So two nights passed : the night's dismay
Saddened and stunned the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
Distemper's worst calamity.
The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child ;
And having thus by tears subdued
My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due
To natures deepliest stained with sin,-
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish and do !
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me ?
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Death did not come for Minette that evening, nor the night that followed. Nor did sleep embrace her; she found herself ill at ease in the bed, half-convinced the sheets might twist and writhe in the night to suffocate her where she lay, so she curled instead beside it, the cool floorboards pressed against a face that she still struggled to recognise in the mirror. Her ear flat to the floor, she listened to the heartbeat of the castle, and found that the entire room seemed to shudder with the fear of what the morning might bring.

Every time she closed her eyes, the spectre of the rose-haired girl floated to the surface of her mind, disturbing in its serenity. The prince's voice might have been woven into her hair, so persistently did it invade her ears: pointless pointless pointless.

He knew who she was. Did he know? He must. He knew their purpose. He knew her cause. He knew, and yet Minette still breathed, her heart still shook out beat after uncertain beat, her magic still kept her mask fastened into unyielding place, as though by iron shackles.

Where was Levi? Where was Oliver? Where was Yegor?

Minette was just one soul among thirty four, yet she doubted she had ever felt so lonely before. The room still felt a crypt; Minette felt herself a single step closer to a corpse.

"I'm sorry to have disturbed you." It was long, cold hours before the light returned to the room and Minette knew that the morning had come. Mrtvola's crisp voice was very nearly welcome, though the cold quality of it struck Minette to the bone. "I wasn't certain if you would be awake."

"I am awake," Minette said softly, her voice burdened with wakefulness. She turned from the vanity to glance at the diminutive figure, glad that she had thought to add the final details to today's mask sooner rather than later. Venus' face bore no hallmarks of the shattered night Minette had spent on the floor – her skin was smooth and clear, her eyes bright and watchful, her hair aglow beneath the gold frets of the roof.

"Venus," Mrtvola said. Her hazel eyes fixed on Minette with an intensity that set the masked girl ill at ease indeed. Minette was unsure if the word required an answer, and offered none. In any case, after a long and still moment, the servant continued. "I was sent to fetch you. Breakfast begins in ten minutes."

Minette nodded. Whatever yesterday had been, this was the true beginning of the Selection – whatever form that took. She took small comfort indeed in the idea that she was hardly here to win; she knew she had to avoid elimination at all costs, until Yegor could put the next steps of the plan into motion. Eliminated girls were never seen again, and even Minette with all of her shyness couldn't quite bear that idea. She dug her nails into her palms, drawing up pale silver crescents where her skin was thinnest, and offered Mrtvola the faintest of polite smiles.

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

Word for word her instructions from yesterday. Minette wondered if she was reading from a script. The thought comforted her almost as much as it disturbed her – just as she was a player on the prince's stage, so too was Minette a puppet with Yegor at the strings. All these souls dancing around one another at the whims of a few powerful voices.

"Thank you," she said, though Mrtvola seemed ill concerned with politeness, so quickly did she turn on her heel and sweep from the room with an air something between imperious and impatient.

Minette did not approach the closet with the same reverence that had marked yesterday, although it still occurred to her that the handle should be made of bone, the wood painted with blood, something to outwardly indicate the sheer dissonance of the entire place. The dress inside was not the one she had worn the day before, though she knew for a fact that no one had entered the room between her undressing and this moment; Minette held back a frisson of revulsion at the idea of the kind of voyeuristic magic the court might be able to employ to accomplish such a simple task as replacing a dress without her knowledge.

Today's dress was a deep navy blue, simple and modest in its shape, with a long skirt and a sweetheart neckline. Though it appeared quite plain on first glimpse, there must have been some witchcraft stitched into it; she found that where she touched it tiny white embroidery flowers bloomed and blossomed for the briefest of moments across the fabric, withering as she removed her hand. 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 still could not tell precisely what time it was; the lack of a window disconcerted her, so far from the rest of the world did it seem to trap her. Not even the illusions painted onto the walls of a wide Zulu desert or a roiling whitewater river hemmed in by emerald hills could make her feel like less of a butterfly behind glass. There was something grotesque about the wearied falsity, the half-hearted attempt to render a semblance of freedom.

