bérézina (n.) a sense of panic associated with a huge defeat.

"I understand your opposition. I do. I understand completely. Really. Intellectually, I understand why you would be... opposed."

"I hear a but incoming."

"But."

"But he's afraid."

He shot her a withering look – it made it seem as though the stars themselves had dulled – that made Evanne realise that Eunbyeol Seo was entirely correct about this supposition. She said, "but I'll protect you, Si."

She raised her hands and curled them into a pair of boxer's fists, swaying like a sparrer. Eunbyeol rolled her eyes, and Silas almost smiled. Nearly. She would have to start carving out a tally, she thought, of the number of times that he nearly smiled when she was nice to him. What a tease he was, she thought ruefully.

She dropped her hands and added, "you don't have to come."

Her voice was playfully taunting; he responded with his usual dourness. "The Selected are not permitted to leave the grounds either."

"We've already broken curfew," Eunbyeol pointed out. Her low voice had such a strange way of making the most simple sentences sound wonderfully sardonic; she made every statement into the most obvious thing in the world. Shadows suited her, Evanne thought; the gloom dripped off her features as though she had been doused in them, almost utterly indistinguishable from her hair and eyes. The fortifications around the palace, were not so immense as the triplets Evanne had always known – Schreave, Szymańska, and Alliette – but where the trio were standing in the shadow of the walls, it rather seemed that they had blotted out the moon itself.

Eunbyeol and Silas were the same, in that sense; Evie had the oddest difficulty picking their silhouettes from the darkness, even despite the faint pearl-grey sheen of her dress, the bone-grey parchment of the note she was turning over in her hands, more out of idleness than nerves, the white-grey pocket-square in Silas's breast pocket, the pale bandage on his face, their shared pallor and white smiles. When Eunbyeol stepped back to regard the walls around the palace, the lacy skirt of her dress rustled across the grass with a lovely gentle whisper that seemed to set Silas ever more on edge.

Evanne had worn a scarlet dress – she had ignored that it matched perfectly the colour of the Watchers's coats, and had joked instead with the other Selected that it was to hide whatever blood managed to seep around the edges of her bandages. Nonetheless, she was quite sure that it had not escaped the notice of Silas and Eunbyeol, just as it had not escaped her notice that Silas was wearing a scarlet red tie and a pocket-square the same pearl-grey colour of Eunbyeol's gown.

It was, Evie had to concede, very cute. Had he truly never had a pair of friends before? Was he trying to signal something to them? Or had he realised that, with so many girls wearing so many colours, he was sure to match some of them and had decided to match the girls he could trust to read the least into it?

If the latter, then Evie was afraid that she was rather disappointing him.

"Curfew," Silas was saying, "doesn't count. I told you to meet me."

"We are your Selected," Eunbyeol said. "You may meet us whenever you please."

"And it pleased me to meet you now."

Eunbyeol quirked a single eyebrow – or at least, Evie thought she saw the shadow of the same. She was envious of the other Selected's ability to operate her eyebrows independent of one another. It opened up so many more avenues for snarkiness.

"In the middle of the night," Evie added. "At the very end of the palace grounds. Without your personal guard knowing."

"I needed," Silas said. "The fresh air."

"The air is fresher in town," Evanne lied.

Eunbyeol shot Silas a look – he returned it – and Eunbyeol quietly shook her head. The plain pithiness of the gesture was enough to make Evanne's heart genuinely hurt. It reminded her so much of the twins.

Silas said, "I have come to the carefully reasoned conclusion that you are lying to me."

"That may be the case."

"Well," he said. The bandage on his face had not been there the night before; Eunbyeol had been the one to spot it when the pair had glimpsed him leaving on his daily pilgrimage around the palace grounds with his personal guard, the grey man, in tow. "I am perturbed by the fact that you seem so well-practiced at it."

"It isn't," Evanne reassured him, "personal. Is it, Seo?"

Eunbyeol said, "you never lie to me, Chae."

"I'm half-convinced you can read my thoughts, that's why."

"Only half?" Silas asked. Eunbyeol relaxed her mouth in the expression that Evanne now knew to be the closest she came to a properly warm smile.

"There's never a need," Eunbyeol said. "You always say what you're thinking."

That was not true. That had never been true. She was perpetually self-censoring in this place now, unable to speak openly about the strange meeting with the queen and her glowering maid, about the way that the guards watched her like they were measuring her for a noose, about the fact that Pjotr had been here and was now gone and had killed so many in going. She was watched here, constantly: the injuries on her face, terrible as they were, and her continued survival, miraculous though it seemed, marked her out as Evanne Chae, the traitor, the fool, the girl who could not be trusted, the girl who was still in the Selection only because she had got a good look at Pjotr's face.

