Fire had spread here as well—a noxious burst of black smoke all but buffeted them as they plunged into the flickering dark. Boxes were strewn, the wall sagged, and between the dancing plumes, Charlotte’s watering eyes could see the steady progression of her men, cloaks dragged up to their faces to stifle the smoke. Dartrek draped his own cloak about her for just that purpose, and when she protested, he simply drew a hand up to his face and covered it up, as though that would be enough to spare his lungs. Mimicking her performance outside, he pushed ahead, and did not wait to hear her objections.
They were in an office, a mass of dates and figures affixed to nailed parchment which told the tales of this place’s schedules. Open windows looked out on the warehouse below, and though it stung her eyes, she forced her head out one of them, trying to see what hell her men stepped into.
It was the shadows that caught her first. Motion tugged at the edges of her vision and only gradually took the shape of flesh. She squinted, cursing whatever fools designed a body so weak as their mortal coils. There was a glinting, in that thought. Long, slender glinting, stretched across time and space in the hand of one that knew too well how to use it, a smoky figure lain prone beneath. Heart lurched. Only once before had she seen a blade as such. Only once, and would forever after mark it, for it came attached to the black skin of a myth, and laid its blood-stained kiss upon her hand.
It had smelled her, once upon a time, and marked her even as she marked him.
Charlotte stiffened. She felt suddenly dizzy. There was a sulfurous stench that swept her nostrils, above and beyond the burning of a merchant’s wealth.
Yet even as the brain stammered, reality hit its notes. There was a figure, prone beneath that blade, to whom she had pledged too much and given too little, and her heart would not stand for its flight. Have you finally found your way beyond the tunes of fate, dear witch? He might have killed her. She did not know. Either he would die for it, or he would be kept from it entire.
“Iruwen!” she bellowed beyond her own disbelief, such that even Dartrek turned in fury.
This, and this alone, steadied the blade. Bright eyes, every bit as silver as the blade that strode before them, flickered for an instant to her perch. It knew. It had heard. And beneath it, the body of another woman stirred.
She would remember this moment, the stars blinking through the canopy behind her, soot stinging her lungs and staining her clothes, with flames and jutting, razored boards risen like a wall of spears between her and the figures Cullick coin would name their murderers. A deadened, bleary world, straight out of a frieze of Hell.
Shouts dragged the moment from her grip. Her men had surrounded them, a torrent of blades and crossbows, eager to avenge fallen comrades. The eyes wrenched away, sweeping the new field, and the blade twisted accordingly. The threat was poignant. He, as well as they, knew exactly the situation to which he had found himself.
And if she did not act, there would be blood. More blood.
“Stop this. Stop this now! Aurinth, these are not the acts for which you have been paid!”
There was little time. The fire was spreading. In a place such as this, it had too much kindling, not enough resistance to smother it. They would all be engulfed if they took too long.
She coughed, her head spun, and she realized too much smoke was getting in.
One by one, the creature marked her men, cocked its head to the new scene, and crouched with a boot on Usuri’s throat. What had always been storms within the world of men, shuddered and all but broke apart. The storms were dying, as her hands scored the madman’s boot.
Its lips moved. She could not hear its reply.
She turned to Dartrek, pleading; she could see the hesitation welled within him.
“Beyond coin,” he repeated.
There had, she realized then, always been an anger within her. A need to resist. In her youth, it too often welled into petty things—rebellions that, for all her simple intent, swelled beyond her grasping. Here, now, she thought she saw exactly, for the first time, what she had in mind. How it would react. And it began, and ended, with a phrase months old: Don’t you hear the word? There are no strings to pull, for the mind is all so null. It all came back to words, really, in the end. Words had moved Usuri to action. Words were what Charlotte’s family wove to reach ascendancy. And words, above all, words were what stirred a lion.
“Then you will be the last. I swear to you, you will die and there will be nothing left of a memory,” she spat. She meant it. She would end him, if either foot or blade snuffed the witch.
