These are outsiders, always. These stars—

these iron inklings of a January,

whose light happened

thousands of years before

our pain did; they are, they have always been

outside history.

They keep their distance. Under them remains

a place where you found

you were human, and

a landscape in which you know you are mortal:

those rivers, those roads clotted as

firmaments with the dead.

How slowly they die

as we kneel beside them, whisper in their ear.

And we are too late. We are always too late.

Eavan Boland


Midnight came more quickly than anyone could have dreamed, with the striking of the clocks above Honduragua rumbling thunder-like through the dark clouds that had come to hang low above the spires and wooden roofs of the city. Mindful of Yegor's strict instructions, Minette had locked herself into one of the spare bedrooms with ten minutes to spare - which gave her plenty of time to examine the wounded mahogany of the empty shelves and the threadbare blankets strewn about before she felt the threads of her borrowed skin began to dissolve and fall apart.

Beneath the mask lay another, of iron, of gold, of steel, one Minette could not alter but one which fragmented and broke apart come midnight nevertheless and left her as herself. Recognisably and rarely so, pale and pretty, blonde and blemishless, a girl of stars and dreams, a girl who could not exist but in the midnight hour, and she savoured the reflection in the mirror for as long as it lasted - which was not long at all.

A curse was a curse was a curse. The false face grew again like rust, slowly and gradually - the burns appeared first, blooming into red blemishes across her nose and cheekbones as though like one of the Fabulists she had taken a branding iron to her own face. Then the scarification, long thick ridges of callused tissue stark white and anaemic. The hair tangled, matted, grew strings of clumped dirt even as she watched. It was very nearly beautiful, she thought, almost. But it was not beautiful - and nor, now, was she.

There were only two, perhaps three, rooms in this little safe house, and with so many new faces and voices about and the promise of more to come she felt almost uncertain setting her music box beside the bed, but she did. She wound it and opened it, and listened to her mother's voice, soft and wordless, until her iron mask was firmly back in place and the peal of midnight had dissipated into the stars above Honduragua. Minette looked herself in the mirror, and remembered the sheer disgust on Levi's face upon glimpsing beneath her mask - and she was growing brave, but not brave enough. Not enough to face everyone else in this little rebellious enclave looking at her like that. Levi would have to get used to it; eventually, so would the rest.

Minette could only steal the faces of those she had seen. Usually that meant people she had met, people she had spoken to, people she had seen move and smile and speak. Yesterday's mask had been the very first time she had attempted a replication from photograph alone, and she thought the seams had been very obvious. So she chose another instead - dark skin, wild corkscrew hair, big soft eyes like a doe. A pretty, unassuming face. Innocent.

Once her mask was in place, she opened the door again. The place was in hush, as though it had been waiting for her to exit her room - and then the silence was broken by Andromeda's voice, low and guttural, agonised.

"It's bad," Nithya was saying. The street medic had been in the back room with the injured woman when midnight had struck but now she was hovering at the threshold of the kitchen, uncertain. "Worse than I thought..." Her heart-shaped face was all creased with the etchings of anxiety. "Infection," she was saying. "And a lot of blood."

Minette moved closer, padding quietly down the hallway. Taja was standing in the centre of the kitchen like Nithya's words were an assault, her arms folded, and Levi was silently shuffling a deck of cards, sitting at the narrow wooden table, wounded by tiny knicks and burns like someone had attacked it, that dominated the dining area. No Cappie. No Yegor. Maybe, soon, no Andromeda.

Nithya sounded resigned, and rather as though she resented speaking to Taja at all. "I've done all I can."

Taja was silent, one long finger gently testing the edge of a safety pin she had removed from the inside of her jacket. Then, very abruptly - too abruptly for Minette to perceive the motion until it was complete - she stabbed the pin into the flesh at the inside of her wrist, strong enough to drive two inches of iron into her skin and produce a weak, watery tear from the corner of one brown eye.

Minette almost yelped in abject sympathy. Nithya flinched, although her face suggested this was hardly a new occurence. Blood welled up at the crease of Taja's wrist, hot and dark.

"Back in a second," Taja said, and went into the back room.

Nithya exhaled through her teeth, an irritated, fearful gesture, and looked at Minette with the same dislike. So many of the rebel's so-called allies detested the very existence of a resistance - they hated the fact it was necessary at all, they hated what the bloody men and women did in the name of freedom, and they hated that the war never seemed to be won. Minette thought Nithya was probably one such ally. She might set their bones and stitch their wounds and cure their ailments, and she might support the rebellion, but she didn't like the rebels, didn't like what they had become. Not one bit.

