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When I was young, my father used to say, I loved to dress all in white and sneak up on folk among the spruce. Then I would push them into the snow and run off laughing. I was slight and pretty then, you understand, and my body was lighter and harder to see. As light as the wind.
I imagined him as a thing of feathers, a drift of cloth, a daisy-chain of snowflakes on the breeze. It wasn’t hard. My father had always moved through the world like that, unlike anyone else I’d met.
In those days I wove among the branches of trees playing tricks on them, making them pull straight instead of bending when they shook in the wind, tying the terns’ wings and switching their dreams with those of the hares. I was free.
Here I would giggle, picturing the snug dreams of hares, warm in their deep-buried burrows. I imagined them warmer and snugger than I on my father’s lap, which was never as comfortable as my mother’s even in the room with the fire. He was a jangle of long and spindly limbs, fine separately but ill-fitting together. But he had such a way of saying that word, free, like a spellbound puff of breath in the cold. I marveled at it.
Then I met your mother, who wove for me a smock of purest white with the faintest stitchings of red. She left it draped on the branch of the spruce I loved best, with a sprig of rowan and a prayer. In those moments he cast his eyes somewhere far, like the hook at the end of a fishing line. Out of the room with the crackling fireplace, out of our lives and into the past. I accepted the gift gratefully, unknowingly. For who would turn down a gift, freely offered?
Sometimes a hint of irony entered his voice, like bitterness many times diluted, cinquefoil dissolved into tea. Of course, things such as us could not see red. Your colors are alien to us. When it came time for me to push her, she saw the thread in my clothes and caught me fast.
Here I would always hold my breath, as though waiting for something terrible to happen.
And then she pushed me down into the snow and kissed me with her red lips.
Now I can see, he would continue, and smile his small sly smile. I was young, then, if things such as us can be called young. I had not known there was such cunning among your kind. I found all of you amusing, yes, but she was the first that I loved.
For she, too, had the gift of trickery. And where she touched fell all the colors of the world.
↬
My mother died when I was young, which is not to say that she died when I was born. I remember her strong arms, her bright clothes, and the stitches that she would sew into my father’s clothes. For despite the strength of her arms she always made very fine stitches. She laughed a great deal, and unlike my father, whose laughter was like icicles snapping and falling from the corners of the eaves. Hers was low and rich and warm like leek soup on a cold winter’s day. We had many of those, bowls of soup and winter days, but not enough with her in them.
My father was always a strange man. He did not go hunting like the other girls’ fathers, the ones I saw venturing into our woods from the nearby village, nor spear for fish in frozen lakes. But he had a gift for coaxing plants out of the dry earth, leeks and turnips and berries. I used to ask him what he liked about sneaking up on people and pushing them into the snow. He would think for a little, still braiding my hair, tilting his head just so. “The shapes their spines would curve into when they lost their balance,” he said after a moment. “The shapes they left in the snow.”
I inherited my mother’s looks, her sturdiness, her thick dark hair with the ability to be braided into two long plaits. Only my father’s eyes, which were the color of ice, sat unrestfully in my plain face.
I imagine this was why I could only ever see in shades of red.
↣
I remember well the day that the strangers came and took me away, because it was the day that my father regained his freedom. Or rather, reclaimed it.
(Could I blame him? Hard to say, even now.)
They walked out of the woods on a sunlit day in spring, when the pale pink snows were just beginning to melt and clump around the salmon-colored shoots that emerged from beneath the patches of dead grass, pressed and slightly darker. They were like no one I had seen before—not like my father, but differently so, and in ways I was not used to.
They numbered three in all. The one at their front looked like a young woman whose ears were slightly pointed. She had the lightest skin and hair that I had ever seen—almost the color of the snow, only slightly rosier—and a face that was a little pinched but boyish and honest despite it. Strangest of all were the plates of metal she wore all over her body, like the shell of a beetle.
I was twelve and working in the garden, and therefore the first to see them coming.
“Hello,” said the first in our language, an admirable but heavily-accented attempt. “Are your parents around?”
“My father’s inside,” I said. After my mother’s death, he had sometimes taken to needlework himself, though he never had her talent for it. Leave the best of crafts to those who are best at it, he would say, and I had never thought to question why out of all crafts he named that best.
Then her two companions came into view. They moved slowly, I thought, perhaps so as to not startle me. But it was too late for that.
One was even more plated over with metal shells, and wore a helmet that covered their whole head that was pitted all over with holes, like a honeycomb. There was another slab of metal strapped to their back—it looked so ponderous that I couldn’t believe a living person could lift it. All of this was a dull wash of maroon, not eye-catching in the slightest. But I found it fascinating. They carried items I had seen in neither nature nor handicraft.
