I tried to end it. They stopped screaming, at least, but they lay so still on the ground and when I found it in me to touch them, they were chill to the touch, and there was nothing left of them that was human. Their twisted limbs and agonised faces were sculpted in stone.
I walked away, stepping over their granite limbs and frozen faces, leaving them behind in my haste to escape what I had done. But the visions I had, the futures that those men would never see, they stayed with me. They are with me still.
As are you all.
I was a monster, I was a victim, I was broken, I was crazy. I cut my braid from my scalp. It was all I could do not to cut deeper, dragging every hair from my head. I was dirty, I was filthy, I was a killer. Blood, blood, I couldn’t get it out of my head, couldn’t concentrate on anything but cleansing myself, scrubbing away the horrors, letting it all drip out of me. I couldn’t kill myself, I didn’t deserve such a release, but I could make myself hurt and bleed. That was how they found me, cuts welling in my skin. I was a demon, I was a witch, I was …
Now do you see? Now do you see what I have been hiding from, what I have been trying to prevent from happening again? There were times I managed to convince myself it had just been a strange turn, that it hadn’t happened, that the heat had just stirred my imagination into something ridiculous and cruel. That I was raped, by four men, or five, and the rest was a crazy dream I had made up, an elaborate revenge fantasy to hide the truth of it from myself.
But then Velody brought them home, one by one, the Lords and Court and Kings and sentinels, speaking of animor and cats and power and the sky falling. It was real. Anything was possible. These people would not blink to hear of a person who could burn men from the inside or turn them into stone. Nor would they hesitate to put me down if they thought I was a danger to them. They had their own power, their own monstrous abilities. They were like me.
But can you honestly say that Delphine or Macready would forgive me for what I have done? That Velody would have forgiven me? I can’t even forgive myself.
Delphine left the Palazzo after spending half a day ignoring Ashiol’s attempts to pretend he was sane. She had left Crane in her place, and was surprised to find Macready waiting for her on the road. He fell into step beside her as she walked down the hill.
They had been avoiding each other for the most part since that day she had taken surrender and Ashiol’s mind had broken once and for all. It was only the business of being a sentinel between them now, or at least Delphine assumed so.
It was best that it was over. She couldn’t stand sleeping with someone who was so damned good about everything, and she absolutely hated anyone having expectations of her. She was bound to be a disappointment.
It wasn’t like he was that great in bed.
Delphine was tired. If he had something to say, he should just say it now. She didn’t want to fight when they got home. She didn’t want to fight at all. She wanted to sleep. Halfway along Via Cinqueline, Macready reached out and took her hand. ‘Let me show you something.’
She frowned as he led her into a narrow alleyway between two shops. ‘What are we doing here? There are spiders!’
‘I spotted this place a while back,’ he said lightly. ‘Thought it would make a fine nest, so it would.’
‘So? What’s that got to do with me?’ Macready looked at her. She looked back, waiting. Then the centi dropped. ‘You want me to make a nest? I don’t know how!’
‘I wasn’t going to stand here and watch you make it up as you go along,’ he said, rolling his eyes at her. ‘I’ll teach you, if you’ve a mind to it. Now, take your blades out, the skysilver sword and knife. Just so.’
He turned Delphine gently to face the wall. She could hear the clank and rattle on the other side of dishes being washed, and the acrid scent of pulses on the boil. ‘There are people in there.’
‘It’s of no matter. That’s not where you’re going.’ His voice was low, and his breath tickled the back of her neck. ‘A nest is a new space. It’s not entirely of the city. Now, lay your blades against the wall.’
She did so, first the knife blade and then the sword.
‘Imagine a space opening up, a room, a place of safety,’ Macready told her, still in that low, firm voice that had her heating up from the inside out. Delphine did as he told her, for once. She felt the prickle of the skysilver against the skin of her hands, and imagined a safe place like the first nest that Macready had taken her to.