"Tell Yegor," Nithya said, her voice low. "I did my best."

Minette glanced at Levi, but Nithya's eyes were fixed on her. The masked girl nodded, uncertainly. "I'll tell him."

Nithya moved quickly, grabbing her doctor's bag, a battered satchel, from the counter and disappearing out the door as though she feared the king himself might be waiting outside to catch her. She left a faint scent of perfume hanging in the air behind her - blue lobelia and hyssop, Minette thought, piercingly sweet, as sweet as sugar tasted from the edge of a knife.

Andromeda made a strangled sound in the back room and Minette started as Cappie faded into being beside her, carrying a bottle of something dark purple and pungent in one hand, and carrying a little girl in her other. Minette found herself staring at the child - so sudden and abrupt was her presence. She was half-asleep, her hair tied back in a tangled braid that looked as though she had worn it for perhaps a week or more, her clothes a little ragged like she had come fresh from the streets. She observed Minette sleepily for a moment, and then set her head back rather resolutely on Cappie's shoulder, looking resentful.

"Taja's helping," the ghost girl said. It wasn't a question. "Ooh, Yegor won't be happy." She threw the bottle to Levi, who caught it in one hand without looking up from his cards. "You done in the room, Minette? I'm a little sleepy. Might as well get some rest before Yegor gets us all killed, huh?" Cappie looked up at the ceiling as though expecting to see stars there, and nodded firmly, before heading into the bedroom Minette had just vacated, and shutting the door firmly behind her. The child had not spoken.

Minette wondered if Cappie sometimes faded in her sleep as well - if she found herself being eroded away at midnight, as Minette did, and if she sometimes lost her edges, the shape of herself. Was it hard, once you had lost yourself, to find the person you had been before?

She thought it must be.

Taja's face was dirty with tear streaks when she reappeared in the kitchen, but she didn't seem inclined to grieve, to act sorrowful - she took two small shot glasses out of the cupboard and sat opposite Levi with her boots on the chair opposite, dropping the glasses on the table and shooting Minette a sharp look. "Want some?" She seemed at once irritated and tired, aloof and friendly. It was an odd combination.

Levi uncorked the bottle and started to pour. The drink was even darker out of the bottle - closer to black than purple, like snake's venom. Minette shook her head. Levi looked at her, then, for the first time, as though her movement had caught his eye, as though they were meeting for the first time. He must have got used to her false face; the corners of his lips twitched, an almost smile, a far cry from the disregard he had shown her that evening. Minette didn't feel quite so nervous then about moving closer to take a seat as the kitchen clock ticked the minutes away until dawn.

Taja leaned forward as Levi started silently to deal once more, his hands quick and sure as he split the deck between himself and her, two wolves playing, one Yegor's tame hound, the other big and bad and offering Minette a slight smile when he found her watching him. She didn't understand this game - she wondered if rebels always played by their own rules. There was near total silence - wolves, she supposed, didn't need to speak. Occasionally, one or the other would say a single word - horseman or cannon, something vaguely militariastic and the other would shake their head and sigh as they handed the other a card. They drank between deals. Levi refilled their glasses every time they emptied. He finished his glass before Taja, always. Within two or three games, the bottle was drained, but neither looked as though they were anything less than stone-cold sober.

Minette found herself moving closer, trying to somehow divine the code by which this game was played, inclined forward in her seat. Without looking at her, Levi said, his voice wry, "Keep a gamester from the dice, and a good student from his book, and it is wonderful."

"Lecturing someone else about gambling," Taja said, rubbing a card with her thumb as she considered the spread across the table. "Know what that makes you, Fallon? A hypocrite. Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all. "

"Few," Levi replied. "Love to hear the sins they love to act. Anyone have dice? We could play a game of liar's."

Taja flicked her eyes up at him. "You're only trying to change the game because I have the ace, Fallon."

"Only a fool plays a game he knows he'll lose," Levi replied. "And speaking of fools..."

"No."

"I know the smell of a grave, Sweeney."

Minette almost held her breath.

Taja turned her attention back to her cards. "Why should I know? He doesn't tell me anything. He doesn't need to."

