by J. P. Oakes
She lies there gasping. The black spots are back. There is painful pressure in her chest. It takes her four attempts to flip over onto her back.
When she manages it, though, lying there gasping and defenseless, the assassin leaves her alone. He sits on the floor, holding his face. When he takes his hands away, he stares at the blood on his hands.
“Shit,” he says quietly. “Shit.”
“Thacker!” Granny Spregg screams. “The purple perfume bottle! Now!”
Thacker is still staring at her. “Is this the time—” he starts.
“I will carve the lungs from your fucking chest!”
Thacker runs to her bed chamber. She hears him rattling through glass bottles.
Her throat feels raw as she waits. Her heart races. There is a fire in her lungs that keeps rising and rising. The collar on her dress feels too tight.
All the fight has gone from the assassin. He sits in the remains of her piss pot, with tears leaking down his face. “You fucking killed me,” he says.
Granny Spregg speaks through gritted teeth. “You are not the first to come at me with a poisoned blade.”
For a minute she thinks he’s going to attack again, that his faith in his poison won’t be enough to stop him from wanting to truly finish the job. But he just spits at her. “At least I’ll be the last,” he says. He leans back, props himself up on his elbow. The poison will be affecting his vision already, Granny Spregg thinks.
“I got you.” He shakes his head. “Bitch.”
Thacker arrives. He is holding twelve bottles of perfume, each a different shade of lilac, violet, indigo, and… yes, there it is. She plucks the small porcelain vial from his hands.
“I do not like that word,” Granny Spregg tells the dying assassin. “So, because of that, I’m not going to share this.”
The assassin lowers himself back onto the floor. His breath is coming shallowly now, but he still has enough air in his lungs to laugh at her. “Well, I guess I’ll be the worse-smelling corpse,” he says. His mouth twists. “The shame might kill me.”
Granny Spregg smiles her own thin smile as she unscrews the diffuser from the vial with shaking fingers. She can’t feel her legs anymore.
“No,” she says, then she puts the vial to her lips, tips, and pours. She lies back. “I’m afraid you’ll just be the only corpse.”
Knull
Home, Knull knows, is where the heart is. Which is why, he thinks, it is very important to carve your heart from your home’s ribs, and put it somewhere worthy as soon as you’re able.
The house is a sagging ruin, a collapsing pile of rubble. He’d feel bad for rats if they lived here. And yet, here he is again. No matter how far he runs, or how much he makes, its gravity always reclaims him.
He stumbles across the street, his ankle throbbing wildly. The brick of Dust feels like a lead weight. He’s panting hard.
He finds the front door unlocked. There’s no need for a latch, he supposes. There’s nothing inside worth stealing.
As a makeshift safety measure, however, it appears his parents have wedged three tons of crap behind the door, so when he pushes on it, it only opens a few inches. And with his ankle the way it is, he can’t get enough leverage to push the bastard thing open any wider.
He batters at the door, smashing the gap wider inch by inch. He knows it’s no use calling for help. His parents are incapable of getting off the couch.
Except then someone does come, hurrying down the hallway toward him. And then, a moment later, he is eye to eye with his brother.
“Edwyll?”
“Knull?”
Their surprise is mutual, their wide eyes almost identical.
“What are you doing here?” Edwyll asks at the same time as Knull says, “Don’t you live at that artists’ squat now?”
They both stand there staring at each other. Edwyll is younger than Knull, a little shorter, a little thinner, his skin a lighter purple than Knull’s dark blue, his hair the yellow of a sunset, compared to Knull’s teak-colored mop. Their father’s pixie blood is stronger in Edwyll than Knull. Perhaps that is why they have grown so far apart. Perhaps that is why Edwyll’s jaw is jutting now.
“What are you carrying?” Edwyll demands.
This is not a question Knull wants to give an answer to any more than he wants to tell Edwyll what he’s doing here.
