han (n.) a state of simultaneous sadness and hope; an unresolved resentment against injustice, a sense of helplessness in the face of overwhelming odds and a desire to seek revenge and justice.

He was almost indistinguishable from the mist when they arrived at the palace. His silhouette was only half-formed, all wavering, as though at any moment he might twist away into the fog and be lost forever. A tempting thought, that – would there be some redemption in oblivion? The redemption of taking evil from this world, he thought, the extinction of devilry by the extinction of self.

The only colour about him was the blood on his cuff. Red, he thought again, red, like a loop, like a turntable, a phonograph turning over and over itself, red like his own. Devils both.

Devils all.

Three more devils now loomed through the clouds of smoke which hung over the hill, warring with the mist that crept in from the dewy fields beyond. The guards were burning piles of scrap in the bottom courtyard of the palace; recovery from Pekka's attack went on and on and on, if recovery was possible when there were bones in the gardens, when there were bodies in the ballroom. He wouldn't be noticed – he rarely was. They wouldn't be noticed – or so he desperately hoped.

They were wearing the coats he had pilfered for them. Khalore looked good in blue. It was a natural fit. It brought out the green in her eyes. Zoran and Ina looked more like her shadows, dressed as they were in a by-now-familiar charcoal grey – as though any of them could afford to lose any more colour, Ilja thought ruefully, as though any of them had vibrancy to spare.

Lore kept her voice low. It came out sounding husky, as though it had been sieved through the smoke. She had a set of knives on her belt, all bloodied, and a screwdriver as well, tucked in close. She said, "all clear?"

"Should be," Ilja said. Should be. Why, he wondered, why hadn't he simply said yes? Why was he hedging his bets? The palace was familiar ground by now – he could have dreamed of its floor plan – but seeing Nanna and Zor and Lore standing here in ill-fitting coats, without Ilja's simple curse-bound ability to simply blend into the milieu, without the guarantee of recognition within the castle walls – or, perhaps more terrifyingly, the spectre thereof….

He hadn't known to be afraid for them, until this very moment.

"The queen is in her study with Azula and I will accompany Si – the prince – on his daily excursion. Princess Asenath is attending to the Selection today, so..."

Ina nodded and twisted her wrist. Were the threads dancing there? Could she name each one? For this plan to work, she would have to be able to do so – she would have to be able to tell when Azula was drawing near, when Ilja was about to turn the corner, when Kinga and her retinue of excubitors were in the next room over. A single moment of recognition would be all it took to bring crashing down their many months of work.

"I'll be sure to steer clear," Ina said, sounding quietly confident, and Ilja had to nod. He had to trust her. He had to trust her curse. Hers, if none other. "Of every xrafstar in that place."

Zoran, after all, looked as if he hadn't slept in an eon. It would do well to sell the appearance of a guard, for they all tended to look so. He kept curling and uncurling his fingers – Ilja regarded him more closely – but he was still here. Still here. Still here, and still now. That was as much as they could ask for. That might be all that they could dare to hope for. That might be it. Ilja would take it.

Ilja would take it every time.

Ilja found himself asking again, as though he had deluded himself into thinking they would somehow grant him a better answer this time: "do we have a last resort?"

The vision swam in front of his eyes, unbidden: the stone curse-form of the Tower rising above the palace walls, rubble exploding around its impossible form; Hyacinth Estlebourgh unleashing the power of the Sun as Voski Grigoryan once had, so that everything certain in the world was lost to the same bleach-white ice-hot supernova of light; Kinga turning on him in the forest, nails digging deep into his throat, the utter familiarity in his heart set to war with the part of his brain that recognised her – it – as inhuman.

Zoran said, "we won't need one."

Ilja found himself wishing Zoran could have just sounded as sure of that as Khalore had when she proposed this plan in the first place.

It was simple, when you got down to it. Keep your back straight, but keep your eyes on the floor. Walk as though you know where you are going, but do not take up space in the corridor. Move quickly and surely, but do not rush and do not take corners at any great speed. Concede all: space, and priority, and eye contact.

In another life, Zoran would have made a wonderful guard. Who would he have protected? The immediate answer leapt to mind – he dismissed it. In another life, they would never have known each other.