"Need to know basis?" Minette glanced at Levi who shrugged.

"I doubt we could understand Yegor's mind even if he told us what he was thinking. Alright, Sweeney. Five red, two black, you have the ace."

He dealt again, and someone knocked at the door. In the very same moment, Taja and Levi went still. Listening. Watching. Waiting.

Two knocks. Three, four, five. A pattern. Like a heart-beat.

Taja gave Minette a sharp nod, and the masked girl rose from the table to open the door. The girl waiting behind it looked as though she was dying, almost-dead, already dead and still standing only through sheer tenacity and strength of will. She raised her head to stare, wild-eyed, into Minette's false eyes.

Minette found herself staring into a broken mirror. The same face she had worn the day before, a mask with a crack running the length of it, through an eye blackened with bruises and a swollen lower lip. Skin had been scraped from the high, hollow cheekbone, leaving flesh red and raw.

Taja was at Minette's shoulder in a second, and the girl whose face Minette had worn spoke to her as she said, her tongue bloody, "They know. The king knows."


Honduragua woke late and languid, so wild were its nights, that the streets were empty despite the warmth of the early dawn; Oliver found he rather enjoyed the silence. It was a far cry from Angeles, and all of its chaos and constant, cruel motion. Here, one could hear their own breath, see it hanging in front of them, be assured that it was their footsteps only that they heard and their shadows only that they saw. All the magic dissipated come four or five in the morning; it belonged to the midnight, to the wild scatter of stars like thrown dice, to the darkness and the flickering light of the revels.

It was still dark. He had arrived in the province in the deepest, darkest part of the night and little light had spilled across the sky to change that in the hour or so it had taken him to move from the borders towards the heart of the city, where the rest of his team waited. He moved quickly, travelled light - he could always find new weapons in Honduragua if it came to that. And Yegor's note seemed to promise that it would.

Three days.

Oliver had been waiting long enough, and three days ought to be nothing, a fraction of a fraction of the time he had patiently awaited his vengeance, but the closer they drew towards the hour the more impatient he found his thoughts becoming, the more frantic for action his nerves grew. He was ready. He was ready. He was ready, so why wait three days?

Move now. Strike now. Burn now.

Adelaide deserved that much, didn't she?

He would have been an idiot to think that Yegor hadn't chosen his position without knowing what that role would mean. Watching the Selection - watching every single one of those girls walk into that palace - and knowing that each was Adelaide and that Adelaide had been each, scared and alone and walking to her death. Had Yegor believed he needed that motivation to sharpen his need for vengeance, to whet his anger and keep him waiting? Yegor had been wrong. As though Oliver would ever forget what the king and his hunger had done to his older sister. As though his hatred would ever dissipate from the fire in his veins.

The safe house glowed forth from the dark, the copper verdigris glowing like a ghastly thing in the gloom, something diseased or rotten, wounded doors on shattered balconies resembling broken teeth. Broken glass crunched underfoot; some merchants had abandoned stalls on the sides of the street, but their wares had turned to ash after midnight. Oliver ran his fingers through the thick dark sinders and pushed open the door to the safe house.

A narrow flight of stairs led up to the apartment, which glowed with wan light made staccato by passing shadows. In the flickering light, Oliver realised that there was a little girl sitting on the third step from the landing, knees drawn to her chin, staring down the steps, lips moving slightly as though singing to herself.

He had got the address wrong. He must have. Or did this safe house belong to some sympathetic family, some benefactor and his wife and children, with rebels hiding in false walls and under the beds like childhood monsters when the guards came knocking?

"Hello," Oliver said to the girl. "What are you doing out here?"

She observed him solemnly, as though deciding whether or not he was worth speaking to, whether he counted as stranger. He supposed a girl like this accustomed to strange men with blood on their hands often dropping by during the night. He added, "Is Yegor up there?" and gestured up the stairs, which seemed to make up her mind.

"He told me to wait out here."

"He did?"

She nodded, big eyes serious, her lips uncertain as to whether she would smile or cry. "Because of the crooked girl. He said he didn't want her to put the evil eye on me. So I'm waiting out here until she goes."

"The crooked girl?"

"With the scar."

