On an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay -
When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day.

- Patrick Kavanagh


"I'm sorry to have disturbed you." The voice was flute, the tone behind it crisp and cold, a thing of beauty detached from its source, snowflakes in a grey sky. "I wasn't certain if you would be awake."

The girl who appeared around the door was delicate and precise, small and very slender, so tiny that she seemed at risk of being crushed by the sheer weight of the world around her. And she was all the smaller in the towering magnificence of the palatial room. The roof, fretted with gold fire, appeared exceptionally far away from where Minette lay in the bed; the walls, framed in thick dull butterscotch curtains, rose high and stretched wide; the bed in which she lay was wide and soft and unfamiliar, and as she moved groggily from the pillow the girl at the door moved slowly to approach, red silk swaying about long pale legs.

"Venus," the girl said.

"Yes," Minette said uncertainly, hoping that her unease and unfamiliarity with dealing with the stranger's name could be excused away by the wariness and uncertainty that were natural by-products of being Selected. "Yes."

"Mrtvola," the girl said.

She did not offer her a hand. Her hazel eyes were steely, her hair raven, and her skin marble – she could have been a statue from antiquity, a spurned demigoddess with wrath beneath the surface or some legendary queen without elemental concerns: air, water, warmth.

"I was sent to fetch you," Mrtvola said. "For a royal viewing."

"I see," Minette said cautiously.

"I'll give you a moment to prepare," said the girl. "The dress in the closet. Don't take too long."

She was as good as her word, and as swift at disappearing as appearing in the first place; Minette was left alone in the cavernous room that reminded her more of some royal morgue, the tomb for some long dead emira, than a bedroom for a living, breathing girl. She lay there for a moment, almost afraid to stir for fear of disturbing the silence which permeated the entire empty space.

Eventually, however, she rose, and moved towards the closet indicated; although to call it a mere closet seemed an insult, so rich was its wood, so fine the gold of its handles and hinges. They were not a subtle group here, she thought distantly – she had expected something more macabre, but everything was pale and gleaming, absent blood or bone or traces of awfulness as she had expected. Even the dress was nice, if needlessly showy – made of some kind of clinging silk and chiffon that flared into a wider skirt, it was clouded with silvery stars, more densely around the chest and heart, more dispersed along the hem. She liked it. She wasn't sure she should.

She studied her reflection in the mirror of the door to ensure that all was as it should be, and no threads had come unravelled during the night. She could not have slept more than a few hours, though she could not tell precisely what time it was; it took her a moment to realise that the windows were not windows at all but mere paintings of a world beyond, landscapes both foreign and familiar – one a cityscape like Angeles, a skyline studded with flickering lights and another a long, jagged line of mountainous crags, all sand and limestone. There was something grotesque about the wearied falsity, the half-hearted attempt to render a semblance of freedom.

She dressed quickly – the cloth slipped through her fingers like flowing water, light and insubstantial, like something a ghost might deem too thin – and left her fingers in a folded pile on the bed, uncertain of what precisely the protocol was for these kind of situations, and rather doubted the clothes would still be there when she returned again. A quick search of the pockets gave up nothing to incriminate her or the others; nonetheless, leaving the sundress and cardigan behind rather felt like a final sacrifice of Minette, and all her freedom to run and hide, leaving her with only Venus, trapped like a rat within a maze.

No sooner had she finished dressing, leaving Venus' hair in strands around her shoulders, than she heard the staccato of locks being undone again, and Mrtvola appeared to gesture Minette through the door with a single glance. Pausing only to slip on the shoes which had been left neatly beside the rug, the masked girl followed; the corridor outside seemed to have entirely abandoned the pretence of glamour, preferring instead to exude the aura of a medieval dungeon carpeted by flagstones, wallpapered by slate, dotted by similar slab wood doors spaced every few metres. She wondered if each held a Selected girl. She wondered where they were, of what they were thinking.