In his garb, the other made a slice of garnet so dark I almost thought I was seeing true black—but that was impossible. He might have been neat-looking if not for all the things on him that trailed: the hair that was gathered in one long queue where the first traveler cropped hers short, and the thin, curved blade that hung at his belt. One skeletal arm hung by him like a lightningstruck branch.
He had the same ears as Beetle Girl, for I had begun to think of her as that, and wore an expression that reminded me of the merchants who haggled at the village marketplace.
I was so distracted by their appearance that I did not notice when the door opened behind me and my father’s voice sounded. “What do we have here?”
Beetle Girl bowed, a little stiffly. “Representing the Entente Realms,” she started. Then she said something that didn’t sound like a name: “Elizabeth Caswell, at your service. But everyone calls me Cassy.”
“Veskind Noct,” said the man in chains, giving a brisk nod. And from the great pitted helmet rang a voice filled with echoes that pronounced, “Koschei.”
I turned to regard my father. He had crossed his arms contemplatively. His eyes fell on them like a sheet of ice, as though scanning the stars, taking in the whole sky at once.
Then he smiled and said, “Of course. Won’t you come in for something to drink?”
↠
They turned down the mead and skyr but consented to sit with us at the table by the fireplace. I had never heard these words before, Entente Realms and dungeons and recruit shortage. They seemed far removed from our corner of the world, with its snowfields and spruce that curved upward towards the sheets of light that danced in the darkened sky—as far as the stars, or the dancing lights themselves. Distantly, I knew that the village merchants had to source their goods from somewhere, but we lived deep enough in the woods that even our visits there were few and far between.
Their conversation was awkward, fractured, like a log for firewood. I could never understand more than a handful of segments.
“If we could come to an agreement,” said Beetle Girl, whom I still couldn’t believe was named Cassy. She seemed uncomfortable. All of her movements fizzled with a nervous energy; later I would remember that none of them had parted with their weapons.
Veskind Noct sounded businesslike, but his eyes were worse: again that almost-black garnet, like wells in a face that appeared, to me, as a sort of rose taupe. As though there was some immense horror in the room with us, unseen and unheard, something he dared not speak. “They are always looking for individuals with… unique abilities.”
“Surely,” said my father, “you do not mean me.”
“No,” said Noct. “Your daughter would do.”
Leaning back in his chair, with his funny little beard and ungainly limbs, it did not seem possible for my father to seem so frightening. But instantly the room felt colder. The smile had vanished. I held my breath.
“Careful, seiðmaðr.” His voice was ice in water. “You are in my domain.”
I almost admired Noct for not flinching, then. “And how long do you think you can keep up this illusion,” he said, “when we were able to enter it? I was a witchblade, lord of rime. A slave-mage of Agn-Vach. The Entente set me free.”
The chill did not lift. “Do you mean to suggest that my daughter is a thrall?”
“We mean,” said Cassy, “that she can’t live like this forever. One day she’ll get curious. Ask questions. Bloody hell, I’m surprised she hasn’t already.”
“And will she have such an ordinary life as one of yours, I wonder? Trained to kill? Slaying monsters like…” He cast a glance in my direction. “Well, never mind that.”
Koschei, hulking and silent, suddenly spoke. “She won’t have to kill.” His voice was a hollow boom. “We need a healer.”
“I’m sure you know plenty about that, little dead thing.” My father sounded amused. “And what of the…”
Gradually my eyelids were drooping, though I tried hard to stay awake. The conversation was just getting interesting. I wanted to ask what he meant by dead, and if they were really going to take me away—but he wouldn’t let them, right? But sleep closed over me like a soft fall of snow, like someone stitching my eyelids together, little by little.
When I awoke it was almost dawn.
The fire had died down to embers. Everything was a hazy grayish rose. (I am told this is really the color of dawn, even for those who can see in all colors.) Someone had laid a blanket over me. I thought I saw my father, knelt on the ground next to my chair and holding my hand. I do not know if he knew I was awake. There was an expression on his face that I had never seen, a little sad and tired, and so old. There were so many things I had never seen in the world.
He said: “Oh, my sweet.” Something seemed to crack down the center of his throat. “Remember that you, too, have the gift of trickery. When you were born I thought you might have the gift of all colors, but… perhaps someday.”
He smiled, and for a moment his face was as clever and animate as it always had been. “I love you. I won’t be far. Remember to rack the mead.” And he ruffled my hair once more.
Don’t go, I wanted to say. But my eyes closed again and sleep took me again.
Next—what next? I remember waking up, running to the window as if by instinct, pressing my fingers to the cold glass. Outside, in our front yard, the three travelers stood in a semicircle against the morning sun. Everything was a glaze of icy pink, and very bright. Through the gaps in their silhouettes I could see my father, in his long cloak, pulling off the hood.
I ran for the door, too late.
