Knaves

  The Lady’s hands were reaching, plucking, gathering more cards from the slots in her skin like so much ripe fruit.

  So much for not taking any bones with her.

  She felt her palms itch, the etchings asking to be set free. She didn’t want to hurt. She wanted to be done with hurting. One more and then she would be done. She closed her fists against their insistence and tried another tack.

  “Lady, have I offended you in some way?” She tried to think. While she didn’t truck with the Ladies and their cards, she didn’t distain them either. She laid her salt and sulphur, gave the moths their due, never crossed water without first asking permissions. Her father had taught her many horrible things, but he had also taught her to save herself. So, if she’d offended, she couldn’t think of how or why. Even so, it was possible. Anything was, this final journey.

  In answer, the Lady released a handful of cards, each connecting to each, becoming a writhing snake that wrapped Kansa’s neck before she could reach to stop it. The black beast tightened around her, coils doubling, as it took her voice and then her breath.

  It was as if the Lady knew—without voice, the dust devil etchings were useless, merely ink upon the skin. The talisman was protective, although it was hardly doing its job currently. Kansa had her blades, but they were for real things, blood and bone. Not shadows and shifting.

  The blackness brought by lack of breath closed Kansa’s vision. Narrowed the line of light into a single dull shard of grey. Her knees fell to the track, heard more than felt. Her palms, whirling useless, pressed to the dirt.

  She saw no way out. She might have known it would come to this, after everything. She had nothing and no one. She would fall here, in the dust and grit, and become the end of her line. Maybe that wasn’t so bad. Maybe it was as it was meant to be. Maybe Haile’s way was the smarter one, after all. Truck with the hangwoman and you get hanged. But at least you get that.

  Her foot, bloodied and bare, twitched against the dust. So many pained steps to come to this moment.

  No. It would not do to die here, on the very doorstep of what she’d built her whole life for.

  “No, I’ll not kill you,” the Lady said, as if she’d heard. “I have a message. And I heard tell that you do not listen well without… assistance. So I have given you that assistance.”

  A message? From who? Of what? The words were on her tongue but couldn’t find their way out of the black coil.

  The Lady seemed to be waiting for something. It was hard to grasp for what in the darkness. Kansa’s chin fell down to the writhing card snake around her neck in an effort to say she understood.

  The dull shard shifted. The constriction on her neck slithered open. Just enough to let the light back in. But not to return her voice.

  “Listen.” The Lady knelt before her, returning to the posture she’d started with. The stitching in the Lady’s winked eye untied its tail knot and began to unravel from its holes, one-by-one, until it was free. The wrecked lid popped open, behind it, a false eye of garnet and steel. The Lady blinked, once, and when the lid opened again, Kansa saw the message meant for her.

  The choking this time came not from the black coil—it had already slid loose, disconnecting from itself to become nothing more than card shreds, falling—but from what she saw in the Lady’s green-cast eye.

  No. It was not possible.

  Kansa said as much, now that she had air again to release into noise. “Lies,” she hissed, her words dark shapes slipping over sand. “Lies. Who are you to show me such lies?” Her hand was on the hilt of her heftblade. Surely the Lady worked for her father. Surely he’d sent her to force her from her path. Why else would such a thing exist, be here, now, before her?

  “She said you’d say that,” the Lady said. She pulled a new card from her neck and held it up. Kansa met its face with the point of her blade.

  “Who said?”

  In answer, a red heart. A black dog. A face, turned as though to catch a final glimpse of someone walking south. A profile she would know anywhere.

  But not proof.

  Except the face turned, and the mouth—a mouth nearly the same as hers, with a scar riding high on the cleft lip—told her what her nightmares had been trying to tell her for weeks. “You left me. You left me, and you owe me, big sister.”

  Haile.

  Her heart took this in—the Lady, the message, her little sister’s face, moving as if it were still alive—and spit it back out.

