TEN. WAIT FOR HEROES TO FALL FROM THE SKY.
Slick, oily water closes over her legs, torso, arms, and pain lashes at her like a whip. Alyssa releases a shocked, spluttering gasp, floundering to keep her head and the bottle from the Pool of Tears above the surface. The water feels like acid on her burns and sets fire to a a constellation of tiny cuts and scrapes she hadn't known existed.
Involuntary tears leak between her closed eyelids as she kicks away from the barge and begins a one-armed paddle toward the shore. Alyssa doubts she'd be able to see through them even if she dared open her eyes.
Don't scream. Don't splash. Don't make a sound.
She pours all her focus into forward motion, following the slight ripples of Taelor's wake and forcing herself to breathe slowly, evenly. The bay laps at her chin, droplets of water speckling her cheeks and stinging when they touch her lips.
Don't cry out.
They haven't been spotted yet. Or at least, Alyssa can't hear the commotion she imagines will follow if they're seen. The quiet worries her; besides the low slopping of water around them and the pulse of blood in her ears, there's nothing, nothing.
Her toes scrape against something solid and prickly, and when she kicks again, her other foot comes down in a patch of soft, sucking mud. It peels her sock off when she pulls herself free.
Almost there.
Alyssa surges forward, eager to get out of the stinging water and slink out of sight of the barge, and her knee slams into something hard and sharp as broken glass. It tears through her leggings like they're made of tissue and claw into the skin underneath, and then water sears the sears the fresh wound like white-hot needles. The cry of pain she's worked so hard to suppress rips free. Taelor snatches at her shoulder, hissing for her to shut up we're at the shore come on—
Too late.
As Alyssa staggers out of the water, bent double and wheezing with pain, a high voice shouts behind them.
"There! On the beach!"
She freezes, gaze locked with Taelor's for one horrible, heart-stopping second. Taelor's fingers dig into her shoulder while the color drains from her face.
Alyssa shoves at her. "GO!"
Taelor stumbles, turns, then launches forward, pelting up the beach without a backward glance. Alyssa cranes her neck just long enough to get an impression of red-clad soldiers streaming away from the dock, toward them, before hurtling after her.
Agony lances through her knee and up her thigh and for a moment, Alyssa feels it'll give out beneath her and send her toppling into the slippery black mud underfoot, but she catches her balance and throws herself forward again, and in the next couple strides the pain blurs beneath a spike of adrenaline. More shouting breaks out behind her, and the ringing sound of metal crashing against metal, and terrified determination to escape lends lightness to her feet.
There's a low stone wall at the top of the beach. Alyssa vaults over it and crashes to her knees on the other side. White spots bloom and burst and fade in her eyes and she's up again, staggering at first but gaining speed until she's sprinting full tilt after her own shadow. East.
Trees soar out of the ground to her left, but the land ahead opens in a flat, wide plain. Scrubby vegetation swipes at her bare feet and legs as she runs, but she won't trip, refuses to trip. She's never run like this before—her legs pump harder and harder and she's drawing even with Taelor despite the other girl's longer legs and head start. The pain of her tattered knee and the burns sloughs away, blotted out by shrieking fear about what happens if they're caught.
Air burns her lungs like dry ice. Her vision tunnels to a singular, bright point on the horizon. Some detached, unfeeling part of her whispers that she can't keep up this pace much longer; Alyssa tells it to shut up.
They are going to make it, and absolute certainty buoys her steps in the instant before a second stream of red erupts from the trees ahead.
Hearts.
They fan out towards her and Taelor. Ten of them, wielding glaives that glitter like blood in the twilight.
Alyssa screams and locks her knees, throws her weight backward, and skids to a stop mere inches before her own momentum would've impaled her on one of the glaives. She topples over, slamming shoulder-first into a prickly shrub that is, at least, a softer landing than the dry earth. Next to her, Taelor keeps her footing, but only just.
The Hearts encircle them in eerie silence.
They aren't the silly card soldiers of the cartoon but actual people, all of them clad in crimson gambesons with small white hearts stitched into the sleeves—rank markers, Alyssa thinks dizzily. The Ace, a slight, olive-skinned woman with vivid yellow eyes, wears a white breastplate over her gambeson. A messy heart is slapped across the chest in red paint.
Alyssa focuses on that instead of the Ace's hawkish stare as the she rests the barbed tip of her glaive on Alyssa's collarbone and says, "Alyssa Gardner?"
Alyssa is too busy gulping air to answer, but the Ace seems to take her panting silence as an affirmative. Or maybe she wasn't expecting a reply at all. She cocks her head, and continues, "By order of Her Majesty the Queen of Hearts, you and your… companion"—her merciless gaze flicks to Taelor for an instant, then returns to Alyssa—"are to present yourself to the Court at Argine for trial."
