by Dave Rudden
“Oh, sorry, are you all right?”
Unfortunately, some lessons were easier to learn than others.
“Yes,” he mumbled into the floor. “Just give me a minute.”
He hadn’t even seen Darcie’s foot move. Why did people have to have so many limbs?
Fire snapped and growled in his heart, and Denizen imagined it licking away the blossoming aches. It helped a little, though he’d be sporting bruises tomorrow. More bruises, he corrected himself. His back was a palette of green and yellow and healing brown. At first, he’d sort of enjoyed waking up as a barrel of pain every morning. It felt like an achievement, each twinge a stepping-stone on the path to being a Knight.
That had lasted a month. Now they were just bruises.
Simon and Abigail waited their turn on a couch in the corner, draped in gold and black by the shifting light of candles. But for the occasional comment on technique, Vivian could have been just one more portrait on the walls. Mallei from centuries past—hard-eyed men and women in battered steel armor, the grim and honored dead.
Denizen tried to ignore them. It was a tough crowd to please.
“Will we go again?” he asked, wincing slightly as his limbs creaked him upright.
“That’s the spirit,” Darcie said, smiling. “You are getting better. It just takes time.”
As the Lux Precognitae of Seraphim Row, Darcie was so keenly attuned to the barrier between worlds that she could sense the ripples of a Breach before Tenebrous spilled out. It made her far too valuable to risk in real combat, but Darcie had made a point of undergoing training as arduous as any front-line Knight.
Denizen liked sparring with her. Her encouraging manner took some of the metaphorical sting out of being flipped onto hard surfaces. Besides, he thought, trying not to grin at Simon’s hopeless-looking expression—he could have been sparring with Abigail.
“How much time, exactly?” the taller boy called. It was taking Denizen an inordinately long time to get the hang of hand-to-hand combat, but Simon was even worse. His arms and legs were so long that by the time he’d convinced all of them to move at the same time, Abigail had him on the ground.
“Training replaces instinct,” Abigail said. “Soon your reaction to a punch won’t be Oh no, someone’s punching me. You’ll just grab their hand and—”
She made a complicated series of violent gestures. Denizen’s eyes started to water.
“Oh good,” Simon said weakly.
Thinking Oh no, someone’s punching me wasn’t Denizen’s problem, though he had to admit it was a very Denizen thought to have. That was no longer his instinct at all. The Cants had been jarred from their slumber by repeated impacts of head against floor and were offering far more ... effective solutions.
Scintilla Scythe, barely there at all, just enough to bisect Darcie …
The flames in his chest were flickering red and raw.
Simon is weak; gather him up in Eulice’s Ram and break him against the wall… .
Vivian was staring at him as she always did during these sessions, as if waiting for something within him to snap.
She would be difficult, maximum force required, but what was Cost beside the thrill of fire?
“Denizen?”
Denizen carefully folded up the smoldering hunger in his chest. It wasn’t that it had anything against Darcie, Abigail, or Simon. It just sought escape, any escape, and saw very little distinction between training partner and foe, and even less between surrounding area and fuel.
He let out a shaky breath, focusing on Darcie’s voice.
“…like any skill,” she continued, slipping back into a fighting stance, “it takes time and practice. Your body is learning, even if you don’t feel you are.”
Denizen nodded. That would all be fine if it were just Darcie he was fighting, but with the fire in his heart, he felt locked in two wars—one far more dangerous than the other.
“Ready?” Darcie asked.
Deep breath. Denizen gave his mother one last sidelong glance and then slammed great walls of willpower between him and the furnace of his magic, winding up his training and his determination and the pain in his back until he thrummed with readiness.
He was a Neophyte. He was a weapon. He was thoroughly sick of the taste of floor mats.
“OK,” he said. “Go.”
There was a knock on the door.
Darcie hit the floor in a tangle of limbs and a whoosh of expelled breath.