She gasped as the skysilver came awake under her hands, and she could feel the wall opening up at her command. Macready kept with her, murmuring encouragement and instructions as Delphine stretched the city wide open, creating a nest for herself.
Finally, exhausted, she fell through into a small and lopsided space full of new air which tasted of skysilver. She gasped in the air, laughing. She had done it. She had no idea what she had done, but it was hers, and it felt safe in a way nowhere else had felt safe in a very long time.
Macready stood above her, grinning all over his stupid face. ‘You can seal it with a blade, or with your hand once you’re accustomed —’ he said, and probably would have said more if she hadn’t lunged herself at him, kissing him to shut him up.
‘Is that what it’s like for them?’ she said breathlessly, still bathed in the afterglow of what she had done. ‘When they use animor?’
Macready’s eyes were a little unfocused from the kissing. ‘It’s better,’ he said, holding her hips steady so that she did not twist away from him. ‘Because it’s ours.’
She smiled, and pulled him down on to the floor of her new nest. They tugged and fumbled at each other’s clothes, grinding possessively against each other.
Yes, all right then. This probably counted as a relationship.
Some time later, Delphine and Macready reached the little courtyard behind her house. She felt sore and dishevelled, and deliberately didn’t invite him in, pretending not to see the disappointed look on his face.
Rhian sat at the kitchen table, with armfuls of hacked-apart roses spread out on the table before her. She was still cutting them, slicing through ruined flower heads, spreading them out into messy patterns. There were colours everywhere, bruised and slashed petals tumbling off the edge of the table and on to the floor.
‘Are you all right?’ Delphine asked, letting the door fall closed behind her. Rhian looked up and there was something awful about her eyes. ‘Mac!’ Delphine screamed, and he was there in moments, slamming back the door and crossing the threshold.
‘Lass?’
‘There’s something wrong with her.’ Delphine was trying not to panic, but this was Rhian, and they’d all gone through so much. (She couldn’t lose Rhian too, she just couldn’t; she would fall to a million pieces.)
Macready went to Rhian’s side, neatly disarming her and placing the knife further along the table, out of reach. ‘Now then, my lovely, how are you doing? What a mess you’ve made here.’
Rhian turned to look at him, but her eyes were sightless. ‘I can hear them singing,’ she said in a frantic voice. ‘They just keep singing at me.’
‘Is she …’ said Delphine, and choked on the rest of the question. First Ashiol, now this. ‘Is she broken too?’ She couldn’t do this, couldn’t look after a crazy Rhian by herself. She needed Velody, and that thought was enough to make her chest twist into knots.
Velody was gone, and they were on their own.
‘Not like Ashiol,’ Macready said in what he probably thought was a comforting tone of voice. ‘But she’s the Seer now, lass. It could take her hard.’
‘She has to give it back,’ Delphine blurted. ‘She can’t do this; she was already so fragile.’
‘Is that what you think?’ said Macready, his hand hovering as if he was going to touch Rhian’s hair, before he pulled back without making contact. ‘I always thought she was the strong one, so I did.’
Rhian grabbed out at his hand, squeezing his fingers tightly between hers. ‘He’s makin
g them sing, Macready! Cover the mirrors, quickly, before they come through.’
‘Aye, lass, we’ll see to it, but you must draw out, now. No getting lost in the futures. Trust me, there are no kind ways to bring you back.’
Delphine watched as he soothed Rhian with his voice, responding to her as if what she said was normal. He kept it up for far longer than she would have had patience for. What kind of a thimblehead was she, trying to push this man away?
Finally Rhian was calm and herself again. ‘Thank you,’ she said to Mac in a soft voice.
Delphine tidied away the ruined flowers and then made mint tisane for them all with shaking hands, forgetting as she always did how many scoops of the fine dried leaves she should use. She almost cried with relief when Rhian chided her for making it too strong. Normal. Somewhere near normal.
‘Well now,’ said Macready a while later. ‘We’ve had a narrow escape here, so we have. So busy working on Delphine’s training, we never gave a thought to yours.’