“Gone,” Aurinth grunted a moment later. “Already gone.”
“Then you would go like them, without a purpose?”
A beam snapped overhead. Several men scattered as it crashed into the floor below, sparking another blaze that leapt atop the crates surrounding. It was creeping closer, in leagues, and its choking canopy only thickened. They were out of time.
She raised her hand, to give the call. Sweat dripped the length of her swaying stance. Not dignified. Not dignified at all.
Then the purple lips moved again. They moved, and Dartrek said his piece, and what was meant to be an execution became a gesture of salvation. The blade moved. The roof crooned, and inch by inch the night grew closer to fruition.
She was shivering when they laid her down in the street. Usuri, white-knuckled and unable to stand, quivered like a newborn babe. Further on, in the courtyard of the lost warehouse, her assassin knelt with his hands on his thighs, ringed by steel and yet the picture of calm. His own weapons had been taken from him.
Charlotte’s heart was a thudding hammer in the anvil of her breast.
“She is in shock,” one of the guardsmen was saying. It was the only explanation they could come up with. The condition did not match the wounds.
There had been days when Charlotte had seen the girl’s body wracked with fever and delusion, agony and blood. Magic, whatever its course, was a violent, virulent act, as tumultuous to its wielder as the world upon which it was wielded.
In all those other moments, the only cure had been bed rest. She scarcely ate. Scarcely drank. She rested firmly beyond the hands of doctors, who worked their wills upon the flesh—not the spirit. Her festering was on the inside, and from what Charlotte saw now, it was as a poison of frostbite, for which even the heat of the flames had done nothing.
“She dies,” the assassin said soft as a dormouse.
“She is resilient,” Charlotte countered, defiant. She did not look at him. Could not look at him.
One of the guardsmen struck the creature with a gauntlet. She heard the ring of it striking bone. “Lucky we don’t kill you, dog.”
The girl whimpered beneath her, reached a hand to hers. “Little bird. It flies. Still flies. But circling, always circling—never away. Why can’t it leave the nest?” The babbling, broken voice had the old, mad quality to it, but a sadness now, without the fury that once had stoked it.
She tried to hush the girl. To ask the guards for something, anything that might avail her. But they knew nothing of the witch and had little interest in the preservation of one. Usuri’s normally dark skin had paled and purpled, and seemed to sap Charlotte’s own warmth with the very touch. Veins were prominent even in the hollow light, and her eyes shot with blood.
She would not survive the return to Vissering.
“It does not need us,” Usuri whispered, her words coming in gulping chitters. “S…so much and many, all about, and none to s-see, it…it’s the name, see, the name, and everything else between is just…just air…”
“Hush, hush.”
“My little bird would flutter. But what—what happens when there’s no more air?”
It was too much to take. Clutching the girl’s frozen hands, Charlotte twisted her own malevolence on the assassin, who had not bothered to lift himself back off the ground.
“What is wrong with her?”
The corners of the assassin’s mouth twitched, just so
.
She nodded to one of her men and he kicked the assassin square in the chest. He folded inward with a wheeze, but did not cry out.
“What. Is. Wrong?”
Beneath the ashen mask of his hair, the assassin abruptly returned to her, caught by something in the manner of her voice. “Yearns,” it said belatedly. “But of the flesh—the curse. All things must come from somewhere.”
“What do you mean?”
He rolled his eyes—at first, she thought with a flare of rage, at her, but belatedly realized he was gesturing to the scene around them. Smoke. Wildfire. Usuri’s doing. The whole night had been her doing. Charlotte’s eyes creased to slits, and she wondered how this was at all relevant.
“Exchange. There is never more than there is, nor less than needed. Burn, she does, and freeze she will, for one never lacks for fuel, so long’s they still bleed…”
Blood had, once, been enough to start a fire that consumed a doll before her eyes. Charlotte had watched it burn, the witch dancing a jig upon the crackling embers of its corpse. She had tried to forget it, tried to forget that there was, in that burning, another man that had been put to the pyre miles from their gates.
