It was half-ten when I got home, but when I entered through the wall, practically-invisible, everyone but Xastur was still up. Jaid and Jaroan were on one couch, Xantaire and her grandfather on the other. Spread between them was the fortify set – I stopped in the shadows for thirty seconds, watching and listening with pride. The twins were teaching their elders how to make the most of their pieces’ positions and, amazingly, there appeared to be very little by way of deception going on.

“That one’s the Grim Ghost, remember,” Jaroan was saying. “Doesn’t move that fast, but it goes through other pieces, even enemies and terrain.”

It was just too good an opportunity to pass up.

“What a useful power that sounds,” I remarked from the shadows beside the bookshelves.

“Kas!”

Jaid ran to me and threw her arms around me –

I looked down at her forearm sticking straight through my abdomen.

“Ah – give me a sec…”

I separated us, got my wraith turned down again, then gave her a proper hug.

“What happened?” Xantaire asked, half-concerned, half-curious. “We were down in the square, and the criers were getting reports flying in – literally – about how there were some mass-arrests or something, the most darkmages they ever heard of –”

“It’s been a… a long day.”

I found a seat between the twins. As much as I didn’t want to talk anymore, as much as I wanted to hit the sack and enter an extended, hopefully-dreamless sleep – I knew there were certain essentials I had to cover.

“It all started about… sweet Locus, was it just ten hours ago? Well, it’s probably been eleven or twelve for me…” I noted their baffled expressions, and decided to start at the beginning. “We’d been invited to the Arrealbord Palace, to discuss Dreamlaughter’s attack last night…”

I told them. How we’d been played. How there’d been a dragon, with a network of charmed minions. The twins must’ve understood from my tone that this was not something to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ over. When I divulged the true nature of Lovebright, my sister just looked crestfallen rather than squealing in glee – I put my arm around her, but she didn’t seem to need it.

I didn’t mention how Zel saved us, but I did explain her betrayal. I had to. The way she wasn’t ever my friend. The way the creature sharing my mind for almost two months turned out to be no better than a demon after all.

I felt their confusion, and I had no words for it. I was no less confused myself. Perhaps more so, versed as I was in some of the deeper underpinnings of the matter.

She was dangerous. So dangerous. They had to know they couldn’t trust her if she showed up. She knew everything – she was my… Soulmate was very much the wrong kind of word for it, yet I knew of no other.

Where the heretics were concerned, I left the information at a bare minimum.

I had to say something about the fire in Treetown and the attack on the Maginox library – that’d be all over the news by tomorrow. I didn’t mention the not-dead-actually-evil Everseer knowing my name – another evil arch-diviner at whose mercy my choice of profession had placed my loved ones… The last thing they needed was more to worry about, but I still had to say something… In the end I just let them know that there was a lady with curly blonde hair and sunken eyes who was bad news and that if she showed up, to fetch me, or, if I wasn’t answering my glyphstone, to do exactly what the darkmage said until I showed up.

When I said that – then it was that I felt Jaid tense up under my arm, move almost imperceptibly-closer to me.

I gave a false grin, patted her hair and drew her even closer into my embrace.

“Hey, at least you got to the bottom of the Dreamlaughter thing,” Jaroan pointed out.

“Yeah…” I sighed, sat back. “Except we don’t know who she is or where she is… or even what she’s actually capable of, now Lovebright’s gone…”

“Are we going to,” Xantaire flicked a finger at my face, “lose the mask at least? Gods, Kas, my skin’s crawling. It’s like I’m expecting darkmages to come pouring in through the windows any moment –“

My eyes went wide, and I couldn’t help but flick my gaze across the room to the shutters, just to be on the safe side –

Worse – Xantaire saw me do it.

“Oh! Oh, man.” My friend got to her feet, strode to the front door to check its locks, then paced back, arms folded across her chest. “Kas, I don’t like this.”

“You see now why I talked about getting somewhere else to live,” I said.

“Somewhere! –“

“What! –“

“Kas! –“

“You didn’t! –“

“Look, I don’t mean I want to move out,” I interjected, raising my hands for peace and looking back and forth between them, “in fact I don’t suppose I’ll really have to… See, there’s the delay in rents, and one of the fellas who owned the block out there was willing to sell his share, if the price was right.”

“You mean –” Xantaire gestured towards the lane “– you’re gonna be a landlord? Like Peltos? Over there?”

“Hopefully not much like Peltos,” I muttered ruefully.

“I d-don’t want you to,” Jaid whispered.

“And that won’t help if this blonde woman’s got your name,” Jaroan said, less anxiety in his voice than in Jaid’s, though not by much. “It just puts us in more danger, if you’re not here, and someone comes – in the night…”

I waved a hand at the flickering blue lines that’d been there for weeks, which they’d never seen. “Not with a set of shields around the place.”

