fall (v.) to move from a higher to a lower level, rapidly and without control; to lose one's balance.

She was screaming again, as she always screamed at night – a wild shriek, something with talons and bite that clawed from her throat, frenzied – but when she burst down the stairs, it was with a delirious look on her face, stranded in the blighted no-man's-land between horror and shock and delight.

"Gone," she said, "gone."

They were staring at her as though she had gone insane. Maybe she had. And who would have blamed her? She and Zoran would be alike then. She might be able to love him a little easier, if she was as mad as he.

Eero blinked up at her lazily, a little less judgmental than the rest. He had been asleep on the couch; when his hair was tousled, he looked a little more like the boy he had been. It was an effect that was accentuated by the browness of his eyes, nearly precisely the same colour as the one that remained to Kinga. Khalore, sprawled on the floor beside the couch, had been cutting little chunks out of his hair for no apparent reason – golden locks dusted her skirts and the slate floor around her, clinging to her shirt and to her own dark hair as though reluctant to fall. Zoran had been silently watching her do so, as though hypnotised. No one, it seemed, had seen the point in rousing Eero to warn him, but he was roused now, and seemed not to have realised that his lovely long hair had been sabotaged in his slumber.

Zoran said, with the soothing voice of a man trying to soothe a spooked colt, "who's gone, Ina?"

She stared at Zoran in undisguised awe. He was himself again – the himself he had been – in the world as it had been before she had taken her curse. An empty world, an undecorated world. She had spent so long seeing only Eero in this way – Eero as a sudden, shining point of utter normalcy in a world otherwise irrevocably corrupted and complicated by her curse – that when she saw Zoran without threads dripping from his every atom, it was all she could do to keep from embracing him tightly to make sure he still existed. "They're all gone," she said. "They're all gone."

Khalore had hidden the scissors behind her back and was feigning innocence. She said, slowly, with the air of one who expects to be scolded, "is this about Nez?"

"The strings." She wanted to shriek it. She wanted everyone to know. She wanted it to bounce off every wall and cobblestone in Illéa. She wanted everyone to hear, and she wanted everyone to understand. That the world was clean again. That her heart was no longer bound up, trussed by multi-coloured strings like some kind of macabre package of meat. That she felt, for the first time since Pekka had died, like a person. "They're gone."

It had just struck three in the morning, and the clock was still chiming somewhere deep in the walled city, and Zoran was staring at her with undisguised concern. Had she looked at him like that, when he had tried to kill her? He said, "but that's your curse."

Her curse indeed. Every person around her, converted into colours and knots, string and thread and a confusion of shades and overlapping fabric. It could have been worse, couldn't it? Kinga didn't look human anymore, even when she was. Zoran was barely Zoran, even when he was. Ilja and Azula were both grey shades of the persons they had been. Who was she to complain about a world full of colour?

That was gone now: the world was normal now. Normal again. She had almost forgotten what that might seem like. She had almost forgotten what the world was meant to look like.

But that was her curse. That was the point.

Maybe this was mastery – a learning, not a loss. Maybe she had just, at last, learned to filter the unnecessary from her field of vision. Maybe she was a Warrior, with a Warrior's hold on her curse. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. The possibilities were a metronome, tolling uncertainty against the very bone of her skull, drowning all rational thought.

There was no thought: there were only brown eyes, blue eyes, brown eyes.

Khalore had allowed the scissors to fall to the floor. They had clattered. It sounded particularly loud in this silence. They had gouged a chip from the slate floor. It shouldn't have been possible. Zoran had risen to his feet. He didn't seem to have realised that he had done so.

And Eero was smiling.

Her hands drifted; where they had covered her mouth, they now clutched at her throat. Like she was choking again. Like she was drowning again. Like she was breathing fresh air after an eon on a pyre.

Was this humanity, at last, at least?

Was she truly a xrafstar no longer?