Minette dressed quickly – the cloth slipped through her fingers like flowing water, light and insubstantial, like something a ghost might deem too thin. Glancing in the mirror, she found that the dimensions of the face she wore were still strange to her, but no longer entirely foreign; she rarely wore the same mask for this length of time, and a small part of her mind whispered that it was like she had merely awoken from a long and convincing dream that she had ever looked otherwise.

"Venus Collins," she whispered. "I am Venus Collins."

She shut her eyes. Venus Collins. Selected. And yet – only a day into the façade and the prince seemed to know the truth better than she. And though the thought of the wolf of Bonita protecting her from the shadows calmed her heartbeat for the briefest of moments, her fickle pulse bounced back into a panic at the idea that, trapped in the den of the lion as she was, she was utterly ignorant as to the developments outside the palace. Her entire cohort of co-conspirators could be cold corpses cut and quartered in the castle courtyard at this very moment.

"Every tedious stride I make will but remember me what a deal of world," Minette said softly. She opened her eyes, and smoothed her skirts, admiring how the flowers flared beneath the gentlest of touches. "I wander from the jewels that I love. Must I not serve a long apprenticehood to foreign passages." She took a deep breath and turned towards the door as the handle rattled and Mrtvola appeared at the threshold. The rest of the quote was breathed in a rush, as though she exhaled with it all of her hopes, all of her fear, and all of her faith in the crow's crusade. "And in the end, having my freedom, boast of nothing else but that I was a journeyman to grief?"

It was like a prayer, and with the words spoken Minette followed Mrtvola from the room. No sooner had she crossed the threshold than Acacia, the dark-haired girl from the day before, appeared at her elbow with a bounce in her step and a smile on her lips. "Good morning, Miss Collins! Did you sleep well?" Trailing in her wake was her own gray, unhappy servant – Mrtvola's twin, right down to the strange intensity of her hazel eyes.

Minette straightened her back. I wander from the jewels that I love. "Oh," she said airily, adopting a facsimile of Andromeda's confidence as she waved a hand with Oliver's arrogance. "I could barely get a wink. The excitement, you know."

Acacia flashed a sympathetic look. "I can relate." She squeezed Minette's arm. "Well, sleep or no sleep, you look fantastic; and beauty lives with kindness."

Every corridor they walked through were clones of the last; Minette was not sure if Mrtvola was following them or they her, until at long the narrow hall in which they were walking opened onto a much larger foyer. They took a different path this time, moving away from the ballroom in which the royal viewing had been held in favour of ascending white stone steps towards an immensive banqueting space. Minette caught sight of the Fabulist she had glimpsed the day before, Kgetha, though she find she could not bear to hold the other girl's gaze for long; her skin itched if she looked at the burned girl for too long. Magic or mere instinct? Minette had little motivation to find out.

Acacia glanced at Minette as they entered, and smiled apologetically. "We have to sit according to our numbers," she said softly. "See you later."

Minette nodded, and trailed in Mrtvola's wake towards the end of the third table. She was the thirty fourth girl, and with one elimination, she held the very last number. She found herself beside a silent New Asian beauty and a pretty blonde with a bad shake in her hand as she attempted to pour tea for the girls around her. Fear was etched into every line of her face, and Minette found that she was glad all over again that she had a mask to hide her emotions.

Dangerous in a place like this to wear your heart on your sleeve.

She accepted a cup of tea from the nervous blonde girl, and stared at it for fear of looking elsewhere; though she trained her gaze on the surface of the dark liquid, she imagined she could still feel Kgetha's hawkish gaze still boring into the very marrow of her bones. She resisted the urge to tear her skin off; it was like spiders crawling across her skin, that gaze. I am a journeyman to grief. She imagined the strings of her heart were filled with lead, so heavy was her chest. Minette felt very alone.

And yet, even as she gazed at the teacup, the tiniest of butterflies, no larger than a mote of dust, peeled itself from the depth of the liquid and spiralled for a single moment, silken in shades of burnt sienna. It spun in the air, and descended to touch very lightly onto the nail of Minette's pinkie finger before the magic collapsed into mundanity and the shape shattered into shadow, leaving only the memory of its beauty.


Andromeda had not slept soundly in a year. Night brought only the memory of Demetrios' gurgling death-cry, and the knowledge that with every dawn that broke, she moved one day further away from him and from all of the safe harbour he had provided her over the years. No, Andromeda slept little these days; insomnia had clutched her mind, and seemed little inclined to relinquish her from its thorns at this late stage.

