On Wings of Bone and Glass

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “And if we succeed?” Chester asked, low. “What happens if we don’t need an angel?”

  “Then perhaps our time here is over,” Amhric said.

  The silence then was absolute, and each one of us hated it.

  “No,” Ivy said. “If it is for us to make choices, then this path I will refuse. We will not claim our agency on the bodies of another species. That is truly the demon’s path.” She lifted her chin, and in that moment I saw my mother in her, and her grandmother, and every female warrior who had ever dared the dark in the future’s name. “We all stand to be saved, or all of us fall.”

  “The sacrifice,” Eyre began.

  “May be honored in myth and story,” Carrington murmured. “And there will be sacrifices. But it’s all wrong, John. The elves have to choose the altar. If they die here, like this, it will be because humanity trussed them up and threw them there. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

  “I still don’t understand.” Chester’s hands were tight on his knees. “Why was Marne’s sacrifice necessary? Why did it resolve into... this? With him trapped for centuries that way? It wasn’t a solution, not a permanent one. Why didn’t the angel just kill the dead?”

  “The books say that the angel offered a choice,” I said. “That it is the nature of angels to give choices, and for demons to take them away.”

  “But what was the choice that earned him this?” Chester asked.

  I shook my head. “Maybe only Marne will ever know.”

  “And Sihret,” Ivy said.

  Sedetnet. My counterpart, doomed to live apart from his king. And I had wondered at his madness? What would I be, if I had been tasked to stay so distant from Amhric, knowing what he suffered?

  “Maybe we’ll get the chance to ask,” Eyre said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “For now, though, we should rest for the little time we have.”

  They consented to this only because I had given them too much to think about. Amhric, though, I saw to myself, tucking the cloak close around him. “Rest,” I whispered in the Gift, drawing his head to my lap.

  “I hardly feel I can, knowing now what I do,” he answered in kind.

  “But you must.” I set a hand on his shoulder. “When Marne dies, all his power will come to repose in you, and all the magic of this land will be free. You will have more to hand than you have had in your life—than any elf has now, or will until we are unencumbered of the curse. And I doubt that power will come to you easily.”

  “And you?” He looked up at me, concerned, and my heart tightened. “When the mantle passes to me, Sihret’s will pass to you. How will you be ready?”

  “In the way that all princes have been.” I set my hand on his shoulder. “By knowing why I wear it.”

  With that he had to be content, and in that way of his of knowing too well another’s heart, he was. I kissed his temple and he slept, and I kept the watch, and this I found good. The others slept or didn’t, or slept poorly, as their natures dictated, but all of them wanted the quiet to nurse their scattered thoughts.

  And I had company.

  “Oh Master,” Almond said when I did not send her away. She curled up against my side, head tucked against my shoulder. “Your mother. And your father! And you with no time to grieve!”

  “I knew neither of them.” I wrapped an arm around her and brought her close enough to breathe in the floral scent of her fur, and beneath it, the hint of power that was the magic bound into her for the use of her captors. Here was another mystery. Why had Sedetnet wrought the genets? What had been a prince’s purpose in creating them? Had it been as simple as the need to keep Amhric winnowed? Or had it been the solution he’d offered the elves to keep them from slaying the first candidate he’d found that hadn’t been an amoral monster?

  Perhaps there had been no plan. Perhaps it had been as simple as Sihret being mad. I sighed against Almond’s fur. “I knew neither of them, and I do grieve, but it does not cripple me. Does that make me a terrible person?”

  Beyond Almond, Kelu snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Ah, the repository of my common sense has arrived.” I smiled as she sat beside Almond, though her gaze was for the figures huddled under cloaks and coats and saddle blankets, not far from us. “Please, Kelu. Save me from my own puffery.”

  She sighed. “You get more ridiculous the longer I know you.”

  I chuckled, and if it was a low sound, and half-hearted, I made it all the same. “Come and rest,” I said. “Even genets must need it.”

  “Almond can rest,” Kelu said. “I don’t have much longer on this world. I’d like to see it before it gets demon-blighted, before I die.”

  Almond’s ears flattened. “You still have time—”

  “I’m old.” Kelu shook her head. “I’ve lived too long as it is. It won’t be long for me. You’ll see.”

  I reached for her hand and surprised her into letting me capture it. “Kelu,” I said, quiet. “You will live to see this world demon-blighted, and cleansed of demon blight. I swear it.”

  Her ears flipped back, sealed to her head, and her nostrils flared. Her reply was slow in coming. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

  “I’m not,” I said. And to this, she said nothing more.

  Less than two hours later, I chivvied everyone awake and back to the thankless task of preparing their mounts. The wind tore at us, too chill; there were clouds clinging to the edges of the horizon, and as I glanced at them, they broke and began to burgeon. I smelled something moist, but unclean; beneath me, the drake hissed, and the horses rolled their eyes and blew flecks of foam in their anxiety.