It was just after four in the morning that they were evicted from the publican's, and the trio – soldier, citizen, prince – stumbled back out onto the cobbled streets of Ganzir, blinking gauzily into the sudden darkness of the shadowed alleyways. Silas carried no money, but between the two girls and what little they had carried into the Selection, they had managed an approximation of a good drinking session – good enough that Evanne had to thread her arm through Eunbyeol's in order to ensure she kept her prosthetic leg steady beneath herself. Eunbyeol, for her part, seemed to have the liver of a sixty-year-old sailor; she had not even reddened with the liquor as Silas had, a deep, dark flush running the full length of his gorgeous cheekbones. Aesthetically, Evanne had to hand it to him: it was exceptionally hard to find fault in his stupid handsome face.

Despite the late hour, the world was abuzz with activity: there were ladders resting against each of the facades which lined the Main Street, workmen hanging from them, and garlands of flowers strung the streets, forming a beautifully colourful lattice overhead as though wound amongst the stars themselves. The trio moved slowly, drinking it all in. Evanne was quite certain that she had known tomorrow was Fall Day when the night had started, but that knowledge had, like mist, twisted and turned and rather evaded her until just this moment.

They paused at the entryway of the Ganzir School, Eunbyeol and Silas helping Evanne to ease into a seat upon the steps. The School at the centre of the Illéan capital province was a genteel collection of blue marble buildings, a handful of streets over from the house of mercy that they had visited with the rest of the Selection. The steps were fingerprinted with a gorgeous white spiderweb of marbling across which Evanne could not help but trace her fingertips; the whole place looked like a school woven out of pure sapphire. The attack – Pjotr – had left jagged scars in the steps and the buildings of the building; the Scholars had all been moved into temporary residence in the Gjöll School, where the handsome general was directing studies of the material that the human druj – Petja – had left behind.

Silas was looking up at the Schools; in this light, his eyes looked all black, without any white or sclera visible at all. Eunbyeol was looking up at him, and Evanne was looking at Eunbyeol, and they spent a little while like that in comfortable silent. Evanne was quite certain that she could feel the blood moving through her very veins. Alcohol always had this effect on her: it made her quiet and very awake, as though veiled through the gauzy blur of tipsiness was the only way she could see the world in full colour. It warmed her, pleasantly so. Shae had given Evanne her first drink at the age of fifteen, during one of their myriad quiet evening huddled around a hissing, simmering dark fire in the shadow of the outer wall, and every drink since had tasted of that night: Jovan's deep voice murmuring something in the buzz of conversation around her, Katie's hair falling over Evanne's shoulder, Gregory's teeth glinting grey-white in the dim light, warmth in her chest and in the tips of her fingers that she had a place here and that her place was central. She mattered. She would help.

She yawned widely. Maybe not so awake, then.

Silas said, thoughtfully, "I think this is my bezirk."

"Berserk?" Evanne said, at the same time that Eunbyeol said, flatly, "gesundheit."

"Bezirk," Silas said again, looking away from the School and looking back out onto the streets. "Gjöll is divided up into smaller neighbourhoods: bezirke. They have their own royal patrons. A kingdom-within-a-kingdom."

"And this is yours?"

"I think so."

Eunbyeol said, "and you've never visited?"

"I never left the palace," Silas said. "Until tonight."

Evanne bit back her urge to ask him whether he thought that it had been worth it. What had they done, really? Capered, she supposed, but even their capers had been at a minimum: they had drank, and they had hidden from Mirabelle, and they had drank some more. And now they were sitting in the dark – for Silas and Eunbyeol had taken a seat on either side of her, Eunbyeol smoothing down her skirts around her, Silas stretching his legs out long and leaning back against the steps – and watching the workmen of Gjöll set up the skeleton of the Fall Festival. It was nice. It felt like this was the adolescence that had been due to them, all of them.

"We'll have to be up early," Silas said. "For chapel."

Evanne nodded, and shivered; quite without realising, she had leaned into Silas's shoulder for warmth, and he had done her the decency of not shoving her away again. One would not mistake this for intimacy, but he had, at least, draped one arm carefully around her shoulder, as though his presence alone could beat back the gentle chewing cold of the air around them. She yawned again. She seemed to be the only one who was tired; Eunbyeol and Silas seemed as awake as she had ever seen them.