He had already begun to dissolve into feathers and crystals of ice, into a whisper on the wind, gliding skyward toward the cold stone sun.
⤔
At Creche I learned the meaning of all those words. Entente Realms: my gracious hosts. Allied kingdoms who took in children of unusual potential and gave them an education, schooling us in the methods by which we would defend the world. Dungeons: strange locations that could pop up anywhere, and either spawned or drew evil to them. Usually, but not always, underground. Recruit shortage: the reason I was here.
It wasn’t bad, you understand. That was the confusing part. I never stopped seeing only in red, but other than that, I adapted. I wore the proper uniforms, and though I spoke little to the other children I grew to like them. How could I not? My peers were marvelous and alien to me. Of various shapes and sizes, they had horns and fur and the frills of gills lining their necks, and more types of ears than you could count. (Some of them looked like me, of course, but it was just another trait, like having eight fingers or bioluminescent venom sacs.) Some could blacken paper to cinders with a thought, and some could take the shapes of turtledoves. Some were just very good at fighting.
My presence, too, had a purpose. I learned that the same gift that allowed my father to coax leeks and turnips from the ground could, with some refinement, be used on people—to breathe life back into the wounded, to chill the fever and set the bone. To trick the brain into thinking it was out of pain. As they had promised: to cure and revitalize, never to harm. The year I was taken in had been a bad year for healers.
I came to love the clockwork city where we were housed and trained, where crooked serpent-streets wound endlessly between towers that drove upwards like the fingers of a hundred pleading hands, and insects the size of skuas delivered messages imprinted on the filaments of their wings. It was a masterwork of dull maroons and wine and garnet—the colors of metal and stone in red, the susurrations of a thousand machinations and the dreams of more people than I had known were in the world.
Here, the world’s protection was wrought not through the spontaneous actions of do-gooders, but airtight calculations and methodical optimization. Underground, thauma-physicists seeded self-contained labyrinths with miniature versions of the dungeons we were to face. They were every bit as deadly as the real thing, but with the assurance that they would not spread, virulent, past the tempered glass that kept both us and the monsters locked inside—for thirty minutes, an hour, a day.
Little by little, my childhood faded, until it took on the quality of a dream that one sometimes confuses for memory. Like a world in a snowglobe, small and enclosed. Sculpted. Unreal.
Sometimes the trio who had acquired me came to visit. Rarely all at once—party optimization meant that teams could change at a moment’s notice, whether for casualties or situational need. Nevertheless, on our monthly Guardians’ Days, where others had parents or grandparents or older siblings turning up in the Antechamber of Inverted Dawn, it would be one of them: gallant Cassy in her gleaming plate or stolid Koschei or dour, slanting Veskind. Perhaps they felt some sense of responsibility for me. I could not tell. Unlike my father, I had never developed the trick of divining the dust-devils of intentions that lurked behind others’ eyes.
Perhaps it was the red. Now, they’ll say this: that it made everything raw and violent, both too-real and not real at once. That it was what maddened me.
But for me, it was simply the tenor of my world. It was why I could stare directly at the sun, and why the stuffed bear that Cassy brought me for my first Guardians’ Day—though I was far too old for it by then—appeared pale pink instead of white. I think she thought it would remind me of home, though we had lived too far from the pack ice for them to be anything more than vague creatures out of my father’s stories.
“How’s it going, kiddo?” she would always ask.
And I would say, “Okay.” Or “I think I’m getting better.” Or, occasionally, “We lost someone in training the other day.” Then she would shuck off the heavy hauberk and pauldrons and stick them in a big bag, right in the middle of the Antechamber, and give me a hug.
The Knight of Lilies, they called her, after the Caswell lilies. That was why she had such a strange name—the human Caswells had adopted her as their scion. Otherwise she would be one of the sideways children, the people with pointed ears who lived in the hills, who had names like Merendil or Ilzernon or Veskind. Without the armor she was simply a small, compact person with a clear, open gaze and a great number of freckles. Her laughter rang like a bell.
Secretly I always aspired to be more like Cassy. But it was not to be. Not only did I hold a sword like a limp waterfowl, it was not my assigned role to be martial. I was content to have for a guardian the demon of the Shadewater Caverns, who had once felled a horde of geists as the last living member of her party—though she did not seem to like talking about the experience, and I did not like seeing that distant look come into her eyes.
Veskind Noct, for that matter, was not as terrifying as he seemed. He and Koschei—who really was dead, as I’d learned, a sort of reanimated corpse—had come from a domain called Agn-Vach. A domain was a dungeon that had grown large and sufficiently overrun with evil, typically under the control of an overlord.
