Path of Night

by Sarah Rees Brennan

  But not the one they were waiting for. Not yet.

  Ambrose directed a fond grin at the shining spheres, thinking of someone else who was small and bright.

  “What … are you … thinking about?” Prudence asked, her voice slightly rusty, as though she was unaccustomed to simple pleasantries and not sure if she was getting them right.

  There hadn’t been much pleasantness for Prudence in the Church of Night under Father Blackwood. That could change now. As soon as they hunted down her father.

  Ambrose was on board with the plan for bloody vengeance, but he felt there was no reason they couldn’t combine revenge and romance. It was a nice night.

  “I’m thinking about my cousin,” he said honestly.

  Prudence gave an irritated sigh. “What about Sabrina?”

  “Nothing in particular.” Ambrose took a deep breath and committed sacrilege. “I love her, so I think about her a lot. Wondering how she is, if she’s happy, whether she’s back at mortal school or broken up about Nick. Pour one out for Nick Scratch.”

  He poured Prudence a fresh glass of champagne. The golden bubbles in her glass glided upward as the faerie spheres cascaded down around them.

  I love her. It wasn’t the kind of thing witches said. It felt like confessing a crime.

  Luckily, Ambrose was comfortable with crime.

  Prudence took a long sip of her champagne. “Are you sorry about Nick?”

  “Sure. I liked Nick. What’s not to like? He was hot, he cared about Sabrina, I’m a simple man,” said Ambrose. “Seemed horrified to find himself in a love triangle, which: strongly agreed. So much fraught emotion when there’s an obvious solution. Calm down and come to an arrangement, people in love triangles!”

  Prudence made a small face, like a kitten whose nose was being shoved in a dish. “Then you’re in an arrangement with Harvey.”

  “Therein lies the beauty of my plan,” said Ambrose. “Suggest an arrangement to Harvey, watch him die of horror, find someone else to have an arrangement with.”

  Prudence’s laugh was as lovely as the sound of bells over Florence.

  Ambrose laughed with her. “Shame Nick didn’t get the chance to initiate Sabrina into a world of carnal delights, but them’s the breaks. Guess it’s Harvey after all. Brace yourself for potentially days of tender cuddling, cousin! Those will be some amateur fumblings, but Sabrina loves him. Always did. Don’t think she knows how to stop, though I expect she’s trying.”

  Ambrose checked in on where Prudence was at, with this scandalous talk of love. Prudence was scowling.

  “I don’t like cuddling.”

  “Oh, no?” Ambrose asked.

  Pity.

  Prudence propped her chin onto her fist. Her voice was gloomy. “Nick Scratch tried to cuddle me once … I think. It was a horrible experience.”

  Ambrose raised his eyebrows and grinned, knife sharp. “How bad could it have been?”

  Prudence, lost in awful reminiscence, didn’t grin back.

  “He had no idea what he was doing. It was like being attacked by an awkward coatrack. I lay still and thought of the Dark Lord. After five minutes I threatened Nick with a knife. He leaped back. My hair got caught in one of his shirt buttons. I had to cut myself free. Later I hacked off my hair and bleached it to make the memories go away.”

  “Wow,” breathed Ambrose. “That’s much worse than I was expecting.”

  He recalled his childhood, carriages rattling down the streets of London and lamps barely able to burn through the fog. In his nursery, there was always a fire burning in the grate. There was his auntie Hilda, holding him and cooing at him about who was the sweetest, most handsome boy in the whole world?

  Then and now, that was Ambrose. But the witch orphans of the Academy hadn’t had his advantages.

  “I wouldn’t give up on cuddling just yet.” Ambrose shot Prudence a provocative smile. “The best way to experience new things is trying them with someone who has experience.”

  Prudence shook her head obstinately. “I don’t like it.”

  “I’m a fan, personally,” Ambrose observed. “Chains and cuddling. Girls and boys. I like it all. But you know that. I always wonder why so many mortals are obsessed with monogamy when there’s beautiful variety in the world.”

  He tilted his head to see the effect of this on Prudence.

  “What’s monogamy?” Prudence asked lazily. “A mortal game, is it not? You get all the hotels and you win?”