“Touché,” she said, wincing, and then broke out into a bright smile. “See, Denizen? Training replaces ...”
She trailed off when she saw Denizen wasn’t even looking at her. He was staring at the great oak doors.
“Did you hear that?”
Someone had knocked. At the door.
As a rule, the aura of Seraphim Row did not encourage visitors. Footballs kicked into its backyard stayed there, abandoned to the vines. Salespeople didn’t approach the place, or if they did, their remains were never found. There had been only three visitors to Seraphim Row in all the time Denizen had lived there, and the building still carried the scars.
Vivian was already striding toward the door, hammer in hand. Abigail had produced a pair of her ever-present knives—sharp little wands of steel. In any other house, and at any other time, Denizen might have considered this an overreaction ... but they were Knights.
Everyone was out to get them.
The knock came again—three short raps, as if the person knocking were unsure whether they even wanted to be heard. A glance from the Malleus split the Neophytes up to find their angles, spreading out to avoid catching her in the crossfire. A small part of Denizen was pleased. At least some of the training is sticking.
Vivian’s hand closed on the door handle and turned. Denizen tensed.
“Jack!”
An unbidden grin flashed across Denizen’s features. Darcie stepped forward too, clasping her hands together.
Fuller Jack filled the doorway like a bald eclipse.
“How are ye all?”
Jack had been Seraphim Row’s blacksmith—a massive man with a beard like a gorse thicket and iron hands scarred from a lifetime at the forge. His face had the blunt lines of a statue carved by someone with more enthusiasm than skill, iron sweeping across it in black tides, but Jack had been one of the first to welcome Denizen to the Order, and that iron softened when he smiled.
Then his eyes flicked to Vivian, and his smile faltered.
“Vivian.”
“Fuller.”
Vivian had on what Denizen thought of as her Malleus face—jaw set, eyes blank. There were shields on the wall with more human warmth and expression.
Jack had on a fair approximation of a Malleus face himself. It didn’t suit him.
He ran a hand across the new scars on his scalp and sighed. “It’s good to see you. All of you.”
“It’s good to see you too, Jack,” Darcie said. She was the one who’d been in the most contact with him, ever since ...
Seraphim Row had not always been so empty. Corinne D’Aubigny, one of the most dangerous people Denizen had ever met, had lived and loved and fought here before meeting her death against the Three. The Frenchwoman had stalked these corridors like a tiger—vicious and vital, a warrior to the bone.
Denizen missed her.
He’d never heard either of them say the word, but love had radiated from Jack and D’Aubigny like heat from a furnace. He had been the maker, the smith, and she had wielded the blades that he had forged.
And then she died, and he left.
Denizen had never lost anybody close to him before, which was strange, considering so much of his life had been dictated by loss. It had been the bedrock of his existence: already there, already real. His parents had always been gone. It wasn’t a process; it was a truth.
Crosscaper hadn’t helped—grief was as much a part of the orphanage as the air or the dust. There were always new arrivals. Parents were such fragile things. There had
even been a poster on the wall of the infirmary detailing the various stages of mourning, not that it was needed. All you had to do was look down any corridor: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and somewhere, finally, acceptance.
For Denizen, those losses were people he had never met or seen. But what the Three had done was different. Now he knew both sides. People who had walked around, talked, joked, and loved, now just ... didn’t. Grief wasn’t a thing of the past. It was a knife that swept into your life and divided it into two sides—the part where you loved something and the part where you missed it.
Cold October sunlight. The crackle of flame in a plastic cup.
I’ll show you real magic.
Denizen swallowed past a lump in his throat. D’Aubigny wasn’t the only person they’d lost that night.
“I’m glad you are well,” Vivian said quietly. Jack shrugged.
The Neophytes exchanged glances. Jack had left a few weeks after D’Aubigny’s funeral, headed to parts unknown. This was the first time he’d returned to Seraphim Row. Was there a chance he was coming back?
