Issue #261, Tenth Anniversary Month Double-Issue I • Sept. 27, 2018

“Shadowdrop,” by Chris Willrich

“Court of Birth, Court of Strength,” by Aliette de Bodard

“Ruby, Singing,” by Fran Wilde

“We Ragged Few,” by Kate Alice Marshall

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

SHADOWDROP

by Chris Willrich

         The folk of the Infinite Forum swore in nine languages and ninety dialects as a cat’s black shape darted up Via Antiqua’s hot white stones. They hissed again as they spied the magic-twisted bloodhound bounding after it like a carnelian thundercloud. And cursed once more as their gazes flicked back to the cat.

         I didn’t blame them. I’d have been more afraid of me, too.

         However I, Shadowdrop, most magnificently tragic of black cats, had fears of a different litter that day. My chief worry wasn’t the hellsnout, for all that it pursued me past the hundred marble emperors glaring beneath pigeons’ feet. I didn’t trouble much about its spittle-flecked fangs chomping the air behind my tail as I cleared the iron fence of the Western Gravegarden. Nor was I overly concerned about its frantic howling as it summoned a half dozen friends for a chase up the Stairway of Ages, up the stone stretch, the bronze stretch, the iron and steel stretches shining near the hilltop. For, whatever strange fates separate us from our origins, hellsnouts remain dogs—and I, a cat.

         No, what preoccupied me that afternoon when I raced through the drought’s heat toward Underseers’ Tower was that, once again, I’d shed bad luck upon innocents.

         The Tower before me offered both safety and distraction from the screams. It pretended to lack a first story, its columns wreathed in a mass of pipes, scaffolding, gutters, and ladders. The infrastructure was all real, but its exposure was all symbolism. The wizards needed no stairs, but there were pathways just for magical servitors and cats, and I rose into a rhythm of leaps, spiraling around the building, my hunters baying below.

         As I reached the second story, where the tower looked more like a respectable fortress with crenelations and arrow-slits and all the architecture of killing, I peeked between gargoyles, surveying the damage.

         It was impressive, even for me.

         Overturned fruit carts spilled pink wondermelons and purple squirtbursts onto the stone emperors’ feet... A carriage sprawled within the Fountain of Shackled Seas, and silk-clad nobles fled the spray spurting from every gilded window... A crowd emerging from the Zodiac Coliseum tangled in the backwash and like angry bees swarmed between the partisans of Glorg Headsmasher and Snarl Biteblood.

         Mighty was my chagrin, and mightier still my power.

         “My congratulations, sister.”

         I twitched my tail in solemn acknowledgement. There were maybe a hundred black cats in the city, a feline village of sorts within the human metropolis... but even if there were a million, I would know Whiskerdoom.

         “I really am impressed, Shadowdrop,” he said from his perch upon a gargoyle, executing a negligent-seeming but thoroughly precise maneuver of paw-wetting and face-grooming. He looked upon Archaeopolis, and his eyes, in the manner of our family, resembled obsidian flecks mounted in jade and fringed by gold. “Why, break all my mirrors if I haven’t seen such spectacular luckbane all year. You were always the strongest.”

         He didn’t mean just in our litter, of course. I was a legend, of sorts, among black cats. It was one reason I avoided my kind.

         “Might has its drawbacks,” I said, regarding the ramshackle houses far over in Foottown. I remembered the day a year ago when I had encountered the girl who read books to me. “As in, people might have gotten hurt.”

         “Ah, but people are always getting hurt. Clumsy dumb things! If they’re not injuring themselves, they’re throttling each other. Except the wizards, naturally.” Whiskerdoom nodded a trifle uneasily toward a small steel panel crisscrossed with magic symbols. They glowed with silvery light, yet it was afternoon with no moon in the sky. “A shame you’ve never applied to be a familiar, sister. You’ve got the luck for it. In a way, that’s why I sent for you.”

         “Oh?” Despite myself I was curious.

         “I invite you to come through the cat door.”

         I eyed the magic symbols more warily. “I distinctly remember you saying...”

         “It was instant death? I may have exaggerated. A bit. Well, a lot. If you’re blocked you’ll receive a nasty shock, though no worse than a kick from a random cat-hater in the streets.”

         “Why, thank you.”

         “You’ll not trigger the ward, Shadowdrop, fear not. You are my kin. Recall the spat we had last month over, oh, I do not quite recall...”

         “You introduced me to your colleague as, and I quote, your ‘mangy brat of a sister but harmless in her own way.’”

         “Ah, yes. That was it. The fur flew, and I found myself with a bit of yours on my nose.”

         “And I with a bit of yours in my claws.”

         “The point is, the bit of you on my nose... that should have been enough to trigger the warding spell—like your pride, it’s on the sensitive side—but it didn’t. Now that is interesting. I want to see what happens when all of you goes through.”

         “And supposing I’m injured? Or attacked by wizards?”

         “I am here to look after you, little one.” Whiskerdoom had been first in the litter by perhaps a minute. “Or would you rather keep company with the hellsnouts?”

         We glanced down. The seven had dwindled to three, as the beasts lost interest and whined their way down the hill, disappearing into foliage, alleys, and sewer-holes. The ones remaining were not the largest but the fiercest. Chief among them was my first pursuer, whom I’d dubbed Hork. Like his cohorts, Hork had an alligator’s-worth of sharp teeth, rhinoceros-like hide, and claws worthy of a grizzly bear. But the greatest modifications lay within. Hork spat fiery phlegm upon the cobblestones and growled up at us.

         We licked our paws, making a show of being utterly oblivious. Nonetheless I said, “An indoor nap might be agreeable.”

         “After you.”

         Nerving myself for the unknown, I nosed through the cat door.

         For a moment my hair stood on end, as the enchantment scrutinized me and found me worthy.

         I entered a modest, high-ceilinged stone landing built for feline comfort. There was a metallic human-sized door covered in arcane symbols, beside which stood a shaggy, many-branched scratching post. Two cat-proportioned stairways, one up and one down, lay at either hand, but I disregarded these in favor of exercising my claws.

         There came to my ears a muffled voice, saying, “Eek. Ooo. Hee hee. Gah.”

         I backed away hissing. “What?” I managed to say.

         “Whoo. Heh,” said the scratching post, though it had no mouth that I could determine. It did quiver a bit.

         “You talk?”

         “Um, yes. Hm.” It sounded surprised. Possibly masculine. It said, “You’re asking a question? Say there, you’re new.”

         “My name’s Shadowdrop. Whiskerdoom’s my brother.”

         “Ah. That explains it. You are joining the familiars, then.”

         “No, just visiting. There’s a lack of cat-hating monsters in here. I approve.”

         “I’m surprised Mistress Wurm did.”

         “Well...”

         “Oh, I see. Well, I’ll not tell! Wurm thinks she knows everything. I’m happy to disprove her at every opportunity.”

         Whiskerdoom appeared. I decided not to hunt the subject of Mistress Wurm. “Thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind... er...”

         “You may call me Postgrad.”

         “Thank you, Postgrad. That is an unusual name. But then I wouldn’t know what one names a scratching post.”

         “I used to be human,” said the post, “a post-graduate scholar here, or as the jargon goes, apprentice. But I was overly free with my opinions. And perhaps my jokes. Have you heard the one about the prophecy, the curse, and the blessing who walk into a tavern? Never mind. Those were the days. I can at least voice my discomfort when the familiars need to sharpen their claws. Ow.”

         “I’ll be just a moment,” Whiskerdoom said.

         “Take your time,” sighed Postgrad.

         “Brother!” I said. “How can you?”

         “Well, first you flex a little,” Whiskerdoom said, “and then you kind of keep the tension going...”

         “Do not worry,” Postgrad said, perhaps a little too quickly. “Really, at this point it mainly tickles, albeit a bit aggressively. And the cats aren’t truly cruel, they’re just... cats. No offense.”

         I said, “None taken. We are what we are, and proud of our claws. But I won’t sharpen mine on you.”

         “You are... different. Well, you have a friend in intermediate places, Shadowdrop. I—”

         Whiskerdoom eyed me and said, “If you’re done chitchatting with furniture, we’ve things to discuss. The experiment worked, sister. You can visit our fair tower after all. So, I have a little suggestion... I would find it nice to take a vacation, stretch my legs around town, just for a while. Chase banderflies. Lick axefish heads. Sniff the chimney-smoke where they’ve got the yak-yak birds turning on spits. Live like ordinary cats. Ordinary magical ones, I mean.”

         “You never do these things?”

         “I can escape briefly but my mistress may need me unexpectedly and she’s unpleasant when she has to wait. You see, sister, we black cats are valued as familiars not simply because luckbane enhances our minds. The luckbane itself is of use. Wizards can siphon off a portion of negative probability to enhance spells.”

         “That never backfires?”

         “It does, sometimes, but wizards are crafty. They’ve been needing more and more of our strength lately, in their tussles with the Things that rise from sewer and catacomb. That is the Underseers’ purpose after all, the magical defense of the city’s infrastructure, just as Overwatchers guard us from Horrors from the stars. But I need a rest.” He continued in a more conspiratorial way, his mews supplemented by many twitches and tail-flicks. “I propose a trade, sister.”

         I understood, in a way that made me want to sharpen my claws. “You want me to pose as you.”

         “Only for a time. We’re quite similar in appearance and aura; the cat door experiment proves it.”

         “Only until I talk!” For, alone among humankind, wizards understood cat conversation.

         “Mistress Wurm takes Moonsday off. Lately she isn’t around at all much that day. She might siphon luckbane on her way out, but otherwise she won’t even acknowledge your existence. What say we switch places tonight, and switch back again Bloodsday morning. Just one day. Who’ll know? You’ll get excellent food and shelter, and I’ll get to roam.”

         I was tempted by the chance to see Whiskerdoom’s world. But I remembered the human child who’d sometimes read to me and the way she’d looked the last time we’d met—thin as an abandoned housecat, stomach growling like a territorial tom. Things had been hard, with the drought.

         “I don’t think I can,” I said. “Perhaps next w—”

         “Fine, then!” Whiskerdoom snarled. “For once I thought you’d might be fun, Shadowdrop! But have it your way!” Whiskerdoom stalked up the cat-sized upper stairs. I was left alone with Postgrad.

         I arched my back, feeling that old tug between fight and flight, even though my brother was already gone. It was ever thus—one minute purrs, the next hisses.

         “He has a temper,” Postgrad observed.

         “Some cats are like that,” I said, striving for an appropriately feline nonchalance before an audience, even if it was a scratching post. “The next time I see him he’s as like to be cheerful again. At least he doesn’t hold grudges.”

         “That is true,” Postgrad said. “He’s one of the easier ones, when the storm passes.” Postgrad added, “You are different. Calmer...”

         “Having such an acute example of spitting anger to observe,” I said, “I saw the value of serenity. It’s said all siblings distinguish themselves.”

         “I didn’t mean different from Whiskerdoom. I mean different from other cats entirely... or from most humans, for that matter. You have a striking empathy, guarded by a shield of aloofness...”

         “Your conversation bores me now. I must be going.”

         Out the cat door I found two hellsnouts remaining below the tower, hopeful of a good rending. Hork at least had wandered off. I puzzled again as to who—or what—had made the beasts, and why they increasingly threatened our city. Archaeopolis was older than recorded history, and the underground coughed up ancient horrors the way other soil might reveal arrowheads or potshards. But of late, creatures stalked the open air that had no counterpart in story or scroll.

         Even a black cat might be mildly concerned.

         But in any event, what could one cat do? On that last innocent afternoon my answer was to nap in the shadow of a gargoyle, soaking up late afternoon heat, waiting for the sun to drop, and for long-suffering apprentices to finally chase away the hellsnouts with enchanted trowels, wedges glowing like fangs made of sunset. With all clear I scuttled down the drainpipes and scaffolding in the eased temperatures of early evening, off through dusty cobbled streets to Scatterwind Market.

         Tru, the little girl who read to me, had recited tales about our whole coastal country of the Eldshore being the sinuous body of the immense slumbering Elddrake, with Archaeopolis sited at the socket of its heavenward eye. The other draconic eye (she’d read) looked toward molten things in the depths of the Earthe, and should it ever blink the land would shake and weep fire and Archaepolis would gain a fresh layer of skeletons and relics...

         The sight of a gold Blazon in the red sunset, gleaming precariously on a sewer grate, returned me to the present. This would “buy” a nice pheasant for Tru’s family. I carefully reached out to bat the coin toward the cobblestones... and froze.

         In the shadows below the grate a trio of glowing red eyes, arrayed in a downward triangle, gazed upward.

         They were of human shape. Human eyes, however, do not come in threes. Nor are they crystalline. And they certainly don’t blaze like furnaces. I withdrew my paw, puffed up my hindquarters, and flattened my ears.

         The Thing in the darkness merely stared back. I had the sense of an oily presence, raspy breathing, the scent of dry dust, and a whiff of hot ash.

         “Why... I know this cat...”

         The voice had a serpentine sibilance to it, and an insectile trill, and a human mockery. Perhaps a touch of the feminine? I wasn’t certain. I was certain I’d never before heard such a sound.

         A smarter cat would have run. A braver cat would have hissed. But I was a cat with a keen interest in money.

         I spun as I swatted the coin free, wheeling around the grate. My moment of triumph was interrupted by a grey tentacle that shot between the bars. Searing my skin, it constricted around my right hind leg like a burning rope. I thumped to the cobblestones and it dragged me backward.

         I wasn’t sure how the Thing expected me to fit through the sewer grate. I’d the feeling such considerations were far more important to me than to it.

         I hissed, “Omens and outrages! Pain and pestilence! Your future is full of boils, bandits, and banana peels! Lice and lightning covet your flesh! All your prayers against toothache will be as naught! Your sinews are but thin reeds, and the rocks are falling!”

         The Thing released me, and I skittered backward.

         I was very lucky indeed. I had in no way crossed the Thing’s path. Only my reputation protected me. I wasted no time recovering the Blazon and carrying it like a kitten in my mouth.

         Hurrying toward Scatterwind Market, I limped a little from the tentacle. I couldn’t dwell upon such Things, however, for I had come upon people.

         Although night was beginning, the Eternal Esplanade that led from Hourglass Harbor to Scatterwind Market was crowded with early revelers for the Festival of Time’s Breaking the day after tomorrow. This aroused my curiosity. Soon a temporary wooden bridge would be assembled across the Harbor, symbolically severing its hourglass shape. The bridge was even now being carted in pieces to either side of the waters, a flotilla of small boats crowded with eager hands to help it along. Starting tomorrow the humans would dance and frolic and generally pretend there was no high birth or low birth, no left or right, perhaps no masculine or feminine, no yesterday or tomorrow. The distinction between prim respectability and gyrating with a bottle in your fist would also be somewhat blurred. The festivities would reach a peak on Bloodsday, with another cooling-off day to follow.

         Even tonight there were hundreds of two-legged obstacles in my way. Most were light-brown of hue, but Archaeopolis attracted humans from all the known Earthe and possibly farther, and they came in as many colors, sizes, and shapes as my kind did, and every mode of costume or lack thereof. So I blinked three times and walked among them, ducking and shifting, weaving and leaping. In my second sight I beheld, like a potful of noodles made of moonbeams, the silver threads of human world-lines.

         Behind each man, woman, and child these cords were tightly bound and distinct, gradually trailing off into ghost-like transparency, then invisibility. Things were stranger out front. Ahead of each person the world-lines first jabbed like silver spears but soon blurred and expanded like twisted reflections of silver birch trees on a windy lake. Whiskerdoom claimed that the spear-like portion represented thirteen seconds’ progression into the future—the part of a human world-line we black cats could poison. I didn’t think the period was quite so precise, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. (Some day Whiskerdoom might declare the period was fourteen seconds and that he’d always believed it so, and that would not be worth arguing about either.)

         I could stay clear if I kept alert, taking advantage of alleys, corners, rooftops, shadows. It made progress slow, but it was best. For to come near one of those bright silver threads was to bend it like a cobweb in a breeze, snap it, make the remnant curl and blacken for a time. The person so afflicted might stumble, gag, be hit by a falling brick, or collapse in a seizure. My nose twisted at the thought.

         Once I fell into my rhythm, I peered more deeply.

         Surrounding these sharp, bright pathways was a kind of haze of silver possibility shrouding the city, like a fog that crept in on little cat feet. I could enter that fog without harming the humans, though I sometimes wondered if even then little accidents might spread upon the wind—stubbed toes, lost coins, forgotten names. In some places—markets, crowded neighborhoods, the castle—the probability mist curdled thick, foaming with the mixed fortunes of a throng. In others—back alleys, quiet rich neighborhoods, graveyards—the mist was thinner, the futures less volatile. I sought such places when I could.

         There was another reason for preferring quiet retreats. Over the last few days, I was noticing a new factor: bubbles in the thickest parts of the fog, places where the possibilities were rent. The bubbles were slowly expanding like cracks in the clouds of chance. I didn’t know what to make of them, yet they made my hair rise.

         There were many such bubbles today.

         I blinked three times and banished my fatesight. I was nearing the Market, which was open late in anticipation of the festival, with bright stands sprawled across the hulks of old ships like flowers strewn amongst broken pots, and for all that I worried over humans I had to focus on what could hurt a cat.

* * *

         Scatterwind Market didn’t merely encompass dilapidated piers and boardwalk; it filled hundreds of wrecks crushed together like fish from a catch. I scrambled up the hull of the Dawn Zephyr, which lay on its side amid tidepools and muck, and from there leapt to the overturned hulk of the Grandiloquent, with its many market tents upon the keel. Sliding down its edge I boarded the Modest Compensation, a gigantic hulk split into two pieces, rope bridges thick between them.

         My target was the neighboring Boon Companion, a wreck of recent vintage. It had a more or less level orientation, with several bright-colored and rich-scented food stalls. There was a butcher there, one whom I’d visited before, and unlike his cohorts, his meat didn’t stink. I slunk in, batted my Blazon toward his feet, and stole a pheasant.

         “That cat!” roared the proprietor. “That benighted cat!” Other merchants shouted and commenced chase, while he himself stood back and quietly pocketed the coin.

         My pursuers, naturally, had no chance. Prize in mouth I bounded off, taking in turn the hulks of the Cloudrunner, the Deep Ending, and the Windthreader. The tricky part was protecting the humans as I veered around their world-lines. At last I ducked belowdecks on the Windthreader and followed a rat-path I knew well, through dark interstices where the day-lit hulks crushed against the deeper ships.

         Tru had read me the history. The Market’s pile-up began centuries ago in the great storm of 744 E.Y., when that ill-timed hurricane destroyed a victorious returning armada, and the resulting naval graveyard was long considered haunted. Flooding and engineering created the Hourglass Harbor while reeds and mud shrouded the old one.

         But, as if the dead ships held a fatal attraction for live ones, new vessels joined the originals every few years. At last the emperor, shrugging at old ghosts, declared a peculiar rehabilitation. Enterprising vendors strewed scaffolding and rope bridges across the wreckage, because only in Scatterwind could a business operate tax-free and away from official eyes. Thus humans flocked to this creaky place for the promise of bargain prices or disreputable wares.

         Down here amid planks and mud were skeletons of sailors still clutching their treasures. Sometimes adventurers excavated them, drawing the wrath of the merchants who needed the whole mad conglomeration stable. The risks were great and the rewards slim and I rarely noted any speculative archaeology in this spot. And yet...

         As I passed through the hold of the Heat Mirage into the belly of the Sickle Moon, I caught a scent and saw a glow, both disturbing and familiar. Red lights moved in hidden spaces far beneath my paws, a ship or two below me, where no human ever went.

         “You were not followed?” rose a voice I’d recently heard from a sewer grate.

         “Control your fear,” came a woman’s voice, rich and strong like salty waves. “I am unsuspected. Why did you ask to see me personally?”

         I hesitated. Yes, I had a mission. But I was curious. So kill me.

         “I require one last component. A book called the Nominus Umbra. Specifically, page 99.”

         “What? I know the Nominus Umbra. It is kept in the Northstar Tower of Castle Astrolabe, watched by constelletons and sealed in a dome of crystalized phlogiston. Even Underseers are not allowed to consult it, save with an Overgazer escort and tongs. To steal it—”

         “The whole book is unnecessary. Only page 99. You can burn the rest.”

         “If I singed even one corner of one page I’d be torn to pieces before I escaped the castle. And then they would punish me.”

         “Control your fear. I am collecting what I need for a diversion.”

         “You must cast the Dragonspark on Bloodsday, at the height of the Festival of Time’s Breaking. If you had been freer with your plans, Ruingift, I might have had agents in place.”

         “I have faith in your resourcefulness. The city is full of those who might profit from its destruction. In fact...” The one named Ruingift paused. “We are being watched.”

         I decided discretion was the better part of curiosity. I slowly padded through the darkness.

         A plank creaked.

         “Above,” said the one called Ruingift. “I will investigate.”

         Now I ran. Behind me something slithered and muscled through wreckage and muck. I scrambled through the maze of rubble separating the Sickle Moon from the Clean Getaway and from there burst through a portal onto a sunlit muddy bank. “I am a cat among cats,” I purred to myself, darting under the legs of a wine juggler on the boardwalk, escaping the market with my mouth full of pheasant, my ears full of shattering glass, my nose full of spilled Merlot.

* * *

         Tru’s family lived, you might say, in the very heel of the city.

         Foottown was peculiar even for Archaeopolis. Two hundred dwellings rose here, all in the shape of paired human feet. Foottown’s origin (as Tru had read to me) lay, or stood, with Emperor Garn, he who’d commissioned fifty-foot statues of himself and his Empress bestriding Archaeopolis’ eastern gate, glaring toward the frontier. Not content with dominating the land by day, Garn had his delven artisans fit the statues as watchtowers, with firelights crackling behind their stares. The flame-tenders dwelled in one foot of each statue, and the watchmen in the other. Not to be outdone, Garn’s daughter and heir Vame raised, just beyond the gate, statues of herself and her husband. These fit the original specifications except that the statues were fractionally taller. Garn’s grandson the Emperor Besk continued the tradition; he and Empress Krin were observed to rise a little higher than their predecessors.

         This pattern progressed for several generations, and the ever-changing city expanded to trail the statues, until the Emperor Vorg, facing three invasions, publicly denounced such wasteful monuments.

         That he was slain a week later by Mandrake Marauders was taken as a sign. The next sixty rulers raised statues tall and early.

         In the twilight of the Age of Emphatic Expansion, the needs of the far-flung provinces at last demanded economizing at home. Delven artisans were rejected, and increasingly flimsy materials went into ever-taller statues. Then came the great earthquake of 888 E.Y., which tore a gash in that district afterward known as Scarside. As buildings collapsed throughout Archaeopolis, the last and tallest pair of statues snapped backward at the ankles. They collided with their neighbors, which collided with their neighbors, and after the last crash had finally toppled the statue of Garn, the event became known as the Day of the Footless Emperors.

         Ever since, the east end of the city had been a poor district, rubble-strewn, never fully rebuilt—while Footside was itself a tolerable neighborhood cutting through two bad ones, though the housing was, it must be said, of modest footage.

         A family large as Tru’s might acquire, if lucky, two such foot-shaped houses, whose lost emperor had been demolished for materials long since. Tru’s had made theirs homey. Thatch covered the hollow vestiges of legs, with a chimney poking up from the left shin. Laundry quivered on lines between sandaled stone feet. Dogs and chickens barked and clucked on the plot between. Seven human beings dwelled within the Emperor Vrul’s soles, four on the right, three on the left. They mostly slept in the toes. Tru herself, however, claimed the heel door, where she could communicate secret messages via clothesline to her little sister Dru.

         I knew eight-year-old Tru and seven-year-old Dru were holding the family together. As I approached, their mother and father were once again arguing about whatever adult humans argued about. (Lovefearmoneyworklusthope it could have been called, though humans tended to focus about only one aspect of that Great Worry Beast at one time.) Their noise echoed up a stovepipe. I neared Tru’s heel-door, watchful for humans.

         I dropped the pheasant outside, scratched on the wood, and slipped around behind the heel to wait. The door opened, and Tru appeared.

         Eight was of course a redoubtable age for cats (in those days I was three) but very young for a human. Her green eyes looked old, however—until she saw the pheasant. Then those eyes widened on her too-thin face, and a smile burst beneath them bright as sunlit rain, its breadth moving freckles like dark wheeling stars in a sepia sky. “Pepper! I know you’re out there. Thank you! Mama and Papa are fighting again. This will distract them. Wait! I’ll be back.”

         There were sounds within of surprise, fumbling speech, and grumbled apology. I padded closer, and Tru emerged.

         “Thank you, Pepper,” Tru said, sitting down and twitching her extended fingers. Now that Tru wasn’t moving, I could approach, nuzzle her fingers, curl up in her lap, and purr. I deigned to do these things.

         Being called ‘Pepper’ was neither fish nor fowl to me. Humans were always making up silly names. And here was a strange thing: being unable to talk could be soothing. Just now it allowed the notion that I was a simple kitten looking for warmth.

         The illusion couldn’t last. “Pepper, I know you can’t really understand. But it helps me to talk to you. I’m worried. My brother Zik is missing.”

         I stopped being a kitten. I perked my ears.

         Tru said, “People saw his gang? in Scarside, exploring old mansions. That was yesterday. They never came back.” She hugged me until it hurt, but I didn’t want to deny Tru her solace. At last I mewed my discomfort and Tru loosened her grip, saying, “Mom and Dad keep screaming at each other. I think they care more about who’s to blame than how to help Zik. It’s like when Vil died.”

         I went still as a drop of shadow. I remembered well when Vil died.

         “You were the only thing good about that day,” Tru was saying. “You and the Millers. That was the first day they loaned me a book.”

         I nuzzled Tru, wishing she’d change the subject and read one of those books again, about the city, about magic, about anything.

         “Mama says Papa’s been too hard on Zik since we lost Vil. Papa says Mama went too easy. I just want them both to shut up and look for him, but I’m just a child...”

         I wished I could say It will be all right. But I couldn’t communicate this idea, in which I had less than perfect certainty. So I mewed.

         When Tru was called inside, I slinked through Foottown and crossed a bridge into Bookside. I padded through alleys behind those shops where amateur mages find their spells, toward another district where few humans tread after dark. I wanted to get far from Foottown and the river and the thought of Vil’s death.

         I blinked away my fatesight as I passed into the Tombgreen. There were still very faint traces of silver in the air before the sight left me, remnants of mourners perhaps, or nearly imperceptible world-lines of mice and moths, or vestiges of ghosts. My presence couldn’t hurt anyone here. The mourners were long gone, the animals were little affected by my power, and ghosts were already about as unlucky as they could be.

         It was quiet. Dead-silent, vine-choked, dust-hushed, web-wrapped, stone-still. Peaceful.

         But quiet brought me no peace. Misfortune seemed everywhere—drought, hellsnouts, missing children. And I, creature of bad luck, felt somehow responsible for it all. What I wanted was to leap, scamper, chase, claw, pounce, grapple. I wanted to hunt without ever considering the effects of luckbane.

         I wanted to be pure cat.

         I climbed atop a tomb sculpted with visions of afterlives hopeful and otherwise. Up there was the last thing I wanted to see.

         It was another cat.

         Specifically, it was a meekbreed, an ordinary cat. A calico, healthy of body, but with a torn and badly healed ear. So... a feral cat but a frequently fed one, perhaps with several adopted human households. It hissed in the unsophisticated way of our mundane kin. “Go away,” the sound conveyed.

         “I wish only a corner of your domain,” I tried to explain.

         “Go away.”

         “I am most inoffensive and will be gone soon.”

         “Go away,” came the hiss.

         “I am bad luck!” I hissed back.

         The other cat, sensing in its sinew the truth of things, screeched and leapt off the tomb.

         “Yes,” I called after it. “Yes, run! For I am a black cat. I am unlucky, and that is all you need know. I am destruction with four legs and a tail and fangs. I need no friends.”

         I lay down. A moth landed beside my nose.

         “I am too dejected to eat you, O stupid and happy insect. Mock me, fluttery one.”

         In this melancholic mood I surveyed my city, the ancient and ruined, the thriving and splendid. My gaze settled upon the tower of the Underseers. While firelights appeared in other buildings of the Forum, this citadel’s windows shone with strange flickers of blue, red, purple, green. Within dwelled humans who did not fear black cats. There, amid musty grimoires and dripping alembics and singing skulls and talkative brains in jars, a cat could just be a cat. Albeit one who might know a spell or two.

         “Whiskerdoom,” I said, rising. “On reconsideration, brother, you have a deal.”

         I leapt to the hallowed ground. Once when I glanced behind me, I noted the moonlit moth meandering about the tomb, and the calico stalking it. I couldn’t shake the notion, just then, that the whole city was in the much the same peril as the moth.

* * *

         “Well...” said Whiskerdoom, at last emerging from behind the arcane cat door, “... met by moonlight, eh? By that I mean it’s late. I wasn’t planning for the switch, sister.”

         “It’s still the night before Moonsday,” I persisted. “It can’t be too late.”

         “In a wizard’s tower, arrangements must be made! I have prismspiders to contain, slinkrats to debrief, rafterghasts to feed. I must now do all this in haste, so you won’t be in a position to mess things up.”

         “Why, thank you. Then you will do it?”

         “I will do it, sister.” Now that I was actually interested, he made it sound like a magnanimous gift. “And of course I benefit as well. I will experience this city of ours as a real inhabitant sees it, not in passing along the way to beast-infested sewers or ghost-troubled houses.”

         “I am pleased for you, Whiskerdoom. There’s one more thing...”

         “No doubt.”

         “There’s an errand I myself couldn’t complete, that your vast talents might easily master.”

         “A cat appreciates flattery. Go on.”

         I told him of Tru’s brother, lost in Scarside.

         Whiskerdoom wrinkled his nose. “You have not promised anything to this Tru person, I hope?”

         “I can’t even talk to the humans, Whiskerdoom. You need spells for that.”

         “Ah, indeed.” Whiskerdoom twitched his tail. “Well, no doubt I can find him if I wish. Heh. That could be fun. A real adventure! And not as a mere servant!”

         “Thank you, brother.”

         “All right, all right. I can never refuse you! Well, I often can’t. Once in a while I can’t. But you must be wary, sister. I won’t have time to coach you. I will do my Moonsday morning chores now. Moonsday afternoons are taken up with naps, so you won’t be expected to do anything but look elegantly sinister. I think you won’t mess that up.”

         “Why, thank you.”

         I gave him directions to Tru’s place, and he gave me quick instructions. I was at my liberty until dawn. Now that I’d done something about Tru’s brother, I decided to roam the city’s nighttime heart, in case I could detect any more signs of monsters, or of this Ruingift.

         This region was frequented by nobles and the rich (overlapping but distinct sets) but also by commoners enjoying the Forum and Coliseum. There weren’t many this late, however, and with care they could avoid cats and catastrophe. I strolled upon the edge of the Fountain of Shackled Seas (they’d cleared the fallen coach) wondering what it would be like to visit a place where my kind was some approximation of normal.

         “Good evening, my feline friend,” an old human’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

         I didn’t know how I’d missed him before. He was a grey-haired dark-brown man with a scarlet spattering of psoriasis like a topographic map of volcanoes. He had the deflated look of a big human gnawed thin by disease, and yet, as his toga-covered frame perched on the rim of the fountain, studying a set of cards laid out in solitaire fashion, there was an intensity to his eyes like the first crow to spot the corn.

         I recognized the human game as one called Treatment. Every card represented either an illness (demoniacal tittering fever, perhaps, or nasal crabs) or a medical procedure (e.g., crack of dawn screaming monkey surprise or bloodletting-and-nice-fresh-air.) The right combination of cards would let players eliminate their diseases, discard their hands, and escape the “hospital.”

         “I have seen you now and again,” the man continued, setting down a treatment (blindfolded medium-range acupuncture) that required two side-effect draws (intestinal monologue and peculiar luminous seepage.) “You had a hand—or paw—in the Forum’s recent excitement.”

         There was something wrong about all this, but I was too fascinated by the man and his game to slip away.

         “But there was only so much excitement, eh?” he said, eliminating mossy shingles by adding placebo pudding flambé to his treatment spread. “For you are the black cat who endeavors never to cross anyone’s path. The one with heart and conscience.” He was down to three cards now. “You realize that every chain of events can have the most wonderful, hideous, and outré results.”

         I gave him no acknowledgment.

         “You do not know me,” he said, setting down earwax termite colony, “but I am in a parallel position. I can hardly sneeze without some unfortunate being thrown into a workhouse or down a oubliette. If I wish to accomplish a good turn I must be discreet.” He played elixir of screech-eel and was compelled to draw the side effect acidic weeping. “This is because I possess primarily persuasive power against the rich, but mainly violent power against the poor. Lately the wealthy have concluded the thin spiders’ webs of safety we’ve given ordinary mortals are a costly indulgence that might deprive them of one whole soiree every year. They mean to rend those strands.”

         I pretended to swat at an invisible insect. The man worried me, but somehow his voice was catnip.

         “They will kill me,” he said, considering his last card, “if they discover how vigorously I oppose them. But they consider me an uncouth old imbecile and dismiss me. The rich, you see, confuse a lack of dignity with being weak. And they confuse a lack of scruples with being strong.” He placed a card labeled targeted luckbane—eliminate any two cards, then discard this one. He smiled as he won. “True strength of character means braving risk for yourself, not just apportioning it to others. I know you possess that strength.”

         I could only stare.

         “But the moment may come,” he said, packing up his deck, “when you have to impose a little danger on others as well, not capriciously, but judiciously, to save them from greater harm. I don’t fault you for shrinking from that crisis. Your isolation has a certain nobility. But your city may be better off for facing a small risk. Just as you may be better off taking the risk of friendship. As always the trick is knowing what cards to play and when.” He nodded. “Good evening, Shadowdrop.”

         He left the fountain and passed without interruption through the dusty crystalline doors of Castle Astrolabe. It occurred to my sluggish brain I might have been in the presence of some wizard. I had no reason to trust him, yet found that I did. But I couldn’t see what he was urging me to do, nor regard the world as a game of Treatment. Too much of life wasn’t a game at all but a hunt.

         In this reverie I spotted one of my kindred across the Forum, peering out from behind a Coliseum column. It was an old, lean, black cat, one who chose every movement carefully. She mewed.

         “Shadowdrop, is that you?” she said. “My eyes aren’t the greatest anymore. But whichever one you are, hightail it out of here! There’s a Thing that... well, a Thing...”

         “Grimtail?” I recognized the voice of our eldest.

         “It is Shadowdrop! I knew it! I’ve still got it! What was I... Right! Get out of here! And tell Whiskerdoom—”

         The message was lost as the tentacles of something hidden behind the column wrapped around Grimtail and dragged her out of sight.

* * *

         “Why didn’t you tell me about these Things before?” Whiskerdoom snapped at dawn, when I related the attacks on Grimtail and, by way of context, myself. He scratched compulsively at his neck, freshly shorn of his iron collar. “Now I’ve no time to consult the grimoires.”

         “So you don’t recognize the threat?”

         “No. I don’t like this, sister. The undercity’s getting creative. We’ve had hellsnouts for a year, and lately we’ve gotten pigeon-spiders and bedbanes. And now this whatever-it-is. It’s like someone’s making these Things on purpose, mocking the Underseers.”

         “The one I met said it knew me...” I felt I should tell him more, but his manner grew agitated, and I knew from painful, nipped-ear experience there was no talking to my brother in one of these moods. And surely, I thought in my innocence, we could discuss it later.

         “Arg. Enough of your tales! I’ve got to make my exit, before you change my mind. I’ve just warned the other cats my little sister’s visiting and not to expect me back for a day. If I go back inside now I’ll be ambushed with by-the-ways, just-one-more-things, and do-you-have-a-minutes. I have to go, sister. The sweet illusion of freedom calls.”

         I watched him dart hither and yon amongst the buildings caterwauling happily to himself, until I lost him in the morning grey. Nothing grabbed him during that time. It surprised me what a relief that was.

         Working up my nerve, I nosed in.

         Again my hair stood on end as the cat door scrutinized my aura or blood or mouse-breath or whatever and found it barely acceptable. I greeted Posgrad.

         “Hello, Shadowdrop,” said the muffled voice. “I understand you’ll be here a while. Let me give you such advice as only a scratching post can give. The cruelest cat here is Quickfang; she is Master Slint’s. The coldest is Nightwise; he is Mistress Voyd’s. The angriest is Hauntclaw; she is Master Hake’s.”

         “Quickfang, cruel. Nightwise, cold. Hauntclaw, angry. Thank you, Postgrad. I suppose I’d better go meet them.”

         “Up the stair to your left and into the lions’ den. Good luck.”

         “Thanks.”

         I ascended into a cat’s dream of meandering stone passages, nooks, and high places. It was like a miniature sandstone canyon that had been weathered down to smoothness, with leaded glass windows bringing enough dawn illumination to perfect the shadows.

         There were just two flaws with this cozy scene. First, there was another iron door to grant access to wizards. Second, there were the other cats.

         The cruel-appearing one poked her head around a corner and sized me up, as the cold-seeming one peered aloofly from his moonlit perch and the angry-looking one slowly backed away down the central path. Hello, Cruel, Cold, and Angry.

         “I’m Hauntclaw,” hissed the angry one, stopping and puffing herself up in the way of the cornered cat. Her collar was of bronze. “You just watch it, kit. We’re wizards’ cats. Show yourself false, we’ll turn you into somebody’s lucky scarf.”

         The cold one craned his head, revealing his collar of silver. I recognized him as the colleague Whiskerdoom had once introduced me to. He yawned, pointedly.

         “Oh, do let her alone,” cooed the cruel one, slowly emerging into view. She was a sleek, quick-looking cat bearing a collar of gold. “Whiskerdoom will have warned her all about foolishness like chasing bugs into pentagrams, or climbing golems, or sleeping on our blankets. There will be no cause to break her, ha. Hello, dear. I am Quickfang. I assume you’re the great Shadowdrop. You’re dead if you’re not.”

         “I am Shadowdrop. Thanks for having me.” I called to the tom overhead. “And you must be Nightwise. Hello again!”

         “Whatever,” said Nightwise. Bits of white fur starred his brow. His answer given, he licked his paw as if exactly no one were there.

         Hauntclaw, a large cat threatening to become a fat cat, lowered her haunches, though she kept her distance. “Whiskerdoom’s such a fool. Monsters are stalking the streets! And he wants to traipse around like a meekbreed on catnip. And make us babysit.”

         “No one’s babysitting,” I said. “I am a black cat full-grown. I bear the unluck that is blessing and curse. I see the silver lines of fate, the black lines of fate unraveled. I bear the mind that knows death and life, choice and destiny, the word and the book, and yet remains cat. I will do as I will do.”

         In their various manners, Hauntclaw, Quickfang, and Nightwise silently acknowledged this declaration of old.

         “Follow me,” Nightwise said unexpectedly, and leapt down. I complied, stepping carefully past the other females. “Here,” he said, showing me an alcove at the far end. “Whiskerdoom’s lair.” There was a whiff of Whiskerdoom’s urine around the entrance, the usual ‘my place’ marker.

         “Whiskerdoom’s air, anyway, ha,” I quipped. “That was a joke,” I added.

         “Whatever. He left his collar. If you dare it.”

         Was this a test? Whiskerdoom had said nothing of the collar.

         “Thank you, Nightwise,” I said. “I wish to rest now.”

         The other could voice no objection, though he lingered. “Right.” He strolled away with the kind of slow deliberation that says the next sunbeam may be ten feet away but by heaven I’ll get to it before the hour’s up.

         I entered the lair and confronted the collar, an unbroken iron circle as simple as could be, with no hint as to how one donned it. I batted at it, nosed into it, and said hello to it, by then feeling mocked by it.

         I heard a footfall and turned to see Quickfang. She stepped exactly one paw beyond the boundary marked by Whiskerdoom’s scent.

         “Yes?” said I, raising my tail in formal greeting.

         Quickfang raised her own tail, but a little lower than mine, implying superior status. “We are going to view the crystal Orb. The wizards are rarely up at this hour on a Moonsday, and we have saved mice for the occasion. Your presence would be... tolerated.”

         I decided to leave the puzzle of the collar for later and followed the others down the stairs. I got a few appraising stares for that but no snide remarks. Apparently I hadn’t disgraced myself quite yet.

         Quickfang paused long enough to exercise her claws on Postgrad. I said nothing, though I heard murmurs of pain.

         Guilt vanished amid wonder as we entered a huge chamber taking up three stories of the tower, with a stairway climbing the walls beside vast windows. Huge tables stood cluttered with books, maps, sketches, hourglasses, gears, beakers, candles, crucibles, drafting tools, alchemy gear, unfinished mugs of coffee, and marble mazes.

         “Don’t even think about playing with the marbles,” whispered Nightwise. “They don’t like that.”