  Ambrose opened his mouth to correct her, then recalled the time Prudence was staying over in Sabrina’s room. He’d found her running her fingertips lightly over Auntie Hilda’s books and the stacked-up games he used to while away evenings playing with Sabrina. He knew she’d seen the Monopoly box.

  Prudence was making a joke. Ambrose smiled, thrilled with her, and Prudence smiled a naughty little smile back.

  “Best way to win that game is not to play,” remarked Ambrose.

  “Doesn’t seem like a game I’d be interested in, no,” drawled Prudence.

  So that was settled. Fantastic.

  “But I’ve been thinking,” began Ambrose.

  His eye was caught by the glitter of a midnight-blue orb falling from above. The bubble was almost lost against the night sky, but notably dissimilar from the globes of white and crimson, green and gold.

  This was what they were waiting for. Ambrose clocked the gargoyles creeping across the roofs.

  No rest for the wicked. For the wicked it was all sexy adventures, strange magic, and duels to the death, which Ambrose personally found to be terrific. He indulged himself by reaching out and taking Prudence’s hand in his, the same brown as his own but ringless and with the nails painted dark.

  “What do you call this color nail polish?” he asked idly.

  “Eggplant,” Prudence responded, her eyes sparking and intent.

  Ambrose kissed her hand. “I call it aubergine. Americans are a ghastly people who speak a brutish tongue.”

  “We speak the same language.” Prudence rose. “Try saying something in English that I couldn’t say.”

  Eggplant and aubergine were their code words.

  The gargoyles dropped from the curved-eggshell dome of the Duomo, the hard claws of stone monsters scraping against the cobblestones. One gargoyle looked to Prudence, and its gray lips curled back from granite fangs.

  Ambrose grinned as Prudence drew her twin swords. “Darling, I rather fancy you.”

  While they were in Italy, Prudence wore long, floating dresses. Usually she dressed to match her sisters, in a witch uniform of prim lace collars, dark colors, and short skirts. Ambrose liked to imagine that Prudence sometimes saw this murder quest the way he did. As an opportunity to be who they were when not bound in a web of complex loyalties. Escapism got a bad rap. Who couldn’t use an escape now and then?

  Prudence’s long dresses showed cleavage in which a man could plunge to his glorious death.

  As Prudence spun over the darkened cobblestones, her skirts and her swords were a luminous whirl. Ambrose drew his own sword, tipped his straw hat to a table of mortal tourists, then flung his hat onto the table, where it landed spinning between their champagne flutes.

  “I challenge you to a battle of wits,” Ambrose told a gargoyle.

  The gargoyle grunted.

  “I can see in the battle of wits you are unarmed,” said Ambrose. “Battle of battle it is!”

  He joined the fray. The legend went that the last star to appear at evening in the warlock Galileo’s city would show you exactly where you wished to go. Being guided by the stars was something even the mortals knew how to do.

  But there were other warlocks and witches hunting for the star’s answer. Or perhaps someone was trying to prevent Prudence and Ambrose from reaching their goal. For whatever reason, these gargoyles had been sent to stop them.

  Their enemies hadn’t yet realized that Ambrose was with an unstoppable girl. Prudence reached out and grasped the midnight-blue bubble.
The gargoyles closed in.

  Prudence circled their enemies, skirts swaying like a country girl dancing around a maypole, and lopped off a gargoyle’s head.

  “Do not make puns about how everyone loses their heads over me,” warned Prudence. “You already did that with the ghouls last week.”

  “Yes, dear,” said Ambrose. “But consider this. We are gorgeous immortal creatures with cool weapons and killer fashion sense. The world has a right to expect witty repartee.”

  A gargoyle lunged for Prudence, and Ambrose buried his sword in its stone breast.

  “O, if no harder than a stone thou art—” Ambrose began, then was rudely interrupted by another gargoyle, stone claws sinking into his sword arm. Prudence hurtled through the air like a silver shrike, landing on the gargoyle’s back and cutting the creature’s throat. Ambrose admired her narrowed eyes and the lethal twist of her mouth, her face set harder than stone over the monster’s shoulder.