The late overlord of Agn-Vach had a fondness for necromancy and blood magic and grand plans for taking over the world. She had come close to doing it—she’d conquered the kingdom where Koschei had been the youngest of seven princes, and of her lieutenants Veskind had been the one to kill him. But when she tried to raise them into her service, all six of the older brothers became shambling zombies. Only Koschei reacted well to the necromancy.
Why? No one knew. Something about the number seven, perhaps. The thauma-physicists theorized that it had special properties.
The Entente had won that war, but it was a close call. When the swarm tactics proved ineffective, the overlord had sent out Koschei to duel their Knight of Lilies. Some said that the corpse prince had volunteered to spare Veskind, his murderer-turned-tutor, the overlord’s least-favored lieutenant. Others said that he had volunteered in order to die his second death. Whatever the case, it proved why you didn’t make a battlemage tutor a shield-bearing knight. Cassy thrashed Koschei soundly—but didn’t grant him the death he so wanted.
It took Catalyzer Kanya, Haytham the Ember, and Ife of the Six Ribbons to slay the overlord herself. Nobody said that the Entente fought fair.
Afterwards… What else was there to say? Koschei followed Cassy back to the Entente hoping for a rematch, and Veskind followed him. In the end, they both agreed to undergo rehabilitation. Nobody said that the Entente wasn’t resourceful, either.
Perhaps they were a pathetic bunch, my guardians. But I grew fond of them. Hard to imagine as a servant of unspeakable evil the wry, tired person who would show up to Guardians’ Day with a bag of sweets and do paperwork while I told him about my day—even if he still had eyes like a nightmare and wore a blood-mage’s chains. I was always the worst at blood magic, he would remark ruefully, but the best at bureaucracy.
I remember the first time Koschei showed me his face. He was there with Veskind, and I got curious. I was fourteen then and well-versed in the art of professing my commitment to the Entente; I even believed it.
“I should know what I’m going up against,” I said gravely, crossing my arms. “Right?”
Veskind pulled a face like he’d just discovered he had ten more post-dungeon reports to fill out. “My prince, is this wise?”
We were in a deserted hallway. The Antechamber, where everyone wanted to see the girl who had not one but three major players in the Agn-Vach War for guardians, was not an ideal place for Serious Conversation. (Though I confess, part of me enjoyed the borrowed attention.)
Koschei, dear Koschei, was silent for a moment. I had never met a dead man who was so sweetly sad. If Cassy was like a knight out of a storybook—they kept those for the little kids; I had been placed into reading lessons with them, which was humiliating—then Koschei was like one of those princesses cursed into deathlike sleep. One had the sense that he had never fully awoken, that he spent his undeath sleepwalking. Thrice-Cursed Koschei, they called him—once for dying, twice for undeath, and thrice for his defeat by the Knight of Lilies.
“Maybe not,” he mumbled. “But she’ll have to see death, won’t she?”
I refrained from pointing out that I already had. Casualties during training were rare, but they did happen. Just last month a boy had fallen from a high ropes-course and broken his neck. Later, they retrieved the body, a small pile of frail bone and fractured vertebrae.
Veskind sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “All right.” He turned to me. “Just—be prepared. Death was not kind to him.” Then he shook his head. “I was not kind.”
Slowly, Koschei moved his gauntleted hands toward his helmet. A moment of trepidation. What if I regretted it? Maybe he would truly look so terrifying, so revolting, that I would never want to see or think of him again.
But—no. He was my guardian. It was out of the question.
The helmet rose. A fall of ragged hair shook loose: to me, a dull grayish pink. I thought, suddenly, of the last time I had seen my father.
I could see the person he used to be: the broken nose and blunt wedge of jaw. Deep-set eyes in the stark unhandsome face. It was also, undeniably, the face of someone dead. Even painted in the false ruddiness of my red reality, an open slash in one cheek went straight through the muscle, exposing teeth. Smaller punctures dotted both cheeks. Flesh clung tightly to bone, as though afraid that it would fall apart into scraps; if the stitches binding the worst of the scars were any indication, perhaps it really would.
The eyes were a milky color all over, with neither pupils nor irises.
“Oh, Koschei.” I reached my hands toward his strange dead face, and for some reason he obliged me, leaning down. I examined it intently, not sure what I was looking for. “I wish I could reverse this.”
“Greater healers have tried,” said Veskind gently. “And mages, too.”
Koschei only closed his eyes, and covered my hands with his cold hands.
“I know,” he said. Air dragged through the extra openings. “It’s enough.”
⭃
Eventually I graduated, and the Entente coordinators placed me into parties of my own.
That was when the trouble started.
Oh, it wasn’t all death and destruction. Too obvious for the laws of narrativity. No, it happened like this: we would be venturing through the Murmuring Wood or the Catacombs of Castle Cremini, and someone would hear a voice. Did you just speak? they would ask me. And I would say no, of course not, because I really would have no idea what they were talking about. I’ll go investigate, they would say, even though we’d all had it drilled into us that splitting the party was a terrible idea. And then we would either find them stuck in quicksand, or dangling from cobwebs, or just a body. Or not even a body.