  There was nothing for it but to ride on, over earth gone sinister, through air that now tingled with the anticipation of the magic to come, and the guttering of the light. That these things came attendant gave me some pale thread of hope: God gave power to deny the dark with the dark, and around me were the people I’d chosen to wield it. All humanity could now be a shield, thank Winifred and her covenant. I had shown them the way, but she had made them ready.

  Before me, Amhric was tense, shoulders bowed inward. Now and then he looked back, and on the fourth time, I said, “What is it?”

  “I feel it,” he whispered. “I feel it, Morgan. It’s coming.”

  But when it came, none of us were ready.

  It came in the ground, and in the sky. It was swifter than water flowing, more tempestuous than storms, and silent as the space between notes of music. It was brighter than lightning, and it came first: the magic, released in a great explosion that coruscated the length of the world and rolled on, scattering arabesques of eye-watering brilliance that shuddered over eyes that watered and blinked to behold it. All the land was blessed by it, and cried out to receive it, or those were our cries, of shock at the feel of it passing through us, thin as ghosts and great as the love of God.

  Ivy pulled up her mount, which was caviling wildly, and how she didn’t fall I didn’t know. We all followed suit because there was no moving through so much joy, so much shock. The clouds had thickened into storms, surging toward us on a wet wind, pulling at hair, manes, coats, cloaks. But we did not move.

  The earth beneath me was singing.

  “Oh God,” Carrington whispered. “Is that what we’ve been missing all this time?”

  Ivy and Chester were both weeping, unashamed. Eyre looked proud, a man greeting his destiny. In them all I could sense the wan candles that had been their impoverished magics flying like pennants, so bright, so strong. There were never elven sorcerers. But there were now human ones.

  “That we should live to see this,” Eyre whispered, head up, facing the storm. “That we should be the ones! Winifred’s legacy, and the gift of angels!”

  And then a spear of light transfixed Amhric, broadened into a column, and all of it fell into him as if filling a deep, deep well. The drake dug its claws into the earth, head down, as if it bore a weight too great for its back, and I hastily slid from it
to leave the two of them.

  The mantle came, flared into a rune around his body that shone so bright my eyes watered to witness it. When it died, it left a man that gleamed at every edge, and above his head a crown of light shimmered, the halo that had heralded the holy in icon and myth for as long as human hand could lift a brush. I recognized it anew, from some other lifetime: the elven sigil that had heralded the silver-eyed king in the Vigil manuscript that no doubt still reposed in my student flat.

  “The King is dead,” Eyre said. “Long live the King!”

  Amhric sighed out, soft, opened eyes gone molten amber. He reached a hand to me. We had played this scene out before, the two of us, when I had driven off our tormentors on a beach on Kesina. He had handed me my staff, and I had accepted, and with it my role in his life and in the myths that would be written long after we had gone to dust. Here, then, was my last chance to repudiate that future. Curls of light limned his fingers, rose from them in coils and sigils that doubled back into themselves in the infinite patterns that the elves had written down and called the Angel’s Gift. In his cupped palm, a pool of light, as if it could be captured and passed, from hand to hand to ailing heart.

  Here was truth, and beauty, and all good things… and their inevitable companions, duty, and grief, and sacrifice.

  I rested my hand on his, and took the mantle.

  What was it like? How could I describe, save that it was intimate, and more personal than I’d expected? My studies had led me to believe that magic was a force of nature, some external power to be manipulated by the puissant. But it was the very opposite. Magic sprang from within, was created in the secret, sacred center… was the soul’s tears shed in its joy, the manifestation of all that was good and healthy and right. Did I wonder how blood might come to symbolize that transaction? I had only to feel the Prince’s power coming to me to know, because it came as wings, not chains.

  And this, I realized in that moment of acceptance, was how Sihret had felt, joining himself to Marne. And what had been eating him from within ever since the exile. Sedetnet no less than Marne had been the sacrifice that deferred the judgment of that final battle. I extended a heart-rent prayer that he might find the peace his king had, dying at last.

  But we were not done yet. I went to Carrington, who’d remained on her horse. It shied once at my approach, then settled as I rested a glowing hand on its nose. Looking up at her, I saw her, saw her and needed no spectacles to tell me of her allegiance. She was breathing quickly, with high color, and the storm wind had swept some of her hair from its habitual knot, straggling it over her brow. But her eyes were steady, if wild.

  “Will you have the gift?” I asked.

  It was a formality, the asking, but I saw her gratitude that I’d observed it. She licked her lips, then nodded once, and I reached into her and showed her where the magic lived in her. She groped blindly for the pommel of her saddle, and I gave her my hands instead, and held her steady until she was done—for now. I thought she and Ivy would have something to talk about, if time we had for talking.

  “The storm’s coming,” Chester said. Behind him, Kelu’s face was unreadable. “We shouldn’t tarry.”

  I pulled myself back up behind Amhric as the others wheeled their mounts away from the source of the magic. But I paused once to look backwards, and think of the dead, and for a moment because of that I thought I had summoned the noise. It began as a pressure in the ears, crested, transformed abruptly into a wail of grief and rage and desolation so unbearable that we all cried out, and the horses screamed, and even the land shivered beneath us, mute tremors of grief and shock. There was no sanity in that howl, and every one of us knew who had uttered it.