Her affliction, such that it was, had a few perks, and it was precisely her tendency to spend wakeful nights sharpening blades and casting dark glances around the room that meant Yegor was inclined to allow her the night watch. With Tyrell and Fallon out of the safe house, Kasha in the wind and Chastain trapped in the Selection, the space was unusually quiet, and Andromeda found that if she stilled her hand and held her breath, there was little to perceive except the soft breaths of the little girl, Charity, lost to dream in the next room over and the even softer consultations of Sweeney and Corbeau, filtering down from the roof muffled and incomprehensible. Andromeda did her best to ignore the tight hand of resentment that curled around her throat at the thought she was being so excluded from the pair's confabulations; she comforted herself with the knowledge that the Sweeney girl was little more than a tame hound at Corbeau's command. The boy knew better than to try and domesticate Andromeda in the same way.

And Sweeney was a girl, barely nineteen years old, nearly a decade Andromeda's junior. The older woman could scarcely imagine why Corbeau relied on so many so young, these children who still barely knew life and could hardly be experienced to treat death with much diplomacy. Oh, she was dedicated to the cause, to the matter of killing the wretched king, but to Corbeau himself she held not even the tiniest smidge of loyalty, and she knew that her apathy was not popular among the pet crows the chessmaster had gathered around him.

She supposed when she remained stubbornly aloof from his machinations, it was harder for the others to justify their devotion to even themselves.

Achterkamp had faded early in the evening, vanished into the hum and roil of the street, and Andromeda idly wondered if she had seen the writing on the wall and jumped ship in Kasha's wake. She imagined the loss of the ghost would sabotage Corbeau's plans much more soundly than the fleeing of the arsonist's daughter; certainly she imagined they would rely on the little infiltrator to worm their way into the palace, although Corbeau seemed loath to let more than the bare minimum escape his lips. She hoped they would move sooner rather than later. The cogs were turning so very slowly in this strange war machine of Corbeau's that Andromeda half imagined things were standing still. Certainly he seemed to have spent more time covering his tracks than taking steps.

And at that thought, she heard Corbeau's steps approach - first his, faltering slightly, the click of his cane bolstering an unsteady gait, and then Sweeney's, lighter and quicker. They stepped down onto the balcony; Corbeau reached to help Sweeney down, his gloved hand at her waist. They were framed there for a moment as though illuminated in glavelight, the glow of the streets below casting them in strange shadows and painting them in odd neon shades of silver and red. Despite her wolfish moniker, the Sweeney girl had always reminded Andromeda more of a broken doll - her viridescent eyes had always had something wretched about them, her ivory skin making her appear somewhat ethereal and lost. She was beautiful, in the way that broken things often were, and, made otherworldly in the flickering argent light, Andromeda knew that there were many men and women who would kill to have Sweeney look them the way she looked now at Corbeau.

And for his part, for a single instant, Andromeda rather imagined there was something in Corbeau's eyes that approached reciprocation.

Though it did not, could not, last for long, and Andromeda herself broke the spell by dropping her boots to the floor and coughing loudly. She closed her hand around her spear, remembering how earlier in the day she had heard Demetrios' death-throes for a second time, brought forth by Sidonie's illusions - no, she corrected herself, Sidonie had brought forth only the shape of her brother.

It had been Andromeda who killed him this time, and left him choking on his own blood in agony as she sprinted onwards into the fray.

"Well?" She spoke sharply to dispel the cruel thoughts, her voice a muted crack like pearls falling across the frozen surface of a lake. "What genius have you two kindled?"

Corbeau's expression was marred with mirth. "There is little left to plan, Valour. Yesterday, I promised Oliver Tyrell three days; I intend to deliver."

"Am I to be left here babysitting, then?"

Sweeney's expression was inscrutable, but her eyes did not leave Andromeda. There was something hard about her tonight, something that suggested she might bite if Andromeda put her hand too close to her lips.

"No," Corbeau said mildly, but he did not elaborate further. He moved further into the kitchen, and rested a gloved hand on the back of the chair. "I know you crave blood, Andromeda. And I give you my word." A curl of the lips. "I fully intend you be sated before these two days are up."


Corbeau has his hooks in you now. He'll reel you back.