The glaive pricks the hollow of Alyssa's throat as she sucks in another lungful of air. Her whole chest burns with the need for it. "On—what—charges?"
"For a start?" The tilt of the Ace's head grows more severe. She blinks once, slowly. "Unauthorized entry. Mingling with undesirables." Taelor makes an incredulous noise at that, but fortunately the Ace ignores her. "Conspiring with dissidents against Her Majesty's rule." Her eyes glitter coldly. "Plotting regicide. No doubt Her Majesty and Her Grace of Hearts will find additional charges, should those prove insufficient."
"We haven't done anything," Taelor says. "I, for one, didn't ask to get dragged into this mess. I just want to go home."
The Ace glances at her again, and for the first time, Alyssa sees a flicker of something other than steely disinterest in her expression. "You may be sent home, if you can persuade the court of that. Her Majesty is not unreasonable. Your arrest, however, is non-negotiable. Her Grace gave orders that you were to be killed, if we couldn't capture you alive." A rather wry smile appears on her lips. "She takes no chances with the Queen's safety."
"The Queen of Hearts is not unreasonable?!" Taelor hisses, hysteria bubbling in her voice.
"Mm." The Ace gives a tiny shrug, and the cold mask drops over her face again. She turns back to Alyssa and prods her with the glaive. "On your feet, Gardner."
Slowly, hyperaware of the blade against her neck and a litany of pains making themselves known again as her adrenaline high ebbs, Alyssa shuffles off of her shrub and clambers awkwardly to her feet, listing as far to the right as she can without falling. She has no desire whatsoever to test her injured knee at this point; already it feels like it's been flayed.
The Ace glances at it and lifts an eyebrow. "Can you walk on that?"
Alyssa shakes her head. She's really feeling it now: sharp, electric shocks that keep time with her heartbeat, and a ripping sensation when she moves. Any vestiges of tolerance for the pain are gone.
Frowning, the Ace turns to the Heart beside her—a pale, brawny woman at least twice her size, with a crooked nose and deep scowl—and days, "Do you think—"
But whatever she means to ask is lost beneath a strangled, gurgling cry and tremendous THUMP from the other side of the circle. Alyssa twists around to see, steps on her injured leg, and crumples with a howl; lights flash and pop in her eyes and barbed claws rip through her knee, but she can hear shouting and trampling feet, a sickening wet noise she thinks might be the sound of a blade sliding through human flesh.
Then her vision stops swimming, and she looks up—
Morpheus.
One Heart is already down, and Alyssa watches, open-mouthed, as Morpheus wrenches a glaive from the gut of a second, and then spins with unearthly grace to block a blow from a third. Three glaives swing at him all at once as the other Hearts close in, and he leaps and twists, his body coiling inwards like a retracting spring—and suddenly he's a moth the size of Alyssa's hand, soaring above while the glaives sweep through empty air beneath him.
He changes back between one flap of his glossy black wings and the next, resuming his human form with an audible snap. Feet and glaive lash out as he drops, catching one Heart a heavy blow across the neck and slashing open the chest of another.
Both of them lay motionless where they fall. The six Hearts remaining rush him, and Alyssa's heart crawls into her throat when they close into a wall of red, blocking him from her view.
But there's one cry, and then another, and the line of Hearts cracks as another of their number fall. Through the gap, she sees Morpheus sweep a sixth Heart off his feet with a whirl of the glaive, and then plunge it into his neck before he can recover. A choked scream, an arc of blood as Morpheus tears the glaive free, and the Heart spasms and dies.
And then there are four.
The Ace whistles shrilly, and the survivors retreat out of range of the glaive. Morpheus spins the weapon in his hands as if contemplating where to strike next as he moves to position himself between them and Alyssa.
"How many times," Morpheus says, "must I send the Queen's dogs running with tail between legs before she learns better?"
"We aren't running," the Ace breathes. Blood streams down her face from a gash over her brow, and her yellow eyes are bright with loathing.
"Consider," Morpheus says in a low drawl, "that I felled six of your hand in under a minute. Consider that you and yours failed to so much as scratch me in the same." He cants his head to the side and tuts mockingly. "Need I take your whole eye to drive the lesson home, Captain—Cordella, isn't it?"
A nerve in the Ace's jaw twitches. "This is not over."
"It never is," Morpheus says, sounding bored. "Go. Report to your mistresses, unless you'd rather I give you the mercy of a quick death."
She hisses at him, but at a shake of her head, the three Hearts at her side lower their glaives and retreat, melting into the forest as swiftly as they appeared. The Ace lingers a moment longer, stony rage written over her face.