  Yes, she had left her sister, her baby sister, in the horrendous darkness of the Crim. But her sister had been dead, in mind if not in body, long before then. Haile’d chosen to truck with the hangwoman, had chosen to feed her madness and pull it around her like a death pelt. There was no turning that back. No amount of killing or pleading or not-leaving that would undo what was done.

  You left me first, baby sister.

  Kansa found no blame—any daughter with a devil for a father was bound for madness, come one way or another. Here, after all, she was herself, dust devils and talismans and blades for the kill. But her sister was gone. This magical illusion was just that.

  Kansa rose from her knees. Her palms opened, and within her skin, the grey circles of buried ink began to swirl.

  “Show me that lie for what it was,” Kansa said. “Before I do take bones with you, and do something we shall both regret.”

  “Regret seems to be the only way you do things of late,” the Lady said. “Wary of the baggage you saddle yourself with, Kansa, Devil’s Eldest Daughter.”

  “Devil’s Only…” Kansa started to say, her tongue a blade… but she was no longer sure. This magic wasn’t a magic she knew, these cards gone feral. It didn’t matter, Eldest or Only. For soon, she would not even be that. She could feel the end coming like a bend in a wild river, rapid and dangerous and dreamed-of.

  “Take it,” the Lady said, card before her.

  Kansa didn’t want to touch the card. Its rust-hued heart. Its dog of death. Her sister’s profile. But she sensed she had no choice. The road would not let her go forward without taking its toll. She pinched the paper and forced it to fold into her pocket, another bloodied memento with a weight behind its means.

  “Begone, beggar queen,” Kansa said, barely aware that the woman had already disappeared. “I’ve paid my dues.” Again and again and again.

  Behind her came the haunting wye-wye-wye of the piebald magpies from their perch over Last Hope’s door. Kansa was suddenly, achingly tired. As if her very bones were metalwork, her blood silvered and steamed. She did not think she could make it to the end of the track, even without the woman standing in her way. The etchings beneath her skin deepened into her veins, and she closed her fists against their downward sink.

  She walked. Through desert and dust. Through churns as tall as mountains and wheel ruts that were cold at the bottoms. The sun burned her eyes until she lifted one hand, ancient and slow, to ward her vision of the building at the end of the track. At one point, she thought she would lay down and rest. The ground beneath her feet was sun-warmed and soft, and she might sleep away this exhaustion. Gain back her strength before she went on.

  From the porch, the hound bayed. Kansa pulled her gaze from the ruts to see Seth watching her from the porch. Somehow his eyes brought her back to herself, collapsed time and effort back into something more akin to normalcy. Though Seth lay as he always had, gold-gleamed form stretched out in repose and his metalwork paws slanted over the side of the wood, as if his highest care in the world was daydream of mudbunnies for breakfast, his cobalt eyes had been on her since the moment she’d stepped into town. Maybe before. She understood the ways of metalwork better than most—though she did not care for it—but there were secrets on secrets in the depths that she couldn’t begin to fathom. How the hound could track her days away was something she’d never figured out as a child. He would have tracked Haile too, but Haile never ran away, and so Seth had never had to come for her, hiding in the streams and woods and shado
ws, and haul her home, some part of her clasped in his gentle grip.

  The hound had been her companion since she was a child, but she held no hope that he’d greet her as a playmate, long-lost. Nor even as an equal. They might have played together as youngsters, games of fetch and hide and tumble, but she did not fool herself to think Seth was hers. Not anymore. Nor that play was ever merely play. Her father had been training all of them for purpose. For loyalty and legacy.

  She left the hardened earth of the track and lifted her foot over the salt-and-circuit circle that surrounded Road’s End. For a breath, she was sure the metal-moat wouldn’t let her through, that he’d warded it against her, and she stiffened, a pull that scolded her muscles, before she set her foot down. But there was only the sting of salt in her broken skin, the sharp edges of metal pointed between her toes. She let the tears come, knowing even as they swelled that they didn’t belong to pain, but to relief. A wash of things being nearly done. Come one way or another, here and now, they would finally be put to right.