Others requested not to be grouped with me. I fell in the rankings, beneath the likes of Flint-Mender Ferraya and Rureth “Teeth” Ruruthel, who had always been at the bottom of the class. Worst of all was when the algorithm placed me in Haytham the Ember’s party.
The Jadefire Mage always had the habit of showing up at inopportune moments. Once, years ago, Haytham had paid an awkward, unexpected visit to my guardians’ apartment, where they had all tried very hard to talk about some mysterious thing without ever putting it into words. A veteran of Agn-Vach, Haytham had never truly accepted the absorption of Koschei and Veskind into the Entente. Back then I had found him frightening. One of the partway children, he stood no taller than three-and-a-half feet and was bound all over with tattered bandages—save on his face. In the darkened eye of his half-mask burned a single pinprick flame. Catching a glimpse of him, I would think of the pictures of liches in our Monsters 101 textbooks, something malign and dread and dead.
This particular quest saw us in the Bonedust Gulch. The southwestern deserts were a no-man’s land between the Entente and a patchwork of remote, unincorporated domains and settlements. All through the gulch peeled the wind, flung between its terraced walls and strangely-shaped formations sculpted from the rock by an ancient river. The river had run dry. Per its name, the place was dismal with dust and skeletons.
The latter were unfortunately prone to reanimation.
So it came to be that the Entente had gotten word of some necromancer using rumors of gold to lure treasure-hunters to Bonedust Gulch, where they would soon join his ever-growing army. No such riches had ever been conclusively proven to exist, though our debriefing included survivors’ accounts of a wondrous cavern where gold sprouted in perfect cubes from the walls, small as dice and large as packing crates. The sight had transfixed them, before the dead came crawling out.
“Idiots,” said Haytham the Ember waspishly, as we climbed down the ravine walls. “Fooled by a cave full of pyrite.” He clicked his tongue. “Though why it’s occurring so abundantly, I have no idea. More to investigate.”
He was our natural leader. One did not have a living legend in your group without deferring. But a party also could not consist of a single questant: besides him, we had the bow of Stony Ema, the daggers of Slip-Step Jim, the sword and shield of Teshka Redscales—whose scales were indeed, in my vision, a pure ruby red—and my healing hands.
Having swept away a few skeletons that wandered listlessly through the gulch, we had found our way to the storied caves that housed both gold and undead—or false-gold, as Haytham suspected. I never had much interest in geology or mineralogy, or whatever it was.
At our back blinked the harsh sun, the palest peach in its dust-rose sky. Grateful for a reprieve from the heat, Jim and Teshka had already clambered in. I peered through the entrance. It was utterly dark: the kind of light-sucking, pregnant dark that bespoke a true dungeon. For all his show of veteran’s exasperation, I couldn’t help but feel that Haytham kept one eye on me. Whether it was the living one or the ember, only the many-handed gods could say.
“Well?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said quickly, and ventured in.
We fought through those caves for several hours. The tales of undead had been true—instead of skeletons, the ones here were in various prior states of decomposition. As such, we emerged gory and gunk-splattered into the final cavern, with its shining cubes protruding from the walls and floor and ceiling, resplendent in our torchlight.
The necromancer, a raving and wild-bearded old hermit with more ambition than skill, fell easily. Perhaps too easily. Just as Haytham was stepping off to inspect the pyrite formations, and the rest of us were looking for loot (an outdated term; all recovered monies and artifacts were to be turned in to the Entente’s High Commission), something very strange happened.
One by one, the cubes of pyrite started to drop from the walls.
Only the small ones, first. As they fell, I thought they looked different, too—no longer cubes, but nuggets, and the metallic red was slightly richer. They glanced off Ema’s stone skin while the rest of us covered our heads. Haytham raised a flat disk of flame so hot it melted the metal on contact. His expression troubled me: it was the first time on this quest I had seen him look anything resembling concerned. I followed his gaze. The larger chunks were starting to fall, bringing pieces of stone with them. From far off I heard rumblings, echoes of rockfall. Was this happening throughout the cave system?
Haytham must have thought the same, because he snapped: “Out, now.”
Except Jim and Teshka did not obey. They had crouched down and were scooping up handfuls of the fallen stuff. Their eyes shone giddily, not unlike those of the necromancer we had just killed. “This is real gold!” chirped Teshka, ordinarily so regal.
Jim took a nugget between thumb and forefinger and bit it. “Yep,” he drawled, smiling contentedly. “The genuine article.”