He told himself this, and yet the book-filled apartment on Majnun Street, with the windowsill drowning in floors, with the scent of cooking stew, with her arms around him and her cheek pressed to his back… he didn't need to close his eyes to see it. It was as real to him as Ghjuvan, something that you knew had been and had lost but which had been no less real then for its inexistence now. He had smelled her perfume. He had heard the crowds, felt the heat rising from the stove. If this was the insanity all Hierophants were promised, then it was a tolerable sort. He could live with this much.

It was still difficult to look the other Warriors in the eye, and for that he had two reasons, each as good as its sibling: first, they knew what his hands had done – what he had done – and they moved as Ina moved, as though prepared at any moment to step in and break Zoran's fingers (if they must, if they must, and he would have told them to, gladly would he have told them). It was with a mournful wariness that they regarded him; he withered beneath it.

Second: just as they saw him now, he had seen them. He had existed with them, in moments they had never told him about. He had seen Khalore cower from her mother's raised hand when Arsen Grigoryan stiffed her on a fair payment; he had seen Ragnar playing with the cat in the courtyard of the father Kinga never spoke about; he had seen Ilja stand on the threshold of the room of a dying woman, wishing desperately to hug her and to be told that salvation was his own. Oh, but it hurt now, to stand here and pretend that he had not seen these things. Khalore, sleeve hanging empty, hand on her knife, would not have welcomed it; Ilja, watching from the hidden tunnel entrance as his fellow Warriors disappeared into the smoke around the palace, would have laughed when he wanted to cry.

They had known each other for nearly eleven years. If they had wanted him to know, they would have told him. So he bit his tongue, and followed Ina as Ina followed Khalore, and they moved through the palace as though it was their birthright, Ina silently directing them according to her threads, taking them this-way-and-that, and then they came to a stone door in front of a set of stone stairs, and they went down-and-down-and-down, into the bowels of the castle, into the dungeons beneath the castle, in search of the dead girl Khalore had seen hanging there the night before.

Zoran had half-expected the corpse to be gone. Just to make a mockery of them. Just to complicate matters.

But she was still there. Still hanging. The match Ina held aloft painted shadows – macabre and ominous – across the open wounds on her face and back. It roiled Zoran's stomach to see a human being treated so. Her curly dark hair had been shorn short; she had empty, staring eyes. Her blue dress hung from her like a hanger.

Khalore said, "Ina, how did you find her?"

Inanna said, "I'll tell you in a moment."

Zoran knelt and slipped the wrapped package from the pocket of his jacket. It had been Ina's idea – all the best ideas were, he thought ruefully, particularly when it came to his curse. She had picked up the largest shard of glass from the mirror he had broken in his workshop in Aizsaule, and Kinga had polished down the edges on one of her sleepless nights, and Eero had, painstakingly, painted its sides with lacquer so they were no longer sharp enough to slice skin. It was, in size, similar to Zoran's own hand, and of no shape that he could name – it was eleven-sided, jagged in its irregularity – and when he held it up now it did not reflect the dungeon back to him, but the dormitory of the academy in Irij.

The dormitory – as he had dreamed that very morning. Late evening there, as it was here, the beds by the window dappled with honey-amber light. The beds had been made with their usual military-precise edges, and the personal effects on the bedside lockers – photographs and trinkets – were unfamiliar: he could not see Ragnar's chessboard, or Uriasz's books, or Myghal's wristwatch. The room was empty, but if he looked closely, at the space by the door, he could see the shadows of children in the yard, stretched wide and grotesque across the floorboards of the entrance way, moving back and forth quickly as though in agitated movement. Whose shadow was that? For a moment –

"Czarnecki." Khalore's voice was a lifeline.

He angled the glass so that it caught the meagre light seeping from the match in Ina's hand. It pulsed across the mirror shard in a white glare, blotting out any hint of the academy and restoring the reflection to a true facsimile of the dungeon in which they stood.

His heart sank. This plan would not work if the reflections insisting on playing their own likenesses. But there, there were the flagstones; there were the manacles. There was the girl bound by them. She was smaller in the mirror than she seemed in life, smaller and somehow more alive, as though infused by some hidden inner light. For a moment, he had a feeling of such familiarity – but no, most unlike Kinga, the girl in the mirror was blonde and pale and pretty. She was undoing the manacle on her left wrist, leaning against the wall of the prison as she did so, her motions relaxed and unhurried.