Similar corridors seemed to spider out into all directions, more of them now as the walls grew gold and silver and the slate gave way to marble, as the dull dim flicker of poor lighting became the soft glow of opulence, and the prison around her gave way to something decidedly more palatial – Minette barely noticed the transformation until it was complete. The narrow hall in which they were walking opened onto a much larger foyer, from which a dozen similar corridors spiralled, and from each came a Selected girl, following behind their own grey, unhappy-looking servant. Minette wondered if they were all called Mrtvola, and if any of them breathed. Then they were walking together in a long line, and Minette did not have to think before adjusting her pace to match the others as they fell into a neatly-spaced line, two abreast, walking swiftly and silently, dresses rustling and heels clicking, each girl directing their gaze directly ahead into the distance.

Into the ballroom with them – the press of humanity around her, the only sign she had glimpsed thus far of such a thing, was so overwhelming in its scarcity, a mere thirty four girls, that Minette barely got the chance to look around. The lines in which they stood were as regimented as the one in which they had walked; Minette did not even wish to look to either side for fear that an action out of the ordinary might draw the more unpleasant kind of attention to her.

There was stillness. There was silence.

There was silence. There was stillness.

A movement beside her – the dark-haired girl tilting her head towards the roof as though to experience the first drops of a spring monsoon on the tips of her eyelashes. Not just her – the others as well, all turning their gaze towards what might have once been a sky.

A balcony ran the length of the room, a wrought iron railing sheltered by velvet crimson curtains.

Footsteps.

And there, on the balcony, stood the prince.


Iliya could not remember becoming a guard.

Hadn't he always been a guard? Hadn't he always walked these ramparts, silent and watchful and choking on snow and fog? He protected the monsters in here from the monsters out there, and he protected the beasts out there from the beasts which dwelled in here.

Did it matter when or where or how or why he had become so, when the fact was that he was so?

There were many of them. Some of them only wore silver and gold; others, scarlet and ash, war colours. Dark blue, sometimes, if they came and they went. They wore their blood on the wrong side of their skin, most of them.

Like Iliya.

Iliya could not remember becoming a guard.

But Iliya could remember dying.


"I had a nightmare."

Oliver had found himself wondering more often than he would have like precisely whose child Charity was. The young girl was merely present, constantly, and Yegor seemed disinclined to permit her escape the confines of the safehouse. It was difficult for Oliver to comprehend Yegor as any kind of a father, and Taja appeared disinclined to offer any information on the matter, regarding the child with dark eyes as one might a bleached skull in a field - accepting that it is a natural thing, and disliking it all the same - before disappearing into one of the back rooms to wash the blood out of her hair, off her hands. Cappie, looking none too happy about the use of violence against their comrades-in-arms and even less happy that she had not been involved, had not been consulted, had gone with Andromeda to scour the city for some hint of whether Aaron Hale lived or died, and precisely what had become of the Selected contingent, Minette and Sidonie and the prince included. Oliver supposed that left him as some kind of loco parentis.

Oliver said, "did you?"

She nodded sombrely. Oliver offered her his hand, and she took it; she was small, even for her age.

"What kind of nightmare?"

"My mother," she said, and her eyebrows drew together tightly and she fell silent as though her tongue had knotted similarly.

"It's just a dream," Oliver said, but she did not seem inclined to take the stranger at his word, so after a brief moment he rose and went with the girl into the small living room where Andromeda had nearly bled to death on her first day in the city. Someone had set up a small futon for the girl - Oliver was inclined to believe Minette or Cappie - with pillows and blankets strewn about into the semblance of a net.

"What happened?" the girl asked.

"Happened?" Oliver repeated, sitting down on the ground as Charity fumbled her way back into the makeshift bed. He wondered if it had been this way with Adelaide, when she had cared for him, looked after him, raised him - if she had believed him delicate and breakable and whether she had believed the world around him to be a thing of cloak-and-dagger, smoke-and-mirror, blood-and-bone.

"I had a nightmare," Charity said again. " About you."

"I thought you said it was about your mother."

"There was a witch," the girl said, and traced a long line down the sign of her face, across her eye, turning the corner of her lip down as her nail touched it as though to simulate a mutilation. "And a bird."

"Of course," Oliver said. "The witch."

"You know her?"

"I've known my fair share."

He smiled and that seemed to incline the young girl to smile also. The apartment was quiet and cold, lit in cool dim light that left strange shadows flickering on the walls; a lone golden butterfly survived on the wall by the door, moving slowly in the currents of air, as fragile as a creature of spun sugar. Yegor's pacing had fallen silent; the faintest strains of music floated in from the balcony, where Levi was shuffling cards and drinking whiskey and smoking, trying to fit a lifetime of sins and vices into a few scarce hours as though they would be his last.