Then she steps back, shrugs her shoulders, and folds herself into the body of a hawk. Alyssa has an impression of tawny feathers and a razor-sharp beak, the beating of powerful wings, and then she's gone: a dark silhouette against the lilac sky, shrinking rapidly as she glides away over the treetops.
Silence settles in her wake. Morpheus tosses his glaive aside with a contemptuous scoff and turns. A single stride carries him to Alyssa's side, where he kneels, his deep black eyes intent on her face. "How are you hurt?"
Alyssa thinks he should be able to see that perfectly fine, but she swallows the sarcastic answer and says, "Burns from the Pool of Tears. And I cut my knee on something in the bay."
"More than a mere cut, by the look of it," Morpheus murmurs, delicately running a fingertip down her shin. Even that contact, indirect and gentle as it is, makes her knee blaze with pain, and Alyssa lets out a sharp, gasp. He shakes his head. "You're in for a rough night, luv."
"Excuse me," Taelor says, sounding no less hysterical than she did when speaking to the Ace. "But who the hell are you? And—and—"
"Morpheus," he replies, not even bothering to look her way. "Leader of the resistance in these parts. Surely dear Alyssa didn't neglect to mention me? The real question—"
"You killed those people!"
This time, Morpheus does look over his shoulder, catching and holding Taelor's gaze for a few seconds. "Would you rather I had let them drag you to Argine?" he asks. "Left you to the meager mercy of the Queen's guillotine?"
Taelor flushes, and says nothing.
"You oughtn't interrupt unless you've something important to say," Morpheus adds. "It wastes Time, and he doesn't take kindly to that. As I was saying, the real question is: who are you?"
"…Friend of Alyssa's," Taelor mutters.
"Her name's Taelor," Alyssa says, casting her an exasperated glance. "She sort of—fell in with me by mistake."
Morpheus scowls. "That isn't supposed to happen."
"Well, so sorry, but the ground sort of fell—"
He waves her explanation away. "The Rabbit Hole isn't meant to allow more than a single Abovegrounder to pass through it at a time. That it did is only another sign of how far the corruption has spread. Our time grows ever shorter." A shadow passes across his face, and then he shakes it away, replaces it with a grim smile, and flicks his cravat away from his neck with a few quick, tidy movements of his fingers. He leans down to fasten it around Alyssa's knee, a makeshift bandage in navy-blue paisley. The soft fabric stings as it settles over the wound, but Alyssa supposes that's preferable to leaving it exposed. "I've a mouthful of concentrate of the agate bolete with me," he says. "It'll make you small, and I can carry you from here as a moth. My home isn't far from here, as I fly. You, my dear"—he throws another glance at Taelor—"will need to proceed on foot. I'm afraid I didn't anticipate needing a second dose."
"But—"
"Continue east until you see a tower flying blue banners—it's about a mile on—then enter and tell the Owl that Morpheus sent you and you are to be moved to the sanctuary post-haste."
Taelor draws a sharp breath and opens her mouth to protest, but Morpheus adds, "Unless you'd rather stay here and try your luck with the Hearts, of course," and she closes it again with a soft click.
"I thought not," Morpheus murmurs.
He slips a slender hand into the pocket of his leather coat and emerges with a crystal vial the size as Alyssa's pinky, which he uncorks and hands over to Alyssa. By the smell, it's the same stuff she and Taelor drank beneath the Pool of Tears. With a resigned sigh, she tilts the liquid into her mouth and swallows.
As before, her spine collapses like a telescope first, and then there's the rush of air and sensation of falling. Morpheus and Taelor grow to gargantuan size; the scrubby vegetation rockets past her until it looms overhead like a vast, ancient forest.
Then the huge black mass that is all she can see of Morpheus wavers, blinks, folds in on itself, and changes; at her present size, his moth form is big as a carthorse, with vast wings like sails made of black velvet. The swirling wind they stir up as he flutters to the ground just ahead of her nearly blows her off her feet.
He's covered in bristling black fur, which glistens an iridescent blue where the light strikes it; Alyssa's first, ridiculous thought is I'm going to make a mosaic of him when I get back home.
She shakes her head, setting that thought aside, and half-limps, half-crawls up the rounded slope of his back. There's a little hollow right behind the place where his wings attach, and Alyssa gingerly settles herself into it. Vaguely, she remembers reading that it's bad for moths to lose the delicate hairs that cover their bodies, so she's wary of pulling it out—but an exploratory tug reveals that it's much stronger than she expects.
One of his long, furred antennae twitches, as if to warn her, and she presses herself flat against his back and grabs two fistfuls of the soft, silky hair.
The enormous wings snap up. For an instant, she feels encased in some sort of velvety black cocoon, warm fur beneath her and wings enfolding her on all sides; then they beat down and Alyssa yells, half in terror and half in exhilaration, as the force of their acceleration snaps her head back. And then—
And then they're airborne.