A man paced at the edge of the glass, his phantom threads unravelling and ravelling anew every time he drew near true reflection. As it was, he was contorted by the edge of the mirror, stretched large and strange, all of his features malleable and grotesque. He should have had his sword, Zoran thought. Why didn't he have his sword? He was saying, to the blonde girl, "it took longer this time. Much longer."

"I am not myself," the girl replied.

His voice was golden venom. "Precisely the problem. His Grace has noted that–"

"Return to your Radiance." Her eyes were deeply shadowed. She was a girl torn in two. Was she thinking about the brothers and sisters she had left behind? It was a lonely thing, to stand as a xrafstar alone, tempted across a cursed sea by a promise now revoked. "Worry not about me, Alliette. Imitate Ezer – his grace – a little, in that regard."

"You are the most attractive prospect for worries, Iggy. Your problems can be solved."

She tched, as Kinga might have, voice full of bitterness, and broke the manacle from her wrist. "In a most final manner, I suppose."

"My thoughts exactly. So occupy your mind with that, and let…" He wavered close to reflection. Zoran could see the disgust on his face. His hair had whitened prematurely. He was not a xrafstar. He was something else. Something more. Something less. "Let lovesickness distract you little."

"Did Lady Alliette take physical custody of your heart when you married," Ignacja Szymanska said, her voice dripping with cruelty which was most out of character, "or were you born without one?"

"I tore it from my chest when it was asked of me." His voice was short. "I would counsel you to consider similar action."

Oh, the similarity had been masked before but she moved like Kinga now, like a predating animal, all sudden violence. Her hand found the man's throat like one had been carved for the other. "I have given the empire everything," Ignacja said. It should have been a snarl, but she was not yet human enough – not yet, not again – to summon such genuine emotion. The words instead came out twisted, like the voice of a carrion crow that had learned to speak. "I made myself a monster and I betrayed my brothers and sisters for Ezer, for Kur, for you..."

"Not everything," Priscus said calmly. "Not yet."

"Zor." It was Ina's turn to reel him back. All according to the plan. She was kneeling beside him to give him the most light; the match had burned right down to her fingers, blackening the edges of her nails.

He shook his head, and put a hand on hers, to assure her that he was still himself. To her credit, she did not flinch. She quenched the match. In the darkness that crept up to envelope him, he murmured, "too far back."

Khal said, a terse bite of delight tightening around the edges of her words, "but it's working?"

Zoran said, "it's working."

Inanna lit another match. It bounced beautifully – gold, of course – off her smile.

Princess Asenath approached the dead girl slowly. She put a gloved hand to the girl's chin, so that her head could be tilted up and her face inspected – languidly. Like regarding a piece of art. Those markings gouged into her face… he could recognise them, detachedly, like recognising words in a foreign language he could only half-remember.

They were the same symbols that marked the walls of the sacellum in Opona. They were the same symbols he had dreamed of, carved into the sword of the First World, who had worn Eero's face at the Fall of Siarka. They were the same symbols that Eero had used to bind the Star to Ghjuvan's teeth until it could be passed on to Belle.

So this girl had been, for whatever brief period, in whatever small way, the Radiance.

The reason they were here.

The reason they had lost so much.

How strange to know that now. She didn't look like she had ever been anything. As though she had come into existence dead, and hung forever from these manacles.

Her name had been Tereza Stan. He had to hold himself back from following her story to its conclusion – what might have been, if she had not been Selected. She had two sisters, one older and one younger. She had a mother and four aunts who loved her dearly. She had a nephew who had cried to see her leave for the palace. She had a boy named Cezar who was waiting for her to come back from the Selection and tell him how handsome and wonderful the prince had been.

Their daughter's name would have been Rozalia.

Did Princess Asenath see any of this in Tereza Stan's dead, disfigured face? Did she comprehend the ruination she had caused thus, worlds extinguished?

She removed her hand.

Tereza's head fell back against her chest, as an object falls.

She said, "we cannot buy him much more time."

"A little more," her grandfather counselled, his voice as soft as shed snakeskin. "A little more time is all that it requires. There's a new girl being brought in – she will buy us some days. He is not so weak as you fear."

"I will take it," Asenath said, her words brittle. "If I must. If it would ease his burden..."

