The sniper at work over the street corner acts.
A girl, breathless after the dash across,
radiates heat and bouquets. She explodes, rages,
curses the sniper; at the window, seemingly,
I'm watching a beautiful storm. From the other, words
like a sun-umbrella's flutterings, in the morning,
on an Adriatic beach. Now and again, she flicks her head
back: just for us. As she well knows: flicked hair
sweetens the air. Beauty, always forthcoming, never
misses a half-smile. As they well know: making us happy
costs them nothing. Those half-smiles saying
you aren't just one fact among others—not at all,
not for them—even banishing the hex of that fact
if any other woman's glacial look had magicked it up.
The air smelt strongly of my distant youth
when every boulevard led to the end of the world,
when life was not yet "threadbare as a proverb."
Now she's going, leaving such tenderness in me
as engulfs you when looking too long at the heavens
into which snowflakes are swarming.
So she disappeared, not a girl
but a breeze, blown lightly, surprisingly,
through the St. John's heat of siege. The St. John's heat
of being.
- Marko Vesovic
Levi was already asleep when Oliver boarded the last passenger car of the train due north-west at the Honduraguan border. The New Asian soldier was out on the open balcony that protruded from the back of the car with one long leg propped on the railing, head tilted towards the light exuding from the busier cars. It was a cliche, Oliver thought, but he did look younger, less wolfish like this. Almost normal, if not for the shadows under his eyes, the blood on his breath.
Or perhaps he wasn't asleep, because as Oliver approached he saw the flicker of the other man's eyelashes and realised he was awake and watching, and could not help but wonder if the wolf of Bonita ever slept. He wondered if he was lonely without Kasha. Were they friends? They didn't act like friends. But she knew where he slept - perhaps that secret bound them together in something other than friendship. Oliver had realised the crooked girl was leaving until she was gone, and could not bring himself to mourn her departure very much.
"What did you see?"
Levi's eyes were very steady. "Same as you."
"Bullshit," said Oliver and Levi's mouth quirked into something approaching a smile as he raised his arm and offered the other man a glass of amber liquid, a twin of the one in his hand that seemed well-worn.
"Perhaps," he said, and Oliver accepted that as perhaps the closest he would come to an answer and accepted the whiskey even as he moved to sit on the other side of the door. The world retreated rapidly before them - he could see the burning edges of Honduragua in the distance, glimmering with fireworks and lamplight. Beyond, where once had laid the oasis of life of island Dominica, was darkness. They had finally doused the fires which had raged there for several days. The prince had seen to it personally, with Gaëlle Sidonie at his heels, that nothing had survived its razing.
Arsonists like Kasha tended to bring fire in their wake. She had gone north, Oliver thought, or, at least, the crooked man was in the north and she had gone to the crooked man. He wasn't certain a creature so cold-blooded would or could survive long amidst the ice. Yegor didn't seem to miss her. Minette was in the Selection, Oliver and Levi moving to take their positions in the centre of the kingdom where James Lawson waited, and the others going to their roles. Yegor's curse was that of a revolutionary: let no one know the full plan. Always keep them guessing. Always, always. Never trust anyone.
Oliver thought he could sympathise with that.
"What did you see?" Levi echoed his words, and Oliver found himself realising just how those words grated against the mind only when they were turned against him in turn. He shrugged, and drank rather than answer. Levi didn't smile.
"I thought so," he said.
The stars were very faded tonight, he thought, an anemic light that raged against the dark that threatened to close in tight but which faltered, flickered and faded behind the smoky clouds which wreathed the horizon, the sky, everything.
"Love sucks," Oliver said, rather distantly as he shook his head, his voice low, and Levi made a sound like a stillborn laugh.
"Say it again," he said, and raised his glass to tip the edge against Oliver's.
"To the rebellion," Oliver said. "And to the crow's crusade."
The child loved to fade. Cappie supposed when you were young and unafraid of death, the prospect of losing your grip on the world was not so frightening. It frightened Taja, she knew, whenever Cappie drew the wolf-girl into that shadowy ghost world of invisibility, because Taja knew what it was to lose your grip on the light. Taja knew the bottom. She knew what lay at the pit.
The child did not seem to know any such thing, so Cappie indulged her - now that Levi was no longer around to conjure golden butterflies and bronze dragonflies and need which buzzed gold-vermilion, the only thing that seemed to distract the girl from the business of conspiracy and crime around her were those moments in which Cappie seized up her tiny doll-like hands and spun with her until the world blurred, and then blurred the world into a grey nothingness, and the drained even that nothingness of its grey until it was nothing - not black, not white, just the essence of invisibility. The stuff that stars were made of. And then Cappie would let go and allow the girl to go tumbling back into being, suddenly and shockingly, and there would be laughter.
