Wintercraft: Legacy (30 page)

The ancient spirits of Fume would watch the rebuilding, the lower streets would begin to be restored and damaged towers would be repaired. Funerals would be held for all those who had not survived, including Artemis Winters, whom Kate buried in the same grave as her great-grandfather. She did not think it would be right to bury Artemis in the family crypt that she uncovered beneath the Winters tower. Artemis would have wanted to be near the sky.

Kate and Edgar cleared rooms in the upper levels of the old museum to claim as their own, while Silas continued living in his own dark space deep beneath the main floors, letting his crow fly freely around the corridors and streets, watching over Fume’s people. Edgar’s brother returned to the Skilled to continue his early training, and
Laina and Greta became regular visitors to the museum, where discussions over the creation of the new council would continue for months.

Under Silas’ direct command, the wardens would soon reinstate safe routes between Fume and the nearest towns, and begin reconnecting Albion’s settlements as they had been in the past. Work upon the city would continue for many years, but repairing the country’s broken way of life would take even longer. Albion’s people had grown suspicious of one another over the generations, but as the wardens’ harvests stopped and the Night Train was left to rust and fall into distant memory, war with the Continent would die down to a whisper and towns would begin to make contact with each other again.

Kate would watch Edgar become a formal officer of the new wardens in a ceremony held in the charred courtyard of what had once been the High Council’s chambers, while the men who had made up that council left the city and disappeared from living memory, leaving only a dark mark upon the pages of history they inhabited.

Kate did not know what lay in her own future. She spent her early weeks in her room within the museum restoring
Wintercraft
, just as she had restored dozens of other books during her old life in the bookshop with Artemis. The spirit’s rejuvenation of the pages had only taken it back to its original state, but – with its permission – Kate rebound the cover, strengthened the spine and reattached loose pages that could not restore themselves.

Tom had told her about the note Artemis had found inside the book. When Kate found it again, she sat down
and read it for the first time. She did not want to believe that her life’s course was set, but those words, written almost a century ago, had changed lives long after their writer’s death. If Ravik had never written it, Kate would not have found it hidden in the mirror and Artemis might still have been alive. If Dalliah had not encouraged Da’ru Marr to experiment upon Silas, he might never have gone looking for Kate. And if the book itself had never been written, Albion’s history would certainly have followed a very different course.

It was impossible to know if the events Kate had seen were predetermined and prophesised by seers looking into the veil, or if people’s belief in what they had ‘seen’ drove them to create situations that otherwise might never have happened on their own. She wanted to believe in free will. She needed to know that destiny could be changed, that she was not simply acting out a life whose course had already been witnessed by people who were now long dead.

Her father’s family had been consumed by their search for knowledge at any price. Her mother’s family had trusted the veil to show them the way, putting their lives in the hands of forces no one could truly understand. Kate did not sit easily upon either of their paths. She had her own life to live, and her own history to make.

She secured Ravik’s note into the back of
Wintercraft
, along with her own neatly written pages, detailing how the book had regained the spirit that now remained locked within it. She read the neatly written warning inside the cover, and then closed it gently, feeling the Winters soul
pass softly through the ink and paper within. She had her own story to add to the knowledge inside, but that could wait.
Wintercraft
’s journey was over, for now, but Kate’s future had only just begun.