Page 203 of The Bone Season

Gail was in the Porters’ Lodge. Michael and Fazal were in their rooms. Nobody was around to see me. I slipped into the forbidden wing.

Candlelight staved off the darkness. The sound had been organ music. It filled and awakened my entire body, resonating in my bones.

A small door stood open. I went through it, up the steps beyond, to the organ loft. Warden sat at the bench with his back to me.

His music roared through the ranks of pipes, up to the vaulted ceiling – a sound that pervaded each alcove and corner, straining against the ancient roof, as if it were fighting to escape into the sky. A sound that surged with terrible melancholy.

Nobody could play this without some degree of feeling. I listened for a long time.

When I finally approached him, the music stopped. I sat on the bench at his side. We faced each other in the gloom, with only the light from his eyes and a candle.

‘Paige.’

‘Hi.’ I touched my fingertips to the keys. ‘I didn’t know you could play.’

‘We have mastered the art of mimicry over the years.’

‘That wasn’t mimicry. That was you.’

There was a long silence.

‘I’m sorry she hit you,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t have to put up with that, Warden.’

He glanced at me.

‘I should not have taken your memories,’ he said, ‘but they allowed me to escape from Oxford. I walked with you through a meadow of poppies. I flew with you on the rooftops of London.’

I listened.

‘Magdalen is my home, but also my purgatory. I am both its master and its captive,’ he said. ‘Living within these walls for so long has afflicted me with a terrible wanderlust – yet here I am, two hundred years after I arrived. Still a prisoner, though I masquerade as a king.’

All the while, both of us had been captives. I wished I had known sooner.

‘Tell me about Novembertide,’ I said.

‘That night, I planned to launch a rebellion,’ he said. ‘I hoped that, with new prisoners among them, the humans would have the hope and pride to fight back. No sooner had I sown word of my plan than one human chose to betray us all. In exchange for his own freedom, he sacrificed the others. The cruelty of it shook me.’

His brow was dark. I wondered how many years of work had come crashing down around him.

‘We’re mortal.’ I gave him a bleak smile. ‘Our instinct is to survive at any cost.’

‘So I learned. For many years, I did not understand why a man would bite the hand that fed him,’ Warden said. ‘In the end, I did see. It was because he knew his right to feed himself, as well he should.’

‘You’re getting it,’ I said. ‘What made you want to try again now?’

‘You.’

I blinked.

‘Nashira did not fear a second uprising. I dared not risk one,’ he said. ‘But when you arrived, I saw potential. All of us did. Those who remain.’

‘I don’t understand why she let you stay here. Why were you allowed to train me?’

‘I convinced her that I was the only one who could. Because of what she did to me,’ Warden said. ‘I told her there were many times when I longed to abandon my body; that I had taught myself to cast my thoughts from it. That was true. She believed I could use the experience to help you dreamwalk.’

I thought on those words, putting the shreds of knowledge together.

‘The scars,’ I said quietly. ‘They still hurt?’

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