  The drake leaped forward at my hissed command and the others streamed in my wake. We fled the storm that was, and the storm to come, and behind us Death was rising, a shadow gathered against the sky, an inverse of the light that had proclaimed a king. We had run, not out of time, but out of choices. All possible endings were narrowing to a single path, and we coursed it like foxes fleeing the hunt.

  9

  We arrived to a city under siege.

  “What the hell!” Carrington said from behind us. “That’s our excavation! Who are those people?”

  “Those,” I said from beneath gritted teeth, “are my people.” Beneath my breath, “And I will not kill them because it would grieve you did I undertake it.”

  Shocking me, Amhric said, “Some of them may need killing.” And if he sounded sad to have said it, yet it had been said, and with his breath.

  The road to Vigil was a stream of elves that shone even in the drizzle that had dogged us all the way over the plains—when it did not become storms—and among them were carts drawn by horses and loaded with swaying towers of cages. Suleris had won its bid for primacy over the expedition through the Door, and brought with it all its chattel, to be used, no doubt, when they pacified the natives with the magic they had stolen from their king and sealed in their slaves. The genets were of no more moment to them than the barrels of gunpowder used for one of the artillery pieces Radburn found so fascinating, though their oppression was so distinct one could almost hear their whimpers on the wind that snapped through the sheets of rain to whip the flanks of our mounts.

  “So is that what it looks to be?” Eyre asked me, bringing his horse alongside.

  “If you think it is all our enemies from Serala, who have stopped at Vigil to snap up what resources they might find before continuing south to even richer plunder, and you think that the treasure they seek is the magic they can strip from human souls... then yes, you are correct.”

  “So the elves are evil,” Carrington said behind us.

  Amhric said, quiet, “Some of them. Not all. But some.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “But I am now their king.”

  “And I am your prince, and they will answer to us.”

  “And what’s going to stop them from killing you when you show up and demand their fealty?” Chester asked.

  “The fact that I can rip the magic from them.” Was I trembling? I was. It was the cages. So many cages. I had promised I would come back for them, that I would free them. And here they were, and I would see it done, save that to release them from their prisons was not sufficient to that promise. How then could I free a race from the bondage of a botched creation? They had been made incomplete. They could not survive without us.

  “You’re thinking of going up there,” Ivy said.

  “We don’t have time for anything else. The demon is brooding in the north, but when he’s done he’ll come, and he must find us united.” I reached back and undid the ties holding the staff to the back of my saddle. Rolling the incised iron in my hand, I said, “Let’s put paid to this.” I drew in a breath and added, quiet, “I’ll need you all.”

  “You have us,” Eyre said. “Only tell us what you require.”

  “Stay close for now.” I urged the drake up the slope, heard the horses shuffling as they were turned to follow.

  No one stopped us as we joined the file of elves heading up the road. Some grumbled when we pushed our way ahead of the wagons, but not a single individual was curious enough to question our identity. They saw two elves with attendant humans and genets and thought the obvious of us. I let them, and guided us as quickly as possible to the gates of Vigil to see what had become of Kemses, Rose, and the excavation.

  The buildings, I saw, still stood. No other sign did I see of our former companions. The entirety of the cleared plaza, once dedicated to the human encampment, had been colonized by elves, who were occupying a city of hundreds of multicolored tents, bright flags against the constant silver rain and the gray mud of Vigil’s wreckage. A small area remained clear near the barracks and what used to be the stairwell into the athenaeum, but it appeared blocked: smoothed over with stone, and not a sign that it had once offered ingress. Had someone seen the elves coming and hidden everyone away? It seemed the best course of action. Even Kemses, who could fi
ght a line duel for days on the donated energy of human friends, could not take on the entire elven nation. And if the entirety of Serala was not here yet… it would be soon enough.

  “They’ve outgrown the Archipelago,” I murmured.

  “This was once our homeland too,” Amhric replied.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But that’s not why they’re here.” I sent the drake loping down toward the center of the plaza, slowing to thread my way among the crates and cages and trying not to look too long toward the drooping shoulders and downturned faces of the slaves that languished amid the other cargo.

  “What are you planning?” Amhric asked.

  “To make them our people.”

  I stopped the drake at the plaza’s edge and dismounted, then led it to the center. We remained unremarked, but that wouldn’t last much longer. As my friends joined me, I gestured them closer.

  “Professor,” I said to Eyre, “Have you learned enough from the Vessel to keep a bonfire burning in this weather?”

  Eyre cast a look up at the clouded sky, lashes blinking as droplets of water struck them. “I believe so, yes.”

  “Chester, help him start it, please. Then I’ll need you and Ivy with me.”

  “And me?” Carrington asked, hesitant. “What shall I do?”

  “And us, Master?” Almond was wringing her hands. Kelu had become grim in her silence, unsurprisingly; here was evidence of all the injustice leveled against her kind. But Almond thought only of me, and probably always would until she died. I couldn’t help a sigh and then smiled to reassure her.