Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you
but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you're dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.

Louise Glück

How did one steal a throne?

Crimson had often wondered. But even children know the power of words, the danger of words, the threat of words, and she had never allowed those words to pass her lips, to drip like poison into the air, to rip and render a conversation before it could begin.

How? How? How?

It didn't seem an act for a cutpurse or a pickpocket, a bag-snatcher or a market scavenger; it seemed grander. More dramatic. Steal a crown, steal a throne, steal a kingdom - how, exactly, had the false king done it?

But that wasn't something you could ask when you could not even name the damned criminal. Crimson knew the king's name, although she spoke it not - no one ever did.

Xisuthros, the liar. Xisuthros, the coward. Xisuthros, the false king and the thief.

Crimson often found herself wondering these things.

Every good fairytale had a princess in a tower, after all, but Crimson found herself tiring of this role, of staring at the stars and waiting for the soft sound of locks clicking open, clickclickclick, like that. Of waiting for orders, for commendation, for some contact from the Corbeau boy who had sent her to hide here, to hide and to wait, to wait and to watch.

She would be safe, Yegor had told her. She would be safe. Well, Crimson didn't exactly believe that. She didn't think that she would have trusted him even if he weren't a Corbeau, even if he wasn't a fox-eyed revolutionary with a liar's mien and the tongue of a snake. She didn't trust him by his very nature. Men like him destroyed. They reaped without sowing. They drew blood without care.

And he had her daughter. Somewhere, out there in the world, Charity was dwelling amongst the vultures and the wolves and the arsonists and the ghosts, and Crimson couldn't protect her, not truly. The only thing she could do for her daughter was hide in the tower and wait for the dragon to come creeping.

And then? Well. Crimson kept a knife in her bodice for a reason, didn't she? And dragons couldn't scare her anymore. Nothing could scare her anymore.

They were going to kill the king. She was going to kill the king. She was sure of it.

And to prove it to herself, she breathed the name, too soft for any raven or dragon to hear, a whisper for her own ears only: "Xisuthros."

Cappie dropped Minette's hand and the world snapped back into being, so sudden it was dizzying - where once there was not, now there was, and it was nauseating: the noise, the sound, the scenta, everything so sharp and awful that Minette couldn't comprehend how she could function everyday in a world that tasted and smelled and sounded like this.

"It's alright," Cappie said, without any true sympathy in her voice - a ghost saying ghostly things. "It'll be alright. Deep breaths."

Minette drew in one deep breath, and then another, dimly aware in the mess of sudden sensations (birds singing footsteps crunching wind in the grass her own heart beat thump thump thump) that a man was speaking, and Cappie replying.

"You're certain no one followed you?"

"I'm certain that no one could."

"Come in, quickly. The servant's entrance..."

Cappie took Minette's elbow and helped her brusquely up a set of low steps and through a short, squat doorway. Minette was aware only distantly of colours, shapes, something about stars, as Cappie followed the shadow of a man down a long, narrow hallway.

"Is she alright? Poor girl. No, don't - we can't risk being seen. I'm sorry. The servant's hall."

Down a set of steps this time. Minette wondered if she was reacting poorly to Cappie's particular brand of witchcraft because it was such anathema to her own. Cappie hid behind illusions, rendered herself a ghost, while Minette wove masks and presented a false face to the world.

Or maybe it was just as Cappie said softly to reassure: "It's always hard the first few times."

Minette was eased into a chair, and, blinking rapidly, forced the world into some new semblance of order once more. The man had ushered them into a square room paved with charcoal flagstones and paneled with polished redwood, furnished with a long, wide oak table like one she thought you might find in an old-fashioned castle's banquet hall or ballroom and soft armchairs in each corner. Cappie was perched delicately on the arm of Minette's seat, her arms folded and her eyes unhappy, uncertain, unamused.

And the man was, Minette supposed, Apemios Collins. He had kind eyes. Hair like an aristocrat, albeit dishevelled as though he had not slept the previous night, nor any other in the past week. A broad face with laughter lines along his mouth and eyes. A tailored coat, like Yegor might have worn if he was forty or fifty, and shoes that gleamed.

In other words - hardly a revolutionary.

He was pulling a chair away from the servant's dining table to set it opposite the girls, his eyes serious. "A pleasure to meet you both. Yegor had told me he was sending plenipotentiaries, but I never thought..."

"Revolution," Cappie said with a slight quirk of a smile. "Is the domain of the youthful."

"I won't argue with that," Apemios replied. "And this is the faceless girl?"

"Is that what Yegor calls me?" Minette asked dryly.

"Pay no heed to him. He dwells amongst snakes and drinks venom and expects not to shed his skin." Apemios shook his head. "I don't agree with his plan, but..."

And Minette knew, and she wasn't sure if it made her like Apemios more or less. She was right; he was hardly a revolutionary. He was a benefactor and a funder, a silent supporter, willing to pay for the arms with which Yegor led children and teenagers to death and despair in the name of a fool's crusade. He made the revolution possible, and hid behind his money and the high walls of his estate to do so.

Did that make him a coward or a smart man?

"I'll do anything," Apemios said. "To save her."

"Her?" Minette replied distantly.

"My daughter," Apemios said. "I know you have Fabulists amongst your ranks, but there's been rumours of even their kind being claimed over the past few days and weeks."