That wasn't a good sign. That could not, conceivably, be a good sign. Because as little as Oliver knew of Yegor's plans for the days and nights ahead, and that was very little indeed, he knew that they would not involve the crooked man's daughter, the liar, the arsonist. Kasha brought destruction in her wake, and sometimes that was useful, but often it was not, and her very face was a reminder of what she was capable of and where her priorities lay. Oliver had met her once. He had not spoken to her. She hadn't so much as looked at him. But he had known what she was.

One monster recognizes another.


A corpse is a corpse is a corpse. That's what Yegor had always known - it was part of being a Corbeau. One set of bones was rather like the next, once the soul had been well and thoroughly shaken from them. One skin was like another. Faces tended to look the same without life in them.

But something nevertheless fascinated him about Adelaide Tyrrell. Not the corpse, not the girl, but the way in which the girl had become the corpse. The Selection killed, true, but how? No Selected girl ever returned from the palace, but why? The queen was the only one ever seen again, and Yegor found himself staring at photos of Adelaide's open, staring eyes and asking himself what, exactly, had killed her.

That was all he had - photos. Oliver would be arriving soon. Yegor was quick and Yegor was clever, but Yegor was neither quick nor clever enough to think of an excuse for having his sister's carcass in the safe house should Oliver stumble across it. It would hear his blood, Yegor knew. People would die, Yegor knew. Well, people would die anyway - Yegor just didn't plan on being one of them. So Taja had stowed the cadaver and Yegor had locked himself in his room and now he asked himself why, why, why.

The night had grown weary of being night while he asked himself this question. Taja had come to the door perhaps two hours ago - sweet, mercurial, dangerous Taja - to call through the door and offer tea, something to eat, fresh air, and Yegor had been so lost in his thoughts he had not realised he had not answered her until she had gone away again. Well, Taja was accustomed to being treated like that. She was one of the revolutionary girls, but a pale facsimile of the same - her eyes were not as bright, her heart was not as passionate. Not like Andromeda, who burned with the sheer righteousness of revolution. Not like Cappie, who wore her sureness on her sleeve and he certainty on her collar.

No, Taja fought because Yegor told her to fight.

Earlier, when they had carried the bleeding, dying Andromeda in from the cold air, Taja had gone to heal her and Yegor had told her not to. To see if she would listen, perhaps. She had listened. She had left Andromeda to her screams, and she had left with Yegor for a graveyard, and if she had thought Yegor oblivious to the way she looked at him...

Well, then Taja was more a fool than Yegor had ever been.

But useful.

He left his pen to the desk and stood, staring at the photos for a moment - at the dead girl and her eyes - before he carefully slid them into the hidden pocket sewn into the interior of his coat and moved across the room to unlock the door. Oliver would be here by now. Andromeda would be up by now. Kasha would be talking by now.

"Sinodie was there." The smoky, venom-laced voice of the crooked man's daughter was soft, conjuring thought of arsenic, of hemlock; as Yegor moved into the kitchen, he caught sight of the dark-haired girl sitting on the counter beside the stove and looking malevolent, her bruised knees bare and a silent Levi bandaging her left hand. Her dark hair hung in damp tendrils about her angular face, and she looked at Yegor as he entered, her eyes hard.

Cruelty and selfishness in those eyes, although she hid it well enough. Yegor didn't think she looked at anyone the way Taja looked at him.

"I thought they sent her north," Andromeda snapped with an accusing tone.

"They must have sent her back," Taja shot back, just as quickly. Taja always did choose sides quickly. She tended to defend what was hers. Yegor liked that.

Yegor caught Kasha's eye. Her smile broadened, sharp teeth apparent, and she spoke to him when she spoke: "and the prince."

Levi's hands stilled on Kasha's, but he said nothing - it was Cappie, looking up from the pot of tea she was brewing by the window, who said mildly, "I didn't think he went with the raids..."

Little green Minette said, wearing a more original face this time, that blurted: "the prince?"

"The prince gets into your head," Oliver said. "Devours your thoughts, spews nightmare into the spaces left behind..."

"But the queen," Kasha said. "The queen will rip your heart out."

There was something devastatingly final about the way she said that.

"We won't have to worry about you, so, Karga," Yegor said, and if that name drew her ire she did well to hide it. "Did he get into your head, then?"

For a moment he thought she would make her ersatz-father proud and lie as she usually did, but with a tightening of the tendons by her jaw and a curl of her fingers, she shrugged. "He did," she said. "There wasn't much to get into."

