Catherine - Present

  Six miles. Two in the trees. We make it to Ithek.

  A fine-enough city between things that matter, about two days’ ride to Mesica along Fjolln’s easternmost riverway, and a safe enough pce to hide from what She’s done. We’ve agreed to y low, collect some things. An inn. A bath. Some strength, if it comes. It will mean letting Fornthveit’s memory mingle with the caravan, and certainly catch us, but we’re left with little alternative. Luca and

  Izzy are exhausted.

  Staying for the night also means I will sleep outside the walls, to keep away from others as best I can. At least until I make sense of the thoughts in my head. I pray that they are Hers. And only Hers.

  Because Ithek’s walls are not high enough to keep me out.

  The southern gates greet us with a stoic indifference as soft earth gives way to worn cobblestone. A few armed men rouse dutifully as we pass, their eyes slipping over us, unconcerned by a few ragged travelers. We pass under a rust-bitten iron gate set into a great stone archway. The gate’s metal bars are choked in strangling vines. And I shiver beneath them.

  “No distractions, Izzy.” I draw my cloak tight, hiding the blood that remains on my jerkin. I press silver into her palm. “Supplies, then back. Find a pce to sleep after.”

  “You’ve given us quite enough of those,” Izzy says, striding ahead, Luca at her heels, as if I might eat him should he linger too long. “Do us all a favor and try not to end any bloodlines while we’re gone.”

  Luca waves back at me, his eyebrows arched in sympathy and agreement. I wait at the entrance of the city, as asked, to keep the bloodlines safe. And because I have no more linens to repce these.

  I lurk just inside the gate to the right, standing in what shadows will take me. Moments of solitude like this one remind me of my youth, and my how father used to say, remembering is one of the bravest things we can do, because even the happiest moments of our lives leave bitterness behind for having lost them.

  Izzy ughed the first time I told her that. Told me it was “grotesque sentimentality.” I ughed, too, because those are the biggest words Izzy knows.

  Well, grotesque or not, I remember anyway.

  The townsfolk drift with pleased expressions from storefront to cookhouse, and surprise me all the while. Their words are honey in my ears when I catch them, the kind that keep a smile alive for half a day. They mind their distance and bow their heads with well-defined grace. And despite wearing the road on my body like a thick film, passerby acknowledge my presence. Even if only due to the smell.

  It disarms me.

  Civility like this has long since starved to death on the back of my tongue and in the tender muscles of my hands. I don’t know that I could even mimic it now. Ithek has changed.

  It is no Mesica, but when I listen to them both in my mind, even one through time, they almost rhyme. And She keeps quiet, knowing full well this is no pce for Her mockery of table manners. I grin, picturing Orn spyed across the tavern counter, that ridiculous look in his eyes when I—We whispered those sweet nothings he so craved from us.

  I came here once as a girl, hand in hand with my mother. Her face is bnk to me now, an empty canvas, one my father could never quite paint. But her smile—I remember that. It put the darkness in the distance, made it so nothing bad could ever reach me. Maybe that’s why I was taken. Without her to keep it at bay, the dark could roam free.

  I could roam free.

  The st of the happy thoughts disappear as new memories surface. The way the man’s throat gave in my grip, ridges of bone straining through fibrous tissue. A sound like leather ptes caving under an iron axe. I suffocate a ugh in my chest, the savage joy of Her experimentation must be buried.

  A rattling convoy rescues me from the blood-spattered fen in my head. I slink against the city walls, half-expecting Batar and the others in tow. No, they’d be tearing down the camp, and finding what we left behind, still some long hours out. Instead, it’s prisoner carts fnked by real soldiers. Chainmail slung over muscled frames, pte spaulders gleaming. Pike-men. Shield-walls. Crossbowmen.

  These men move absent thought, hours of drill working as intended.

  Excessive for prisoner transport.

  There’s a tug in my head as one of the wheeled cages rolls past. Inside one, a girl, no older than Luca. Maybe even a few seasons younger. Golden hair dulled in her confinement, with eyes to match.

  Her thin, spindly arms are wrapped around her knees, and she buries her chin between them.

  An aspect-trader in Ithek?

  And one so young. Tears have stained her cheeks but they fall no more, grim resignation has her now. Whatever price she paid for power was too much it seems. Nightfall under the executioner’s bde will cim her head. I hope she got what she wanted.

  A couple passes by and one spits at the cage. “A weak lot, The Ulfrengr will die from insult.”

  The Ulfrengr. Still clinging to the barbaric ways of old, I see. Perhaps you haven’t changed, Ithek.

  The soldiers push townsfolk aside when they don’t move or wander too closely, and the convoy vanishes around the bend in the road, beyond the merriment. They go now to the Council of Three Wardens. A fancy name for harsh jailors mocking the role of a judge. The prisoners’ fates will be decided through combat or execution, in the name of entertainment. Who can say what they will do with the aspect, to that poor girl.

  The Ulfrengr prefers combat.

