Pocket Full of Tinder

by Jill Archer

  “I have never, in all my life, heard that version of the story,” I told her.

  She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It’s still a good idea.”

  “Why don’t you just wait for Cliodna to come down from her sanctuary and arrest her then?” Night asked. “It sounds like encountering Eidolon’s Alternate Ending is the bigger risk.”

  “It’s the two of them together,” I said. “And the fact that Cliodna’s… canny.” I looked in the direction of the sanctuary and continued in a lower voice. “Every minute I spend here is another minute she might escape. I want to destroy Eidolon’s Alternate Ending – and Cliodna – tonight.”

  Fara huffed. “We. Every minute we spend here… You’re not going up alone.”

  I smiled at her. It was brief and fleeting, but it was real. I handed her the shield. “I can shape my own. Rafe, grab the Hunter’s shield. Night, if we’re not back by morning, catch the first train to New Babylon and tell Karanos what happened.”

  He nodded, looking as grim as the Reaper.

  I hadn’t worked with both Fara and Rafe since we’d swum into the murky moat and half-submerged basement of the Stone Pointe keep two semesters ago. The memory was disconcerting, but the spells they were casting me up with were decidedly not. They spared nothing between them and loaded me up with all sorts of cloaking, shielding, and magic-maximizing spells. Since being cursed by Eidolon’s Alternate Ending would likely turn Nova and Virtus into enemies rather than allies, we left them with Nightshade and then the three of us exited the back of the rotunda.

  Slowly—and quietly, thanks to the spells—we crept up the crumbling stairs of the old amphitheater. There wasn’t much moonlight, but Nocturne helped us to see in the dark. As we neared the top of the mountain and the outline of Cliodna’s pavilion came into view, I glanced at the rest of my team. They weren’t simply retainers I’d selected for some morning training melee. They were my friends. If I lost them too…

  My limbs froze and I stopped climbing.

  Was this what I would be like now? More scared and hesitant than I’d been on my first day at St. Luck’s?

  I mentally riffled through all of the spells that Rafe and Fara knew. Was there one they hadn’t yet cast that would clear the gelatinous fear from my veins? Get my blood pumping and my legs moving again?

  Ichabye? Before, that spell might have been comforting. Now it just reminded me of Ari, death, and sadness. Fearless? That spell would certainly take away my fear, but I remembered how losing the inability to love had changed me in unforeseeable ways. How even my magic had worked a little differently after the curse. I couldn’t take that risk tonight.

  Fara and Rafe flanked me. In the dim light, Rafe’s wild, hay-colored hair and taupe eyes looked like a puff of smoke and two silver bullets, while his ripped pants and worn leather made him look like a shambling (albeit well-muscled) strawman. Fara, on the other hand, had exchanged her earlier bright white glamour for simple gray fighting leathers. We stood there for a moment, staring at Rockthorn Gorge’s version of its evil queen’s castle. There were no quips or quotes I felt like making; it was time to simply do. I squared my shoulders, told them the plan, and then led us the rest of the way up the mountain.

  Unlike the night of Frigore Luna, I couldn’t sense Cliodna’s presence. But that only meant she wasn’t on the first, open floor of the pavilion. We kept our gazes cast downward and snuck past the birds and bird baths. I worried that one or more of the macaws might squawk an alarm, but they stayed mute. In fact, it was eerily quiet. No cooing, flapping, or splashing. Some guard birds they were, I thought, leading the Angels past a cold forge, inert spinning wheels, and empty work tables. Out of the corner of my eye I watched for easels, frames, paintings, the color white, bare skin, or feathers. Finally, we made it to the narrow, twisting stairwell that led to the sanctuary’s subterranean vaults. Inwardly, I snorted.

  Every Luck-forsaken time! Couldn’t one of my assignments end without me venturing into a demon’s dark hidey hole?

  The birds’ unnatural stillness bothered me. Cliodna had seen me walk out of the fete with two strangers. And, since I hadn’t returned or spoken to her since, she might have guessed that something was up.

  Would she try to attack us?

  Just before we reached the bottom of the stairs, we stopped and Fara cast Simulacrum. Instantly, a duplicate trio of us descended the stairs and walked right. I gave Fara a thumbs up, hoping the ruse might draw Cliodna out from wherever it was she was hiding in the same way it had drawn Acheron out.