  The first porch step had creaked since time immortal, but she didn’t sidestep it. There was no sneaking up on this—not on Seth, not on her father, not on her future. She planted her foot, let the wood whine at her passing. He would already know she was here, maybe even before Seth did. Maybe even before she herself had known that this is where she would end her journey.

  Seth, she said, softly, seeing now how old he’d grown while she’d been gone. His silver was tarnished, the copper fur dented around his ears and muzzle. He rolled a blue eye toward her; even that was a replacement, she saw, a deeper, murkier blue than the one he’d been made with. She was tempted to reach and touch the worn-smooth spots around his ears, but stopped herself, unable to bear it if she found he too, had turned against her. How many times did a heart break before there was nothing left to put back together? A day ago, she would have said she’d found the answer. Now, she knew elsewise.

  From inside the building, she heard the murmur of the cards being moved and deals being made. She would have liked to have come at a time when Road’s End was empty, but there such a time didn’t exist. As long as the devil took up residence here, the building would know no emptiness, no quiet, no peace. Those with the purpose and the money and the means would always come and go, provided they didn’t offend the devil. Or sometimes, if even when they did.

  I have a truck with the devil, she thought. Kansa saw her sister’s face on a card and wondered how close to madness she might be.

  In her memory, the metalwork symbols on the door were deadlier, darker. Permanent and dangerous as death. Now, they had aged with Seth. She hadn’t known such a thing was possible. For the first time, she wondered about the man she would find inside. Would he be the fire and brimstone temper she remembered, the devil who wielded wisdom in the shape of fist and fury? Who taught love like competition? Or something else? Aged by memory and time? The latter hardly seemed possible.

  She could handle revenge. She could even handle her own death. What she could not handle, would not handle, was the possibility that the devil was no longer the devil and she would have to… What? Forgive him? Go to some wirework therapist and listen to her father say all he’d done wrong and how he’d repented?

  No. She did not deal in forgiveness. It was just one of the many, many things the devil had taught her.

  Kansa lifted her bloodied, beaten hand and put it to the wood. The wards reacted and sizzled. Nothing special she’d done, other than being the daughter of the devil. A story the world had told her again and again. She opened the door to Road’s End.

  Her father sat at a card table, long-limbed and dark-suited, dealer of time and destruction, cards sliding through his fingers toward the players across from him. The players—three of them, losing badly by the marks across their hands—turned at her entrance. One of them began to speak—

  The devil canted his head, salt and pepper since as long as she could remember, in a gesture so small it was nigh imperceptible. All three players stilled mid-act. Silent and eternal as stone. He’d done that to her once, when she’d been crying over some small hurt thing. She could still remember the hum of time passing, and realizing it was her own heart, slowed to time eternal. It was the first bit of her father’s power she’d taught herself to resist.

  “Welcome home, Eldest Child of Mine,” her father said. Unlike Seth, he didn’t seem older. He seemed… the same. Ever and ever the same. There was relief in that. She would have her revenge, come one way or another. “I’ve been waiting.”

  Of course he had been. There was nothing the devil did not see coming. Or at least that’s what he’d taught her to believe. She wondered just how much of what was coming he saw now. Was his relaxed rise from the table truth or ignorance? She could only hope that latter.

  “Home,” she said. A word that tasted of spit and metal, void of meaning. How many times had she run from here? How many times had Seth caught her and dragged her back? “This was no home…” But no, she would not fight him word to word. She had all the power she needed in what she’d come to do.

  He let the cards lie fallow on the table, took a single step toward her. The vulture that lived inside the end of his finger broke its head from beneath the skin, beak ready and beady eyes a-blink. He dragged the beak across his skin until it broke, a red river of ink and promise. “You’ve come to claim your kingdom,” he said. “And you are so very close. I am proud of you, Eldest Child of Mine.”