The big man sighed. “You won’t like this, Vivian, so I’m just going to go ahead and say it. The Palatine is coming.”
Vivian scowled. “Why?”
Somehow Denizen wasn’t surprised Vivian didn’t seem to care for the leader of the Order. He was more surprised when he discovered things she did like.
“A message has arrived from the Tenebrae.” Jack sounded like he couldn’t believe the words he was saying. “Not a threat, or a demand, or a declaration of war. A message. An offer from the Court of the Endless King himself.”
Vivian had gone very still.
“What ... what did he say?”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Jack said, his gaze turning to Denizen. “The message isn’t from the King. It’s from his daughter.”
“IT’S A TRICK,” VIVIAN said flatly. “A trap. A plot of some kind.”
The warm, acrid smell of coffee filled the kitchen. Jack took a long swig from his cup and set it back down.
“Well, it was a nightmare receiving the letter,” he said, “so, when the Palatine did get it, he thought it best to actually read the thing. Mercy and the Forever Court wish to thank the Order for their part in her rescue. For avoiding a potentially damaging conflict. Her words, not mine. And ...”
Denizen felt the blush starting, inexorable as a sunrise.
“She wants to thank one of us in particular.”
Six months ago, Denizen Hardwick had saved the world.
He hadn’t meant to. It had sort of happened by accident while he was trying to stay alive and he hadn’t really thought about it until it was over and, when the adrenaline had worn off, he’d gotten a migraine and had to lie down.
But yes. World-saving. It was a very large thing to have done, and he could only comprehend it in little segments or the headache would come back. It hadn’t even resulted in glory or praise or any of the other things normally associated with saving the world. No medals, no ceremony—he hadn’t even been thanked, and it wasn’t like he could go and put it on his CV.
That was fine with Denizen. He’d had the panicked notion that after scrambling for their lives against the first stirrings of a Tenebraic invasion, the Order mightn’t have been best pleased with the very stressed thirteen-year-old who’d solved the whole thing when their backs were turned.
The Order. Denizen had known there were other Knights outside Seraphim Row, but it was one thing meeting Jack and D’Aubigny and Darcie, and another facing the grim strangers who had taken Grey away, leaving Darcie sobbing into Denizen’s shoulder.
The Three had enthralled Grey, forcing him to cage Mercy and divide Vivian’s cadre, giving them the chance to attack Seraphim Row and kill D’Aubigny, leaving Jack gravely wounded and broken by grief.
A further source of food for the Three.
Denizen wanted to be ignored, in the aftermath. It hadn’t seemed fair that he had emerged unscathed. Besides, it wasn’t like he could explain how, when real Knights had fallen, he had somehow survived, as the only honest answer was: I have no idea.
“Anyone could have done it,” he said in a small voice. “Really.”
“That’s as may be,” Jack said sympathetically, “but we’ve never received a message like this before. Everyone’s running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to figure out what we should do. Before all this, we didn’t even know the Endless King had a daughter. Now we find out he does, and she’s offering thanks, and her handwriting is pretty good. It’s a lot to take in.”
“It,” Vivian repeated coldly, “is a trap.”
Raw limbs of mist and storm, lightning climbing the distance between their lips. A creature of light rather than darkness, a smile luminescent and ever-changing ...
Denizen’s cheeks burned.
“The Malleus has a point,” Darcie said. She was taking notes, because Darcie always took notes. “The Endless King, the Forever Court ... these are human names for inhuman things. They might speak our language or mimic our forms, but only to hunt us. How can we be sure what they really want?”
The Knights only knew the barest fraction about the Tenebrae, but what was known was that somewhere in that sea of pitch there was a King, and a Court that served him. They were the oldest and most terrible of the Tenebrous—dread nobles shrouded in the worst of stories, if they appeared at all.
That was the problem. Stories needed survivors to tell them, and the Knights’ records had a bad habit of cutting out whenever the Court came into play.