Magic defied rule. Its very essence broke logic and tore asunder the boundaries of their mere mortality. Yet it would seem that even in the illogical, there was some confine of logic—a transference, as it were, and she was quick enough to catch the assassin’s meaning.
The heart pumped the blood that warmed and fueled the body. Take the blood, take the warmth, and the heat could be used to make fire. Or vice versa, she supposed—draw off the heat of the blood until hypothermia set in. Usuri, then, had used too much in too little time. It was frostbite, in a sense—she was literally freezing from the inside out.
She grated against the grasping of her own thoughts. She was no doctor, but then, neither were most doctors. Much had been achieved in recent decades. They had tonics and tinctures, means of preserving men from some of the most grievous horrors of war. Yet doctors too were bound by the simple means of the world: they could repair what they could decipher, what they could see, but they could not create. Some matters were beyond even the most skilled hands.
This was not a poison. It was not a wound or break. It could not be set or patched or massaged. Yet there was a fix. She was certain of that. It simply commanded particular needs she was certain that, just a few months before, she should never have even considered.
“Knife.”
A demand, not a question. Yet most of her men treated it as such. They exchanged awkward, bemused glances until she fixed them with her father’s grim stare. She was not a woman to repeat herself. They understood this. This, they did not question. To this, they offered more than one short blade, and she simply snatched the nearest.
Maker guide and preserve me. Even the wisest among your flock are but fools before desire. Then she set the blade to her own flesh.
“My lady, no!”
More than one echoed that call. She ignored them, carved a wincing line across the unmarred texture of her arm.
She saw Dartrek reach out to seize her by that arm, but she fixed him also with that dirty look, and he hesitated, the pain in his eyes palpable. Usuri had drawn as still and wide-eyed as a dying doe. There was something humorous in that. The pain, she found, she could weather. So she hovered her arm over the dying witch like a benediction, and made her peace.
“You must swear to me, Usuri.”
The witch shook her head. What little hair she brooked twisted in matted, sweat-slicked tangles. She was so pale. So pale.
“Easier, bird, so much easier, without the complications of my birth…”
“Speak it,” Charlotte insisted.
The witch winced, looked pitiably away. “All die. All go. And I would…I would…”
“Better still,” the assassin murmured. It was followed by a soundless suckling of air as another boot struck him.
“You would take my gift, and you would make of it what you would, and you would join me as we bring some sense back into this tumultuous pisspot of a land,” Charlotte seethed. She was, she realized belatedly, becoming a touch lightheaded. Warmth welled about her wrist and drew long lines down her skin, welling in little beads. Such warmth. Such chill in its wake. “There is a vision, you’ve yet to realize.”
The witch shut her eyes, shook more fervently then. “It sees! It sees! Oh, it has seen the beauty, and it shall come to pass with or without the blood of the…of the…” Charlotte forcibly clamped the girl’s hand about her wrist, and Usuri’s bloodshot eyes burst open instantly. “Why?”
Charlotte flexed her arm, adjusting to keep its stains from leaking onto her already ruined jacket.
“Because nothing burns so bright. Now take and drink, or my specter shall stalk you through even the darkest circles of your final walk.”
There was recognition in those eyes: of a dream, long ago it seemed, before Charlotte had been named an empress without a crown, and Usuri had been but a mad woman with razor claws. Different people, then. More and less human, in their ways.
Usuri met her. Held her. Then she mouthed the words. It was only after that everything lurched sideways.
A great wind. That was the best description she could summon. Memories on a ship, on distant waves, standing at the edge as the world quivered unsteadily beneath her and a great wind swept through her very core. No matter how one bundled themselves, there seemed to be no escaping it. Flecks of water lay within its bite, a dampness that defied even the light of the sun.
