Salli lived across from mine – not in the blocks still undergoing reconstruction, but farther towards the bottom end of Mud Lane, where the buildings had survived the Incursion unscathed.

“Thanks to you,” she muttered when I mentioned this fact, crossing the lane.

“Keep your voice down…”

I looked around furtively but few of the remaining camp-dwelling refugees were outside their tents at this hour, and none within earshot, something Zel was quick to point out.

Salli’s infectious, throaty laughter came pouring out. “A secret kept in plain sight, my dear Kastyr. No one would believe me, anyway, even if they heard me. You’d better, you know, fix your face or whatever, though. People are gonna notice if I have some strange man round, especially if he’s stolen Kas’s clothes, and his voice to boot!”

“Is that what it was?” I asked, feeling very much on-edge. “The voice, the clothes…”

How stupid have I been? I was bound to get figured-out eventually…

“Pretty sure I said that exact thing, oh, eighteen or nineteen times…”

Shut it, Zel, and check this isn’t Dream. I’m not putting up with any more puppies.

“I’m ninety-eight percent sure.”

Just check again, will you? Last time you were ninety-five percent sure, and the way Madame Sailor looked at me when I showed her what the fire did to the other robe…

“The voice, the clothes… everything,” Salli was replying. “But don’t sweat it. I heard you order a mug of beer a good few hundred times. I’m pretty sure I’m better than most at putting a face to a voice. Especially after seeing you in the Incursion.”

For all her reassurances, I remained unreassured. She was hardly the only one who knew me intimately. Sure, she was probably right that her job as a barmaid helped her out in identifying me with such ease. But just because she was better than average didn’t mean the average wouldn’t cotton-on eventually.

Would I have to avoid Mud Lane entirely? I’d taken my idea about getting a place I could go to in my champion guise and combined it with my investment plans, taking advantage of the Incursion to purchase several plots on Mud Lane, directly opposite my current apartment. Had I made a mistake, thinking I could continue to live here, close enough to the twins to be at their sides if they needed me, but far enough to have plausible deniability of my identity? I could hardly walk on by when someone was in need, but if getting involved could expose the twins, and Xantaire’s family, to the kind of consequences champions alone were made to face… It didn’t bear thinking about. But what was the alternative? If I didn’t live here, Salli could well have died tonight.

It was just the Incursion, I told myself. She got to see and hear me close up, in costume, more than most of the others.

But it sounded like a weak excuse, even to me.

I let my illusion blink away once we were in the stairwell, out of the sight of any prying eyes that Zel failed to account for.

I followed her up the stairs to her fifth-floor apartment, while she shook out her keys. Sticktowners were sometimes too poor to afford proper wedding rings, settling for soft, cheap metals in many cases, but the one area we didn’t scrimp on the iron was locks – locks and the keys that fastened them.

She opened the door into near-darkness, and the snuffling of her dog was the only sound. I scratched the old boy’s neck and did my best to evade the expertly-wielded wet nose, while Salli lit a proper candle off the slow-burning wick on the stand. She lived with her three brothers, at least one of whom was a Bertie Boy, and I wasn’t that surprised to find they were out. She shut the door behind me, locked it, then busied herself making her home look half-presentable, wittering at me all the while. Apparently her flatmates had left it a mess – there was an empty wineskin on the table, various cooking tools and implements lying around with caked-on food, unwashed clothes hanging off the chairs…

I could discern the scent of old blood on some of the clothing, even through the general aroma of drop that clung to our footwear.

“I – can’t – believe! – Jordak. It’s gotta be a million times I’ve told him… Sorry… So, you’re the famous Feychilde, are you? I can’t believe it! I mean, now I’ve seen it with my own eyes, of course I believe it, but still… Liberator of Zadhal… What was Zadhal even like? It’s just – how did this all happen to you? And you – you’re rich! Well, rich enough for all them tents down there – oh! Oh, that was you, Kas?”

She stopped pacing, stared at me.

“Which question would you have me answer first?” I asked, smiling.