         At they don’t like that my gaze drifted upwards toward cages suspended on chains. At first I thought these were filled with broken skeletons, but my vision clarified and I realized they held junk. They spun overhead like the distilled essence of a dozen antique shops. There were cases and boxes and piled contraptions and scrolls and sculptures and curios and swords and bows and paintings and turtle shells and butterfly collections and padlocks and keys that seemed relics from opposite ends of the Earthe. There were stuffed owls and stuffed bats and stuffed humanoid heads with wings for ears. There was a complete sarcophagus and a ship’s wheel and a rusty sword that seemed to twitch a little as its cage spun and creaked, scattering dust. There were several peculiar candles whose sticks branched like stubby trees.

         “It’s like Scatterwind Market,” I said. “No, it’s more like the ships beneath...”

         “The Underseers are, sad to say, sloppy,” Quickfang said. After the resulting pause she added, “Well, it’s no crime to say it. Instead of storerooms, they have hung these cages. If they require some oddity, chances are excellent it’s in there, somewhere. The only inventory they keep is in their dear little brains.”

         “Sometimes,” Nightwise said, “they need the Orb to find something that’s ten feet over their heads.”

         “Where is this Orb?” I asked.

         “It’s over here,” Hauntclaw said, leading us to a table bearing a low pedestal with a glassy sphere twice as big as a human head. The milky look of it made me hungry. I didn’t want to admit weakness, of course, so I followed Hauntclaw’s example, leaping from floor to chair to table. The Orb was surrounded by books with names like The Seven Wands of Architecture and Civil Wizarding and Ley-lines: Their Application to Sewer Systems and Feng Shui and the Art of Street Paving. The tomes crowded like an honor guard. Black cats perched atop them.

         Quickfang rubbed her paw against the crystal. “Nightwise,” she said, not looking at him, “be a dear and get the mice, would you?”

         Sulkily, the boy-cat left. I lingered, watching strange images move about within the frosty glass like unknown insects twisting deep within tangled webs. But I pulled my nose away.

         “I’ll help,” I told Nightwise, catching up.

         Nightwise’s eyes held suspicion, but he led me to a corner beside a trap-door for garbage. There lay a dozen dead mice in a basket labeled YE INCENTIVES. It was difficult to carry the mice in our mouths without nibbling, but I managed.

         “Thanks,” said Nightwise on the sixth trip. “You’re not so bratty.”

         “Does Whiskerdoom talk about me?”

         “Sometimes. Too much, maybe. The rest of us lack kin. Familiars are usually loners. I guess the tower becomes a family. Of sorts.” He paused. “Whiskerdoom says you’ve gone batty. Spending time with humans. Ordinary ones, I mean.”

         “I suppose the humans are a kind of family.”

         “That’s strange.”

         “Is it?” I said. “Some mundane cats are fond of humans.”

         “You’re not mundane,” he countered. “Humans don’t like black cats.”

         “Sometimes with good reason,” I said.

         “We don’t do too much harm— “

         “Maybe you don’t,” I said, “but all my life I’ve had strong luckbane. There was a time...”

         “Yes?”

         “It’s about humans. You wouldn’t care.”

         He surprised me by pausing and setting down his mice to show he was interested. “Try me.”

         “I... it was when I met Tru, the little girl who reads to me.” And for the first time in a great while I let myself remember.

* * *

         When I’d met Tru the year before, she was playing beside the Dragondraught River, toes splashing muddy water. I’d seen her before on bug-hunts, always keeping my distance, because in addition to being fragile, human children lurched and grabbed. But as I chased dragonflies I was peripherally aware of Tru dancing her way among sticks and stones and detritus. I was careful that our paths didn’t cross.

         Meanwhile her family added bits to their foot-cottages. Two adults constructed an awning, while a young man hammered upon a tiled roof.

         A peculiar thing occurred then.

         The boy paused amid his pounding and stared across the river. At first I thought he was looking at me, but his gaze appeared to focus on something above the level of my head. Curious, I turned.

         Upslope were the bustling streets of Bookside, and there strode a young woman laden with baskets, emerging from a shop painted black and covered with so many white stars and moons and orbital charts, and so many eyeballs and strange letters, you’d think it was a tavern where astronomers kept their trysts with astrologers.

         I’ve never understood human notions of attractiveness (why not rank agility above all else?) but I suspected the slender girl was indeed desirable, as was the broad-shouldered boy.

         As I watched, the Bookside girl paused and looked around as if sensing someone’s attention. She stared across the river and her gaze met the boy’s.

         A tingling in the air made me blink three times.

         In fatesight I beheld silver worldlines spearing out from girl and boy, stretching across the river. The lines bore such a lovely argent shimmer that I was transfixed—and so I didn’t move as they suddenly dipped and intersected within my body.

         I convulsed. Never had I felt such a contact, never such a backlash. Both world-lines shriveled and snapped backward like yanked springs. The concussion of misfortune was silent but dreadful.

         The girl was struck by a horse and cart. The Bookside streetcorner erupted with screams.

         The boy lost his balance and tumbled through the unfinished roof. Tru’s family’s wails echoed those across the river. And only I understood the link between them.

         As her family raced into the house, I remained to see what became of Tru. She, confused by the commotion, stumbled into the water and was swept away.

         The river wasn’t deep here, and the current wasn’t strong, but Tru was young and the folk of Archaeopolis had little practice swimming in the murky waters bequeathed by their ancestors. Tru flailed, not yet drowning but unable to escape.

         This was ordinary bad luck, such as has afflicted life since the world began. I wasn’t the cause, not directly. It shouldn’t have concerned me. But I’d just destroyed two humans. Somehow it seemed unacceptable to lose this third. It wasn’t just the pathetic waste of it all. I refused to simply be a conduit for luckbane. It wasn’t enough to be a force of nature, albeit a sublime one. I was a cat. I would act.

         I ran.

         I needed help. I could endure the water but I couldn’t rescue Tru. I raced along the bank, yowling. Occasionally I heard somebody in Bookside stumble or swear as a river-aimed worldline brushed me. But nobody noticed us.

         Racing ahead of Tru I reached a mill beside the Tombgreen, near where the river bent into Scarside. This was my last chance. I leapt onto a barrel and caterwauled.

         The miller burst forth armed and ready to confront monsters, and I splashed into the darkness beside the waterwheel. With his gaze directed by the sound, the miller spotted the struggling girl. Bellowing to his family he dropped his sword and dove. He, at least, perhaps from a need to maintain the wheel, could swim.

         As the family led the dripping Tru inside, I saw her darting eyes notice me. She seemed to understand something of what had happened. And I glimpsed something I had never seen before on a human face.

         A smile that was for me.

* * *

         I’d no idea what Nightwise might say. I’d given him a terse version, but it was more than I’d ever told anyone, even Whiskerdoom. It felt draining and yet freeing to give it voice.

         Nightwise’s response was, “Odd.”

         “Odd?” That was all? I had the urge to swipe at him.

         “Odd,” Nightwise said. “I study luckbane. In my off time. There’s a rumor it comes from the Elddrake itself. And that it’s twisty, like a dragon. Consider. Those humans’ world-lines intersected you. But that shouldn’t have happened.”

         “Of course not!” I said.

         “What I mean is this. Even were they crazy enough to swim toward each other, their meeting should have been downstream. Right? So why did their world-lines touch you?”

         The incident was so clouded with dread in my mind, I’d never considered this point. “I don’t know.”

         Quickfang called out, “Where are the rest of the mice? Do we have to come looking for you, you lazy meekbreeds? We’ve started without you, you know.”

         “We’re coming,” Nightwise called. “I was telling Shadowdrop my exploits.”

         “That shouldn’t take long,” Hauntclaw put in. “Hurry it up.”

         I didn’t know what to say. We returned with the mice and settled onto our books. Now, the crystal sphere was like a giant drop of day-lit ocean. Within it seemed to dart rainbow-striped fish. It fixed the attention. I nibbled thoughtfully on my mouse.

         After a while, Quickfang said, “What would you like to watch, Hauntclaw?”

         “Birds in the mountains,” said Hauntclaw, touching the crystal ball, “somewhere where it’s dawn.”

         The ocean shimmered and vanished into wild dazzles of light; the bright flurry faded and became grey cliffs and the aeries of hawks, with the brow of the sun just now glaring above shadowy grasslands. We watched the birds and our voices rattled in our throats.

         I felt dizzy, and left off eating. “Amazing...”

         Hauntclaw said, “I suppose it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”

         I did not want to concede this truth, and so said instead, “Can it find a particular being?”

         “I’ll show you,” Nightwise said. “When it’s my turn.”

         After we watched hawks glide and dive and return with rodents, Nightwise rose and touched the glass and said, “The Elddrake.”

         The other familiars stood still. They hadn’t expected this. We beheld our meandering country from a great height, with wisps of cloud between us and the green-brown land and its companion the midnight blue water. We could not see the political borders, but the combination of coastline, hills, and mountains did suggest a serpentine form.

         “So it’s true,” I said.

         “Yes,” Nightwise said. “Now—the skyward eye of the Elddrake.”

         “Nightwise,” Hauntclaw said. “You sure...?”

         The view was like that of some mythic bird diving through clouds to behold our city sprawling in bright and decaying majesty. Somehow its walls and harborage did suggest an eye.

         “And now,” Nightwise said, “the earthward one.”

         We plunged, it seemed, into the streets and thence into darkness. Now I perceived catacombs and caverns, lit by a fiery red glow that seeped mysteriously from the stone itself. In time we came to a vast pit with molten fires dancing far below. The roof of the chamber was an inverted stony dome, fringed with stalactites big as buildings. A pathway ran directly beneath the dome and around the edge of the pit, large as a city wall.

         We gazed at that titanic shut eye, and something in me felt a strange recollection, as if the eye and I knew each other from of old.

         The scene lurched. The eyelid shifted, and light like an exploding sun appeared at one edge. The vision faded to white.

         A tremor shook the tower. “What have you done?” hissed Quickfang.

         “I... we got its attention...” Nightwise said. It was hard to say if he sounded rueful or triumphant.

         As the tremor subsided, we heard footsteps far overhead.

         “Move,” Quickfang told us. “There is time for only him to be blamed.”

         “But my turn—” I began as the others leapt from the table.

         “Stupid meekbreed!” hissed Hauntclaw.

         I ignored her. Touching paw to Orb I said, “Zik, brother of Tru, of Foottown, last seen at Scarside Falls.”

         Shadows twisted like a muddy river. The scene shifted to a dying campfire on the edge of an abyss, a waterfall surging beside. A ruined passage framed the scene, and more ruins piled above and below. A band of sky told me the spot wasn’t quite underground but lay so deep amid the ruins no one in the living city could spot it. Three human boys crouched beside the fire. One looked like an older, male version of Tru, though his hair was short and he wore a permanently befuddled expression. He conducted a hushed conversation with his companions.

         “Hey, wow... did you feel that tremor?”

         “Of course we did, Zik. So what?”

         “We’re going to die here, Zik.”

         “Shut up, Jol. Ignore him, Zik.”

         “Hey, leave him alone, Dev. And, hey, I don’t want to wreck anyone’s mood, but we’re going to have the ruins collapse on us if there’s another one. That could kill us or something.”

         “Don’t cry to us about it, Zik. It was all your idea anyway.”

         “Hey, now, you thought it was a good one, Dev.”

         “We’re going to die here, Dev.”

         “Shut up, Jol.”

         “Wait. Do you, uh, hear Things moving around below? Like, monsters? Because, now that’s exciting!”

         “Shut up, Zik.”

         More footsteps above me, and doors creaking. “They’re at the Orb again,” came a woman’s exasperated voice.

         A man sighed, “Could they have caused that quake?”

         Another man mused, “Doubtful. They are just cats.”

         I whispered to the Orb, “Show me more; pull back as if we were a bird, flying.”

         Within the Orb swelled an expanse of Scarside, thick with dawn shadows, its gaping chasm like a ghastly maw in the earth, sucking up silver waterfalls.

         A cat tackled me, and I saw no more.

         “Move!” hissed Nightwise.

         The Orb was a milky sphere again.

         “All right,” I said, my anger quenched in the wonder of another cat caring for my welfare. We fled.

         The Underseers were emerging from their dwelling overhead. Light flared in crystals strategically placed within the swinging junk cages. “There they are!” I heard, and “Confounded cats!” and “Come back, Nightwise!”

         At those last words, uttered by Mistress Voyd, Nightwise twitched and ceased running. “Hide,” he told Shadowdrop. “You can get away, you’re not wearing...” He gurgled, turned, and staggered toward the wizards like a puppet with mismatched strings.

         I hesitated.

         Another voice cried out, “You as well, Whiskerdoom!”

         So commanding was that rich voice that I almost bolted toward it. Worse, it was, to borrow a word, familiar. I dared not tarry to think about it, and I retreated up the cat stair.

         “What a fool,” Hauntclaw greeted me on arrival at the landing.

         “What were you thinking?” Quickfang said.

         Postgrad had nothing to add, for which I was grateful. I fled and hid within Whiskerdoom’s alcove. I saw his iron collar twitch of its own accord.

         The great wizard-sized door opened and That Voice roared, “Out, Whiskerdoom!”

         “Enough, Wurm,” soothed the voice of Mistress Voyd. “Let it be. It’s not worth—”

         “You correct your familiar, I’ll correct mine. Out!”

         The collar rattled. I held still.

         “Very well,” said Mistress Wurm. “Your willpower’s increased. I’m impressed. I have business in the city and can’t waste time with you. You must emerge eventually, if only to eat. Those mice were barely nibbled. There’ll be no food until we have words.” The door boomed shut.

         The collar ceased its shaking, but my own commenced.

         For I recalled now where I’d encountered Wurm’s voice before—in the hulls of the Scatterwind Market when I’d heard her discussing, with someone named Ruingift, the destruction of the city.

* * *

         Yowling echoed through the tower.

         After it stopped, there was a great silence. Eventually Quickfang and Hauntclaw slipped into Whiskerdoom’s nook. I stayed curled up, head under paw.

         “He’s not back yet,” Hauntclaw said. “Mistress Voyd’s never kept Nightwise this long.”

         “It’s all your fault,” Quickfang said.

         “How?” I said, slowly uncoiling to face them.

         “How?” said Hauntclaw. “What do you mean, ‘how?’ You stayed at the Orb!”

         “And you lacked your collar,” Quickfang said. “That meant Mistress Wurm couldn’t summon you back. And that made her angry.”

         “To be fair, she’s always angry lately,” said Hauntclaw. “But this sure doesn’t help. She may have goaded Mistress Voyd into punishing Nightwise. That’d be just like her.”

         I regarded the collar, with the truth about Mistress Wurm on the tip of my bristly tongue. “How do I wear it?”

         “It’s too late for that—” Hauntclaw said.

         “Wait,” Quickfang said. “Why?”

         “Because,” I said, “if I go to the Underseers, maybe they’ll go easier on Nightwise.”

         “You’d do that?” Hauntclaw said.

         “I had assumed,” Quickfang said, “you kept the collar off by choice.”

         “Whiskerdoom didn’t tell me how,” I said. “I would wear it now, if I could make life easier for Nightwise.”

         Quickfang studied me. Proud though I was, I felt like an insect. She said, “You may be right—your appearance may ease things for our colleague, whether or not you don the collar. Perhaps having the collar will perpetuate your and your brother’s deception, if you wish.”

         Hauntclaw said, “If Wurm uncovers your ruse, it may go a lot worse for Whiskerdoom later.”

         Quickfang said, “Wurm is cruel but unobservant. She is the sort of human who thinks she knows all truths before she even sees them. Shadowdrop... lower your nose into its center and purr. You must believe in the purr. Do what is necessary to attain that state. You might imagine yourself a kitten, and pretend the collar is the jaw of your mother. You might, if you are truly pathetic, envision yourself in the lap of a human being. Whatever thoughts can ease you into believing that submission is joy, use those, and the collar will leap to encircle you, for a split second, dividing.”

         “How do you get it off?” I asked.

         “Dream about the hunt,” said Hauntclaw. “But do it soon. It gets harder and harder to remember the chasing and the pouncing and the heartbeat pounding, the longer you’ve got the collar on.”

         I wondered at the hidden aspects of Whiskerdoom, that he had managed to remove his. Slowly, I lowered my head—but my attempt was interrupted.

         The great metal door opened. Pale hands lowered a black cat into familiars’ territory. Nightwise walked stiffly to his alcove. The hooded shape of an Underseer lingered for a long moment at the opening before the door clanged shut.

         “Nightwise,” called Hauntclaw. We all followed as he slunk to his lair.

         As we crossed the threshold, Nightwise spun and hissed. He appeared physically unharmed, but his movements were the opposite of catlike grace. “Stay away,” he said. “Especially you, Shadowdrop. I wish you had never come.”

         We three backed out, regarding each other in silence.

         “Perhaps it is best you go,” Quickfang said at last.

         “‘Perhaps?’” Hauntclaw scoffed.

         “I have to wait until sunset at least,” I said, not meeting their gazes. “To keep up appearances.”

         “Then Whiskerdoom will return,” Quickfang said. “Things will at last resume their normal pattern.”

         No they won’t, I thought. I wanted to tell them about Wurm. But I couldn’t make myself speak. And why would they respect anything I said? And would they side with Wurm regardless? I slunk away to the least conspicuous shadow and dropped myself there.

* * *

         Sunset blazed bloodily as a slaughterhouse on a coronation day. Whiskerdoom had not returned. I decided I couldn’t wait. I was doing no one any good, including, significantly, myself, so I descended the stair.

         “Where are you going?” whispered the scratching post.

         “Away.”

         “Oh.” He sounded disappointed.

         “What is it to you, Postgrad?” I snarled.

         “Well... it was nice to have someone to talk to. I mean, someone who didn’t want to cause me pain.”

         “There’s nothing for me here. And I have to warn...”

         “Warn?” Postgrad surprised me by taking me seriously. “Warn whom? What about?”

         I hesitated. But if you can’t confide in a scratching post, whom can you confide in? “It’s Wurm,” I said as quietly as I could. “She’s up to something terrible. I don’t really understand it. I have to warn someone.”

         “I can readily believe she’s up to something terrible. Have you alerted the familiars?”

         “Won’t they take Wurm’s side?”

         “Is Wurm betraying her duties?”

         “I am pretty sure.”

         “I’m no fan of the familiars, but they believe in duty.”

         “Even so, I’m not sure they would believe me.”

         “Hm. Well, find a human!”

         “I’m just a cat. Humans don’t understand us.”

         “I understand you.”

         “You’re not human.”

         “I was human. I could tell someone. It would delight me to foil Wurm.”

         I regarded him dubiously. “You are a scratching post.”

         “That is not my fault.”

         “If you warned a human, they would say, ‘Aieee, it is a talking scratching post.’ I suspect that would be their full response. Until they fetched an axe.”

         “You may be right. And there is the problem of transport. Hm... Aha!”

         “Yes?”

         “The Orb.”

         “I don’t like where this is going.” I said.

         “The Orb can send messages. If you could bring me to the Orb, I could speak through it. I would be a disembodied voice, reverberating with tinkles of crystal, arising as if from the ether, like a spirit speaking from unfathomed realms beyond the grave and therefore much less disturbing than a talking scratching post.”

         “Are all your plans like this?”

         “Ever since I planned to be a wizard.”

         I said nothing, realizing with some horror that I was actually considering it. I could hear human movement elsewhere in the tower.

         “All right.” I started clawing him.

         “Hey! What did I do?”

         “This isn’t to hurt you. I need to tip you.”

         I leaned Postgrad over, using my own tail to muffle the noise of impact. It hurt like a booted foot, and I suppressed a yowl. From there I carefully backed myself down the stairs, clawing Postgrad along.

         “Shadow—ow—drop, I’m not—ack, so sure—urg—about this.”

         “Too late now. There’s no way I’m getting the Orb up the stairs, but I can get you most of the way to the Orb.”

         “Be—urk—careful. I—ngh—hear the talk—oof—of wizards.”

         At the bottom of the stairs I listened. Luck, not just luckbane, was with me. It seemed the wizardly conversations were happening overhead, echoing down from the human-sized stairway that curved along the wall. I caught the voices of Voyd and one of the males. I made out a few tantalizing words, like probaballistics and candlequicks and dracotectonics. The rest were inaudible, or at any rate even more mysterious.

         I tugged Postgrad bit by bit across the floor of the grand workshop. A gentle light emanated from the Orb. I hauled the scratching post beside the Orb’s table and leapt up.

         A creak made me stop and peer upward. One of the cages of junk twisted on its chain. A stray breeze perhaps? I returned my attention to the Orb.

         My task was to roll the great crystal onto the floor. It would contact Postgrad, and Postgrad would contact help. Simple. But I had to prime the Orb by selecting someone. I pawed books out of the way to clear a path, every moment fearing creaks and sighs. Whom to contact? The Emperor? The head of the Archaeoguard? At last I decided on the chief of the Overgazers.

         I raised my paw. But a sudden impulse came over me, just as one might be stalking a bird and become distracted by a tasty moth.

         “Whiskerdoom,” I mewed, paw upon crystal. “Find me Whiskerdoom.”

         Light swam and sparkled, before darkness shrouded the Orb. I feared I’d botched something. Then my eyes adjusted to a dim illumination and my ears detected a waterfall. A black cat crouched in the same spot I’d located Zik, though no humans were visible.

         “Whiskerdoom.”

         “Shadowdrop?” came his voice. “Is that you? Not some trick?”

         “It’s me! What’s happening?”

         “I made it, through cleverness and athletic prowess, into the Scarside catacombs. Embarrassing to admit it but I like your human. Acceptable chin scratches. I find myself so loyal now, you’d think I was a dog. The shame! But I must remember I am a cat, and a great one! It took a familiar like me to discover the secret passage from the left heel of Emperor Garn into the tunnels.”

         “You found the boys?”

         “There was more than one? You’d think they’d make more noise. No—but I have found monsters! I think they may have a considerable presence here. In fact, I think they are coming for me. It is very exciting.”

         “Run, Whiskerdoom!”

         “I am shy on escape routes and flush with precipitous falls... Shadowdrop! Of course! You can inform Mistress Wurm!”

         “Um.” Fear churned in my gut like bad milk. “Wurm is working with the monsters.”

         “Surely not!”

         “I’ve heard her voice in the underworld. I didn’t know it was Wurm’s until today.”

         “She wouldn’t do that... would she?”

         “Trust your sister, brother. We have to warn the city. Somehow you must talk to a human.”

         Pairs of red eyes filled the vision within the Orb. The black patch that was Whiskerdoom edged back toward the brink.

         “I’m a little short on humans right now. You will have to find a way.”

         “Whiskerdoom, watch out, they’re—”

         “Beware, Shadowdrop, for I hear a candlequick—”

         Something seized me.

         The dim light of the Orb went out. I yowled and kicked and bit. The grip was not fleshy but waxen. My claws dug in, but the servitor admitted no pain.

         Our tussle knocked the Orb loose. I felt like a player of Treatment forced to draw side-effects, as the Orb dropped, bounced, and chimed.

         “Shadowdrop!” Postgrad hissed. “Who do I—”

         I heard no more as the waxen thing and I rolled off the table together. Impact broke our grapple. The Orb flared just then, and I got a good look at my foe. It was a large candlestick with eight fused smaller candles serving as limbs. As I watched, the wicks ignited. The overall effect was that of a brass spider on fire.

         Wizards were cursing. Cats were racing. The Orb’s light died, but at least the flames marked the candlequick as it lunged, and I scurried out of reach.

         There was no chance of reaching the cat door. There was a human exit but I couldn’t manage the bolt. That left only the trap door for garbage.

         I leapt upon the lever as the candlequick bounded after. The panel flipped up and the thing was catapulted into the air, landing amongst a stack of maps. Flames danced up.

         I peered down. Because the lowest level of the tower was a mass of beams, scaffolding, and piping, the garbage door opened on a plunge through cool early-evening air and down through a pit into the sewers. However, a third of the way to the ground lay a narrow walkway intended for magical servitors. Whiskerdoom had pointed it out to me once from the outside. The walkway was too small for a human, but a leaping cat might land safely.

         The candlequick was back, and fire licked my tail. I leapt.

         I clawed the wooden walkway’s edge but my hind legs dangled. No points for dignity. As I scrabbled my way to safety my waxen foe gesticulated angrily like the vanguard of a tiny torch-wielding mob. I hissed back, but my feline pride was hollow. Leaving Nightwise and Postgrad well the worse for knowing me, I launched myself down into the twilight.

         The stars were out when I reached Foottown and collapsed beside Tru’s door. It took minutes before the urgent voices within penetrated my skull.

         “Where did Tru go to, Dru? Where!”

         “To Scarside, Mama... I’m sorry, I’m sorry...”

         “What in the world’s five corners is she doing there? Trying to find Zik?”

         “She thought the black cat was trying to find Zik, Papa.”

         “The black cat!”

         “Tru said she had to help.”

         “This is what comes of her reading books! You were very wicked not to tell us sooner.”

         “I know, I know...” The conversation dissolved into bellows and wails.

         I wanted to rest. I couldn’t rest. It was as if my whole city had walked under a ladder while spilling salt under the full moon. Now Tru had at last fallen to bad luck too. I knew that despite all their puffed-up belligerence, her parents would never dare enter Scarside.

         But I would. Maybe I couldn’t stop Wurm, but I could help Tru. I dragged my carcass up and hunted my doom.

         The feet of Emperor Garn lay at the very place where Foottown began, where the crumbled Old Wall cast dawn shadows. Hidden in the garden between the feet, I recognized a groggy pair of elderly moonshroom vendors, plucking their silvery fungal wares from a shaded arc of the wall and aiming their wheelbarrow at Scatterwind Market. Moonshrooms got their best flavor if they soaked up moonlight, and the ships’ decks were fine places to catch it. Tru had read me that, out of a book.

         As they scrounged for their keys, I slipped inside Emperor Garn’s left foot, and the old woman cursed, “Another one, Bren!”

         “Count your blessings, Marg,” said the old man. “It didn’t cross our path.”

         “Well, lock it in,” said the woman, chuckling. “We can fetch old Glu the alchemist later. I’m sure he can distill something out of a black cat.”

         “Didn’t used to be so many black cats around,” Bren said, his voice receding.

         “Or monsters,” said Marg.

         “Or earthquakes,” said Bren.

         “Or squeaky wheelbarrows.”

         “It’s the times. Young people these days.”

         “No respect for their elders. The way they throw rocks at our houses.”

         “We used to throw rocks.”

         “Yeah, but we did it respectfully.”

         The squeaking receded. I nosed and clawed among their ledgers and dishes and cuttings and pots but saw no secret passage. And yet Whiskerdoom guided me, for a pungency arose amid the tickle of the herbs and the smell of human sweat; he’d sprayed a corner. No wonder the residents were so eager to alchemize me.

         Investigating, I found a broken piece of floorboard. This wood appeared different from the neighboring planks. Perhaps the current owners had needed to repair this spot because past occupants had known of the old secret passage and left it uncovered. Whatever the truth, I was able to wiggle through the break into the recess beneath the floor.

         I pawed around in the dark. Yes. There was a sliding panel in the old metal, well-crafted by the delven whom Garn had employed. It took only a steady paw. The passage was snug for a crawling human, spacious for a cat.

         It led toward Scarside. Back in Garn’s day that had been a wealthy district, so maybe he’d wanted a hidden path from a friend’s manor to the city’s edge? Now the walls lay far beyond his statue and Scarside was in ruins. Time made its passage, I reflected, and not just for cats.

         I emerged within the husk of an ancient manor, and many more passages opened to me. Luckily, Whiskerdoom had continued marking territory. I appreciated his arrogance, as I tracked the reek through a tangle of old human habitation and lost streets between. Sometimes the way led through dry sewers, other times over piles of rubble, and on the whole the maze was like the entrails of some titanic ravaged beast. At last I found the now-abandoned place where I’d spotted Whiskerdoom in the Orb, and I smelled fearful cat and angry hellsnout.

         I don’t know how long I followed those scents through shattered mansions before I heard a boy human calling through the darkness, “Help! Hey! Maybe now?”

         I padded down a peculiar tunnel beneath the flow of the River Dragondraught. I had the impression of titanic hands having shoved aside the ruins, patting them down into a structure composed of old tiles, stones, frescoes, beams, windowpanes, statues, sundials, trellises, gazebos. I didn’t trust the stability of this path, nor did I approve of its nearly forty-five-degree downward slant.

         But then: “Why are you doing this?” cried another human, and it was the voice of a girl. A voice I knew. There was no turning back.

         The passage twisted and switched back and plunged some more and at last opened upon more narrow corridors that had actually begun their existence as such. This new region had the look of a wine cellar, or a dungeon, or the dungeon of a wine seller. Old barrels lay mustily to either side. I crept up to an interior balcony and beheld a fire-lit underground sanctum.

         It seemed that before the Day of the Footless Emperors, some oenophile had concealed rather more than casks of Chateau d’If. Huge iron braziers rose to the level of the balcony, illuminating all in chaotic flickers. Vast frescoes displayed fire-breathing dragons upon the walls. A massive altar silently snarled in the shape of a draconic snout. A huge circle of flame rose unnaturally from the floor before the altar. I sensed a theme.

         Slouched before the altar and within the ring of fire were one girl, three boys, and fifty black cats.

         I didn’t cry out, for all that I saw Whiskerdoom and Grimtail and Tru and Zik. They needed my silence now. I crept forward, nose to stone, and studied the captives. Most were unconscious—and perhaps the loop of magical fire had something to do with that. I noted various arcane-looking symbols carved around the perimeter, symbols that looked rather more ostentatious than mere ancient writing. I couldn’t make sense of them, but I suspected they weren’t notes about grape picking or fermentation.

         Whiskerdoom, one of the few wakeful cats, guarded the unconscious Grimtail while sizing up the figure behind the altar. Judging by the hooded red robe, the concealed shadowy face, and the knife with the ambiguously rusty stains, their captor was either auditioning for the role of Chief Evil Cultist in The Tragedy of King Laughgloom, or the altar had an ugly dual purpose. The knife itself earned marks for flamboyance. It bore a disturbingly crimson fringe of flame that always treated the jabbing direction as “up,” and only its thin line of smoke finally admitted natural law and vainly sought the sky. To make matters worse, the human or human-shaped thing in the cloak had three glowing red eyes under the hood to match the dagger, arranged in a downward-pointing triangle. Tentacles slithered from the robe, which possessed rather more sleeves than two. My enemy was both horrifying and practical.

         “I regret how it must be, children,” said that dusty voice I recognized from the wrecked ship, a voice that seemed to echo with wind and sand blowing over old bones: Ruingift. “The cats we have uses for. You children are a distraction. You are too few for forced labor, too poor for ransom. Perhaps we will grind you into food for the cats.”

         “Why, we’d never eat them,” scoffed Whiskerdoom. “Too stringy.”

         Ruingift turned toward him as if in understanding. “Maybe the hellsnouts will do it then.” It gestured to the six mutated beasts who cavorted and snuffled around the fiery perimeter.

         “We’re Foottowners!” said Tru, clearly not understanding Whiskerdoom. “We’re used to being stepped on. You don’t scare us.”

         “Your courageous words are as irrelevant as the fear that twists your insides. But have the courage to admit your fear, and perhaps you can serve me. I will found a new realm, and I will need servants.”

         “Oh, yes, do go on, give us the speech,” Whiskerdoom said, in a voice that drawled indifference.

         “I needn’t explain myself to you,” said Ruingift. “You are a kitten gifted with power you don’t deserve. I will tap that power for a worthy purpose.”

         “There is no worthier purpose,” said Whiskerdoom, making a show of yawning and licking his paw, “than to catch little animals, play with them, eat them, lie in the sun, look regal, and do it all over again tomorrow.”

         Despite all the trouble between us, I was proud of him.

         “Um, ‘scuse me,” Zik asked Ruingift, “so, are you talking to the cats?”

         “Cats,” scoffed Ruingift. “You humans are bound to them by a fiction more wicked than any sorcery. For you believe they love you.”

         Zik said, “Hey, well, my sister thinks so. Her cat’s pretty nice...”

         “You lie!” Whiskerdoom was saying, and I might have taken offense, but I realized he was correcting Ruingift. “Humans have an honored place on the love list! Directly beneath catnip, just above sunbeams.”

         “Pathetic hunter-and-prey,” Ruingift continued. “Evolutionary dead end. Parasite. You do nothing to contribute to the world but pounce and devour and sleep. Your only saving grace is you look pretty while you do it.”

         “Ah yes,” Whiskerdoom said. “Tell me how pathetic I am.”

         “Once the black cats of the Eldshore were indeed pathetic. But the Elddrake stirred once, and saw that humans bred too numerous and built too high and thus disturbed his sleep. And that elder dragon breathed out his soft vengeance. A black smoke threaded through the streets of Archaeopolis and settled upon those whom the Elddrake perceived as the most dragon-like of the inhabitants. Not a single human met his standards. But a few of the cats did. They were marked with the smoke, they and their offspring. Ironically, the naturally black cats who weren’t chosen fled the Eldshore in terror. Today in Swanisle they are considered lucky.”

         “So we have a dragon’s blessing?” Whiskerdoom said, puffing himself up. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

         “You have his blessing,” Ruingift jeered, “and bear his curse. It is your purpose to spread disaster amongst teeming humankind, lessening the noise that afflicts the Elddrake’s mind. You have done a terrible job.”

         “Beg pardon?”

         “You remain too little dragon and too much cat.”

         “Why, thank you.”

         “You are too indifferent to the humans to properly doom them. You even allow yourselves to become familiars.”

         “Well, the food is good.”

         “Enough. I will put you to use. The Festival of Time’s Breaking is at its fever pitch tomorrow. And you shall all be released into its heart, at the start of the Parade of Missing Souls.”

         “Why?” said Tru, her fear forgotten, her anger apparent.

         “To distract people from the true danger.”

         “And what’s that?” said Tru.

         “You show some wit, girl, and for that I may spare you. And there is something about you and your brother that haunts...” Ruingift paused. As if not realizing its action, it removed the hood of its robe.

         I perceived now that both natural eyes were covered with a blindfold and three red crystals had been set into the forehead. The head looked partially caved-in, and covering that cavity was a stretch of thick parchment crowded with arcane symbols like a tribe of beetles.

         But I still recognized her.

         I knew her from the day she’d suffered a cart accident in Bookside, moments after seeing a handsome boy on a rooftop across the river.

         At the sound of my involuntary hiss, a hellsnout sniffed the air and howled.

         “Oops,” I mewed.

         “Another cat?” said Ruingift, looking up with her false eyes. “Another black cat comes here willingly? Delightful.”

         The warped dogs bellowed back and forth, hunting. They were profoundly bad at it, of course, but eventually blundered up the steps toward me.

         I sat still, imitating calmness, cleaning my face. I did it for a reason, of course. Hygiene matters. Also, when I did finally dart across the landing to the balcony, I crossed their paths. The change in the timbre of the howls was very satisfying.

         I leapt from the balcony and smacked into a tall brazier.

         I’d meant to do that.

         There was one summer I’d jumped onto a hot copper roof while fleeing the unkindness of strangers. My paws had screamed. This was like that but mercifully briefer; I bounced off, landing, naturally, on my feet.

         The brazier was rather less graceful. With a clang and a roar it toppled across the circle of magical flame. Nature’s fire and magic’s fire dueled for a time, making an opening in the circle. When great powers wrangle thus, there is often the chance for mere earthly creatures to find the exit. Whiskerdoom took his opportunity, just before the brazier went out and the magical flame closed the gap.

         “The others,” I said.

         “I know, sister,” he said, smoking a little at the edges, “but we’ve got to run.”

         “Pepper?” Tru said in wonder. She looked around and came to the same conclusion as Whiskerdoom. “Run, Pepper!”

         We darted into the nearest tunnel, chancing the depths of Scarside. Behind us Ruingift called out, “You! I know you—!”

         We quickly became lost in a labyrinth of ancient corridors and collapsed buildings. We sought the narrowest passages and in this way evaded the maddened hellsnouts. Even so their echoes hounded us everywhere. At last we emerged at the base of the great chasm.

         The night had passed. The Bloodsday sun rose just high enough to tease details from the gash’s darkness, and so we could pick our way along the rubble where the Dragondraught flowed from the falls toward Scatterwind and the sea. The waters gurgled and echoed like a vast salivating beast.

         “This whole chasm,” I mused, “made by a dragon stirring in its sleep...”

         We pressed downriver in silence.

         “Thank you, sister,” Whiskerdoom said at last.

         “My pleasure,” I said, and it was true. Despite everything I was exhilarated. Curiosity, and loyalty, hadn’t killed me after all! “But I’m sorry I got you into trouble.”

         “It was exciting! I kept using my Spell of Trinket Questing—the one the Underseers use for finding lost keys, wands, that sort of thing—and zoomed in on a tattoo Tru chanced to describe as occupying an embarrassing spot on Zik. Decent primate, she is. Scratched those nice delicate spots beside the ears, just the right amount of pressure. Anyway, I braved—I!—the streets, the crotchety old humans, the tunnels, the hellsnouts, and got captured! It was incredible!”

         “You’re not angry?”

         “This is the most invigorating day I’ve had in years. Admittedly, it might have ended much worse. Then my opinion of it would perhaps be different. I might have been fed human... by the Swiftest Mouse, Shadowdrop, those human children, they’re doomed.”

         “Maybe... However, I think Ruingift wanted them terrified, not dead.” Or so I wished to believe.

         “We have to get back, put a stop to all this.”

         I was startled. I’d never felt so in accord with my brother. It pained me to argue with him.

         “Whiskerdoom, we have to gather what black cats remain and warn the city.” As we walked, I told him all I knew.

         Whiskerdoom was silent for a time, which was an interesting change. We fell into the rhythm of travel, and it was possible to pretend we were kittens again, just enjoying companionship in the wide and misty world.

         At last he said, “My mistress? I still cannot believe it. It’s true Wurm has a temper, but... it’s well I don’t have my collar, or else I’d call to her.”

         “And what would you say to her?” I said. “‘Excuse me, Mistress, but are you trying to destroy the city? Is your good friend Ruingift going to release our brethren into the festival to distract everyone while you do?’”

         “Who would want to destroy the city? Three thousand years they’ve had a city, and before that a village and with its chickens and goats, and before that a temple with jagged pillars as if to hold up the sky, and before that caves with strange paintings of absurdly large prey. It’s been abandoned and reclaimed before, and had many names—oldest of cities, eternal.”

         “But it’s not eternal.” I waved a paw at the clouds in the sky, all those mighty white sketches of beasts and vessels and continents, all ready to drift apart. “Humans seem immortal to cats, and the city seems immortal to humans, but we’re all just the flit of a crow’s wing beneath the sky of Time. This could be our last day, brother.”

         Whiskerdoom halted. “You’ve changed. If I didn’t know better I’d think I was talking to a wizard. Don’t forget where you come from.”

         “I come from an alley in Archaeopolis. Brother, you are serving Archaeopolis’ enemy. I am sorry. It doesn’t mean you’ve done wrong. Working with somebody who’s partially evil is, in my view, part of the cost of living. But knowing someone is absolutely evil should change your calculations, shouldn’t it?”

         Whiskerdoom hissed and strode on. Here it was again, the sudden anger, the ear-folding, snarling fury. “Do not worry,” he growled. “I do not need your pity! It is clear I made a mistake, and I will pay.”

         “Whiskerdoom, it’s not—”

         “Of course I know what the others say about us familiars. Fat! Pampered! Idle, but for a few simple chores. Oh, we know nothing of life on the streets. Oh, we’re all just soft and weak.”

         “Brother, I don’t—” And here again the fumbling speech, with all my best words escaping like agile birds just beyond my paws.

         “That’s what you think,” Whiskerdoom went on. “You don’t have to say it. Always wanting to cut me out. Always believing you’re better.”

         “Stop it.”

         “Well you’re not,” he said. “You’re a joke of a cat. Afraid of your own shadow. Never brave enough to get what you want. Blaming me for being smarter.”

         “Stop. It.”

         The old hurt filled my mind like nightfall. I felt it tug at me, ready to pull me into a ball, a blot of darkness.

         “You got more milk than anyone from our dam,” Whiskerdoom said. “She spent more time training you to hunt. Everyone loves you, even the humans. Your tricks work on them. But I see through it all, to the stupid selfish little beast within.”

         I pounced.

         We scuffled, scratched, bit. When we were youths Whiskerdoom had grown swiftly, and deep in my brain I still expected my brother to overwhelm me, leave me humiliated and bleeding as in the old days. So I was surprised to find that striking in anger I could overpower him. His knowledge of magic and monsters didn’t equal a life on the streets. I grappled, raked, bit at his neck in the spot that would have shattered his spine had he been a mouse.

         “Enough,” he said.

         I let go. He rolled away and just stopped there, belly up, looking at the clouds.

         “You cannot help,” he gasped, “being what you are. A cat. A normal, healthy cat. It is I who am peculiar, Shadowdrop, I who reach for strange heights of imagination, of knowledge. You are typical. I declare you ordinary, sister. Relish it.”

         This, I realized, was as close to an apology as I would ever get from Whiskerdoom. I could either accept that, or carry old anger in my mouth like a rotting mouse carcass.

         I’d rather drop the carrion, I decided. Sometimes with individuals, as with waterfalls, you must simply learn to appreciate their good qualities from a safe remove. Or drown.

         “I accept your... whatever, brother. Are you able to go on?”