What a fool James had been. He had let the arsonist's daughter get close, and with her had come the spectre of the crow, and all the shadows she brought with her had nearly strangled him. He stood on the platform with his shoulders hunched against the chill of the evening, and rued the day he had ever caught sight of the scarred girl and wondered what names she might let him call her.

The world moved in black and white around him, shadows and suggestions of faces and hands, reaching and grasping, and the only real thing in the world was the hand on his elbow. As though shrouded in mist, figures faded back and forth, any semblance of clarity lost to him.

There was only a vague hum to suggest sound, and the tick tick tick of the watch Cappie wore around her neck.

She released him with an abruptness that was almost violent; the intrusion of colour and sharp shape into his vision was almost rude. He had no time to adjust to the hard reality of concrete below him and stars above him before the train rushed into the station, bringing with it a wind that blew his hair and clothes into a tempest. The glow from the front carriages carried with it the sweet sound of laughter and easy living; from the back, two dark figures slipped from the balcony without need for Cappie's sorcery to become invisible.

James tried to keep his lip from curling. He didn't think he had ever met Fallon in the soldier's own right; he had always seemed an afterthought to Kasha, her shadow writ large in the bloodied garb of a killer. Without her venomous presence to soften him by comparison, there was something dangerous about the New Asian man, a feral quality matched only by his seeming exhaustion in its intensity. There were few things more dangerous than an animal; James thought an insomniac animal might just qualify.

His companion was a handsome fellow; James was comfortable enough in his own skin to admit as much. Dishevelled blonde hair and hooded blue eyes gave him a slightly rogueish quality, more small-time hustler than Fallon's serial-killer-in-his-spare-time. Malevolence didn't cling to his clothes the same way Fallon's did.

"Gentlemen," James said languidly, giving both of them a sardonic wave. "Nice of you to join us."

The rogue glanced briefly at Cappie, and then shrugged. "What can I say. We travel in luxury."

Cappie jabbed an elbow into James' ribs with a quick, fiery glance. He was almost taken aback by the casual way she did it, as though they were lifelong friends. "The deep of night is crept upon our talk," she began, but was interrupted by the wolf of Bonita before she could force many words out.

"And Nature must obey necessity." His voice was husky and wearied, like he had spent the train journey swallowing matches. Were there quicker ways to thaw a heart?

"I think we know well enough by now to dispense with the cloak-and-dagger rigmarole, don't you?" the rogue commented mildly.

Cappie shrugged. "You think Minette's the only one who can craft masks?

James did not think he imagined the slightly pained look on Fallon's face at the mention of the unfamiliar name.

"What an awfully unnerving thought," the rogue said, to no one in particular. "Thanks for the trust issues, love."

"If you didn't have them before," Cappie said, her voice tinged with mirth. "I imagine I'm doing you a favour."

Fallon shook his head, and looked at James, but said nothing. James met his eyes as though in a challenge - after all, it was the arsonist who was meant to have the basilisk's gaze. There was little to fear from the soldier, especially on a day they were ostensibly on the same side.

The rogue broke the silence. "Lawson, I presume," he said. "Do you have the, ah..." He cast about, rather theatrically, as though the very stone might be eavesdropping upon them, as though the weeds in the railway tracks listened closely. "The assets?"

"We wouldn't be here if I didn't." James reached for his bag, but his motion was stymied when Cappie held out her hands.

"Unless you two intend to give the whole railway station a show, boys, I suggest we adjourn to a more private location so you can change." She looked at Fallon and the rogue with sympathetic eyes. "And may I propose we get something to eat? I don't know about Levi and Oliver, but when I'm attempting the impossible in infiltrating a totally impenetrable palace and carrying out the most daring murder the world has ever known while retrieving the two agents we have on the inside... I like to have a full stomach."


A note: Minette's portion of the story takes place one day after the other sections. I realise the timeline may be difficult to follow, but I wanted to check in with as many characters as possible due to my long absence. I apologise if there has been a dip in quality; the next chapter will be published much sooner, and will hopefully be a return to form.

I just want to apologise for my long absence! It's been nearly a year since this fanfic was updated, and I totally understand if people have lost interest in the story and the characters. I just want to say that if anyone is still invested, I'd really appreciate a review telling me what you thought. I love the world and team, so I intend to finish this story no matter what!