After the battle, many new ghosts cry,
The solitary old man worries and grieves.
Ragged clouds are low amid the dusk,
Snow dances quickly in the whirling wind.

- Du Fu


Taja's voice was the merest spectre of a sound, drifting like cold fog across the rooftop as she moved sinously, bonelessly, as though she had no need for the likes of gravity or balance, as though she were moving about on wires and the divine will of the moon itself.

There was no moon visible tonight, wreathed as it was in impenetrable charcoal clouds that had obscured the sky from one horizon to another, neatly veiling the stars. But women like Taja had no need for things as mundane as light by which to move.

"You see them?"

Andromeda's hair was a will-o-the-wisp in the shadows that swallowed the spires of Honduragua, and just like those ghostly fireflies she seemed to promise destruction to any who followed her as she wavered on the edge of the platform and turned her spear in her hand. The tip of the deadly weapon should have gleamed, but there was not enough spare light in the dull early morning to waste on such trivialities. "Not yet." Her voice was not soft, but it was quiet - the muted crack of a champagne flute on marble, Taja thought.

Taja crouched, staring so intently at the street mired in gloom that spots began to float before her eyes, could catch absolutely no glimpse of either Levi or their adversaries. Then again, she hadn't seen Levi all day. Taja trusted Yegor to know what he was doing, what his team was doing, but a splinter of thought in her mind told her that maybe Levi had done the cowardly thing, the uncharacteristic thing, the smart thing and cut and run with the arsonist to the home of the crooked man - to hide in a crypt and wait out the war so that they could sift through the ash and cinders of the society left behind after Yegor and his band of fools had fallen and failed in their task.

Let them, she thought fiercely. Let all of them run. The king could only have one heart, and Taja rarely missed, so if she was the last one standing, willing to fight, then let it be. Let it be. She would let it be.

But Yegor wouldn't let it come to that.

Andromeda's movement on the rosa corssa tiles which paved the rooftops of the wild city awoke Taja from her reverie, and although she knew there had been no change, she still swept her eyes down among the scene before her. Oliver might have believed himself invisible at the window half a block down, still and silent with a sniper rifle aimed firmly at the cobblestones, but Taja saw all.

Taja always saw all.

She tensed her fingers over the arrow she had notched in her elegantly curved bow, and readied herself for quick and certain movement. She knew Oliver was doing the same.

She hated that it had come to this.

The sun had begun to bleed across the horizon, absent one second and present the next, and she shrunk back as though in fear of it as it threatened to touch the rooftops. Taja was more comfortable in the moonlight. She always had been. This time, the twilight of dawn, was unpleasant – neither here nor there, grey like the world Cappie seemed to inhabit with only the occasional tenuous flash of light that could not be trusted, could not be relied upon.

But the prince's entourage moved only at these times, between day and night. The Selection dwelled only within these hours. That was key. They moved in the wake of the sun, a step into the shadows, and Taja knew that Yegor's crew were not the only to acknowledge that fact.

It was a rickshaw that appeared at the corner of the street and moved slowly down the street. Taja had half-expected the men who carried it to be faceless men, skeletons with the skin flayed from them, living corpses like those that were rumoured to guard the Selected girls within the palace. But they were just men, men clad in the silver and gold uniform of the Selection.

The curtains were drawn on the rickshaw. A shadow moved between them, small. Minette, in the face of another.

Taja rarely doubted Yegor, his plans and his schemes, but on this occasion she hoped that Minette would have the sense to die quickly if it came to that.

"Where's the prince?" Andromeda murmured. Oliver must have been thinking the same; he moved, a half-there shade in the window, and readjusted his scope.

"He'll be here," Taja murmured.

A carriage followed the rickshaw, similarly veiled, pulled by dark horses with fine, delicate faces. A girl perched on the roof, her legs knotted beneath her, slim and willowy and a little taller than Taja had expected from the stories. Her dirty blonde hair was thin, her skin approaching porcelain, and although Taja knew the girl to be in her late teens, she appeared far younger, younger even than Kasha.

It took a moment for Taja to spot the pale gold shackles which bound Gaelle Sidonie to the roof of the carriage, but there they were. They looped her wrists and her ankles, and although she seemed peaceable, it was a visible effort for her to move and adjust to the sway of the carriage over cobblestones. Her eyes were closed. Taja wondered if she feared the same nightmares as the rebels.

Oliver would have his scope aimed at her. Taja prayed he would not fire. Not yet. Not until they saw their target. Not until she saw their target.

There. Beyond the street, in one of the many side alleys that split off from the main thoroughfare and spiralled into the labyrinthine maze of the city, a man was moving. Not Levi. Shorter, with golden hair and amber eyes – Aaron Hale.