His wings billow and undulate, carving through the air and hurling him forward and up, and when Alyssa cranes her neck to see over his wings, she sees the land rolling out beneath them, the treetops of the Frangible Forest shrinking into a mottled patch of green which encroaches on the heath, which unfurls in a rolling sea of purple heather splattered by yellow-orange patches of gorse.
It isn't at all like looking out an airplane window, as Alyssa would've probably imagined it to be if she'd thought about it before they took off. Wind roars past her face and sends her braid streaming behind her like a flag, and the world seems closer and huger than it does from an airplane. Morpheus banks to the left, and she catches a glimpse of Taelor—almost normal in size, from this height, jogging east with a resigned expression on her face.
After a moment, Alyssa becomes aware that she's laughing from the sheer exhilaration of flight, and tries to stop, and then she thinks, Why shouldn't I? and throws her head back and gives herself fully over to the laughter. This is a hundred, a thousand times better than the thrill of popping an ollie on her skateboard.
Morpheus tilts an antenna back and flicks it against her forehead. His voice whispers through her mind, as clear as if he'd spoken aloud: Close your eyes.
"Why?"
We're about to jump, luv, and I'd rather you didn't lose your mind to the screaming horror of it. Even in her thoughts, she can hear the trace of dry amusement in his tone.
Puzzled but obedient, she shuts her eyes.
Morpheus shudders like an airplane caught in a turbulent current of air, and Alyssa yelps as her injured knee jolts and a line of fire streaks through her leg, and—
It all stops.
The sensation of light beyond her closed eyelids. The air rushing past and snatching the breath from her mouth, and the sound of it whistling in her ears. Gone.
Alyssa thinks she screams, but she can't hear that either.
Feelings she'd never even been aware of before vanish: the light pull of air pouring into her throat, the weight of an atmosphere bearing down on her shoulders, the omnipresent strain of her muscles against gravity—
There's nothing nothing nothing except Morpheus's silky fur and the sizzling pain in her knee, and even that feels distant and false, like something out of a dream.
This is what death feels like, she thinks, and this time she knows that her mouth is stretched in a silent, horrified scream.
She has no idea how long it lasts. They seem to hang suspended forever in absolute emptiness while her lungs burn because there's no air to fill them when she tries to inhale, and her skin feels leathery and stiff and dead, and no matter how hard she squeezes her eyes shut, she can never convince herself that it's simple darkness surrounding her.
And then Morpheus rolls, and the world of the living reasserts itself with a slap of cool, damp wind and the piercing sound of her own screams. Alyssa snaps her eyes open again and sobs in relief at the confused blur of color and light that greets her.
It's over. It's over.
Into her thoughts, Morpheus whispers, Well done, luv. You survived the Dark Country. And now we're almost home—look!
She looks.
Her vision clears and she realizes that they're no longer flying over the open heath, but through a long, deep gorge. Dark cliffs sweep up to the left and right, blotting her view of everything save the dusky purple sky directly above. A glittering river snakes through the gorge, and the land between its banks and the stone walls of the gorge looks wild, untamed. Long grass wars with rambling thickets and drooping willow trees; here and there, Alyssa thinks she sees luminous green eyes peering out of the shadows.
Just ahead lies a small copse of trees, coming nearer with every sweep of Morpheus's wings. In a moment, it's beneath them, the treetops racing by so close that Alyssa can see the shape of individual leaves: tear-shaped, pale green, with serrated edges.
A moment more, and Morpheus begins a swift, spiraling descent that carries them through the treetops—
Which dissipate like smoke as they pass, becoming the empty air above a small clearing. Morpheus soars over a stretch of overgrown lawn broken up by curving, shrubby hedges, over an iron table set for tea.
Alyssa looks up and catches her breath.
Ahead of them, rising at the edge of the clearing, stands a tree, a tower—both, she sees as Morpheus's flight carries them closer. Decades or centuries ago, someone had planted a ring of saplings and grafted them all together so they grew enmeshed, and now the trees are braided and woven tightly together. The tower walls ripple with dozens of different shades, different patterns of bark—pale, smooth white melting into craggy brown, fibrous red, orderly grey. Every so often the trunks separate, bending into the shape of windows large and small. Soft, golden light shines through the gaps.
"You live here?" Alyssa whispers.
Aye.
His wings flutter, and he bobs almost in place for a moment, as if to let her savor the sight. The roof of the tower is its own forest, innumerable trees all growing as one and erupting in a magnificent crown of leaves of all sizes, all shapes, all colors.
Then Morpheus angles his wings, and bears them up toward the highest of the tower's many windows. There's a clear note of satisfaction in his tone when he says, Welcome to Rethen House, luv.