With the malevolent wings, the meridians of death,
I have seen you - at the gallows,
I have seen you: it was you,
With your exact science set on extermination,
Without love. You have killed again,
As always, as your fathers killed,
as the animals killed that saw you for the first time.
And this blood smells as on the day
When one brother told the other brother:
"Let us go into the fields."
Forgot, O sons, forget your fathers:
Their tombs sink down in ashes,
Black birds, the wind, cover their heart.
Salvatore Quasimodo
They piled the dead beside the quays of Dominica, dozens atop dozens, and burned them where they lay. Rivulets of gasoline and petrol, spilled lazily across their flesh, ran across their skin and across the cobbled streets, and puddled at his shoes. If he looked down, he could see himself in the oil-slick surface of it: young, and pale, and frightened.
His hair touched his shoulders, wild. His hair hadn't been that long since Jaana had left.
In his dreams, the girl who moved between the corpses had Kasha's face, her dark skin, her bloody clothes and her bruises on her hands. When she raised her head to meet his gaze, he could see that her scar was gone - as were her eyes. Dark, hollow pits stared back, even without eyes amused, and it was the queen who began to laugh as Yegor watched the bodies of his team burn.
There was a raven at his window when he woke, gold butterflies raining through the sky behind it. Yegor watched the corpid, as though daring it to speak, to croak, to lie with a slit tongue dripping arsenic.
"Nevermore," Yegor said softly, and the raven took wing as though startled into a starless sky.
"Come with me," the devil said and she didn't have to think twice.
She was tired of bleeding. She was tired of bruising. She was tired of breaking. She had no tears left - every day she thought the same and every day she proved herself wrong. The world closed in on her, a world of corners and tight spaces. If this was hell, there would be no escape but the one the devil offered her.
And what a handsome devil he was.
This, then, was love.
Minette extended a finger hesitantly to the perfectly symmetrical, perfectly otherworldly golden butterfly that had alighted on the doorknob, aureate wings quivering in the slightest movement of her breath. It felt like silk on her finger, somehow weightless, as though it had been wrought from the very sunlight that streamed through the open balcony doors. She shut her mouth tightly, and tried to stop her heart with a mere thought, for fear of disturbing the creature, so small and wonderful it was, and for the briefest moment she held magic on the very tip of her nail - a tiny, flawless piece of magic.
Kasha dropped something heavy on the table on her way out to the balcony and sent the butterfly spiralling into the air once more. Minette sighed a tired sigh.
"You're showing off," Kasha told Levi, her words careless. He was out on the balcony in early morning cold with the little girl, the one they called Charity, entertaining her with golden butterflies dripping from his teacup and charming little silvery sparrows from out behind her hair. The little girl was trapping them in her small hands, spinning in a cloud of jewel-like insects, tempting tiny birds across the balcony with bits of rotten bread. The arsonist nudged Levi's leg from the balcony so she could sit on it, her back curved, long legs hanging lazily. "Quit showing off."
The soldier didn't even look up from his book, didn't move his hand from the spoon with which he stirred his coffee, but as Minette watched a shroud of the glossy moths and butterflies that cluttered the balcony, hemmed in by invisible glass walls woven of wordless magic, began to settle on Kasha's her shoulders, her head, so that they were woven amongst the inky strands of her hair, a stirring ornament gleaming impossibly. When she moved her head, they caught the light, and the arsonist appeared to burn with all the light of the heavens.
You almost didn't notice the scar.
"And you," Levi said, as Kasha flicked away one of the insects with a blunt nail and Minette winced in sympathy, "are being impatient."
"That can hardly be a surprise to you, volkaya."
"You always surprise me, darling," Levi said, rather theatrically, rather loftily, and then looked a little - well, not quite embarrassed, but something - when he caught Minette watching them, as though he was unaccustomed to being kind and having his kindness witnessed. "I never knew you were so fond of Lawson, Kash. He's not your type."
"My type? You," Kasha said. "Have clearly never seen that boy's..."
"Enough." Levi's smile was brighter than a hundred, a thousand, of his golden falsities, and he directed it at the floor, shaking his head ruefully. Minette had not believed a face as sharp and as cruel and as handsome as his capable of such warmth. She didn't like it. "I don't think I want to hear this."
Kasha's voice was deceivingly innocent, full of impossible honeyed promises. "Oh? My sad behavior feeds your vulture folly. Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger? But oh," And she put a scarred hand to her bruised forehead. "What damnèd minutes tells he o'er, who dotes..."