Leader of the Honduraguan flying battalion. A capable soldier, a true revolutionary spirit and – perhaps most surprisingly of all – a good man.

"There," Andromeda said softly, and Taja let her arrow fly.

It flew true – Taja's arrows usually did.

It struck Aaron Hale in the heart.

Where his heart would have been, had he not been wearing body armour. No doubt makeshift – the rebels rarely had access to anything else.

But he was surprised. That was all the really needed, that surprise. He stepped back, as one often does in surprise, and in that moment the chance was lost for him to attack. The rickshaw passed. The carriage passed.

Gaelle Sidonie, her eyes still closed, turned her head to face the skyline. She turned her face to Andromeda and Taja, and Andromeda let out a breath that suggested she was itching to use her spear.

The chance was lost, but maybe Aaron didn't realise that, because he made to lunge forward, and now Taja saw the gun in his hand and, more than that, she became aware of the life thrumming around them. The other rebels hiding in the shadows - an ambush.

They had probably been waiting for the Selection of a Honduraguan girl for weeks now, maybe months. They had probably been waiting for the chance to descend on the prince like a pack of jackals and tear him limb from limb. They probably thought that the death of the son of an immortal king would make a difference in the world.

Taja knew the truth. The prince would mean nothing. Not today. And she knew that Yegor was secretive and paranoid enough, and the matrix hierarchy of the resistance movement intricate enough, that these local raiders probably had no idea of the plan that had been years in the genesis, their plan, the plan to which Taja and their ilk had pledged their lives and their sanity. Aaron Hale was on their side but Yegor Corbeau was not on his.

And Aaron Hale was a good man who would not grieve for too long if Venus Collins died this morning, but Yegor Corbeau was a liar and a fool who still had plans for Minette Chastain within the gilded cage of the castle.

And that meant they had only one option.

"Stop them," Yegor had told her, and Taja had just nodded.

Andromeda flung her spear and Aaron Hale flung out his arm as though to catch it and instead the spear splintered as it flew, shedding pieces of wood and peelings of iron until all that reached him was the sharp steel head that he caught casually in his hand.

"Now I see why we hired him," Andromeda said darkly, and the dark was lit up by the orange and crimson of muzzle-flashes as Oliver began to fire.

Aaron moved his hand as though to catch each bullet, and each bullet shed its lead casing and its velocity as it moved until it reached Aaron as a useless trinket that bounced from his leather jacket like a handful of thrown gravel. But Oliver was relentless when he set his mind to his task, and for every bullet Aaron could spot and stop there were three more than evaded him and it took only a moment for one to find its target.

Aaron's blood moved in rivulets across the cobblestones, and he fell abruptly, without ceremony, onto the side of the street.

"Is he…?"

Andromeda's whisper was interrupted by the dull explosion of something thrown into the street. It was a curious sensation, that explosion, more felt than heard, and it rippled up through each of Taja's ribs to focus around her heart and force it into a new hollow rhythm as she and Andromeda flattened themselves against the roof to avoid the cataclysm of debris which followed.

Oliver's gun had fallen silent, and for a moment Taja wondered if he had been killed. Smoke choked the scene; she climbed back to her feet and readied another arrow.

The street below was being flooded with men, motley in their uniforms and arms, less revolutionary, more desperate, but they swarmed forth onto nothing. The rickshaw, the carriage, the uniformed men who carried them, the Selected girl and prince contained within – they might as well have dissipated into the smoke.

And yet, from that smoke, nightmares crawled forth.

Without a flicker of hesitation, Taja let her arrow fly. It flew true.

Taja's arrows usually did.


The quiet aristocracy of the Collins' estate should have tasted like home to Cappie, but it didn't.

It tasted of terror. When one spent as much time in the grey half-world without colour as Cappie did, shielded from the world just as the world was shielded from her, one learned to pick up what one could, the most distant traces of something, and when she looked at the Collins' home she remembered black bags and handcuffs and the distant thud thud of a shotgun.

"Come on," she told Venus, although her voice rippled and dissipated as a shadow through the greyness which filled the world and drowned out all the sharp edges and vibrancy of the universe. The girl was silent. Cappie didn't blame her. It could be overwhelming, sometimes, to be a ghost.

Nithya would not be happy, but she would not complain, and she would not turn the girl away from her door. The rebellion was fueled by money funneled from resentful aristocrats like Venus' father, like Cappie's parents, but Cappie knew that they would not have lasted as long as they had unless they had the support of the ordinary people and the begrudging help offered to them by people like Nithya and Mara Morosova proved that they must. It was a dangerous hobby, to support a rebellion - Cappie couldn't blame Nithya for being hesitant and unhappy with their methods. She was afraid of going the same way as so many, following the same path as Cappie's parents, into an open grave with iron bars across the top.