         “Yes, of course. Apology accepted. I consent to your plan. Let’s go show my mistress what it means to cross a black cat.”

* * *

         We reached the streets. The hellsnouts were waiting.

         We evaded them by slipping into the maze of ships that underlay Scatterwind Market. In the hold of the Silver Hind we peered out at the shining mansions of Relicwood, gleaming between tall trees. Beyond these estates rose the great buildings surrounding the Infinite Forum, the Zodiac Coliseum, the Vault of Heaven, the Tower of the Underseers, the Temple of Clockwork Justice, Castle Astrolabe.

         The hellsnouts had anticipated us here too. Between the Forum and us paced my old friend Hork.

         “Castle Astrolabe,” I said. “The Overgazers can speak with us. They might be friendly. They need to know the Nominus Umbra is a target.”

         “Huh. Heavily-guarded place, filled with magical wards. I’ll do it. You need to lead that hellsnout away from me, get all the free black cats rounded up, and get them to the Forum, so together we can counteract Ruingift’s distraction and possibly Wurm’s theft of that page from the Nominus Umbra.”

         “All right,” I said, agreeing to what had originally been my idea. “I will distract Hork. And I will summon the others. I know the city.”

         “Agreed,” he said. “It’s not much of a plan, but it’s ours. Let’s get going before I decide to live permanently in this creaky, rotting mousetrap.”

         We exited the ship and crept up to the Esplanade, which was crowded with sailors and wayfarers and vendors and performers and gawkers. My eyes tracked cutlasses and daggers and juggling balls and pirouetting feet. Most distinctive of all were the carriages of the rich, horse-drawn fantasies of grand wood embellished with brass or ivory or clockwork gargoyles. And a few of these went beyond fantasy into inanity. There was a carriage pressed with gold leaf, shaped to evoke a cloud of autumn leaves. There was a carriage made to resemble a giant pumpkin. There was a carriage that looked like a miniature version of the city, with silver towers for the heights, a tumble of tiny ships for Scatterwind Market, and crystal veining standing in for the Dragondraught River.

         I stared several seconds before noting a more salient aspect of these opulent vehicles. The fanciest of the carriages were all going the wrong way.

         In the midst of the year’s biggest event, the city’s wealthiest humans were leaving town.

         The rich, you see... the old man at the fountain had said, confuse a lack of scruples with being strong. What did these fine people know that the average reveler didn’t?

         Enough. Hork, still pacing at the edge of the Scatterwind’s mass of hulks, keeping to the shadows and out of sight of the revelers, was sniffing the air, as if he’d caught our scent. I touched noses with my brother and dove between the fantasia of leaves and the grand pumpkin carriage, leaving startled horses and shouting people in my wake. Bad luck. But perhaps a few of them deserved it.

         Hork chased me through the ivy-threaded, rose-festooned compounds of Relicwood, his spittle igniting topiary.

         I found the mansion of one Fain Raithson, dapper weapons merchant, with a sprawling hedge maze I knew as well as the kinks of my own tail. I led the hellsnout into the leafy twistings, and when I’d gotten him thoroughly enmeshed in the green puzzle, I ducked out through a narrow passage in the roots, leaving outraged snarls behind.

         On a rocking swing near the garden I found our sibling Sootpaw. He was pretending to sleep through the commotion.

         “Oh, it’s you,” he said, eyelids rising to reveal black pupils aswim in green. “You do cause trouble, Shadowdrop.”

         “You have no idea. There’s a plot to destroy the city. It involves us.”

         “Oh? Do we want to destroy the city?”

         “No! Meet us at the Forum.”

         I raced on before hearing his reply. I didn’t worry that Hork would chase Sootpaw, for I heard the baying and knew that only I mattered. As it should be. It was almost flattering.

         I found another sibling, Moonset, in a dry birdbath at the manse of the slave trader Slith Sainsdaughter, who was very careful to keep all her slaving offshore. My sister was pawing idly at dust-colored moths. I’d never gotten along with Moonset, who also fancied Scatterwind Market and disliked sharing. Yet we weren’t enemies. I knew what an enemy looked like. “You say,” she said, “our whole city is endangered. Do you mean for humans, or for us?”

         “For all.”

         Green-and-gold eyes scrutinized me. “You have a most un-catlike partiality for humans. I had to ask.”

         “It is not un-catlike. All breeds but ours show an affinity for their kind. Our world-lines have been woven together since before the sun began rising in the east.”

         “You speak of meekbreeds. Our kind are different.”

         “We are not so different, Moonset. If only we could control the luckbane...”

         “Enough, Shadowdrop. Clearly you will mew and twitch until I respond in the affirmative. I shall do so. Behold: yes. To the Forum, you say?”

         “Yes.” By now the enormity of my task had resonated through my aching legs and lungs, and I added, “But tell two cats before you proceed there, and bid them do likewise.”

         “Two black cats.”

         “Yes, Moonset, two black cats. I believe Smokefang and Gloomrunner dwell near here. I go now to the haunt of Lighthunter.”

         “Go then. For I smell a hellsnout close by.”

         That took care of my siblings, so it was on to the others. At the Timberchar Bridge I found Lighthunter amid the two-foot-wide alleys between the businesses and tenements of that improbably old span. He wordlessly agreed to my plea, flexed the claws upon his bulky paws, and leapt on his way.

         I crossed and located the young kitten Flickerdark scrounging garbage behind a slaughterhouse in Ashenspan. She was eager to accompany me but reluctantly agreed to run messages. By the time I reached the Abbey of Lost Gods and peered about for the twins Cryptleaper and Tombscramble, I realized I’d run out of time.

         “You,” said Cryptleaper.

         “The crazy one,” said Tombscramble.

         They stared down from the roof of the Abbey. I explained everything to their impassive faces. Luckily, big ears ran in their family. They conferred in a flurry of mutterings and twitches.

         “We’ll go,” said Cryptleaper.

         “But you haven’t much time,” said Tombscramble. “Up here we can see far. The parade is starting.”

         “If this Ruingift wants to unleash our captive brethren,” said Cryptleaper, “It will happen soon.”

         “Thank you. On your way.”

         And I ran on mine. But my destination had changed. For the citizens were lining the sidewalks of Timearrow Way, the paraders massing by the Eternal Esplanade, and soon Ruingift would spring whatever evil she planned. I needed to accelerate my plans.

         Once more I needed the Orb.

         To the Forum I ran, and hellsnouts followed. They’d arrayed themselves to spot me if I approached the city’s heart.

         All right then, I thought. It is cat versus dog. As it was meant to be.

* * *

         People were everywhere. Hork caught up with his cohort and together they herded me toward the thoroughfare. They knew me. They knew I’d avoid harming innocents with my passage.

         Somehow I had to get through to the Forum, and the Underseers’ tower, and the Orb—and quickly.

         Tru’s dead brother, and Ruingift herself, would always haunt me. But the living needed me now. Me, Shadowdrop. Greatest of black cats. No, let’s just say greatest of cats. Or, to keep it simple—greatest.

         As always the trick is knowing what cards to play and when.

         Forgive me, I thought. Into the Via Antiqua I ran.

         And then the truth dawned upon me like warm sunlight upon fur: I would cross no-one’s path.

         I wasn’t using fatesight, but even without it I should have felt the frayed world-lines as my luckbane burned through them. Yet I felt nothing, saw only the endless startled faces, all unharmed.

         Of course, I thought. They’re all waiting for the parade! They’re not going anywhere for thirteen seconds, or even thirteen minutes! For this little while they have no path to cross.

         I had a chance. I ran on.

         And a peculiar thing happened. Amid the shouts there came a cheer. And then another, and another. At last there was a roar of approval from the humans as I and my pursuit enacted a mighty entertainment before them. This day even a hellsnout, even a black cat, was accepted as part of the bread and circuses. For the first time, I felt like a citizen of Archaeopolis. For the first time the old man’s words your city made complete sense.

         At last I reached the Stairway of Ages, rising amid the foliage of the Gravegarden. As the parade would not ascend the Stairway, here I faced the problem of spectators milling about on the lowest steps.

         I yowled in a deranged manner I hadn’t essayed since the day Tru almost drowned. The startled crowd shifted ahead of me, just a little. My luck held, for even now, I crossed no-one’s path.

         Up, up, up... Along the stairs of different metals marking different Ages I went... I thought of human eras and how my kind were but a soft footfall along history’s path. Volcanoes, plagues, famines, earthquakes, floods... why, with all these catastrophes facing them, would humans ever deliberately harm their own?

         But as the Tower appeared before me I thought as a human might, as someone who builds. I thought of all those fantastic carriages moving away from the city toward countryside retreats. And I understood, then, that the richest of Archaeopolis were poised to swoop in and rebuild after this disaster, to become more powerful than ever. Never mind they’d sacrifice the real assets of this city (my city), its people and their creativity. Never mind that overall, everyone would be poorer. All hierarchy was relative. Rather than settle for merely being rich in a thriving metropolis, they preferred to be tyrants of a ruin.

         I would stop them somehow. I, bringer of bad luck.

         I ascended the tower’s cat path, leaping away from the spittle of hellsnouts and through the cat door in triumph.

         Pain washed over me, and darkness overtook me. They’d changed the locks.

* * *

         Oblivion came, looked me over in the dark, and decided I tasted bad.

         I woke to claws upon my face.

         “Shadowdrop. Wake up. We need you. Then you can die, if that’s what you want.”

         It was the voice of Nightwise. The voice was attached to his face, and to the claws. The claws were almost welcome, for they distracted me from the ache suffusing my whole body.

         “What...” I managed to reply.

         “Whiskerdoom’s banished. The warding’s set to kill him.”

         “Kill...?”

         “You set the tower on fire. They think it was him, though. Luckily you’re only his sister.”

         “I don’t feel all that lucky...”

         “We need you. The others are in trouble.”

         I could rise, I decided. I even went ahead and did it. We were on the landing beyond the cat door. I noted Postgrad back in his usual spot, none the worse for wear. I decided not to address him, in case he preferred to be ignored. We were otherwise alone.

         “Hauntclaw?” I said. “Quickfang?”

         “Mistress Wurm made Masters Hake and Slint loan their familiars to her. Their own familiars! Maybe they’re infatuated. Maybe she’s worked a charm. My own Mistress has taken a holiday, she’s so sick of Wurm. Whiskerdoom’s nowhere.”

         “But where are Hauntclaw and Quickfang?”

         “Wurm made Quickfang sneak into Castle Astrolabe. I don’t know why. Hauntclaw’s hiding outside the Castle, waiting. I don’t know why that either.”

         I knew. Quickfang must be accomplishing the theft of Page 99 of the Nominus Umbra. Hauntclaw must be her accomplice somehow. Wurm could thus make the cats endure all the risk.

         “Where’s the Orb?” I asked.

         “Again with the Orb? It’s out of reach. In Wurm’s own chambers. She’s there now. Meanwhile Hake and Slint are in the workshop. You’ll never make it up the stairs.”

         “Tell me the way.”

         He stared at me as if a rabbit had suddenly frothed at the mouth, grown fangs, and cackled death-death-death. Then he told me, adding, “I think this is the last I’ll see of you. I’m sad. Because I like you. Even if you’re trouble. If things were different I’d ask you out for midnight caterwauling. Alas.”

         “Listen, Nightwise. Wurm has never truly met me. I mean to surprise her. And... I may have another trick, if you will help.”

         “This will get me into even bigger trouble. Won’t it?”

         “Not necessarily. Wait here while I get something.”

         I raced to Whiskerdoom’s nook and retrieved, like a mom-cat, the iron collar. I rejoined Nightwise and the silent Postgrad. I said, “I gather the connection between collar and wizard is like a leash that can be tugged? I wonder if a wearer’s feelings are strong enough they might shake the wizard on the other end of the leash... not enough to control, but enough to distract.”

         “I don’t think,” Nightwise said, “I can challenge Wurm.”

         “Ah, but I do not ask this of you.” Claws retracted I patted the scratching post, some of whose limbs would easily fit the collar. “I ask it of him.”

         I now noticed that Postgrad hadn’t escaped from our adventure unscathed. He was charred a bit around the edges.

         “I should say no,” said the scratching post. “But I’m getting a taste for defiance.”

         “Defiant furniture?” Nightwise scoffed.

         “Haven’t you ever been ambushed by a table corner? Well, maybe that’s a human thing. Shadowdrop, when you dropped the Orb on me before—”

         “Sorry,” I said.

         “I’ve had worse. Anyway, somehow you left within the Orb the image of an old man playing cards.”

         “I’d briefly thought about the game Treatment...” I recalled.

         “Well, I couldn’t see him clearly, but I did contact him for an instant. I think he was inside Castle Astrolabe. All I was able to convey was the message Danger! For all I know, I got merely the head chef and he double-checked the larder.”

         “It’s more than I hoped. Thank you.”

         “I’m eager to help any other way a scratching post can. Hey, ow!”

         Nightwise objected, “But you said...”

         “Give me that collar,” growled Postgrad.

* * *

         I padded into the workshop, counting to one hundred. Back on the landing Postgrad and Nightwise did likewise.

         Nine, ten, eleven...

         Masters Hake and Slint were bent over dusty city maps, cross-referencing monster sightings. It sounded like they were on the right track, but they would never draw the correct conclusions in time. Nor would they ever believe me. I crept past table legs.

         ... seventeen, eighteen, nineteen...

         No one but a black cat schooled in stealth could have managed it. The wizards noticed me not.

         ... thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five...

         The wizards’ servants were a different matter.

         Two candlequicks pattered somewhere within the chamber even as I threaded the stairway’s shadows. Worse, I saw candles in alcoves above, twitching in an alarming way.

         ... forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one...

         I slipped up past these benighted illuminators and into the hallway inhabited by apprentices, such as I gathered Postgrad had been. There were few in those days (word about Postgrad had perhaps gotten around) and the hall was quiet. But I heard skittering on the stairs behind. I padded up another stairway. This one was draped with a red carpet; beyond lay the wizards’ chambers.

         ... sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four...

         Halfway up the stairway I realized that the carpet, covered with intricate yellow patterns and mysterious green calligraphy, had begun to ripple beneath me. Its ends quivered and rose, and I envisioned it wrapping a human-sized intruder like a pastry.

         I was a cat, however. I stepped lightly, never quite giving the carpet the excuse to grab me, all the while marking the scuttling behind. As the candlequicks tried to pounce, I leapt to one side, slamming hard onto the magical fabric. Like a spring I shot up again, this time landing beyond the carpet’s reach.

         It closed upon the candlequicks. It quivered, and smoke began pouring out either end. I hurried on.

         ... Eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five...

         The upper chamber boasted four ornate rune-covered doors, one for each cardinal direction. Nightwise had spoken of the intricate patterns required to open each portal. I possessed a memory honed by learning the ways of the slow-motion cauldron that was Archaeopolis, and so I clawed at the necessary runes of Wurm’s door, leaping sometimes to catch the high ones.

         ... Ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven...

         The door swung open without a whisper. The chamber beyond surprised me in being brightly lit, filled with ferns and flowers, decorated with paintings of sunny scenes, enlivened with shelves of colorful curios. Mistress Wurm left her skulls and newts for the workshop. But she—willowy, silken-haired, gentle of face, back turned—was tapping blood-colored nails upon the glowing Orb.

         Within it swam a scene that couldn’t belong to Here and Now, for the sun outside her window was high and bright, not clouded with volcanic ash. And it couldn’t belong to Once and Elsewhere, for those buildings that were collapsing were Castle Astrolabe with its newest towers and the Sidereal Senate with its fresh mural portraying all the Eldshore’s provinces. Wurm was considering the Maybe Soon. And smiling.

         That is, had been smiling, for the expression was already a ghost of itself as she finished speaking to someone not present. “Enough of your misgivings, Quickfang, and shove the page through the window. Hauntclaw will do the rest.” Then she spun and said, “Whiskerdoom, you have much to—”

         She screamed and fell to her knees.

         ... One hundred.

         “You,” Wurm gasped, rubbing her fingers to her temples, as Postgrad’s years of rage were conveyed by the medium of Whiskerdoom’s collar. The scene of Archaeopolis dying flickered away as I rushed upon the Orb. I touched paws to its cold white crystal, just like a housecat yearning for birds beyond a winter window. But what lay revealed to me were black cats, many of them already converging like an eclipse upon the sun-soaked forum. As though the Orb recognized me now, it responded to my silent wish and let me speak to all the black cats of Archaeopolis at once, wherever they were.

         “It is I, Shadowdrop! Many of you have already received my summons to the Forum. It is urgent that you all go there. Our kinswoman Hauntclaw is at the foot of Castle Astrolabe. I believe she’s been ordered to catch a page from a magical book. She will deliver the page into the hands a great force of evil! Be kind to her, but do not let her take it. For we are lackeys of no man or woman or Thing. We are cats!”

         I perceived that Wurm was rising and not altogether pleased. A sensible cat would go. I stayed with the Orb. “Shred the page to bits, my friends, to bits! To you let it be as mouse, sparrow, butterfly, and armchair! Rend!”

         “No!” Wurm rose, and her lithe fingers played a symphony upon the air, and the lovely room became noxious and stale, like a place deep underground. I gagged upon a scent like rotten eggs. “Stupid animal! Do you have any idea what I’ve sacrificed? What I could achieve? Yes, some people will perish at first, but I’ve warned those of quality, and this city will be made safe again! No more monsters underfoot! No more sinkholes and collapses! No one ever again dying in some meaningless toppling of old architecture, like my parents. All things will be made new.”

         Now I embraced the better part of valor, but Wurm snagged me by the tail. “You... you’re not Whiskerdoom. You lack even his feeble magic. What do you have to say for yourself, copycat?”

         “You think you’re a hard person,” I observed, “but your eyes are soft.”

         I treated her face like a rodent.

         It was something new, after so many months of being a shadow, to become the lightning-stroke. Wurm screamed and brought her hands together. She spoke words that were like sharp rocks in the ears. Her spell knocked me over as if I were a crumbling wall. Something in me, something feline or dragon-touched, I do not know, protected me. I fell, but I lived.

         “Your torment will be prolonged,” Wurm said, wiping her bleeding face. “You will become an arch-stone in a bridge, perhaps, and be trampled forever, or a lightning rod or a sewer grate...”

         “Mistress Wurm,” the voice of Nightwise came from the door. “A Word.”

         He spoke it, and hearing it was like the tiniest of rocks pricking the skin. Whatever it was, it afflicted Wurm far worse. She staggered, muttering her spell for the second time. This time it shattered the window.

         When I dared look up she was gone, and hot winds blew in from the city. I scented the festival, with its sweat and food and fire and dust. We heard the baying of hellsnouts and shouts of alarm. I couldn’t take it all in. “Nightwise? I thought you couldn’t face her. And I thought familiars had only minor spells.”

         Nightwise licked his paw. “I like you. And she made me mad. And I used a trivial enchantment called Krumwheezle’s Mnemonic Fishhook. It makes entities remember the most important thing that’s slipped their minds.”

         “Page 99,” I said, rising.

         “I suggest we use the window. The Masters are coming.”

         I realized Nightwise had no collar.

         “Yes,” he said, noticing my stare. “Today I remember the hunt.”

         We picked our way along the windowsill and leapt among crenelations and gargoyles. I am not ashamed to say that I lost my footing and toppled to the place of the cat door, though I landed on my feet. I saw Nightwise taking a slower and saner route, so I decided to check on Postgrad.

         “Shadowdrop,” Nightwise said. “Don’t.”

         “I will be quick,” I told the edgy Nightwise. I felt that, forewarned, I could endure the warding. I was right. Paws shaking, I entered the alcove.

         What I couldn’t so easily endure was the sight of Postgrad in pieces.

         “No,” I said. His struggle with Wurm had shattered him from the inside.

         “Shadowdrop...” came a weak wooden voice. “Thank you. I am free... Perhaps somewhere someone is making a magic sword, or a magic statue, or a magic accordion that needs an animating spirit with experience... My schedule is open ... At any rate, at last I gave Wurm a piece of my mind, or, heh, a splinter...”

         “No,” I said again, and pawed the remains of the scratching post. This time there was no answer.

         The human-sized steel door behind him began to open. Master Hake or Master Slint must be looking for us, and after the commotion upstairs I doubted they were in any mood to listen to cats.

         I hissed and almost stood my ground. But I didn’t have time for these Underseers. I had to stop Wurm and Ruingift. I turned tail and exited through the cat door. Outside, Nightwise gave me a wordless look. As soon as we dared, we raced to the Stairway of Ages.

         Hork and the other hellsnouts roared back and forth, frothing in anger and fear. They had good reason; thirty black cats filled the Forum, and more were still arriving. The crowd was panicking now, but it hadn’t yet bolted. When it did, people might be trampled, bad luck or no.

         “Difficult to get through,” Nightwise said, “without crossing anyone’s path.”

         “Yes,” I said, surprised he would care.

         “What you said before,” he said. “About the humans your luck killed...”

         “Yes.”

         “I have wondered since if you are right. About our power. That the harm we can do means we ought to be careful. Always. But—Shadowdrop? What sort of life is that? To always constrain your own strength?”

         “I don’t know. What does it mean to an ordinary cat, that her mere footsteps can destroy tiny insects? Let her enjoy her ignorance! But for us, if we care about other beings, somehow we must learn restraint. There are compensations, Nightwise. To know we’ve spared something good, that may live and grow. To tread lightly upon the world and know we leave it none the worse. To sleep in sunbeams secure that we bring no suffering thereby.”

         “These seem like thin rewards.”

         “Thin as a shadow, and as wide. Some days like a river, others like a drop.”

         I blinked three times, and he followed suit. We darted past the hellsnouts, who for once were too agitated to notice us. In wordless agreement we slipped between people’s feet, trying to merely brush their world-lines. Some tripped, others collided, one had a fit of sneezing, another briefly choked on his own spittle. But no one passed away at our passing.

         Yet death was in the air... At the edges of my vision I saw those bubbles in the haze of probability over Archaeopolis, larger than ever. Now I knew their import. The plans of Ruingift would lead to slaughter.

         There was no sign of Whiskerdoom or Quickfang as we reached our brethren, but there sat Hauntclaw, encircled by her fellows, hissing her outrage. “How dare you accuse me?” she said to them. “I bet you’re just jealous I’ve got important work to do!” Her gaze flicked to us. “Nightwise! Are you behind all this? Is this about you thinking I’m hogging the Orb again?”

         “The treachery’s not ours,” Nightwise said. The cats parted for us so that we stood within their mass. “You all heard Shadowdrop’s message.”

         “No page has fallen, sister,” said my sibling Sootpaw. “Bird droppings, yes. Pages, no.”

         My other sibling Moonset added, with suspicion scratching her voice, “Perhaps you have overreached, by a claw.”

         “Look at our numbers!” I said. “See how many are gone! Do you truly think that’s an accident? You know of the disappearances.”

         At that moment screams rose from the harbor, at the starting point for the parade.

         Of course. Ruingift had released our kin.

         We could not see exactly what was happening—what had come of fifty luckbane-blessed black cats tormented and terrified and then set loose to run. But through the screams we heard structures toppling. We saw fires rising along the Esplanade. Maddened horses ran from that place, with terrified riders and passengers tumbling in their wake. It was like mob violence without the inconvenience of a mob.

         “Do you see, Hauntclaw?” I said. “It’s begun.”

         “I...” she began, but halted as her gaze darted up.

         At a high window of Castle Astrolabe two black shapes struggled on the sill. I realized with a rattle in my throat it was Whiskerdoom fighting Quickfang. From their catfight tumbled a shredded page. It was covered with dark, twisted writing. Even from far below it made my hair rise like rows of sleeping vipers.

         Page 99 of the Nominus Umbra drifted down.

         Hauntclaw studied the falling page as though it were a tasty moth, before folding back her ears as though confronting a wasp.

         “No,” she said.

         “Fool!” cried a voice.

         A ragged Thing drifted upon the drought-wracked air. Jerkily it flew without wings, resembling a blanket torn loose from a Foottown clothesline, or a gliding vulture prematurely mistaking our land for a desert. Tentacles reached out from the tatters of an old cloak to seize the page, and I knew the apparition was Ruingift.

         She laughed, and now I saw her ravaged head, smirking there above our doomed city. “I’d hoped not to reveal myself, but soon most witnesses will be dead.” Her red trio of crystals picked me out of the crowd. “Levitation is among the first spells I attempted, you know, the day before I met you, cat. I could only rise a few inches then, but I’d been about to fly toward that boy I had mooned over, and summon him to me as well. If not for that spell, you’d not have crossed our paths.”

         “I am sorry,” I said, so quietly I was certain she couldn’t hear. And so help me, I was.

         “Do not be! That disaster was a gift. His death, and my maiming, showed me the truth about life. Love is fleeting, life precarious. Only power can be trusted. My dedication to my Art was tripled.”

         “I am sorry,” I said, meaning it even more.

         “I need no pity, cat.”

         “My name is Shadowdrop.”

         Just then, a old human figure in a toga leaned out of a window near Whiskerdoom and Quickfang’s catfight far overhead. I knew him only as the card-player, but the humans in the Forum began calling out, “Emperor Rel! Emperor, help us! Rel! Save us from the black cats!”

         Only then did I recognize him, from many a coin.

         He raised his fingers as if playing a card. Fire and lightning and stranger energies I could perceive only as a torment of the air all lashed downward at Ruingift.

         But though Ruingift shrieked and her tattered robes grew perforated with holes, she didn’t fall from the sky. Her false eyes blazed, and a fiery nimbus surrounded her and absorbed the emperor’s attacks. “Soon you will need pity, Shadowdrop—all of you. But for now, I cannot endure these annoyances forever. Come. I will teach you wisdom.”

         An invisible claw yanked me into the air, and I knew how the mouse feels.

         Ruingift and I flew over the mass of cats below, past the stupefied faces of Whiskerdoom and Quickfang in the tower, passing above the racing forms of the released black cats who even now charged up Timearrow Way toward the Forum, disaster in their wake. For a short stomach-twitching period, serpents of energy pursued us from the hand of Emperor Rel, but we outpaced them. Beside Ruingift I dove into Scarside and plunged into a series of dank tunnels to the lost temple where I’d previously encountered her. Mistress Wurm awaited us there. The human captives were still there too, bound to the altar by locks and chains.

         They probably hoped I was there to rescue them. After my dizzying flight I threw up on them instead. At least the magical fire was gone; perhaps Ruingift needed to raise it again. And the hellsnouts were busy elsewhere. These were factors in my favor, if only...

         “Pepper!” called out my human, Tru.

         “Her name is Shadowdrop,” Ruingift mocked, alighting and drawing her fiery dagger. “And at last I recognize you, sister of my hapless boy. It is fitting that you and the cat converse properly at the end.”

         Although I now crouched upon the floor, I couldn’t move, for the invisible claw held me still.

         “What do you mean?” Tru said, terrified but unwilling to panic. Here, even at the end of it all, I was proud to know her.

         “It matters little, save that it amuses me,” Ruingift said. “Wurm, make her comprehend cat-tongue.”

         “I’m not your lackey,” said Wurm.

         “You’ve no secrecy any longer,” Ruingift said. “You must see our partnership through. And I am preoccupied casting the Dragonspark.”

         Wurm said, “If you don’t cast it, your life, too, is forfeit.”

         “But unlike you I am mercurial and mad. You know this. Dare you risk me abandoning my whole plan on a whim?”

         Wurm considered this. Then she snarled and spoke various Words. Ruingift laughed and approached the altar, clutching Page 99 like a mad composer about to conduct.

         “There’s a tickling in my head...” Tru said. “Pepper? Shadow...”

         “Shadowdrop,” I said. “Do you understand?”

         “I do! Shadowdrop. You’ve been trying so hard to help. I’m sorry I got you into all this.”

         “I got you into all this. It’s because of me your brother Vil died.”

         “Vil...? Oh. And when I fell into the river?”

         “That was just bad luck. The ordinary kind.”

         The last thing I expected was for Tru to laugh, but she did. “It doesn’t matter now. There’s always bad luck, and there are always people—and cats—doing their best, despite it. And there’s always wickedness. That’s what I’ve learned from all those books. But I’ve learned this too, that if we can endure without becoming wicked ourselves, enjoying life until the bad luck finally gets us, then we’ve done all right.”

         Wurm studied her. Her voice was strange. “Why not release these children, Ruingift? They are rather like innocents... caught in a structural collapse. Does the Dragonspark require them?”

         “No,” Ruingift said, perusing her spell. “But they remind me of my youth. I hope some will yet join me in comprehending the truth of power.”

         Wurm was silent. She put a finger to her lips and traced patterns in the air.

         The locks snapped open.

         The children rubbed their wrists. Two boys ran, but Zik stayed beside Tru. I still couldn’t move, but Tru stepped beside me and stroked me between my ears. Never let anyone tell you doomsday is no time for a head scratch.

         Ruingift shrugged. “I see your sentimentality, Wurm. No matter. They will likely die when the dragon wakes.”

         “That is what the Dragonspark does?” I asked. “Awaken the Elddrake?”

         Ruingift was incanting. It was Wurm who answered me. “It does. Even a brief awakening can convulse the land. Archaeopolis, sited in his eye, will suffer most.”

         “Why?” Tru said. “You swore to defend this city.”

         “After a while, you get tired of dragging bodies from the rubble. I discovered Ruingift, and learned that her goals ran parallel to mine. I wish to wake the dragon to make a clean slate. She wants to siphon its power, as we siphon luckbane from our familiars. She will found her own empire far away, while I rebuild this one. Is that not right, Ruingift?”

         Ruingift was still muttering and did not answer.

         I mewed, “Throw me,” so low that only Tru could hear.

         “What?” Tru began.

         Page 99 took fire, ignited by the dagger. But there was no salvation in this. Rather, blazing letters fell from the page as Ruingift read with rising glee. The burning symbols sprouted tiny insectile legs and skittered around the room, falling into cracks, plunging deep into the earth.

         “Wurm!” cried a human voice.

         The other Underseers had arrived. Mistress Voyd, and Masters Hake and Slint, all bore glowing trowels, and with these they advanced upon their estranged colleague.

         In that moment of distraction Tru grabbed me and threw me at Ruingift.

         The paralysis broke as we connected. I tore away the blindfold. I’d expected to see empty sockets or worse. Instead I beheld beautiful brown mad eyes, as perfect as that day upon the river. Ruingift had simply abandoned her natural vision to view the world through other means.

         So I tore at the ruby crystals in her skull.

         She yanked me by the scruff and threw. I was getting used to being airborne. A shame I wasn’t getting any better at it. This time I landed among the Underseers, and I took my opportunity where I found it. I leapt upon Wurm anew, and she screeched.

         Suddenly hands seized her from either side and she went still. Very still indeed.

         As I dropped to the stone I apprehended that she’d become a marble column, supporting the ceiling. A hint of her startled expression remained within the veins of the stone.

         Beside her, Masters Hake and Slint had likewise transformed, grim faces suggested in the stone by ripples and cracks.

         Mistress Voyd’s head was bowed. “It’s the last devotion of the Underseer,” she said, “to become part of the city we defend. My colleagues sacrificed themselves to stop Wurm... and gave her an honorable ending.”

         “You won’t receive one,” said Ruingift, advancing as the earth shook.

         Yet as she spoke a tide of snarling darkness swirled into the chamber.

         A hundred black cats crossed Ruingift’s path.

         The earth trembled again, and half the temple’s ceiling collapsed upon her. She raised her face as if to ward off the rubble with her ruby eyes. The three crystals glowed like compact furnaces. But they’d been loosened by my assault, and, unluckily enough, they all chose that moment to topple out of her head, trailing red ichor as they fell.

         The weight of history buried Ruingift.

* * *

         Our nook of the chamber survived. Near the transformed Underseers there was a pocket of improbable stability, in which crowded our little empire of cats and the three humans.

         Old Grimtail told me, “Shadowdrop, good to see you again. Close up, this time. The Overwatchers broke the terror Ruingift had us under. I’m just sorry we weren’t in time to claw the stuffing out of her. And that we’re all doomed, of course.”

         “Mistress,” said Nightwise, nuzzling Voyd. “I’m sorry I defied you.”

         “I regret we didn’t recognize the danger,” Voyd said. “I regret many things. It took Emperor Rel summoning me to make me understand.”

         “Indeed,” said Quickfang, for she and Whiskerdoom were among the cats as well. “But that is the past, and this is now.”

         Zik was shaking his head. “So, the cats talk?”

         “Yes, brother,” said Tru. “I wasn’t just crazy. Maybe someday you can learn how.”

         Quickfang sighed. “I don’t think there will be any somedays. The emperor told us there’s no stopping the Elddrake’s awakening. It will, at minimum, stir sufficiently to destroy the city before it settles again. I’m afraid this is goodbye.”

         “This chamber can hold for a time,” Voyd said, “but inevitably it will fall.”

         She was a wizard. She must be right. And yet.

         “We are all here,” I told the assembled cats. “Kindred, I’m the strongest of you. It’s no secret, though I’ve long kept to myself.”

         There were a few cries of dissent but many more of encouragement. “Shadowdrop will save us!” one voice rang out.

         “What I have long feared,” I pressed on, “I embrace. I am the bringer of bad luck, and bad luck can help us now. Let me lead you to the Elddrake himself.”

         “Shadowdrop will get us killed!” the voice amended.

         Nightwise stepped beside me, wordlessly showing his support. Impulsively, I nuzzled him. I felt brave, my strength rising even as all things were tumbling down.

         At that moment Hork and the hellsnouts roared into the chamber.

         I felt compassion then, for in their own way they’d suffered at the hands of Ruingift, even as had we. Underground with us, they would surely perish. I screeched, “Bad luck!” and my kindred all did the same.

         Whining, Hork and his ilk scurried from that place with tails tucked between their legs.

         “Heh,” said Whiskerdoom. “Bad luck does have its good side. You really think we can stop the Elddrake?”

         “This is our last card,” I told them all. “Today we hunt.”

* * *

         And so I led them down, farther from the sunlight than I’d ever been, instinct guiding me through the tunnels, waves of luckbane parting the earth where needed, following the vision I’d seen before within the Orb.

         And after what seemed an endless dark race, we found the very Pit that marked the cavern of the Elddrake’s eye.

         Nightwise and Whisperdoom gasped beside me, staring up at the oval eyelid of rock, big as the city. “Well,” Whiskerdoom said, “as last things to see before dying, I admit it’s fairly impressive.”

         “You should see it as we saw it in the Orb,” I said, “with its eye opening.”

         There was a rumbling and a shaking all around.

         “I think he may get that chance,” said Nightwise. “So what do we do now?’

         “Follow my lead,” I said, and ran onto the great oval path below the eye. The others followed, a great dark wave of skewed probability.

         Overhead the rock trembled. Flecks of stone fell upon us as we ran, and a great windy whispering arose. Some of the whispering formed words.

         CATS, the words said. I TALK IN MY SLEEP, DREAMING OF CATS.

         Here goes, I thought. “We must remain a dream, O benefactor.”

         WHY? THE FIERY LETTERS TICKLE MY BRAIN. I AM AWAKENING.

         “If you wake now, great one, you will perish. Or at least go blind in one eye.”

         EXPLAIN, CAT.

         “If you awaken, your eyelid must open. And as it sweeps across this immense chamber, we will cross its path.”

         There was a pause. The rumbling did not cease. MY EYELID WILL SWEEP YOU ALL INTO DARKNESS.

         “That is as it may be, but your fortunes will be poisoned. You who gave us this bad luck, you will suffer it all.”

         I CREATED YOU.

         “You changed us. But we have always been, and always will be, cats. We will not be dismissed. We will not let our city be destroyed without a fight. And we will do all these things while looking magnificent.”

         I CREATED... I CHANGED YOU... TO QUELL THE HUMANS. YET YOU SERVE THEM?

         “We serve ourselves. This is our city, which we permit the humans to inhabit.”

         Now the whispering seemed to acquire a chuckle. YOU AMUSE ME, CAT. IT IS NOT YET TIME TO ARISE AT THE ENDING OF DAYS. I WILL SLEEP ANEW. BUT I CANNOT STOP THIS BRIEF AWAKENING... UNLESS I AM CALLED BACK INTO DREAMS.

         “How can this be done?”

         ONE OF YOU MUST SEND YOUR SPIRIT INTO MY EYE.

         “Send our spirit...? What happens to this volunteer’s body?”

         IT WILL PERISH. BUT THE SPIRIT CAN WEAVE TALES FOR ME, SPIN IMAGES, AND SOOTHE ME INTO DREAMING.

         If this was the only way, then I, in my magnificence, was the only one who could manage it. I said, “I am the greatest of us. I will volunteer—”

                  “No,” said Nightwise, “I’ve studied luckbane, and the Elddrake. I should—”

         “Out of the question,” said Whiskerdoom. “I am, not to put too fine a point on it, the most learned of the familiars. It shall be me...”

         “You’re all wrong, wrong, wrong,” said Grimtail. “As your elder, the task is surely mine.”

         Other voices took up the call. It was perhaps the strangest, proudest moment of my life, when every member of my tribe offered themselves up, with all the arrogance they could muster, for the greater good.

         The vast eyelid opened a tiny bit, but that was enough to shed blazing light upon the proceedings.

         It will be me, came a human voice. The magic sword business can wait.

         And looking up we saw a distant shadow against the light, a fleck against the blaze, a shadow that might have taken the form of a scratching post before it resolved into a man’s shape.

         Remember me in your claws now and again.

         As the eyelid closed, we heard the voice grow distant, even as it said, An Underseer, an Overwatcher, and a black cat walk into a tavern...

         The eyelid closed like a vault door, and the shaking ceased.

         We came to a halt, and I raised a paw in salute to Postgrad. “We did...” I tried to say, then started over, “We all would have sacrificed...” and finally attempted, “we really...”

         “We are cats,” Nightwise said. “We did as we did. For our own reasons.”

         “As indeed we always will,” said Whiskerdoom.

         “But we must never,” said Grimtail, “and I do mean ever, breathe a word of this to the humans. We have a reputation to maintain.”

         “True,” I said.

         “I’m over here!” my human called out, with Underseers and Overwatchers behind her.

* * *

         Things have changed. Things always change.

         The first thing to change was what we experienced when we returned to the surface. Pattering sounds came all around us. Soft coldness spattered our faces. Blinking, it took me a long moment to remember the word rain. The convulsions of the Elddrake had changed the weather somehow, and the drought was over, for now. Soon children were stomping in puddles and adults were staring up with their mouths open. The parade was ruined; this was better.

         I didn’t like rain. I soaked it up, just for the feeling of it.

         The second thing was that Emperor Rel was waiting for us, his rash-covered face bright-eyed beneath the dark hood of a rain-spattered cloak. “I had a feeling you’d prove important to the city, Shadowdrop. You faced your crisis more resolutely than I dreamed. Which is very fortunate, since my enemies proved even more powerful than I feared. You played a good hand.”

         “Or paw,” I couldn’t help saying.

         I envisioned being grabbed by soldiers and dragged to the alchemist Glu, but Rel merely chuckled and said, “Or paw, indeed.”

         “I was lucky,” I said.

         “This time we all were. But you shifted the balance of probability in our favor. The Eldshore must reward you.”

         “There is no reward greater than being a cat.” Apparently something in me couldn’t help but be smart with emperors.

         “Naturally. But even a cat must satisfy her curiosity. The Underseers must be built up anew. You could learn much by joining them.”

         “I have tried being a familiar, Emperor Rel. I don’t think it suits me.”

         “I suspected as much. But there are new openings for a job with fresh air, good food, and flexible hours. How would you like to enlist in my new bureau of Nocturni?”

         “Nocturni?”

         “In earlier days it meant the men of the night, people charged with fighting fires and crimes after dark. I thought I might revive the name, as it is quite appropriate for black cats. But they will not be cats alone, nor avoid the day. There will be humans, and goblins, and delven and perhaps stranger things. For I’ve seen new possibilities in all our denizens working together. Sometimes that is what bad luck does, you know, makes fresh opportunities apparent. You will guard the roads and public places. And if you are willing, Shadowdrop, I do have an immediate task for you and yours...”

         Which brings us to the third thing.

         The folk in the ornate carriages slinking back toward the half-crumbled city walls along Via Antiqua swore as three cats’ black shapes leapt onto the lead vehicle. They hissed again as they noted the smiling, freckled girl (perhaps no longer quite so thin) clutching the leash for the magic-warped bloodhound named Hork in one hand and a bill for civic damages in the other. And cursed once more as their gazes flicked back up to the cats.

         As we used their gold-leafed roof as a scratching post, Nightwise, Whiskerdoom, and I shared a look. We didn’t blame them. We would have been more afraid of us too.

* * *

Thanks to Nicholas Ian Hawkins for advice and cat-lore.

Copyright © 2018 Chris Willrich.

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Chris Willrich is a former librarian who lives with his family in the otherworldly environs of Silicon Valley. He’s best known for his stories about the poet Persimmon Gaunt and the thief Imago Bone, who have appeared in various places including the novelette “The Sword of Loving Kindness” in the very first issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the novel The Scroll of Years and its sequels from Pyr. (Two of his other BCS stories, “Shadowdrop” and “How the Wicker Knight Would Not Move,” are set in the same world.) His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and elsewhere, most recently the Gaunt and Bone story “What Lies in Ice” in Tales From the Magician’s Skull.