"I haven't been to chapel since..."

Evanne let her sentence trail off, unfinished. She wasn't sure that she quite knew how to finish it. When had she stopped depending on something other than her own grit?

Eunbyeol said, "I don't think I've ever been to chapel."

"You're gonna love it," Evanne said. "It's all listening to recitation, and staring at the wall, and trying not to fall asleep."

"I think," Silas said, "that you may not have been doing it right."

"Army chapel is a beast of its own," Evanne said. "I defy anyone to focus for longer than thirty seconds."

It was a reflex by now: she could not help but touch the gauze strapped to her cheek to make sure that her blood had not oozed through over the course of their evening. Silas' first ever words to her: you've bled through your bandages. Silas watched her do so, his dark eyes shadowed. Was this mutilation fated to act forever as a reminder of the suspicion which hung over her? Would Eunbyeol and Silas ever be able to look at her without thinking of Pjotr, and his rampage, and all of those deaths?

"You would tell me," Silas said, "if you were going to hurt me. Wouldn't you, Evie?"

She did not point out how little sense this made as a question; she did not tell him that someone seeking to hurt him would not admit it under any penalty. She just said, "yes, I would, Silas."

Eunbyeol said, "what about the druj?"

"We met him at the house of mercy," Evanne said. "I thought he was a tagma soldier. I met him thrice in all."

Had they exchanged even one hundred words?

Eunbyeol said, softly, firmly – "it."

She moved forward onto her knees, crouching on two steps lower than Silas and Evanne, scrabbling in her pockets for something. The stupefying effect of the alcohol pinned Evanne where she was, but there was nothing here against which she should have defended herself: Eunbyeol was simply producing a handkerchief, the same pearl-grey colour as her dress, and holding it to Silas's face with her usual unreadable expression. Silas's nose had started to bleed, quite without Evie realising. Silas's reaction suggested that he hadn't noticed either. Perhaps it had been the cold; it agitated the blood, didn't it? Or was that an old wives' tale?

God, but Eunbyeol made even the most tender of motions seem brusque and bureaucratic.

"It," Evanne echoed. It.

The workmen swayed on the ladders and the flowers swayed over the street and the stars were swaying as well, though Evanne suspected that they ought not. In this moment, it was hard to believe that druj existed anywhere in the world. It was hard to believe that this world existed of anything behind this simple tableau. Anything beyond the three of them, on the steps of a school, watching the world move past with a gentle laziness.

Eunbyeol said, "this was nice."

Yeah. It was.

She was still a xrafstar. That much was clear.

That much was irrevocable. Whatever this was…. it was a disruption, not an end. Relief from the symptoms, not a cure of the disease. The curse was still lying within her, rotting her, twisting and turning in her chest like something living and malignant and awful.

That was final. It had to be. Otherwise, what had been the point? Nineteen generations.

The alternative was simply unthinkable.

She had started out sitting on the couch; now she was curled up on it, clutching a mug of tea between her hands, and staring, wondrously, at her hands. Clean. Empty. Light. No strings, she thought, no threads. Nothing weighing her down. Nothing tying her to the others. Nothing binding her here to these people, to this cause. Was this how Kinga felt all of the time? Was this why the Moon of Kur thought that she had to bind herself to them, chain herself to their broken little family, for fear that she might otherwise, out of sheer self-preservation, abandon them to their ruin? So that, no matter their cowardice, they would always do what they ought. Go down with the ship. The ship was certainly still sinking, but all the chains had rusted and all the ropes had torn. Ina was adrift, at last, adrift. It was only the warmth clutched between her palms, drifting grey steam into the air, which managed to perform any semblance of grounding her. Free, she thought, at last, free.

Ah, but it wasn't that simple. It was never that simple.

Eero's watch was marking five in the morning. Zoran had drawn a chair up beside the futon – close to her, but not too close, though how he had determined that distance was an utter mystery to her. It was, Ina thought dully, the strangest phenomenon: the space between them seemed more an uncrossable chasm than if he had simply taken a seat a little further away. Khalore was still sitting on the floor, legs crossed, grimly studying the screwdriver with which she had murdered Nez. The blood around the tip had dried brown and black, like something birthed from the soil.