Orstrum chuckled. “You can do that, my boy?”

“I picked that trick up ages ago.” I didn’t take my eyes off Jaroan. “If someone comes, it’ll be for me, not you. Trust me, no darkmage is stupid-enough to hurt you guys or kidnap you – not if they know who I am.”

“That’s a paradox!” my brother blurted.

“Exactly! They’d be after me – the whole point is that I need to keep you out of the crossfire.” I swung my head to Jaid. “But I won’t do it if you’re not both onboard with the idea.”

Jaid looked like a diviner had time-frozen her.

“It’s okay, you don’t need to decide now!” I attempted a good-natured laugh. “Come on, we’ll talk about all this another night. Why don’t you continue your game?”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“I could do with a cup of that wine,” Orstrum said with a grimace. He actively avoided fortify whenever he could – how they’d roped him into it, I had no idea.

“Don’t, Grandpa,” Xantaire scolded him. “If Zel is… you know, not Zel… then what about Flood Boy…?”

She looked at me.

I blinked, and it seemed to last a lifetime:

The arch-wizard lifts his huge, gleaming boot and strikes out with the heel.

Smashing with magic-fuelled strength into Flood Boy’s face.

Scraping him off the ice-blade.

Letting him fall in a heap.

Fall and wither away.

And he too was a traitor…

“How’s about I just – leave all this till the morning?”

I tried not to make it sound like I was begging, but I could hear the desperation in my voice myself, and Xantaire just shook her head, looking down at the fortify board.

I could practically hear her thought: ‘Just don’t ever tell us.’

Or was that just my wishful thinking?

I too studied the board, then looked at Xantaire. “Say, if you’re going for the Geomancer, try to set up your mountains early, and in a clump, cards-willing… I always ended up using them like defensive shields, reactively, and it sucked. You’ll get a far better concentration and come end-game your opponents’ options will be severely limited. Just don’t think you’ve got to copy everyone else in the first few rounds.”

I felt Jaid and Jaroan, out of my eyeline on either side, staring daggers at me.

“Hm…” Xantaire looked down at her cards. “Okay, cool.”

“Arch-diviner tips.” I tapped my temple.

“No fair!” Jaroan snorted.

“Hey, do you have any tips for my Swordmaiden?” Jaid asked.

A sense of normalcy restored, I watched them play their game, interrupting only the bare minimum to clarify rules and card-wording. But while my outer self was sitting on the bench with a faint, amused smile on its face, my inner self was drowning in images and words.

Lethargy stole over my body. I felt like it was an anchor, pinning me to a material existence my mind had left far behind. All I saw were dead bodies, all I heard was sacrilege and lies.

They kill them all… to stop the dragons eating them.

My solid lump of flesh, the crude body to which my floating consciousness was bound, felt its smile widen. The ludicrousness of the heretics – were they all possessed of the same delusion, or did they each have different ones?

It was only then that I realised how the pieces fit together.

Heresy. The nobles of Zadhal. Everseer.

Lowborn archmages, their existence threatening downfall.

Dragons, swallowing their souls, their powers.

Of course, if the lines of archmagery weren’t tightly-controlled, there could be more and more of them with every generation… If the lowborn were permitted access to magical abilities, would this not increase the potential amount of souls the demons could harvest? Would this not allow the dragons to return with even greater strength? Was there some tipping-point – a number of archmage-souls beyond which the doom of Mund would be assured?

If they came, we would fight them, and we would win. The important thing would be to stand strong, together, as one. Not fracture into petty dissent – and certainly not start killing people, which had to be up there for the most defeatist notion ever conceived by a human mind…

Less than an hour later, Xantaire had successfully dominated the board, and made a winning move. My work complete, I swiftly excused myself and withdrew to the bedroom, dodging the worst of the twins’ vitriol while they were stuck putting the pieces away – the penalty of defeat.

Half an hour after that, the twins were asleep. I closed my eyes and gave in to the fatigue.

Not for the first time, I found that my hopes of a dreamless slumber were the futile wishes of a condemned soul.

None of the dragon’s insinuations. None of the fairy’s visions. Just an array of bog-standard nightmares to wrack my spirit.

Events that never happened which in hindsight I might’ve brought into being, had I only chosen differently. Occurrences that did happen, mistakes I could’ve avoided with a single action, a single sentence. Even the simplest accidents, like letting Khikiriaz trap my leg under his weight when I charged the weave, receive special treatment – in the dream I dispel him the moment we go down together and instead of lying there, rolling around in the grass, I fight Winterprince with all my faculties intact.