"Tell me," she commanded with the air of one who is accustomed to the adoration of those who loved her and was not certain if anyone loved her anymore.

"About a witch?"

Charity's silent gaze was the only answer he received and he relented.

"When I was growing up in Britannia," Oliver said. "We lived on one side of the street, my sister and I, and the witch lived on the other. The witch," Oliver said. "Was very evil, and very beautiful."

"Both?"

"One follows another."

Charity seemed rather dubious at this proclamation.

"And the witch," Oliver said. "Tore hearts out, the hearts of little girls and young maidens and old crimes, and sold them on the market, every Thursday evening - if you listened carefully you could hear her ringing her bell at about six o'clock, to call the warlocks to see and to buy the hearts while they were still fresh."

"Did they steal your heart?"

"I don't have one."

"Your sister's?"

"Ah," Oliver said. "That's the thing, isn't it? Now, one day the witch tried to. She lured you in with crow feathers and fox prints, this witch - you'd walk down the street, and see the most beautiful feather you had ever seen, all the colours imaginable shining on the surface and even a few you had never encountered before, and then another, twice as beautiful a few feet away... Or else you'd wake up in your bed with sugar scattered across your floor and fox-prints moving through them. But after the witch had stolen many hearts, many, many hearts, people began to know her tricks, her way of luring and deceiving."

"Like Yegor," Charity said, and Oliver grinned.

"Exactly like Yegor. So this witch had to come up with another cleas, another plan, to steal hearts from little girls and young maidens and old crones. And she decided that she would transform herself into a snake, and slither into the homes and gardens of these people while they slept. One day she saw my sister chopping wood in the garden, and the witch became a snake and... under the garden gate she went... up the steps she went... across the lawn she went..."

Charity's eyes were a waning moon, wide and glimmering in the wan light, appearing vaguely distraught and Oliver reminded himself that his honeyed words were more of a risk here than any non-existent storytelling prowess. People tended to take his words as truth, no matter how fanciful, and as much as he typically prided himself on that skill, he didn't exactly want to leave this girl fretting over imagined intrusion of snake-witches with feathers in her hair and fox paws for feet.

"And then?" The girl's tone was hushed.

"My sister cut her head off with her axe," Oliver said simply.

"Really?"

"Of course. It's the only way to deal with a witch. They don't have hearts, you see; that's why Fallon keeps his knife with him on the balcony. If he sees any witches climbing up here, Charity, he'll cut their heads off before they can even set foot over the threshold."

Charity looked relieved. Oliver offered a smile that was returned tentatively, but as Oliver went to rise and move away a small hand darted out and caught his sleeve. "Please don't go."

Oliver nearly rolled his eyes. "Why not?"

Charity blinked, childish eyes large and sweet. "I can't sleep."

"Yes," Oliver said softly, and this time there was force behind his words, a gentle pressure, the syllables threaded with magic and the sounds woven with legerdemain until they were less words than invocations. "You can."

Charity blinked again, slower this time.

"Go to sleep," Oliver said gently, and freed his hand from the girl's weakening grip. "You won't have any more nightmares."

He smoothed some curls back from her face and wondered what Adelaide would have done in the same situation.

"Go to sleep," he whispered, and the girl wavered, eyelids fluttering shut, and when she slumped against the blankets it was the sleep of the near-dead that had claimed her and he knew it would be dreamless.

The music on the balcony was soft, but as he stepped out of the living room he caught the faintest few notes from it; Levi had a music box balanced on the railing, but didn't seem to be listening to the husky voice that spilt from it.

"...yī zhǐ dúláng, yī zhǐ dúshé, ài jiéchéng, dào jiéchéng..."

Snakes and wolves and love and wounding. Oliver's life seemed to run along familiar payterns, adhere to familiar themes, as of late. With a slight sigh he returned to the table and to the cleaning of his rifle. If any witches arrived unexpectedly, after all, he would have to be ready for them.