  She had more killer instinct than he did, but he could usually keep up. Even when he couldn’t, he had fun trying. Ambrose took a knee and scythed the legs out from another stone monster. When three came for Prudence, stone teeth raked her shoulder, and she let the orb drop. Ambrose rolled across the cobblestones, caught the star’s message, and came up swinging. Their swords kissed with a victorious ring as they cut off the last creature’s head together.

  He and Prudence stood with their blades bared as the stone flesh of their enemies crumbled to dust at their feet. Moonshine made their pale clothes glow silver, so they seemed beings garbed in light.

  Ambrose was wearing a white linen vest and trousers. He felt no need to wear a shirt on holiday. He was cheerfully confident that he and Prudence made a handsome pair.

  The table of mortal tourists applauded enthusiastically. Ambrose bowed with a flourish.

  “What a fun cabaret!” called out a woman. “Do you do private performances?”

  “I’m just as sensational in private,” Ambrose called back.

  “Ambrose,” said Prudence, her voice arch but firm.

  She caught his hand to attract his attention. Ambrose gave her a swift, fond glance. Prudence gestured to the midnight-blue orb in his palm.

  “The star’s message?”

  Ambrose turned away reluctantly from his adoring public and passed a hand over the orb, the metal of his rings sparking and suffused with light. The shimmering blue turned to water, and he pulled out a message written in blood on a broad white feather. The message read: Ask Urbain Grandier at Marche d’Ailleurs in Paris.

  Prudence nodded. “This is our last night in Italy.”

  “Then we should enjoy it!”

  She started to release his hand, but Ambrose pulled her around the curve of the domed building, glowing pink marble on one side and a glittering Florence on the other. Prudence’s skirt flared, and her laugh came pealing behind him. Better than bells, filling the whole city with music.

  “You enjoy yourself too much,” Prudence told him breathlessly.

  “No such thing,” Ambrose returned.

  “Doesn’t that attitude get you into trouble?”

  “Sure,” said Ambrose. “I was put under house arrest for trying to blow up the Vatican. I go big and I go home … and stay there under occult house arrest. I do it all. All’s a lot more fun than nothing.”

  Prudence laughed. This was going considerably better than Ambrose’s confession of misdeeds on his first date with Luke, Ambrose thought.

  Thinking of Luke made melancholy drag down Ambrose’s buoyant mood.

  His boyfriend Luke Chalfant, lost in exactly the same way Ambrose’s father had been. Killed by witch-hunters. Only, unlike Ambrose’s father, Luke had loved Ambrose. Luke had told him so.

  Ambrose was flattered, and fond of him. Luke was cute and had appeared on Ambrose’s horizon when Ambrose was almost despairing. Luke offered him freedom from house arrest, and Ambrose had dreamed of nothing but freedom for decades. Ambrose owed him. Luke had no reason to help Ambrose. He’d been purely motivated by affection. Ambrose thought, surely if he was capable of loving anyone besides his family, he should love Luke.

  But Ambrose hadn’t. Ambrose thought maybe it would come. And he’d thought maybe he couldn’t love anyone. Not in that way. Perhaps love was only for his family, for Auntie Hilda, Cousin Sabrina, and Auntie Z, not that Zelda or Ambrose would admit to feeling that way about each other.

  Maybe Ambrose couldn’t ever fall in love.

  “If you’ve forgotten the way to our hotel,” said Prudence scornfully, “I shall lead you.”

  And maybe he could.

  She led him past Gothic towers and cathedrals, over the Ponte Vecchio with its medieval arches and jewelry shops where mortals bought diamonds for their beloved ones. There was a stone plaque on the bridge, worn to illegibility with time, saying this bridge had been rebuilt after a flood seven hundred years ago. Prudence didn’t let go of his hand.

  “You said earlier you were thinking of something,” said Prudence.

  Ambrose hesitated, but if not now, when?

  “I was thinking about having a partner in crime. How it would be to go on all the adventures of the world together.”

  Prudence’s glance was half startled, half disdainful. “You’re a romantic, aren’t you?”

  It seemed like a night for confessions.

  “I used to be. I wrote poetry. Even had a book of poems published when I was at Oxford—a mortal university. Quite old.”

  Prudence didn’t seem impressed by Oxford. She was difficult to impress. It was one of the things Ambrose liked most about her.