No one was looking at one another. The talk had come earlier, panicked and unfocused and accomplishing nothing; now, they were thinking, and Ina suspect that their thoughts were as panicked and unfocused as anything which had spilled from them earlier. Zoran had, as reverently as he ever did, uncovered the broken piece of glass Khalore had collected from his shattered mirror. He was staring into its depths with a fixated, silent desperation which seemed somehow more pitiable than any of the moments that he had spent raving.

"Anything interesting?" Inanna said softly. She wasn't certain what answer she desired from him. What if he looked up from his scrying glass – for that was what she, in private, had come to consider this shattered piece of mirror, the reflection he kept captured with him wherever he went – and said to her, this is forever, Ina, you are cursed no more? Would it be a relief? Would it spare her?

The idea, though anathema, went to her very core. It hurt. If Zoran looked at her, and said that she had more than her ten years – that she had twenty years, that she had thirty, that she would live to grey and crow's feet and children playing in the courtyard? – could she really say that she would stay? Was this mission so important to her, whatever this mission had become?

Inanna had never been very good at lying, even to herself.

"Nothing," Zoran said. "Nothing at all. Just Zoran."

His voice was on the verge of breaking – from fear or from relief, she could not be certain.

She stared at him. For once, he did not stare back. He was clutching so hard to the jagged edge of the mirror that his knuckles had gone white and his palms had sprung up tiny constellations of blood. She was still marvelling at his clean edges, unmarred by the clutter of threads and knots and string: he was, all of a sudden, Zoran alone, Zoran undefined by his relationship to others, Zoran as he ought to be.

Not the Hierophant. Just Zoran.

She was already struggling to remember what colours they had worn. Zoran had been bound to her by silver and scarlet, had he not? To Kinga by her bronze chains, and to Ilja by that grey and yellow rubber band, and to Khalore by…. it had been a thread, though she could not remember what type, in a dark colour, a jewel colour, something navy or forest green or maybe royal purple.

And to Eero not at all. To Eero, never. The stringless man. The one point of sanity in her world, made mundane by whatever had passed over the course of the last two hours. She remembered how happy she had been to see him. How it had, however briefly, made it seem as though things might be okay. That the world might settle back upon its axis, and spin smoothly once more.

Ina leaned close to Eero. Ah, but he smelled like home: the salt-stained lumber of the docks and the sweet smoky scent of the tears-of-Siarka that her mother had cultivated on the windowsill of their apartment kitchen. She had never so badly wanted to cry. She wanted her mother. She wanted her father. She wanted Zoran as he had been, and Pekka as he never would be again. Through her unshed tears, and the scream she had stoppered in her throat, she said, "and you? You're still the World, aren't you, Eero?"

"Oh, Ina," Eero said. Ina wasn't sure that she had ever heard him sound apologetic before, but he sounded apologetic now – deeply, tragically, heart-achingly so. "I never was."

The Moon had fallen like a shooting star, shedding black feathers onto black air.

It had seemed quite impossible that it might do so: for a single moment, the stars had not seemed to exist, so utterly did the monster in the sky blot out any hint of light. He had been struck, not for the first time, with something that might have approached a strange kind of pity for the people of this caged city, who did not know that a world still existed outside their walls, who did not know that world was full of magic as well as monsters, who did not know that such a world was kept safe only by their imprisonment on this wretched island.

The Moon had visited no ruination upon them on this night: it was a mere distraction from a dead, yellow-eyed girl beneath the palace, a spectre in the air to remind the people below that there was something yet to fear in the tiny world that they knew.

And then the Moon had fallen, and his heart had stopped. The stars had come back into view, and the enormous beast tumbled from its place on the edge of space, careening down towards the city below.

It should not have been possible. He almost hadn't realised that something was wrong until he saw her, not the Moon, not the monster, but her, dark hair whipping about a face serenely set as though in sleep, eyes closed: torn free of the carcass of the monster that she had been, spiralling towards an unpleasant reunion with the cobblestones below.