  So, he didn’t know everything, didn’t see everything coming. He still thought she’d come to take his place. Oh, what joy. What sweet pleasure. Everything—almost everything—worth this moment. “I’m not—” she started.

  For behind her father, the cards lifted themselves, whirling from the table. Catching in the light and dark, shadow spun, they built themselves into a sister. Black spades for eyes and heart. The heart-shaped mouth of red. Dark insanity made flesh.

  Haile.

  “Only one last thing,” her father said, not turning, not surprised. He had known. He had known Haile lived yet. Had known she’d come. Had known, even, this card magic. Her hope withered, small blossom in the shade. “Your sister lives still.”

  The devil must have seen something in Kansa’s eyes. “I know,” he said in the soothing voice he’d used when she was too young to understand his other forms, and she’d cried and run and kicked out, useless and small, against him. “I know. You thought you were done. It was smart, truly, turning her mad, leaving her in the Crim.”

  He gestured to her palms, and she found they itched. She rubbed them against her skin.

  “But you must finish her,” the devil said. “She is all that stands between you and your destiny.”

  “Sister, you owe me.” Her sister’s voice was slice of paper through skin.

  That, then, was the reason for the Lady in the street. Not to show Kansa that her sister lived still, but to gain this bargaining chip. Cash in this remembered debt. Use it against their father. Oh, Haile.

  The devil lowered himself before Kansa, and his voice was slick with power. His eyes the red she fled, the red she wore upon her skin. “It must be you, Eldest Daughter. Not your sister, for she is worn by madness. She is not strong.”

  “You do not know strong,” her sister said. Haile turned to the devil, card to card to card, became a tree, a vulture, a haunt. Shadow-visage, sister, daughter. Power rolled from her like ancient tongues. “I will kill you. We will kill you. Help me, big sister. Help me.”

  With the final word, the cards became a tempest, tornado, whirling turns of faces. Skyward winding, the fury caught the roof and sky and brought them both down upon the devil.

  Who moved from his crouch before Kansa, a roll and sleight of hand, and both roof and sky were caught in his fist, a weapon aimed and ready.

  “Everything you’ve worked for,” the devil said. “So close. Reach and take it.”

  No. She did not want to become the devil’s salvation. Nor her sister’s. Would
not. And yet, she’d come so far for this, given up so much. Indecision stayed her hand, as strongly as any monster’s grip.

  Wood and air left his fist, a flood that scattered the cards of her sister, sending them careening into the stock-still players. One toppled backward, the crash of body and chair sending a deep growl from Seth’s throat. The cards regrouped, a flock of prey, arrow and hammer, aiming steady.

  Her father and her sister. Both mad in their own way. Both bearing her scars, and she theirs. In the name of a destiny she did not want.

  “Help me,” they both said, and in it, her voice too.

  Her palms opened, and within her skin, the grey circles of buried ink began to swirl. “Be stilled,” she said.

  Her father, bound by time and legacy, waited.

  Her sister, bound in her madness and magic, waited.

  Her hand, bound by death and promises, waited.

  The grass, bound by nothing, did not wait. But went on.

  She watched the man who’d raised her, who’d broken her and built her to become him. And the sister who’d chosen madness, who’d left her, and whom she’d left. She pulled the card, bent and bowed, from her pocket. Red heart. Black dog. A face turning south to watch what was leaving.

  “Be your mourning ending as soon as it’s begun,” she said, and understood she was talking to herself.

  She didn’t ask Seth if he wanted to come. He just joined her as she went by, step-to-step, down the wooden stairs. The road out of town beckoned her, but she’d traveled that path before. She lifted a bare foot over the metal-moat and left the road. Turned right. Found a place no one had ever expected her to walk, and went there.

  Here, in the leaving, was a new kind of madness. That of choice, of free will. A soft and wild madness that left her uncertain, for the first time, of her path.

  Somewhere behind her, she could hear the devil’s magpies asking, wye-wye-wye.

  “Because I can,” she said, and her voice was nothing but her own.