  For a moment I think the drumming is back, but it’s just the heartbeats all around me. I pick one out. The girl’s, and the tugging sensation returns. But it doesn’t feel like Her. It’s something else.

  She’s responding to it, but not by choice.

  The urge to follow the convoy is almost overwhelming, but the clotting blood in my hair serves as an omen against it. Even being here this long is a risk.

  Still. An aspect-trader, here? To be born with the potential is rare enough, but to actually make the offering is more so. She had to discover it first. Then, find out how to perform the ritual, find rare reagents, scrawl out the rune-work—it’s beyond complex—and that’s saying nothing for the zealots out of Rothingham and the Seven Pools. The penalty has always been death. So say The Servantis. Foolish girl. I can see no possibility that she acted alone, but she will die that way. Power has a tendency to rot quicker in youthful hands.

  I would know, as would thousands of maggots.

  I watch Izzy and Luca round the corner a few minutes ter with a small sack. Izzy wastes no time in pushing it into my hands and me out of the gates.

  “Stay close. High.” Her eyes flick to the ridge overlooking the southern entrance and back to me, searching. “Don’t come down. No matter what happens, Cat. Don’t you fucking come down here.”

  I hear Izzy’s voice in my head sometimes. Not Her’s—Izzy’s. The way she used to say my name like it was fragile, like even the movement of her lips might crush it and send me tearing through innocents. She doesn’t do that anymore. Maybe she can’t.

  I nod and turn my back to them.

  “W—wait!” Luca stammers after me, “Catherine, please, a moment of your time.”

  I swivel my head.

  “The words…to express my regret, I don’t have them. Please, forgive me for what I have done—

  “If you would have my forgiveness then take it. But do not ask for it.” I say, not just to him, starting back out of the gate. “Ask us for nothing.”

  ***

  I tear into a hunk of Brie and mold-flecked bread as I duck into my shoddy lean-to, braced high on the ridge above Ithek. The ratty tarp overhead keeps most of the water out—because it never stops fucking raining in Thespa—but that’s owed more to the oak I built against than to any skill of mine. If I listen closely, a down mattress calls out to my body from below, promising me the sleep of dead things. I resist its call and dig my bare toes into the earth.

  Izzy and I have spent as many torrid nights under these wretched, spdash things as frigid ones. By now, they feel more like home than Ithek ever could anyway. I sigh through a soggy pocket of sour bread as it calls my bluff.

  Splendid purchase, friends.

  The city begins to glow. Enchanted brimstone nterns light the streets like a procession of firebugs. Ithek is trying to be seen and, credit wherever due, I’d say it’s doing a fine job of it. For all that rune-work, it certainly has a resident alchemist, and attracting one of any skill is quite the feat for a pce this small. Perhaps one of Mr. Dugan’s boys has grown enough to take on his father’s lesser work. No, the eldest was a lout who craved maidens, and the other was as empty-headed as Izzy. There’s no mind for big words or thoughts that required more than fitting shapes into matching holes.

  Still, people can change.

  Then my mind slips into the brittle peace Luca carved into me. The sigil works. Maybe not as intended, and certainly not for the benefit of all, but it’s given me something I haven’t had in a long time. Stability. I’ve regained a sembnce of control.

  Not all mine. Ours.

  Before, I kept to the shack. Prayed through the evening. Avoided any thought of the past, or what might come next. Sat in meditation and scraped together enough strength to enter town for what I needed. Nothing more.

  Now, I can let myself think of them, back in the cavern. I can see their faces again, and it doesn’t break me. His face no longer chases the light from my chest, because I am the thing hunting. And we are already in the dark.

  Guilt still creeps in. I see bodies twisted in death, the lukewarm slurry of blood and bits between my fingers. I used to wake soaked in it, the sweat, the taste. Now it feels distant. Not so far I couldn’t cry if I tried. Just far enough that I don’t want to, as if it’s something I can bury in a hole and leave to the worms.

  The arena’s cheering wakes me from my thoughts. It sits near the center, a paltry thing retively speaking, but proud. Ringed in stone, fed with noise, the people gather around it like it’s holy.

  Who am I to judge those who would worship blood?

  I suck the salt from my fingertips and let their flesh graze under my teeth, yearning for iron. By this point, the little aspect-whore probably is, too. Begging for the guillotine to fall already and meet her putrid ancestors in the deep pce.

  I giggle a bded thing, sharp enough to split the head from her spine all by itself. It should be time now. My skin fres above the sigil and I shrug it away.

  On some cosmic cue, the appuse crescendos, erupting from the arena’s top in a pilr of frantic bloodlust. The wind carrying it to me like a courier. This is the way of pit sand and peasants. They follow the w. Suffer it. Break it. Then they bleed for it. Bleed enough, and they die for it. Sometimes, it’s simpler to skip to the end.

  Then the burning worsens. The sigil spreads heat, sharp and deep, as if someone is carving it fresh into my skin to match. I grit my teeth, doubled over—

  Lightning cracks the sky wide, smming into the arena’s northern wall.

  The crackling psma rips through the shrieks.

  Together, they herald my name.