Cappie thought she rather would have liked a little sister like Charity Martinez.
But if she had a sister, she would have a dead sister, and to have no sister was better than to have that.
Yegor had a sister, she thought, and Oliver had a sister, dead sisters the both of them, and Kasha had murdered her own twin brother (or so the rumour to the east went, if you cared to listen to liars), and the rest were orphans, self-chosen, self-made or self-possessed. This girl was probably an orphan as well. Maybe she didn't know yet what she was. Cappie found that most people didn't know much about themselves when they really stopped to think.
"Again?" Cappie asked, and the world vanished and for a moment they were shadows once more, all glavelight and ghostlight and greylight, all monochrome and greyscale and chiaroscuro. A shadow moved in front of them – Yegor, orchestrating the murder of a king and the deaths of all who followed him. He looked little different in black-and-white; after all, Cappie thought, the Corbeau boy had very little colour to spare. He answered the door; the spectre of Taja moved from the door into the backroom, and Cappie watched her go.
Back into the world she tumbled, and Charity tumbled with her, and Yegor turned towards them only to arch an eyebrow and curl his lip. "So bored with revolution, Diantha?"
"Don't call me that," Cappie said mildly, helping the girl to her feet. "That's not my name."
"So it shouldn't matter. What's a name? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man..."
"You sound like Levi."
"A sin to be sure."
Cappie watched the Corbeau boy and was silent, strangely, for a moment, before she held her hands out to Charity once more. "Well, this isn't revolution. This is murder. And it's alright to be bored with murder, isn't it?" She smiled at the little girl, and her golden hair was a halo about her head in that moment, bright and glowing. "Once more unto the breach, little sparrow? We'll make you a crow-ghost yet."
So the rumours were true.
Or at least, this was a kind of truth. Since joining the rebellion, Minette had grown familiar with the mutable, changeable, intenable nature of the truth. Everyone spoke their own truth. It may not have been real, but it was true.
Well, this was real. The sleeping girl was as pale and as gaunt as a corpse, her skin waxy as a lily petal in the facsimile of death. Her eyelids were campanula and columbine, blue enough to appear painted so, as though one of the master artists of Illea had conspired to compose the most beautiful carcass that had ever existed.
Even Minette, who had worn more masks than she had ever cared to count, who had composed threads of faces beautiful and ugly and mutilated and unusual and bland, had never seen a face quite like this one.
She imagined that her eyes would be amber and green, like gold coins spilled amongst sprouting grass, like emeralds dropped in honey. Her eyelashes, long and thick, were dark, like kohl, like coal, like char. But most strange of all: the girl had, as was said, rose petals where should be hair.
So the rumours were true.
They did not belong to a red rose. Minette had never stopped to think what other colour those petals might be, but they were not red – they were lavender and white, fragmented where they grew long as though they had withered from age, fresh and soft nearest her scalp. The lavender was pale, like wisteria and periwinkle, and the white was bright and flawless, absolutely unblemished and pristine. The petals reached her shoulders and curled, slightly.
Her lips, though, they were rose-red, her skin snow-white.
And she lay, indeed, within a glass coffin, dressed in a lace slip the colour of amaranth and quartz, the soft lacy fabric of which moved gently about graciley slender limbs as though in an invisible breeze. Her fingers, curled gently at her side, were tipped with pale crescent nails small enough to belong to a child.
So the rumours were true.
Minette let out a wisp of breath and watched the petals move in that nonexistent zephyr. She did not move she didn't think she could. And she didn't think she could speak until the words slipped from her lips: "So the rumours were true."
"Indeed." The prince was a silent presence, without even that warmth of another life to maintain Minette's awareness of where he was, of how he held himself. She wasn't sure if he was even breathing until he spoke. "I just wanted to... let you know."
"Let me know?"
"That it would be pointless to try to kill me when we have Altansarnai to drag my bones back from hell."
Minette felt her blood go cold in her veins. He knew. He knew. Did he know? She was beneath the ground, beneath the castle, far from the sky where the crows might spot her when she died. Yegor had promised her, Levi had promised her, that the wolf of Bonita would be close by, in all his viciousness, and that he would not all anything to happen to her – but Yegor was a liar.
She felt her breath catch in her throat, a fly in the web of a spider, and was silent, her body frozen, and then the prince laughed, a sharp and cruel sound like the snapping of ice, a sound like Kasha and her scar, and then Minette heard his footsteps retreating, moving away, and leaving Minette silent next to the glass coffin in which lay the rose-haired girl.
"Just a thought," the prince called, his voice languid and lazy and heavy with wealth, and he left Minette stared at the dead face of the sleeping beauty before her.