"Yet doubts, suspects," Levi said, with a tone that suggested victory. Minette laughed and Levi shook his head and knocked on Kasha's bruised, black knee with the book in his hand as he turned to look at her. "New face?" he said to the masked girl.
"Old face," she replied, taken aback at how simply he spoke to her. The iron mask - the burned one, the scarred one, the ugly one, the one she could not remove or alter no matter how much she wished to do so - was firmly in place once more. Yegor had advised her to save her strength, what little magic she possessed, if this could be called magic. And Yegor, Andromeda had muttered under her breath on the way out the door, was never wrong.
"It's nice," Levi said.
Minette smiled.
Kasha laughed. "Lies don't suit you, Fallon." She punctuated her words by flicking away another golden moth from where it clung to her hair.
Minette's smile faded.
Now she could see the sunlight playing on the surface of his tea, shimmering gold and silver in the pale morning, and as she watched another butterfly peeled itself from the puddle of shine and glimmer and fluttered skyward. Levi watched it go, looking thoughtful.
"No," he said. "I don't think they do."
Cappie faded into being at Minette's shoulder, and the masked girl jumped. She didn't think she would ever, ever get used to the way that ghost had of forcing the world to hide her at will. Now she held armfuls of clothes and fabrics, alternately dark and pale. Poor colours, Minette thought - there was no other way of describing them. They simply lacked richness. She was familiar with clothes like these.
"You know," Cappie said lazily, apparently oblivious to the hypocrisy in her words. "That's kind of a waste, isn't it?"
"A waste?" Minette repeated, uncertain.
"The parlour tricks," Cappie said, and Levi smiled and spilled his tea away over the balcony, all the light draining with it.
"I have enough pain to fuel my use," he said calmly, and Kasha caught Minette staring and wondering and she answered an unspoken question.
"Magic is all about sacrifice," Kasha said. "Even I know that much." Levi laughed. "Sometimes that builds slowly - use and use and use your magic knowing that it's eroding something, stealing something, culminating in something awful. And sometimes that's sudden and abrupt and bloody."
"You," the masked girl said suspiciously. "Sound like you know a lot about this."
She wondered what magic Kasha had. Whether they called her the arsonist for that reason - whether she scorched with a touch and burned with her gaze. But Kasha didn't seem the type to indulge in magic.
Kasha shrugged slowly, a thoughtful gesture like she was rolling the knots out of her shoulders. "The crooked man made deals," she said. "Magic is all about deals."
Cappie laughed. "That's a nice way to say it, isn't it?" The ghost looked at Minette, her laugh dying on her face. "Her mother gave her away," she said. "That's what Kasha can't be bothered to tell you. That's why she doesn't use her real name - because her mother traded her in to a monster for a handful of starlight and a string of wishes on a chain."
"I can't fault her," Kasha said. "I couldn't compete with a deal that, could I?"
Levi plucked a golden butterfly from her hair. "No," he agreed sympathetically. "I'd trade you for far less."
When Kasha stuck her tongue out at Levi, Minette was half-surprised to see that it was not forked.
Click click click went Yegor's cane on the floorboards. Funny the effect that could have on a group of arsonists and murderers and ghosts and girls - all turned to seek its source, and they were not disappointed. Yegor moved slowly into the kitchen, a delay borne not of infirmity but of some kind of solemnity, as though his thoughts were heavy enough to drag behind him as lead anchors.
"You can't go out like that," Yegor said to Levi and Kasha, who looked unsurprised at this pronouncement. Minette supposed it made sense: all of Kasha's clothes were torn and dirty and burnt; Levi had given her his soldier's jacket, but it was a bloody, battle-stained one, frayed at the cuffs, the mark of some Zuni garrison on the lapel, buttons missing, like he was a corpse from some long-ago forgotten war risen for some nefarious purpose. No good for blending in. "Mara and Nithya sourced some Honduraguan clothes for you all. If the king knows we're here, then we would do well not to be here as soon as possible. Until then..." He gestured to Cappie with his cane. "Everyone, try to be a little bit more like Achterkamp. We're ghosts now."
Cappie smiled.
"Minette," Yegor said, as the others went out onto the balcony. "Can I speak to you for a moment?"