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COURT OF BIRTH, COURT OF STRENGTH

by Aliette de Bodard

         The leader of House Hawthorn’s Court of Birth lived in a part of the House that Samariel had never been to: a wing of dusty, disused corridors where the wainscoting had rotted away and the wallpaper’s elegant asphodels were obscured by elongated smudges of grey fungus. The door was small and crooked. Samariel would have thought it the entrance to a garret, but it opened into a wide, airy space with barely a trace of mould or spells gone awry. A makeshift antechamber held two Louis XV armchairs with plump, curved mahogany legs, and behind it was the shape of a four-poster bed that had seen better days, its silk canopy patched so many times the patterns on it had all but disappeared under the seams of repairs.

         Samariel stood, uncertainly, on the blue and red Persian carpet, breathing in an odd smell: a mixture of distant humidity and the sweet, sharp tang of some flower he couldn’t quite recognise.

         “Come in, come in,” a voice said, from the bathroom. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

         Samariel pulled one of the chairs to him and sat down. The door creaked open and a Fallen walked in, buttoning up the collar of his ruffled shirt. His dark grey swallowtail jacket hung tantalisingly open. It was the same one Samariel wore, the uniform of the House, except he’d have given years of his life to know how to wear it so gracefully, so effortlessly. The Fallen had the smooth, ageless face of former angels, with a faint lambent light beneath his skin that made it appear paler than it really was: magic, the same that sloshed within Samariel, though much, much stronger.

         “My name is Asmodeus,” the Fallen said, sitting in the other chair. “As you already know, I take it.”

         He had dark hair with a touch of white at his temples, grey eyes that shaded to green as the sunlight shone, and square horn-rimmed glasses—an affectation, since like Samariel, like all Fallen, he had perfect eyesight. His hands, resting lightly on the armrests, had the long fingers of—a pianist, Samariel would have said, but they were so thin and pointed that they looked almost insectile.

         “I—” Samariel cursed himself for a fool and said, “Thérèse suggested I see you.”

         Asmodeus’s gaze rested on him, light, sarcastic. “Did she now. What would this be about?”

         Samariel wasn’t Court of Birth, only a minor member of the Court of Strength, tasked with making the House look good at official functions, but he had heard all kinds of stories about Asmodeus. How he spent entirely too much time in the cells in the company of the Court of Persuasion, instead of doing his duty within the birthing rooms; how a steady stream of lovers walked into this room and came back bruised and cut and haunted, unwilling to discuss the night, or completely unharmed, with a glazed, blissful expression on their faces, even more unwilling to talk at all.

         All in all, not the person he would have turned to for help, and especially not with... this kind of embarrassing problem.

         He withdrew a small charcoal sketch of a bunch of grapes from his jacket pocket and set it on the left armrest of the chair. “This is going to sound idiotic,” he said.

         Asmodeus reached for the sketch, weighed it carefully in the palm of his hand. His voice, when he spoke again, was grave. “Eglantine Bressacq.”

         “How—”

         “You forget. I’m the leader of the Court of Birth.”

         And technically in charge of the birth and education of the House’s children, but there were so many of them, in these days after the war: all the mortals seemingly pregnant at once, desperate to make up for lost time, a stream of births that seemed never to stop, well into autumn and winter, and then year after year until the hospital was glutted with the laughter and tears of the young; and some of the babies died, for even magic couldn’t keep them alive, in the absence of the medicines they’d all taken for granted before the war, but still...

         Samariel took in a deep, trembling breath. Asmodeus was watching him, with that distant, amused curiosity, the sketch lightly resting in the palm of his hand. That smell came again, orange blossom, with something else, something tangier and more acidic. Lemon; lime?

         “Eglantine takes private drawing lessons with me,” he said at last. “Charcoal, mainly. She’s very good at it, considering.” Considering she was ten years old. He stopped then. Well, he’d gone this far, he might as well plunge all the way in. It couldn’t be worse than the alternative, facing Thérèse again and telling her he’d turned tail like a coward. “She didn’t come yesterday.”

         “Didn’t she? Children are fickle, aren’t they.”

         Samariel shook his head. “She’s never missed a lesson. She even wanted to come when she had chickenpox.” Thérèse had been outraged, worried that she’d pass it on to Samariel, but he was Fallen, and mortal diseases, no matter how contagious, stood little chance of affecting him. “And I asked around. Thérèse hasn’t seen her since yesterday morning, and neither has anyone else.”

         Asmodeus’s face had gone oddly still. He said nothing, merely waited.

         “There’s a Fallen, in the Court of Birth,” Samariel said. “Locheren.”

         “I’m familiar with her.”

         “She was last seen with Eglantine.”

         “And not since?”

         “Yes,” Samariel said. Asmodeus was still watching him, with a burning intensity. Any moment now, he was going to smile or say something in that light careless tone, and Samariel didn’t have the fortitude for it.

         “You know,” Samariel said, half-rising, “this was a bad idea. I’ll not bother you any further. I’ll ask Lord Uphir.” Uphir was head of the House; Eglantine, an orphan whose parents had been day labourers, wasn’t a full dependent, but she was still his responsibility.

         Magic swirled, in the air, gently pushed his body back down in the armchair. “Uphir won’t care.” Asmodeus’s smile was wolfish.

         “Because she’s not a dependent?”

         “Because he’s a fool.” Asmodeus’s voice was level. How could he—how could he speak what amounted to sedition against the House? Samariel raised a hand to his mouth, and felt again the same light touch of magic on it, slowing it down. Asmodeus went on, as coolly as if nothing had happened, “Too many children in the House, and Uphir thinks of them as mouths to feed. As burdens.” He straightened the lapels of his swallowtail jacket, almost absent-mindedly. “There’s only one question worth asking.”

         “Which is—” Samariel’s breath came fast, unsteady. The grey-green eyes held him. The lips, thin and red, parted on sharp white teeth, like a predator’s.

         “Uphir doesn’t care one jot. The question is, why do you?”

         Of all the things he hadn’t expected. He opened his mouth to speak, found no words in the scorched desert of his thoughts. Fallen didn’t have childhoods. They grew up fast, because they had to. Because they were given magic, because they were precious alive or dead, and because they had to learn the meaning of power lest they become consumed—literally, sometimes—by those in search of it. “I—” He stopped, fumbling for words. He saw Eglantine so often he’d grown used to thinking of her as the daughter he’d never have, and she in turn, orphaned young, considered him more father than teacher. Samariel was Fallen: ageless, changeless, sterile. No children of his own blood for him; no chance of catching a resemblance to himself in wide, wonder-filled faces as they discovered the world.

         But shared blood, in the end, mattered so little when it came to children.

         He thought of Eglantine’s scrunched face as she tried to draw all the seeds of a split pomegranate; of the time she’d tried to rearrange the tablecloth and all the fruit had come tumbling down; and how, kneeling to pick up bruised, scented apples, they’d both struggled not to laugh. “Childhood is such a small, precious time for mortals,” he said, finally. “Such a fragile thing.”

         Silence. The warmth of magic. No, not of magic. It was that of Asmodeus’s hand, resting just next to him with the sketch within it. He ought to move. He ought to, but he daren’t.

         “And what is most fragile is most beautiful, isn’t it? In that one moment before it’s forever broken.” Asmodeus withdrew his hand, leaving only the sketch, the paper crumpled, showing the first flecks of mould. He buttoned, slowly and deliberately, his jacket, all the way up to the ruffled shirt collar, fluffing it in one smooth gesture. Samariel could only watch, unexpectedly entranced, aware all the while that it was like watching a snake, in the moment before it decided you were prey.

         “Let’s go,” Asmodeus said, rising.

         Samariel stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

         Asmodeus’s smile was quick and wounding, like a stab to the heart. “You came here for my help, didn’t you? Let’s go and find that missing child.”

* * *

         The Great War of the Houses had torn Paris apart, and the city still hadn’t recovered. Streets and buildings had vanished; ruins dotted the landscape; entire areas had become polluted with the residue of spells, the river Seine running black with ashes and fragments of magic, dark and eager to seize passersby from bridges and quays.

         The Halles, once the belly of Paris, the marketplace where all the produce of the countryside flowed, was no exception. The huge glass pavilions were charred ruins, with no trace of the chaotic stalls that had sold everything from chunks of beef to Roquefort and Comté cheeses, and some of the more distant alleyways were covered in grey, aggressive fungus that ate clothes and flesh indiscriminately. They’d been neatly cordoned off, but people—the Houseless, the desperate—still foraged in them, hoping to find magical artefacts or remnants of spells they could sell for a price.

         Instead, a different market had sprung up. Grimy, thin, starved workers in patched bourgerons and aprons waited at each corner, the slight differences in their clothes denoting which work they were offering, from fixing roofs to gardening, to less savoury occupations.

         Asmodeus strode through the crowd as if he owned it, heedless of the startled gazes that turned to follow him. It was just the two of them, no bodyguards, the black car they’d come in parked well away from the marketplace, and they stuck out like sore thumbs in their Hawthorn uniforms.

         One of the workers sidled closer to Asmodeus, altogether too casually. Asmodeus made a fist with one gloved hand as magic flowed through the air. A crunching sound, as loud as a gunshot, and the man reeled back, nursing five bleeding dislocated fingers.

         Samariel, struggling to keep up, had never felt so exposed. The Court of Strength, which he belonged to, was the part of Hawthorn that provided soldiers, bodyguards, and escorts. Among the Houses, Hawthorn was unique in its organisation into smaller Courts, each of which fought fiercely for its prerogatives and its members’ well-being.

         As a member of the Court of Strength, Samariel had left Hawthorn before, on official delegations, on errands, but always as part of a crowd; always with others, a reassuring presence and a reminder that, if things turned ugly, he could count on them for support. Here, every other starved worker seemed to be weighing him up as if deciding how much he would be worth, carved into small chunks of magical flesh and sold on the black market, or taken by force and bartered to another House for God knew what purpose. “I don’t understand why we’re here.”

         Asmodeus slowed down a fraction, to draw level with him. “If there is any place in Paris to offer up a House’s child, it will be here.” His gaze swept the pavilion they were in; he pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Seamstresses. They’ll want small hands, for lace and embroidery.”

         “You assume Locheren will sell her,” Samariel said.

         His gaze was dark, amused. “Yes.”

         “I don’t even know why Locheren took her.”

         “I don’t, either,” Asmodeus said. “A House’s child goes for quite a high price on the market. This is the most likely place, and selling her the most likely option.”

         Coolly weighing and discarding the worst scenarios, with scarcely a trace of pity. Samariel just wasn’t capable of that. The only thing that came to him was the truth. “I wouldn’t want to be in your head.”

         Asmodeus smiled and didn’t answer.

         The seamstresses were under the broken dome that had once housed the commodity exchange. The row of arcades that surrounded the broken marble floor was still intact, and a huddled group of women and girls were waiting there, leaning against the pillars. One of them—an old, weathered woman with a cataract in one eye, wrapped in a red shawl with intricate embroidery fit for a head of House—detached herself from the group as Asmodeus walked closer.

         “Asmodeus.” She didn’t sound altogether happy. Then again, few people were happy to see him.

         “Mathilde.” He bowed to her, as deeply as to a queen in her own country.

         “You seldom come here,” she said. She gestured to the other end of the exchange, where a group of younger men and women—whose attitude left little doubt as to their profession—waited. “Are you sure you want a seamstress?”

         Asmodeus smiled, pointing to the elaborate ruffle on his shirt collar. “I might have torn some cloth.”

         “You might have.” Mathilde pursed her lips. “And we both know you didn’t.”

         “This is Samariel,” Asmodeus said. “We’re looking for a girl.”

         Mathilde laughed, pointing again to the group of prostitutes on the other side. “Said you were in the wrong place.”

         Asmodeus’s face closed for a moment, became jewel-hard, the face he must show to the disloyal in the House’s prison cells. “They’re my next port of call.”

         “Asmodeus,” Samariel said, horrified.

         Asmodeus didn’t even look at him. “You didn’t come to me so I could give you pleasant lies. There are many uses for children in this city.”

         “Locheren wouldn’t—”

         “I don’t know what Locheren would and wouldn’t do, anymore,” Asmodeus said sharply. “Had you asked me, I wouldn’t have said she would steal a child from the House and run away.”

         Focus. Focus. Samariel said, slowly, to Mathilde, “Her name is Eglantine. She’s ten years old... a meter twenty-five, thirty? Not very tall, with swarthy skin and short black hair.” He withdrew the sketch he’d made of her, showed it to Mathilde.

         “And she’s Hawthorn’s.” Mathilde looked expectantly at Asmodeus, for a while.

         Of course. “You don’t have much time to waste, and even less for pointless enquiries that don’t lead to a job, I would guess.” Samariel rummaged in his jacket pocket, locating three silver coins, a currency that was seldom of use in the House. He took them out, held them to her.

         Mathilde watched them for a while. “The child...”

         “Yes?” Asmodeus raised an eyebrow.

         “What will you do with her?”

         “Crisis of conscience? How most unlike you.”

         Samariel had no time for Asmodeus’s games. “We’ll bring her home,” he said. “To Hawthorn. Where she belongs.”

         Mathilde shook her head. “You sound like a decent sort,” she said to Samariel. “You shouldn’t be with him.” Her gnarled hand closed on the three coins, held them.

         “I’m flattered,” Asmodeus said, drily.

         “We have no time,” Samariel said. “Please.”

         “I haven’t seen her.” Mathilde looked at Asmodeus again, and at Samariel. “But...”

         She’d seen something. Something she didn’t want to talk about, because she was afraid. “We can protect you,” Samariel said.

         “Or make your life a misery, if necessary.”

         Mathilde snorted. “Unlikely. The days of Houses levelling entire districts are past, Asmodeus.” She sighed and called to one of the other seamstresses, a girl who had to be scarcely more than fifteen or sixteen years old, stick-thin and gaunt. The girl stood, staring at Asmodeus and Samariel with only the barest hint of fear in her gaze.

         “This is Laure,” Mathilde said. “Show those gentlemen what you showed me, dearie.”

         Laure foraged in her torn shirt and withdrew a piece of paper, which she handed to Samariel.

         The sketch was rough, clearly not drawn from life, and not by someone who knew its subject well. But the face was unmistakable. “Where did you get this?”

         Laure took a step back. He sounded too intense. Too annoyed, and it wasn’t even with her.

         “It’s fine,” Samariel said, taking a deep breath. “Sorry. I’m worried.”

         “I can see that,” Mathilde said, drily. Beside her, Asmodeus was silent, for which Samariel was thankful.

         “They wore House uniforms,” Laure said. “But in blue and black.”

         “House Harrier,” Mathilde said, unnecessarily. Samariel knew all the colours of all the Houses that still mattered in Paris. “They’ve been around, same as you. Asking for a girl that they say belongs to them. I have it on good authority they tried most of the professions in the market. Without success.”

         It made no sense. Why would House Harrier be looking for her? If Locheren had tried to sell her to them, they wouldn’t need to scour the market for her. And if she hadn’t, why not? Samariel looked at Asmodeus, who looked back levelly. “I don’t understand.”

         “Not yet,” Asmodeus said, with a touch of annoyance. “But it’ll make sense.”

         Samariel took the paper, rubbing it between his fingers. “Do you know House Harrier’s envoys?” he asked Asmodeus. He was the leader of a Court, after all; must have attended most of the formal banquets and negotiations Samariel gladly skipped.

         “Some of them.” Asmodeus’s face was set again, as if something or someone were profoundly frustrating him. God have mercy on whoever that was.

         Samariel took out one of his spare charcoals, the one he’d used to sketch Eglantine in the car, and turned the paper over. “Can you describe them?” he asked Laure.

* * *

         There were two envoys, but Asmodeus only recognised one of them from Laure’s description: a Fallen with a shaved head and elaborate markings curling around her cheeks and ears; not tattoos, for it wasn’t possible to mark skin that kept healing itself, but henna markings.

         “Darrias,” he said, curtly. “House Harrier’s... hound, you might call her. Pleasant, if relentless.” He thanked Mathilde and Laure, gravely, courteously, and the two of them walked away, back to the distant safety of the car.

         “Mathilde knew you,” Samariel said, finally. “How?” The House had seamstresses, and he should have had no need to come to Les Halles for much of anything.

         Asmodeus’s face was smooth, expressionless. “We go back a while, when I was still on the streets. Informants are always useful.”

         Samariel stared at him. “You were on the streets?”

         “You were not, I take it.” Asmodeus’s gaze mocked him, the colour of ashes, of a city gone up in flames and cinders.

         There was a saying: a Fallen beyond a House’s walls, shall be stripped to bones when night’s blade falls. Most Fallen were found by Houses within their first few hours of life or never found at all, only in bits and pieces of magical flesh on the black market. Houses were a newborn Fallen’s salvation; there weren’t nearly enough Fallen to cast large spells, but a House—an alliance of Fallen and human magicians—could be made near inviolable through skill and sheer strength of numbers.

         Mathilde was sixty, seventy? Samariel couldn’t remember when Asmodeus had come into House Hawthorn, but surely he was older than that? Samariel himself... “Me? Nothing much to tell.” He could feel himself colouring, his pale face going beetroot-red. “I don’t remember much after my Fall.” He didn’t remember anything from before either, but of course no Fallen did, save perhaps Lucifer Morningstar himself. All he had were confused memories of traceries of light slowly shifting as he flew, and voices, raised in song that was beautiful and heartbreaking and terrible. “I woke up in a bed in Hawthorn’s hospital.”

         “One of the favoured ones.” Asmodeus smiled. “Never out of the House much, never among the Houseless.”

         Samariel looked away, obscurely embarrassed. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.” The smell of Asmodeus’s perfume—orange blossom and citruses—saturated the air between them.

         “Don’t.” Asmodeus grasped his shoulder for a fraction of a second, a shock that travelled up Samariel’s chest until he could scarcely breathe. “We all play the hands we’re given. There’s no shame in that.”

         And the Houseless—the poor, the destitute, the hungry—what kind of hand were they given, and was any of it fair? Samariel shook his head, trying not to stare at the marketplace around them. “Nor much comfort,” he said at last. If it was this much of a shock for him, how much worse for Eglantine, who had never been outside Hawthorn, never seen Paris or its casual cruelties?

         “You worry about the child,” Asmodeus said. “Eglantine.”

         ‘Worrying’ didn’t describe the way fear made it hard to breathe. “Why wouldn’t I?” And then he remembered that Asmodeus, in all likelihood, didn’t. Thought him naive and well-meaning, and unbearably callow; a child himself, fit only to be indulged, carefully watched over lest he break something.

         It shouldn’t have twisted quite so much in his stomach, this lack of regard.

         Asmodeus was silent, for a while. He said, finally, “You mean well. But caring will destroy you.”

         “Perhaps I’d rather be destroyed,” Samariel said. “What’s the alternative? Thinking of everyone as a burden, as Lord Uphir does—”

         “Let’s not speak of Uphir here,” Asmodeus said. His eyes were aglow with light, with the flames of the Hell the more radical priests said Fallen belonged to, a dancing wash of red like a tide of radiant blood.

         Sedition, again. How had he kept his post as leader of one of Hawthorn’s Courts, if his disregard for Lord Uphir was this strong? “You can’t criticise Lord Uphir,” Samariel said, slowly. “If I told anyone in the House...”

         “Would you?” Asmodeus’s gaze held him, transfixed him like a thrown spear. He found his breath had gone missing again, his lungs burning with some of the same fire as Asmodeus’s eyes.

         “I—” he struggled to speak. “No. But not everyone will be so generous.”

         “Indeed not.” They were back at the car. Asmodeus was holding open the door for him to climb on the driver’s side—another odd thing about him. Samariel had expected to drive, because he was the one of least rank, but not to be treated with that cautious, barbed respect.

         Not that it was a pleasant experience, all things considered.

         “You know Darrias,” Samariel said, at last. “Can you find her?”

         “With certainty? No. But if she’s out on a mission for Harrier, there are only a few places she might be.”

* * *

         Those places were cafés and bars, it turned out; nothing like the endless scattering of tables on terraces and chequered red-and-white tablecloths from before the war but small, darkened rooms where the representatives of Houses stopped for cups of stewed dark and bitter herbs that tasted marginally like coffee, or for stale and rotten leaves of tea preserved like treasures.

         In the third such place they tried, they found Darrias and her escort, sitting at a table by a boarded window, staring into the depths of their beer glasses.

         “What now?” Asmodeus asked. “Do you want to follow her?”

         Samariel glanced around the bar. The counter was chock-full of grimy, dusty bottles, and the smell of stale magic filled the room. The other patrons barely glanced at them; two Fallen in House uniforms were nothing unusual, out there. Apart from the two with Darrias—both mortals, a man and a woman who both looked as though they could choke the life out of Samariel as well as Asmodeus—there was no sign of Locheren, or of Eglantine, or of anyone remotely in the right age range. “No,” he said. “I want to know what’s going on.”

         Asmodeus shrugged, a gesture that eloquently said that it was Samariel’s—flawed—choice.

         Darrias looked up as Samariel pulled up a chair. Her two mortals started to rise. She gestured, and they sat back down again, glowering at Samariel. The smell that rose from the beer glasses was the loamy, choking one of mildew. “House Hawthorn,” she said. Her voice was low-pitched, not unfriendly. “What a surprise.”

         By her tone, it wasn’t.

         A scraping of wood on broken stone as Asmodeus pulled another chair, folding his tall, lean frame into it. “Hello, Darrias.”

         “Ah.” Darrias’s gaze sharpened. “Now this is unexpected. Have you decided to officially renege on your obligation?”

         Asmodeus was silent for a fraction of a second longer than necessary. “Not that I know of. But then again, I’m not the one who incurred it.”

         “The entire House incurred it.” Darrias’s voice was malicious.

         What was going on? It was like sitting in at the table for a card game where people played by utterly unfamiliar rules, unfazed, calling out names and numbers so fast they could barely be followed.

         “I see,” Samariel said, with an assurance he didn’t feel.

         By his side, Asmodeus pulled on the cuffs of his shirt, sharply, so that they descended straight out of his jacket’s sleeves. “My apologies. I misjudged. Céline Morcerf’s death, was it?” His voice was light, conversational.

         Still making no sense, and the name, which Samariel had never heard before, didn’t help.

         “You already know that it was.” Beneath the intricate henna markings, Darrias’s face was hard. “So now Hawthorn scrabbles to save face. I hadn’t thought you’d be involved, honestly.”

         “The actions of a rogue dependent can hardly be laid at our door,” Asmodeus said.

         “Your dependent, your mess.” Darrias laughed, curtly. “But I’m feeling generous. We can help each other out. I’ll grant you this: you’re efficient. Always have been. Two groups searching could make a difference. I have no desire to be here longer than I have to. Lord Guy is in a hurry.”

         Asmodeus’s face was expressionless. His hands rested lightly on the table, utterly still, faint light playing under his skin until the taut bones showed through. “I see.”

         “I knew you would. Harrier always gets its due, Asmodeus.” She drained her beer glass in one gulp, and rose. “You know where to send word.”

         “Likewise,” Asmodeus said.

         After she and her escort were gone, Samariel looked at Asmodeus. “Are you going to explain any of that?”

         Asmodeus withdrew his hands from the table. It was lightly scorched where his fingers had rested on it: ten depressions in the wood, faintly smelling of brimstone. “Reparations,” he said. “They offered Eglantine as reparations.”

         “They?”

         “Uphir. To Harrier.”

         Samariel took in a deep, shaking breath. “She’s just a child. You don’t send children!” Not her. Not her.

         There were few laws between the Houses, and little love lost. But if a death or other bodily hurt to a House’s dependent could be traced to another one, then that House would have to compensate the other for the loss. The old way: eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

         Blood for blood.

         “I told you.” Asmodeus’s face was odd, in the dim light, no longer sharp or cutting, his eyes deeply shadowed, almost bruised. “Uphir thinks of children as a burden.”

         “And he didn’t tell you?”

         “By now, you should have understood that Uphir doesn’t bear much love for me. The Court of Birth is my punishment. Something he deems me utterly unsuited for. I would have found out about Eglantine eventually. Later, or possibly after the fact.”

         “But Locheren found out?” It was the only thing that made sense. And rather than let Eglantine be bargained away, she was trying to save her.

         Asmodeus didn’t answer.

         Samariel took a deep, shaking breath. Reparations for a murder. A life for a life. “What is House Harrier going to do with her?”

         “What do you think?” Asmodeus’s smile was unpleasant. “I told you—there are many uses for children.”

         Samariel found his own hands had clenched into fists. “This is—” Unacceptable. Monstrous cruelty; beyond even all of the casual cruelties Samariel had seen in the House, in the city.

         A soft, barely perceptible touch of magic on his lips, a warning. “Careful. You’re this close to sedition.”

         “You’re the one who doesn’t care.”

         “But you do.” Asmodeus lowered his hand, and the touch of magic faded. But the memory of it remained; a trembling, oddly intoxicating imprint. “Think on what you want, will you?”

         “You condone this?”

         “Do you?”

         “I’m House, Asmodeus. Whatever Lord Uphir does is for our own good. For our survival.” He had to believe this. He had to, otherwise he would go mad.

         “That would seem to be the case.” Asmodeus’s voice was toneless.

         “So we help Darrias track down Locheren.” And stand by as House Harrier took Eglantine.

         “Do you see any other choice?”

         There wasn’t one. If they didn’t honour the House’s bargain, the reparations Uphir and Harrier had agreed on, it would be the end of the fragile peace House Hawthorn had enjoyed so far. The quiet, complex balance of powers that had taken hold of the city after the Great War rested on the understanding that all Houses would do their duty by each other. Any House that refused to compensate another for its loss would face the wrath of all the others. Harrier would declare war on them for failing their obligations, and the other Houses would join its call. Hawthorn would be utterly destroyed.

         Damn him. Damn what they were reduced to, after the war. No, of course he didn’t see any other choice. Of course. “I’d rather sit this one out,” Samariel said, and it was small and pathetic.

         He expected Asmodeus to laugh, to tell him how soft he was, how utterly unsuited to the business of Houses. But Asmodeus’s face was serious. “That’s always a possibility. We can pretend to keep looking, and fail. Darrias will think she’s got the better of me, but it’s nothing I won’t survive.”

         Samariel wasn’t sure why Asmodeus was indulging him, but why look gift horses in the mouth?

         “You mean well,” Asmodeus said. “But there’s no good solution to this, let me assure you.”

         “Locheren meant well.”

         “And still betrayed the House. You don’t select which orders you prefer, when they’re given. How do you think we’ve survived this long? Not with everyone making their own moral judgments.” He looked past Samariel, at the dark entrance of the café, and shook his head. “Sitting out, I’m afraid, is now no longer an option.”

         “What?” Samariel asked, startled.

         He turned and saw what Asmodeus had seen: the slight, hunched shape of Laure the seamstress, nervously making her way towards them with a paper in her clenched fist.

         She bowed to Asmodeus and to him, so nervously it seemed like she would shatter any moment. “It’s all right,” Samariel said.

         Asmodeus merely plucked the paper from her unresisting hands, with only the barest of greetings. “From Mathilde, I take it?”

         Laure was shivering, not looking them in the eye. “She said I’d find you in the cafés. She said you’d pay.”

         “Always,” Asmodeus said. “Whatever the nature of the debt.” It ought to have been a reassurance, but it sounded like a threat. He unfolded the paper, laid it flat on the table. It revealed a single line.

         Salon du Glacier of the Opera Garnier, tonight at nine. House Shellac.

         Shellac was one of the newer, smaller Houses, in the Southeast of Paris, holding the Gobelins Manufactory. They’d survived the war but were teetering on the edge of destruction.

         Samariel was naive and callow, but not that naive. “The only protection against a House is another one. Locheren is going to give Eglantine to Shellac, because they’ll protect her against Harrier. And Shellac will take her in to spite Harrier. Of course “

         Asmodeus smiled. He pressed something Samariel couldn’t see in Laure’s hand, raised the back of her hand to his lips and kissed it, as courteously if she’d been a House lady. “A token,” he said, lightly. “Tell Mathilde I owe her, and I won’t forget.”

         Laure coloured. “My lord—” she started, and then fell silent as magic swirled in the air, the same trick Asmodeus had used on Samariel.

         “I’m no head of House.” Asmodeus sounded... regretful. “No need for that. Now run along. I know where to find you.” Again that gentle tone, halfway to a threat.

         After she was gone, Samariel went on, stubbornly, “Why Shellac? They won’t be able to stand against Harrier—”

         “Only a small House would be brash enough to think they could,” Asmodeus said. “And who knows. They might get away with it. Everyone is recovering from the war, and not every House will be keen to start a new one.”

         It had been a dispute between Houses that had opened the war: a conclave that had turned sour, degenerating into the murder of dependents, then the protracted negotiations for reparations that had never come; a slow, inexorable spiral of destruction that had finally engulfed them all. “House Harrier isn’t that careful,” Samariel said.

         “I don’t know about Harrier. I’m not intimate with Guy.” Asmodeus folded the paper, carefully, and handed it to Samariel.

         His long fingers lingered on Samariel’s palm, dancing along its lines for a fraction of a second longer than necessary. Samariel felt the warmth of magic trembling between them, climbing up his arm all the way into his chest. He withdrew his hand, carefully, and still felt as though he was irreparably breaking something. The words he wanted to say seemed to have shrivelled in his mouth, choked by orange blossom and citruses.

         He said, finally, “Hawthorn won’t let it pass.” When Lord Uphir found out Locheren had tried to thwart him, Samariel wouldn’t want to be in Locheren’s shoes. Or anywhere he could be considered an accomplice to her defiance. And yet.

         “Of course not.” Asmodeus smiled, wide, dazzling. His gaze behind the horn-rimmed glasses sparkled, taking Samariel’s breath away once more. “Good. You’re learning. Now what will you do?”

         Samariel looked down, at his own hands, at the faint light that played between his fingers, the magic that made it unsafe for him to be anywhere outside House Hawthorn’s protection.

         What was one child, one life, weighed against the entire House?

         The answer surged out of him like water through a burst dam, fast and incontrollable.

         Everything, if the child was Eglantine.

         “And what will you do?” he asked Asmodeus.

         Asmodeus was silent for a while. “That rather depends on what you do, doesn’t it.”

         “Does it.” He tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “I don’t even understand why you’re still here.”

         “Don’t you?” Asmodeus’s gaze held him. Samariel felt, again, the touch of magic on his lips, trembling on his skin. He opened his mouth to speak, but Asmodeus saved him the trouble. “You asked for my help. That’s rare enough that I notice when it happens. And you care about your own. It’s... endearing.” His smile was almost unguarded, almost carefree, an unusual expression that seemed to transfigure him.

         Caring about his own, in a way Lord Uphir never had. Dancing, once again, on the edge of sedition. “Locheren cares, too.”

         Asmodeus shook his head. “I can’t help Locheren anymore, I’m afraid. Not after she tried to single-handedly start a war with Harrier without my knowledge. But you—”

         You’re not past hope. You might still grow up. Into the kind of person who would, without a second thought, hand over a child in the name of survival. He remembered the war—families on the streets, there one moment then only boneless skin and muscles as the battle-spells hit, slowly crumpling on burst cobblestones. He remembered crouching behind a broken window in a devastated bakery, listening to the low gurgling moans of the dying as their lungs turned to liquid and their bodies emptied themselves of blood through every orifice. All of that—all the spells the Houses had been carefully sitting on since the armistice—visited upon Hawthorn until not a single person in the House was left alive.

         He couldn’t let that happen, no matter how much the cost made him ill to his stomach.

         Samariel swallowed, trying to ignore his nausea. “Nine. At the Opera Garnier. I think we should be there.”

         “And send word to Darrias?”

         “No. If we’re really going to let Hawthorn hand a child over to Harrier, I want to be there. I want Lord Uphir to be there. It should happen in Hawthorn. In broad daylight, and not in the darkness, like thieves.”

         “Will you can sleep better at night, seeing Eglantine’s face as you betray her?” Asmodeus’s voice was light, mocking.

         Samariel’s hands clenched into fists. “So that none of us let others do our dirty work.”

         “Doing the right thing. You’re so proper it hurts.”

         “I’d rather be proper than deadened to the cost of what we’re doing.” Samariel had a vague, desperate hope that things would be better, back in Hawthorn; that Darrias would prove to have been mistaken about Eglantine being offered as reparations, though he couldn’t believe that lie for long; that he could plead with Lord Uphir for other reparations—for another child to be offered, if it came to that, though the thought made him feel small and ashamed of himself.

         But at least he wasn’t Asmodeus.

         Asmodeus watched him, as he might an insect which had learnt to speak. At length, he took off his glasses and wiped them clean with a handkerchief from his lapel pocket, slowly, carefully. “I’ll have to notify Darrias, regardless. Or we’ll have our war with Harrier, as sure as the sun rises.” He raised a hand to forestall Samariel’s objections. “I’ll tell her ten o’clock. You have one hour, to do whatever you feel should be done.”

         “One hour is fine,” Samariel said, biting back angrier words.

* * *

         The Opera Garnier had weathered the war, in a fashion. The building was still intact, with only blackened broken windows bearing witness to the devastation within. Inside, the great stairs, splitting in two from a central landing, were covered in rubble, the elegant lamps all smashed, and the statues half-melted by spells. The coloured marbles that had once been the pride and distinguishing feature of Garnier’s masterpiece had been denatured by spells, leeched to a sickly pale grey or broken into meaningless fragments.

         Samariel had been there once, before the war—a memory of men and women in elegant clothes, the floral notes of perfume, the glitter of chandelier lights on pearl necklaces, white gloves that seemed to catch fire in the profusion of radiance; and the distant, plaintive sound of chords from within, where the orchestra was fine-tuning their instruments before the sharp, fragile brilliance of the evening started.

         There was none of that left, now. Just a faint, unpleasant smell of magic gone awry, and the drier one of burnt dust. The ornate paintings on the ceiling were cracked, their mythological characters broken into incoherent, monstrous pieces.

         “That way,” Samariel said.

         Asmodeus paused on the landing, looking around him with curiosity.

         “You’ve never been here?”

         “Not since the war, no,” Asmodeus said. He gestured at Samariel to join him, his lean thin shoulder muscles shifting alluringly beneath the fabric of his swallowtail jacket. Samariel thought it was going to be some grand pronouncement on the ruins they stood in the midst of, but instead Asmodeus showed him the knife in his hand. “You’re going to need this.”

         “I don’t—”

         “Magic doesn’t always solve everything. What did you mean to do, if things turned bad with House Shellac?”

         “I don’t know!” Samariel said, and remembered to keep his voice down to a whisper. He was already on edge enough as it was.

         Asmodeus smiled. “So take it. I have another one.”

         Of course he did.

         The Salon du Glacier was where they’d sold refreshments and ice creams, a long, long time ago. To get there, they crossed broken marble floors, raising clouds of dust—going around the faded splendour of the amphitheatre into what had once been a large corridor but was now nothing more than debris creaking and snapping underfoot. Something crunched under Samariel’s shoes: a translucid ivory fan, the painted fragments shining with heartbreaking vividness in the dim light.

         Was he here to save Eglantine, or to hand her over to Harrier? The thought of war was unbearable. Everything would be gone: the flowers that had bloomed in once-ruined gardens, the smell of fruit and freshly baked bread that had replaced gunpowder and the sweet sickening one of magic, the laughter of children that had finally overwhelmed the screams of the dying in his dreams.

         But the price of that peace was the life of a child. The child he’d seen grow up from chubby toddler to young girl, from awkward scribbles with wax crayons to detailed drawings of flowers and fruit in charcoal; who would run towards him along the corridor to his room, with that unbearably fragile smile on her face lighting up her entire being.

         How could he choose?

         Voices, echoing under faded ceilings. They crept closer, Samariel all but forgetting to breathe when he recognised Locheren’s measured tones. Asmodeus moved lithely, as elegant as a cat stalking prey. Samariel felt slow and clumsy by comparison. But Asmodeus stopped at the entrance to the Salon. Of course. He’d already made it clear that he wouldn’t intervene.

         The Salon was a rotunda with a host of openings equally spaced around its circle; little concealment to be found, though subtlety had never been Samariel’s style.

         He flattened himself against the closest wall and bent, quickly, to have a look inside.

         The room had survived almost intact, the parquet floor smooth and shining like lacquer, the busts on plinths merely singed. Even the chandelier still hung in the centre of the rotunda, its facets catching the few scraps of light and magnifying them tenfold.

         Locheren was in the rotunda, talking to a woman in the white and yellow of House Shellac, while a male Fallen in the same colours leant casually against the wall about a meter away from them, looking bored.

         By the Fallen bodyguard’s side was Eglantine. Samariel’s breath caught in his throat, but she looked unharmed, if pale and scared, wearing a dress in the dark grey and silver colours of Hawthorn. They were formal adult clothes that sat uneasily on her, unlike the simple, large skirts she preferred to wear.

         She wouldn’t need any of that, in Harrier. The thought sat like a stone in his throat. Was he doing the right thing? He couldn’t tell anymore.

         “I need to know you’ll take good care of her,” Locheren was saying.

         By Samariel’s side, Asmodeus was watching the Salon, a lean, amused presence Samariel could feel even without looking. His right hand held, loosely, a knife identical to the one he’d offered to Samariel. He looked as though he was going to throw it at any moment.

         As if that would make things better.

         They just needed to get Eglantine out of here. Locheren—of course the Court of Persuasion would want Locheren, to punish her for her betrayal, but Samariel couldn’t care less about their desires. Samariel closed his eyes and sent a faint, faded tendril of magic into the room, an almost imperceptible touch on Eglantine’s cheek, coming from the corridor he and Asmodeus were waiting in.

         Eglantine frowned, looked up. But not in the right direction. Curses. Samariel sent the touch again. It had to be faint, or the bodyguard would pick up on it, and then they’d be in real trouble. It was three against two, but with Asmodeus mostly tagging along out of what seemed like amused curiosity...

         At last—at long, long last, what felt like an eternity—Eglantine looked in his direction. Her eyes widened, and a half-smile transformed her entire face. Her mouth opened on his name. He shook his head, raised his finger to his mouth, and shifted. The magic shifted with him, drawing her toward him, a gentle invitation for her to walk to where they stood. We’re here to help, he wanted to mouth, but the lie wouldn’t get past his throat. He didn’t know what he’d do once he reached her.

         Eglantine’s face set. She threw a glance at the bodyguard, who was busy watching Locheren and the Shellac representative haggle, and slowly, ever slowly, started to creep towards them. Samariel’s held breath was burning his lungs.

         “She’ll be House,” the Shellac representative was saying. “I have the authority to make her a dependent here and now. Surely that should be guarantee enough?”

         “Houses harm their own.” Locheren’s face was hard.

         “What promises can I make that you would believe?”

         “Swear binding oaths. The old way.”

         By Samariel’s side, Asmodeus watched the room, his grey-green gaze amused, but made no move.

         Eglantine was halfway through the small space that separated them, almost close enough to touch...

         “Lady Calyce didn’t empower me to do that, I’m afraid. But we wouldn’t go through all this trouble just to discard her.”

         Another few centimetres that felt like an eternity. Samariel reached out, his hand connecting with Eglantine’s; drew her to him, heedless of the weight he had to pull, tensed, ready to run, all the way back to the waiting car, to the impossible, illusory safety of Hawthorn, never thinking of war or of the future.

         “You came,” she whispered.

         “Of course, little bird. Always.”

         Magic roiled, around them. It was coming not from the Salon but from behind them. “I see you’ve found our missing child,” a voice said.

         Darrias.

         How—

         “You said—” Samariel said, turning to Asmodeus, still holding Eglantine, stubbornly refusing to let go.

         Asmodeus shook his head. “Not me.” His face was hard.

         “Credit me with a little intelligence,” Darrias said, walking through the splinters of the corridor’s parquet floor, the hem of her loose trousers raising a cloud of dust. Her escort split: the man watching Asmodeus and Samariel, the woman making for the Salon. The thin lines of carvings came loose from the walls, reaching out and imprisoning both Locheren and the Shellac woman in unbreakable coils before they could move. They reached for the Fallen bodyguard as well, but he was already moving away from the wall, magic shimmering between the palms of his hands, running towards where Samariel and Eglantine stood.

         Asmodeus shifted. Samariel barely saw him move. The Fallen bodyguard reeled back, a knife blade deep in his chest; took one, two faltering steps backwards, coughing out blood, and fell to one knee on the parquet.

         Darrias continued, as if nothing had happened. “As I was saying, Asmodeus is good at lying. You—” she said, smiling, to Samariel, “are less so. Your eyes betray you.”

         Locheren’s round face was taut with fear. She looked from Asmodeus to Samariel, to the House Harrier representatives.

         “You have some nerve,” Darrias said to the Shellac woman. “Stealing from Harrier.”

         “Playing the game,” the woman said. Her voice was low, musical, with the accents of the well-educated. “Worth a try.”

         Darrias watched her, for a while. “It’ll cost you. Not as much as it’ll cost everyone else, though.” She turned, to Samariel. “The child.”