"They would burn through you. As surely as they burned through the girls before. Poor Tzipora lasted the longest, and even she –"

"I'm strong enough to bear it," Asenath said. She had black ichor on his boots. She had come from a dissection. Her fascination with the druj extended to xrafstars, but her concern for her brother drowned whatever morbid curiosity might have presented itself at the prospect of inspecting the corpse of a cursed on. "All of them. For his sake."

"Sena, that is not the way these things are done..."

"If the old ways prove inadequate," Asenath said. "Then we must carve new ways forward. You taught me that, Priscus."

"The Selection is underway," Priscus said. He was lingering at the edge of the vision, as he had done when he had spoken to Ignacja all those years ago. He was at the very precipice of Zoran's perception, no matter how the Warrior tilted the glass to try and capture him.

Was that his gaze Zoran felt on his skin?

"The old ways have not failed us yet. There are candidate Kasimiras aplenty to repent for your father's folly. Have faith, my dear..."

The match had burned down to Ina's fingertips again. It was a rudimentary form of timekeeping, but it was all that they had. It would have to suffice.

It was Khalore's turn. She said, softly, "Zoran."

He always had the oddest expressions when he was lost in his reflections – she was not certain that she could quite describe it. There was a forlorness to it, as though he wanted to climb inside the mirror and dwell there, in whatever version of the future or past he had imagined on its glassy surface. Would it be preferable? Khalore could not imagine it would be otherwise: the dungeon was cold and damp, smelling faintly of mould and decomposition. Not from the dead Radiance – she was perfectly preserved, though by curse or by cold, Khalore could not say for certain. She looked exactly as she had looked when Lorencio had found her. Still with that white film over her eyes, thicker than a cataract, more opaque than the blindness which came over the Hierophants of Irij.

Khalore thanked whatever gods existed that Zoran was not blind yet. Not lost yet either, despite his best efforts. He stirred gently from this vision, and nodded. "She was the Radiance."

Khalore felt her heart leap in her throat. "And?"

"Silas is… it's not clear. They share it between them, or…"

He screwed his eyes shut. Ina gestured that he should be permitted to think, though Khalore itched to grab him by the shoulders and shake the truth out of him. She tried to counsel herself towards patience. What would Eero have said? It was a pity he was not here now – he might have been able to interpret these fragments of Zoran's, broken as they were, with his esoteric Worldly knowledge – but he had stayed behind at the atelier quite purposefully. Had Gijs's words rattled him? Did he not trust himself not to take the Radiance from the others, if they managed to find it?

They were on the same side. They wanted the same thing. Why would he take it from them? Hadn't Gijs said as much? Eero had asked him, straight-out, to assuage the concerns of all the Warriors assembled: am I still on the side of Illéa, Gijsbert? As far as you know?

Then we win. Khalore had never heard Ilja's voice so brimming with hope. Was this the sound of a man on the cusp of redemption? He had looked at Gijsbert like the man could offer him communion on the tip of his tongue. You win, Gijsbert had said, and Khalore had felt her heart twist in her chest, twist fully over, because if this was what the Hierophants had agreed upon, if this was how they won….

Ghjuvan had been a sacrifice. A necessary sacrifice, but…

A tithe nonetheless.

The thought crawled across her skin, cold and clammy. Did the Hierophants all feel thus, when the pieces fell together? Playing chess against their future incarnations with human-shaped pieces?

Her Hierophant said, at last, "this wasn't their plan either. Someone shirked their duty, and now they're struggling to keep the Radiance alive – to keep it satiated – to keep it fed – until the Selection is over."

Khalore could tell, even in this gloom, that Ina had raised an eyebrow. "But who…?"

"That means," Khalore said, "that the Selection… it's tied to the Radiance? Or… that's who they'll give it to. Right?"

"Then Belle," Ina said, "can steal it back."

Khalore exhaled in a long rush. "If she wins."

"Otherwise," Zoran said. "We kill the girl who does."

He had never sounded so much like a Warrior.

Ilja had guaranteed them a single hour, and the hour had elapsed; the dead girl could offer them little else. Zoran covered up his mirror again, tucking it as carefully into his pocket as another man might tuck away a love poem; Ina lit another match, and Khalore said again, "Ina, how did you find her?"

Inanna's golden eyes could hide so little from her fellow Warriors. Was that why her curse had manifested as it had – a simple desire to render the world as open to her as she had always been to the world? It would have made a certain kind of sick sense.