And Mercy had never appeared in those records at all.
“Denizen?”
Denizen was jerked out of his reverie by Simon poking him in the side. “What?”
Simon gave him a searching look.
“You’ve gone all red.”
Yes. That was the other thing. He could almost hear Mercy’s voice.
We will see each other again, Denizen Hardwick.
Denizen had assumed that was the kind of thing magical glowing girls said all the time, to promote an air of mystery. He hadn’t realized it was something she was going to go and organize. Then again, he didn’t have a lot of experience with girls, ethereal princesses in particular, and perhaps the best prophecies were the ones you organized yourself.
“Look,” Jack said. “We can’t afford to ignore it. Or risk offending her. The meeting is going to be held in Dublin in a few weeks. The Palatine is coming personally, along with representatives from the Order and our allies abroad.”
“And Edifice Greaves chose you as a messenger?” Vivian said the name like a curse.
Jack didn’t seem fazed. “Yes. He’s been in contact a good bit since ... that night. About Grey, for instance. And other things. I came early to prepare the venue, and he thought it best if I dropped in to give you the news in person.”
“They’re not coming here,” Vivian said sharply. “We’ve only just—”
Jack lifted a massive hand. “Not here. In Retreat. It’s a secure location.”
Vivian looked disgusted. “Monstrous place.”
“Then it suits its purpose.” Frustration was evident in Jack’s tone. “Look, Vivian. None of us need this. And I understand you’ve been through enough. We all have.”
Now it was Vivian’s turn to look away.
“But this has never happened before. I don’t know what it means. Greaves doesn’t know what it means. But we owe it to the world to find out.”
Denizen swallowed. He wanted to see Mercy again. The thought did something to his insides that had nothing to do with the Tenebrae and everything to do with the taste of lightning on his lips.
But this wasn’t about him and Mercy. Denizen had learned enough in the last few months to know that events didn’t just happen one by one, neatly and politely. This was the opening salvo to a barrage.
The last time he had seen Mercy, Denizen had had to save the world.
He really hoped he wasn’t g
oing to have to do it again.
—
AFTERWARD, DENIZEN AND SIMON got chips. It was a little anticlimactic.
That wasn’t a complaint, exactly. Anticlimaxes were usually better than the alternative. Life in Seraphim Row had a very inconsistent quality to it. One moment you might be fighting for your life against impossible odds, and the next you’d be doing the dishes. Maybe that was why Knights were constantly on edge—you never knew whether the next five minutes would contain soul-crushing horror or chips with garlic sauce.
Everyone had gone to do something, leaving Denizen and Simon alone in the kitchen. Like everywhere in Seraphim Row, the room bore the scars of the Three—two of the ovens had been removed, leaving pale patches on the slashed wallpaper, and most of the trestle tables had been smashed to kindling. It made the kitchen seem emptier than ever.
Abigail was calling her parents. They were in Honduras, Denizen thought. Or Haiti. They weren’t in the Palatine’s inner circle, but she wanted to check if they were coming anyway.
Darcie had retreated to the library to research the Court. Jack and Vivian had disappeared somewhere to talk about adult things, or Knight things, or both. Vivian had been the only Knight in Seraphim Row since the Three had attacked. Sometimes Denizen wondered if she was lonely.
Frown No. 8—I Am Missing Something Important Here, Which Is Unfair Because It Concerns Me—creased his brow for a moment. Why am I not in that conversation? Surely he was just as involved as they were? No, his mother would tell him when she was ready. Or, he thought sourly, she’ll tell me when she has absolutely no choice.
Fine, then. He could wait. He didn’t want to talk to her either. Right now he was going to sit here and eat chips and have a think.
“What’s she like?” Simon asked, examining a chip before popping it delicately into his mouth.
Denizen knew the Cants back to front. He knew there was absolutely no way another Knight— especially a Neophyte—could read your mind. It was just a coincidence that Simon asked that question.