They walked a different path now, one of the many thread-like back alleys which tangled the city into a mess of houses leaning onto one another and laundry lines curtaining both sides and newly dyed carpets drying over their heads so it was as though they were walking through a tented tunnel which filtered the dusky origins of dawn into a new, lighter greyness. People so often thought Cappie's ghost world was without beauty, without shape or colour, but Cappie was of the opinion those people just refused to look closely enough.

Nithya had the sense to bury herself amongst a crowd and lived in the basement apartment of a towering block which held a dozen families with half a dozen people apiece. In a city like Honduragua, there was always need for a medic, and Cappie doubted that two girls approaching the door would attract much notice but she didn't want to take the risk as she scanned for danger and then pulled Venus to cross the street and ascend the steps to the building.

"You'll be safe here," she murmured. "Just do as Nithya tells you. And forget you ever met us. Any of us."

"Thank you, Diantha," Venus said softly and Cappie jerked her hand back abruptly, hurtling the both of them back into the real world and all of its intensity, everything that demanded to be seen and heard and felt and her head throbbed and her blood burned with the sheer pressure of the world that suddenly existed around her and demanded, demanded, demanded.

"What did you call me?"

"Call yourself what you want," Venus said softly. "The stars will always know the truth."

Her mother had worn seven pleats in her navy blue pencil skirt. Her father had been heedless of the pollen in his mustache as it twitched with a smile. Diantha had been dizzy with spinning and the sky had spun with her.

That day -

"Then tell me," Cappie said tightly. "Do the stars know whether the king dies?"

"Many kings shall," Venus replied.

Cappie spun on her heel and walked away, distantly aware of Nithya opening the door behind her and pulling the delicate Venus into the safe house. They would be safe, Cappie thought. That could be guaranteed - unlike Minette's safety. Unlike Cappie's.

Because she was Cappie. Diantha had faded from the world and drowned in that charcoal alien dimension and Cappie had returned to take her place, full of revolutionary fervour. The girl they had called Diantha wouldn't have had the strength to oppose the false king's regime. The girl they called Cappie was going to raze everything he held dear - if he even had a heart - to the ground.

Cappie, after all, was a ghost.


Adelaide was dead.

Oliver knew Adelaide to be dead.

It did not make it any easier to kill her for a second time.

But he did.

Oliver Tyrrell did not appreciate his sister's face being used like that, to attack, to provoke, and although he could not deny that it had worked - his skull seemed to have tightened over his eyes with rage, every movement an extension of purpose, to kill the people who had done that to her - he knew that it would be the last time Gaelle Sidonie would make the mistake of believing that wrath would make him careless.

No, Oliver fed off that rage, and now he moved surely.

Down the stairs, still wreathed in smoke from the explosion on the street, and over the rubble which had imploded through the outer wall of the ancient building to land recklessly in the stairwell, incongruent in its mosaiced surroundings. The door had been damaged badly, hanging loosely on a single hinge, and Oliver damaged it worse still with a powerful stab of the butt of his gun, sending it the rest of the way. He climbed over the collapsed compound wall. He stepped over the body of a fallen Honduraguan rebel.

Down the street.

He reloaded the gun as he went.

Monsters took many forms, and the kind that lunged at him, peeled from the shadows, wrought from illusions with enough magic behind them to hurt when they hit you, were the most basic of all: the kind of visceral and twisted shapes that frightened without substance, were terrifying for what they were rather than what they meant, the kind with too many eyes and too many teeth and flesh hanging off them in strips.

Oliver was not perturbed by this kind of shallow horror.

Sidonie was good when she knew what she was doing but she had underestimated Oliver Tyrrell.

And he had known Adelaide to be dead. That fact had kept him company for many long, cold years, the knowledge that his family was gone and the Selection the cause and he far from home, kept from the familiar shores of Britannia by the barbed wire grip of the false king without purpose and without path except to avenge.

Because he had known Adelaide to be dead.

Illusions couldn't fool you if you knew the truth behind them.

And yet when the girl appeared before him, he stopped.

He had seen her, as he monitored the palace, had watched her watch the stars and wondered if she would jump.

And now she stood between him and his quarry.

Hair like the feathers of a raven, lips as red as blood, eyelashes like coal. Small. Petite. Fragile. And alive.

Was she alive?

Gaelle Sidonie's eyes glinted behind the girl, blue and green, and Oliver wavered. For that split second.

Long enough for a knife to bury itself in Sidonie's sternum, a certain and solid throw that cracked the bone.

