The room they entered was dark. Clusters of candles cast flickering shadows over the audience that waited for them. Hushed, expectant. Emma hesitated in the doorway, but Jasper led her on by the wrist. A table had been set in the middle of the room, like an altar. Emma saw crumbling parchment, the gleam of a knife, a jug of red liquid. And at the center, the Turnbull bowl. Spiderweb cracks marked where they’d had to glue it back together. Emma’s cheeks burned, but no one was looking at her.
They all watched Jasper. Squaring his shoulders, stepping forward to the table. The Turnbulls crowded round him, all in red coats and hunting hats. Among them, Emma recognized nasty Piers, Richard, and Hugo.
The girls stood apart, huddled by the fireplace in fox ears and tails. Emma was relieved to see they were wearing gowns and heels, just as she was. Julia was a cloud of crimson in a satin halter dress; her only possible concession to practicality a tightly pinned crown of braids. She beckoned Emma to join them. Venetia, beside her, was almost vibrating with fury, her hands clenched against the black mesh of her jumpsuit. The girls had been pushed to the sidelines, Emma realized. They had a terrible view: the Turnbulls’ backs blocked the table. For once, Emma was grateful to be tall. If she stood on tiptoe, she could see Jasper and the bowl.
“What is this?” Emma whispered.
“They’re doing some sort of ceremony first,” Elizabeth Lim whispered back. “The one they didn’t do at the annual dinner.”
“I’ve not seen it before,” Antonia Viacelli added. “We were toosoused at the end of last year’s annual dinner to take it in. I was asleep with my head in a soup tureen.”
“The punch,” said Elizabeth. They all pulled a face.
“So we’re supposed to stand in a corner, like good little girls, until they’re done?” Venetia Kent’s eyes gleamed dangerously. “We’re supposed to be the most powerful generation of women the University has ever seen. And look at us, waiting all nice and proper until we’re wanted. We can’t even see.”
“Don’t,” said Julia, pulling Venetia back. “It’ll only make a scene.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Emma said, surprising herself.
Venetia flashed her something that was almost a smile.
“It’s starting,” Julia said, with a quelling stare for both of them.
The hush was unnerving. Jasper held the parchment before him, ran a finger over the spidery writing. His voice shook as he intoned the first lines. Then it grew in power, until someone else might have been speaking through him, it sounded so unlike Jasper. Snatches of words winged around the room. Brotherhood. Sacrifice. The Turnbulls watched every movement of his lips, eyes glazed in the candlelight. Then the speech dropped into Latin.
Emma knew only as much Latin as she’d been able to pick up from species names over the years. The words rolled over her. The air in the room was heavier, somehow. She licked sweat from her upper lip.
There.Sanguis. She knew that one. It meantblood. Andmortis,likerigor mortis.Death.
Piers glanced back at the group by the fire with a horrible smile. Emma bit back her revulsion and looked past him, to where Richard stood at Jasper’s elbow. He lifted the jug and let the red liquidsplash into the bowl. The veins in the glass-stone glowed scarlet. The spicy, sullen scent of wine rose in the air.
The Turnbulls roared a chant, harsh and rhythmic. There was something ancient about the sound, something raw. As though centuries of civilization had fallen away, leaving only the hunger of a pack.
Jasper slid the knife under the seal of an envelope. The paper inside was covered on both sides with typed text. Illuminated for a brief moment in the candle’s glow, it looked like a list.
Jasper let it fall into the wine. Patches of scarlet bloomed across the paper. It struggled to stay afloat, then plunged down into the depths of the bowl.
Richard handed Jasper a stone jar, edges softened with the wear of centuries. Jasper tilted it until a single red drop fell into the bowl at each compass point. The Turnbulls had been repeating the same phrase, over and over. Now their chant rose to a higher pitch.
The knife flashed. Jasper had plunged it into the bowl. He stirred the wine. Fragments of paper spun and dissolved. The liquid had taken on a dark, viscous look.
Jasper lifted a battered silver cup and dipped it to the bowl. He drank deeply. Wine ran over his fingers, dark as blood. He pulled his lips from the cup, dripping red, panting. The room thrilled to his voice.
“Gentlemen. By our flesh, by the bones of our fathers, and the spirit of the chosen: The Society of Turnbulls lives on.”
“The Society of Turnbulls lives on,” the room thundered back. Each Turnbull dipped the cup and drank.
When the last one had drunk, Venetia broke from Julia’s holdand charged forward. But there was nothing left in the bowl. Nothing but a few specks of wine sediment, like dried blood. Emma knew she was imagining it, but the veins in the glass-stone walls of the bowl seemed fatter now. Almost as though it had been fed.
Afterward, they brought out the champagne. Someone had hurried the bowl away. It was a good thought, because in the mess that followed, of wine and large male forms being flung around the room, Emma doubted it would have survived intact.
“No, but really, the thing about fox hunting,” Emma heard someone say behind her, “is the adrenaline high. More than paragliding or other extreme sports, which I do a lot of.”
“Really.” Venetia sounded excruciatingly bored. “Fox hunting.”
“Yeah,” the boy added impressively. “Because you could actually die.”
“Right, right, that’s it,” another voice boomed. “Hunting’s all about skill.”
