Page 401 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

‘Hey.’

‘You are here!’ Vasily looks up brightly. ‘Come.’

‘Where’s Lachlan?’

‘Security checks and weapony things.’

Kade closes the door.

Vasily’s room is larger than the standard guest quarters, positioned close to the Watch among the bedrooms reserved for High Command, but Iron Star has never possessed a luxury setting. The furniture is functional, the walls bare and the narrow wardrobe barely large enough to accommodate Vasily’s shoulders.

‘Sit,’ he invites, patting the mattress.

Kade sits opposite him. ‘So. These are the journals, huh?’

‘They are.’

‘What’s with the pictures?’

Vasily gathers the nearest photographs and passes them over.

‘These are their children before the Refinement.’

‘Refinement… is what they called it?’

‘Yes.’ Vasily hands him a small, neat stack of photographs.

Kade stares at the top one. ‘Is that me?’

‘Younger, yes. Fourteen, I think.’

The boy in the photograph is beautiful, sad and pale.

Kade looks at the one underneath.

It shows a boy with dark hair and the same fine bones as Julian, although the clothes place him decades earlier.

Back and back he goes, seeing older versions of what looks like a family line, but really, he knows he’s seeing children raised for possession on Alistair Penhalyx’s side of things.

Photographs become cabinet cards, then tintypes, daguerreotypes and finally painted miniatures and roughly sketched portraits.

‘All of them were possessed?’

‘That is their legacy. My father’s,’ Vasily says, showing Kade another pile which reveals boys who resemble himself and Roman a little, but several have golden curls. ‘And their sister.’ A final pile with girls Kade doesn’t recognise, long brown hair and brown eyes. ‘Sael, Olek and Elva and all the children they made to possess.’

‘Your father kept the journals?’

‘He did. This was the most recent one. You and I read it many times in the Estate before we made our plan.’

Kade skim-reads through several pages of densely beautiful handwriting, skipping through passages that were clearly for Vasily himself from Mikhail and several longer ones to Roman.

‘When did he write this?’

‘While on Sable Key,’ Vasily tells him. ‘He knew he would die there, I think, but he did not expect to lose Roman.’

Kade looks up.

‘Why did you want to show me these?’