"And we," Cappie said, directing her gaze first towards the ground and then slowly, gradually, towards Minette. "Need to put someone on the inside."

Minette took a deep breath and nodded. Yegor had explained as much, but how could she persuade her heart to accept that lone, terrifying fact? She was going into the Selection. She was going to the palace. She was risking her life on the word of a liar. And despite what Yegor had promised her, she wasn't sure she could trust the wolf of Bonita to save her if it came to that.

"Yes," she said. "That's me."

"Venus is on her way down," Apemios said. "And you give me your word you will hide her?"

"We've got plenty of places to hide," Cappie said. "Plenty of safe houses. It's a big world out there, and the royal family won't even be looking for her."

Apemios met Minette's gaze levelly and stoically. "You're certain you can do it?"

Minette hesitated. "Yes," she said.

"Yes," she lied.

She had a feeling she would be doing a lot of that in the next few days and weeks.

Remember midnight, she told herself, remember midnight.

"They'll be coming for her tomorrow," Apemios said, examining the girls as though attempting to see beneath the service. "That gives us this evening to prepare you. If you don't want to do this, though, I can't make you." He didn't use their names. Minette thought he might not have known their names. Wasn't that the safest way to conduct things? Yegor certainly knew his business of destruction. "And I won't blame you for it either. Corbeau should know better than to - Venus, darling, there you are."

Minette turned. If Cappie was a ghost then this girl was a spectre - skin like porcelain and hair like an ink spill tied back in a thick, loose braid lying on one shoulder. She had the body, Minette thought, of a broken bird - thin, tiny, bones protruding at awkward angles like her skeleton was trying to escape from her skin. A little shorter and a little thinner than Minette, but she thought that maybe it was disguisable. It was the face that was the issue - delicate features, almond shaped eyes, thin lips and an upturned nose. It was always easier to work like this - to see the way the light played on the skin and the precise specifications of proportions and features. Putting on Kasha's face had been the first and only time that Minette had attempted to work from a photograph rather than a face-to-face meeting, and she thought it had probably been rather apparent, had fooled no-one; Levi, certainly, had known the truth instantly.

And now, Venus Collins found herself staring herself in the mirror as Minette wove the mask in a single instant and transformed herself.

"Father," Venus said, but her reedy voice was uncertain as she stared at the masked girl. "What did you..."

"It's probably best," Cappie told Apemios. "If we make this as quick and clean as possible."

Apemios nodded, sorrow in his eyes, and Minette had to avert her gaze as the man rose and went to embrace his daughter in farewell. Paternal love, she thought. True paternal love. The kind that she had lost in the moment her father lost his sanity.

"Be careful," Apemios whispered to his daughter, and Cappie clapped Minette on the shoulder with the same words - "be careful."

"I will. And you too."

Cappie rose and went to take Venus' shoulder. Flicking Minette a wink, Cappie and Venus vanished from the world and Minette was left alone, in the face of stranger, facing the Selection.

"Well, goodbye, then." Kasha pulled her coat tighter around shoulders like sharp blades, her eyes distant and detached as she considered the far-off horizon with a gaze that suggested mutiny. "I'll give your love to Martinko."

"To the crooked man?" Levi was lighting his cigarette, hands cupped around his mouth and a match, close enough to swallow the flame if he so desired. "You know he hates me."

"He doesn't hate you. He just loves me more."

Her smirk had been tenuous enough, like a needle spun of glass, and it shattered now, a scowl returning, when Levi spoke sharply to her.

"You think that's enough to protect you if you go to him? Kasha, you of all people should know: love is just a habit."

"No. Love is a vice."

"And?"

"And you already smoke, drink and gamble."

"I don't pretend to know what you're accusing me of."

"Not accusing. Warning." She tossed the words over her shoulder, careless, reckless. "I don't need tarot to know your heartstrings and the tunes they like to follow, sergeant."

Levi took a drag and exhaled, smoke billowing in the cold crisp morning air. "No one ever accused me of loyalty."

"No."

She took his left hand in hers, the way she had the first day they had met.

"You're not," she said. Her voice was low. "Loyal. And you don't owe these people anything."

"Kash..."

"Let someone else die," she said. "Let someone else fall beneath the spokes of Yegor's war-machine. Let someone else fall at his command and bleed for his favour. Because, Levi, you know he's the fool and you know how this story will end, to the very last word, and you know that the Corbeau boys are trouble and they always have been."

"You want me to run," he said. "Like you are."

"Pride is an anchor," Kasha said. "It'll drown you, strangle you, if you let it."

"You," he said quietly. "Of all people should know it isn't pride..."

"Then it's guilt and it's senseless."

He stooped and roughly kissed her cheek, wordless, and she glared at him as he did so. Kasha didn't know the meaning of gentleness. She touched his hair as his lips brushed her skin and then she pushed him from her.

Perhaps another girl's eyes would have shone with tears but Kasha was fire incarnate and any sorrow was burned away in the instant it was born. They had repeated this argument for what felt like an eternity. She still thought she had some chance of winning.

"If you die," she said. "I won't visit your grave."

"Burn me, then."

The doors were closing. Smoke and fog were pouring across the station floor as the train prepared to depart. Light was dying on the horizon.

"Give my love to Martinko," Levi said and Kasha shook her head, hair flicking, and turned. She got on the train. The doors slid shut. She did not look back.