She could have seen it against her eyelids, if she cared to. She did not care to.

"And what I'm thinking now," Evanne said, "is that we are wasting very valuable darkness, during which we could… gambol."

"Gambol," Eunbyeol agreed. "Frolic."

"Caper," Silas offered. Evanne could see in his dark eyes the very moment that he realised this contribution was as good as an agreement to go with them. He was irritated with himself; she didn't blame him.

But then – Evanne and Eunbyeol made a most forbidable pair when they wanted to.

"In that case," Evanne said, "if we are capering – someone's going to need to help me over the wall. I'm not as good at climbing as I used to be."

She was so tired and so lost in her stupor that Oroitz had to wake her when time came for Lady Chou's evening tea. The queen liked to be brought a a pot of pu erh tea just before midnight, when her focus would otherwise be waning; she said that it helped her to stay alert for an extra hour or three, when the rest of the castle had fallen silent and the world belonged to her alone.

Well, she had said, belongs to us, I suppose.

Azula remembered laughing at that. That was good, she thought. Good that she remembered that much.

Oroitz woke her gently. She hadn't expected that. She hadn't expected gentleness or gentility from Death. She had not been raised to expect anything but ruin from Death, and certainly his black, black eyes did not bode otherwise. But in this, at least, he was kind: he put a hand on her forearm, and said, "you'll lose your job yet, little devil."

Azula smiled into her hand. "Somehow I doubt it."

She always slept with her arm tucked comfortably under her head and her legs curled up beneath her. It was a position which made her think of rain, though she was not certain why that would be the case. She couldn't remember. The fog of sleep still weighed too heavily upon her for her to be sure, or to waste much energy trying to remember. Energy was precious in a world where her curse was as much a limb as either of her legs.

She yawned, widely, and sat up; Oroitz sat back on his heels. He looked as tired as she felt: his long hair hung in lank, greasy locks over a hungry, sallow face whose bones all stuck out at odd angles, as sharp as knives, as though he had spent a thousand years starving. With those hideous black eyes of his, she could never tell precisely where he was looking; in the haze of her half-remembered dream, she reached out to find his strings, as surely as an expert harpist finds her chords, and turned his head away from her.

That was better.

Once he was looking away, she could remember her own dream a little better: she had dreamed of stars, in the strangling embrace of the sky, squeezed of all light, wrung out like ripe lemons and strung out like a necklace through the inky dark as a warning to any that might dream of following them to ignition. She remembered wondering whether all the curses had shone like this before combustion. She remembered Maryam holding her, looking down at her, her headscarf all covered in Oroitz's blood and saying, daring to be contradicted, I think he's still alive.

Still. Not her worst dream. Not by far.

Oroitz was still kneeling there beside the futon, frozen in the strange posture she had chosen for him – head turned aside, hair over his eyes, hands curled gently around the edges of the blanket – as she rose and moved from the bedroom to the adjoining bathroom to shrug on her uniform. Lady Chou had been good enough to move her into her own quarters, away from the other maids, but she was still to be considered a maid.

She was still to know her place. That was fair. The queen had been good enough to her. The queen could ask for a little loyalty in exchange.

Azula pulled on her jacket – the winter was nearly over, she thought, but it was not quite over, not over enough, so she should wear her jacket for the short sprint from the cottage to the palace. It was a red jacket, like a Watcher's jacket. She wasn't sure who had given it to her. She wasn't sure where it had come from. It might have Oroitz's – it was all bloodied around the collar, as Death's might have been, when they had dragged him into the palace and made him what he was.

Who had Death been before? She ought to have known.

She released his strings as she moved back through the room, ensuring that his bones were his own again. He had the oddest sheen to those black eyes of his, she thought, which meant that he had probably just come from treating the king – he always looked the same after using his curse. It was a lost, oddly glazed look that Azula had always associated with those she had glimpsed in the den next the orphanage: addicts reliant on poppytears and charas to put them into a stupor from which the world might seem, if superficially, kinder.

"Get some sleep, Txori," Azula murmured. "Sleep –"

She frowned, and she wrenched.

He wrenched upwards and into the bed that she had just vacated.

"Sleep," she said again, and had that unmistakeable sensation again that he had seen her, and that she had seen herself: running in the shadow of the Wall, fast, faster than she had ever run before. She had been a child. She had still been someone with a name, someone with a history. She had been Someone.

Now: she was, she had always been, Gehörtnicht.

It was nearly autumn, she thought, if the leaves bronzing on the trees lining the path to the palace was any kind of indication. It was dark enough that she had to study her path across the courtyard, so treacherous could these flagstones be when the gloom had drawn down close. She knew the way to the kitchen almost by heart. She could have found Lady Chou's study blindfolded. It was strange, she thought, to feel so at home in a place that had once seemed so dangerous.