Minette paused, and could find no reason to say no, and so turned away from Levi and the others as Yegor moved across the kitchen, that same slow, thoughtful movement. She wondered where he had sent Andromeda and Taja - to what fate they had disappeared into the dawn fog, Andromeda wearing knives under her jacket and Taja looking dark and dangerous and wolfish, her eyes like picks. Oliver had departed a few minutes after them, with an expression that suggested blood would follow.
Minette hoped that whatever tasks Yegor assigned them, they would come back with their blood on the right side of their skin.
"I just wanted to say good luck," Yegor said. He had pushed his shirt-sleeves up to his elbows, which looked far more formal than it should have, and Minette abruptly noticed that he was more slender than she had assumed - was lean the right word? He looked like a shadow with a heartbeat, just life-like enough that few questions were asked. He looked sick. With stress? She didn't think Corbeau would recognise the word.
"Do you think I'll need it?"
He folded his arms and turned his head away, a slight smile dancing on the edge of his mouth. "I hope you won't. But I'm a realist." He glanced askew at her. "Are you scared?"
In that moment, Minette was not a liar. "Yes," she said softly.
"I won't let anything happen to you. If anything goes wrong..."
Minette bit her lip and stared at the window. "Please don't say that."
"Levi will be there," Yegor said. "Trust him, even if you don't trust me."
Minette looked at him, for a long, long moment, and could only shake her head, slowly, and swallow back the fear she had almost managed to quell. "Tell me," she said. "Tell me that you need me to do this. That this is the only way. That it'll make a difference."
Yegor never hesitated when he lied. "Yes," he said. "It will be the difference between victory and failure, Minette."
She shut her eyes, and drew in a deep breath. Yegor put a hand lightly on her shoulder, hand gloved, she noticed, and nodded. "Remember," he said. "Midnight."
"Midnight," she agreed, and opened her eyes.
Yegor nodded, and moved away. Minette very nearly asked him where he was going, what he would be doing while all the rest of his little chess pieces scattered to do his bidding, but realised that she was unlikely to receive an answer, and even more unlikely to be told the truth. His shadow sloped across the corridor as he moved back into the depths of the apartment, where the sunlight did not reach; the little girl they called Charity watched him go, her eyes darting.
"Cappie," Minette said, heading out onto the balcony, and then shut her mouth abruptly and averting her eyes upon realising that Levi was shrugging on a shirt and wearing very little underneath. She didn't need a mirror to tell that her face, mask or otherwise, was flaring rose and camellia.
Kasha's laughter was not friendly. The arsonist was peeling off another layer of thin, smoke-stained shirts, and Minette could see now that as slender as the girl had seemed before, her scarred, stitched, sutured skin clung to her bones more tightly than she would have ever realised. The crooked man's daughter seemed unconcerned about Levi or Cappie's presence and her own bare skin, as she knelt by the pile of clothes and began to sort through it to find a new shirt for herself.
"Yeah?" Cappie half-turned towards her, clearly unconcerned about changing into the garb of the locals. With her gift, no one could blame her.
"I'm ready to go," Minette said. "Whenever you are."
The ghost girl nodded. "No point in waiting, right?"
She slipped past Minette, quick and quiet, and Minette was about to follow when Levi said, "Be careful."
Minette glanced, surprised, at him; she was glad to see he had a shirt on now, and was buttoning it, a scatter of rings on his fingers flashing in the gold of dawn. His sunlight butterflies had begun to wither and die in the sky, raining as dying light around them - Kasha held her hands out to gather them as they fell, and closed her fingers over great handfuls of them, crushing and crunching like autumn leaves.
"Careful?" Minette repeated.
He didn't smile. "Careful," he confirmed, and then he and all the rest of the colour drained from the world as Cappie's fingers closed over Minette's.
"He's going to make you soft, girl."
She was stitching his wounds shut, then, her hands still and steady and warm, light across his bruises, feather-light. He got the impression she would have sewn his very mouth and eyes shut if the fancy struck her. He got the impression she still might return him to the pyre if the old man told her to do so.
"No," she said. "I don't think he will."
This, then, was friendship.
There was magic, and there was magic. There were cheap parlour tricks, magicians follies performed on the streets and in the markets, sleight of hand with cards and sheets and smoke, illusions of the mind and illusions of the eyes - and there were golden butterflies raining from the sky, voices caught in wooden boxes, shadows reeled out on kite strings to follow and to listen, girls who breathed smoke and coughed sparks.