The shaking had grown more palpable. Chunks the size of grapefruits were starting to fall. Haytham had expanded his protective disk as much as possible without burning us—the heat made me sweat, and drops of molten maybe-gold were beginning to pelt our clothes. Now he crossed the cavern in fewer strides than I would have thought possible, and looked at each of them quickly. He slapped Jim across the face.
Jim reeled, for just a moment, looking dazed—but then his head swung back up, still smiling, and his hands reached for the gold. From my place by the entrance I heard Haytham muttering to himself, something like no, no, no and impossible… killed him, so how can this be…
Without warning, he shouted, “You two! Get over here and help me drag them out.”
Ema and I rushed over. The shock had delayed us, I thought, we could have moved faster. But in the time that it took for us to cross the cavern, Jim and Teshka had grabbed the same nugget. “Mine,” hissed Teshka, in a voice utterly unlike herself.
Haytham was fast, but constrained by the deadliness of his magic. Before any of us could react—Jim had slipped one of his daggers into hand and stabbed Teshka in the chest.
But in that moment Teshka, too, lunged forward and sank her fangs into his neck.
Ema arrived in time to catch her as she fell backward, and I, Jim. Now the very ground shook, and we faced scalding by the molten gold that flew in every direction. Even the fastest, shoddiest resurrection spell would take far longer than the time that we had. I looked at Haytham, and was reminded of why he had scared me as a girl. Fury was inadequate to describe the emotion on his exposed half of face.
But he said simply, “Go. Leave the bodies. I’ll follow.”
We did.
We fled through those caves as they crumbled around us, torches sputtering, with occasional flashes of light that I could only imagine were green as Haytham deflected debris that fell too close. As we ran I thought I could hear laughter, oddly familiar, like that of someone I had once met in a dream—until the sun hit our faces and we stumbled, gasping, into the heat.
⥯
Immediately after our post-dungeon inspection, Haytham took hold of my wrist and marched me off. Ema gave us a look of concern, but she was being treated for head trauma; golems were not completely invulnerable, and even stone could crumble when struck by stone. The medics, too, raised eyebrows. But who would question Haytham the Ember?
The Citadel of Dragonflies was sprawling and labyrinthine: a many-layered, obnoxiously vertical building with uncountable spires, staircases, and balconies. At this point I was familiar with maybe a tenth of our headquarters; there were places junior questants simply did not go. As we passed people stared or tried deliberately not to stare, or bent their heads together, muttering.
Finally I asked outright, “Where are you taking me?”
Haytham remained silent, as he had since the dungeon. I would never find out where he meant to take me, though—as we turned a corner, there was Veskind, levitating a globe of dark liquid and taking notes. It was a common area, a sort of stopping-point between stairways, with a number of small hard seats and desks near the curved walls. A few others sat or stood around, poring over papers or speaking quietly.
Veskind looked up. The blood-globule fell and splattered on the ground.
“Haytham,” he said, but his eyes were on me. Veskind had always been very good at not showing fear. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Two lives,” hissed the Jadefire Mage, in dead and frigid rasp. His grip tightened enough to hurt. Everyone was looking now. “Two lives. I have not lost that many in twenty years. I don’t care what special permissions you got from the Commission—if this is the risk you took, I will burn her to ash while you look on.”
He glanced at me, and his one uncovered eye made my blood run cold.
“Let her go,” said Veskind calmly, or with the appearance of calm. “She’s been tested in every way that matters. Her powers are limited to healing.”
“Then read our report and explain what fucking happened. Pyrite to gold. One tore out the other’s throat—and from a bog-standard necromancer?”
“A curse,” Veskind suggested, “on the vicinity.”
“No,” said Haytham instantly. “I’ve seen localized curses. Try harder.”
“Let her go and we can talk.”
“Not until you explain.”
“Let her go,” said Veskind, once more, “or I’ll finish what I started all those years ago and pull the entrails from your tattered corpse.”
“So that’s what it takes.” I looked down at Haytham; on the uncovered half of his face burned a ragged smile, bright with bitter triumph. “Remember, Noct. At the slightest sign…”
Suddenly, he released me, and swept back down the stairs in a swirl of cloak.
⤄
What did it all mean? Never in any class had we learned about people who could curse others without even meaning to, just by being near them. Veskind was right—my aptitudes had all come out perfectly standard. And yet in my mind I still saw Jim and Teshka bleeding out in that golden crucible, their eyes glazed over, fingers curled around pieces of metal.
In the end, I went to Koschei. Surely, I thought, surely he had some experience with curses. Or at least the perception of being cursed. We had no more Guardians’ Days, of course, but we were all colleagues or comrades now and moved in the same circles.
“Is there something wrong with me?” I asked flatly. He was training with a dummy, the kind that would hit you back. As I watched, he blocked one last jab from its mechanized sword and stepped back from its range.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean that… bad things keep happening to people in my parties.” I made a helpless, shrugging gesture. “Sometimes small things. Sometimes not-so-small.”