‘I —’ said Rhian and then stopped, darting an anxious look at Delphine, as if whatever she was about to say could be worse than anything else Delphine had put up with lately. ‘I hear them. The other Seers, the ones from before. I hear their voices. I think they are the ones who are supposed to teach me how to do this.’
‘Aye,’ Macready said grimly. ‘I thought it might be something like that. They won’t always be able to help you, my lovely. There are some things about being a Seer that — will be a problem for you.’
‘Like what?’ Delphine interrupted.
Rhian broke her cup. They both turned to stare at her, but she was lost again, staring at the tisane as it dripped over the edge of the table, her eyes locked on the broken pieces. ‘He’s coming back,’ Rhian wailed. ‘He’s coming back, he’s coming back, and you’re all going to burn!’
Macready watched Rhian as she babbled, eyes glazed over by the futures only she could see. My poor sweet lass.
He’s coming back, she had said. He. Not Velody, then. Whoever it was, it couldn’t be good. No time to dwell on that. Rhian was lost again, deeper than before, and feck it, he might not be able to talk her down this time.
Macready remembered how hard Heliora had railed against all this when it first crashed in on her. She had loathed being a Seer, and it swallowed her up whole and hard. She had been a tough wee fighter, though, right from the start. For all he said that Rhian was strong, there were clearly some things she couldn’t deal with, and this damned role was going to hurl them all at her.
‘Make it stop,’ Delphine said in a high, panicky voice, dragging Macready back to the here and now. ‘Do something. How do we make it stop?’
Well, one of us could frig her against the wall. How would that be?
Saints and devils. Rhian was tumbling over herself now, barely able to speak the prophecies as they fell from her mouth. She was losing herself. ‘He’ll break us in pieces, all over again, he can’t come back, we can’t return to what we were, we won’t survive it …’ She was trembling, and the words burst out of her as if she was trying to hold them in.
‘Rhian,’ Macready said urgently. ‘Don’t let them take you. We can’t bring you back. You have to do it. Stay strong, lass.’
‘Help me,’ she mouthed, pushing herself back from the table so violently she almost fell back on her chair.
Macready made his decision. He got up and dragged the table against the wall, making space.
‘What are you doing?’ Delphine demanded.
‘Give her one of your swords,’ Macready ordered her, drawing his own, the steel blade that still didn’t feel like his. (The loss of his lasses was an ache he hadn’t come to terms with yet.)
‘Are you kidding me? She can’t fight you.’
‘Physical reality — it’s the only way to snap the Seer back when the futures take them,’ he said, wishing he didn’t have to spell it out. ‘Sex, lass. That’s what Heliora always used. Given a choice between fecking and fighting … which do you think we should force on your lass here?’
Delphine hesitated and nodded, tugging Rhian to her feet and closing her fingers around the hilt of her own sword. ‘Don’t hurt her.’
As if he would. Macready leaned in, flicking the sword against the one Rhian held in a stage trick rather than a genuine fighting move. ‘Play,’ he said firmly.
Rhian had been silent for some time, though her eyes were still glazed with the unmistakeable look of someone lost in the futures. She looked at him blankly.
‘Play,’ he said again, and rapped his blade harder against hers. Maybe she didn’t have much experience with a sword — but she had a multitude of Seers in her noggin, and Hel surely wasn’t the only one of them who had started out sentinel.
Rhian’s eyes narrowed, just a little. ‘The children will sing and he will return and the sky will fall,’ she burst out. ‘It happens that way a thousand different times, different events, different deaths, but they always sing and he always returns and it’s going to be a bloodbath.’
‘Good to know,’ Macready said steadily.
The third time he rapped her blade with his, she started fighting back. Her moves were slow at first, as if she was relearning something she had known instinctively as a child, but as he pressed his advantage she began to fence him like someone who knew how to use a sword.