The star-gazer blinked in and out of existence as Sidonie shook on the edge of falling. And then she did fall, and all the threads woven to form the dark-haired illusion began to unravel, bit by tenuous bit. Her hazel eyes were the last to go. By the time the illusion had collapsed completely, Levi had joined Oliver, adjusting the cuffs of his soldier's coat as he glanced down at his kill.

Not a kill. Sidonie stirred, still shackled to the overturned carcass of the carriage. Empty. No prince, no Minette. Oliver hoped that meant they were safe - that they had got away.

"A knife?" Oliver's voice was scorched.

Levi's tone was unabashed. "I ran out of bullets."

Of course. This was Levi Fallon. Oliver wondered how many of the Honduraguan rebels still drew breath.

He turned away wordlessly and left the wolf of Bonita looking down at the nightmare weaver. Taja and Andromeda had joined them on the street. Andromeda's boots were stained with ash and blood. The quiver on Taja's back was empty. The wounded and well of the revolutionary forces, their brothers in arms, had fled.

Only those foolish enough to follow Yegor's crusade remained behind, wreathed in smoke and fire.


They called her the arsonist, the devil's daughter, the wolf tamer.

"Why?"

Kasha had shrugged. "I don't know. Kasha isn't exactly hard to pronounce."

Yegor was not surprised to hear that she had run.

He had expected nothing less, to be honest. They called her the arsonist, the devil's daughter, the wolf tamer, and Yegor had met her on her way out of the apartment earlier in the day, still wearing one of Levi's jackets and with a knife hidden in her boot. She didn't seem happy to see him - probably thought he would try to talk her out of leaving.

Yegor remembered first asking her to wake Levi, and wondering why she alone was trusted to know where he lay. He wasn't used to not knowing things, but he still didn't know. The arsonist was just that - an ordinary, scarred, selfish girl. A true revolutionary, in a way.

They were better off without her, then.

He wondered where she was. How long she would make it on her own.

"The evil queen," Kasha had said. Yegor no longer felt the need to recoil when Kasha fixed her lone dark eye upon him, the other blind and filmed with white. She gripped his arm as well - she had long, thin fingers like the limbs of a spider. The pads of her fingertips were as rough as sandpaper. "In all the stories, she tears hearts out."

"Yes," Yegor had said.

"Please be first in line," the arsonist had told him and Yegor had very nearly laughed. "You're still – "

She paused, and arched a thick dark eyebrow. "Unnecessary," she answered herself.

"Don't worry," he said. "This mission will still take everyone."

She had looked doubtful. Yegor couldn't blame her. She knew him now as a liar, and liars rarely went to the front of the pack. If the puppet-master let you see the strings, well, he wasn't worth much as a puppet-master.

"If anything happens to you," Kasha said. "Taja will be heartbroken."

Yegor's expression had not changed. "That's the plan."

Levi was waiting outside.

"Storm's brewing," Kasha had said softly. "Move your pieces wisely."

She dropped his arm and spoke as she left. "And long live the king."

Not much longer. Yegor nearly had all of his pieces where he wanted them: Crimson in her tower and Minette in her cage, Taja at his shoulder and the rest, Andromeda and Oliver and Levi, still to take their places but ready to move.

Yegor had promised Oliver three days. The first was dawning. He rather thought they would be ahead of schedule.


When Minette stirred from her long sleep, it was only reluctantly. Consciousness returned to her begrudgingly, retreating at first and then surging around her so that she was suddenly aware that she was no longer in the home of the Collins.

She had dreamed of a rickshaw, and of crows descending en mass from a sky full of crows so that the world was blackened as surely as something burnt and useless. And she had dreamed of a prince with flaxen hair and glass for eyes, and she had dreamed of a wolf in the skin of a man with gold moths littering his arms, stained with blood. And she had dreamed that a fox had stolen her tongue and disappeared beyond her, into the house she had been born in, the house in which she had lived with her mother and her father and her brothers, and although she had tried to follow she could not.

And then she had awoken, and dreamed no more.

She was inside the palace. She was one of the Selected. She was within a few hundred meters of the king.

And she awoke to the sound of her bedroom door unlocking.


Sorry for the delay! I've been really busy with exams and so on, so the next chapter may be similarly delayed, and then I hope to get back into a regular rhythm. The last chapter or so have been rather expositional and slow-paced, so I hope you all enjoyed the leap forward in action here!

Once again - thank you all so, so much for your reviews. It means more than I can say that you guys give my story even a few minutes of your time, and I hope that I do not disappoint. As usual, please don't hesitate to tell me what you think, any of your theories, or any improvements that could be made!