His voice echoed, as bleakly as ever, from the helmet. “That is how things always are.”
“But is it because of me?” I pressed. “Something… strange about me?”
Koschei only shook his head.
I left disappointed. Cassy and Veskind were similarly unhelpful. The former only assured me that there was a learning curve, that it wasn’t my fault. The latter was evasive; had been since the confrontation with Haytham. Something was being kept from me. Whispers followed me through the halls. Life began to feel like that last night in my father’s home, when I drowsed during the deciding of my own fate—but now I was awake, and it was no use.
Those nights, I dreamt of snow. Dreams with the texture of memory. In the dreams I lived in a house inside a snowglobe, only the snow fell outside the glass and within the grass and wood and leaves were as red as they had ever been. A bird flew by with the face of my father, reflected again and again, and when I called out I realized that I had forgotten his name, that my voice was muffled by the glass.
⬲
This, too, began as a quest like any other. They sent us to some northern village suffering from an infestation of were-lemmings—the kind of pitiful task to which I had been reduced, after the incident at Bonedust Gulch.
Having informed the village elders of our resounding success, we had nothing left to do: since the Entente centralized our wages, bounties and rewards were things of the past. Departing, I lingered a moment, peering out over the dull plum waves that crashed against the cliffs that stretched their way past the village. Past me and upward whipped the salt wind, shrieking.
Neither my woodland childhood nor the Entente’s Creche had ever sent me to the ocean. When I licked my lips, they tasted like the wind, chill and briny. A vague cold ache flooded my chest. Suddenly, I felt a vastness older than that of cities and spires, like stars glimpsed through branches of spruce that circumscribed the night sky.
In a flutter of pale wings, seabirds broke loose from the rocks.
“Wait.”
I turned. There on the narrow cliffside path was an older woman. Something in her face looked familiar. Like me, I realized. The same harsh nose and thick brows. The same shade of skin as my mother and some of the people who lived around here, which looked only slightly darker than Veskind’s rose taupe. (My mother and father. When had I last thought of them?)
“...just like her,” the woman breathed. As her eyes scanned my face, there was something fearful to them. “You look just like her. My younger sister.”
I shot a glance down the path. Ema was waving to me, concern on her chiseled features. I made a gesture that was meant to convey I’ll be right over, don’t wait.
The wind cried louder. “What happened to her?” I asked, shouting to be heard.
The woman paused, blinking, as though in disbelief. An odd expression came over her face, soft and confused. “Ran away with some… spirit. They called him the lord of rime-on-pines. But then we were…
“Damned memory.” Her lip trembled. “Won’t even leave me my sister.”
I frowned. “You were what?”
“Under his thrall,” she said suddenly, wrenchingly, and her eyes were very dark. I froze. “In his domain. For fourteen years he had us there. If not for him, we would have joined the Entente sooner. Should have joined before.”
In my ears swelled a roaring that was not the waves nor the wind but like them, something half-formed and terrible, dredged from a world at the beginning of time. I stared at the movements of her mouth. They were red for everyone, the inside of mouths, or mostly everyone. Not only me.
“But he beguiled us,” she continued, “played with our memories. Kept us unaware of the outside world.” Don’t forget to rack the mead. “Haven’t you heard?”
Yes, yes, of course it had been in our debriefing. Under control of overlord until ten years prior. But I had never thought—I had never—I—
I turned, fled without a word.
⬰
I was waiting for them when they came.
They’d come when I’d called. And why wouldn’t they, my guardians-turned-comrades? I had reserved this space just for us. That was still my right as an Entente conscript: one of the highest places in the Citadel of Dragonflies, its own little belltower with steeple and belfry. Waiting, I traced my fingers over the bronze bell where Catalyzer Lumos, first architect of the Entente, had inscribed in nine thousand and fifty-four glyphs a lament of bitter admiration for the overlord who had sunk his floating city to the bottom of the sea rather than see them raze it. Beyond the railing, in the distance, the setting sun washed everything in real red. (Or so I am told. I only ever had the word of others.)
After Agn-Vach, Haytham the Ember and his former classmate, our very own Catalyzer Arjun, had scattered their master Kanya’s ashes from the top of this same tower. It was said that they glittered green when the light hit them. That siege had cost the Entente, too.
The bells were just tolling six when they arrived. I counted out the rings. (One.) My mother brings her cleaver down on the neck of a goose. I try not to flinch at the coppery smell, for I know that I can see the color there for what it is. (Two.) My father walks ahead, leaving footprints in the snow for me to follow. Limits and boundaries, my sweet. He smiles, flakes in his eyelashes. It pays to keep track of them. (Three.) The proctor asks me to mend a broken arm and I reach inside, probing for the same principle of life that grows beans and squash. It is all the same, all red-and-breathing things. (Four.) When I pass the qualifying examination, Cassy picks me up and swings me like I am still a little girl, not a battle-mender ready to die for the Entente. (Five.) Jim dead. Teshka dead. Haytham the Ember’s livid face, trembling with rage from within his self-incinerating coffin of a body.