Ilja Schovajsa had never learned to use the hooks of the excubitors, but what did that matter to the curse of the Chariot? He thought that perhaps something more than gravity had lifted him from the ground – Ghjuvan's ghost, perhaps, guiding his hand – and it was certainly not with any grace that he struck her, but struck her he did, and then they were both falling. A shorter distance: they hit the rooftop of the School in Kass District, and Ilja was quite certain that he heard something crunch in his shoulder, something snap in her chest, as they did so.

That was alright: they could live with that. As long as he wasn't picking bits of her off the street, he could live with that.

He held onto her, until he was sure that they would not plummet through the tiles of this roof, so unsteady did its foundations feel under him. A shudder was ripping through her that seemed to shake the very bones of her being, and as it did so, the thing she had once been shook as well, feather and claw and fang. As it struck Wall Schreave, what had been black flesh exploded into black smoke, great billowing clouds of something like inky stardust.

Kinga said, "that shouldn't have happened."

"No," Ilja agreed. His heart was restarted again, but unsteadily: it juttered out, staccato, a limping pulse.

Kinga was looking past him, at the moonlight. Her face was slowly regaining its usual features, her familiar strong jaw and thick eyebrows slowly darkening as though she had greyed into fogginess during her time as a beast. Slowly, she raised a hand, and touched, very gently, the skin beneath his eye. Unbidden, there came to mind that voice again, gentler: there is nowhere you could go that I would not follow. For the first time in fifteen years, he had not thought of his own redemption.

Kinga touched, reverently, his cheek. "No tears?"

She frowned, mockingly. He practically threw her from his embrace.

She seemed as ill-inclined to trust the safety of the rooftop as he; she tested it gingerly, propping up one knee, before she rose, and offering him a hand that was – he tried not to look like he was inspecting it – mostly free of scales. She was smoking, very faintly, black curlicues of smog rising off her body as the final hints of monstrosity dissipated. "I nearly died, Iliusha."

He grumbled. "Should have let you fall."

His shoulder screamed protest as she hauled him up. He prayed fervently – Preacher, where do I put my hands again? – that it would not be broken. A dislocation, he thought, he could live with a dislocation.

They stared, together, at the corpse rotting slowly into smoke on the street. Kinga said, again, with much more fervor of feeling, "that shouldn't have happened."

"Are you…?" Ilja shook his head. "Has this happened before?"

She would know what he meant, that he referred not only to her but to the lineage of beasts which had gone before her. Oh, they had studied all of the Warriors, as though their successes had been replicable, as though redemption could be aped so – had they redeemed themselves? had they really? Decebal Nicolescu had collapsed into dust, Jaga Szymańska had been butchered by her own sister, and Matthias Kloet had died embracing a monstrous manifestation of their shared sins, and which part of that was salvation? – but the Szymanskas handed this sort of knowledge down, hand-to-hand-to-knife through each short generation, without need for interlocutor placed between. The dead whispered directly to their butcher.

"I'm fine," she said. "I'm fine. It was… it was a normal…."

She cocked her head. It was a curiously Jaga-like movement, though Ilja wasn't sure why he would have known that. Did he know that? His usual certainty was leaking from him. Using the hooks should have been second nature to him, so much time had he spent around Ghjuvan and Kinga, soaking in their knowledge through osmosis. It should not have been this: this rough, graceless, painful crash landing, and this ache in his shoulder, Kinga's hand flat against her ribs, like she was holding herself together by stubborness and strength alone. But none of it should have been like this. None of this had gone right. There was no atonement in what they were doing here. Was there? Ghjuvan had been martyred, and Mielikki as well, and Pekka had tried but they – Ilja thought they, as though he and Eero were a single entity – had given him no rest. Kur were to serve until they were empty, not merely dead.

Kur were to serve until they were empty, and Ilja was feeling hollowed. The devil of devils was a beautiful, dying boy and nothing was making sense.

"We should get back to the others," Kinga said. She was more Illéan than the rest; when she looked for danger, she scanned the rooftops. "In case..."