         A single child, for peace. For safety. For the sake of the House, and everyone in it. So that the horrors of the war would not be visited upon them; would remain dreams and memories growing fainter and fainter with every passing year. And yet. And yet, it was Eglantine.

         How could he pay that price? He ached to protect her, even knowing he shouldn’t.

         Eglantine pressed herself against Samariel. “Samariel. Please.”

         “No,” Samariel said. Again, it was gut reflex.

         “Do you want a war with Harrier? And all the other Houses as well?”

         “Don’t be a fool,” Asmodeus said. It wasn’t clear if he was talking to Samariel or Darrias, or both. He leant against the wall outside the Salon, his black shoes resting, lightly, on fragments of broken glass.

         “As I said”—Darrias said, shaking her head—”I’m in a hurry. Give me the child. I’ll take her to Harrier, and that’ll be the end of this business. There is, after all, no way you’ll be blamed for the actions of a rogue dependent.” That last clearly addressed to Asmodeus, and deeply sarcastic.

         “Samariel,” Eglantine whispered.

         “Ssh,” he said. He still held her, refused to let go. There had to be something, anything, they could do. “Everything will be fine, little bird.” Lies. What could he do, that Locheren hadn’t already tried?

         “Everything is seldom fine,” Asmodeus said.

         “I—” Samariel shook his head. He’d said they could go to Harrier, that he could plead with Lord Uphir—except that now, standing in the darkness in the ruins of the opera house, he saw how utterly ridiculous, how utterly naive that had been, his belief that he could make things better. Reparations. House business. How could he ever have believed that he would make a difference?

         He’d never forgive himself if he let go of her. But there was no other choice.

         Except...

         “Reparations,” he said, aloud. “Blood for blood. It doesn’t have to be a child, does it?” He shifted, slightly. “A House Fallen would do.”

         Asmodeus opened his mouth, closed it. Darrias watched Samariel, intently. “You’d offer yourself?”

         The world seemed to have become unbearably light, unbearably sharp, the glint of the chandelier’s crystals like wounds, the shards of the parquet floor digging into his skin. But really, what other choice was there?

         “No,” Samariel said. “I’m not a child. I’m not a mortal. It’s false equivalences. If I came back with you to Harrier, forever”—a deep, trembling breath; he wasn’t going to think on what would happen there, on what prices they could exact from him— “you’d get more than you are owed. Reparations are a trade, and an equal one.” He kept his voice level, but it cost him.

         Asmodeus’s gaze rested on him; his face was... oddly misshapen, in the dim light. Shock, Samariel realised. It was shock.

         “If you came with us? To spare a mortal child?” Darrias’s smile was predatory. “Oh, Samariel. You’re such a fool.”

         “Indeed,” Asmodeus said, dryly.

         “A small price for sleeping well at night,” Samariel snapped. “Now will you think on it?”

         Eglantine tugged at him. “Samariel—”

         “Not now.”

         At length, Darrias nodded. “Come back with us for a day and a night,” she said. “That should serve. We can, after all, always find uses for Fallen from other Houses.”

         The same way they’d find uses for children? No. He didn’t want to think about that. Reparations involved blood, and pain; or worse, being used against his own House, secrets and spells and magic torn out of him piece by piece, in the little time they’d have...

         “Samariel,” Eglantine said. “Please. Don’t—”

         A day and a night. “And I’ll walk out of Harrier, when this is over.”

         “Yes,” Darrias said. “You have my word.” Her smile was malicious. “Though I cannot promise you will be whole and unharmed.”

         “Of course not,” Samariel said. “Do we have a bargain, then? To let Eglantine free?”

         “If that’s the way you want it.” Darrias shrugged. She gestured, and her escort flowed back to her. “I have no objections.”

         Eglantine said, “I can go, Samariel.”

         He knelt, stared into her face. “Be honest, little bird. You can’t. You know you wouldn’t survive.”

         Her eyes were wide, bruised, fearful. “It’s my duty to the House.”

         “The House,” Samariel said, savagely, “doesn’t owe you this.”

         “Neither does it to you!”

         “Perhaps not. But someone has to volunteer.” Samariel straightened her dress. “Just go home, will you? And wait for me to come back. I shouldn’t be long.” He forced himself to smile.

         Eglantine’s lips were trembling. “You won’t come back.”

         “Of course I’ll come back.” He kissed her forehead, trying to think of drawing lessons and the sanctuary of his rooms in Hawthorn, with only the scratching of charcoal on paper. “You heard Darrias.” What position or capacity he’d be in by then, though... He withdrew his arms from around her shoulders, pushed her gently towards Asmodeus. “You can get her home,” he said.

         Asmodeus detached himself from the wall he’d been leaning on—the smell of orange blossom and citruses filling Samariel’s nostrils, a memory he’d take with him into Harrier and cling to like a lifeline. Asmodeus walked towards Samariel; his hand went up, into Samariel’s golden curls. “You’re learning,” he said, sharply, as he’d said to Samariel in the café. “Not always the lessons we’d expect, it seems.”

         Samariel opened his mouth to speak, found no words.

         Asmodeus withdrew but made no move to take Eglantine, who in turn didn’t budge. “A word with you,” he said, to Darrias.

         Darrias raised an eyebrow. “Now?”

         Asmodeus didn’t move. Magic was flowing to him, the shadow of great, dark wings at his back, a black and terrible splendour that must have been awful to behold in the Heavens he’d Fallen from. The dark grey of his swallowtail jacket took in the light of the Salon—the glints from the parquet and chandelier—and reflected nothing. “Now,” he said.

         “If you think to prevent us from taking our due...” Darrias started.

         “I’m no fool,” Asmodeus said. “Now will you come?”

         They walked under the rotunda to stand at the opposite end, where blackened, soot-stained windows hid the vista of devastated streets. Asmodeus spoke in a low, even tone; Darrias listened. Samariel couldn’t hear anything except the music of their voices. It seemed to go on forever.

         On the one hand, every moment they spent talking was a moment’s reprieve. On the other, he’d made his choice. He needed to leave with Darrias before he realised what he’d done, and turned tail and ran from the room.

         Eglantine’s hand rested in his, pressed, lightly, against his magic-charged flesh. She didn’t speak. Which was just as well, because he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to reply.

         At length, Asmodeus and Darrias parted and walked back to where Samariel and Eglantine waited. Darrias’s marked face was unreadable. She looked, for a while, from Samariel to Asmodeus, and back again. Then she made a wide, dismissive gesture with her left hand. “Go.”

         “I’m sorry?” Samariel must have misheard.

         “Go. Before I change my mind.”

         “Reparations—”

         “They’ve been paid.” Darrias looked... not unhappy but thoughtful, as if still digesting something unpleasant. Her two mortals were freeing the Shellac woman from her bonds. Darrias turned, for a fraction of a second, to look at the woman. “You can go too, but don’t think this marks the end of Harrier’s business with Shellac.”

         The woman didn’t need to be told twice. She picked up the stricken Fallen—who was still on one knee, struggling to breathe—propped him up on her shoulder, and together they made their slow, tottering way out of the opera house.

         “Asmodeus—”

         “You heard Darrias.” Asmodeus had the knife in his hand once again. He must have retrieved it from the Fallen bodyguard’s chest as he’d passed him on his way back. “Go to the car and wait there. We’ll be with you in a moment.” He held out his hand to Samariel, pulled him close; and, as he did so, whispered in Samariel’s ear, so low no one else could have heard it, “Get Eglantine out of earshot.”

         Out of...?

         Samariel looked from Asmodeus to Locheren, who was still pinned by the carvings that Darrias’s escort had used to imprison her in the Salon and watching Asmodeus with wide, fearful eyes.

         Court of Birth. Of course. Locheren was Court of Birth, and therefore his responsibility.

         I can’t help Locheren anymore, I’m afraid.

         Asmodeus’s voice, when he spoke, was again a whisper. “Yes. I could leave it to the Court of Persuasion. But I can assure you I’ll be infinitely more merciful to Locheren than Uphir or the House will.” The knife glinted in the palm of his hand. Darrias hadn’t moved, either. Was she going to watch, or to participate?

         Samariel didn’t want to know. He’d thought he’d feel sick or repulsed, but instead part of him—the harsh, unyielding part that had refused to let go of Eglantine, that had preferred to suffer than give her up—understood that there was a price. That there were always consequences for defying the House, for doing the right thing, or the wrong thing for the right reasons. “I see,” he said, slowly. And, to Eglantine, who was looking, wide-eyed, at both of them—who had to understand at least some of this, “he’s right, little bird. Let’s go.”

         Neither of them looked back, as they left.

* * *

         Samariel wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Some kind of reproach from Uphir, some kind of official calling to order. But, after they returned to Hawthorn—Samariel carrying a sleepy Eglantine in his arms, and Asmodeus carrying the bloodied, broken shape of Locheren—after they had parted, with scarcely a word said between them, life seemed to swing back to normal, as if the entire thing had been nothing more than a nightmare.

         Eglantine wouldn’t talk about what had happened with Locheren, though Thérèse told Samariel in private that she woke up at night screaming and couldn’t be comforted.

         Prices to pay. He daren’t tell Thérèse, or Eglantine, that it was the best thing that could have happened, given the other risks. He was too afraid it was going to make him sound callous.

         About three days after they came back, Samariel was teaching Eglantine to paint chrysanthemum flowers—ignoring her complaints that flowers were much harder than fruit, and that it wasn’t fair—when someone knocked at the door.

         He looked up from his sketch, startled.

         Asmodeus stood in the doorway. He wore the uniform of the House, though the collar of his shirt was slightly open, revealing the smudges of bruises at his throat. “Asmodeus,” Samariel said, suddenly feeling ill at ease. “I hadn’t thought—”

         Asmodeus’s smile was dark, unamused. “—that I’d bother coming?” Eglantine was standing away from her easel, bowing deeply to him. “Child.” His gaze swept her, up and down. “I see Samariel got you a knife.”

         Samariel coloured. He’d asked her what would help and had sat very still, waiting for her answer, despairing there would ever be one—until she’d spoken in a low voice, asking if she could learn to defend herself, in a tone that suggested she expected him to laugh it away. He hadn’t laughed. He’d asked around and come back with a sharp, double-edged damascened blade, its handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl and perfectly sized for small hands—as well as a matching sheath. Eglantine had tucked it in the front pocket of her shirt and not parted with it since. “Just a little something—”

         “To keep the nightmares at bay?” Asmodeus’s voice was grave. He knelt by Eglantine, watching her. His hand brushed her hair. Samariel felt, once more, magic coiled in the air, trembling on her skin. Eglantine’s eyes were wide... with awe, with fear? “A lesson, from the Court of Birth,” Asmodeus said, mildly. “Nightmares never really leave, but their hold over you will fade. In time. Do you understand?”

         Eglantine said nothing, but at length she nodded, carefully, slowly. Asmodeus rose, to look at Samariel. Who cleared his throat, feeling obscurely embarrassed.

         “Eglantine, would you mind...”

         Eglantine, startled, looked at him. “No, of course. I’ll be back later.”

         “You’d better,” Samariel said. “Don’t think you’re getting out of sketching decent chrysanthemums.”

         A quick, fleeting smile, like the sun peeking from behind clouds, and then she was gone.

         “She’ll be all right,” Asmodeus said, watching her run. “Children are more resilient than you give them credit for.”

         “How would you know?” Samariel said, and stopped. “You do care, don’t you.”

         “Of course.” Asmodeus’s smile was wide, mocking. He pulled one of the green plush chairs to him and sat in it. Or rather, lounged, like a predator taking his ease. “They all belong to me. And I take that seriously, when I’m allowed to.”

         Samariel pointed to the bruises at Asmodeus’s throat. “Who—”

         “I had a word. With Uphir.” Asmodeus shrugged. “Nothing that need concern you.”

         “Except that I am concerned, aren’t I?” Samariel couldn’t keep the sharpness out of his voice. “What did you tell Darrias? How did you convince her to back away?”

         Asmodeus watched him, for a while. “I didn’t.”

         “You...?”

         “I made her a promise. A debt, to be claimed when she so chose.”

         “And your word is worth that much?” But of course he was head of a Court, worth more than a minor Fallen like Samariel.

         “One day,” Asmodeus said, carefully opening the collar of his shirt further, showing more pliant, ivory-pale skin glowing with magic, “one day, my word will be worth more than Uphir’s.”

         Samariel found his heart in his throat again. He’d taken three steps towards the chair before he realised what he was doing—breathing in orange blossoms, citruses, a strong, pungent mixture that seemed to make the entire world wobble and contract. “Sedition,” he said, flatly, but there was no conviction in his words. “Why, Asmodeus?”

         He’d expected Asmodeus to laugh, to tell him that he knew why, but instead there was only the creak of the chair shifting. And, looking up, he found Asmodeus standing millimetres away from him, close enough to touch. Close enough to kiss. “Tell me you don’t know why,” Asmodeus whispered. “And I’ll walk out these doors and never come back.”

         The air was trembling with unbearable warmth, his entire being tingling with something Samariel could barely name. “You change lovers like you change shirts.”

         “Do I?” A finger, running down Samariel’s nose and lips, sending a thrill of desire in his bones. “How fortunate I’ve been wearing this shirt for three days, then.”

         “Asmodeus—” He bent, breathing in the sharpness of Asmodeus’s perfume– lips on lips, magic roiling in the air between them, a wave of pleasure rising through his entire body.

         They pulled away, stared at each other. Samariel’s breath was back; marginally, his lungs still feeling afire. He reached out, undid one, two buttons on Asmodeus’s shirt, revealing the broad shape of his torso. Samariel laid a hand on Asmodeus’s skin, feeling muscles tightening and Asmodeus’s breath, coming in fast and deep under his touch. He pushed. There was hardly any resistance. Asmodeus folded backwards, his head coming to rest against the back of the armchair, his body spread out below Samariel: enticing, arousing.

         Asmodeus’s gaze—grey-green, the colour of a rising storm—held him. “You know where this leads,” he said, and there was no trace of amusement in his voice.

         By now, you should have understood that Uphir doesn’t bear much love for me.

         A fall away from favour, Uphir’s disinterest in him turning to outright hostility. And on their part... Sedition. Rebellion. Uphir’s undoing, if they could find a way. An end to the casual use, the casual discarding, of children and dependents; all of the bloody, difficult work in the future, thoughts that would press down like leaden weights if he allowed them.

         But he wasn’t that much of a fool.

         “Ssh,” Samariel said. And, bending down, kissed Asmodeus deeply, drowning himself in the heady smell of citruses and orange blossom, and in the intoxication of the present.

Copyright © 2018 Aliette de Bodard

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories which have garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books include The Tea Master and the Detective, a murder mystery set on a space station in a Vietnamese Galactic empire and inspired by the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award, Locus Award finalist) and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns (Ace, Gollancz). Visit her at aliettedebodard.com for writing process and Franco-Vietnamese cooking.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

RUBY, SINGING

by Fran Wilde

         Yes, I went walking with him near the Deaf King Inn.

         There are some in Quadril who will call that my first mistake.

         They’d be wrong, my child. It was my fifth.

* * *

         I need you to listen, as best you can. I want you to hear me out.

         Let my flaws show you the way,

         from my bed on the ground, to your house in the town,

         I am singing heartbeat and melody.

         A deep vein runs near,

         I need you to hear,

         To find me before it’s past late.

* * *

         Poppa always called himself an honest man. This, he told us, was why he prospered.

         He said it so often, people began repeating it. “Ramond Vorendt has the honest trade shop. You’ll get your value there.” People like to know things like that.

         And so Poppa did prosper. And so he was an honest man.

         To find his shop, come through the city gates as if you’re home for a visit. Follow Market Street past the square and down the hill until you can just see the masts from the dockyard. At the bakery, go under the archway to Victor’s Alley. There are three pawn shops on the Alley, plus a seamstress. A jumble of swinging brass signs and spinning iron vanes hang above their doors. Only Poppa’s sign stands steadfast, bracketed against the wall: Vorendt’s Trades.

         Alternatively, if you come to the city from the river—as if you’re here to make your fortune—go straight from the docks. The cobbled lane branches left and right, but do not turn until the road narrows, until there’s no way out. That’s us on the end.

         If you come from inside the city, listen for whispers about Poppa’s two daughters, and how one disappeared. You can follow those rumors all the way to the brick house with the thick door and the small inset hatch, the balcony above, all watched by the old silent cat.

         About the whispers: I’m all that they say. Headstrong. Willful. Wild.

         What they don’t say, because they don’t know: I’m a good listener. Poppa tried to keep that quiet.

         They say I was headstrong because I ran away at eight. Left my sister alone in the shop and followed the lane down to the dock. The baker shouted at me, but I kept going.

         That’s how they knew.

         That’s how Poppa knew I was a good listener too. How he knew I could hear a melody few could, coming from the river.

         When I chased it the first time, they said I was wild. I’m sure they say much more now.

         I heard the song and followed it. Was carried home by a stevedore. Later, Poppa went back the way I’d gone, coins jangling his pockets. He returned with a sack full of rubies and one sapphire. I could hear them coming all the way up the street. The same song I’d heard before.

         One I’d hear again.

         “Your girl has an ear for trouble,” the baker said as Poppa passed by.

         Poppa lied, of course. “I don’t know where she gets it.” But he knew where. I found that out later.

         The next day, he started me sorting gems in the shop; my sister too. Small fingers can pull stones from their settings much faster than grown ones. I’d hum as I put diamonds in one pile, rubies in another; arranged by size and cut.

         Sometimes the gems sang back—hints of music filling the workroom, surrounding me. “Do you hear that?” I’d ask.

         Father, in the shop beyond the door, would quiet, then grumble about his ears going bad. Dea, my sister, would tilt her head and lean toward me. “Nothing, again,” she’d pout. She’d look at me strangely. “You’re lucky.”

         I felt lucky, because she said so. Because the song was beautiful. Because it filled the quiet that surrounded us with Momma gone.

         When Poppa bound the gems again, the song would hush and I’d hunger for it.

         “You’ll hear it again,” he promised. And Poppa was honest about things like that.

         But when I heard it, I chased it. The song a heartbeat, the words just out of reach and I desperate to know them. The baker caught me that time, helped Poppa put the first locks on the door. Of course the neighbors talked. That poor man. Bereft and now a headstrong child.

         “It sounds like sweets,” I told Dea later, because she loved sweets. “But the licorice ones. The ones you have too much of, and they hurt your stomach.”

         She nodded, solemn in her black dress, which was exactly like mine. She watched me prize more gems from their cheap settings. “Then I don’t want to hear. I don’t like the licorice as much.”

         Poppa gave us sweets on Momma’s deathday, which was our birthday also. Licorice, because it was black, for sorrow. The jellied ruby candies for joy—he said they’d been her favorite. That’s all we knew about her. Sometimes, hard striped suckers too.

         Dea would hold the sweets until they stuck together in her hand. I’d keep mine hidden, to make them last.

         “You don’t have to listen, do you?” Dea asked when we were fourteen. She twisted her sleeve in her opposite hand. She’d piled opals together with sapphires. Silver findings mixed with gold.

         “You don’t,” I agreed, re-sorting the piles before Poppa saw. Meantime, I waited for the music like a becalmed boat waits for wind. Sometimes I thought I heard it, but I didn’t. Sometimes it was whispers instead.

         Motherless children seemed a special risk to the neighborhood. “We’ll keep an eye on them,” many promised. So the baker squinted at us. The sailors gazed at us each day as we walked out with Poppa to school in our matching dresses. The entire alley followed our path when we came home. They meant well, I’m sure. But our reputations hardened like shells: Dea, the good one, the simpler one. Mira—me—the wild, headstrong, willful one.

         So that’s what we became.

         The winter we were fifteen, Poppa closed the doors after too many ships came to port with sickness in the hold. But not before Dea began to cough.

         I thought we’d lose her when the fever hit. I sang her back to me, sponged her forehead. Poppa’s stoop grew with the weight of worry.

         When she woke, the fever broken around her like a river, she clasped my hand. “I heard the music. I wanted to go.”

         I couldn’t let go of her hand for a week. I fed her broth and jelly candies.

         Our elbows and knees showed through the thinning cloth of our dresses before the sickness was done town. We stopped going to school for good. We couldn’t afford it.

         We grew thin, like everyone, and I didn’t mind missing school. I hadn’t been able to stay seated; was always in trouble for tapping my toes. But now our townhouse admitted neither wind through its thick walls and latched windows, nor many people from the street through the double-barred door. “Cannot be too safe,” Poppa said. And no one was there to check him.

         That was a silent season. No music. No rumors.

         Poppa read by the fire. Quizzed me on my letters while I tended Dea. She recovered and I didn’t sicken, but without the town to tell us who we were, we began to change. We grew whimsical. Made up stories.

         “What if Momma could hear the gems, like you?” Dea whispered. “What if she wandered away and got lost.”

         “She didn’t get lost.” I laced my fingers in Dea’s. “I won’t get lost.”

         “What if Poppa can hear the gems, but won’t tell us?” She sounded like she might cry. “What if I’m the only one who can’t?”

         But Poppa couldn’t hear much after that winter, unless you were standing right in front of him. I vowed to help him more.

         When the sickness broke, neighbors brought the last of their treasures out to trade. They bought flour with gold rings and meat with emeralds, not because those things weren’t precious, but because nothing else was. Silently, the baker brought these treasures to our shop, because he knew Poppa was an honest man.

         The workroom grew loud again with gems, but not enough of them. Poppa couldn’t hear which gems to buy, which not; we couldn’t afford new clothes. The bakery stayed open, but the dressmaker closed.

         That spring, we were sixteen. We leaned on the balcony, over the quiet alley. “Listen,” Dea said.

         And out on the street, I heard a familiar tune whistled. Sweet in the ear, then too sweet.

         “I hear it too.” She was so excited.

         A few notes, that was all. Then a stranger followed it up the alley, whistling. “Oh,” Dea said. “Not a gem.”

         Not a gem, but a song so familiar I forgot to blink.

         There wasn’t much to the stranger when he arrived at my father’s door. Skinny and bright-eyed. Mining dirt beneath his fingernails and etched deep in his skin. “Unfinished rubies,” he said through the hatch, “From upcountry; the creek bed revealed them after the floods.”

         When I didn’t reply, he added, “I’ve come here because they say your father is honest.” His voice was rough, but when I still hesitated, he whistled nervously.

         “Where did you hear that song?” I asked. The music made my heart kick like a sail.

         “By the creek,” he replied. “With the rubies.”

         I can tell you what I know now: he lied.

         At the threshold, one hand on the wrought iron latch, the other on wood carved long ago and soft with use, I let the evening breeze kick dust into the house. “I’ll get him.”

         I could have let the door swing shut, leaving him outside, and I could have gone back to my work, my sister. Kept the house closed to him. That was my first mistake.

         “Someone to see you.” I crossed into the shop. Said my words carefully. “With gems.”

         “Tell them it’s late, we’re closed.” Father’s voice had a day’s wear on it. His words were lost faded ghosts in the thick paneling of the shop, its cluttered shelves. “My money’s in the safe already, Mira.”

         Headstrong, I sent Dea to the kitchen to make tea for four.

         “He came because you’re honest. The stones are raw, not set.” I said. Because I wanted to hear more about the river, the creek bed, I repeated what the stranger said. My father pushed his chair back, intrigued. “I can hear them, Poppa. He says there’s more where those came from.”

         “Send him through.” Father waved. “Bring more firewood, and your shawl when you return, there’s a chill here.”

         I’d worn dark muslin all day, but now, I wanted my last good dress. The shawl was silver. The dress, the color of garnets. I dressed, thinking of the stranger’s song. Came below just as he revealed the rubies.

         The man spoke of ancient mines and lost jewels as he held out his hands. A gnarled rock, fire sparked when the light hit it. Not ancient, not lost.

         But oh how it sang.

         Standing beside my father, my sleeves tucked up, shawl wound tight around my shoulders, I leaned toward it, listening. Father tensed, watching me, then covered the stone with his hand.

         “Haven’t been rubies from upcountry for generations,” my father murmured, fetching his scales. “A new mine. Where?” He weighed the stone. Tapped the dirt off. Weighed again.

         When he was finished, I put the scales back in their velvet-lined drawer. A piece of rock rolled glittering from the tray to the dark fabric and I left it there.

         He looked at the man from under his thick brows. “What’s your name?”

         “Brac,” the man said. It was a mountain name. He looked at my father, unblinking. His eyes were green with hazel flecks, his cheekbones high. “The creek had a hint of riches. If you can help me fund a search for the mine, I would give you a share of the profits when I find it.”

         “Have you no family to invest in a scheme?” Poppa said.

         “They are all gone,” Brac answered. “I need someone who knows gems.”

         He seemed much younger now. But there was something on him, in his shirt pocket, sounding a small, broken melody. “There’s a vein, somewhere up above the creek, I’m sure of it,” he continued. “I want a partner, to help me search it out. We are both honest men. We would work well together.”

         I blinked and shook my head, like a cat might with a fly buzzing. The sound stayed.

         “Poppa,” I said, leaning close to my father. “He’s got more gems he’s not sharing.”

         The young man’s ears were sharp. His eyes narrowed and his lips tightened to a thin smile.

         “Mira, see to supper.” Father waved me away. I’d been leaning on the counter, and my elbows with the shawl cushioning them left small circles of heat in the wood. “Brac will eat in the kitchen.”

         The man left late that night. His shoes scuffed the dust all the way out of town as I watched from behind the parlor curtain. He was whistling. His pocket jingled.

         I am an excellent listener.

         And my feet arched high inside my shoes, aching to follow.

* * *

         Let this song be a map for finding me.

         Go out of the city, into the Valley, and past the Deaf King. Through the woods, to the creek. That’s how far I got, eventually.

* * *

         By the time we were eighteen, Dea and I spent our days melting down metal findings and sizing gems in the shop. We loved the gems, especially the spinnels and rubies, but all of them. Shapes and glitter. When we traded cash for a cut stone, I could hear how it should be set.

         Brac’s raw rubies had come in looking like soap and dirt, heavy in your hand. But I’d heard how they wanted to be cut; Poppa had known how to bind them. When we had them cut and polished, they turned light and blood-bright. We sold them well. Dea had a new dress, and then I did too.

         It wasn’t enough, but it was a start.

         “You’ve a calling, Mira,” Poppa said. “You could take over the shop with Dea’s help.” I was my father’s assistant, though no one said I was honest. Dea was, though. The whole neighborhood knew it.

         I hadn’t strayed from her side since that once when I was eight. Though I would someday; everyone said so. The neighbors who kept an eye on us were happy to make it known. When someone decides who you are for your whole life, it works like grit on a gem. Polishes you up a bit. Or breaks you.

         I was determined not to break.

         Brac returned that year, with three more rubies. Small ones. My father had grown weaker, but he weighed the stones, invited Brac to dinner. “Still no mine?”

         Brac shook his head. “But I’m close. I’ll find it.”

         “How are you sure? I won’t give you more money on a whim. Can you hear the mines or not?”

         Dea and I sat at one end of the table, listening so hard I thought our glasses would crack.

         “Sometimes,” he said, speaking loudly. “And I have a map from someone who could.” He tapped his pocket. Pulled out a shard of etched amethyst. “This is very old.”

         The amethyst was what I’d heard in his pocket, years ago. Poppa looked at me, and I nodded. I realized later that my father needed to believe Brac’s story. He couldn’t stand in the shop for more than a few hours; his eye for gems was gone. But he lived for this kind of discovery. This last search was keeping him alive. I didn’t want him to die disappointed.

         Dea and I had to help. She in her way, me in mine.

         “Poppa,” I began. But he shook his head. No.

         I stared at Brac from the end of the table, down my nose. And the strange man brought out another handful of rock. “There’s more,” he said. “I know it. This was once a map of all the gem mines in the valley,” he said. “I won it at cards at The Deaf King.”

         “The Deaf King is no good to discuss at a table with young women.” Poppa tried to rise to show him out, but Brac held up his hand.

         “I’m telling you because it’s important,” he said to Poppa. But I sensed he was really speaking to me now. “Most mountain mines are clearly marked along the roads. But Quadril’s valleys and gullies are overgrown. Some say they’re haunted. I’ve searched dozens of caves, but there are still so many left. This map could be the key. I won a mixed bag of stones and shards, including the amethyst. It’s rough and broken, but look at what’s etched on one side.” He held the amethyst and a ruby up to the light. I could see the path. Hear the melody.

         “I followed it and thought I heard something. A whisper of song. And I found the creek and the rubies. Now I just need a little more time.”

         I heard the whisper. Thought he told true.

         I thought father would sit back and scoff, since he’d already given Brac something and seen nothing in return. But he leaned forward instead, his elbows on the table. “What guarantees this time?”

         Brac waved his hand. “I have others investing now. A banker in Riverward, a family in the Western Mountains. But having someone close at hand, who can sell what gems I find, remains useful. Another investment will guarantee I’ll bring my finds here.”

         Father looked at Dea, at me. “We need something to secure your futures.”

         He was right. But guarantees and security were only as good as Brac’s ability to find the mine. Dea needed this. I did too.

         “I am an honest man,” Brac continued. He didn’t look at either of us. “If you know of someone who can hear the gems better than me, I’d appreciate it... I’ve heard rumors.”

         Father stayed seated. “No one I know,” he said quietly. He looked at the table as if forbidding it to speak.

         But I’m headstrong. “Let me go, Poppa,” I said. “I’ll watch out for our interests.” I wouldn’t say more.

         He looked hard at me. “You are needed here.”

         Brac said nothing, but he smiled for the first time. He had dimples, like you do, child. And that was my second mistake, noticing them. For Father’s eyes narrowed further.

         “I think not.”

         He slid coins to Brac for shovels and picks.

         “Our bills will be slowly paid this month,” Dea whispered, dismayed. “I hope it works.”

         How could it work? I would stay with the shop. Brac would return empty-handed. The songs would stop.

         I was needed, but not here.

         When the door closed loud between us, with Brac whistling goodbye, I could hear the neighbors’ thinking about me. The things they’d said behind my back.

         My third mistake was going out the window that night, instead of the door. I tore my dress, my good one, as I dropped over the sill. But the sheets I’d tied together held firm, and Dea waved from above. She understood me, at least, though she couldn’t hear the music. She tossed down my small sack: food and money, a change of clothes.

         “I’ll come back,” I said.

         “Or I’ll find you,” she promised, leaning out the window. Dea was the honest one. “Or father will.”

         “He might not forgive me enough to look,” I said. I didn’t care. I was following the music.

         It was deep night as I walked the bridge out of town. The neighbors had been right, after all. But they’d also been wrong: they weren’t keeping an eye on me at all.

* * *

         From the townhouse, walk through the city gates, when the guards aren’t looking, then slide down the embankment to the river.

         Brac was waiting by the river’s edge, as if he knew I’d follow. I saw his thin shoulders, his sharp cheekbones, brushed silver by the moonlight. His dimples when he greeted me. He whistled, but not the gemsong. A long, low tone of surprise.

         I should have stopped there, but I kept going, wild and willful. Following this stranger all the way to the river, then up to the creek.

         I’d spent so much time in the house on the Alley, in the back room of the shop, that the night felt expansively large. I spread my arms wide as I walked. There were no walls, no locks.

         Brac walked again, a winding route, saying nothing. Not looking back. But he slowed his pace.

         Finally, he whistled the song I’d half-heard all my life. Relieved, I cautiously whistled back.

         “That’s a minesong,” he said. “For those who would listen. Perhaps you can hear more than that.” If he thought I could, then I would. I hoped.

         Hope is a risk one takes when one doesn’t know any better. I know that now.

         We walked all the way to the Deaf King, my shoes wearing first blisters then raw spots in my feet on the rough road. But I didn’t mind. The fresh air, the broad open space. The lack of neighbors telling me who I was. I kept up with Brac.

         The creek trickled past the Inn’s stone walls. Tugged at its mill wheel, grown with moss. The pre-dawn light made it sparkle, a little like magic. I was too tired to know those were spider webs, decked with dew.

         The Deaf King’s owner stank of moonshine and asked few questions. He didn’t ask if I would like my own room. That unsettled me, at first, but just then, Brac handed me the amethyst he’d told father was a map. The intaglio etchings edged my fingertips.

         “Somewhere, there is a mine with a vein of rubies. If we find it, we become kings,” he said.

         We.

         The amethyst sang. Right and true. I heard it. He saw my head tilt towards the stone. “You can hear them,” he said. His dimples showed again. “Talented girl.”

         The praise filled me up. To say otherwise would be dishonest. I nodded. “It sings. So few things do.”

         To tell the truth was a relief. To see Brac accept it, a delight.

         The amethyst’s wasn’t the song I’d followed so long ago, but I could hear echoes of that as well, somewhere nearby. I didn’t mention that then, because I thought Brac could hear it too.

         He understood what had been tugging at me my whole life. He whistled the melody.

         “I think the mine is here. “ He pointed at a rough mark near the break. “I’m pretty sure. When we get close, we’ll hear it.”

         We again. So he hadn’t heard the nearby song yet. But he knew the broken melody, from the amethyst. That, at least, was true. I stayed with him. There at the Inn. Held close to him, for warmth, he said. He whistled merrily and swung me around, and it made me laugh with the freedom of it.

         And when he asked me to carry the shovels my father had bought while he walked on ahead, scouting the riverbed, I did.

         That was my fourth mistake.

         I carried them all over the valley. Carried and dug while I waited for Brac to hear the minesong too. To make sure I wasn’t imagining things. I wanted us to hear it together. To prove my father’s investment right and the neighbors wrong.

         Our shoes wore straight through, our supplies dwindled while I waited. Brac stopped whistling. Began grumbling. We searched for days, weeks. The few caves we found held bats or spiders but not gems; the creek bed revealed no more rubies, even after it rained.

         The cave that had spilled the stones remained hidden.

         “Can’t you hear anything?” he finally asked, ankle deep in the mud of a ravine. “You can’t be this useless.”

         You. Not we.

         In the silence that followed, I knew what he hadn’t told my father: Brac had been looking for the mine for a long time. Longer than he’d said.

         “I’m sorry,” I said. I meant I’m angry. But I was afraid to say so.

         He spun on me, spat his words. “Don’t be sorry, be right.”

         We walked through the undergrowth back to the path in silence. It dawned on me. He couldn’t hear the songs I heard. Not one.

         Not the minesong, not the gemsong, not the lullabies I hummed in secret.

         The expanse of the valley closed in around me. When next I listened for the cave, I could not hear it.

         And if I couldn’t find it, I couldn’t return home. Not without a vein of gems that would redeem me and save the shop.

         Above us, the clouds broke open and the evening grew cold. Snow began to fall. Silently, Brac and I returned to the Deaf King. We ate in silence. He had me sleep on the floor for my failures.

         In the morning, he woke me with the toe of his boot nudging my backside. “We’ve nearly run out of money. I’ll find more investors. I’ve paid for the weeks ahead, for you.” I felt this as another punishment, but his tone was kind. He kissed my cheek. “For luck, for the child,” he said. For there was to be a child. A you.

         How the neighbors would love to discuss that. How Dea, and my father, would not.

         But you were what I had left to me in this world. I hummed your lullaby, the gemsong, as he packed. And as I sat on the wood floor, I thought I felt you shift in recognition. I gasped at the motion and then at the return of the melody, all around me.

         When Brac pocketed the broken amethyst, I worried. How would I search without it? What if the music went away? How would I protect us, secure your future? “I’ll come down with you too.”

         “You’re too ill to travel.” His dimples disappeared as he kissed me. But he left the shovels, the gear with me. A guarantee of his return. “Keep looking,” he said.

         I held the kiss close, the truth closer: he did not want me along but knew I couldn’t leave him. Not like this.

         “I’d like to write my sister,” I said, though I had nothing to write with.

         “I’ll pass on a message,” he promised, and then was gone.

         Once he left, the Innkeeper all but ignored me. His wife, however, kept a close eye out. She frowned at me often. Slipped me cheese to go with my bread. “I remember your mother,” she said. “She was from up this way. She was headstrong. Was good with the tourists, took them gem hunting.”

         The words gave me courage, and sadness in equal parts. I hadn’t known her, except for the taste of licorice and rubies.

         The woman covered my hand with hers. Ducked her head. It was a kindness.

         “You should walk, as much as you can,” she said. She loaned me scarves and boots. She might not have minded if I kept walking straight and did not come back.

         But I remained in the Valley, too headstrong, too wild, too willful. Like my mother. And I walked the paths around the Deaf King for you, then, through the Valley trails, singing to you, my child.

         And it wasn’t long before the mines sang back.

* * *

         From the river, follow the path high into the woods and keep going past where you think you should stop.

* * *

         In the spring, Brac returned, whistling a different music. He had enough money to pay our lodging.

         “Any response from my sister?” I asked, hoping.

         He shook his head as he eyed me, noting that I’d grown enormous. “Which is well, as we can’t send you home like this.”

         This I now knew all too well.

         He’d changed too. His shoulders had thickened, his chest grown broad, his beard filled in. His cheekbones were less prominent below his eyes. He’d eaten well, wherever he’d gone.

         Meantime I was always hungry. Always tired. You grew insatiably. And with you, the talk at the Inn. The men clapped him on the back and made crude jokes. They said nothing to me. Their silence said it all.

         How did I feel? Angry sometimes, sad others. When we were alone, I was happy. I could sing.

         But with Brac back, we weren’t alone any more.

         “We’ll find the mine, my heart,” Brac whispered. “You’ll feel better then. We’ll find it and be rich and well, while they will still be here.” His voice had layers. Flaws. Annoyance and hunger.

         But he walked with us. Steadied us if I stumbled on the path. Asked me now and then if I heard anything.

         But I didn’t take him to the mine, did I.

         Too soon for him, I asked to turn back to the Deaf King. To the tick-ridden mattress stuffed with moldy straw. Or to the floor, if he was angry.

         “You cannot let the child distract you.” He stopped on the muddy trail. “You must listen harder. You claimed you could hear it. It could be close now. You’ll hear it.”

         He was wrong. I’d already heard the mine, on my walks with you. I’d heard it sing. We’d crawled inside, the mud squelching between my fingers. I’d seen fire glittering in the rich vein that water running the cave walls had revealed.

         You’d kicked in time to the melody.

         I just wasn’t ready to tell Brac.

         It was our secret, between us, my child. Because I’d heard his tune change. Because I’d slept on the floor.

* * *

         Once you find The Deaf King, you’ll know you’re heading the right direction. Find the smaller creek, follow that.

* * *

         But when Brac next prepared to leave again, he packed the shovels, the supplies. Preparing to search in a different place, or to disappear. He sized me up. “You’ll stay here.”

         I refused, headstrong as always.

         “One more walk, then,” he said. His voice lifted. “Just near the Inn.”

         The Innkeeper’s wife frowned. “She’ll fall.”

         Something inside me, sounding the old songs, wanted to hear the rubies up close, once more, for you. “All right.”

         That, as I’ve told you, was my fifth mistake.

         To find where we walked, go up from the Inn, take the rightmost trail to its end. Walk toward the creek.

         As we came close to the cave that I knew was there but he didn’t, I couldn’t stop myself. Couldn’t stop us. We whistled, you and I, the song of the creek bed. The song I’d heard first as a child, that had led me down to the river. The song of the gems Brac had carried to my father.

         He didn’t notice at first. He’d gone on ahead, talking to himself. “The Deaf King is the worst kind of lodging. Vipers and rumors everywhere. Someone told one of my investors I’d cheated them. Told them about you. Now my reputation in Riverward is ruined. Do you know what that means?” That was why he had to find us a new place, he explained, and then come back for me. “Are you listening?”

         I was not listening, and I was.

         I was lost in song. In heartbeat and melody. My ears roared with wind and my nose filled with the smell of wet leaves and mud. I whistled faint and far away.

         He noted my quiet. Saw me staring, but couldn’t see the cave entrance. “Do you hear something? Maybe?” Hopeful, after all this time.

         And I couldn’t turn away. The gemsong was so loud. How could he miss it? “Shhhh.” In the open, he was a distraction when I wanted silence. We would go back soon, and then, perhaps, I would meet my mother’s fate. I put a hand to my belly and felt you keep the beat of the song.

         He didn’t hush though. “Maybe if you sit a spell.” He pointed to a log by the creek.

         “Shhhh,” I said again. I wanted to hear the cave, the gems, unfinished inside, one last time. I wanted to remember the place you and I had gone and listened so many times in his absence. Surrounded by the mine’s song. By heartbeats. By the pulse of new veins.

         Brac turned to where I’d been staring. Pulled me, his feet moving easily over the hidden stones while I stumbled beside him. He made a small sound. “You are a gem, Mira,” he said, as he ducked inside the cave. His eyes adjusted. “This is it,” he murmured. His smile broadened. He whistled again, a hand gripping my shoulder. He took the shovel from me and gestured me inside. “Finally. I found it.”

         I.

         The gemsong quieted when we stood up inside the cave.

         The rock walls gleamed, the rich vein of rubies revealed by the trickling water. The forest outside the cave mouth looked too bright once my eyes adjusted. Then music filled my ears, louder than before.

