But for every victory, there were dozens of terrifying stories. Children were shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, burned. Christopher Madoc’s skin and clothes were permanently dyed by his sister’s blood as he tried to stanch the bleeding of her fatal wounds. Luke Hathaway’s skull was crushed beneath the boot of a Grafter foot soldier. Helen Murtaugh, brought face-to-face with the enemy, lost control of her own powers. Ribbons of black fire erupted from her spine, flogging the comrades around her and consuming her alive. Eventually, her master was called upon to put her down.
The Broederschap recognized the effect that the loss of each child had on the Checquy and began to target the youngest troops specifically. On the battlefield, they dispatched them as brutally as they could. At night, the Checquy camps were infiltrated and the children were snatched away, never to be seen again. The atrocities did not break the spirit of the British. Rather, they inflamed them. Rage drove the Rooks to throw caution to the wind and put their defenses aside to ensure that they brought their foes down. The Checquy moved forward, implacably, and scoured the land clean.
Three weeks after the Grafters set foot on British soil, the war was ended with a final gunshot. The enemy’s leaders fled, bursting through the lines of Checquy soldiers and hurling themselves into the ocean. Their army had been smashed, wiped off the Isle of Wight. However, it had been at horrendous cost. The Checquy had suffered catastrophic losses, especially among their young. A generation of Britain’s supernatural youth had been decimated.
Of course, that was not the end of the story. The Checquy Court traveled to Brussels to oversee the dismantling of the Wetenschappelijk Broederschap van Natuurkundigen. But for the apprentices of the Checquy, the war was over. Their wounds were stitched up, their comrades were buried. They went home. Some of them had lost their masters, and these went to new houses to resume their training.
They were changed, of course. How could they not be after what they had seen, after what they had done? Quieter, more solemn, utterly dedicated to their mission. But there was very little of the crippling residual trauma one might have expected. The children of the Checquy had never been coddled and had never labored under any delusions about what they were and what they might be called upon to do. When they came back, they were hardened, tempered. Hatred for the Grafters smoldered within them. They could still feel joy; there were still times when they could play and romp. Yet they all remembered what they had seen, and they made sure it was not forgotten.
When the new generation of children began their apprenticeships, they brought a little more light into the lives of their sober older siblings. It’s remarkable what exposure to genuinely innocent happiness can do. Inevitably, the younger students adored the older, quieter boys and girls who patiently helped them with their lessons. When it came time for the older apprentices to leave their master’s house, they would take the younger ones aside. They might sit in the master’s library, or at the top of a nearby hill, or simply on the back stoop. And then the veterans of the Isle of Wight would tell their stories, remembering the names of their fallen comrades and recounting the events of those weeks.
The stories were all different, of course. Different soldiers had seen and felt different things. They had lost different people. But, as if by agreement, all the tales ended the same way.
“Remember,” the older apprentice would say. “And pass the memory along to those who come after you.”
And so it went, for decades, for centuries. Each generation passed the stories on to the next and instructed them about the debt owed to the dead. It was not a formal practice or a requirement. In the official histories they were casualties, figures, names, honors. In the stories, they were people, friends, comrades.
In the mid-twentieth century, when the Estate was established as a school, the very first students, former apprentices themselves, brought the stories with them to Kirrin Island. There, finally, all the memories and anecdotes came together, and a new chapter in the oral history of the Checquy began.
When students at the Estate entered year seven, the upperclassmen would sneak into their rooms in the dead of night and take them down to the echoing assembly hall. They would sit, silent in the dark, while the older students took turns telling them carefully memorized accounts of what had happened all those centuries ago. There might be a pupil with a gift for illusion who would fill the darkness with images or perhaps just a budding actor who could draw people in with the sound of his voice. But for hours, the memories of long-dead children would wash over them. When the sun came up, every student was shaken, wrung out, and exhausted. And they all came away with certain important lessons drilled into them.
You will face horrible things. Admittedly, this lesson did not come as a tremendous surprise to the students. But it had a certainty to it now.
You could die. This message struck home, hard. Up to that point, the Estate education had always emphasized triumphant victory. Their bedtime stories and lessons had revolved around adventures in which grown Checquy warriors always overcame the threat. But the children at the Isle of Wight had been called to duty, and many of them had not come back.
You will never be alone. The Checquy will always be there for you. Coming from the bigger students, this meant the world to the year-sevens. After the night they’d had, the lack of sleep, the litany of atrocities and warnings, this was the reassurance that would bond them to their siblings and give them courage to hear the final caution.
The Grafters were normal men. Normal men who wanted to be like us and made themselves into monsters.
All of the students came away from the experience with a smoldering hatred for the memory of the Broederschap. The Checquy generally didn’t hate the monsters they hunted — it would have been unprofessional, and exhausting. But the brutality at the Isle of Wight meant that centuries later, Checquy dinner parties would still frequently end with a toast of “Fuck the Grafters, we’re glad they’re dead! Oh, and God save the King.”
Except that now, apparently, they weren’t dead. Instead, they were walking around the hallways of Apex House. Pawn Korybut’s grip on his desk tightened, and a slick of something slid out from under his touch.
12
“Well, I think that all went very nicely,” said Lady Farrier. “Apart from your little tumble, Miss Leliefeld. How’s your face feeling?”
“Fine, thank you,” said Odette.
“And your throat?” asked Marcel.
“It’s fine, really,” said Odette testily.
Once she’d been picked up by the aghast executives, and all the scattered possessions from her purse (including those damned stockings, a tampon, some shiny and clattering surgical tools, and several dozen pills that had burst out of their containers and made a desperate break for it across the tiled floor) had been gathered up and gingerly returned to her, there had been a humiliating few minutes in which Marcel insisted on checking to make sure that she hadn’t done herself any serious injury. He’d taken her pulse, made her say “Ahh” loudly for three minutes, and asked in a disconcertingly carrying voice if any of her sutures might have ruptured. She was sure the gathered VIPs now thought she was an invalid or an idiot or both.
An invalidiot.
Odette remained silent throughout the ensuing introductions and morning tea and was then given the petrifying news that she was to join Marcel and Grootvader for a little stroll around the building with the Court of the Checquy. The only bright spot had been the fact that Pawn Bannister was not approved to join them. They’d left him sulking by the little cakes and had been led away through some stodgy wood-paneled corridors to a much nicer corridor. And then they stopped.
“And here we are,” said Lady Farrier.
“We are?” asked Marcel.
“We are,” said Rook Thomas. “And now we need to have a little meeting.”