by S. W. Clarke
We all squinted toward the two-by-four-inch card she held out. On it were printed a tiny picture of her face and some identifying information, like a driver’s license. “This,” she said, “is what every formalist carries. And it is what Liara Youngblood will carry into the prison, flanked by her twin fae guardians.”
Elijah and Isaiah grinned at one another. Meanwhile, my eyes shot to Liara, whose face had gone stony.
“Brilliant,” Keene said. “Just brilliant.”
The other guardians gave approving nods.
“What am I missing?” I said.
“For those unfamiliar,” Umbra said, careful to avoid looking directly at me, “twenty years ago, the Youngbloods joined the Mages’ Council. Liara’s father was one of the founders of the formalist movement.”
The plan was stupidly simple: Liara Youngblood would enter the prison as a Singaporean ambassador, and she would present doctored papers approving the extradition of twelve mages to Singapore.
And just like that, the guards would stand down. They would open up the cell doors and escort our prisoners out, and before the prison transmitted word of Liara’s prisoner extraction to the formalist officials, we would have escaped.
While Liara and the twins were inside the prison, the rest of us would keep watch at various spots outside. Make sure no one else went in or out. The fae would take high-up perches, and the rest of us would run interference from the ground.
But I fixated on one thing: This was why the Youngblood name was so important. That was why Liara so rarely talked about her family’s history. While Singapore was no longer a formalist city, it was formalist-aligned when Liara’s father served on the council. That was why nobody in Edinburgh would stop her from entering the prison.
Her name was synonymous with the formalists.
“So,” I said as we stepped out into daylight. I’d made sure I was right on Liara’s heels, and now I moved into her line of sight with the Spitfire roiling inside me. “Your dad founded a movement.”
She stopped, and together we moved aside as a few of the others filed out. Umbra and Milonakis had left first, and were now off and away. Only the other guardians remained, most of them trying not to rubberneck as Liara and I squared off.
Loki stood by my side, tail upright. “Hey, Red Hot, try dialing it back a notch or two.”
“Fine.” My eyes flicked back up to the fae, whose arms were now folded. “My cat would like me to rephrase. For his sake, let’s try this again. What the fuck, Liara?”
“Oh, well done,” Loki grumbled.
Liara’s eyes rolled away. “Your faux-outrage is boring, Cole.”
“Okay, let’s try real outrage.” I stepped into her line of sight again. “You do know the formalists tried to put me in a big metal box, right? They chased me down in cars.”
Her unwilling eyes met mine. “That’s got nothing to do with me.”
“You are a formalist.”
Now those black eyes narrowed. “Say that again, and I swear I’ll slap you.”
“You have a driver’s license.”
“It’s not a license, you normal idiot. It’s an identification card.”
I looked her up and down. “Show me.”
She did the same up-and-down. “No.”
“Honey, Clementine,” Loki said to me, threading his way through Liara’s legs, tail swishing against her. “Or anything that isn’t the rotten-eggs approach.”
I swallowed back my retort. In my first year, I’d learned how it would look to argue with my cat. Also, I’d learned I couldn’t beat him in an argument. He was almost always right.
I gestured down to him. “Just so you know, my cat’s behavior does not represent my feelings toward you.”
Liara purposefully avoided reacting to Loki’s presence between her feet. “Noted.”
Finally, the question I’d wanted to ask since that revelation an hour ago found its way out. “Just tell me one thing: Do the Youngbloods have a seat on the Mages’ Council?”
“Yes,” she said at once. Eyes steely, challenging me. “What of it?”
“And does that seat belong to you now?”
“Yes,” she said again.
“Why aren’t you in it?”
Now her arms unfolded, unchecked anger showing. “What a stupid godsdamn question. After everything you’ve seen over the past three years, you think I’d sit in that tainted chair?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve got one thing in common with them. You both hate witches.”
She slapped me. The violence came out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly, and I was left with a stinging cheek and a roaring of adrenaline, the Spitfire flaring inside me.
It took clenched fists and Loki’s claws on my cloak to ground me, to prevent me from losing myself to my own fury.
How dare she. How dare she.
“You of all people,” she said, low and poisonous, “should know that your birthright doesn’t dictate your life’s choices.”
And then she’d turned away in a wave of dark hair, disappearing around the tree, and I was left with my cheek still tingling and my fists tight and, when I turned around, Eva and Elijah and Isaiah and Keene—all the fae—standing there, unabashedly staring.
“Wow,” Isaiah said. “You’re braver than I thought, Clementine.”
The Spitfire, keening with my shame, receded a little at Isaiah’s words.
“Holy hell,” Elijah said. “If I’d had time, I would have put money on Youngblood sending lightning right through Cole’s heart.”
Eva came over, eyes sorrowful. Set her hand to my cheek. “I can take the sting away.”
“Don’t,” I said, and I knew saying so would come off as an attempt to appear tough. But really I wanted to sit with the pain, to feel it, to let it focus me on what the hell had just happened.
For the rest of the day and the next one, that slap hurt more than the time Liara had zapped me in combat class during our first year. And by the end of those two days, I had decided:
Not a slap—never a slap—but Liara was a little bit justified in her feelings. And so was I.