No. Yegor Corbeau had been certain of that in particular. No one knew more than they ought, more than they needed to know. And Kasha, with her head full of lies, needed to know little indeed.

"Better than getting into your heart," Taja said from the doorway.

She had a tremendously dour tone to her voice that made Yegor wonder if one of her bad days was drawing down over her, a black veil that would construct and choke and obliterate. If so, he seemed to have the only one in the room to notice.

With a sly flicker of his eyes, Oliver Tyrrell spoke - to Taja, to Yegor, to whoever was listening. "This is it, then?"

Yegor couldn't blame him for the slightly sardonic tone in his voice - it was a motley crew indeed assembled, hardly inspiring confidence in the feat that faced them. Taja had her head cocked at an angle, leaning in the doorframe; Andromeda and Minette were sitting in wooden chairs at the wooden table, the former's arms folded and the latter's hands knotted on her lap; Oliver was standing by the window, as though ready for a quick escape. Cappie moved quietly between sink and table with a pot of tea and Levi went to pour himself a cup, Kasha's blood forming dark red crescents beneath his nails. With a slight self-deprecating shrug, Yegor joined him.

"Yes," he said with a smile, and leaned against the table with his arms folded. "This is it."

Minette was still looking at Kasha, but Oliver was looking at Andromeda. "And she is..."

"The muscle," Andromeda said with a slight smirk.

"So you're a spare," Kasha said, in a darkly delighted tone, and Andromeda's expression darkened significantly.

"Watch your tongue, crooked girl," the red-haired woman said dangerously. "Or lose it."

Levi didn't look up from his tea. His tone was mild. "Don't talk to Kasha like that."

Andromeda's tongue could be as sharp as her spear, which was why Yegor interrupted her before she could snap out a reply and spoke very quickly indeed.

"We have three days," he said, very calmly, and took a lazy sip of his tea while all eyes turned to him. Call him what you would - a revolutionary, a soldier, a killer - but he played well to an audience. "Three days before we have very little time at all."

Cappie said, cautiously, "We have to wait three days?"

Astute girl, that one. She hid herself from the world and watched it all go by, untouchable. Yegor nodded. "We have to wait," he agreed. "But I have plenty to keep you busy. Valour..."

"My mission was a success," Andromeda said quickly, sparks of her bruised pride from Kasha's barbs making her voice even harsher than usual.

"I don't question that," Yegor said, and was rewarded with a slight smirk. "I've arranged a meeting with Apemios Collins at his estate - Cappie's going to get Minette in and out without being seen. While they do, I want you and Taja to head over to Rook's Avenue, find a rooftop somewhere for us to plant Levi come Saturday."

"They had Sidonie yesterday," Taja said, irritated. "They'll have her on Saturday."

"We can handle Gaëlle Sidonie and her pretty moving pictures," Andromeda said, defiantly.

"If we do this right," Oliver noted. "We won't have to."

Yegor nodded. He reached into his jacket and pulled the sheet of paper from the pocket he had sewn there - for a gun, for a key, for secrets. He held it out between two fingers to Levi. "James Lawson has moved back to Honduragua," he said. "Doing parlor tricks in the square and flirting with local girls. Maybe you and the arsonist could go and catch up."

"James Lawson," Levi said. He took the page, folded it without reading it, and stuck it into his back pocket. "He was sweet on you once upon a time, wasn't he, Kash?" He sounded as amused as Yegor had ever heard him - if Levi was all things gasoline, Kasha was a lit match. The wolf of Bonita was never quite as alive as when he was with the crooked man's daughter. Yegor hadn't yet decided if that was a good or bad thing.

Kasha was picking at loose threads in the knee of her jeans, her smile small. She still had blood staining the crease of her knuckles. "Was he? I don't recall."

"Kasha," Yegor said. "Has a habit of leaving broken men and boys in her wake. They don't realise she's utterly heartless until it's far too late, you see."

"I'll keep that in mind," Oliver said with a charming cockiness to his tone, and Kasha's glance at him was slow and languid and more than a little bit derisive. As though as a challeng, Oliver held that gaze and Yegor could almost see the thought flirting across his mind to use his honeyed words, to charm this heartless girl and prove her nothing more than as human as the rest of them, but the moment passed and Kasha returned to her bandages and Oliver looked at Yegor and said, "Three days."

"Three days," Yegor agreed. "Three days and we shall spill first blood - and then, Tyrrell, you may drink your fill."