On the sixth ring, they appeared. I’d expected Cassy, but Koschei’s head was the first to crest the staircase—unhelmeted. The other two followed close behind.
I regarded them silently. Koschei, a swatch of grayish rose, with his corpse’s face of the unlovely seventh prince. Cassy in daylily-pink, boyish and guileless and thrumming with energy, never able to keep still. Veskind, who looked at me with a gaze as wine-dark and direct as ever.
“Why didn’t you tell me.”
Did you know was a useless question, after all.
“It’s not like that,” started Cassy, pleadingly, face a welter of pain. She was always miserable at hiding anything that mattered. “We didn’t want—”
“You would have hated yourself,” Veskind cut in. Cassy shot him a warning look. “A life spent loathing yourself. How could we ask that of you?”
“But you didn’t,” I said. You didn’t ask me anything. The dead boy’s body, beneath the swaying ropes. My father dissolved into the air. “Was he part of the bargain? Did you arrange it with the Commission, a domain for a daughter?”
Veskind’s brow drew tight. “He agreed to it, child. Your father was older and stranger than you know. We still don’t fully understand what he was. What class of overlord…”
“Don’t.” My fingers opened and closed, uselessly. “I am not your child. Don’t speak to me about what I know.” My voice broke. “He did it for me.”
“And he was a monster,” said Koschei, quietly. Crystals of ice sprang open on my insides, razored petals, spring-trap mouths. And I am a monster. And he is a monster. As I am. And I am. A monster. We are. I.
None of them had drawn their weapons. He reached for me with one gauntleted hand. From his mouth came the awful, fated words: “But you don’t have to be.”
Before it happened, I saw the quiet acceptance on his face, and that was what broke me.
I only ever fought my guardians once, and by then it was no longer fair. They didn’t stand a chance. It had all just been sitting there, sitting and waiting. I wondered at how I never noticed: my curse, the power that had haunted me, the whole cyclic course of my past and future. I reached for it—the chill in the breeze and the spools of time, the breathing earth and the dreaming sky—and pulled.
Everything came loose. Time like ice caught them one by one. Koschei, still raising his shield. Cassy, eyes wide with disbelief, swinging her sword like a reluctant antidote. Veskind, he was the fastest—his spell had almost reached me, a bolt of blazing crimson. Too slow, seiðmaðr, I thought to myself. You are in my domain. And I laughed, and laughed, and—
(Do you know? In the moment before everything vanished, I finally saw them. All colors. I saw that Cassy’s hair was really gold, and that Veskind’s tunic was really black, and that the Citadel of Dragonflies was a lovely copper-green over a city of smoky orange. Oh, I thought, and at long last understood what my father had wanted for me, too late.)
↯
When I opened my eyes the walls were ice, and the floor was ice, and my breath hung ghostly in the air. My cheek pressed cold to the ground. After a while, my eyes slid upwards.
The roof was gone. The bell was missing. The sky opened out, silver as a frozen pool.
Silver. Something seemed wrong about that.
I pulled myself to my feet. Over the railing swept the wind—and that was mine now, too, every chill wind that radiated from this place, every sound the silence claimed, every pitiless person-shaped hole. Great slabs of ice struck skyward, shearing off shingles and steeples, piercing through the towers that had been there before, the city that I had loved. My domain.
These days I like to walk my endless halls and look at the bodies. I like to run my fingers over the frozen water that separates me from my former colleagues and caretakers, faces still preserved in their final expressions. Encased in ice, you see, they are still alive. I’ve made sure of it. I am a number of things, but no necromancer. Nor do I ever wish to be. One day when my creeping ice has spread across the world and stoppered every dungeon, freezing the breath from all their spawn, overtaking all rival domains—perhaps I will let them thaw. Perhaps I will breathe life back into their blue lips and let them walk again.
Or perhaps I will keep them here forever, exactly like this, in the last moment when I was still a thing they recognized.
Now that you have heard my story, little raven, bring it far and wide. Bring it to all the Entente kingdoms and the ones they have yet to claim. Bring it to every petty overlord and every proud one, grown content and secure in the dark corners of the world. Tell them that I come with the north wind at my back, and I will not rest until this world suffers the old stories.
What is that? You want to know my name?
Signy. That was the one he gave me. Signy… Svansdottir. Yes, I like the sound of that.
For I see only gray, now. Gray and black and white. I am my father’s daughter, and his work will end with me.
⦽