She laughed and blinked a few times, letting herself fall heavily into the one space on the couch she’d actually managed to clear. She leaned forwards and I had to fix my gaze on her face lest I get an eyeful of her assets. She did not dress demurely and, no older than twenty, she had a noticeably womanly shape. This was most definitely not the time to be noticing, no matter what my eyes thought.

We’d all fancied her, one time or another, whether we’d admitted it or not. Me and Tanny, my old friend who’d recently donned the dubious mantle of Bagger Boy, had been the kids too scared to wolf-whistle as she walked to work under our bridge, braided blonde pigtails swishing. Too scared to whistle, and a bit too young, yes, but not too scared to sit there, legs hanging over the edge twenty feet above Mud Lane, trying our hardest to get a glimpse down her bodice as she passed beneath us. She was extremely pretty, and big everywhere – top, middle and bottom – and had a personality to match. It was her that’d let us in the Griffin when we were too young, her that’d served us once we had pubescent whiskers sticking out all over our lips and chins.

I’d been set for a ruffian’s life, until I took a blade in my face. I performed unscrupulous deeds for handfuls of copper, without the knowledge of my parents. I rebelled, and I enjoyed my rebellion. Then everything got too real – the scar on my cheek frightened me with its permanence. “It’ll be there forever!” Mum had said. “And good! So it should be!” Dad had roared.

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I realised now, looking back, they’d just been frightened, and they wanted me to be frightened as well. Too frightened to go back to it, the mockery of a life I was living – but their plan backfired. It worked too well.

I wasn’t just frightened – I was terrified.

And then they died, and everything had changed. I met Xantaire, who saved our collective asses, helping me bring in enough money to keep food on the table, keep a roof over our heads without moving in those circles, never again going to those rancid houses in the midnight hour to take orders from a gang-banging thug just a few years my senior…

Being here with Salli in her house, it brought it all back, the glorious, sordid, misspent years. I only saw her the odd time these days, when I accompanied Morsus for a quick drink, more to get out of the house for half an hour than anything else.

Morsus… I still wasn’t getting used to it. You’d think I’d have the hang of this by now.

I shook my head, drew a deep breath.

“It’s not Dream – one hundred percent.”

Thanks, Zel.

“So, I thought it was customary to offer your guest the only seat in the house.” I fixed my expression and beamed at Salli, eyes locked on hers. “Especially if they just sort-of saved your life, and can conjure the foulest creatures of the abyssal realms…”

She went to jump up, blurting a quick, “Sorry!”

I held out a hand to stop her, chuckling. “I’m joking, it’s fine. I’m just…” As she plonked back down again I regarded her anew. “You know you’re going to need to keep this a secret, right, Salli? Even if you think no one would believe you. You know that isn’t quite true, right?”

“Right.” She was smiling again now. “Right. I just need a drink – here…” She reached her arms around the mess covering the rest of the couch, hurled it towards a corner, then brushed the rest onto the floor. “You sit down, I’ll get the bottle.”

I figured it was probably better to accept the cup of pinkish-brown spirits she offered me, rather than summon Flood Boy for a tastier beverage and risk breaking the poor woman’s mind entirely. I sniffed the stuff – musty, nutty – before lifting it to my lips.

It tasted surprisingly nice – warm, caramellic – but the experience itself was akin to how I imagined it’d feel to drink the green fire-sauce that came with Onsolorian tempura.

Actually drink it.

“Paa-aah!”

“It’s nice, isn’t it,” she said with deep satisfaction in her voice.

“Nice,” I managed to exhale.

“So, can you really conjure the foulest of the foul?” she asked, a bit of unveiled wonder in her tone.

“I – I suppose.” I thought of the atiimogrix.

“You know you have to show me.”

“Most of the awesome ones wouldn’t even fit in here.” I looked around. “You saw them in the Incursion anyway – you sure you wouldn’t rather see a unicorn or something?”

She wrinkled her nose.

“Okay, okay – check this out.”

I brought forth Sir Stinger and had him perform a few tricks. I managed to get a yelp of surprise from my host when I had him grow suddenly, but I never took him any bigger than the dog, who was hiding behind the couch even while the fey scorpion was mouse-sized.

“As for Zadhal – it wasn’t really even me. Nentheleme did most of the work…”

“The… like, actual goddess?” Salli sounded astonished.