         I was staring open-mouthed at the walls, waiting for Brac to say how beautiful it all was, when he hit me with the shovel.

         The forest dimmed. The minesong grew louder than anything else. I fell and fell, turning to cushion you when I hit the ground. Curling around you, like a cave, like a fist, as if I could catch you.

         A tugging on my arm, and the wet leaves and mud squelched beneath my body. Brac pulled me deeper into the mine. Then his shadow blocked the light from the cave, and then he was gone.

         Tell Dea that I found what Poppa long sought. A cave sunk beneath moss and vines and shadows, along a creek bed so overgrown we’d missed it before. Glittering with gems.

* * *

         To find me, to find us, go most of the way through the forest. There’s a gully marked with a fallen tree. Go down the hill until you think the trail ends. It doesn’t. Keep going.

* * *

         I didn’t die, not then.

         Once you’re in the gully, look left. That low ridge? Look under it. The entrance is sunken, but once you’re in, you can stand.

         In the cave, I woke, surrounded by music. By heartbeat. By rhythm. My eyes grew used to the dark, pressed it aside for the glimmer of light. I heard water beside me, gems far beneath me.

         I slept and woke to the sound of rubies whispering raw in my ears. I was never alone.

         I grew bigger there. Monstrous. Waiting for him to return. A fortnight, and by the time I had you, so small and squalling, I could catch anything, eat anything. The rubies told me how. The cave suited me. The rubies taught me to sing.

         They told me many things. Taught me a baby is not like a ruby. A cave is no place for one.

         I listened, I think. Or I dreamed. I protected you from the gems as best I could.

         But in the end, I took you to back to the Deaf King. A cave is no place for a baby.

         That? That was my first not-mistake. Though I wish you were here. I wish Dea were here too. It is so dark.

* * *

         I dreamed the Deaf King’s wife offered to hide you away, so that no one would know.

         I dreamed my insides went hollow, a cave filled with stones.

         I dreamed I’d become everything the neighbors said I would. A girl, wayward. A note, skipped.

         I dreamed Dea found you and kept you safe.

         “You can’t stay here.” I dreamed the innkeeper’s wife sang her words, and that her skin sparkled with diamonds and opals. She looked over my skin, its hard red veins and scars. “People will talk.”

         But she smiled when you squalled. Whispered, “She’s good, she’s kind, she’s perfect.” So I dreamed that I gave you to her, to the innkeeper’s wife.

         How could I, you’ll ask. They’ll all ask that. They’ll tell you the truth about me, and in saying it, it will become so.

         Because I was wound up in minesong. Because I knew how this would end already. Or thought I did. You belonged outside, in the light. I belonged hidden away.

         I asked the innkeeper to write your aunt, to write Dea. He promised. His wife swaddled you tight and nodded and took you. Good and kind and perfect.

         They left me alone.

         When I returned to the mine, the rubies were silent. The amethyst broke its song again and again.

         My feet pulled leaves along with me, covering my tracks. By the time I got to the cave, it was dark.

         I undid the bedroll I’d stolen from the inn and lay down. The dark didn’t bother me any more. Closer to the ground, I heard the singing louder. Let it wrap around me.

         In the darkness, with nothing to distract me, I followed the sound. Into the ground.

         It sang to me, I heard it. I reached for it.

         It was like a brittle lullaby, like wind through trees if the trees were made of glass.

         And I followed it like I want you to do now enough time’s passed. Come find me.

         In the morning, I took the small pick and chisel and began to tap.

* * *

         Go all the way to the back of the cave. Don’t be afraid.

* * *

         When Brac returned, which I knew he would, with more tools, empty bags, I hid there, in the shadows. Watched him move into the cave, sniff the air, then whisper, “Can you hear anything?”

         And I was about to say no. Can you believe it? I would have said no if another fair voice had not said so first.

         Dea’s voice. My sister.

         He’d brought her here.

         We couldn’t be more different, and yet there she was. “Or I’ll find you,” she’d said. I listened, but I braced to grab her away.

         “What should I listen for?”

         “Her ghost, perhaps. She went missing from the Deaf King, and I searched for her. What can you hear?”

         Their voices like water, like air. Like music.

         “Father’s given you the money to find her. Shouldn’t you be listening? I’ll talk to the innkeeper. Him, I can hear.”

         Dea was always the sharper one of us. The one who refused to listen. And father—he’d sent her to find me. My heart lifted, though the shadows held me back.

         “We’ll talk to him soon.” He stepped a ways down the cave, and I saw him note the dug-up places.

         Would Brac let her speak to him? Would he give my message to her? I doubted either.

         Brac’s eyes stalled at the chunks of mineral I’d eased from the vein. He spun a circle, staring at my work.

         The vein had opened wide. It gleamed. It sang, though neither of them could hear it.

         Was that fear in his eyes? Joy? I couldn’t tell in the shadows, though I was used to the dimness. His face was unreadable until he stopped, gaze locked on the pile of gems. The soap-rubies, the fire-lit rocks. “Mira,” he whispered. A blessing. A curse.

         Raw stones. Unfinished. Singing, so softly only I could hear. A lullaby. A finding song.

         “Dea, you should go to the Inn,” he said, “Before it gets dark. I’ll follow.” And Dea believed him. She stepped from the cave, safe. I breathed relief.

         I prepared myself.

         When Dea stopped at the inn, did she see you? Did she know you?

         If you’d say you recognized her voice, I would believe you.

* * *

         Look under the large pile of stone and dust at the back of the cave. Bring a shovel and a sieve. Don’t forget.

* * *

         “Mira,” Brac whispered again, “You’d best be dead if you’re still here.”

         That was his first mistake.

         His voice echoed in the darkness. He stumbled on the uneven ground. But I could see him just fine. “I’m here.”

         I let the silence build behind my answer. His voice came quieter then. “You are?”

         “Yes.”

         “Don’t you want to see your sister?”

         I’d seen her. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to see me. I didn’t want to see her in danger, with Brac. “You brought her here to see if she could hear the stones too?” He must have figured he killed me too soon.

         He was right about that.

         “She wanted to find you. Your father could pay. You should be glad.”

         “I am not.” I let the shadows fall from me. His eyes widened to see me. I must have been frightening. Pale and splotchy and dressed in rags. “I wanted your return.”

         Did Dea recognize you as mine? Did the innkeeper tell her? I could hope. For that and later, perhaps more. Perhaps one day you would hear me singing.

         “Show me where the gemline is, Mira, and I’ll take you home. Your father’s heart is broken.”

         So said the man who helped break it. He wasn’t wrong.

         I felt a twinge in what was left of my heart. The part that hadn’t turned to stone and ruby, calcite and spinel. This cave does things like that, especially when you sing. “Be careful, there.”

         For a moment, I thought I could give him a few rubies and send him on his way. But when he saw my outstretched hand, his eyes glazed with greed. “You’re—”

         I was. I would continue to be. The rubies kept me alive and I—well I gave them something too. An audience, a voice.

         “I had no idea they could do that. Nothing in the books says they can.”

         “Will you take my sister home if I show you?”

         He smiled that smile again. “I will, I promise.” He stepped closer.

         But he twisted and struck fast, his hand across my mouth. That was his last mistake.

         He screamed, for my skin had hardened there, and he bled into the ground. Around us, the walls rumbled. The creek began to run backwards. The hem of my ruined dress brushed the water and darkened with clay.

         Dea, I hope you can get yourself home.

         I turned to him, smiling also. “You said you were honest. You said you could hear.”

         He tried once more to strike me. Down to the ground, but I twisted away from my shock and grabbed his arm instead. Pulled hard. He fell. We fell. He hit his head. I hit my arm and it shattered.

         And his knife was against the still-unencrusted, unprotected skin of my neck in seconds.

* * *

         Look under the pile of stone and dirt, beyond the raw stones. Move it all away.

* * *

         As he was killing me the second time, I began to sing. The cave walls echoed with my voice. I did not feel the blows. I felt the rubies sing back. They sounded sweet, too-sweet, like licorice.

         When the mine roof fell, when dust filled our mouths, we were trapped there together in the darkness, pinned by the weight of the cave.

         And the years have passed as the rubies make more of me each day and his skeleton falls apart. I cannot be sad that the water chews at his bones.

         They speak of me now in the city. You’ll hear it if you make your way to the shop, if you come into town in just the right way. But that isn’t the real story. It never is. Because that story hasn’t ended yet, and the words they use are fixed and sharp.

* * *

         Come find me, my daughter, and bury me deep.

         Let the rubies whisper your way:

         You are good, you are kind, you are perfect.

         Father come find me headstrong and wild,

         Come say your goodbyes, sister mine.

         The rubies call to you sweetly

         From my bed on the ground, to your house in the town,

         I am singing to you heartbeat and melody.

         I’ve killed a man now and a child I’ve left,

         And I don’t want anything from you.

         But a grave and a stone, a place to call home.

         And the memory of someone come to bind me.

Copyright © 2018 Fran Wilde

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Fran Wilde writes science fiction and fantasy. She can also tie a bunch of sailing knots, set gemstones, and program digital minions. Her novels and short stories have been finalists for three Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, and two Hugo Awards, and include her Andre Norton- and Compton-Crook-winning debut novel Updraft, its sequels Cloudbound, and Horizon, and the Nebula-, Hugo-, and Locus-nominated novelette The Jewel and Her Lapidary. Her short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, and the 2017 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. Her poetry has appeared in The Marlboro Review, Articulate, and Poetry Baltimore. She holds an MFA in poetry and an MA in information architecture and interaction design. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and at franwilde.net.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

WE RAGGED FEW

by Kate Alice Marshall

1

         The rot hound struck in the dark hours of the morning. It took one of our horses and left a geld woman bloodied and wild, telling tales of a two-headed wolf with eyes like the last embers of a fire.

         I had known this would come. Not the wolf but something like it, ill fortune made flesh. I took down the bone spear from where it hung above the hearth and fetched my shield from its resting place. The pull against my muscles echoed imperfectly: too long spent splitting wood, gutting rabbits instead of men.

         Imri stopped me at the door, hand resting on the swell of her belly where Evahr’s child grew. My child as well, by agreement and custom; the affliction that beset our people had withered my womb, and so my sister bore for us. But I still did not know if I would see the mewling babe and think mine or ours or his or theirs, and I was not eager to discover the answer.

         Is this it? she asked, hands darting quick in the gesture-speech of the mutelings. Is it what Titha warned would come?

         “I don’t know,” I said. “The beginning of it, maybe.”

         You should not go, she said. Not alone.

         “There’s no one else. I will come back,” I promised. “Keep the fire, and keep the door shut. Let no one in.”

         Imri nodded. I didn’t have to warn her to be wary; the iron chain around her neck was reminder enough. When I paid the price of blood and iron to bring her home, we had cut her collar, but the chain took its place—sign and symbol of how fragile the life we’d won remained.

         How fragile, too, the illusion of freedom we had spun, and how quickly shattered.

         The beast’s trail led me away from the coast, into a forest of dumbstruck birds. I sank through the silence like a blade, tasting the air with every breath, following the faint scent of rot. The bone spear dug against my shoulder, over the web of scars a grayling’s blood had burned. The woods were thick with the gray, and the wise wore iron when they strayed among the trees, but I had warred enough with the hidden; I bore bone like a banner of peace, and I saw no swift gray flanks or thin gray limbs among the trees. Only once, blink-quick, a narrow flint face, its eyes wet and black and staring. And then gone.

         I scented blood and bent my course. Found a clearing. Found a body. Scar tissue knotted the man’s cheek, burned to obliterate the mark of our holding. Dalrig: cast out eight months ago for stealing from the holding’s winter stores, now torn bloody, his gut a lake of thickening red. I knelt to touch my fingertips to his skin; warm, and his blood still fresh.

         Dalrig had an eye keener than a hawk’s. It hadn’t saved him. So I didn’t look. I listened—and heard the hot exhale of the beast, a breath twinned between two sets of teeth, the instant before it leapt.

         I whirled, slinging down my shield. The beast caught against it, claws scrabbling hard on the wood and teeth snapping shut, one-two, over a breath I’d foolishly loosed. I thrust the bone spear between its ribs as it ripped at my breath. Something in my chest tore. I drove the spear deep.

         It took long, writhing moments to die, and it loosed my breath only at the end. I choked on blood, coughed, felt wetness crackle in my lungs. A wrench tore my spear free. The wound bloomed with maggots.

         A crow called, lighting on a withered branch west of me. I spat blood on the snow and bared stained teeth at it. “Go bleat your warnings, then,” I said. “Fly ahead so your mistress has time to choose a lie. I have my proof.” Proof we should have fled, when Titha warned us of what would come. The crow ruffled its feathers, croaked again, and flung itself skyward like an insult to the clouds.

         Bent down on one knee, I set to skinning the beast with a knife carved of a stag’s antler and stamped with knots. A gift, passed from my elder sister’s pulseless palm to mine, the day she died. The day she warned us of what would come.

         With the hound’s pelt bundled over my shoulder, I walked the left-hand road toward the sea, to Kalstavr, where Talgrun sat in the tall seat and took his tax of salt and silver—and of flesh. I passed no one on the long road, and I tasted something in the back of my mouth like old meat, going sour. Something I hadn’t tasted in five years—not since I last let my iron blade drink its fill, not since Talgrun had ordered my collar struck and my face marked with the sigil of the hold. That day I left war to Evahr and to the iron thralls, but I could feel it in my bones and blood like a killing frost.

         The town teemed. By the water, white sails boasted against the gray sky, and men and women, true and geld both, thronged at the docks. The hold’s raiders returning: the iron thralls, and Evahr commanding them. Joy leapt up in me, bright like the silvered side of a fish and just as quickly lost to darker waves. Evahr would be a glad sight in Kalstavr. I would not be so welcome.

         I pushed through the crowd and broke the front rank in time to see Evahr kneel at Talgrun’s feet. The thralls were the blade, Evahr the hilt, and Talgrun the hand upon the knife, and none must ever forget who knelt and who stood over them.

         Talgrun spoke the ritual words, praising Evahr for the silver he’d brought and for the greater prize—four women wearing muteling collars, one already round with child. Three of the women clutched each other, thin fingers woven together, sides pressed against sides as if they could become one being and, thus diminished, be forgotten. The fourth stared openly at me, eyes dark as a seal’s, and touched two fingers below her left eye. I looked away. Looked instead at Talgrun and my husband, and the briar-haired old woman who stood beside them holding a weathered yew staff on which perched a ruffle-feathered crow.

         “Tonight we celebrate our good fortune,” Talgrun said, ritual satisfied. “And feast these warriors of salt and iron. Today we are blessed.”

         “Blessed,” the crone repeated, daring me with a look to challenge her.

         I no longer carried iron, but I could never let a challenge go unanswered. “This day is not blessed,” I said. Evahr’s head whipped up. He mouthed my name, worry in his eyes. Concerned for Imri, no doubt; promise a man a child, and he chokes on a thousand small and sudden fears.

         “Reyna Bonespear, why have you come speaking storms while we praise the sun?” the crone asked. She’d fed her name to the crows when she carved her staff; I wasn’t old enough to have heard it spoken.

         I loosed the ties around the rot hound’s skin and jerked it, unfurling it on the rime-stiff mud at Talgrun’s feet. The two heads flopped against the ground. A worm wriggled in one empty eyehole.

         “I slew this creature this morning,” I said, speaking loudly over the wind-in-the-rushes sound of rumors being born around me. Talgrun’s eyes lifted from the beast. I met his weary gaze and offered no respite with my own. “I told you we should not have stayed.”

* * *

2

         Inside the long hall, the fire sparked and leapt like a flapping hand. Spring brought thaws at midmorning, which meant less wood heaped on to burn and less smoke to prick our eyes, but the air still held a thin gray haze. Talgrun took his seat in the boneback chair, spine to spine with a longtooth his grandfather had killed. He gestured, and Evahr shut the doors against the crowd, leaving only six of us to stand in the warmth of the great fire. Evahr and I, the crone, and three men with white in their beards and wisdom enough that Talgrun trusted them. Of the three, I trusted one.

         No sign of Mad Hosfar, Talgrun’s strongest and wildest warrior, and I could not decide if I was glad of that. He’d broken more bones for Talgrun than anyone, but he’d stood with me beyond the narrow place, the day I cut free the graylings’ heart and brought it back to set at Talgrun’s feet. I would have counted him as a friend, if I weren’t so wary of him.

         We weren’t six, I realized then, but seven: Talgrun’s wife, Ymaera, emerged from the door behind the throne, parting the curtains with fingers thin as fish hooks. The whole of her was thin, and a thumb if pressed to her skin would bruise, but she was called beautiful by some—and a true woman beside, with a voice like a lark’s and a womb that would quicken.

         “Reyna,” she said when she saw us. No surprise at the salt-skin warriors back from the seas; only me. We’d once been friends, Talgrun’s wife and I, when I was her husband’s thrall and she wove my braids for battle, but now she held no love for me. I had never been certain what changed, only that change it had. “It’s been too long since you stood beneath the beam.”

         Subtle venom laced the words, an accusation not quite voiced, but I bent my neck, bowed my head—saving rebellion and my breath for a more important moment. “My lord,” I said. “My lady. Forgive my absence, but there are things you must hear now.”

         “You make a spectacle of yourself, Reyna,” Talgrun said.

         I shrugged. It did not do to be more prideful than my headman, but I was never wise the way a woman should be. I had a warrior’s wisdom, and among the iron thralls humility earned no praise. “I came to tell my lord of grave things. It seemed unwise to delay,” I said.

         Talgrun snorted. A lord had no need for manners. “This dog,” Talgrun said. He held out his hand to the side, and Ymaera stepped up to rest her fingers over his. “Where did you kill it?”

         “In the woods,” I said.

         “Beyond the stones?” Ymaera asked.

         I hid my bristling. “Beyond the stones,” I admitted. The warding stones kept the worst of the graylings and their world from our holding; the graylings had not come past them in force since the war, five years ago. “But I tracked it there from our farm. It killed a horse but took no meat. Bit a laborer. Left Dalrig dead, and if our laborer has not yet joined him, her wound will already have festered.”

         “Who?” Evahr asked.

         “Sora,” I said, and pretended not to note the fleeting relief in Evahr’s eyes. Better ale-soaked Sora than one of the others. And better a geld than a true man or woman, though few would say as much aloud.

         “There are always dread things beyond the stones,” Talgrun said.

         “Dread things,” echoed the crone. She leaned on her iron-banded staff. Iron and yew, which the graylings would not touch, and carved with the eight-and-twenty knots. Like the stones in the woods; like the midbeam that hung above us, which Korohn had carved with his own hands. The crone was more a threat to the graylings than I and my spear ever would be.

         “It came past the stones,” I said, voice edged as an ax now. “Nothing so wicked has come so far since Korohn set the beam. Not unless the graylings flushed it out.”

         “Perhaps they did, to plague us,” Talgrun said.

         “No.” It was a dangerous thing to shape such a word to a chief, but I looked him in the eye. As a thrall I had pledged to Talgrun. As a free woman, I pledged to the hold—a pledge signified by the knot tattooed beneath my left eye. It was my duty to speak so, however dangerous. “You did not pass through the narrow place, my lord; you did not see what lies beyond. You did not hear the hounds in the twilight when the wounded lay wailing for water and mercy.”

         There was but one here who had been with me that night: the white-haired Nagrat. He looked grim in his remembering.

         “The hounds came among the dying, drawn by their moaning, but they did not pause,” I continued. “They came into the camps instead. They killed those who’d killed that day, and graylings died as swiftly as men. The graylings do not hunt the hounds. They do not herd them. They fear them as one fears a plague, a storm.”

         “What are you saying, then?” Talgrun asked. “This beast came hunting my iron thralls? Came hunting your husband and our warriors? Or a murderer, perhaps?”

         “No,” I said, though Dalrig’s death made me wonder what bloodshed his past hid. “A hound does not come for a meal so small. It scented killing, a great deal of it, but it must have come too soon. The wind through the narrow place plays tricks sometimes. Time runs differently. He scented not what is but what will be.”

         “Omens are the crone’s art,” Ymaera said. “So what say you, crone?”

         The old woman cocked her head one way and then the other, and in the thatch her crow cackled a laugh. “She speaks of omens but stinks of rot,” she said. “Of things not new and dead but old and dead. Old wounds, old grudges, old corpses cold and pretty.”

         She split her lips in a yellow grin. Evahr’s hand gripped brief and tight on my shoulder, as if I’d be fool enough to leap, to shed blood beneath the beam. Acidic anger pulsed in my gut, but I was long accustomed to its slow, liquid pain. I no longer bit at every provocation like a wounded animal.

         “This is not about my sister,” I said. Our sister, Imri’s and mine. Titha. Cold-born, blood still as a corpse’s and yet living. The cold spoke prophecy, and since Korohn’s time we had listened. Until Titha’s final Telling.

         “Not about your sister, you say. Yet the first words you spoke to me were ‘we should not have stayed,’“ Talgrun said, settling back in his chair as if weary of me.

         Perhaps I was growing more temperate as the cold leached years from my bones. I did not tell him that my sister had warned us—that she had died to warn us, and we had not heeded her. Two years now since Titha had spoken her prophecy, and still Talgrun listened to the crows and their mistress.

         “Your husband has brought a bounty, and you will share in it,” Talgrun said. “Celebrate, and put this beast out of your mind. The threat is no more. You slew it, and a fine trophy it will make for your home.” Your home, not his. He did not claim it, as was his right: a final insult masked as a gift.

         Perhaps I had not grown so temperate after all.

         “We cannot stay here,” I said. “Titha warned us, and all she’s said has come to pass. She said the snows would take seven that first winter. She said the gods’ light would dance the night the next cold child was born, and Vieka nurses that black-eyed babe even now. And she said the old threat would come back, and the village would stand gutted as an elk after the wolves are done, and no more sons and daughters would be born in the holding, and no more youths would add their blood to the beam, and no more warriors would lay their salt and their silver before you. She saw worms in your eyes, Talgrun Longtooth’s-Bane, and maggots in Ymaera’s womb. The rot hound has come to remind us, and the time is near. So tell me, honored wife of my lord—are you with child? Or was my sister wrong?”

         Ymaera said nothing but pressed her hand against the loose fabric of her gown, betraying the faint curve there.

         “There is no doom coming over the mountains,” the crone coughed. “The child will be well. The prophecies of the cold ones are weak things born on wind. They have no meat. I see in the entrails. I listen to the iron and the yew. Which do you believe, my lord?”

         “If you will not flee, then we must fight,” I said, before Talgrun could answer. “All of us, in all the holdings. If the old war comes again, we will have to stand together.”

         “The old war? All the holdings?” Talgrun said, and shifted back. “You talk of kings, Reyna.”

         There was a rustle among the elders, like an uncomfortable laugh hastily concealed, and I burned.

         “Perhaps I do,” I said. To talk of kings: to speak of things too grand, too distant, to bother with. To invite by your careless speech those troubles that demand a king.

         It was an accusation, and a warning. I must not forget that at Talgrun’s order, I could be ignored—or bled dry before the beam as ward and warning.

         Talgrun shook his head. “There has been no king of the holdings since my grandfather’s time, and before him none since Korohn. And none who’d sit the throne at Agelfyrd, gladly or otherwise. Take your talk of kings and cold ones’ dreams back to your farm.” He lifted his hand and showed me the back of it. Dismissal, and one I could not refuse.

         Still I stood for the life of a single breath, my limbs tensing the way they did before a fight. But Evahr’s hand was on my arm then, drawing me away, and I surrendered to him. I saw Nagrat’s face as I left, the one in three I trusted, and saw that he believed me.

         The door opened before us. I looked back over my shoulder and lifted my voice, cast it like a net across the crowd and the council alike. “Titha’s warning will prove true, and soon,” I said. “We’d best be ready.”

         And then I pushed out, ignoring the swarm of half-questions that came with me. Let them buzz and wonder. Those that mattered, the dozen grim-eyed men and women in the crowd who would follow my voice blind through an ice storm, heard and drifted swiftly away. We would have our own council, without the nattering of crows.

* * *

3

         “Are you mad?” Evahr asked as we made the long walk home. I wore the rot hound’s pelt and carried my spear and shield. He hauled ax and shield, spear and mail shirt, oilskin pack and satchel of gold and silver loot—and the chain of the seal-eyed muteling who walked close behind and listened.

         I ignored my husband and glanced at the girl. “You know our tongue?” I asked. I repeated it in the Slight Isles tongue, the stutter-speech of the holdings Evahr had taken her from. No response. I tried the old tongue and she reacted, but it might have been fear at the language, not acknowledgment of the question. It was the tongue of sorcerers, though its power was well faded since Korohn’s time.

         “Don’t bother,” Evahr said. “We spared an old man and in turn he told us much. Including that their headman caught these mutelings wild in the forewinter. None of them so much as gesture.”

         Is that true? I asked, hands flitting like swallows. No answer. “It’s too soon for another child,” I said. “Let Imri birth hers first before you get to rutting again.” My words were idly bitter, bitten with anger after the council. Evahr clenched his teeth and dragged on the chain, passing anger down the line as I had.

         I thought we had agreed we would take no other muteling, nor ask of Imri what she would not offer. We had not said as much. But Evahr knew me, knew my mind, better than any living man. I thought it did not need to be said. I thought he understood.

         “I don’t mean to—” He cut himself off. “You know I wouldn’t.”

         “What if Imri doesn’t breed true?” I snapped. “Or if she spits out gelds and cold children—or mutelings, forbid it? You’ll be without a son to take over when you’re rattling your last. Can you say you haven’t thought of that? Why else claim her?”

         “She was a gift from Talgrun. I couldn’t refuse. Not without angering him. I won’t—she won’t—I don’t know what you expect me to do.” Evahr gave a frustrated shake of his head. Looked away from me.

         I rubbed the side of my neck, the spot where my skin was still scar-roughened from the iron collar that I had worn for a decade. Evahr had worn his longer, but the only scar it had left him was a patch the size of my thumbprint, at the base of his neck. Still sometimes I wondered if he had forgotten his collar was no longer there. That he did not belong to Talgrun anymore.

         “We’ll be without a son, you mean,” Evahr said at last.

         “What?”

         “Not you. We.”

         I grunted. Some women stood over their husbands as they strove with a muteling, or even lay in the bed beside to claim some connection to the act. I’d taken the spear and trailed a honey-colored stag past the stones and to the mountain-foot, gone two weeks to give them time and time again.

         I loved Imri; I loved Evahr; I hated that he loved her, and I hated that she did not love him, and I hated most of all that the chain around her neck made everything between us a broken, tainted thing. Since the gods had stained our skin and made gelds of most of us, the simplest thing had become impossible.

         We did not speak again. Not until we reached the farm and found Imri waiting for us outside, despite her promises to me. She went to Evahr first, pressing herself against him. He wrapped his arms around her. She laid her chin on his shoulder and stared at the muteling he led, calculation in her eyes. But when Evahr stepped back, that calculation was gone. She did not care that I saw it; we understood each other, Imri and I, and always had. But Evahr would not.

         I wondered sometimes if Imri had only offered to mother for us because she knew how it would bend Evahr’s distant tolerance into a fierce affection, rooting her in his heart. It was as calculated as the embrace; an act of survival. She knew that I would do anything to protect her. She knew that my protection might not be enough.

         We did what we had to. And did not speak of it.

         “We will have guests tonight,” I said. “Ten, perhaps. Make certain we can feed them. I’ll see to your prize, husband, and you can rest beneath your own roof, and wash the salt from your skin.”

         “Until we sail again,” he said.

         “Until you sail again,” I echoed. You-not-we. It tripped my tongue even after these five years gone.

         I took the muteling’s chain. She would not stay with us in the house, before we trusted one another. More than one man found his throat slit by a muteling’s hand. No muteling was killed for such a thing; in the gods’ cruel humor, the gelds’ affliction passed over the mutelings, left them fertile. Hardly one child in three proved true, man or woman, and there were no wombs to spare to retribution. But for every death a muteling caused, she lost two fingers, one from each hand. I’d seen a muteling once with a pad for a hand, a folding palm and a thumb and nothing else, and she had triumph in her eyes when she looked at me. I drank to her memory, from time to time, when the names of the dead were spent.

         I led the muteling to the workshop. One of the geld laborers was there, and I bade him strike her collar: a heavy thing that stretched collarbone to jaw so she could hardly tilt her chin, the lock iron and heavy enough to brain a man with it. He threw them on the pile of scrap. We had no collar to replace it, but he looped chain twice around her neck and locked that. She’d not be able to pass into Kalstavr without a collar and the mark stamped on it, but that would cause no trouble for a while yet.

         “Better?” he asked.

         She’d held still through it, and now her fingers reached up to poke and prod and feel her new collar.

         “Temporary,” I said. “We’ll get you one fitted. Thin and light.”

         She twitched a question with her fingers. Gesture-speech was not a language of distinct words but of linking thoughts and letting meaning shape itself in the gaps between. She traced a contour like Imri’s belly, let her nail tap the links around her neck—I’ll have a chain like hers?

         “Perhaps,” I said. “You could have a chain that thin, if we trust you. But I cannot promise it.” And now I knew she knew our tongue—and gesture, too. “Do you have a name?” I asked. She shook her head. “Do you want one?” I asked. She hesitated.

         A name was a powerful thing for a muteling or a cold child. Every one of us bore grayling blood within our veins, changed by our proximity to their world and their kind. For most it was a subtle thing. Our eyes a shade darker, keener in the night, our skin cool or faintly gray. The change was starkest for the cold, stilling their very hearts. Too inhuman to be made struck by the gods’ affliction but barren nonetheless, nearly sexless like the gray. The mutelings stood at the cusp between the worlds. Voiceless, like the graylings. Untouched by the affliction. But human enough to bear.

         A name might tug at us from time to time like old scar tissue, but it wrenched at the mutelings and the cold; tore at them. The giving of a name was not a kindness to force one upon them.

         “A nickname,” I suggested. “Something to call you, that’s all.”

         Slowly, she nodded. There was danger in that as well, of course. A name called could turn into a name true with repetition, if it fit too well. “Seal,” I said. It belonged to another creature and would be slower to embed itself. Another nod; it would do.

         What did you mean? she asked. Her words came slowly to her fingers, as if she were still reluctant to admit that she could form them. That your people should not have stayed here?

         I leaned against the wall and considered her. I looked to the gelding. “Go see if my husband needs anything,” I told him, and he left with a ducked head. “My sister, Titha, was cold-born,” I said. “You know what that means?”

         Born with still blood but moving breath. Cold flesh and black eyes. They see and know what is to come.

         “And she saw more than most,” I said. “She said the old doom would come over the mountains again, and no living man or beast would remain in the holdings from the horn in the north to the dashing rocks in the south.”

         The old doom?

         Most did not teach history to mutelings, or anything else. There was no purpose to it; they were tainted wombs, that was all. Iron thralls were both more and less—born to kill and die, never to continue our lines, but we were taught the songs and stories to remind us of why we fought.

         “In my grandfather’s grandfather’s time, there was a race of giants,” I said. “The gods—the gods of stone and field, hearth and flame, sky and sea—held them at bay. But the gods betrayed us. They set the affliction upon us to make us barren and loosing the giants from their bonds. The giants cracked through the old holdings like eggs. They bit down on bone and ripped at flesh and ate us down to the molars. We fled and fought and fled again, until we reached the mountains. There was no way to cross the mountains, it was said, but Korohn found a path through the belly of the greatest and caved the tunnel when his people had passed. That is why we call ourselves Summer Holders, in this place of winter,” I said. “We came from sun and golden fields, but we had to flee. And my sister saw the giants striding over the mountain peaks that we passed beneath—that we believe protect us. Saw, too, a two-headed wolf devouring the sun. And other things—but they all meant that we must flee from here.”

         But you did not.

         “We did not,” I agreed. “We remember the last war we fought, not the one before it. We remember the graylings, not the giants—remember them coming through cracks in stone too narrow for a blade. And we remember that we defeated them. We are wary of the woods now, not the peaks. Giants are a distant story, told by old women to frighten children.”

         The muteling pursed her lips. She looked over my shoulder at nothing, blank wall rimed with dirt. A cold one does not see untruly, she said.

         “This is so. But the crone says otherwise.”

         Why?

         I sighed. I did not know how to explain the history held between the lot of us. Evahr and I and Ymaera and Talgrun and the crone and Titha. A history of secrets kept and betrayed, of battles won and lost, of deals struck and power traded. The crone’s power was a thin, mealy thing, as bent as her staff. She feared losing it. Ymaera feared Talgrun discovering that the babes she’d borne weren’t his. Talgrun feared that he had erred when he gave me my freedom and my sister, and made a hero of me.

         And Evahr was full of fear. For me, for Imri, for the future. And that was why I had never defied Talgrun but carried my anger at his inaction lodged like a knifepoint below my lowest rib.

         “Talgrun will never flee Kalstavr, and he will never bend his neck enough to ask for help from the other holdings,” I said. “And there is no lord who’d be a king to save the world.”

         If you stay, you die, she said.

         “We die,” I agreed.

         Then you leave.

         The simplicity of it cut. “We leave,” I echoed. “With whoever will follow.”

         And pray Talgrun didn’t kill us for trying.

* * *

         I had spoken those last words in Kalstavr as a summons—a call to those who trusted me or who trusted the cold ones’ words. Some would be afraid to answer, but others would hear, would understand. They would come, and we would speak of what needed to be done.

         I told Imri to cook for ten men, and then I sat in the yard, sharpening my spear and watching the left-hand road with wary hope.

         Imri made food for twenty and proved the wiser of us. Fifteen came, in all. Most were freeholders of one sort or another, but a few wore the collars of the iron thralls, risking death even to sit at the fringes of our council.

         “Careful,” I told Imri, whispering as she bent to serve. “I’ll start to think you cold, with your guesswork.”

         Not cold, she signed. Just clever. She smiled, her face unblemished, unmarked. Mutelings and thralls did not bear the mark of the holdings on their cheeks but rather stamped on the iron of their collars; Imri’s chain was anchored with a flat iron circle at the nape of her neck, etched with the holding’s knot. Allowing her passage—but not belonging. I wondered if she would accept the sigil, were it offered. I had taken mine gladly, a triumph I had clawed after for years, but it was a prize any iron thrall could earn if they were skilled and lucky. No muteling could ever be free; not until all of us were free of the affliction.

         Most gathered with us were fighters of one sort or another, scar-notched men who’d served under Evahr, or Nagrat under whom Ehvar had served in turn. Vieka and her black-eyed babe had come, and the old woman, Onesha, who’d been the one to tighten the cord around the last king’s neck when his reign was deemed done. These were the people who would leave the holding with us, if we could convince them—leave and seek a new home.

         I knew Nagrat was a true man, and Vieka’s child was proof enough of her abundance, but I searched the others for the sign of the affliction: the red-wine stain that appeared in childhood, at the age when the last milk teeth were lost. My own stain looped over my shoulder, up my neck, across my jaw as red as blood. Others wore their stains on their arms, across their knuckles, knotted at the base of their spines.

         All those I had been uncertain of had some scrap of red visible on their skin. Six whole men, one woman true, and the rest of us gelds. That pricked some part of me, the narrow sliver of myself given over to worrying at the curve of the long road instead of the steps straight ahead. There were not many of us, and fewer whose lines would continue; we might survive, only to wither in the first generation.

         Don’t worry about winter if you’re starving in spring, I reminded myself.

         When the meal was done, the room went quiet; the silence passed down the line to Nagrat and stayed with him, his to break.

         “We all know why we are here,” he said, accepting the duty. “Not one of us spoke of it before we arrived. Not one of us had to. Everyone here knows Reyna. Knows Evahr. Knows me. Some of you passed through the narrow place with us. So I won’t waste time explaining why you should listen, and trust, and believe.” He looked to me.

         “My sister died to bring us her warning,” I said. “Drank grayling blood enough to eat her through from the inside. Because she knew how much was at stake. The old doom is coming. We should have had years to prepare, to fight or to flee. Instead, it is nearly upon us.”

         There was a murmur, discontent shouldering its way among the crowd. I raised a hand to still it. When silence won, I dropped my hand and considered each face in turn.

         If we stay, we die.

         And so we leave.

         But it was not so simple as that. They had come; they had answered. But they were not ready to follow. No one had left the holdings since the days of Korohn—not willingly, not in numbers. Beyond the holdings lay the wild, the living winter that preyed on any warm thing, the beasts that even graylings feared. But it was not fear that kept this lot rooted here, this band of iron men and women more ferocious than wolf or bear.

         No, not fear, but its opposite. They did not want to leave, because to leave was to run, to abandon the holding and their defense of it. And it was a far harder thing to talk a man out of courage than out of fear, when he had his teeth in it.

         If we stay, we die.

         I looked at Nagrat. At Evahr. Neither spoke. It was I who had heard the Telling, who had carried it to Talgrun as I had carried also the graylings’ heart. If we were to leave, I would have to lead them.

         “Talgrun won’t act,” I said. “He listens to Ymaera; Ymaera listens to the crone. Without him, we cannot rally the other holdings, even if there was time. Our only choice is to leave, and leave quickly.”

         “Leave?” said a red-bearded man named Kalgrim.

         “Warriors and iron thralls do not flee,” I said. “Iron thralls and free men stand and they die for their holding. That’s what you are thinking, is it not?”

         No answer, but the looks on their faces were confirmation enough.

         I looked to the men I knew, the men who had stood shoulder to shoulder with me, in the days of the red raids over the water and the war with the gray, beyond the stones. “I fought alongside you. Evahr leads you now. Did I ever break? Has he ever broken?”

         “No!” came the answer at once.

         “Did I ever run? Has Evahr ever run?” I demanded.

         “No!” they answered.

         The chorus grew louder, crowded the rafters, and a grin stretched my lips, battle-hunger beating fast in my chest. “Because we stand, we hold, we fight. For the good of the holding. But there is no standing against the old doom. If we fight, the holding dies. Every muteling mother, every geld, every child. We are cowards if we stay, too wedded to our pride to protect our own.”

         I looked at them each. Hard, well-blooded men and women: those wearing Talgrun’s iron yoke, eager to break it, and those with faces tattooed as mine was with the seventeenth knot, the sign of our holding. The fiercest of the holdings, the strongest. We who had lifted our beam half a league from the narrow place, unknowing; who had been harried by the gray more than any other holding and never broken.

         “Talgrun is a coward. Too afraid to see the truth,” I said. “I will not stay and die a coward with him.”

         “Nor I,” Evahr said. Ever my echo, ever behind me. But there all the same.

         “Nor I,” said Nagrat, and then there were nods among the others.

         Kalgrim crossed his arms. “Will we leave the rest behind, then? To die, or else be left without our blades to keep raiders from the shore?”

         “We must take as many as we can,” I said. “But tell no one we cannot trust completely. If Talgrun discovers us, he’ll kill us before he lets us leave.”

         “It’s too large an undertaking to go unnoticed,” Nagrat said. “We cannot leave overnight and expect to survive outside the holdings.”

         “There is another sailing in a month’s time,” Evahr said. “We can mask our preparations. Gather more than we need for the sailing. Leave behind those that aren’t loyal, and bring our families in their place.”

         A month. Too long, but they were right. Starvation would kill us as surely as whatever danger drew close over the mountains.

         “One month,” I said.

         “Where would we go?” Vieka asked, voice soft, her cold daughter watching with still black eyes from her lap. “To one of the other holdings?”

         “The old doom will not stop at our holding,” I said. “We will sail, and we will not stop until we find safety.” There were lands beyond our shores and islands, or so the stories said—a cousin’s cousin’s friend had found them, or a stranger had washed ashore with stories of places free from the gray and the affliction. The sort of tales readily told and rarely believed.

         Nagrat spared me further questions. “The rest will not be for all to know,” he said. “But for Reyna and Evahr and I to decide.”

         “But we are not decided,” Kalgrim said. “You are no chief, Reyna. And we are not your thralls. Call the tally, and let all freemen have their vote.”

         “You are right,” I said. “I am no chief. There is no headman here. And if we do this, none of us will make this journey as thralls. Let all have their vote. Let every voice be counted.”

         Kalgrim hesitated before nodding approval. At the edge of the room, Imri’s lips twisted in bitter humor. No voice, no vote. But she met my gaze, and I spoke to her voiceless. My blade for you, I said in gesture, and she understood.

         Evahr and Nagrat dragged the table to the center of the room and without ceremony cast their votes: two iron knives tossed onto the center of the table without hesitation. Evahr returned to me; Nagrat gave me a deep nod before returning to his seat.

         The rest of them approached the table, singly or in pairs. One blade after another joined Evahr’s and Nagrat’s, then Vieka and Onesha’s iron thumb-rings. Kalgrim stayed at the edge, scratching his thumbnail against his jaw. Then, abruptly, he strode forward, throwing his blade down with the rest.

         “So be it,” he said, more to himself than to me, and took his place again.

         And then there was only my blade left to add, pale among the rest, final.

         We would leave.

* * *

4

         The night our sister died, she sent for me. I still had the habit of iron, then, clinging to the weak warding of the cuffs at my wrists, the blade at my hip. I went into the woods well-armed and watched graylings flinch and flurry in the trees. Dozens of them; many, too many, but they did not attack.