“Just help me open the door,” he says. Edwyll hesitates, then grunts, and together they force it wider, and finally Knull elbows his way in.
“What happened to your ankle?” Edwyll asks.
Another unwanted topic. Knull chews his bottom lip. This time, it doesn’t cut it.
“Oh, screw you,” Edwyll says. “You want to pretend you’re doing something so fucking important and hush-hush. You’re a petty self-interested drug dealer who left me here to deal with the shit you didn’t have the balls to face. So at the very least you owe me…”
Knull’s fists are balling as Edwyll trails off. Knull sees his eyes come to rest on the package of Dust.
He turns, trying to put more of his body between Edwyll and the drugs, almost speaking over his shoulder. “Look,” he says. “I fell. I messed up my ankle. It’s fine. I just need to stash something here for… probably less than a day. Then I’m gone. I was never here.”
But it’s too late. Of course it is.
“Holy shit, Knull,” Edwyll breathes. “You… You can’t put that here!” His voice is rising.
“Eddy?” a rumble from the living room at the end of the hall. Knull sees an arm flap like a wilted reed. “Who’s it?”
“Shit,” he whispers. “They’re awake?”
“Dad is.” He turns toward the living room.
“Don’t tell them I’m here.” Knull can’t handle them. Not on top of everything else. Not tonight.
Edwyll looks at him, and Knull sees it for a moment: the desire to wound, to cut as deeply as Knull has cut before. And it would be easier, he thinks, if he didn’t understand. His heart sinks as Edwyll turns away.
“It’s no one,” Edwyll calls to the living room. “Just the wind blowing through.”
Knull finds his own gratitude slightly pathetic.
When Edwyll turns back, though, his jaw is set. “Now get out. Blow away. You cannot stash that here.” He points at him, at the Dust. “That is… Shit, that is so much Dust. How did you get so much?”
Knull decides to just deal with the first half of that. “I can stash it here,” he says. “I will. They’ll never even know.”
But now Edwyll’s looking at his ankle again. Now he’s doing the math. “Oh, you asshole,” he says.
“It’s not—” Knull says, the denial both automatic and automatically dismissed by Edwyll.
“Who?” Edwyll demands. “Who did you screw over to get this? Who did you steal from? What trouble are you bringing down on their heads?”
And there are better ways to handle this than anger, but they have known each other too long and fought about this too often for Knull to have any other reaction.
“Why are you even defending them? You know why I left. My whole childhood was them dumping their shit on me. So, yes, I get to dump whatever shit I like here now.” He points at his younger brother. “On us. They are bad parents, Eddy. They deserve all the shit they get. More than I can give them.”
Edwyll’s jaw works.
“You call them bad—”
“They are.”
“Weak.”
“They are.”
“But which one of us is back here, beaten up, trying to sell the same shit that broke Mum and Dad? Which one of us isn’t strong enough to take on his responsibilities? I’m not here because it’s fun, Knull. I’m not here because I can’t tear myself away. I’m here because you turned and ran like a goddamn coward. You are everything you accuse them of and worse.”
It’s an old argument. So very, very old. They’ve been having it for years. And at its basis, Knull knows, is Edwyll’s failure to underst
and the fundamental lesson of the Iron City: no one else is looking out for you. You have to focus on yourself or you will drown. And Edwyll’s refusal to learn that, his desperate clinging to the twin anchors that are their drugged-out, wasted wrecks of parents, means that he will drown too. Faster than most.
“Do you honestly believe,” he says, “that if I went into that living room right now, they would be able to remember my name right away?”
Edwyll’s hesitation is all the opening he needs to push past his brother. “They won’t find it,” he says as he heads down the front hall to the door that leads to his old room. “Because I won’t be stupid enough to leave it within six inches of the fucking couch. And when I come back, all my troubles will be gone. All of them. Because this is it, Eddy. This is the ticket out. I’ve done it. I’m doing it. And all I need to do is dump this here for one night so someone doesn’t roll me in the streets and ruin it all.”