Death, then, is nothing more than a final wind. We can only hope that silence is its wake.
Then it was done. She was shivering, her skin a touch more ashen than it had been a moment before, and what had been a cool spring’s evening became a winter’s chill.
“A cloak,” she whispered, and was promptly greeted with Dartrek’s. She wrapped herself in it, and did her best to preserve her dignity.
Beneath her, Usuri flushed. Though still frore, color suffused what had been drained, and her breaths slowed, deepened. All this, Charlotte could feel through the hand that clutched her. It seemed, for a moment in time, as though their heartbeats synchronized. Usuri, she realized belatedly, never looked away, though her eyes grew more heavily lidded.
So it was, when she spoke again, the words were slurred, where once they chattered. “And the lion, shrouded, shall no more slake his thirst, when even his pride…” And no more. Usuri the Many-starred fell away from their light, and down, down into the dark.
Charlotte almost shook her, so still did the girl become. There was no peace in that stillness, but rigidity—a cold, corpse-like anguish that gripped and held her far away from all the simplicities men and women were supposed to experience. A motion, was all. A motion, and the men knew they were to take Usuri from her hands. They did so without question. They carried her—gently, her look assuaged them—as one might carry a babe. An ill babe.
Tragedy was that the world did not allow for time to compose.
She turned and levied the full weight of her malevolence on the assassin that had nearly snatched the girl from her.
“Better, it thinks, to have let its song die out,” the assassin said as calmly as a shopper assessing goods at the market.
She didn’t even have the energy to order another beating. It would have done no good, at any rate. Pain was something this creature dealt in. It was obvious its dealings in turn meant little for him—though there was something to be said for what might be therapeutic for her.
“Breathe deep, Iruwen. It is all you shall have to tell me why I ought not have the heart carved from you.” For all that had happened, her voice was rock-steady. It was not anything resembling an idle threat.
The assassin blinked at her, then slowly swiveled onto his belly. With the grace of a tumbler, he pressed himself up by his wrists and swept his legs under him, bringing himself nigh supplicant before her. Those same wrists he then laid palm-up against his
thighs, and in his gaze, she knew she had become the only one before him. Then he sucked at the air.
“Frail is the beauty where light falls on ivory. Frailer still the pride in which two lions stride.”
The creature looked to her. He was not the only one. At a word, at a glance, she might have ended him. One inclination and any man of half a dozen should have brought steel upon his neck—as he, she reminded herself, had brought to far too many good men this eve.
“Oh, good,” she said, too brightly. A stir went through her men. “After all this, it’s my father you would speak ill of? Truly?” Her one, icy note of laughter was more a bark. “God be damned. If all Iruwen were as arrogant as you, I understand now why there are so few.”
It was bait she offered, but the assassin refused to take it. “It spoke of lions, and so should this one, for in them lie the weight of all things. Forgets, the world does, that the gryphon is part lion—forgets, she does, that before her lies the ugliness of illusions forgotten. This one speaks truths.”
“You speak in deaths, and so should I answer,” Charlotte said.
“Pragmatic,” it said, with an icy smile. “So does her father trade.”
“Enough.”
One man took it as a cue. The blade cleaved brilliantly through the night sky. From where he sat, Aurinth the Iruwen assassin should never have been able to react to it. Yet it had to be said: her father had never chosen men for lack of kind. In a matter of seconds, Aurinth had not only disarmed the man, but broken his helm and thrown him down in his place. With the man’s own sword he thusly might have killed him, but as the others tittered and roared their response, he held himself aloof, and she, standing sharply, ordered them off. The dazed man stared up at what had been his prisoner, and the blade pressed to his collarbone.
The blade fell beside him, unceremoniously, and mercifully unblooded.
“If you may,” the assassin said humbly, with a bow of his ashen skull.
Charlotte, still shivering, gritted her teeth against this show, but stood firm. “What of my father?”
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