The Twilight Prince

Chapter Forty-One: The Dark Ship

"The Barren King first came to me in a room like this," said Éven. "Not in the real world, but in a dream. I did not know what I was then. I was ordinary, but I knew I was different; a lonely boy full of anger at an unfair world. I fell asleep on a bench by a bridge in a park, and I woke in a grand hall with trees in the walls and stars in the beams. I think that was the moment that my birthright found me."

I thought I could see it as he described it. A richer darkness spread across the shadows of the hall and carried with it a thousand pinpoints of light.

I wasn't imagining it. The magic was transforming the inside of the building, just as it had transformed its bricks.

"As I stood in the hall and looked around in wonder, a tall thin man with silver hair and dark green eyes stepped out of the shadows. He offered me water from the river of memory, and I drank, and all at once I saw the blazing sun and the swelling clouds, and the veil of night and a thousand stars, and I recognized the great stone halls of the Twilight Palace.

"I woke up to myself in that moment. He gave me the knowledge of my power and place. He told me that the lands of the fey were dying because they had drifted too far from the world. He told me that he was the Barren King, and he needed me to save my people."

Éven pressed his hand to a bare stone wall. Shadows spread across it like black paint, and the shadows split apart to reveal a doorway, and a spiral staircase that stretched up into a tower.

"Come with me."

Éven raced up the stairs with long strides. I followed. The wall of the tower was warm to the touch, and it pulsed and breathed. The view through a tiny slit window showed that we had climbed above the roof of the courts. The stairs rolled and rose beneath my feet, like the tower was growing and stretching.

We stepped out onto a balcony at the top of a black spire. The lights of the city shone like specks of rain on a windowpane. The Thames cut a black swathe through London's heart.

I looked back over the roofs of the Royal Courts and saw vast indigo sails billowing in the wind, each containing a field of shining stars. The emblem on the mainsail was a sword raised high in a bare hand.

We were travelling through the night sky on a ship of brick and shadow.

"You see how beautiful it is?" said Éven. He was elated, excited. He smiled at me, and in that moment, he was real and human again. "You see how beautiful the world can be? This is how he transformed me. This is how he will transform the world."

Beyond the sails of Éven's ship of night I saw Buckingham Palace cruise past, a giant stone prow stabbing through its wall and several stalagmite masts jutting from its roof. The ship was hung with sails that looked like sheets of shining diamond, and they bore the now familiar emblem of the bulrushes that I had seen in Southey's notes and on Gogmagog's Wall.

All around us I saw other ships cut through the clouds, all in various states of transformation. Beyond Buckingham Palace was St Paul's Cathedral, now decked in coral and boasting sails of falling water. A scallop shell emblem glowed beneath the cascade.

The imposing Horse Guards building cut across us with cannons in the windows and a rig of golden light. The pale stone of the Old Royal Naval College formed a magnificent barge with sails and oars. The portico of the British Museum was just visible inside a shell of frosted ice in the form of a ship.

I hoped Dr Southey's friend was still safe inside there.

"The Barren King guided my hand in all of this," said Éven. "He told me about Frobisher's Alicorn and the Cup of a Thousand Flowers. He told me where to find St Cuthbert's Kettle and the Dayshade and the Pannonian Reeds. He knew of John Dee's death mask and the witch seed. He has been watching for centuries, you see? Waiting for the time to be right. He knew about the seven nails and how they could be undone.

"Yet even he did not know about the eighth."

The eighth nail. That was the mystery that had yet to be answered. That was the country's last hope for defeating the Barren King's plans. I hoped we were still in radio range of the Admiral, because if this was the moment of Éven's confession, I wanted her to hear it.

"Where is the eighth nail?" I asked. "It wasn't on John Dee's map."

"The eighth nail was not John Dee's doing," said Éven. "Dee had conspirators when he cast the seven nails. Some of those conspirators were fey who betrayed their own kind, and they had descendants who kept their secrets. One of those was of your blood."

"One of those was—?"

I didn't need to give it more than a moment's thought.

Who told me about the Noble Fleet?

Who told my brother to protect me?

Who could have cast the spell that made me immune to all forms of magic before I was even born?

"My father," I said. "He's descended from one of Dee's conspirators."

"Your father was a man of many secrets," said Éven. "The descendants knew of the Barren King's plan to draw the nails. They conjured a new plan to protect the country. They created the eighth nail."

Éven brushed his hand against my neck, just as he had done when we first met. He touched the ugly stain of brown skin that ran along my neck—my birthmark—and he gritted his teeth and drew away. His fingers were black, as if he had touched iron.

"You bear that rusted mark as a sign."

I trembled, and not because of the cold.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I think you know, Ben. You are the eighth nail."

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