Khalore had known. She wasn't sure how, but she had known.

She kept her voice low. Their hour was nearly up. They needed to go; they could, at any moment, be killed.

Khalore said, "where is she?"

Inanna said nothing.

Khalore said, "I know she's here."

Right here. Right here and so close. As Ilja had said. Their stories from that evening had occurred mere metres away from one another. Khalore, standing with the dead girl. Ilja, confronted with a girl soon-to-be.

She was here.

Khalore did not wait for Ina to light another match. She was on her feet before Zoran could stop her – and Zoran would not have stopped her – and gone, into the next cell, and when that was empty, into the next – fumbling in the darkness, reaching for her own set of matches, striking them even as she heard the raspy breathing at the back of this room, felt the faint warmth of another living body in the same space.

She struck true. A light blazed from her hand, just strong enough to illuminate the ragged shape of Nerezza Astaroth in the corner of the cell. Her yellow eyes glared at Khalore from beneath a matted tangle of dark hair; there were bruises, angry purple and red, raised up on her mouth and on her cheek and above her eye, as though she had been beaten.

She said nothing. Not even as Khalore's face twisted in hatred, not even as she reached for her screwdriver, not even as she took a step forward that was checked only by Zoran's hand on her shoulder. "Wait."

Wait? She had killed Ghjuvan. Nez had killed Ghjuvan – killed him, used him as bait, just to protect her own worthless skin. She had reduced him to something that Lorencio could barely recognise as human, something that Kinga had still almost been killed trying to protect. She had taken him away. Turned him, like the dead Radiance, into a thing. Just a husk which might have once been a person. Just a dead body which would not smile, which would not tie Khalore's hair back for her when she struggled with her single arm to do so, which would not make Kinga laugh like her heart was going to burst from her chest, which would not go home – he should be going home with us – to the brother and father and mother and Myghal that were waiting for him, to the future he might have had, whatever future he might have chosen to have, whoever he might have chosen to become….

Nez had taken it from him, and she had taken him from Khalore.

Khalore wrenched herself free of Zoran's grip, and seized her knife.

"Khalore," Zoran said again, "wait."

And Ina rounded the corner, and covered her mouth in horror.

Khalore tore her eyes away from Nez and stared at her fellow Warrior, imploring Inanna to let slip what terrible sight unseen had produced such a simple, aghast, response.

Ina just said, "her mouth."

There was nothing wrong with Nez's mouth. It was simply – quite unlike her – shut.

Ina said again, almost dazed, "oh, god, Zor, her mouth."

There was nothing wrong with Nez's mouth. Not yet. Khalore would see to it –

"Wait," Zoran said, a third time. He had an arm around her shoulders, bracing her. Had he always been this strong? She could not remember. "Lore, think. If you kill her, then they will know that we were here, they will know we did this, they will know that someone let us in, they'll suspect..."

I don't care.

Khalore wasn't sure if she had screamed the words internally only. It felt like there was something dwelling inside her, clawing at her ribs. It felt like, if she did not scream, if she did not hurt Nez, then she would simply self-immolate, there and then, burn and burn and burn. He was in her mind. Warm white smile, warm brown eyes. Her Ghju. Their Ghjuvan. Their guiding Star.

I won't let her take anything else from me. I won't let her take anything else.

Inanna. Azula. Belle. Ilja. Kinga. Zoran. Eero. None of them were safe. Not as long as Nez could still take them from her.

"If we leave her here," Khalore bit out. "Then they'll take the Wheel from us too."

He wavered. That was all it took.

Did he think having only one arm would slow her so much? This was her curse – this was the reason for her existence. Her grasping hand found the screwdriver on her belt – she had used it to rip out one of her own teeth, as though closeness to Ghjuvan might be achieved by sharing his phantom pain – and closed fast over the handle. She had blessed it with her own blood. It did not matter if her aim was not true. This was her curse.

He would have moved faster if he thought she shouldn't, wouldn't he?

Was he secretly hoping…?

It didn't matter.

Khalore grabbed the screwdriver, and she flung the screwdriver, and the screwdriver buried itself in Nerezza Astaroth's awful yellow eye, piercing right through to the skull.

As though it had never possessed any other purpose.

As though it had dreamed of the day.

Rather like Khalore herself, then.

It was as simple as that.

Death was rarely complicated.