Was she so reluctant to believe that she could simply fail? Of all of them, Kinga had struggled the least with her curse, borne into it with the assured self-confidence of one who believed in destiny, if not in fate. It would be a comfort to her, he thought, if there was other danger lurking here, a cause and a reason for the dead Moon rotting in the street below them. It would be a balm to her ego.

What a terrible person his sister was.

It was a miracle that had been shattered: Pekka had died all over again.

So many of her dreams had passed thus, that for a moment, it struck her: perhaps this was all some strange nightmare, formed half of perpetual, repeating fear and half of unspoken, desperate desire. Alas – she sat on the bed, and creased the cover, and touched Pekka's forehead, gently, and watched her fingers part his short-cropped blonde hair, tracing gently across the skin on the very top of his skull that was more gravel than flesh.

In a single, sudden moment of utter clarity, it struck her: yes, she could fall in love with him again, if there was an again, if she got another chance with him. There was enough of Pekka in Pjotr, though deeply buried; it would be like trying to recompose a symphony after burning the sheets it was scrawled upon. Perhaps it would not again be so brillliant. But it would be there. Composed. Forced from her, like a strike to the ribs and a sudden exhale of air.

It was easier the second time around. It wasn't so traumatic. Maybe this was death as it was supposed to be: slipping, gently, into oblivion, with your loved ones around you – though even Pekka, in his infinite kindness, would probably not have said that he loved Zoran. Liked him, perhaps. Admired him, it was possible. Appreciated him, it had not gone unsaid, though that had always been more for his effect on Ina than any virtue in and of himself. But love?

Love. Love love love. Had it served anyone? Had it made any of this easier? Were Kinga or Khalore the happier for having loved Ghjuvan?

Ina said, defeatedly – and sounded, even to her own ears, like a broken record – "you should have told me."

"I'd love to know," Eero said, "how I should have done that."

"You had so many chances – "

God, but it wasn't even cathartic to berate him: he was just taking it, all wood-brown eyes and down-turned mouth. When he did protest, it was mild. Like this: "I had four chances."

Four. Like he had counted them.

Inanna did not doubt that he had.

When she had first seen him, here, in Illéa, after all those years, she had thought the lack of strings disturbing; it had frightened her, an instinctual kind of deep-seated unease like looking at a dog with mange. It had been, she had thought then and thought again now, like seeing a puppet standing of its own accord, its strings cut.

God, but how could she have been so stupid? She could only think of brown eyes and blue eyes, and her mind could only turn over and over and over, caught in place, as uselessly as a butterfly in a jar. She said, "can I guess how much was true, or should I let you tell me?"

He was sitting in the windowseat that usually belonged to Lore, one arm slung around his knee, and he was not looking at her. It was not pointed, this dearth of attention; it was not, as she had expected, driven by any kind of embarrassment, or shame, or chagrin.

But why would he feel any of those things? Inanna felt a manic kind of mirth bubble up within her. It hadn't been him. None of it had been him. He wasn't to blame for any of it. Wasn't that convenient? Wasn't that a fucking miracle?

And he had told her. He had told her. She had wanted to believe the happy ending that he had tacked on to the end of it – no, not he but it, the happy ending that it had tacked on to the end of what had happened to him, as though it could be words alone rewrite what had been done to the little boy that Ina had known and loved.

It had looked her in the eye – electric blue, as they had never been in life, like Pjotr's and like Hyacinth's, like all the other limbs of the World, stretched across the narrow sea to the island of monsters – and he had said, alive, as long as he was – happy, as long as he was – believing in his causes, as long as he believed, merely an adjunct of the World, one of many limbs, wholly him, but looking through my own eyes….

And oh, now he had his own eyes back. However briefly. However painfully.

Perhaps that was why he was so relaxed about it now: this was duty to him, as surely as becoming a monster was to Kinga, as surely as melting into greyness was to Ilja or losing his sanity was to Zoran. There could not possibly be any greater sacrifice for one's country than body and soul both. Perhaps she ought to tally his mind along with that: surely no sane man could be so nonchalant.