  “You can tell me one of your poems,” she said. “Please don’t pick an overly sentimental poem.”

  Ambrose began to smile. He stopped by the ancient witch’s moondial on the bridge, pressed their joined hands to his heart, and declaimed:

  “The lioness, you may move her

  To give over her prey;

  But you’ll ne’er stop a lover—

  He will find out the way.”

  “Catch this lioness giving up her prey.” Prudence’s lip curled. “I never would. Lions don’t belong in love poems.”

  “That’s nonsense,” said Ambrose. “All the best love poems have lions. The oldest love poem in the world, four thousand years old, has a lion. ‘Lion, dear to my heart. Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.’ ”

  The river Arno washed under the stone arches, waters new every minute under old shadows.

  “You used to write poetry,” Prudence observed. “But you stopped. Why?”

  “Lucifer came to me in my dreams,” said Ambrose. “He asked me to perform a dark devotion. To write a certain letter to a mortal I knew in Oxford, a tender mortal boy who … liked me. Among mortals, caring for someone of the same sex is sometimes seen as a crime. He was only a mortal. But somehow, after I did the Dark Lord’s bidding and ruined that mortal’s life, I didn’t have the heart to write poems any longer.”

  They weren’t meant to speak of the devotions. They were meant to obey.

  “The Dark Lord never wanted us to have the heart for much,” Ambrose murmured, soft as the sound of the river. “Did he?”

  The Dark Lord, and his darker devotions. Asking them all to shut up their hearts, hurting themselves by being willing to hurt others. Until your ability to care for anyone became something that crawled in chains when it used to fly.

  And they’d gone along with it, every witch soul, Ambrose included. Without even seeing that their lord had them trapped.

  Nick Scratch saw it. Nick Scratch stopped it.

  For love of Sabrina, a motive Ambrose entirely sympathized with.

  He’d misjudged them, the students of Blackwood’s Academy. He’d been trapped so long away from witches and warlocks, he’d seen the Academy orphans as nothing but new amusements. He hadn’t taken Nick Scratch seriously. Not until the last second, when everything Ambrose had seen of Nick added up to more than he’d thought. Pretty boy who liked to have f
un. Sharp guy who liked books and Sabrina. The curious sort, with his pleased, puzzled interest in mortal things like school dances and frozen drinks. None of that prepared Ambrose for the moment Nick stepped up to face down the Dark Lord and did what Ambrose would have died to do. Nick kept Sabrina safe.

  “You’re thinking about Nicky,” remarked Prudence.

  “I was thinking he was a brave boy. Raised by wolves and witches, but reaching for something else. I didn’t know.”

  “He was a fool to do what he did,” Prudence announced. “He was always a fool. We used to date. He dumped me and my sisters, saying he wanted something real. As if we weren’t real. I should have stabbed him and saved him some pain.”

  “Forget what I said just now,” Ambrose told her. “I didn’t like Nick that much. He dumped you? The man was an idiot.”

  That made her smile.

  Worse than misjudging Nick, Ambrose had misjudged Prudence. She’d turned up one day and he’d thought, Why, hello there. She was perhaps the most stunning woman he’d ever seen, and from the first minute it was evident she thought Ambrose was cute too, so she was a stunner with great taste. The night they met, she knocked on his bedroom door with her hot friends in tow.

  Months later, when Prudence approached him at the Academy to make her interest in further encounters clear, they had more great times. She was as fun to be with as she was to look at, and Ambrose never once thought about what she might feel.

  But then Prudence rebelled against her father, the High Priest. When Blackwood hurt her sisters, she rose up against him in fury.

  We are more than our dark god ever knew, Ambrose thought. We are more than we ever knew. The Morningstar was defeated because he believed we would turn over Sabrina to him without a fight.

  Lucifer was sure love didn’t matter. But love mattered in spite of him.

  They walked back to their hotel hand in hand. Ambrose had reserved separate rooms, but their chambers were linked by a marble balcony overlooking Florence. The balcony ceiling was red-and-blue encaustic tile. A chandelier sang in the breeze above them.

  Ambrose left Prudence at her door every night with a promise they would get vengeance in the morning.