Chapter Eighteen
The morning of our mission, I sat in the guardians’ common room with a map of the prison on my lap. Loki lay stretched on his back by the fire, all four paws extended.
We were leaving at noon, just two hours from now. It would be too strange for Liara to arrive at the prison at night, so my first time in the city would be with the sun at its zenith.
My mind kept wandering; I’d only gotten four hours of sleep last night because I’d been studying maps of the city and prison so late. This would probably be my only chance at the mages’ prison. I needed to get it right.
When my eyes drifted to Loki and the fireplace, I snapped them back, fingers smoothing out the edges of the map. When it crinkled, Loki groaned.
“Even if they flipped that place on its head,” he murmured, “you could still navigate it. So please let me nap crinkle-free.”
He was right, and wrong.
I could navigate the first floor—the one Milonakis had diagrammed for us—but the other two floors? Unknown. Aidan and I couldn’t find any maps of the prison, and the closest he’d gotten was a picture of the entrance in a tourists’ book, which was captioned: The mages’ prison in Edinburgh, where three floors of inmates are held.
Three floors. That was all we knew.
Well, for the time being. Soon—in about two hours—that would change.
Loki lapsed again into sleep, and I fell into my study until a voice sounded dreamily far away, and I was brought back into the world by Eva standing above me.
“It’s time,” she said. “Are you ready?”
I stood, folding the map, and nodded. I had everything I needed on me—including two spare cloaks for the fae we would rescue—and I had my familiar. “I’m always ready.”
Eva’s amusement was soft, tempered. “You should talk to Liara before we go.”
&
nbsp; I knelt by Loki, stroking his belly to wake him. “I will. Eventually.”
“You should do it now, Clem.”
Loki’s claws snapped around my hand, catching me like a Venus fly trap. I winced as I turned my face up to Eva. “She slapped me, you know.”
“Which was patently wrong.” Eva paused. “But don’t let her standards determine yours.”
I shook my head, extricating my hand from Loki, who was now awake and getting to his feet. “It doesn’t need to be now.”
“Would certainly help me feel better about what we’re walking into if our leaders were on speaking terms,” Eva murmured, but she let it go.
Together, Loki and I walked with her out into the clearing, where the others were already gathered around Umbra.
Liara didn’t meet my eyes. She was dressed in formalwear I’d never seen before, luxuriant blue-and-red robes with a high collar. Her black hair, normally long or in a ponytail, had been braided intricately around her head.
She looked like Singaporean royalty.
Elijah and Isaiah also had on blue robes, and they looked pleased as punch about it. Their shocks of silver hair had been groomed back, and they flanked Liara, dwarfing her.
The other guardians were dressed simply, like nondescript humans. As was I. Only I wore a cloak, but otherwise we were the same. Instead of our academy uniforms, we wore simple fall clothes—pants, long-sleeved shirts, calf-height boots.
Umbra spied Eva and me, gave a nod. “All right, thumbs to foreheads, everyone. We don’t want any of you incommunicado.”
We followed her lead, each of us exchanging thumbprints on each other guardian’s forehead. When Liara and I came to one another, we both had an enforced, steely gaze, as though challenging the other to look away.
Neither of us did.
Afterward, we turned to Umbra. It felt strange to be starting a mission on the ground, on my two feet. I was so used to riding Noir, to having his steadiness and power. I felt half-naked, exposed.
“We’re ready,” Liara said, her voice deep—a leader’s.
Umbra’s staff began to glow green, and she said, “When I part the veil, you’ll find yourselves atop a leyline running along the outskirts of the city. Liara, Elijah, and Isaiah will pass through three minutes before the rest of you. Once you’re through, you’ll move to your designated position along the Royal Mile. Understood?”
We understood. We had understood the first time Umbra laid out the plan, but then it had hardly seemed real.
Now, we were at its doorstep. I was about to head into the beating heart of a world where witches were outlaws.
A moment later, Umbra drew her staff through the air, cutting a seam in the veil from six feet up to the ground. When she drew it aside like a curtain, she stepped back, revealing pure, unadulterated darkness.
“Oh.” She cleared her throat, allowing the curtain to fall back to place. “That one’s corrupted, then.”
Elijah snorted, and the rest of us just met eyes. Apparently that wasn’t a huge deal.
“Let’s try it again,” Umbra said. “This time, I’ll send you all to a less convenient spot—near Arthur’s Seat overlooking the city. It’ll be a bit of a walk, but at least the Shade can’t corrupt it.”
When Umbra parted the veil this time, pulling it aside, an empty, hilly vista appeared, wind blowing in through the other side. There, the sky was streaked with fast-moving clouds, the city peppering the view below.
It was beautiful.
“Well,” she said with a gesture of the hand, “off you go. I trust you all most highly, and I know you’ll make your luck.”
Liara, Elijah, and Isaiah passed through first, disappearing from view. And three minutes later, it was our turn.
The others went through ahead of me, and Loki and I waited to last. When I stepped up to the veil, I raised my hand, enshrouding the two of us in iridescent flame.