Everyone in Illea knew the two, and knew the difference.
There was magic and there was magic.
Unfortunately, James Lawson dealt only in the first kind.
He couldn't complain. Business was good - no matter how much real sorcery existed in the world, it was so often subtle and woven, less magic and more peculiarity, an uncertainty and an ambiguity that hovered at the edge of your mind, less than convinced it was magic rather than just some skill or trick of the light.
No, sometimes people needed a bit of falsity and showmanship, to remind them what a lie looked like.
Well, James was happy to indulge them. What other way had he of whiling away time spent waiting for the rebellion to reach out for him, to find some role for him to play, some part for him to take, to offer him some chance at avenging the girl for whom a false eye marked his skin, to offer him some taste of resistance and rebellion and rising, to offer him some shot at the king? It was just as well to work the streets, to earn some little bit of pocket for himself, to pretend not to notice the way the approving eyes of local girls followed him when he moved, the way they smiled when he did, the way they looked away when he looked at them.
Honduraguan girls were not known for being subtle, it had to be said.
But they were pretty. They wore silks and painted their hands with henna and indikón, dyed their hair bloody with kumkuma and bloodless with ammonia, dripped gold and silver from their throats and ears, and some of them had pockets heavy with gold, so sometimes when he caught them looking he returned the look and enticed them closer and whispered charming words and well.
Of course, it didn't work on every girl. The universe, it seemed, liked to remind him of that fact at frequent intervals.
"Persona non grata," he declared lazily, spilling coins between his fingers.
"Go fuck yourself," Kasha said in reply.
Her shadow, cast across him, was long and very dark; her hair was escaping in loose tendrils from the knot she had woven, a dark bruise blossoming on one hollow cheekbone, something feral and chaotic about the light in her eyes. He remembered thinking she was beautiful when they first met, despite the scar, despite the rumors.
"I heard Dominica burned," James said, and Kasha shrugged.
"Would you believe me if I told you I didn't start it?"
"Are you kidding me?" James laughed. "I bet you ran like hell was on your heels."
She was not, after all, a brave girl.
"It may as well have been."
She offered her hand, callused and scarred, engine oil worn into the crescents of her nails so deep it might never wash out, and he took it and stood while she watched the market. This was not the night market of the evening, where true magic was sold. There were farmers here, merchants, musicians. A more mundane variety of the same.
"So where's Fallon?"
Kasha's gaze, slow and lazy and languid, flicked slowly across James, her eyes sly. It burned where it alighted upon his skin, her gaze. "What makes you think I need Levi?"
"He's your shadow, isn't he?"
"He's my friend."
"You don't have friends."
"No," she agreed wistfully. "But he does."
He doubted that. What friends could the big bad wolf lay claim to? When the moon was fickle and Corbeau smiled with bits of lies between his teeth and the arsonist dripped secrets from her lips like wine, who could you trust?
James had made the right choice, forging his own path.
"What do you want, Kasha?"
She shrugged and turned away as he moved, keeping pace with each of his steps, walking backwards to catch his gaze. "I don't want anything."
James arched an eyebrow. "Nothing?"
"Well," she said, and her look took on a new significance. "I didn't say that."
James smirked. "Buy me dinner first."
Kasha's smile grew wide and rather wicked, a thing of edges and angles, no softness in it. "If anyone's going to buy you dinner, it'll be Corbeau."
"Oh," James said, and stopped walking. Kasha wavered for a moment and cocked her head, dark eyes glittering like her sharp, sharp teeth. Dark hair fell over her shoulder, like spilt ink. She said, "Oh?"
"Oh," James repeated. "Oh, no. I don't think so." He held up his hands in mock surrender and shook his head - he was tall enough, two inches taller than Levi Fallon, that he had to look down at the crooked man's daughter as she mimicked him and arched a coal-dark eyebrow. "I'm smart enough," he said. "To stay away from the Corbeaus. All of them, any of them. You should be, too."
"You're one to talk," Kasha said. "I'm not the one who signed up for the crow's crusade."
James blinked. "What?"
The girl shrugged again. She was wearing clothes too large for her - a big woollen jumper, a man's garment, and a white shirt marked with a sooty thumbprint and a scarf stained with smoke. James wondered whose jumper it was. Whether she had stolen it or picked it up off a bedroom floor. Knowing her, maybe it was both. "I'm no one's soldier," Kasha said. "I'm no one's pawn."