Though the flames in the hearth had faded low in the scant hours that Azula had spent asleep, it represented, nonetheless, an oasis of light compared to the darkness outside. Lady Chou was not, as Azula had expected, at her desk, attending to the papers of state in the king's convalescence – instead, she was sitting on one of the low chaises beside the fireplace, fire dancing across the edge of the sword that she was sharpening.

Azula said, "your tea, Lady Chou."

"Thank you, Zula."

Azula drew closer, and set the teatray down on the coffee table, where Lady Chou had left a number of her knives. They were like pieces of art: this one, nearest Azula, had a wavering blade like one of the kerises that the Commandant had trained them to spar with; that one, beside the queen, was broad and flat, like a butcher's meat cleaver.

Lady Chou said, "even a blade which is not used may blunt, little bird."

Azula nodded, easing into the chair beside her. The sword that the queen was sharpening was a flat-tipped razor, of the kind used by the excubitors in the tagma. This was clearly an old sword, and not so expensive as a consort's blade ought to be: the handle had warped to fit the queen's hand, and there were the tiniest hints of rust creeping up the hilt, near to its quillons.

The queen was sharpening her sword with a white, pencil-shaped stone, which she drew in long, calm lines along its blade. She did not move her gaze from her sword as she said, quite calmly, "there has been some bad news, Azula, my dear."

Azula had found herself staring into the fire, quite without being able to remember how long she had been doing so. She could not remember a single time that she had sat in this study and had not, to some degree, lost herself in thought staring thus into the flames. It had been like this when the queen had told her the nature of the Radiance; it had been like this when the queen had told her the truth of the Kur Empire. But wasn't it uncomfortable, she thought, to keep a fire burning in the dead of summer?

The queen had roused her from this blunt-witted reverie; she glanced at Lady Chou and said, "bad news?"

"Bad news," she said, "and good."

Bad news. What could that be? Perhaps it was the other Warriors, wherever they were. She had traded the knowledge of Inanna's hideout to a Watcher for the memory of peeling potatoes with his mother on a cloudless day; she had lost any sense of Ghjuvan's position to a Death who had not co-operated one particular grey morning when the king had hovered too close to oblivion. So she could not be sure that it was not the other Warriors, but Azula wasn't sure that she would still be alive if the others had been uncovered: surely the queen alone was not enough to stand against all the might of the kingdom, if they learned who Azula was and why she had come here?

Why she had come here. Not why she was here still.

"The Wheel," the queen said. "Someone has killed the Wheel."

Nez?

Azula drew in a breath. Her tiredness had hit her all over again. She swayed with it, treacherously. If only it was so easy, she mused, to control her own strings as surely as she controlled those of others. "Who?"

"I have my suspicions," the queen said, her voice tight. "Your soldiers..."

"Warriors," Azula said, automatically.

Kasimira's voice was gentler than Azula deserved. "As you say."

"They wouldn't have," Azula protested, but her voice sounded dull, even to herself. "They wouldn't have. She was one of us. She was our friend –"

"She's dead."

Azula put her head into her hands. It seemed the only reasonable reaction, she thought dully. It seemed the only thing she could do, beyond screaming, and she was not certain that she had the energy for that. Perhaps if she stood outside herself again; perhaps if she worked her own vocal chords remotely, like sawing the strings of a violin. Had Hyacinth felt thus, when Azula had stopped her voice in her throat? Like her own scream was a dying animal at the back of her mouth, curling and withering and writhing for air?

All Azula had ever wanted was peace. All she had ever dared to dream of was a peaceful world. Warriors should never have existed, she thought dully, and they should never have come here.

They were the killers here.

Kasimira set a hand on her back, reassuringly, and Azula thought, not for the first time, that this was how mothers ought to care for their children. Ought to protect their children, knives all aglint beside the fire. Ought to help them and care for them and keep them from the devilry in the world, keep them from the curses, keep them from the parts of the world that hurt the most.

Azula hadn't liked Nez very much, but some part of her had, perhaps, loved her out of sheer desperation. For having little else to love. It was normal to cling thus, wasn't it? When you had crawled into someone's skull to move them about like a puppet, and left a part of yourself behind in them? When you had taken a part of them back with you?

Had it been love, what Azula had done to her?

"Dead," she said. "Can Oroitz…?"

"I'm sorry."

Azula said, dully, "I… I should speak to them."

She didn't even know where they were. Ilja, she thought, Ilja was in the palace. Ilja would know.

Oh, but Ilja had known where Nez was kept.