         Titha’s home was a blister on the earth, a domed-over pit at the root of a tree far more ancient than our holdings. Moss grew over the roof, and that night three graylings crouched among the green, blinking wet black eyes at me, their knees bent up around their ears. They were the common kind, with the shape of a child stretched too thin and too long, their skulls ridged with mushroom caps, their feet and fingers splayed wide. The gills that slashed their ribs like wounds flared and rippled, tasting air, filaments and lamellae as dark as wine.

         “I’ve no quarrel,” I said. “She called me.”

         The closest of them touched two long fingers to its cheek, below its left eye. If it was an answer, I didn’t know what it signified.

         Titha was inside, hunched kneeling by the fire. She held a wooden cup in one hand, blue-black blood viscous and shining in it. Her head hung low. The ground was scattered with red blood, her blood, and more dripped from the corner of her mouth.

         She shuddered when I entered. I went to her, knelt, took the cup from her hand. Her lips blistered where the grayling blood had touched.

         “I see,” she rasped. Her pupils were blown, fixed on nothing. “I see.”

         The graylings moved above us, footsteps rustling. I pressed my brow to hers, breathed in the acidic stench of her exhalation. “Why do you do this?” I asked. I thought it was the same argument we had worried over for years; I thought we would have it a hundred times more.

         Titha was the sort of fool who trusted truth to conquer comfort, and so she drank the blood again and again, listened to the wind through the gap in the stone, through the narrow place, and killed herself to bring us prophecy that only went ignored. I wanted her home with us, beneath my roof, but she stayed out here among the gray, more kin to them each day.

         She turned her face, pressed her cold cheek against my blood-warm hand. “Reyna. You came.”

         “Always, my love,” I said.

         “You came for the Telling.”

         “I came for you,” I said. “Rest, Titha. The Telling will hold.”

         “It won’t,” she said. She shuddered again. “I took too much. Far too much.”

         When a man sees his death, when he knows it, there is a certainty that girds his words, and I heard it then. When a man—or a woman, or a cold one—claims his death, it is an insult to deny it.

         I was a warrior. I did not weep or plead. I pulled her frail body close, held her, shut my eyes and breathed in the truth until I lost the urge to fight it. I sank through rage and into the black water of grief.

         “Titha,” I said, all I could manage.

         She sighed against my shoulder. “I had to see it all,” she said. “But I fear it is not enough.”

         “Tell me.”

         She whispered to me what she’d seen, as she had so many times before, since the first night she came back from the forest, with blistered lips and a grayling’s thorn ring on her finger, babbling of bright stars and a white calf born in winter. Now she spoke of dark things, of rot and of ruin, of disaster come over the mountains.

         Every word, I etched in memory; the Telling must be precise, syllable by syllable. Told true, beginning to end, or it was no Telling at all.

         I listened, and remembered. And when the last word was spoken, my sister spat a glob of congealed blood on the ground and fixed her black eyes on me.

         “There’s more.”

         I laughed, wild and disbelieving. “There can’t be more. There can’t be more than that,” I said.

         “This I Tell to you, and you alone,” she said. “You must not speak it to any other. Not yet. You will know the time.”

         I had no more protestation to offer; it was spent. And so I did not stutter that such a thing—to hoard the words of the cold ones—was forbidden, since the first cold child spoke prophecy.

         She leaned close to me, one hand hooked around the back of my neck, and she whispered in my ear. Her words were the hissing of snakes, of long grass stirred in the wind. “You will stand again beneath an unbroken moon, but bear no iron. You will flee across lands that have no name, and a thousand enemies will be against you. You will feast with death and treat with beasts, and walk among the bones of gods long dead. You will find a place in the hills, a place of summer, but not all will reach it, and it won’t be safe. Not until you drive your spear into the heart of a king.”

         Then she was silent. She sighed, her weight growing heavier on me as weariness stole the strength from her. “Reyna,” she said. She pressed the pommel of a knife into my hand. Not iron; hewn from an antler, carved with Korohn’s knots, but different somehow. They seemed alive in the firelight, twisting like snakes. “Take this blade. Whisper your name to it; wear it against your skin. Forsake all iron. You must—” She did not finish, choking on her words as she coughed blood against my shoulder.

         “I was a child when I was given to the iron,” I said. It had already been nearly three years since I last went with the red raids across the sea, since I took the mark and left the thralls, but still I clung to my old ways and weapons, afraid to discover how much of me was left without them. “I cannot forsake it so easily.”

         “Thrall no longer,” my sister said. Her breath rattled wetly in her throat. “You must find another way, sister, and I will not be there to guide you. Forgive me. Please. I—”

         But that was the last. Sudden, irrevocable. I held my sister’s body as her spilled cup dripped grayling blood to hiss upon the ground, and the graylings took up the sound, and then the hissing turned to low fluting call and it moaned through the trees, spreading shadow to shadow and trunk to trunk until it filled the night from the warding stones to the threshold of the narrow place, and I imagined it echoing further still, over their fields, beneath their unshattered moon.

         My grief was silent. Was unobserved. I buried my sister in the cold ground and built her a cairn of stones, and no one saw me weep.

* * *

         I could not be sure if it was memory that woke me in the night from uneasy sleep or a dream. Only that I had tasted blood and heard the calling of a crow, but woke to neither. Evahr’s hand rested lightly on my hip, the rest of his body canted toward Imri. I shifted, letting his hand fall, and he rolled toward her.

         I watched a moment as he settled again, trying to name the emotion that stirred when I saw them like this. I still couldn’t. Perhaps there wasn’t a name for it.

         I left them there and walked into the night air. It was a clear night, the jagged, wolf-bitten moon bright and full. On nights like these, the wards wore thin, but still I was surprised to see a grayling in the yard, hunched over. Like the ones waiting on my sister’s words, two years ago.

         And then another emerged, long limbs pulling it spider-like across the ground, from the thatch-roofed shed where I’d left Seal chained. When it reached its fellow it stopped, turned wide black eyes on me.

         There was something strange about it. Something different. There were whites around its eyes, and the fingers splayed in the mud numbered five, not four—or was it only a trick of the light? And its features—not so sharp, not so feral. More human, somehow.

         It touched two fingers beneath its eye. I echoed the gesture instinctively, covering the knot tattooed there.

         It shook its head and turned away from me. The two crept across the yard, into the trees. I was wise enough to check for their shadows, lest they had left them to linger and watch, but they were gone as well.

         Imri’s touch at my elbow made me flinch.

         You’re cold, she chided me, and threw a blanket around my shoulders. She nodded toward the woods, toward the spot where the graylings had vanished. They visit her. Why?

         “I don’t know,” I said, trying not to betray how much the sight troubled me. The graylings spoke to the cold. They offered the mutelings no more regard than they did the rest of us, so far as I had heard, and while graylings were strange, their strangeness was constant. Their rules bound them better than iron or the warding stones ever could.

         I don’t trust her, Imri said.

         “Do you distrust her because of who she is, or because you worry Evahr’s eyes will stray to her?” I asked.

         Do you worry? Imri asked, and there were more questions there than she had spoken. I knew what she was asking, and I couldn’t answer. She took my hand and pressed it against her belly. The babe within shifted against my palm. This is your child.

         “How can it be?” I said, softly. Her grip did not relent. “It is mine because you are mine, but if I could make you free, I would. I cannot claim you. I cannot claim your child.”

         It is yours because you are my sister. Because as children we hid together, and when they found me you promised you would bring me home, even as they closed a thrall’s collar around your neck. Because you crept among the thorns and shadows so you could whisper to me and learn our speech. You promised to bring me home, to bring us both home, and you kept that promise. This child would not exist without you. Without all of us. This is your child. And Evahr’s. And mine.

         A muteling had no claim to her own issue. It had not occurred to me that Imri might want a child, herself, one that would not be taken away from her. Another dark current of fear I had not glimpsed or guessed at.

         “I will never let anyone take your child from you,” I said. Including me, I did not say.

         I know. She lifted my hand, touched it to her cheek. Kissed my palm. And then, dropping my hand to free both of her own, she shaped her words carefully. I do not trust her, Reyna. Be wary. For all of us.

         She left me there, cold scraping at my cheeks and doubt biting at my throat. I stared at the dark doorway to the shed, straining to see any shift in the shadows. I did not return to bed for a very long time.

* * *

5

         We were thirty-nine.

         It was too many. Too many names I hardly knew to speak, too many faces only glimpsed in Kalstavr. A secret could not survive so many eyes, but I could do nothing to contain it.

         Thirty-nine, and most of them gelds. Only one muteling, other than Imri and Seal; the few true men among us paid silver and skins for a year’s time with Talgrun’s mutelings when it came time to make an heir. True women had more freedom than mutelings, and what captivity they suffered was one of coddling. They had their pick of husbands, and of true men to sire their children. So long as they bore, they had gifts and praise and more comfort than any geld. Such a life bred complacency, not discontent. They would not risk the seas with us.

         And so our tribe would wither in a generation, but that did not matter if we did not escape these shores at all. I put distant worry aside and nursed the more immediate one: with such a sprawling secret, we could not hope to go undiscovered.

         There was nothing to do, though, except hope and chide the others into silence. And go into the woods whenever I could with my spear and my bow, bringing home game to skin and salt: food for the journey. The sea would be cold and cruel and wide, and there were no gods to make offerings to, to grant us fair winds and full nets. The gods were things of bile and spite, not blessings; not any longer.

         I was returning from the forest with a brace of hares over my shoulder and a child’s rhyme stuck in my mind—under, under, down we all go—when I saw Mad Hosfar’s wolf outside my house, red tongue lolling between her teeth. Worry turned to cold fear. Mad Hosfar went where Talgrun bade him, and blood usually followed.

         That he was here did not mean he knew, I told myself. Did not mean that Talgrun knew. Hosfar was a friend, after all—the way any man was when you’d passed blood debt back and forth in the course of a battle.

         It was five years now since the graylings had come past the stones, a seething sea of them, stronger than the wards at the edge of the woods. They might have proved stronger than the midbeam’s knots and the blood that sustained them, but we iron thralls had driven them back before the graylings could test them. Back and back again—and then that hour of madness in the woods, when the very shadows seemed to strike against us, when we pressed them; pushed them to the narrow place, that sliver in the stone that joined their world to ours—and pushed through it, following them, their blood burning our skin.

         We fought them in their own fields, an endless tide of them. And then we had broken through, just a few of us, Mad Hosfar and I and others now dead. We had survived, and that survival had forged something between us.

         He would not readily break such a bond. It might protect us yet.

         I hung my hares on the peg outside the shed and went to the wolf, bending down on one knee before her to rub her ears.

         “Dayn vahra,” I greeted her in the old tongue, which some beasts still heeded. “What is your master doing here, old warrior?”

         She snapped her teeth at me. A warning, perhaps, or just an ornery old wolf with more than a little of the wild in her. I stood and stooped to go inside, where I found my husband at the table with Mad Hosfar, drinking in silence.

         Evahr nodded toward me, and Mad Hosfar stood and turned. He was a beast of a man, twice as broad across as I and twice as scarred, the backs of his hands rippled where grayling blood had flowed so freely during the three days’ war. His hair was white but for a few streaks of orange and left wild to make him look feral.

         The child’s rhyme echoed in my mind, incongruous—Where tears are for drinking and wine is for weeping.

         “You can set that spear down, Reyna,” Hosfar said.

         I hadn’t realized I was still carrying it. Hadn’t realized I gripped it so tightly. “I’ll set my spear aside when I know what Talgrun’s butcher is doing in my home,” I said.

         “Feythann,” Mad Hosfar said, peace in the old tongue, and laughed when I didn’t move. “Should have known a beast as wild as Reyna Bonespear would not heed the old words. Then let the new suffice. Peace, sister. I did not half-drown in grayling blood by your side all those years ago to raise a blade to you now, in your own home. Talgrun sent me, it’s true, and he means you to be frightened by it. But you’ve never been frightened of me, and I have my own business with you, so forget Talgrun for now.”

         He lifted his hands to the side, letting his fur cloak fall back and showing me the empty scabbard on his belt. Showing me, too, Talgrun’s sigil, stuffed with its cord in his belt instead of hung around his neck as it ought to be.

         I swallowed the fear at the back of my throat and set my spear aside. My hand felt empty without it, clutching at air. Where is Imri? I didn’t ask aloud; I knew better than to bare a weakness in front of an enemy, and Mad Hosfar might yet be that.

         “Why are you here, if not for Talgrun?” I asked.

         “He knows,” Evahr said, and I nearly reached for the spear again. But if he knew and we were still alive, Talgrun must not share that knowledge.

         “I wasn’t there when you spoke before Talgrun and the crone,” Mad Hosfar said. “I’m glad of that, too. I wouldn’t have kept myself from telling the old woman to drink seawater. I knew your sister. And my mother taught me to honor the Telling. When your sister died, I told Talgrun to heed her. I told him he was a fool. And I knew the day would come that you’d leave without him. I’d pledge to you, if you’ll permit.” He drew the iron knife from his belt and held it hilt-out.

         I stood a moment dumbstruck. Mad Hosfar had broken more men for Talgrun than I’d battled in my lifetime. I’d watched him carve through a grayling pack, heedless of the stink of his own flesh burning where their blood coated him. Pledge to me? I had led men, once. To glory and to death. But never as more than a thrall to my chief.

         “No one’s pledged to me,” I said. “Only to the undertaking. So stow your blade.”

         “I didn’t ask what the others had done,” Mad Hosfar said. “It’s you who brought us the Telling, and you who will lead us out. So it’s to you I’ll pledge.”

         “Then pledge to Evahr. He leads the iron thralls. I have not drawn the blood of man or gray for years.”

         “No offense to Evahr, but I don’t know him,” Hosfar said. “I’ve never stood with him as I did with you. Never walked through the narrow place and spilled blood under a strange moon. I know you. Take my pledge or deny it, but I won’t make another, and I won’t go with you unpledged.”

         His hand was shaking, so slightly I might have missed it if I had not been so fixed on him. He’d worn Talgrun’s yoke all his life, for all that he bore the holding’s mark and not a collar. There were those, I knew, who wondered why he did not throw his knife at Talgrun’s feet and call him to the circle to fight for his place on the boneback chair. Hosfar would have won. But a man like Hosfar did not want to lead. More than that, he feared life without the yoke, without command to direct him.

         I stepped forward and took the hilt of his iron blade. He bent one knee, pressing his brow to my closed hand, his breath parted by the blade.

         “I accept your pledge, Hosfar.”

         No more ritual than this. I was no chief. There would be no spilling of blood, no ale to drink, no recitations. This was all, and its simplicity lent it power.

         Hosfar stood. I gave him back his knife, and he grinned, relief changing his posture from that of a man anticipating battle to one enjoying the company of friends. “Then it’s done,” he said. “Call on me, and I will be there. But in the meantime, I’m meant to scowl at you, and make sure you know to keep your place and keep your silence.”

         “Why such urgency in the message?” I asked. “Why now? I know full well what my headman wants of me, without your growling.”

         “His son’s entered his thirteenth year, and without the stain of the affliction on him,” Hosfar says. The stain always came before the thirteenth year, separating gelds from true men and women. The mutelings and the cold, of course, were known from birth—the mutelings silent even as their mouths stretched to wail, the cold quiet in a different way, and canny from the first. “He adds his blood to the midbeam on the morrow,” Hosfar continued. “Talgrun doesn’t want trouble on such a sacred day.”

         “He wants us to stay away? Fine,” Evahr said, half-sneering.

         “No.” I folded my arms. Evahr looked at me, surprise and question in his gaze, and I set my jaw. “If we shrink from him he will think we have reason to hide. When has my pride ever let me stand down from a challenge like that?”

         Mad Hosfar laughed. “She has you there,” he said.

         “Then we go,” Evahr agreed, conceding my point with a nod half amused and half worried.

         “And pretend with the rest of them that Yari hasn’t got your eyes,” I added to Mad Hosfar.

         “Hoi!” Mad Hosfar said, slapping his thigh. “Who am I to deny my headman’s wife when she demands the services of my sword?”

         “Aye, your sword is legendary,” I conceded. “Though if your headman knew how you wield it, you might not be in his service long.”

         “I’ll take my sword and my son with me when we go,” Mad Hosfar said. “And what Talgrun knows won’t matter anymore.”

         He left, the old wolf trailing him, and Evahr and I waited through three qualities of silence—surprised, considering, and content—before either of us spoke.

         “We’re fortunate to have Hosfar with us,” I said at last.

         “I would not have expected it of him,” Evahr said. “And his visit still worries me. Talgrun may not know the full shape of our plan, but he would not have sent Mad Hosfar if he did not suspect.”

         “Of course he suspects,” I said. “He has watched me since my sister’s death.”

         “He’s watched you longer than that,” Evahr said. “He’s watched you since you slipped your collar and his leash. He’s always known you’d call him to the circle, sooner or later.”

         “A geld cannot sit the high seat,” I said.

         “A geld never has,” Evahr said. “But we have been but few generations since Korohn and the Retreat. The youngest babe to pass beneath the mountain is hardly in the ground, brittle though her bones were at the end. Our oldest traditions are young. A geld could sit in the high seat if enough pledged to her. If you had not laid down your sword—”

         “But I did,” I said. “My sword and all iron. I’ll spill no more blood but that of beasts, Evahr, and certainly not for the glory of the high seat.”

         “For the protection of your people?” Evahr asked. “For the protection of your family?”

         I heard her enter behind me: Imri, her steps short as her belly had grown rounder. It would not be long, now, before she birthed.

         “For my family I would drive my spear into the heart of the sun,” I said. “You both know that. But there need not be blood spilled by me or any other. We will retreat, that is all, and leave Talgrun what power he can cling to. There need be no war. No killing. And no more blades pledged to my name.”

         I still believed that this could be a bloodless thing—this flight, this severing. But we had been bound to the holding with blood, and such bonds were not cleanly broken.

* * *

6

         Of the twenty-eight clans to come through the pass with Korohn, fewer than half remained. There were five holdings that kept to the Accord, seven more than had broken it, scattered among the islands and the crescent cusp of the bitter sea, and who knew how many men and women in the tameless wild and the forewinter. But Kalstavr, the seventeenth holding, was the largest, and when its headman’s son—supposed son—came of age, there was no greater spectacle. I walked into the village to the beating of drums, the smoke of a dozen bonfires stinging my eyes.

         A geld girl danced past me, twirling, stripped to the waist with handprints in white and red marking every place someone had manage to touch her. Not many, and she laughed as she danced past a gray-bearded man’s lunge.

         “Remember when you danced like that?” Evahr asked, touching my waist. I shot him a look more pointed than the spear on my back.

         “I never danced like that,” I said.

         “It must have been a dream I had,” he said, goading a smile from me. “But I do remember you danced.”

         Yes, I danced. On days like this, my feet slapping the ground, my blood quick. And on the day I laid the graylings’ heart shuddering at Talgrun’s feet, and he offered me any boon I wished. I asked for myself, and for Imri. And once I was free, I did not have to ask for Evahr; he came to me. That night, we danced.

         Evahr’s eyes strayed toward the shore, where the sounds of fighting vaulted over the laughter and music to reach us. “Go on,” I said. “Try not to bloody your face too much. I like it pretty.”

         He pulled me against him and kissed me, a crushing kiss as full of lust for battle as for me. “For luck,” he said. I gave him all I had.

         Evahr left me, and I surveyed the crowd. Talgrun stood in the shadow of the long hall, cloaked in the pelt of a bear, the claws of a longtooth around his neck. Bare-headed, of course. No crown for Talgrun, no circlet, not so much as a cap against the chill in the air. It was ill fortune to even have the look of a king, and Talgrun was a superstitious man, in all the ways that did not matter.

         Ymaera did not stand with her husband, and I looked for her amid the crowd. I found her watching the drummers with her daughter at her side. Since I’d flung my ill-tempered words her way, she’d stopped hiding the budding swell of her belly, and now she wore a golden chain below her breasts to emphasize her shape. Four months along, I’d guess, judging by how she’d carried Yari and Gann and Nori—and Fithra, who’d died of fever as a babe.

         I wasn’t certain what bold or foolish instinct carried me across the yard to her. Nori saw me coming and tugged her mother’s skirt. Ymaera turned, saw me, stitched the sort of smile to her lips an adder wears.

         “Reyna. I did not think you would come today,” she said.

         “I come to honor my headman’s son,” I said. “He is my liege, is he not? It is my duty to honor the rite—even if your husband sees fit to send a mad dog to my home to warn me away.”

         Her eyes flickered with something—surprise? Then Talgrun had not consulted with his wife when he sent Mad Hosfar to my home. There was once a time when not a thought passed through Talgrun’s mind without him whispering it in Ymaera’s ear. What had changed? What cracks lay between them?

         Silence stretched, wide as a madman’s grin. We had slung so many sharp words at one another these past few years, nursed so much hate, but there had been a time I would have said I loved Ymaera. Before Talgrun took her to wife, before he’d even claimed the boneback chair for his own. We had been friends, until one day we weren’t. I had never understood what had happened, why she had turned so swiftly, so viciously against me.

         All this time it had seemed impossible to forgive, but now...

         “Is your babe well?” I asked.

         Her eyes were gilt with suspicion, but still she smiled. “I’ve felt him quicken,” she said.

         “A boy,” I replied, nodding once, still unsure what I wanted to say or do. I only knew that I grieved suddenly and keenly for the friendship we’d once had and wished that I could believe for an instant that my sister had been wrong.

         “So the crone says,” Ymaera replied. Her hand cupped her daughter’s shoulder, holding her close. “What do you want, Reyna?”

         I wanted her to tell her husband to gather the holding and flee. I wanted her to take my hand as she had when we were young and walk with me; walk away from this place. But she couldn’t. To admit that I was right was to sever hope of a living child. My sister had seen Ymaera birth death, birth rot and decay.

         “I hope that Titha was wrong,” I said. “If you’ve felt the child quicken—”

         “I have,” she said, too swiftly, too fiercely for it to be true, and my fleeting hope drowned.

         I nodded. “Good health to both of you, then,” I said. A roar went up by the water. Evahr had won; his name snapped free of the clamor to confirm it.

         “Good health,” she echoed, words hollow of meaning, and turned away.

         I shook myself free of her, of the guilt of a broken friendship still clinging to me like cobwebs. She’d turned away from me long before today, I reminded myself, and whatever longing I had for the life we might have shared as friends, that branch had withered. Let her fate be in her own hands, then—and yet I wished I could call out to her, and that she would listen.

         I had my own life. Evahr and Imri, our child, our homestead—or the home we would make, wherever the winds willed us. I would not trade any of that, not one inch of it, for her approval.

         I turned, and my gaze caught against Talgrun’s. His expression betrayed neither anger nor surprise, but a thrum of nerves went through me. He held up a hand, bent two beckoning fingers.

         I had never retreated from a fight. I approached Talgrun and dipped my head, all due honor to my lord; he laid his fingertips against the pommel of a sword not drawn in battle for years, as if that were a threat to anything more bold than a field mouse.

         “Why are you here, Reyna? Come to spit more sorrows at me?” Talgrun asked.

         “If you and your wife keep asking why I have come, on a day when all are called to come, I will wonder if you want me beneath the beam,” I said. “If you wish to cut my tether to your holding, you know the words and the ways.”

         Talgrun shifted, mulling an answer, or perhaps only wanting me to think he was undecided. Behind him, men who’d drawn blades and blood far more recently than he stood with hands loose and eyes wary, mindful of the spear on my back and the tales they’d heard of me. I’d heard tales of them, too, and knew that if it came to it I could kill them all. Had Mad Hosfar been there, perhaps not, but even if he’d been willing to fight me, he stood vigil for Yari down below.

         “Come with me,” Talgrun said. I looked, without meaning to, for Evahr, but he was still down by the shore. We should not have separated. Talgrun was already moving, and I allowed myself a single breath before following. There was no reason for me to falter—not if I was obedient, if I was loyal.

         Though I wondered if either of us clung to even the barest shred of that lie. It was odd to think that I might, yet that same part of me that grieved Ymaera’s friendship longed for the days when my lord’s approval made me boastful. Talgrun was not a fool and not a wicked man; I had taken honor in his service, once.

         He led me not to the great doors of the hall, banded in yew and iron like the crone’s staff, but to the recessed steps behind the long hall. The entrance to the underbelly, the tunnels carved with grayling blood, melted inch by inch through the stone long before Korohn came through the pass and drove the gray beyond the warding stones.

         Talgrun took a key from a chain around his neck and opened the door. We both had to bow our heads to pass through it, and the tunnel beyond was narrow enough Mad Hosfar would have to turn sideways to shuffle through. In the room beyond, lit by a pair of braziers gone mostly to coals, a strange procession filed by: three muteling girls, none older than ten, bracketed by their minders.

         The girls’ collars were no more than thin bands of iron; the smallest still plucked at hers, as if she’d only just had it locked around her throat in place of the anklets the youngest mutelings wore. Around their wrists they wore bands of gold. These were the girls chosen for Yari, then, returning from the ritual chamber to the crèche.

         Imri’s child could be like them one day, iron around her throat. Any muteling girl would be forfeit, tax to Talgrun, and we could not protect her.

         And I had brought them here. If not these, others—women, children. The one sliver of blamelessness I could cling to was that I had never brought a muteling in wild from the tameless waste or the forewinter who had not been chained before. But such a distinction was a thin frayed line I drew for myself and did not truly believe.

         The girl at the end, dark-haired and dark-eyed, no marks on her arm, looked at me. She touched two fingers below her eye. Only for an instant, and then her hand dropped, her gaze returning to the floor as they passed us.

         My breath hitched, as if caught in a rot hound’s grip. Seal, and the grayling, and now this girl—they knew me.

         “Does something trouble you, Reyna?” Talgrun said. The girls vanished down the lefthand passage to the crèche, their footsteps whispers against the stone.

         “No,” I lied. “Nothing.”

         Talgrun walked not toward the muteling crèche or the ritual chambers, where Yari would be anointing his brow and his limbs with oil, but toward a passage, rougher than the rest, that I had walked once before. He was taking me to the heart. To the chamber where we’d hidden it.

         Our steps echoed, as if dogged by ghosts. I was, curiously, unafraid. Perhaps it was logic. Talgrun was a leader but not much of a warrior. He’d held the boneback chair through strength of a different sort, and through the reputation of his father and his father’s father. He would not try to kill me like this, in a cramped space without his men. My spear would be useless—I would never get it off my back—but it was hardly my only weapon.

         Or perhaps it was something else that brought me calm. Something like trust—or simply knowledge. He would not kill me today. Not yet. Not if he thought he could bring me back under the beam truly, to his service.

         This was not the same corridor I had walked down those years before. The same stone, yes, oddly rippled where grayling blood had flowed. But the walls were lanced with iron now, bands of it bolted to the seamless stone. It made a lattice, like a net—like a cage. The gaps between the bands shrank as we drew close to the door at the end. It had been wood when last I walked here but was now metal from skin to core, held shut with three iron locks. Still I could hear the shudder of the thing behind the door, the slow, unceasing beat.

         “Why bring me here?” I asked. “I’ve seen the heart. I brought it to you.”

         “You are here because I told you to follow. I did not invite your questions,” Talgrun said, and I rocked back half a step, duly chastened. For all that I meant to abandon his holding and his authority, he was my lord a while yet.

         Talgrun stooped. He trusted me, too, in the same way I trusted him. Enough to turn his back on me in the shadows here.

         The third lock clicked open, and Talgrun braced his shoulder against the door. The hinges groaned; the door swung ponderously open.

         The weak light of the braziers barely penetrated this far, but it did not matter. The heart had its own light, in nodules and veins webbed over the surface of it, pulsing with starlight.

         The graylings’ heart was the size of two great fists pressed one to the other. It was not a thing of flesh and muscle, as the heart of a beast or a man, but of vines and thorns and roots, a snarled mass with dirt still packed into each crease and fold. It bled; years after I’d carved it free from that quiet, sacred place beyond the stones, the marks of my knife oozed blue-black blood that spattered to the pockmarked stone beneath its pedestal.

         It beat. Its vines contracted in a pained spasm, and the drumbeat sound struck the walls and fell back to the center of the room. I tasted copper in the back of my throat. That drumbeat had chased me from the graylings’ fields and forest, back through the narrow place and past the stones, as I carried it. It was different now. It was weaker. The vines which had shone with light cast off dim radiance now.

         “It’s dying,” I said.

         “It’s nearly dead,” Talgrun replied, with the same pride in his voice, the same conqueror’s joy in his eyes, there had been the day I brought it. Not even his grandfather had claimed such a prize, had attained such a triumph over the gray.

         We stood nearly shoulder to shoulder, watching the irregular spasms of the monstrous heart.

         “Soon it will wither. Beat its last. And what will happen to the graylings then? The old tales say they will diminish. They will retreat. We have lived uneasily in this land since Korohn led us through the pass, pushed against the sea with the graylings ever harrying our flanks, but no longer. They will break before us. And they know it. They know the heart’s death will be their own. And that is why they plied your sister with false prophecy, Reyna.”

         I looked sharply at him. “There has never been a false Telling,” I said. “The graylings do not lie. They do not deceive. And by their blood, we hear the truth.”

         “They did not deceive, before we came,” Talgrun said. “But as their blood has tainted us, given us the cold and the mutelings, ours has tainted them. The graylings have changed, Reyna. Surely you, who wander so often beyond the stones, have seen it.”

         I thought of the strange grayling in the yard, stealing out of the shed where Seal slept.

         “There are miles still between that and claiming false prophecy,” I said.

         “The graylings have always sought to drive us from their shores,” Talgrun replied. “They cannot do it with their claws and their fangs, and so they seek to frighten us with visions of the old doom. It is a trick they have played, Reyna, nothing more.”

         He believed it. Perhaps the crone had told him. Perhaps he had invented the tale himself, to justify his failure to act. I understood. The old doom was a story to all of us living; none of us had seen the desolation that drove Korohn and his people to this place. We were safe here. We had our farms and our fields. We had good raiding, and iron, and the eight-and-twenty knots to keep the graylings at bay. If we fled, some of us would die. Perhaps many of us. Perhaps all of us.

         There was more white in Talgrun’s beard and braid than when I had laid the thing at his feet, but he was the same man. A man I had fought for, would have died for. Who I killed for. It was not Talgrun who had changed. And he had been a good leader, then.

         Was he a good leader still? Was I the one that had changed, and lost the ability to see that his judgment was right?

         Or had the world changed with me, and left Talgrun grasping in the dark?

         He was asking me to trust him as I once had. To follow him as I once had. But to do that, I had to name my sister a liar—or a fool.

         “Titha died to warn us,” I said.

         “And she was wrong. Don’t drag more good men to their deaths to chase her error,” Talgrun said.

         He knew. If not the whole of it, he knew me, knew I would not be content to stay and forget my sister’s words. Knew, too, that there were those who would follow me. He was a wise leader and did not want war within his holding. I could bring such a war. Whether I could win it was another tale entirely.

         Outside, barely audible, the horns blew. It was time. Talgrun did not move. I knew what he wanted. But I could not give him unflinching fealty as I once had, and he would read the lie in it if I pretended at such loyalty.

         “You have given me much to think about,” I said. If I was lucky, he would wait for an answer. If I was unlucky, he would already hear an answer in my words.

         I had not lived so long by trusting luck.

* * *

         We packed into the long hall, and more thronged outside. The crowd made room for me and for Evahr; I was not certain which of us commanded more deference, anymore.

         The drums beat; the harps sang. The bone pipes sighed. Yari stood in the shadow of his father and of the chief who called him son and seemed small beside them both. The mark of the holding was fresh on his cheek, the skin around it red. Ymaera, standing to the side, smiled at him. He smiled back for a fraction of a moment before he remembered that today, he was a warrior.

         “Today, my son adds his blood to the midbeam, as every warrior and every thrall and every farmer must,” Talgrun said. He had a voice for ritual, sonorous and strong. I felt its pull. We all seemed to breathe together in the long hall, to fall into a unity that made us mighty.

         The crone emerged. No bent wood staff now; she carried a blade instead, long and pointed as a needle, and a shallow wooden bowl. Yari, Hosfar, and Talgrun turned to her. Talgrun’s hand rested on Yari’s shoulder a moment—a gesture of reassurance or of pride.

         “Who comes beneath the midbeam?” the crone asked. “And who stands with him?”

         “Yari Longtooth’s-Bane comes before the midbeam, and I stand with him,” said Mad Hosfar. There was something brittle in his voice, something joyful and afraid. Be careful, I willed him. Talgrun sees much. Do not let him see your love. “I am Hosfar Ironclaw, called Mad Hosfar; I have shed blood on the shores and the seas and beyond the narrow place for him. I stand with Yari Longtooth’s-Bane.”

         “Who comes beneath the midbeam?” the crone asked again; it was Talgrun’s turn to speak. Dropping my voice, I spoke beneath Talgrun’s words and the musicians’ soft playing and the crackle of the fire.

         “We need to leave tonight,” I said.

         Evahr cast me a startled look. “We aren’t ready,” he said.

         “Talgrun knows.”

         “How much?” Evahr asked.

         “Enough.”

         Then silence again, and then the crone: “Who comes beneath the midbeam, and who stands with him?”

         And it was our turn to voice the response. Yari Longtooth’s-Bane comes before the midbeam, and we stand with him. We, the people of iron. The people of salt. The people of the sea and the people of the shore. We who came beneath the mountains. We who were born of summer. We who will return to the summer lands again.

         It was like thunder; it was like the whole of a storm. For the space of those words, we were one. One people, one holding, one purpose, one will. The power of it was undeniable. And yet—

         And yet I watched as Mad Hosfar took the blade and wetted it first with his own blood, drawing a line along his forearm, and then handed it to Talgrun. And saw the instant’s hesitation between both men. Whatever unity our holding could claim was cracked. Had been, long before my sister’s words sundered us.

         Talgrun bled. And then it was Yari’s turn, and while Ymaera turned her head, the boy did not hesitate. He cut, and he held out his arm, and the crone clasped her wrinkled hand over his wrist to hold it over the bowl. She mashed his arm, forcing more blood free. Enough to pool at the bottom of the bowl. Then she dropped his arm, and Hosfar knelt to bind it.

         Talgrun watched Hosfar. I watched the crone as she climbed the steps to the throne and beyond it, to the place where the midbeam canted, bending like the belly of an upturned ship. The eight and twenty knots wove the length of the beam and terminated here, at a burl in the wood, dark with a hundred years of blood.

         She spoke words in the old tongue, words of blood spilled and oaths made. She held the bowl above the midbeam knot, and tipped it up. Blood spattered against the wood. For a moment, the only sound was the drip of blood against wood and stone.

         The eight and twenty knots glowed with faint light. Every loop, every crossing. The blood flowed, wicking up the lengths of each carved cord, filling every groove. Far too much blood to be only from Yari’s wound, for it was the blood of all of us. Hosfar and Talgrun, Evahr and I, the men and women around us. Every geld, every true man and true woman. We had all added our blood to the midbeam and it shone now, wet and fresh as the day we spilled it.

         The last and best protection against the graylings, against the rot hounds and all the other creatures beyond the stones, beyond the narrow place.

         “Today, Yari takes his place as one of us,” Talgrun said, turning back to the crowd, his hand on his son’s shoulder, gripping tight. “We stand as one; as one, we stand against the darkness. We are bound together, and this makes us strong.”

         His eyes passed over the crowd as they roared their approval. They stopped on me. For a few moments; no more.

         For the space of a single, agonized heartbeat.

         He knew he had lost my fealty. And he knew he could not bring me to heel.

         We were out of time. We had to run.

* * *

7

         We passed the word, never louder than a whisper. Tonight was all the whisper said. Some would balk; too soon, too real. It was as much blessing as bane. Every hesitation was one less mouth to feed, and our supplies were nowhere near what they should have been.

         Evahr and I left as soon as we could without rousing suspicion—more suspicion than already swarmed around us, at least. I had never traveled the path between Kalstavr and our homestead faster.

         Imri saw our faces and did not need to ask; she set to gathering our things, hampered by her belly. Evahr moved quickly to help. There was little for me to do. My belongings had been ready since the night we took the tally of our company, and a third body would only stand in the way.

         I went out into the yard. Night had snuffed out the last of the sun. The broken moon was a split crescent in the sky. Through the trees, the light of the hired laborers’ fires flickered. We had thirteen on the farm, all gelds; twelve, since Sora had surrendered to her fevers. Several I liked; none I trusted enough to bring with us. I wanted to bring every one of them—every soul on this farm, in the village, every man and woman and child of the holding. But there were not ships enough. There was not food enough. And there were so many who would not follow.

         Seal stood in the doorway of the shed where she still slept, night after night. Her days she spent in watchful idleness; we’d given no work to her, for though she ought to have been helping in the house, Imri had asked not to have her near.

         You are leaving, Seal said as I approached.

         We are, I replied, including her in the gesture.

         She split her lips in a mirthless smile. I see. Too many of you barren.

         I hesitated. I will not force you to come. If you would stay...

         She wrapped her fingers around the chain circling her throat, tugged it once. I nodded. Stay or go, she was not free. So what did it matter to her?

         Things could be different, somewhere else, I said.

         Only if they are made to be different, she replied.

         “Only if someone makes them different, you mean,” I said. She shrugged, folding her arms over her narrow ribcage. As if to say she didn’t mean anything at all by it, as if it did not matter one way or another.

         She followed me without complaint. Imri and Evahr were at the door already, Evahr weighed down and Imri carrying only what he truly couldn’t. I took some from him and some from her; to my surprise, Seal stepped up to help. The four of us set out along the pass that would take us to the spit of shore where Nagrat was to have brought the ships we’d pack into, crammed shoulder to shoulder and wedged between what supplies we could scavenge in so short a time.

         The land rose up in craggy hills, rising to the spine of the tallest hill before falling away to the shore. The track was thin, rarely traveled. Mist hung in the air, pressing like cold palms against our cheeks. Just mist, not the breath of the graylings’ land, slipping through the narrow place, but it called up all those memories and cast over the land the same strange quiet that lay over the graylings’ fields and forests.

         I would always think of blood on nights like this. Mad Hosfar drenched in blood, the mist around us, him calling my name as we saw it: the gray tree that was not a tree; the heart that beat half-hidden in the folds of its bark; the creatures of root and vine that gathered in its shadows, pale as bone or black as night or bright with striations of red and blue and green, putting the lie to the name we had given them. The graylings were not one kind but many, myriad. We had seen their workers, their warriors, that was all. “Reyna,” Hosfar had said, awe and avarice braided tightly in his voice.

         “Reyna,” the voice called now. But it was not Mad Hosfar, his voice like the roll of rocks beneath a beached hull. It was a woman’s voice, so twisted in pain I almost did not know it, coming from down the slope to our right.

         “Reyna.”

         “Here,” I said, seeing the shadow of her in the mist, moonlight tracing her outline, and that of her sons and her daughter. Ymaera, clutching her belly, groping through the mist half-blind.

         “What is she doing here?” Evahr said.

         I stepped forward as Yari’s grip on his mother failed, as she stumbled forward. I caught her, helped her down to the ground. She moaned. I pressed my hand to her belly, found it hard as stone.

         “It’s coming,” she said. Too soon. Far too soon.

         “It will be all right,” I said, in the meaningless tone of words spoken without the expectation of belief. “Ymaera, hush. How did you find us?”

         “My father told me where to go,” Yari said. I tensed before I realized who he meant, what he knew. “He said to bring my sister and my brother if I could, that we would leave and he would be my father the way he should be.”

         He was frightened. Marked with the mantle of a man but still a boy. I held Ymaera to me as she shook, as she clutched my hand. “I never felt it quicken,” she said, a broken whisper.

         “I know,” I answered. Talgrun would know his wife and children were gone before long. Ymaera’s belly hardened with another contraction, and when I touched my fingertips to her skirts they were growing rapidly wet with blood. “It’s coming now,” I said.

         “We don’t have time,” Evahr said.

         “We don’t have a say,” I replied. I would not leave a woman to birth alone, and Ymaera could not move in this state. “Take Imri. Seal, too. Hosfar will be with the ships by now. Get his children to him. I’ll stay with Ymaera until it’s done.”

         I will stay, Seal said.

         “You’ve delivered babes before?” I asked.

         Of course.

         Evahr wanted to protest, but I silenced him with a glare. “Get them safe to the water. And if I do not follow, you leave.”

         “I won’t go without you,” he said, shaking his head.

         He’s right, Imri gestured.

         “I will find you,” I said, I vowed. “Always, and anywhere. Now go.”

         Evahr’s mouth set in a firm line. He took Yari by the shoulder; Imri herded the younger children, casting a look back at me as she went. I met her gaze, held it. She went down the slope toward the sea; my spirit went with her. The rest of me stayed, Ymaera’s grip a vice on my wrist.

         “Help me shift her,” I said. Together we propped her against a moss-strewn stone, and I moved to work her skirts over her hips. There was little light but the lantern we’d brought with us. I set it on the ground, and blood gleamed against the grass.