When Timesnatcher bears his corpse out of the burning forest, I smile, my hatred finally finding release: the burning forest is nothing more than my dead dryad, and it had been my own force-blades that had finished the wizard, sliced through his skull.

When Zel lies to me, when she sits there in the air in front of me, smiling her disgusting vile sickening little face off at me and lying to me – I take her in my hand and this time I listen – I take her previous advice, all her murderous counsel, and I extinguish the life in her with my superhuman strength.

I squeeze, and she begs me to continue. She wants to die and she needs me to kill.

Her eyes bulge, her tiny chest rattles, and still she grins, still she laughs at me, breathlessly mocking me for my weakness –

Above me, Stormsword and Timesnatcher kill them all. They tear humans into pieces, showering me in the body parts of the heretics, showering me in their laughter and lightning.

I watch in the throes of excruciatingly-slowed time, as Emrelet directs an explosion that bursts a female heretic like a beetle struck by a sledgehammer – the clothes are ripped away, then the skin, then everything else follows. I watch in that timeless paralysed moment as Timesnatcher delightedly reaches out an unstoppable, impossibly-fast hand, gouging his fingers into the underside of a darkmage’s chin and simply pulling off the man’s jaw, the man’s face –

Nighteye arrives, a tremendous owl descending at the two champions – and instead of stopping them, he joins them in the slaughter.

I watch, and I squeeze, and the fairy falls apart in my hand –

“They’ve not been harmed, Feychilde,” Zel says quietly from Em’s lap. “I know it.”

I woke in the darkness, drenched in sweat. My right hand was balled up in the blanket, clutching a portion of the fabric so tightly that my fingers ached. It was only after thirty seconds of useless effort, numbly attempting to loosen my grip, that my sleep-addled brain reminded me that I could call on my wraith.

I slipped my hand free of the blanket, stared down at it, fingertips floating in and out of the bedding as my chest rose and fell.

I thought I’d gotten most of it out when I broke it all down for Em, but I’d been lost in the emotion of the betrayal.

Zel gave herself away, trying to protect me from myself, trying to help me in her own way. She always went above and beyond.

She… tried to end her life, when we fought Vaahn’s idol…

Her deceptions… The way she’d danced around the issue in the Green Tower, when we talked about her name…

’You can’t know! You can’t know what it’s like, to be me!’

What was it like to be her? What was she, exactly? I knew nothing about her that hadn’t come from her own lips – or Flood Boy’s…

’Who? Who is your true master?’

I’d felt it. The connection had been real…

She was someone else’s all along.

Was there an arch-sorcerer among the heretics? But she was encouraging me to kill them… Was there a way that could make sense? It didn’t seem to fit – unless they fought amongst each other so often that this would be considered normal?

She was always pushing me forwards, propelling me into situations and advising me on methods that would cause me to hone my skills, strengthen my powers… She said she knew I would come to this realisation eventually – had she planned it? That didn’t mesh with what she said – but could I trust her explanation? Obviously not…

I could remember the way she spoke, especially during the Incursion. Telling me my soul was damned just for being a sorcerer. Telling me to join with demons, embrace my powers in full. She never wanted me to be me. She wanted… something else – like the dragon had done. She wanted a killer… not a murderer, no, but a champion without mercy, an archmage who gave no quarter. It was like she’d wanted to break me down, build me up again as a new person…

But that had changed, hadn’t it? She’d seemed different… since Zadhal, at least…

The Incursion! The red-white lights – the eolastyr, killing Dustbringer… The dancing man in rags who’d killed Smouldervein…

And she’d warned me not to enter. She’d kept me clear of the danger – hadn’t she? Had she saved my soul that night?

Hang on, I said to myself in a cold, clinical voice. Are you certain you believe Everseer?

I stood up, sinking my legs right through the bed, then grabbed up my satchel and slung it over my shoulder. I stared at the twins for a minute, checking the shields over and letting my wings coalesce.

I’d head out, leave behind the only people in the world I felt I could trust, really trust, safe in their peaceful slumbering. There were always the usual Sticktown scum out there, thieves and killers, inkatra-heads and minor darkmages. I’d find something to distract myself with, even without my accustomed perceptive capabilities –

The wings were ready; the shields –

The shields here were fine, all rotating perfectly, but –

I scrutinised my inner landscape, and found the barrier I’d left behind – the champion I’d abandoned in death.

I imagined him, lying there on the earth like Flood Boy had done. Glimmer had taken Shadow’s body up, showing him respect, deference – but him –

No matter whether he deserves it – whether he killed my – the traitor – he was a champion –

I growled softly rather than let tears come to my eyes, and I went out into the darkness with all the speed I could conjure. The scum of Sticktown could wait.

Winterprince needed help, one last time.

* * *