"I don't trust them not to hurt you as well, little Zu." The queen sheathed her sword, and stood. "I want you to stay in the palace until we find who has done this. You're too precious to risk."

Now, Azula thought, was no time for joking.

The queen said, "Fall Day begins tomorrow night – at the witching hour, of course." Azula could practically hear the queen rolling her eyes as she stood, and set the sheathed sword into its rightful place at her hip. She had never really looked like a queen – there had always been the air of the soldier to how she carried herself. "Our ancestors were ever superstitious… but it may work to our advantage."

"Fall Day?" Azula wiped at her eyes, and found that they were dry. "The festival?"

She had not realised that it was springtime already.

"Indeed. It is most sacred to our people. It is the time to mourn what we have lost; it is the time to celebrate our very survival. And we must ensure that we can continue to survive here, in peace. Free of the war that they wish to bring to our Walls."

Every time Kasimira said we and our, it was with an implicit kind of inclusiveness; it never felt as though Azula was standing on the outside and staring in. They were both Kur. Wasn't that the only reason Azula could take this curse without buckling, the reason she had been farmed out to the couple whose faces and names she had left behind in a dead soldier, the reason that she had grown up around other fodder, carrion for the curses, mere human shields for the regime of the Irij?

They were Kur.

Devils both: one moreso than the other, and the other more wise about what that meant.

The world had closed its arms over him; the world had closed tight around him, and was trying to turn itself inside out. He could be grateful only that the Devil had left the light on, in the very fibres of himself as well as in the room. In this strange arsenic hush, he would have asked Her forgiveness if he knew what he needed Her to forgive – for future mistakes, perhaps for whatever the days ahead would bring, for wherever this fever he was riding would bring him. He existed in a fever these days: it was all faithless confusion and lonesome haze. He was praying like he was learning his first words; he was praying as though he had been pulled fresh from the fire and She was piecing him back together with pieces She had found on the floor. He was praying for a good time. You never really lost it. Did you? Do you?

Death shouldn't have felt this comfortable; perhaps instead of death hanging over his shoulder, it was sureness that was the comfort chorusing in his skull. Now She needed him. She could not be rid of him, not easily. Who else would She trust with this burden?

None but he who had been dead from the moment She had laid Her eyes upon him. He hadn't even been Krzysztof Szymański then: he had been Oroitz Txori already, an orphan with an orphan's name to match, a son of regret only, something that had forgotten what his hands were for when they weren't shaking.

It was raining somewhere outside the cottage when he woke. He did not for a moment believe that he had slipped the knots of the Devil's chains; she must, simply, have left him loose. He had the strangest sensation that he was flying, or perhaps falling, or perhaps simply weightless and hanging here, on the Devil's set of strings, waiting for the Schreaves to tell him to move anew. The Devil had stitched a part of herself into him, something upon which she could hang her hooks – he could reach into it, if he wanted to, he could peer into the depths of this fragment of Gehörtnicht and he could see what part of herself she considered most precious, most familiar, what she could reach for in a panic to keep Death at bay: the sky had been pearled, and bruised here and there, green and purple, pregnant with brewing rain; there had been a burden relieved, so that her feet were her own again, so that she no longer felt as though she were trying to hold up the very struts of the world; there had been a short set of whispered words exchanged, the very closest that she had ever come to hearing that someone loved her and believing it: Here. You look like you're about to collapse.

The sound of the rush of rain, whispering along the pavements and the streets, was nearly enough to carry him back into sleep, so deeply did his bones ache with the deep exhaustion of the king's death kept, narrowly, at bay. The fountains would be filling in Txori district, he thought, and men would be haunting the streets with hats slowly filling with rain.

The springs of the bed creaked gently with added weight. Somewhere in the smoke – this darkness was thus, a smoke, where other darknesses were liquid, but this, this was a haze – She said, "darling Oroitz, are you awake?"

She must have thought he was still asleep, for her hand, cool, like marble, traced a pattern across the back of his hand. She had never sounded so desperate for him to speak to her. Was that fear in her voice, however slight? But She also no longer dared to touch him when he was awake, so he did not disabuse her of the notion that he was otherwise. He thought of his mother's song, which had been a wretched song: tell him that you will never know any better, and pretend to understand why that isn't good enough. It was good enough, he thought. The wretches had been wrong, as the wretches usually were. The tips of her fingers had found the spaces between his knuckles, where the callouses lay; her nails traced across them, as though testing armour.

He remembered the days that he had been a boxer rather than a husk thus, hollowed out by Her eyes and the simple devilry of she-who-does-not-belong-anywhere. You never really lose it, do you? Do you?

Was he flying or falling? Don't let me down, Zula. Where was the sky? Stitched into Her eyes, perhaps. And why not? Stranger things had happened.