  But it didn’t. After waiting on the stairs for an uneventful quarter-hour, we tiptoed into the lower hallway and stopped at the first door. I’d warned the Angels to touch as little as possible in the sanctuary – especially doorknobs – in case they were coated with poison. Within moments I melted the lock, kicked the door open, and braced for an attack.

  But there was none. Our shiny shields told us that this room was little changed since I’d last been in here. It still held a thousand or more of Cliodna’s starry self-portraits, each of which appeared chaotically distorted in the warped reflection of our shields. We backed out of the room, made our way to the next door, and repeated our entry procedure. This time, however, I didn’t just brace for an attack, I formed a sword. Because this second room was the wax-walled vault where I’d been cursed by Eidolon’s Alternate Ending.

  As soon as we entered, the golden bronze of my shield flashed white and my signature zinged. I nearly looked up so that I could face the demoness head on, but Rafe issued a warning.

  “She’s not here, but it is,” he said. “I can feel it.”

  “Me too,” Fara said, her voice shakier than ever. “It feels… awful.”

  I peered more closely at my shield, fascinated despite everything. In the reflected image of the painting, a young woman with snow-white hair and a gossamer gown cradled a small cygnet in her hands. She looked lovely, sweet, and ethereal. It was almost impossible to imagine she was a demon.

  It was Nickolai’s bride gift to me. I was its original subject. He wasn’t content with a mere portrait of rara avis. No, Nickolai wanted more. Always more. So he had an Angel cast the spell Fairest over it.

  Near the door, Fara made a strangled sound and Rafe said, “We have to destroy it.”

  I approached the painting sideways, keeping my gaze glued to my shield. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the gilded edges of the painting’s frame. In its middle was a whorling mass of blackness, a glint of silver, and a splotch of red. The desire to face the painting head on was nearly irresistible. Whether it was the spells the Angels had cast over me earlier or my own sheer will, I don’t know, but I managed to keep my gaze averted long enough to get within arm’s reach of it. By then, however, my sword felt as if it were forged from lead. I could barely hold it, let alone lift it. So I tried to blast Eidolon’s Alternate Ending the old fashioned way – with a big, ugly, undisciplined fireball. But my waning magic felt as weak as water vapor.

  I glanced over at Rafe and Fara. “A little help?” I said, gritting my teeth and straining against the painting’s corrosive effects on my magic. For a split second, I worried that the painting was even more powerful than any of us had ever thought. That it had tongue-tied the Angels and that its next move would be to force us all to drop our shields and look at it directly. Thankfully, however, my Angels responded immediately. Fara cast Ichabye while Rafe cast something that felt so bold and daring it could only be Fearless.

  Strength returned to my arm and I raised my sword and plunged it into the middle of Eidolon’s Alternate Ending. An unholy shriek sounded from the end of the hallway as my fiery sword oozed into the painting, bubbled across its blackness, and consumed the centuries-old, hateful thing. I had never felt such joy in destroying something. But my joy was short-lived.

  Because destroying the painting had alerted its owner to our presence. As charred pieces of the painting’s frame fell to the floor, I turned to the doorway of the small vaul
t and saw Cliodna standing there.

  28

  SWAN SONG

  If it hadn’t been for the shriek and the birds, I wouldn’t have known it was her. In the past, Cliodna’s hallmarks had been beauty, bare flesh, and bright white. The creature standing in front of us was none of these things. She was revolting in a way that made “melee” Malphia’s macabre battle visage seem merely bleak. If this is what she turned into when threatened, I understood now why Cliodna insisted melees weren’t her style.

  Her pink skin was now bone white with deep fissures. Her dark eyes were blood red, and instead of a wisp of clothing, she wore black rags smeared with birdlime and dead birds. A maggot-ridden raven was the centerpiece of a twine choker tied around her neck, a dozen swallow skulls rattled at her wrist, and bird claws pierced her ears and nose. Her signature was no longer flighty or volatile… it was positively unhinged. Magically, Cliodna felt 100% birdshit crazy.

