Éven floated above the street, surrounded by purple curling fog. The shadow of his brow covered most of his face, making his eyes brighter than ever in the darkness. The lining of his long jacket was filled with the rich black and shimmering stars of the night sky, and the edges of his clothing seemed to drift into one with the fog, as if he were coming apart.
He smiled at me.
"Are you sure you can't open the door?" I asked the Admiral.
"You have to go with him, Mr Frazer."
Éven pressed a hand against the window. The fog surged up against it, staining the glass.
I slipped the radio into my pocket, next to the knife.
A crack ran through the glass.
The window shattered, glass falling to the floor. Wind blasted into the room.
Éven was in front of me.
"You ran," he said.
He didn't seem angry. He seemed hurt. He looked at the monitor and saw the briefing room, and he walked over and pressed his hand to the glass. A black shadow spread over the screen and faded almost at once.
"Good evening, Lord Éven," said the Admiral. "I'm sorry we can't meet in person."
Éven smiled. "Open the door, Admiral Winstanley. I will be glad to shake your hand."
"You won't like what you find in the other hand, your lordship."
Éven chuckled.
"You are not to be underestimated, Admiral. Your defences are remarkable. Have you sent for the cavalry?"
"You know that I have."
"They will arrive too late."
The Admiral put her arms behind her back. "You don't want that, Lord Éven. You're making a serious mistake. You think this is going to end with England under fey control, but you're wrong. The twelve courts weren't bullied or tricked into signing the Horseshoe Accords. They signed because they understood the stakes."
Éven sneered at her like he wanted to spit her words back in her face.
"They signed because they knew you would wage war on them with gunpowder and steel if they did not," he said.
"The island was being torn apart. Great Britain was one of the most magic-rich places in the world, your lordship, and it suffered for it. When Dr Dee made contact with the last of the courts, they told him that they could see the whole island from their city in the stars. They could see that the island was cracked, and they could see that the crack was growing. If magic was not contained, the island would be lost in a great cataclysm; lost to all of us, both human and fey."
Éven shook his head. "More than four centuries have passed, Admiral. What cracks there were in this land healed long ago."
"You can't be sure of that. You can draw the nails and raise the ships, but you can't control what happens next."
"What happens, Admiral, is that four hundred years of human dominion comes to an end. The fey will reclaim their land."
Éven held out his hand to me. I looked to the Admiral, but her face was hard like stone.
"Dr Southey, get Tiana Cavendish back on the line. We're done with this," she said.
The screen went black.
Maybe the Admiral had a plan. Maybe she could get her people here in time to stop this, and maybe Tiana Cavendish could help. Maybe something else or someone else could intervene and save the country.
But maybe none of that was true. Maybe it was just me?
And England expects that every man will do his duty.
I put my hand in Éven's.
* * *
We walked the streets while the city slept around us.
The traffic lights at the crossroads still changed from red to green, but the cars did not move. The young woman who gave out free newspapers lay slumped over her stack. A man on a bicycle rested his head on a lamppost and hugged it like a teddy bear. A woman who had been climbing out of a taxi cab and a man who had rushed to claim it now sat propped against the back tyre with shopping bags piled around them. Just as Hastings did not feel like Hastings without seagulls circling in the sky, London felt artificial without the constant flutter of pigeons.
It was too terrifying to think that Éven had this much power.
I could see that the power had changed him. He spoke differently. He carried himself differently. He looked at me differently. It was as if the power was burning away the last vestiges of the man I wanted to know.
"This is too much, Éven."
He put his hand on my shoulder, I think to reassure me, but it only made me nervous.
"I know that all this frightens you, Ben. It frightens me as well."
"You? You broke out of prison. You faced an army. You started a war. I don't think anything frightens you."
"You are wrong. Failure frightens me."
I looked into his eyes and searched for fear. I didn't find it.
"I have not forgotten who I am," said Éven. "I have been afraid from the very beginning. I am not so different from you."
A white stone building loomed ahead of us through the trees. It was the sort of grand, unusual building that can appear out of nowhere on otherwise ordinary London streets. The tall wooden doors opened to greet us as we approached.
The building looked like a cathedral, but the sign by the doors revealed this to be the Royal Courts of Justice.
I had never been here before. If my father had meant to take me here, he never made it this far down his list.
Éven leapt the low iron fence that separated the courts from the pavement and walked through the open doors. As soon as he crossed the threshold I saw black veins spread across the walls of the building. The white bricks turned to black. Éven's power wasn't only changing him; it was changing everything he touched. Everything but me.
I climbed over the fence, took a deep breath, and walked in.
No sooner had I crossed the threshold than the tiled floor shook beneath my feet and I almost fell. I steadied myself against the door frame and turned and saw the ground sink away from me.
Flying. Like St Paul's and the Globe, the building was flying.
The tree tops rushed past, and the rooftops. I leaned forward to look at the street that I had stood on a moment earlier, and it was at least a hundred feet below me already. The sight threw me off balance and I almost tipped forward.
Éven grabbed my arm and pulled me inside. The doors slammed shut.
"Welcome to the Dark Ship, Ben."
He led me into a long hall with arched alcoves between slender pillars. Blue moonlight shone through the tall thin windows and cast a midnight pallor over the statues of wise old men that lined the room.
"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."
* * *