PART ONE
Serotine Term
1: the Rat
Tonight the moonlight makes the floor of the Great Hall into a game board. Every high window casts a bright lattice, dividing the hall into black and white, squares and margins. The ranks of wooden benches face one another on three sides; in the space between them there is nothing but straight shadows on stone, an abstract in pen and ink. It is as still as a held breath. For once not even an eddy of wind rattles the windows or hums in the great hearth. No dust dances over the dark-barred floor. The empty benches wait. If ever the hall was ready for the first move of a grand jeu, it’s now: midnight, silence, this geometry of light. Someone else would know how to play, how to begin.
But tonight there is only the Rat, shivering a little in her threadbare shirt, her arms tight around her ribcage. She stretches one scrawny foot in and out of the light, thinking dark, pale, dark, pale. She narrows her eyes at the sheen on her toenails. She is listening for footsteps; but then, she is always listening for footsteps. She is hungry; but then, she’s always hungry. She has forgotten to notice those things. She scrunches her toes. The stone is cold. The stone is always cold; even in summer the thin-aired nights are chilly, and the daytime heat doesn’t have time to seep through the walls. But tonight she notices it, because she has spent the day just gone under the eaves – sweltering breathless under hot slates, watching threads of gold creep over her sweaty knees as the sun dipped. She presses the ball of her foot down and relishes the chill. Cold stone, cold bone. She would like to pocket it and suck on it through the long days of hiding. But it is late heat this year. This is the end of summer. Yesterday the grey ones were unlocking doors, opening windows, sweeping grit and dry leaves out of fireplaces. Today they were bustling with their baskets on wheels, making beds, flapping sheets full of the stink of soap and lavender. Tomorrow they will be cleaning on the other side of the courtyard, scrubbing the floors and clanking buckets. They will grumble to one another and smell of sweat. The young ones will slip sideways to blow smoke from windows. The Rat always hides, but soon she will be hiding harder. And then there will be the black ones, the male ones, loud and greedy. There will be more food and more danger. For a few weeks she will move more in the chimneys and less in the corridors. Then, as the days dwindle, the fires will be lit and she will use the ledges and roofs and the gaps in the walls, or only move at night to the kitchen and back. She will sleep and shiver through the long snows. This is the way the year turns.
For no reason she steps further into the hall. Moonlight spills up her ankles. She will not enter the space between the benches, but she stands on the edge of it. There is a line of silver framing the bare rectangle, like a runnel of mercury between the stones. She raises one foot, but she is only testing herself. She already knows she will not cross it. Someone else would; someone else would step forward with an opening gambit ready, bow to the empty benches. But she is the Rat, and she wouldn’t know a gambit from a claw-mark on the wall. All she knows about this place is that it isn’t hers. To the Rat the silver line is a wire, the space a trap waiting to snap shut on her. It is so alien it makes her scalp crawl. The silence stretches.
There’s no wind outside. But suddenly there’s a gasp and a whisper in the chimney, a half-beat of indistinct noise like fabric tearing. The Rat whips round, poised to run. Something drops into the hearth, flapping and scratching. A dry knot of feathers, moving. Talons scrape on the stone. The small sounds echo, magnified by the stillness. An inhuman voice calls to her, fierce and plangent. For a moment she stays where she is, frozen. Then she takes a step towards the hearth, so slowly she feels every joint in her foot where it meets the floor.
An eagle-owl on the hearthstone. It is small: not a chick but a fledgling, still blurred around the edges with the last of its down. But the fierce eyes stare at her, unblinking. Its head bobs and it calls again, a rising hopeless note like a question. The wings open into an awkward, lopsided spread of feathers. It hops, and folds back into itself. A line of moonlight falls across its back, so bright the Rat can see the ghost of brown and cream in its plumage, the fiery glint in its eye. It tries again to fly: the same painful flutter, the same sharp, flinching defeat. She watches.
It tries again, and again. It quavers a long note, louder now. Echoes hum in the walls, on the edge of audibility. She imagines the nest it came from, bare stone at the top of a tower or a buttress, high and out of reach. Somewhere there will be a mother owl. Until now, the fledgling has been safe. Until now, it has been fed and watched over. It goes on calling, as if someone will help. Every time it tries to stretch its wings she feels a prickle in her chest.
The clock strikes on the far side of the courtyard, a pure, single note.
She crosses to the hearth and the fledgling bates. She pauses until it calms again. She glances at the strong claws as they clutch and clutch on the hearthstone. She waits until she is ready. Then she crouches and reaches out, quick as a blink, and both hands grasp slippery-soft feathers with thin light bones beneath. She adjusts her grip, and twists.
There is a snap. The Rat is alone again.
She stands up. She drops the fledgling. Some instinct, deeper than logic, makes her expect a noise like breaking glass; but whatever sound it makes as it hits the floor is drowned out by the rush of blood in her ears. She doesn’t kill things very often. It has made her pulse rise into a drumbeat, a booming stutter in her head that won’t slow down. She uncurls her hands. Somehow there is blood on them. A scratch across her knuckles starts to sting. At one end, where it’s deepest, a dark bead swells, overflows and runs down her wrist. She puts her hand to her mouth and sucks at the broken skin, tasting iron. Her heartbeat trembles in her bones as if they’re hollow.
There are footsteps in the passage. For a fraction of a second the Rat thinks the rhythm of her heart has doubled or tripled. But she is always listening; it only takes that split second to hear the difference between the hot thick thump of her heart and the click of shoes on stone. She scrats a foothold in the side of the hearth and swings herself up into the chimney, bracing herself with her back and feet, muscles taut, deep in the darkest shadow. There is a movement in the doorway, a flick of a pale robe. The Rat closes her eyes, wary of the moonlight reflecting off them. It is too late to climb higher; any movement will make a noise.
The figure walks forward into the room. The footsteps pause. The Rat breathes shallowly, her ribs tight with the effort of silence. Her nose is full of the scent of old ash. A long time – a minute, a second – passes. Then she can’t help herself, and she opens her eyes a slit. She stares through the flickering smudge of her eyelashes. She recognises the figure in white: the female. All the ones in white are male, except this one. The female-male, the odd one out. She is standing where the Rat stood: on the edge of the space, poised behind the silver line. She is looking at the moonlight too. But whatever she sees, it is not what the Rat saw. The Rat clenches her teeth. Her muscles are aching.
The white one makes a movement. It is a strange cut-off gesture, the beginning of something and its end, both at once. It is like a thread linked to her wrist. She lets her hand drop, and is still again.
Then, as if the Rat has made a noise, she looks round. The silence snaps taut. The Rat freezes, pulling deeper into the shadow. Her breath catches. Something tickles the underside of her forearm. A line of wetness is crawling from her wrist towards her elbow, dark on her pale skin. Any moment now it will drip.