Umbra’s eyes were intense on me, piercing through my magic. “Do what you must, and return.” As though she knew. Not just suspected, but knew I wouldn’t do what I’d been told.
I nodded at her, and together, Loki and I stepped through.
On the other side, lush grass and a blowing wind greeted me. The others had already moved off, heading straight for the Royal Mile. They weren’t supposed to wait on the enshrouded witch, or even to acknowledge I existed.
To all of Edinburgh, I was invisible. A wraith.
I surveyed Arthur’s Seat, the jagged green rise of it, taking my first breaths of Scottish air. A long ways off, tourists—non-mages—trekked toward the edge of the overlook. How could I tell? They were wind-battered and led along by a tour guide. The biggest tell: three of them wore Scotland t-shirts.
A small part of me wanted to follow them.
Unlike Eva, who’d visited every country in her childhood, I’d never gotten to properly see the world. Most times I’d been chasing monsters in the dark, or being chased by them.
The thought disappeared in the wind as Loki said, “You want to gawk or get shit done?”
I half-smiled down at him. “Says the cat who, not half an hour ago, was on his back with all four paws reaching for the ceiling.”
Together, we began walking down the hill toward the city proper.
His tail weaved through the air as we walked. “That’s not true.”
“Today, yesterday, or every day you’ve napped before that?”
As we made our way down, closer and closer to the city, we kept on bickering. I needed this—this facey casualness. This unbothered back-and-forth. It was always how I’d dealt with the most terrifying things in my life: by pretending I wasn’t terrified. By making them smaller with humor and smirks and eye rolls.
But when my feet touched the cobblestone of the road, that stopped. Both Loki and I went silent as, not thirty feet away, a fae walked with self-assured swiftness, book in hand, past the road separating one building from another.
The two of us had frozen in place, half-expecting to be spotted. As though the enshrouding magic was like the emperor’s clothes—not there at all.
But the fae didn’t even slow. She disappeared as quickly as she’d appeared. She had been dressed simply, professionally, in black pants and a forest-green turtleneck, her black hair cropped and slicked to her head. In fact, her hairstyle reminded me of Ora Frostwish’s—simple, austere, functional.
A group of adorably young schoolchildren followed a few seconds later, all of them fae, all of them in Scottish school uniforms. Their wings were likely hidden to the human world, they were as iridescent and as beautiful as any fae’s to me.
“You think the fae kiddos learn with the regulars here?” I said to Loki.
“Of course not. They’re headed toward a magicked primary school around that corner.”
My familiar really had studied the maps of Edinburgh. But I still glanced down at him. “How do you know there’s a magicked school around the corner?”
He rolled his eyes up to me. “I’m a hundred-year-old European cat, remember? I’ve been here a few times, back before the city went to the dogs.”
My cat was more cosmopolitan than me. Of course he was.
“You think they teach them magic?” I said, remembering what Eva and Umbra had said: this was an anti-magic city.
“If they do,” he said, “it’s probably just functional stuff, like conjuring food. Makes them useful.”
He was probably right.
“Let’s go.” I started us off, mentally configuring myself to where we were in the city. I had studied the maps so many times, but seeing the place in three dimensions was still disorienting.
We were at the university, which was adjacent to Arthur’s Seat. And we weren’t far from the Royal Mile, which put us maybe half a mile from the Mages’ Council building. It would take us ten minutes to get there, if we didn’t encounter trouble.
One by one, I began speaking into the other guardians’ heads as we walked, coordinating positions. This was my role as
the leader outside the prison: to make sure everyone was in place, ready, watching.
They were all still moving to their places.
For her part, Liara said, We’ll be at the prison entrance in one minute. If all goes to plan, we’ll be escorting them out in twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes. I had twenty minutes.
I walked faster, the city passing me in a beautiful, medieval blur, buildings older than my home country rising simply to my left and right, the roads weaving. At one point I spotted a castle on a hill through the trees, and I could almost forget this place was the epicenter of evil.
Well, aside from Hell.
Edinburgh was sprawling and beautiful, just like in the pictures I’d seen. It wasn’t hard or boxy or bereft as I’d expected. For some reason I’d imagined they would have reformed all the buildings, changed everything to fit their rigidity.
Not so.
As if he’d heard my thoughts—or maybe followed my gaze to the castle on the hill—Loki offered, “The tourism keeps the government flush. Nobody wants to visit an ugly city.”
Which made the formalists even cleverer, cloaking their home in beauty.
But cold reality came with the first passing police car. It rolled down the street, black as a beetle as we reached the edge of the university, and inside I spotted two formalist officers.
In a flash, I was standing in Farina North’s large living room again, staring down two officers with their nightsticks and their dark uniforms. They’d been shameless and fixated on me.
Maeve Umbra had warned us about the security here. You could usually find a police car on every street, and every officer was trained in anti-magic.
A band tightened around my chest as they passed, but the car rolled on by, not slowing.
We were invisible. We were safe—enough.
Loki and I turned down the street, headed toward the Royal Mile—the next cross-street. When we emerged out onto it, grand buildings rising to the left and right of us down the long slope of the road. I tried to keep my heart from galloping and failed.