"You're here, aren't you?"
"Not for long. I didn't stay in Dominica, and I'm not staying here." She raised one shoulder in a gesture of apathy. "You tell me what I want to hear," she said, her voice low and sweet. "And Yegor gets what he wants and I'm gone. First train north, and never coming back."
North, huh? Not that north told him much - everything was northern to Honduragua. Dominica lay southerly, but Dominica was burning, and infested with hell.
"That," James said. "Is hardly going to persuade me to tell you want to hear, is it?"
Kasha angled her eyes at nothing and sighed out a chuckle. "Yeah?"
A step closer. "Well," he said. "It wouldn't be in my interests to push you away would it?" He caught her wrist and she let him and for a moment he thought he might have succeeded.
"Is that so?" She took another step closer. Another laugh. "Well, I've never really been the persuading sort, Lawson."
And he glimpsed the wolf in the corner of his eye.
And he saw the scar again.
And he remembered whose daughter she was.
"What," James said, and dropped her wrist, "Do you want to know?"
"Annabelle," Kasha said, and James very nearly flinched. Of all the words, of all the names, of all the sounds in the world, only that one could wound. Only that one could remind him of what used to be: of a time before streets and false magic and girls and rebellions and Selection after Selection after Selection.
"What about her?"
"Your sister," Kasha said. "What star was she born under?"
Her eyes were innocent, and her smile was wicked.
"Funny," James spat. "You're really Martinko's, aren't you?"
"So they tell me. Now you tell me. What star?"
Her dark eyes, one near-black and the other wounded and white, looked him right in his mismatched pair. He almost didn't want to look into hers. He had heard stories about men and women who spent too long meeting the crooked man's gaze, and were blinded, or forgot how to breathe, or never looked away again, not until they starved to death. Snake eyes, Annabelle would have called them.
Maybe stories were only stories.
"Alula Borealis," he said softly, and she nodded. "Is that it?"
"Yegor has plans for you," she said, and glanced over her shoulder at Fallon, who moved slowly over towards them from where he had been standing, and waiting, and watching.
If Kasha was a viper, he was a wolf, and that made for an odd, not entirely comfortable pairing. Sometimes James thought they weren't very close or fond of one another at all, only acted so out of habit - even now, Kasha stepped away as Fallon approached, and kept her dark eyes on James as he accepted the sheaf of paper the ex-soldier offered him.
He looked at it.
"What am I looking at?" he asked and Kasha flicked a strand of hair over her shoulder with a shrug.
"Fuck if I know," she said breezily. "I'm done with this nonsense. Finished. You boys can play your games of gunpowder and crowns; I'm going home."
He looked up, at that, a little taken aback and distracted from the mess of runes and symbols marked down on the paper, something between a language of magic and the ravings of a lunatic. And an eye. A dark, inky symbol of an eye staring back. A familiar eye.
"You're crazier than I thought." James shook his head. "Corbeau has his hooks in you now," he said. "He'll reel you back."
"He'll try."
"Kiss for goodbye?"
Kasha adjusted her cuffs.
"Oh, James," she said softly. "I don't kiss dead men."
She turned and walked away. Her shadow was much more sinister than she, long and slender, and if she were any other girl she would have just blended in with the rest. But James kept his eyes on her, nonetheless.
He almost didn't notice the wolf moving past him.
"You know," Fallon said. "She has a boyfriend."
James swept his tongue along his teeth and smiled a trickster's smile, broad and white-toothed. "And I bet that just kills you, huh, Levi?"
Fallon didn't smile - that bastard never did - but he turned and kept walking. He was tall enough that it was easy for him to catch up with Kasha in only a few steps; she turned back to smile at him and take his sleeve, her dark hair splitting sunlight into spectrums along the strands, her scar stark and ugly in the sunlight, and James had to turn away.
Beauty like that brought trouble. The Fabulists had the right idea.
"No riddle was ever told worth solving."
She cupped her hands, small hands, the worn hands of a child, and the old man poured starlight into them, so that gold dripped through her fingers, so that her nails were wreathed in silver, so that her skin stained damask and rufescent. His voice was soft, low, husky, a fire-raiser's voice. He didn't have a name. He didn't need one. She didn't need one either. He folded her fingers in over that light, and told her, very quietly:
"Whoever told you otherwise is a liar."
This, then, was family.