Some of Rhian’s moves were classic Heliora, picked up from the Silver Captain, and it twisted Macready’s gut every single time she used them. He hadn’t thought about how he missed having Heliora around, until now. How much of her was inside Rhian’s head?
All of them. He missed all of them. The rowdy family of sentinels he had once been part of. The Creature Court was not the same place without them.
Finally Rhian stepped back, out of breath, and lowered the sword. ‘What — what are we doing? I was making dinner.’
Delphine squeaked and threw her arms around Rhian from behind. Macready shook his head. There had to be an easier way, surely.
28.
Elsewhere
The first day
She was cold. Cold was a good thing, surely. It meant that she was somewhere. Not blown into random threads across the sky.
Velody opened her eyes, and found herself lying on stone. She was naked, and as a matter of habit she reached inside herself for that familiar glow of Lord shape. It was not there. She breathed deeply, calling upon her animor, and found her skin empty of it.
Maybe that was why she was cold.
Silence spread across the air in front of her, reaching in all directions. Velody had spent most of her life within city walls, and had never heard a silence so deep or all-encompassing as this.
Heliora?
But no, even the last remnant of the Seer that had clung to Velody in those moments before the sky swallowed her was gone now. Velody made the sign for swift passing, hoping that wherever Heliora was now, it was peaceful.
This did not address the question of where Velody was. The stone was part of a street. The cobbles were a dusty yellow colour, not the usual brown or black or grey she knew from Aufleur. And yet it was familiar.
She walked out into the main street, and there was no sky. It was not nox, nor daylight. There was no ceiling or pavilion roof covering it, and there was no cloud. The sky was merely absent, as her animor was absent.
This was a city, Velody realised, as she followed the empty street down to a crossroads. A wooden saint was skewered neatly in the centre, as was normal back in Aufleur. This was not her city, though. The stone was golden yellow, and the buildings of a different age and style.
She turned another corner, and was swamped by a wave of memory, so intimate that it almost turned her stomach. This was her city. She was two streets from the Greater Dockyards of Tierce. She was home.
Velody began to run. How could she not? Twelve years ago, she had stepped onto the train that would take her away from here, to an apprentice fair that would change her life forever. It had only been a few mon
ths since her memories had returned, and they came in fractured pieces — her papa’s arms, kneading the dough he would make into crisp bread rolls. Her mam’s apron. Her sisters, squabbling over who would wear the best dress. Her brothers, shouting and tumbling through the busy house until they were put to work in the yard, or at the ovens. Her grandmother’s swift fingers as she spun yarn in starlight colours, to sell to the local weavery. Her grandfather’s stiff back as he lectured them all (even the babies) on the proper handling of flour.
Velody stopped, finally, because she knew this lane. There was the bakery, whole and exactly the same. Smaller, perhaps. Humbler than the palazzo of yeast and rye that had formed in her head after so long away. There was no scent of baking bread. The shop was as empty as the rest of the city. It smelled like death, or the cold stone of an abandoned home. Where were they all?
She hesitated on the threshold, wanting and afraid at the same time to see nothing but the empty spaces left behind by her family. Where had they all gone? The bakery was never empty. There was always new bread. The scent of it infused everything. Velody breathed in, and could smell nothing but stone and dust and the absence of everything she craved.
There was nothing here for her, and yet she could not resist going inside to see the emptiness for herself. The bowls and ovens in the bakery were empty. The house upstairs was full of things, but no people. No food. Nothing that felt as if it belonged to the now. Velody couldn’t bring herself to step into the room she had shared with her sisters, not yet, but she went into her parents’ room and found a soft grey dress, well mended, folded in a chest. Mam’s funeral dress. What could be more appropriate for Velody to clothe herself with upon her homecoming?
She didn’t stay. Being here was too painful. She emerged from the bakery and sat on the top step, staring out at the desolate street. Utterly alone.
Five minutes later, someone started singing. Velody wasn’t sure of the sound at first and then she was on her feet, running, trying to find the source of that odd, lilting sound. She wasn’t alone here after all.
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