.
The shadow of a smile touched Richard’s lips. “I have faith,” he said.
“There are worse things to hold onto right now.”
The buzzing was suddenly cut short by the groaning of the iron hinges set into the door at the rear of the chambers, behind the council bench. For a moment there was silence, then there was movement. Alexander Cain strode in, dressed in the full ceremonial white robes of New Canterbury, complete with a sweeping cape billowing out behind him. With an unreadable face, he approached the bench, his footfalls echoing in the terse silence that now hung heavy over the room.
Everyone stood. The sound of their feet clapping the white floor sent a deep reverberating boom through the tower’s heart.
Alexander stepped up to his chair, the largest and most throne-like of them all, set a foot higher than the others, and sat while staring directly ahead. His eyes had become jewels that sucked all the light from the room bar that around his own body; when he inhaled, it was easy to believe that hats and crops of hair wobbled, as though drawn towards him.
In those few scant moments, the fibres of each isolated clan were gathered up by his gaze and twisted into a single rope. Suddenly the thousands of empty chairs seemed invisible. Before, they had been fragmented, a broken remnant. Now, they were one, united under the one most of them had bowed to upon altars, sworn fealty to, even prayed to at bedtime since birth: the Messiah. The one who would bring them back to dignity, their loved ones, and all they had lost.
It wasn’t their custom to lower oneself to any man, but even Norman felt the queer urge to bow.
Evelyn Fisher’s sonorous voice filled every cranny under the tower’s vast glass-capped ceiling. “Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated and hold your tongues,” she said, her usually haggard and dishevelled body ramrod straight. Norman was privy to a dazzling tessellation; thousands turned their heads in rapid succession towards her as she sat immediately to Alexander’s left. Somehow, the silence deepened to something Norman imagined only the dead had heard before. She swept a final stern glare around at those gathered, then nodded, and the rear doors of the chamber slammed shut. “Thank you,” she said after some time. “Council is now in session.”
CHAPTER 8
Billy smelled lemons. Someone was brushing her hair, slow and steady. Her head was heavy, full of iron wool. Her tongue seemed too big for her mouth, and her eyes were gummed together. She worked them open while she tried to swallow, but the sides of her gullet seemed welded together.
“Time to wake up, darling.” The voice was one she had never expected to hear again.
“Ma?”
“It’s almost noon, clover.”
Billy’s heart ached at the sound of it. Through gummed eyes, she could see a heart-shaped face framed by short dark hair. The teardrop shape of her mother’s face surrounded by a pall of bright light. She had always smelled of lemons.
“What happened?” she rasped.
“Shh, it’s okay.”
“No … You went away, Ma. I remember. You got sick …” She had starved and ended up not dissimilar from Daddy: bedridden, babbling nonsense, withering by the day. They had buried her in the bluebell patch by the reading tree. “Ma, we lost Grandpa. The monsters took him away. And now Daddy’s sick too and … I’m all alone.”
“You’re not alone, darling. I’m here.”
“Ma …” Billy smiled, and for a moment, she was okay. There was light everywhere, and she lay in the folds of something so soft it could only have been her parents’ mattress. That meant Daddy and Grandpa were probably coming home from the fields. She had been in a bad way, perhaps ill, but now she was on the mend. She was home.
Then there was noise: muttering somewhere out of sight, excited and sibilant. She had heard it before, just before the darkness had consumed her in the forest. She had been near death, lost in the darkness, and she had fallen—Daddy would surely die now she