The carriage headed eastwards, with the sun leading their way, past the City Square, leaving the port and tide-swelled sea behind. Streets grew narrower, and sometimes Badd or Bador would move ahead of their carriage to squeeze between the wooden, thatch-roofed houses that flanked the dirt-pathed lanes. The palace of yellow limestone loomed out of her window, haughtily watching over its lesser subjects.

They turned a corner and burst onto cobbled streets once more, this time to the humdrum bustle of the living. Morning visitors sent the hinges squeaking on squat yellow-brick houses, where hand-painted signs swung in the gentle breeze: anvil and hammer for the blacksmith’s, scissors and cloth for the tailor’s, a cog and wheel for…

~The clockmaker’s. That’s Master Northill’s new store on the High Street.~

~We talked about him when you first arrived. Remember?~

Ari looked up instinctively to place a pin on the map at this location of interest, and found nothing but the roof of the carriage. She was going to have to pack a pen and notepad – scratch that – a quill, a pot of ink and some parchment with her everywhere she went.

~Do you normally find it such a challenge to recall events in your life, or… never mind.~

Claribel hovered out of the window, the ghostly apparition that she was, gazing blankly at the women and children turning and waving at her carriage. The box containing Malory’s remains, wrapped in silk, now without a living brother to mourn for it, bounced along next to her on the seat of the carriage, where Claribel had insisted that it should stay.

~Do you…~ Claribel started, and trailed off once more.

Did Ari…? ‘Yes she did’ would have been the answer to many things, like: did Ari struggle with the words to say to a grieving… whatever it was that Claribel was to her – not a stranger for sure, nor a friend, but something that ran deeper than an acquaintance.

she tried. It rang hollow. What was there to say, really? That death would come to us all? That she’d just need to work through the stages of grief, for sure either five or seven: a landscape painted by a stranger of a well-trodden path, ending at acceptance. Ending. It must. It was Ari’s fault that everything had become tangled up, making a maze out of what should have been a sign-posted route.

~Have you… ever felt nothing at someone’s death?~

Oh.

~But I’ve known him since we were young. When Mal died I… I couldn’t physically cry, but I felt. And I… Even thinking of her now, I can’t… But. But Tristram… I just feel nothing. In fact, when I saw his body, all I could think of was whether there were ants crawling over his disgusting skin.~

Ari was unqualified to ask the question, especially about the second male lead who had sacrificed so much for the greater good.

~…Many people think so.~

~It’s not like that. It’s just… we had some minor disagreements when we were younger, but we were young, like I said, and he didn’t know better back then. I just keep thinking that if it were the other way round, if I were the one lying in the ditch, he’d swear to hunt down the killer and seek vengeance on my behalf, but all I want is to forget about the whole thing and never think about him ever again. Does that make me a cold-hearted villain? You’d said so when you arrived, hadn’t you? You’d called me a minor villainess. Maybe it’s true. Maybe I am.~

Claribel was no villainess. Tristram was no hero. That left Rosalind, Leolin and Hesperus on precarious grounds, and made ‘Rosalind by Any Other Name’ a book about the victory of evil.

~…Sometimes, you really remind me of a dear friend of mine.~

~A petal or a kettle, who knows anymore.~

Who indeed. Who knows anything anymore?

Because if Tristram was the surest clue they had to finding Miri, and someone had severed that thread, where did the other end lead?

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

On and on led the road before them, towards the next step, towards the next unstoppable moment, same as it had always been, same as it always will be, slipping away from her.

The air nearby shifted from sea-fresh to the smell of her childhood, back to the days when she’d venture out of the shadows to beg for the kindness of strangers. Once, a well-groomed man with a faded face threw her a handful of pound coins and told her, ‘Remember, money doesn’t buy happiness.’ She did remember. But money bought sausage rolls, which were worth more.

A few women and children milled about here, exchanging morning greetings as they passed each other. One with a blue striped apron pressed past their carriage with a wheelbarrow full of small linen-wrapped parcels, stopping at each house to deliver her wares.

Good thing that their carriage was no wider.

~Yes, exactly, this is why I use the plain, unmarked one for travelling through central Eirene. It is so easy to scrape the paint from one wrong turn.~

Of course she did. Back in her world, plenty of people who weren’t related to dukes owned more than one car.

Ari missed hers, missed it even more than she missed her phone. She had rescued it from the enemy’s lair during her first mission: a knock-off Mercedes 300SL Gullwing in anthracite metallic that bewitched her with its elegant doors that opened like the wings of the original’s namesake seagull. It had cost a fortune to ship it back, though not as much as the dignity that she’d lost and the leveraged that he’d gained begging for the Chief’s permission.