The prince was gone almost as soon as he had arrived. The mere flicker of a figure on the balcony, looking down at them with very dark eyes, and then he was gone again leaving only the trace of gold hanging in the air, like a spectre of half-formed memory and light. Minette almost wasn't certain she had indeed seen him, until she risked a glimpse to her right and caught sight of the rapt expression on her neighbour's upturned alabaster face.

There was silence in the room for a moment, which was broken by the dark-haired girl at Minette's elbow.

"Oh, wasn't that just a dream?"

She seemed to be the only girl who thought so - the other girls, Minette noted, looked absolutely terrified, their faces drawn and tired, their eyes dark and raw, their lips swollen. The only girl which did not appear so was at the head of the line, looking coolly stoic beneath her cloud of cork-screw curls. When she turned her head to throw a look at derision at the dark-haired enthusiast, Minette saw that the afro'd girl was a Fabulist, closer to Minette's brands than Kasha's brutal scar - she had burned, very precisely, patches of the skin about her eye and lip, twisting them into patches of melted skin, which didn't make her ugly enough not to be beautiful. She was beautiful, and cold in that beauty - her dark eyes were unforgiving as they bored into Minette's neighbour, who didn't seem to have noticed she was alone in her sentiments.

"New," she was saying to Minette with a smile that was as sweet as sugar. "Aren't you? The thirty-fourth girl."

"Yes," Minette agreed distantly, her eyes still moving between the balcony where the prince had stood and the other Selected girls around her. "Yes, I am. Venus."

The girl was a study in contrasts and beauty, ink on a blank page, a monochromatic chess-board, a raven against a grey sky with lips as red as blood. "Acacia," she replied, tucking a strand of ebony hair behind her ear. Her dress was identical to Minette's in design but vastly varied in colour and pattern - closer to the grain of a goose feather or swan wing, speckled with scarlet and crimson and bronze like autumn leaves.

She did not offer her hand, so Minette did not offer hers. Minette was a quick learner. You had to be when you could swap faces at a whim.

"Thirty four?" Minette repeated, and Acacia glanced around as though to check no-one was listening, and then seemed to think better of speaking whatsoever and fixed her gaze forward once more.

The girl behind Minette spoke - Minette did not dare look back to catch a glimpse. "He's already eliminated one."

Eliminated - so cold, so clinical, so final and so possible, such an imminent future for Minette that for a moment she could see it before her, unfurling as a golden line before her, a destiny unavoidable no matter what Yegor promised. This was a dangerous place, all the more dangerous for the gold and silver in which it robed itself, and the girls around her seemed to recognise that fact as well as she.

Well, everyone except Acacia.

There was bound to be a few odd girls everywhere.

"Ignore Kgetha over there," Acacia continued, indicating the Fabulist. "She looks at everyone like that."

Perhaps, the masked girl thought, Kgetha was right to be suspicious.

Minette remembered what Yegor had promised her - that Levi would be close by, in all his wolfishness, and that he would not allow anything to happen to her, that single-minded Oliver would be hovering at the very edge of the image prepared to act, that Andromeda would be present when she was needed to be present - but it did not and could not assure her.

Because Honduragua was very far away.

Because Minette was very alone.

Because the ballroom was very empty, but for the Selected girls awaiting elimination.

There must have been some invisible signal, because the two girls at the front of the line, Kgetha and a freckled red-head, and the pair at the rear of the line, two lanky New Asian girls, began to move away, accompanied by their silent grey servants. Minette watched them go from the corner of her eye; only once the ballroom doors had swung shut behind the four girls did the next two pairs begin to move, and so the line slowly began to dwindle. When it came Minette's turn to leave, Acacia grasped her arm and flashed her another friendly smile.

"You mustn't be scared," she said softly, so softly that Minette thought only she and hell could hear the words. "Fear won't help, will it? We're here now."

Minette nodded, and they moved towards the doors, beyond which they went their separate ways, down separate winding corridors. It took Minette a few moments, so unfamiliar was she with the labyrinthine layout of the palace, to realise that they were going downwards, not upwards, and definitely not returning to the room in which she had awoken.

No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than it was answered by the expressionless Mrtvola.

"The prince requests a meeting," she said, unsmiling, and Minette felt her heart constrict, as though in a vice, as they descended into the bowels of the castle, leaving all light behind.