Edwyll trails after him down the hallway, hesitating in the doorway to the bedroom as Knull pulls piles of old magazines out from under his bed.
“You should take some of it to someone who knows how to fix that ankle,” he says grudgingly.
All fae can do magic when they take Dust, but some magic is harder to perform. Healing takes training, it takes a knowledge of which arteries and veins and nerves should be knitted together, a familiarity with muscle, tendon, and bone. Bad heals can lead to tumors, to clots, to necrotic flesh where blood vessels suddenly dead-end in ugly knots of tissue.
“I’m fine,” he says, balancing awkwardly. “This will make everything better.” He stuffs the Dust beneath his bed, shoving the magazines back to cover it. “This will be good for both of us.” He wishes he didn’t feel the need to justify himself, but it’s there like a thorn beneath his skin.
He straightens, turns. “You should come with me,” he tells Edwyll, suddenly expansive, suddenly not quite able to stand up to the pressure of the guilt. “When it’s done. There’ll be enough. We can escape. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to be chained to them.”
“Who will take care of them then, Knull? I know you love to ignore that problem, but it still doesn’t go away.”
“They need to take care of themselves.”
“They can’t.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
Such an old argument. They both knows its shape. It doesn’t get better from here. Knull bites back the words, breathes.
“The Dust will be gone tomorrow,” he says.
“Just like you.”
Except he’s going to be gone long before then. He has a deal to hustle. A deal to change his whole life. To save it. And it could save Edwyll too, if only he’d let it.
7
And Away We Go
Jag
“Don’t run.”
Jag, two rapid steps down the street, hesitates and looks at Sil. Then she looks at the street around them. At the alleyways that look like they’ve been gouged into its edges. At the dead bodies Sil has left on the ground.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Your leg. It’s just… this feels like a running sort of situation.”
“That is not why.” Sil’s tone is as flat as an apartment block roof. “I can run if I need to. But we are approximately 8.6 miles from House Red Cap. You cannot run that far. If you do, you will exhaust yourself and slow us down. Conserve your energy and be smart.”
Jag is almost certain Sil doesn’t intend this as an admonishment. It still feels like one.
They set off, walking at a steady pace. And the limp in Sil’s stride is almost gone, Jag notices. She moves like something caged. But, Jag thinks, she always moves that way. It’s only under circumstances like this—the slaughterhouse smell of the fight still lingering—that you really notice it. Notice that more than a So many things seem so much more apparent to Jag here and now. The sour garbage stench. The greasy feel of the wet asphalt. The silence that feels like a physical presence, muffling their footsteps. This doesn’t feel like the Fae Districts to her. For her, the Districts are lively, smoke-filled places where fae jostle and jockey for a position at the bar, shouting at each other free of all the inhibitions of House life. For her, they hold a golden hue that seeps into skin and bone when a band starts to play.
There is no golden hue now. Not here. Here, there is the bruised amber of streetlights. There is the splash of failing neon, like sparks floating up from a smoldering fire. There are shadows eating up the light. And none of it feels beautiful.
Someone lurches out of a side street, and Jag flinches away from them. The fae—an elderly pixie with folds around his eyes deep enough to bury bodies in—just stands and stares.
These are not, Jag thinks, the Fae Districts she fell in love with. Here, there is none of the raucous, angry pride that has always filled her heart with excitement. Here, even the plastic aspidistras perched in windowsills are wilting.
She has always known she’s out of place in the Districts. She’s always known that her suits, rebellious and punky in the Goblin Houses, only ever read as the uniform of privilege among the patched work shirts and stained overalls of the fae, that her soft hands don’t match the rough palms of the bartenders who take her coin with a look of disdain. She’s always known.
And yet, she realizes, here, on these streets, on this night, she never has. She’s never come close to seeing how far from home she really is here. Her imagination has had limits. The songs she’s heard have made her see poverty as something beautiful and poetic. But it’s not. Now, she sees poverty in the raw. Now she understands. Poverty is a weight pressing down, constraining, confining, squeezing the breath from hope and dreams. Here, the poverty throttles her.