  Thank Luck we’d come up with some kind of plan before entering. I think that – and Fara’s melee practice – was the only reason she was able to cast Portcullis as quickly as she did. Almost instantly, a fiery cage formed around the swan demoness. She glared at us from behind the bars, her expression so calculating it gave me goose bumps. The Angels dropped their now-useless metal shields and faced Cliodna with me. But she didn’t even spare them a glance.

  “Did you think destroying the painting would cure you?” she spat out, her voice echoing discordantly.

  “No, things happened the other way around,” I said. “I was cured and then I destroyed it.”

  Cliodna shrieked again. Fara twitched, but Rafe stayed preternaturally still. Behind us, Eidolon’s Alternate Ending was a pile of ashes covered with melted wax.

  “Tell me why you helped Kalchoek.”

  “Who says I helped him?”

  “Ari told me you were the only other person who knew where the Magna Fax’s matchbook was hidden.” A lie, since Ari had told me Yannu also knew, but I wanted to see what she would say.

  She stared at me, her expression cunning. For a moment, I thought she might try to attack us despite Portcullis. Was she more powerful than I thought? But then her expression softened and she tamped down some of the vileness roiling inside her signature. “Nouiomo… caritas mea… what happened? You left the fete – that wonderful party – why? Things were going so well… Until he showed up.” She switched her focus to Rafe and I became scared for the first time. “Who is he?”

  “An old friend.”

  “I think he’s more than that.”

  I ignored her comment and pulled the vial of waerwater out from under my shirt. I removed the chain from around my neck and held it out toward Cliodna.

  “You know what this is?”

  “I know poison when I see it.”

  “The last demon I gave this to lived. Confess and your trial can be drinking it, instead of fighting us.”

  A spark flared in her signature – a foul, muddy feeling that was too tainted to be called hope.

  “But most demons who drink it die, don’t they?”

  “It’s your only chance. If you fight us, you’ll die.” Another lie. Not the part about dying if she fought us, but the part about drinking waerwater being her only chance. There was no way I was letting her walk out of here.

  She glanced up and around, surveying the cage that Portcullis had built around her, and then threw a huge blast at the bars, which momentarily eclipsed her behind a fiery mass of heat and light. She recovered quickly though, grabbed the bars of the cage, and tried to burn her way through. Her paper-thin skin caught fire as clenched the bars tighter and tighter.

  I should have killed her then. Portcullis prevented Cliodna’s magic from reaching us, not vice versa. But I demurred. Perhaps because, even more than I wanted her dead, I wanted to know why – why had she done it? Why had she partnered with Kalchoek? Why had she plotted to destroy a dam that she would have benefitted from? Why had she conspired to kill almost a hundred people, including Ari?

  My desire to rid the world of her narcissism and deceit and callousness was nearly overwhelming, but she let go of the bars and said, “Fine. I confess. I helped Kalchoek.”

  “Why?”

  “The patronship, Noon,” she said. “It’s always been about the patronship. I am sick of being the patron of lapping waves and water fowl. I deserve better. I deserve more.”

  “I think we deserve more of an explanation than that,” I said, barely keeping control of my magic. And then I realized—

  “It was you,” I said, my voice full of horrified wonder. “You’re the one who told the Angel to cast Fairest over your engagement portrait. It wasn’t Nickolai who wanted more. It was you.”

  “I’ve always wanted more, Noon. Haven’t you? I’ve always longed to be more beautiful, more powerful, more adored. Who doesn’t? Yes, it was me who hired that bungling Angel centuries ago, but he paid for his ineptitude. I poisoned him. Just like I poisoned Nickolai when he refused to marry me.”

  I stared at her, but it wasn’t her appearance that frightened me anymore. It was her.

  “When Kalchoek came up last summer to try to talk Potomus out of building the dam, the bullheaded bunyip refused to listen. But I told Kalchoek not to worry. I’d stop the dam project – if I became patron. The rattenkönig was surprisingly quick to understand that Potomus had to die. And that ‘Displodo’ should take the blame.”

  “But you didn’t become patron. Ari did. Didn’t you help him get elected?”

  Her face twisted with rage. I gathered the memory of Ari winning the patronship wasn’t a happy one.