She should have taken it out for one final drive, her fake Becky persona be damned; she should have wound down the bullet-proof windows that Max had put in for her and enjoyed the cool, misty blast of a winter’s morning, speeding past her under the hum of its replica M186 engine. Its mechanical heart would always bring her comfort, unlike the sound of Max’s heartbeat each time he held her, reiterating with each contraction of his ventricles that he was human, he was fragile, he was temporary, that he might not outlast her. She’d liked it better leaning against his forehead, nose to nose, losing herself in his honey-brown eyes.

Not that it made a difference in the end.

She leaned harder out of the glassless windows of Claribel’s carriage, where the sharp blades of the wind filled her lungs and became part of her, where she became the wind.

‘Ānāpānasati,’ came the echoes of Mrs Hart’s voice, ‘is the study of your breaths, in and out, in and out. Now, one of you Agent-hopefuls name me a weapon. What’s that, Connor Hart? The Lee-Enfield? Wrong again! Connor, darling, if you’d just spent a little more brainpower thinking about the context, you’d see that the right answer isn’t somebody’s grandma’s rusty old rifle. The answer, children, is you. You, my future Agents, are the weapons we’ll wield to fight the forces of evil. Just as we’d polish our blades and clean our guns, you must hone your bodies and learn how to empty your minds.’

In… and out, for one. In… and out for two. By the time she’d switched to counting her inhalations, it was as if there’d never been a ripple in the cold, cold waters that should have been her heart.

Here, wedged between the clutter of houses touting their homemade flatbreads and pickles out of their windows, a red brick building with an arched entrance and a turret stood on a streetcorner with its gates half-ajar. Above the arches, it proudly displayed a coat of arms bearing a kraken and a blade.

~The Guild of Barbers,~ said Claribel, before Ari even asked.

Should a kraken overcome its own hairlessness and develop the ambitions of becoming a barber, perhaps they’d make desirable ones, just because they’d be able to hold many pairs of scissors at once. But. But would they be able to use them without fingers, or were they confined to the razorblade as their only beard-trimming implement?

A separate sign had been propped just outside the door, shouting in large letters to passers-by: ‘DEAD BODIES WANTED (NOT DISEASED)’. A drawing accompanied it, perhaps tailored for the illiterate population, showing that the person who’d drawn it had less artistic skill than her. Judging from the picture, she’d have pegged the place as an orthodontist’s for people in raccoon masks.

In Ari’s world, trainee hairdressers would offer cheap haircuts to the living. To the best of her knowledge, they’d never had to fraternise with the morgue.

~You don’t have barber-surgeons?~

Shuffle-thump. Shuffle-thump. Shhhuffle… Thump.

Ari shifted to the lefthand window to follow the sound, out of place in the buzz of idle mornings and did-you-sleep-wells: heavy footsteps and leather-on-dust, dragging along the ground.

Their carriage slowed to an amble to ease around the source of the sound. There it was: another body, another place. No Cardinal to bid it goodbye.

A child no taller than Finn was dragging the bag of skin and bones that had once been a woman up to the gates of the Guild.

‘Please,’ he said to a man in a black tunic and a chequered apron, ‘I heard you were takin’ in the dead for a good golden eye. She was healthy before she passed, good sir. No cough and nothin’.’

‘We are taking cadavers, but we don’t welcome graverobbers.’ The man said it with a rising inflection at the end, twisting his words into a half-question.

‘I’m not, sir. I… This is… she was… my Ma, sir.’

‘And she agreed to be… given to this Guild, did she?’

The child swallowed hard and nodded.

The man tutted and shook his head. ‘That’s what all them graverobbers say these days. Sending children! Disgusting. Why would you condemn your own mother to the Fated One’s disgust by foregoing fire? Why would any real son or daughter–’

‘Because I’m a mage!’ The words fell out of the child’s mouth in a sob. ‘I… I can make the earth move. Ma said I need to go to the Royal Academy, to go… to… to… learn how to control my powers… She said… she said I’m special, and–’

‘Boy, everyone has the potential to be a mage, but people who are not born to fancy carriages,’ said the man, waving a hand at Claribel’s carriage, ‘would be foolish to feed that curse. Best you quash it. Let the powers fade – and fade they will – then live a normal life. Hey, might be one day you’ll apprentice yourself to a barber.’

‘But I… I can’t… It won’t…’

‘Think about it. If I give you a golden eye for your Ma today, and you run towards that big golden castle on the hill and hand it to the Academy most royal, they’ll let you listen to some old bore for three months and ask for the next coin. Where’s your next Ma comin’ from? That’s just for the teachin’ too. What about them fancy uniforms, hey? What about all those spring chickens you’ll need to feed yourself to stay alive as a proper mage?’

The child’s shoulders drooped, and the dead Ma that had been propped up against the doorframe slipped onto the ground. The child fumbled after the body, and fell…

Or not.

The ground trembled and morphed around the child, catching him in its cold embrace.

The lady with the wheelbarrow spared him a pitying glance.

Ari waited. And waited. And waited for Claribel to make a move.

Nothing.

Oh, what the hell.