She wants to run again. She wants to run faster, and faster, and faster. Except all she has to run to is the father who caused this place to exist.
Or the possibility of assassins who are scheming against them both.
Sil walks five yards ahead of Jag, her head sweeping back and forth in a smooth continuous motion.
“Do you remember where you lived?” Jag asks. “Back before my father came to get you?”
Sil’s mother, so the story goes, was a sidhe maid who cleaned her father’s halls. Then she caught Osmondo Red’s eye and he had her clean a little more than that. She lived somewhere in the Districts for a while, Jag’s heard, before Osmondo Red came to collect his bastard child. After that no one knows, though all imagine a shallow grave was involved. Jag has tried to get Sil to open up about it before, has tried to make their relationship closer to something sisterly, but Sil never talks about any of it. Sil never talks about anything except the here and the now, the threats and the required course of action. Osmondo has broken her, no matter that she is his kin. And Jag has never been able to put the pieces back together.
And still now, Sil doesn’t even seem to hear the question, doesn’t give the vaguest suggestion that she is even thinking of responding.
They walk on. The paint is peeling all around them. The windows are broken and patched with cardboard. Grills protecting storefronts are held together by duct tape where demi-dryads are forced to work behind countertops made from the remains of their grandmothers’ own trees. And it all weighs on Jag, heavier and heavier, an anchor she’s dragging back to her father’s house.
Noise breaks through the oppressive silence, and Jag jumps again. Sil reacts too, twitching her head. There is commotion in the streets around them. Voices, and… running feet? Jag’s pulse starts to thrum.
She concentrates, tries to work out the nature of the sound. The voices aren’t exactly scared, nor angry, nor joyful. But they are also a little like all those things.
Sil, Jag realizes, is moving faster.
“What is it?” she asks.
Sil holds up a hand, and Jag bites her tongue. Her adrenaline surges. The voices are getting closer.
When they emerge, they come from a side street. There are perhaps twenty of them. Fae. Jag flashes back to the previous attack
, but these fae are behind them, not cutting off their route home. And rather than wearing tight-fitting black, they’re dressed in loose work clothes and ragged overalls.
And yet…
All of them do have kerchiefs pulled up to their eyes. All of them are carrying chunks of wood, or bats, or Molotov cocktails. And all of them do turn. And all of them do see Jag and Sil in their incongruent finery, here on the ragged edge of the city.
Jag looks to Sil. Their eyes meet.
“Now,” Sil says. “Now, we run.”
Skart
Skart wants to run, to skip, to dance. It is happening. Here, now, before his eyes: the collected fae rebels are marching out to war, to reclaim this city. They are marching out with dreams of tearing down the factories and occupying the halls of power. They are fired up and ready to unleash the fury of creatures constrained for fifty years. This night will run red, and all of it will be to his design.
The old dryad, Brumble, claps him on the back. Her smile is nearly as broad as her shoulders.
“Well done,” she says. Her eyes are shining in the dark of the basement. “You did it.”
He turns to her, shakes his head. “This is a victory for all of us, Brumble.”
“You feigning modesty,” she tells him, “is as pointless as a House Bogle riddle. We all know you’re the architect here.”
He pushes away from her, gives her a mock frown. “The rebellion,” he says, “does not celebrate the individual but the whole.”
She rolls her eyes. Around them, the rest of the old guard laugh. They’re all a little giddy now. And that’s good, but he can’t afford for them to lose focus.
“To business,” Skart says.
The room comes to life. Not every rebel in the Iron City has marched to war tonight. Successful anarchy, time has taught Skart, requires a little organization. So now, fifty fae arrange tables in the heart of the cleaned-out basement. They spread out maps, and tack lists onto cork boards, and modify assignments scrawled in chalk.