  “Once Acheron backed Ari, there was no way I could win,” she admitted. “So I plotted. And planned. I convinced Yannu to take Kalchoek on as a retainer and I became a member of Aristos’ camarilla – so I could learn how to best kill him. I might have spared him… maybe… for a few decades or more… But he was too besotted with you – his human whore. I wanted to kill you both.”

  And then she stopped. I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. That was it. The whole of her confession. When I made no move to either execute her or hand over the vial, she prodded.

  “I upheld my end of the bargain, consigliere. Now, uphold yours. Give me the waerwater.”

  Why did I give it to her? Why didn’t I just kill her?

  Because, at the time, I didn’t have a good reason not to. Giving it to her was the law. So I tossed her the vial. It clattered to the floor and she walked over to it, picked it up, and uncorked it.

  My memory of what happened after that is a bit blurry. Nightshade explained later that, sometimes, when patients suffer a traumatic injury, they experience confusion about what happened immediately after the event. There’s some long, formal name for the condition – which I’ve intentionally forgotten. All I remember is this:

  Cliodna picked up the vial, uncorked it, and threw its contents right in my face. Because Portcullis was made to keep demons and waning magic in, it didn’t stop the waerwater, which hit the left side of my face and blinded me in that eye. The searing pain was agonizing, but that’s not why I did what I did. I did it for Ari. And for the hundred others Cliodna was responsible for killing.

  I formed a fiery sword and hacked her to pieces.

  When it was over, Rafe and Fara led me out of the sanctuary’s basement. The left side of my face was in ribbons and there was so much of Cliodna’s blood splattered on me that I could barely see out of my other eye.

  Nightshade healed me in Fara’s quarters. As he’d said, healers usually help the blind to see. And he did. He cured the blindness in my left eye, but was unable to fully restore its natural color. Similarly, and miraculously, he was able to heal all of the damage to my brow and cheek, except for a small scar. Fara offered to glamour me and Rafe offered to find a restoration spell, but I forbid them.

  Those fixes sounded too much like Fairest.

  Rafe left at dawn. He might have stayed, he said, but he’d promised me ot
herwise. Part of me wanted to release him from that promise. He’d cured me of the curse I’d brought on myself and helped me past the roughest patch of my recovery. But I knew keeping him in the gorge would be substituting one crutch for another. And besides, I had Nova.

  Nightshade, however, refused to go. He’d come to mend a drakon’s wing, he said, but if he couldn’t do that, he’d at least make sure his sister’s mind, body, and spirit were properly set. He’d conducted open heart surgery on me once. He imagined this new trio of things I’d tried to break would also heal, with time. For now, however, I felt raw and vulnerable. As if I were a snake recently molted, a chick freshly hatched, or a colt just born. My legs were wobbly and my future even more so. But it was my future once again.

  The first order of business post-killing Cliodna was to tell Yannu what I’d done and why. I explained that the Patron Demon of Waves and Waterbirds had conspired with Kalchoek so that he could keep the miserable residents of Myriostos under his criminally negligent thumb while she could finally become the patron of something other than “lapping waves and water fowl.” Yannu was enraged and disgusted. In his eyes, I was almost as much of a sinner as Cliodna, since I’d served as her consigliere and campaign manager. The fact that I’d only worked for her for a week, and that I’d been cursed while doing it, wasn’t seen as a mitigating circumstance because I never mentioned Eidolon’s Alternate Ending. That part of the story was personal and not much of an excuse anyway.

  The day after Rafe left, Yannu was declared the new Patron Demon of Rockthorn Gorge.

  Which meant it was probably him that started the process of running me out of town. But it could have been any number of others: Zeffre, Malphia, Acheron… Really, anyone I’d threatened with the law or bullied with my magic. I tried to right the wrongs I’d committed in the week since Ari’s funeral, but my heartfelt amends and earnest apologies didn’t change my new status. I was officially persona non grata with the people of Rockthorn Gorge. Within a few days, I’d packed my bags and said my goodbyes to the one person who was still speaking with me, Tenacity. After hearing that I’d killed Cliodna, she’d forgiven my sins, saying she’d suspected something similar to the truth all along – that Ari’s death had affected me so deeply I’d ceased being myself for a time.