I thought back to my fever-dream following the surge of etheric energy, when my flesh was being dragged in the clutches of the lich-lords and my soul was cradled in the arms of the Horned One.

She was pretty awesome.

“I suppose… It was scary there, though. Zadhal, I mean. We almost died, so many times. It wasn’t some glorious thing like you’d imagine.”

But I thought of the snow coming down in the blue light of the Winter Door after night fell, and fell silent.

“I saw you, at the memorial for Leafcloak and Lightblind,” she said out of nowhere.

I jerked my eyes to hers in surprise.

“What? I was looking for you – I basically know you – well, I suppose I do know you, if you get what I mean? But it was hard to find you behind Timesnatcher – you should’ve been at the front, ‘Liberator’…”

What could I say? Timesnatcher had been at the front because the whole event we staged on the Noxway, attended by tens of thousands, had been a sham, a lure for Duskdown. The omission of Rosedawn from the proceedings had been deliberately calculated so as to enrage the darkmage, force his hand…

An amateur move, in hindsight. Duskdown couldn’t have foreseen the memorial, entrenched as it was in Timesnatcher’s plans, but he was farther from the edge than we’d believed. He did precisely nothing. And he was still leaving ‘ROSEDAWN’ as his calling-card.

“I didn’t realise how much you cared about champions and stuff.” I went to swig my drink, thought better of it and sipped at instead. (Which was hardly less uncomfortable, I soon realised.)

“Oh, I didn’t – not till you came along.” She giggled, and knocked back the rest of her drink before topping us both up, paying no heed to my grimace. “Bursting in the door, killing all those demons – it was really something. You’re really something.”

What thirteen-year-old me would’ve given to have had Salli talking to him like that…

I gave a short chuckle. “That’s what Stormsword thinks, too.”

“Stormsword?”

“You haven’t heard of her yet?” Em hadn’t been able to attend the memorial as it conflicted with her Maginox schedule, but the criers had still been mentioning her several times a week. “She’s an arch-wizard, and from a well-off family as well… I hope.” I gave my best dreamy smile. “And she’s mine.”

“Oh, yeah – she’s the one that found all them katra-munchers?” Salli didn’t look flustered or disappointed in the slightest – she grinned and punched me in the arm. “Good for you!” She raised her cup in salute before tipping its contents down her throat again.

It is good for me, I thought. Stuff it.

I tipped back my cup too, let the burning liquid fill my senses as I necked it, then shook my head and winced.

Salli was massively underselling what Em had done, the way I understood it – she’d been confronted with over a dozen idiots exhibiting different powers, cornered in the sewers, and she came through the fight without a scratch. But it wasn’t Salli’s fault if the town-criers and news-writers were trying to quell the panic rather than incite it. Publicising a true calculation of the inkatra epidemic and the potential dangers the herb posed would save lives, but only at the expense of damaging people’s morale, their faith in the system, and that just wouldn’t do, not for the highborn who controlled the dissemination of information, oh no…

I slowly uncontorted my face.

“Told you it was nice,” Salli said loftily.

I ducked my head and gasped a few more breaths of flaming air. “Nice.” It was suddenly hard to focus my eyes. “And pow-powerful.”

I set down my cup and shook my head when she reached for the bottle.

“I’d best be going. The twins, you know…”

“Oh – course. Thanks for, well, walking me home?”

I nodded; when I rose she copied me and threw her arms around me, pulling me into a tight embrace I only half-returned.

“I – ah, you’d best tell me who it was that was attacking you, as well,” I said awkwardly, doing my best to pull away. “You know, so I know who to threaten if you stub your toe.”

Her eyes lit up as she released me. “You’d do that?”

“Haha, you have no idea…”

“Well, it was that annoying kid. No one can touch him, his dad’s, like, joint head of the Bertie Boys. Lul… Lulton, right?”

The world darkened, three or four shades closer to midnight black, and the blood rushing in my ears was like a drumbeat.

I remembered watching Toras Lulton hang, the coldness in my belly. I remembered kicking my parents’ gravestone, the rush of emotion filling every nerve.

“Yeah, that’s it, Lulton. Orven Lulton.”

* * *