         “You were right,” Ymaera said. Her face was pale. Too pale. “I knew you were right. I shouldn’t have listened to the crone. It is my husband’s. Talgrun’s. Titha told me—she said I must never bear my husband a child, she told me when I married him—and so I lay with other men, but I love him, Reyna. I know you thought I wed him because he held the seat, but I loved him. I wanted to give him a son. A true son. I should have listened to Titha. I was so angry with her—with you—”

         It was the first she’d spoken my sister’s name since I’d borne that final Telling back to Kalstavr. She wanted me to offer absolution, but I had none. I wished I had, for the sake of who she’d been; of who we’d been to one another.

         She shuddered with another contraction, then another quick on its heels. Blood gushed between her thighs. Seal leaned close and dabbed Ymaera’s sweat-beaded brow with the hem of her skirt.

         Not long, Seal said.

         “I only wanted my child to live,” Ymaera said, and I held her as she wept and as she bled. Her contractions came so swiftly now there was no telling one from another. She had stood at this threshold four times already, and she did not scream, but she moaned and she writhed as her body forced out its half-formed passenger.

         Too much blood, I thought again, but did not say it. Something had torn inside. She would not live. I had stood in this moment so many times before. The moment of knowing loss before it arrived. And now, as ever before, I closed off my grief. I would welcome it in the night, when I was alone, let it into every piece of me. But there was no time for grief. No room for it.

         Or so I told myself.

         She cried out, spine arching. And then it came, slipping out in a fresh spurt of blood and fluid, slick with dark clots.

         “Let me see,” Ymaera said. Her voice was weak. “Let me see my child.” I cut a cloth from a clean patch of her skirts and wrapped it. Held it where she could touch the edge of the cloth. I leaned over it, over her, and whispered in her ear as her eyelids fluttered.

         “I was wrong,” I whispered. “Your child is well. Your children are all safe, Ymaera. I was wrong.”

         “A boy?” she asked. Her lips barely shaped the words into more than a breath.

         “A boy,” I told her.

         “I can hear him crying,” she said, and her head fell back.

         But it was not the cry of a child. Not a woman’s scream, either, but the scream of a man in sudden agony.

         The sound birthed shouts. There was light down at the shore. Torches, and something brighter, something bigger.

         The boats were burning.

* * *

8

         I held the bundle in the crook of one arm and my spear in my hand, and I ran. I went down the slope in the dark, no lantern, no stars. But the night had never troubled me. I read the battle in an instant, old instincts supplying a tale of the moments I had missed.

         Dead men and dying lay tangled on the trampled sand. Talgrun’s men had come from the direction of Kalstavr and caught our people between their blades and the burning boats. Hosfar was not there, or Yari—other faces were missing, and tracks led up into the hills, into the woods, into the questionable embrace of the gray.

         But Evahr stood yet with his back to the flames, blood on his blade and on his brow, Imri behind him with a knife clutched in her hand like a claw. She was too far along to run—not easily, not fast enough to flee. That left only the skirmish on the shore, Evahr’s blade and her own ferocity to stand against a dozen men. Already half and more lay bleeding or dead on the sand, side by side with the conspirators they had come to slay, but even Evahr could not hold long against so many. I charged.

         One of Talgrun’s loyal thralls leapt forward with a shout. Evahr’s sword caught him in the throat; he gurgled as he drowned in his own spilled blood.

         The nearest man, mail-clad and blood-spattered, stood with his back to me. I could have driven my spear through his chest, mail and all. I wanted to. Instead I spun it in my hand, blade and haft reversing, and swept his legs out from under him as I ran past.

         I came around in front of Imri and Evahr, Ymaera’s get in the crook of my arm and my spear a rebuke against Talgrun’s men. They held but did not surge forward again, eying me warily. I caught Evahr’s eye for half a moment. Five years since we’d shared the breath of battle, and I felt him like another limb.

         “Talgrun!” I yelled. Where was the bastard? There. Away from the fighting—the slaughter. The crone beside him, bent-backed, her night-blind crow huddled against her shoulder.

         “Where is my wife, Reyna?” Talgrun demanded. He stepped forward, the furred shoulders of his cloak making him seem broader and bolder than he was. “Where are my children?”

         The heat of the fire lashed my back. “Your wife is dead,” I said. “And your children? You have no children but the one she birthed this night. Your son, Talgrun.” I knelt, and set the bundle on the blood-stained sand, and backed away.

         For a moment, no one moved. Then the crone stepped forward, the hem of her robe dragging over the sand with a scraping hiss. Talgrun’s soldiers parted as she passed. With the narrow, iron-capped foot of her staff she reached out, caught the edge of the cloth bundle, and flicked it open to reveal the thing Ymaera birthed.

         Not a babe, however early, but a twisted root, gray except where it was red and black with blood. It had the shape of a child, or the mockery of it, a bulbous head and spindly, broken limbs. And yet it moved. Opened a black, empty mouth, a soundless cry, thrashed in the startled way of the newly born. No bigger than a fist, but alive—in a way. Behind me, Evahr let out an oath, and Imri’s breath hissed between her teeth.

         The crone stared down at the babe, horror on her face, and then at last I knew: she had believed her own nattering.

         For a moment, she knew she had been wrong. And then her expression shut like a slammed door.

         “The graylings have done this,” she said. “They have done this to trick us and to punish us.”

         Talgrun did not answer. He was staring at the root-child, face empty and pale. “Destroy that thing,” he said. I lunged—too late. The crone lifted her staff, and drove it down.

         The thing—the child—the grayling babe was small and frail, and one blow broke it. I could not say if it had been alive—or if it was alive, if it would have lived, but I whispered a last blessing in the old tongue for it. “Hray hlien, rusati,” I murmured. Run home, little brother.

         Talgrun lifted his eyes to me. “You bring this evil to my home, Reyna,” he said.

         “This evil was always coming. It isn’t too late to go, Talgrun. Your wife is dead; your people may yet live.”

         He looked at me, and at the crone. For half a moment, half a heartbeat, I thought he might bend. Then he set his hand to the hilt of his sword, and I knew he would stand instead until he broke. “Take her,” he told his men. “Bring the others in chains. And find my wife.”

         He started to turn away. I leapt. Blades reached for my flesh, too sluggish to cut more than air. The haft of my spear knocked aside a thrall I’d once fought beside, and then I dug my heel into the sand to vault the last steps to Talgrun.

         My hand choked up the spear haft to hold it close to the leaf-shaped blade, and that I pressed against the notch of his jaw, my other hand gripping his white-shot braids. I yanked and side-stepped, pulling him off balance and around me, getting his body between me and his men. He held his blade impotently, too stunned and then too wise to try to get at me with it.

         “You’ll let us go,” I said. His men moved hesitantly, blades bare and thirsting, unwilling to chance a charge. The firelight wreathed their limbs with light and veiled their faces. Beyond them Evahr kept Imri close, edging her toward the empty shore and the hills beyond.

         “You are a traitor to your holding,” Talgrun said. “You will die for what you’ve done.”

         “It isn’t my death you should concern yourself with,” I reminded him. The point of my blade dimpled his skin but did not break it.

         Talgrun choked out a laugh. “You think I do not know that you have not shed men’s blood since Titha died? Not in anger or sport or war. Not one drop to stain the earth. But you’d murder me?”

         “She would slaughter the stars to spare them,” the crone said in the voice of crows. She held the staff slanted across her body, and her eyes fixed on figments. The air seemed to shudder, pulse, broken by the beating of wings that were not here. “This ends in blood. Time runs in a thousand branching rivers from this moment, but they all run with blood. The only choice is whose.”

         So this was the crone’s prophesying, the words she spoke in secret for Ymaera and Talgrun, hoarded in defiance of the Telling.One of Talgrun’s men murmured an oath I had not heard except in history lessons, a prayer to gods long forsaken, and the others stood transfixed.

         “The river runs through the forest. Through the village. Runs to the sea,” the crone said, her fingers moving along the warped wood of her staff as if she read some wisdom there. “Through the narrowest chink it runs. You cannot outpace it. Echoes, echoes, you’ve sung them wrong. Isth, isth, hristh zaynon.”

         I started at the old words, the old tongue. Under, under, down we all go. A child’s rhyme—or was it? I could not remember, suddenly, where I’d heard it. “Enough,” I said. “This is not prophecy—only nonsense, no wisdom in it. How can you hear sense in all of that, and be certain in it? The cold see death and death comes. This is a tangle of meaning and muttering, Talgrun.”

         “Is it, Reyna?” he asked. He was oddly relaxed in my grip, his voice soft and meant for me alone. “Can you see a path that does not end in blood? Perhaps my eyes are failing me with age, with the dark, but I cannot.”

         “Let us go, and there need be no more blood,” I said.

         “If I let you go, I am slitting my own throat,” Talgrun says. “None will let me sit the boneback chair with weakness like that on me. So let my blood stain the sand of the shore, and yours with it. And Evahr’s.”

         Imri they’d spare, to bear for the holding. A thousand rivers, but none broke free of that. Evahr dead, and Imri caught, and the rest of our company scattered and soon to die. I could see no other path—save one.

         “Let it be my blood alone, then,” I said. “Let them go, and I’ll lay down my spear.”

         He looked to the crone. She could not have heard, over the rush of the sea and the boasting of the flames, but she nodded.

         “They live,” he said.

         “Your word.”

         “On iron and salt, sea and shore, on the knots and the blood, the beam and the memory of home,” Talgrun said, knowing I would accept no less than the whole of the vow.

         My spear point dropped from his neck. I stepped back. He held up a hand, stilling the sudden movement of his soldiers. “Hold,” he said.

         I met Evahr’s eye. “Go,” I said, and the look in his eye told me he knew exactly what I’d done.

         He wanted to argue. He wanted to fight. He was a man of blood and iron. But Imri held his wrist. I fixed my eyes on that contact, hand to wrist, pale skin to that blasted by sun and wind. He would protect her. Protect the child.

         Our child. I no longer wondered.

         Stay alive, I signed. Stay alive for me.

         Every breath for you, Imri replied, eyes shining. Evahr did not speak. I knew that broken look, the impossibility of speech. I heard all he would have said, if he had the words for it. I did not love him because he said the right things or said them well. He spoke his love in the acts and actions of devotion. I had never wished it otherwise until now, with only this silence to mourn me.

         “Go,” I said again, to both of them. “Run.”

         Evahr had never once broken, never once run from battle. But run he did, Imri with him, his hand on her arm to bear her up. Down the shore, up the empty slope, toward the forest. Disappearing into shadows. Vanishing from sight and from the tug of this bloody current, from the crone’s prophecies and the promise of blood—or so I hoped.

         “Your spear, Reyna,” Talgrun said.

         I lowered my spear to the ground, setting it in the sand beside me, and drew my knife from my belt. I ran my thumb over the knots as I turned to Talgrun. “With my blade I once pledged to you,” I said. I held its pommel out to him. “My blood is yours to take.”

         He took the knife from me, his expression impossible to read, and nodded.

         Palms flat, I retreated, and rough hands caught me, held me fast. In the distance, in the direction Evahr and Imri had gone, there was only the night, and the sound of rushing wind.

* * *

9

         Talgrun’s men brought me to the center of Kalstavr, to the muddy yard before the long hall. They bent my arms and bound them with iron and forced me down to kneel beside the brazier that beat back the dark. Talgrun came then, each step marked with the clink of chains, the gold and silver that crossed his chest, that ringed his wrists and arms. His grandfather had worn no gold, only iron. Once I had thought that made him the better chief of the two.

         He might still have been the better of them, but now I knew that iron and blood were not what made it so. The crone walked beside Talgrun, her prophecy faded and her presence somehow thinner for it, as if the light might pass through her if it struck the right angle. I wanted to raise my eyes to hers, to show her I was not afraid. But fear had found me. It started as a shiver at the very edge of my hand, creeping upward. I fought the urge to run, to fight, to do something—because it would accomplish nothing but my death, and I wasn’t yet ready to die.

         Talgrun drew forward. “Reyna Bonespear, you have betrayed your holding,” he said. He reached out; one of his men placed an iron rod in his hand. I forced myself to look only at him, at the lines of his face. Not at the rod as he plunged it into the glowing embers of the brazier. “My wife is dead. My children have been taken from me.”

         “I didn’t kill Ymaera,” I said. “She came to me. She came to me because she knew that I was right. That the holding was in danger. It still is.”

         He twisted the rod. The embers shifted, spat sparks. I swallowed around the stone in my throat. “You poisoned her with your talk of kings, your talk of storms and of legends,” he said.

         “Legends?” I asked. “Is that what we’re to call the old doom, now? A legend?”

         “A story told to explain how we came to this land of strange creatures and cold nights. To comfort us, by pretending there is a land of sun that will welcome us home,” Talgrun said.

         I looked to the crone. She could have mouthed these words for him, they were so much her own.

         “Have you ever wondered, old woman, whose secrets the crows whisper to you?” I asked. “What spirits speak to them, and what they want from us?”

         “Not spirits,” the crone said, voice dead as driftwood. “I hear the whispers of the gods, and they speak only truth.”

         “Gods?” I said, spitting out a sound as kin to laughter as Ymaera’s issue was to a child. “The gods forsook us.”

         “We forsook the gods,” the crone said, wrapping both her withered hands around her staff. “And so were stricken with our affliction. Our skin marked, our wombs hollow. And because we ceased to make our sacrifices, give due obeisance to our gods, we fell under the sway of false and wicked things.”

         “This is what you’ve been muttering in his ear all these years?” I asked. I reeled before the force of it. To talk of kings was to invite trouble; to talk of gods was more madness still.

         “The graylings have ruined us,” Talgrun said. “Have shaped us in their image, twisted us with their false prophecies.” He drew the rod from the fire, its tip glowing red. “It is not entirely your fault, Reyna. You wanted to believe your sister. You did what you thought was right. But now my children are missing. Now my wife is dead. Your sister led you to folly, but you followed willingly, and we all must suffer for it. But you will suffer most of all.”

         I wish the fear had left me then. That I had knelt unflinching in the face of my decision, holding fast to my defiance. But it tore into me, a rot hound’s jaws snapped shut around my breath. I reared back as Talgrun stepped forward.

         One of his men wrapped my braid around his fist, his other hand clamped down around my jaw to hold me still. Talgrun drew close, the glowing brand gripped tight.

         “Hold still,” Talgrun said. “I wouldn’t want to put out your eye.”

         I strained. Not to get away; I could not, and even through my fear I knew that. I braced myself back against the man who held me, his chest a wall. To keep myself still as the brand descended and pressed white-hot against the inked symbol of my holding.

         I screamed. Screamed with the pain of it, the brand held against my flesh as it burned. As it obliterated the mark I’d earned, I’d worn. Marked me instead as outcast, forsaken, condemned to the tameless wilds if I was permitted to live at all. Struck out my name, tore from me every friend, every bond.

         Talgrun drew back the brand. I sagged against my captor; he held me, not ungentle, until I found strength enough to get my feet beneath me again. My left eye showed nothing but a blaze of orange-white light; from the other the world seemed dimmed in comparison, shadows moving within shadows.

         “Bind this woman to the post and leave her under guard,” Talgrun said. “She will give her last blood to the midbeam before the dawn, as restitution for her transgressions against the holding.”

         “Talgrun, please,” I said, voice a rasp. “Kill me if you must. But don’t let the holding die on the word of a madwoman.”

         “I won’t,” he said, and looked at me, and I knew that I was lost—or he was lost, and either way we were both to die.

         I would die a little sooner, that was all.

         I did not know the names of the men that shackled me to Korohn’s post. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps I should have taken the left-hand road to Kalstavr more often, learned the names of the iron thralls and the laborers as I had when I sailed in the red raids. Perhaps if I had not turned my back, I could have convinced them. I could have saved them.

         It was too late for that, now. I had come to the time every warrior faced; a time when one last duty was demanded of them.

         Death.

         My blood for the midbeam.

         Perhaps the beam, the knots, the iron, the stones, would protect the holding after all. I wished I could have held onto that comfort as Talgrun left. But I did not believe it. The wards would fail. The holding would perish.

         I had failed. Failed the holding. Failed Evahr and Imri. Failed Titha. Before the morning, I would die, and my life had come to nothing.

* * *

         It was not sleep that found me but something less kind. A jumble of nightmare and memory. I saw Imri birth that pathetic, twisted thing; I saw Evahr die with my spear in his gut. I saw Titha, her blood and the blood of graylings spilling from her lips, her eyes empty and her hands clutching at me.

         It was still dark when I tore myself free of the nightmares and found myself in a worse one. I was alone. My hands were bound behind me, my shoulders aching from being twisted back so long. Dark shapes at the edge of the yard marked the positions of the men left to guard me, but no one would come for me.

         I hoped no one would come.

         Stay away, I willed Evahr. I thought he would. He would not leave Imri and our child. Their child, now. He was not my husband any longer, not with the mark burned from my face. I was no one’s wife, no one’s sister, no one’s friend.

         The cold wind brushed my face like fingertips. Like two fingers, pressed below my left eye.

         I thought of a grayling crouched on the mounded roof of Titha’s hut.

         In the yard, creeping from the shed where Seal slept.

         Thought of Seal, collared and defiant.

         Of a muteling child, daring a momentary gesture.

         They had known. Somehow, they had known.

         “You are there, aren’t you?” I whispered. “You were waiting for this. For me.”

         I thought it would be a grayling, there in the dark, but the figure who stepped from the shadows had a woman’s form and a woman’s face, and eyes as dark as a grayling’s. Seal. Hands and skirt still bloodied from Ymaera’s birth, she walked toward me and paid no mind to the guards Talgrun had set.

         “Be careful,” I said. “They’ll see you.”

         They will see nothing. Nor hear you speak. I looked again at the guards, at the too-still stance of them, and tasted the air. Mist, thick and strangely warm.

         “What are you doing here?” I asked. “You should have run.”

         Where would I go? She crouched, propping her elbows on her knees. Her dark hair hung down around her face, tendrils of it snaking over the rough, pale wool of her dress.

         “Then why come here?”

         Because I come here, she said, words’ tense slippery as a lamprey. Because I came, come, will come; because I have always, would always... The shape of her hands encompassed every echo of it.

         “I don’t understand.” And then I did. The cold ones drank the graylings’ blood and saw the warp and the weft, saw the threads that made the pattern. They were more like the gray than the rest of us, those cold children, and so, too, were the mutelings. More like the gray—and what did the gray see, that their blood held such secrets? “You have the Telling? Mutelings—”

         Not all. Not many. Not much. Moments. Flickers.

         “You saw me like this.”

         She reached out two fingers and pressed them to the wound beneath my eye. Pain pulsed, then receded. I let out a ragged breath; she dropped her hand.

         I saw you, she said.

         “Help me,” I said. My voice was raw, rock-dragged, wave-worn.

         Why? She held the question a long moment, and I nearly screamed, rage tightening my throat. Why should it matter to me who holds my chain? she asked. I have no reason to help you. I was stolen from myself, stolen again by your husband. When you die, I am sure I will be stolen again. To live here in your long hall, and bear your chieftain’s sons, or some other man’s. And if I freed you—your ships are burned. Your people scattered. You will still die. So why should it matter to me if you die here, or if you die in the tameless waste or in the woods?

         “It shouldn’t.” I looked away from her; I could not bear another moment of her gaze. “It shouldn’t matter to you or any other muteling mother what happens to a single one of us. You are our daughters and our sisters and our mothers and we have chained you.”

         What do your words matter? What does condemnation matter, if you still profit?

         I laughed, low and broken. “They don’t. It doesn’t. You should run to the woods, and leave me here. You’ll survive a while; you’re clever, and you’re young, and you have the graylings’ favor. But you aren’t one of them. You cannot live on starlight and spiders’ webs and the dreams of wild things. You’ll have freedom for a time, but you will die or you will be captured, or you will walk willingly among the villages when you grow too afraid.”

         It doesn’t matter, she said.

         “Of course it matters,” I spat back. “It is all that matters. To be free; to live. For your daughters to be free. For your sons to live. It matters.”

         Her fingers hooked into claws. They tore at the air as she gestured. I cannot do anything for my daughters, for my sons. I cannot do anything even for myself, as you have taken pains to tell me.

         “You can,” I said. “We can. We cannot live without mothers. We can survive, for a time. Like you could, in the woods. But we would come to our deaths at the end, and leave no young ones to bear our names, to sing our stories. We need you and your sisters, so come with us. No chains. No collars. Free to bear when you will. For whomever you will. Or not to bear, and live as any of us.”

         She was still for a long moment. And then, at last, her fingers shaped a single word.

         How?

* * *

         I feared the mist would fail before Seal returned; that my guards would stir and wake and see the muteling move among the shadows, another paler shadow at her side. But she walked past them and no alarm sounded. The thing beside her had the shape of a child. A human child, not the warped mockery of the gray—yet grayling he was. A boy, his skin like bark, tiny white flowers growing over his shoulders. The gills at his sides were narrow slits, the ribbed lamellae within pale as bone. His eyes were human, too, whites showing, irises not black but brown.

         “What are you?” I asked.

         New, he said in the muteling speech and smiled, baring black teeth. What are you?

         “Old,” I said. I shook my head. “I don’t know what you mean, child.”

         What are you? He repeated the gestures with precision.

         “Human,” I said.

         No. Humans cut us with iron and burn us with yew. You bear bone and speak peace in our spaces. You are something else.

         I shut my eyes against his words. I had never explained to Evahr why I laid down my iron. Why I bore only bone, and shed the blood of neither men nor graylings any longer.

         I had cut the heart from the mother-tree, beyond the narrow place. We passed through that crack in the rock, barely the width of a blade, slipping through in the chaos of the graylings’ retreat before it slammed shut behind us. We walked through fields of flowers I could not name, the night pierced with the songs of strange birds. We warred. And when Mad Hosfar and I and those few others broke through the lines, broke through to the great tree, I wept for the beauty of it. Shrouded in starlight, wreathed with white blossoms as bright as stars themselves.

         And I had cut the heart from that beautiful thing. Taken it as a prize. Because it was beautiful, and called to be claimed.

         It was not until far too late that I realized what I had done. What I had destroyed, out of the need to claim, to bind, to own, to break.

         I had not killed again. And yet what did it matter? The heart beat behind iron, dying slowly. Evahr rowed out on the red raids and brought home muteling women chained and weeping. I did nothing by my own hand, and pretended such inaction was absolution.

         I had thought to save my people, to lead them out of this place. But I’d taken Seal, the chain still around her neck—that act alone was proof we were not leaving all of this place behind us, as we should. We were taking it with us, along with every poisoned deed it demanded of us.

         I opened my eyes.

         “I cut the heart from your mother-tree with an iron blade,” I said. “I’m as human as the rest.”

         He looked at Seal. Something passed between them, wordless, without gesture. More like breath than speech, but they understood one another.

         Why call us here? he asked.

         “Your mother’s heart lies beneath the long hall. Guarded with men and with iron and with a key that hangs around Talgrun’s neck. Guarded by the eight and twenty knots. I’ve heard it. It’s dying. You are dying.”

         Why call us here? he asked again.

         “I can give it back to you,” I said.

         You do not offer this freely, the grayling child said. You do not give. You take, or you bargain.

         “Yes, I bargain,” I said. My heart beat quick. One did not strike deals with the gray. Such was the wisdom I was weaned on, but I was never wise the way I ought to be. “I will return your heart to you, and you will gather those who fled the shore from wherever they have scattered. You will bring them to the warding stones to wait for me, and you will grant us safe passage through the narrow place, to what lands lie beyond. For me, and for whoever will follow. There will be no more war between your people and mine.”

         The boy hesitated. Crooked his fingers, head cocked to the side as if he was listening. There was disagreement among the gray, I thought; they had indeed changed. But at last he nodded. You will have safe passage. We will cut you free now.

         “No,” I said. He stilled. “Cut me free and I can do nothing for you. My brand is burned. I cannot step beneath the eight and twenty knots without invitation, any more than you can. I will only stand beneath the midbeam again to die.”

         I tilted my head back, letting it loll against the post. There were no stars tonight; the mist had blotted them out.

         Then what? The boy was asking when I looked again. What do you need of us?

         “You need to find my family. And those who were to follow us—those that still live.”

         I know where they are, he said. I will bring them.

         I nodded. “Then there is only one more thing I need.”

         We will pay what price we must, the boy said.

         “I need your blood.”

* * *

10

         My sister drank grayling blood a hundred times and more between her first Telling and her last. Felt its burn on her lips, her tongue, sliding down her throat, settling in her gut. I had not understood the pain that she invited again and again in service of the truth, in service of the holding, until I sat vigil for the dawn with a grayling’s blood held burning behind my lips.

         Dawn began as a bruise, a tint to the darkness. I waited, teeth clenched. Pain was a living thing, displeased at being leashed. It bucked and clawed at me; I accepted each wound, each lash, my eyes fixed on the empty sky.

         For Titha, who died to warn us, I bore it.

         For Evahr, whose faith never wavered, I bore it.

         For Imri—Imri, who I longed to love simply, to love as my sister and nothing else between us; Imri, whose iron chain made every affection a broken, suspect thing— I bore it.

         For the graylings, too. For my penance. For the heart I’d cut from the great tree, I bore the pain. I welcomed it. And when the crone came with her crows and Talgrun’s men, I met her eyes, kept my silence, and bore it still.

         “The warrior weeps,” the crone said. I had wept; I had no more tears to weep. The salt had dried to my skin like sea-spray. “Are you so humbled?”

         I did not answer. Could not answer. Let her think it defiance, the small sliver of pride I had left to wield.

         “Bring her,” she said, contemptuous. When Talgrun’s man bound my bruised wrists before me and hauled me to my feet, I could barely stand. My knees sagged; he shook me. I stumbled my way as best I could, lips pressed together, jaw tight, tongue’s tip pressed against the back of my teeth.

         Talgrun waited inside the long hall. Talgrun, and two more of his thralls, and no one else. Then this was to be done in secrecy, in solitude. It was a shameful thing, a thrall cast out. Did he fear that my old brothers and sisters of the blade would intervene? So many had died since I served; more had bled out on the beach last night. How many were left who would weep for me? How many who would fight for me? No; it was not fear. It was, instead, the closest thing to kindness he could offer.

         “You served me well, once,” Talgrun said as his man dragged me forward, my footsteps scraping weakly on the stone. “I know that what you did was done for the holding, however wrong you were. Repent your deeds, and I will speak your name again. You will die a thrall of this holding, where you belong.”

         I stared at him unspeaking. Grayling blood trickled down the back of my throat, a fingertip trailing a line of fire. I did not know how much of the blood in my mouth was the grayling’s, how much my own.

         The midbeam seemed to reel above me. Knots within knots, lines crossed and crossing over in turn. Twenty-eight knots. Twenty-eight holdings, and so few still standing, and Kalstavr the greatest of them. Not a glorious triumph, but a mean and muted one. Survival, stubborn and cruel.

         We had escaped the threat beyond the mountains. We had survived the blight that made us barren. We wrested life from a murderous land, and made ourselves unworthy of it.

         Talgrun sighed. He cupped my face with his palm, his thumb brushing the edge of the place where he’d branded me. One more splinter of pain; I barely flinched.

         “Let it be done, then,” he said, and jerked his hand toward the back of the hall, already turning away. He would not watch, then, nor gild the deed in ritual.

         His thrall walked me to the back of the hall, to the bent beam and the knot of wood Yari had baptized with his blood only the day before.

         His grip said he expected me to struggle. Instead I walked with what dignity I could, my steps shaky, my vision blurred with pain. The crone walked with us, my antler-carved knife in her hand, her eyes narrow. Suspicion crawled behind those eyes like a beetle in the dark, but I needed only moments more.

         “Kneel,” she said, when we had reached the beam.

         The thrall gave me no chance for obedience. He kicked the back of my legs and I dropped. My knees hit the stone; I choked. Coughed. Pressed my lips together, but blood spattered against the wall, beside the midbeam. Red-black, blood mingled with blood. The shadow hid the color.

         I was too far away. A lunge would close the distance, but the thrall held me fast. And then the crone dug her gnarled fingers into my hair. She wrenched me close to her, and hissed into my ear, her breath hot and moist on my cheek.

         “Beg mercy of the gods, warrior. They will not be pleased with you when you go to meet them.” And then she dragged me forward, the distance to the midbeam vanishing in an instant. She bent my neck forward, set my own knife against my throat.

         I spat out the blood in a coughing, choking rush. There was no feeling left in my tongue, my lips, my mouth; I could only let my jaw hang, let the grayling’s blood and mine run over my chin, burning, and splatter against the midbeam’s burl. The blood ran down my face and over the crone’s hand, and the hissing of her flesh warned her the instant before it happened.

         “No!” she screamed, but no words, no gods could stop what I had done. The eight and twenty knots lit, limned in starlight. And then they blackened. Smoked and cracked, wood burnt, throwing ash.

         I choked, spat, spat again, but it was only my own blood now, thick and red, and it was done.

         “No!” the crone shrieked again, and I felt the blade bite my neck.

         I threw myself to the side, away from the crone and the knife. I rolled and came to a stop on my back, staring up at the midbeam as it broke, a crack racing from one end to the other with a sound like a glacier calving.

         “What have you done?” Talgrun roared, racing across the hall to seize me, to pull me up by the arms and shake me.

         I drew a ragged breath through my ruined mouth. His eyes locked with mine, searching as if for answers, for meaning. He had not believed, even in this final moment, that I would act to harm the holding.

         He was a good chief, and I had served him well.

         “Talgrun!” One of his men, wild with alarm. The doors to the long hall stood open, gaping, and past them lay the woods. And within the woods, something moved. Shadows in shadows, and then—

         They boiled from the woods, wasps from a kicked hive. Long limbs, crooked up. Black eyes, fixed unblinking. Thin gray bodies moving, churning toward us, voiceless, no sound but that like leaves rushing in the wind. A flood of them. An army.

         “Shut the doors!” Talgrun cried, and his thralls ran to obey. Too late.

         The first thrall barely had his shoulder against the door when they reached him.

         They made no sound as they fell on him, tearing his flesh with long, sharp nails and long, sharp teeth. He screamed until their teeth found his throat. “Fall back!” Talgrun shouted. “To me!”

         The remaining thrall fell back and back again, his blade singing out to strike. Iron bit flesh. Blood spattered. But they were too many and too swift. They surged around him, over him, and his panic was drowned in their silence. They filled the long hall, clambering up the walls, clinging to the beams, skittering across the floor toward those of us still living. The crone swung her staff wide. The sea of graylings seethed back for an instant, then flowed forward, dragging the crone down.

         The staff skittered across the stone and out of reach. The light was gone. There was only darkness, and the sound of wide, wet mouths and the brief agony of men. Silence, and a thrum. Like the rasp of a cat’s purr; a sound of waiting. Then—

         Light. Blue-white, the light of stars, the light of a heart cut from a dreaming grove. Tracing cheek and jaw, limb and spine. The light of a hundred, two hundred graylings crouched against the stone floor.

         Talgrun spun, sword brandished before him. The graylings did not flinch. A perfect circle surrounded us. Surrounded me.

         The ripple began at the doorway. Bodies shifting aside so that Seal and the grayling boy could pass. The boy’s cheeks were speckled with light; bands and bars of it adorned his back. He bent where the crone fell and plucked my knife from the stone, and held it toward me like a gift as he walked. The ripple reached us; so did he. Seal stayed back, a tremble in her limbs like fear—but she wasn’t afraid.

         Talgrun stood as near the wall as he could reach. “What have you done?” he asked.

         I held up my hands. The boy cut me free with a stroke. The blade nipped my wrist. A few more drops of blood.

         “You’ve killed us,” Talgrun said. “Every one of us.”

         I could not speak. I had no voice, no tongue to shape it. I had no words to explain, even if I could have spoken. I stepped toward him. He raised his sword, hilt clutched in both hands. I walked until the blade was at my breastbone. A breath and it would break the skin.

         “You’ve killed us,” Talgrun said again.

         I set my knuckles against the broad edge of the blade. The tremors in his arms passed through the steel to my fingers. I pushed the blade aside.

         The breath went out of him, the sigh of an old and weary man. His knees sagged. He fell to the stone floor, his sword falling with him. Steel clattered on the ground; he stared ahead, expecting, I thought, to die.

         I took the keys from around his neck and looped the iron chain around my hand.

         Follow, I signed to the grayling child, and left Talgrun where he knelt.

* * *

         I took them with me, that tide of strange creatures. Beneath the hall our grandfathers built. In the tunnels, the strange thrum of the graylings’ breath was like the rush of blood, its echo folded and folded again. Seal took one key; I took the other.

         I remembered the way, the turning, to the iron-banded tunnel black as the inside of a throat. The boy went with me; the others flinched back. The boy hesitated at the first band of iron. He crouched down, and his joints bent too far, his knobby knees splayed too wide to look quite human. He touched fingertips to the iron, one by one, pulled his lips in a grimace, then stood.

         Bring it to us, he signed.

         I found the keyhole in the dark, but the dark did not survive long. I pulled open the door, my shoulders, wrenched and strained, aching with the effort, and light spilled from the iron-corded chamber.

         Thump. The heartbeat, slow and weak but still enough to make my bones ache.

         When I had cut it from the graylings’ grove, from the tree at the center of it, I had wrapped the heart in oilskin. I had carried it in the crook of my arm like a child, my blood-pitted blade in my other hand, Mad Hosfar and the other men—fewer with each step, it seemed—behind me. Its frantic spasms had thudded against my belly; I had crushed it to me.

         Now I took the five steps to the center of the room with the solemnity of ritual, and set my fingertips one by one against the heart. The surface was dried and papery, tacky where the blood had flowed and dried again and again.

         I cradled the heart in my hands. Fresh blood wept from the wounds I’d cut and traced a scorching line across my wrist. One more scar to mark this night.

         I carried it over stone and over iron, to the boy waiting with dark, untrusting eyes. When he saw me, his eyelids widened a moment, as if he had not believed I would come. The susurrus of breath behind him ceased—and then the thrum returned, quicker, stronger. He took my blade and set it against his sternum, slicing down, slicing deep. I cried out in alarm, the sound tearing free from the wreck of my throat, but he only reached three thin fingers into the wound and drew the lip of it aside, pale flesh like a mushroom stalk split open.

         He took the heart from me, awkward in his child-sized palm, and fit it into the dark cavity of his chest. His wound closed over it, knitted flesh to flesh. All that remained was drying blood and a tumorous bulge that pulsed, more rapidly now, growing stronger once again.

         It is done, he said. He held my knife out to me, pommel-first.

         I took it. It is done, I agreed.

         You will have your passage.

         I nodded. It was done. And I could feel it already, the change in the holding. It would break. Was broken already. Its people would retreat. They would vanish into the other holdings, or stay in bare-toothed stubbornness, but it wouldn’t matter. They had died when Talgrun refused to listen.

         The mothers were waiting. Not all of them. Not nearly all. They were trained too well in obedience and fear. But Seal was there, and the girl who had pressed her fingers to her cheek when she stood before Talgrun, and more children still. And, to my surprise, three minders, the oldest with a face half-masked by the wine-red stain that branded her barren.

         I went, and they followed. Out through the tunnel’s mouth, into the quiet village, not yet awoken. Bodies lay in the mud. More of Talgrun’s thralls, throats laid open by grayling teeth. I walked along the path and then away from it, into the woods, following the flitting of gray flanks. Toward the warding stones. Toward Imri and Evahr, and whoever else had lived. Toward the narrow place, and what lay beyond. Behind me, the holding slept, not knowing I had killed them in the night.

         Ahead of me, between the trees, a figure stepped into view. Evahr. And there was Imri with him, Hosfar and his children beyond. I could not see their faces—could not see joy or fear or anger, only that they lived. It was enough.

         I reached the crest of the hill, where the warding stones stood to mark the line between our territory and that which the graylings still claimed. Without the midbeam, the stones were dead. Lifeless rock and nothing more.

         There were perhaps a dozen others besides Imri, Evahr, and Hosfar’s family. They stood further back, keeping away from the warding stone—for it was blackened, cracked, its knots as much a ruin as those that trailed along the midbeam.

         Imri came to meet me, three steps, a hand raised to touched the burned, raw skin at my mouth.

         “Reyna,” Evahr said. He still stood back. His eyes were pale in the morning light, gray as the shore. “What did you do?”

         What I had to.

         He tracked my hands, confusion in his eyes, and something else—fear. He knew the gesture-speech to sign to Imri, but his signs were clumsy, his understanding slow. If I could explain to him what had happened, he would not comprehend. And so I offered only one word.

         Follow.

         I was not sure they would.

         But one by one, they did. Through the forest of dumbstruck birds, to the crack in the stone no wider than the thin edge of a blade.

         The stone loomed above us, twice as tall as even Mad Hosfar. Graylings crouched on the jagged dome of the boulder—thirty of them strong, and stranger than those that I’d seen this side of the narrow place. Eyeless, mouthless, with too many limbs—creatures with plates of bone like mushroom caps over their brows or brambles growing from their backs.

         “Mother’s mercy,” Hosfar said, and reached for iron. I stopped him with a lifted hand.

         Down from the rock came a grayling, long-limbed, five fingers on each hand and eyes as pale gray as Evahr’s. It clutched my spear in one hand. Held it out.

         I took the spear, its familiar weight easing the breath in my chest. The grayling stepped back, and set its hand beside the crack in the rock.

         The crack widened. Gaped. Stood open wider than three men across, and yet I could see it plainly still, narrower than my hand.

         The others shifted behind me, muttering nervously. I glanced back at them, just once.

         Follow.

         I did not look back again. I did not dare look to see who came with me; I walked forward.

         I stepped from the woods into the open field, from morning to midnight, from the light of the sun to the uncertain shimmer of the graylings’ moon, round and unbroken. Before me, soft hills lay limned with moonlight, purplish stalks of some strange wheat rippling in the constant wind through the crack between worlds. The graylings’ forests lay beyond, I knew, but now they were only shadows against a night-bruised sky.

         Footsteps drew up behind me, and Imri’s hand slid into mine.

         I turned, my fingers laced with hers. Hosfar, his three children with him, clutching at his cloak, the old wolf trotting behind. Nagrat and Onesha. The mutelings, young and old, their minders chiding the youngest softly to hurry, hurry. And then the rest of the survivors from the shore. And finally Evahr—my echo, my shadow, my beloved. Or so he’d been to the woman of iron and salt I’d been. But I had no iron now, no ship to stride the sea, no knot upon my cheek. No voice to tell him that whoever I might be, I loved him still.

         “Why have you brought us here?” Nagrat asked. “Reyna. Where are you leading us?”

         Evahr walked among the others. He looked about himself, taking in the uncertain faces, and then he looked to me. He had to know what I had done; it must have been written somehow on my face, on my body. How could such a thing leave me unmarked?

         He crossed the distance to me, and drew his iron blade as he came. His face was stone, but I had spent my fear. I could not fear him. I would not. I stepped away from Imri and held my ground. If Evahr plunged his blade into my breast it would be just.

         But instead, he pressed the hilt of it into my hand. He bent his knee, let the blade part his breath. “Reyna Bonespear,” he said. “I have pledged myself to you before, and now I pledge again. Wherever you go, I will follow. Into shadow and into morning. Over the salt sea and through the deep forest. Across this land or any other.”

         “We will follow,” Mad Hosfar echoed. He drew his knife; he knelt. Yari was a moment behind his father. And then Nagrat, and Evahr’s thralls. Vieka pressed her lips to her iron ring, and then Onesha, hesitating, did as well.

         “We will follow,” they echoed, one by one. Every voice added to the chorus—and the voiceless did not kneel, but Seal lifted a hand, pressed two fingers to her cheek. The gesture spread, from the eldest muteling, white-haired, long past bearing, to the youngest. Imri laid her hand on my shoulder, her grip tight, and for once I did not shy from the touch.

         “We will follow,” Evahr said to end the echo. And then he stood. Pressed his brow to mine, his palm to my cheek. His voice dropped; words for me, and me alone. “What you did had to be done,” he said. “Whatever it was. I pledge to you, Reyna. Always.”

         I shut my eyes. Breathed him in, the scent of him.

         A thousand enemies, my sister said, and I was leading my people to them. So that they could live.

         But not all of them would.

         I opened my eyes. There is a place in the hills, I said. A place of summer. That is where we will find our home. That is where I will lead you.

         I saw their eyes, bright with sudden hope as those who understood the words passed them in whispers to the rest. All but Seal—Seal, who smiled a cat’s smile, as if she knew what warnings Titha had spun. But she said nothing.

         Not all would live, but I had saved some from a more certain death.

         Or so I told myself, as we set out under a strange moon, we ragged few.

Copyright © 2018 Kate Alice Marshall

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Kate Alice Marshall lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and several small agents of chaos disguised as a dog, cat, and child. Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Crossed Genres, and other venues, and she is the author of the YA survival thriller I Am Still Alive from Viking Children’s. You can find her online at  katemarshallbooks.com.

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COVER ART

“King of Ruins,” by Mats Minnhagen

Mats Minnhagen is a Swedish illustrator. He has worked with computer games, children’s books, and historical illustration, among other things. You can check out his work at www.minnhagen.com. “King of Ruins” was the cover art for the Beneath Ceaseless Skies website in summer 2008 before the premiere issue.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2018 Firkin Press

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