Or perhaps he was simply defeated, or perhaps – and here, Inanna thought that perhaps she might have truly seized upon the truth – he might simply have been stupid.

She wanted to just lie down. She wanted to just lie down next to Pekka, and go to sleep, and wait for this to all be over. Wait for the Radiance to blight the stars. Wait for Ilja and Khalore to get themselves killed striving for an atonement that they did not need. Wait for Kinga to die the way that she had planned since she had six years old, and wait for Zoran…

Even in whatever bitterness had risen in her, she could not bring herself to think of Zoran with this kind of resentful ire. Even with her throat bruised and her face aching where her tears had burned into her skin like a brand, she just, simply, only, wanted him to be well. The others as well, if she fought through these angry thoughts to a place of reluctant honesty, though conjuring barbed thoughts about the other Warriors was marginally easier. Damn him anyway: Zoran had always made himself too loveable for his own good.

So instead of lying down and waiting for kingdom come, Ina rose, and went over to Eero, and put a hand, gently, on his hair. No gravel here, she thought; he still felt human, unlike his brother.

He wrapped an arm around her waist and said, "he'll be back any moment. You shouldn't let him know that you know."

"The World," Inanna said, "does not scare me."

"I think he should."

"And when he does come back?"

"I'll still be here," he said. "Just…"

She smiled at him. She wasn't sure why. "Taking a backseat," she said.

"Trapped," he said.

"And how much," she said, "was true? About how the curse works?"

He looked up at her. How had she ever mistaken those blue eyes for his? "What?"

"About killing the World," Inanna said. She wasn't certain that she had ever sounded quite so certain ever before. "About setting yourself free. Or was that something it made up to sell your – its – the story?"

"No," he said.

"No," she echoed. She was still smiling. It didn't feel like her own. She was still adrift, she thought, almost gleefully. She was still untethered. "It's true. Killing the World."

"Killing the World."

Eero repeated it slowly.

He repeated it like a prayer.

Like he thought it was a joke, and like he was afraid it might not be.

The door banged open. It made Zoran jump; it made Khalore clutch at her screwdriver, thought she wasn't sure how much she could accomplish now that it was simply that, without the sanctifying influence of her blood. Lucky for her, it was not needed: it was just Iliusha and Ki, looking dishevelled and irritated and concerned.

Ilja said, "please tell me someone in this team is still cursed."

He needed no answer, only to see the white-anxious look which flashed across Zoran's face.

Ilja said, "Motherfucker."

And Kinga laughed so hard she had to sit down, clutching at the place on her chest where Khalore suspected she may have broken a rib. Khalore stared at her, waiting for it to subside, but there was no sign of abatement: she was laughing silently, grabbing silently at her side, hair and shoulders shaking.

"Ignore her," Ilja said. "She's concussed again."

Ina raised an eyebrow. "That's… her sixth time in six months."

"Seventh," Ilja said. Khalore had not realised that he was keeping tabs. "We should never have let this woman in the air."

The woman in question was resting her head on her knees and smiling vacantly like a recent lobotomy patient. It must have hurt too much to keep laughing. Khalore was still in awe that she could do so. In truth, the last few hours had passed by in a silent, hellish purgatory: the slow realisation that her curse, scant though it was, no longer worked… that had been one thing. But the knowledge, settling gradually on her shoulders like something taloned descending from the sky, that this might be it, that she might be relegated back to the place that she had occupied – useless, she thought, maimed, just simmering in her own impotent resentment and grief….

Maybe Kinga knew somethng she didn't. Maybe that was why she was laughing.

"Eero's back," Khalore said, quickly. He was at the back of the atelier, leaning against the wall beside the stairs, where Ina had found a seat for herself. They had been speaking quietly. Conspiring, Khalore had decided – making plans, for that was their part here. That was their place. As Khalore's place had been – might still be – on the other end of a blade, stained in her own blood.

Ilja cocked an eyebrow. "I am aware."

"The real Eero," Zoran said, mutinously. "The real Hämäläinen. The World has been wearing his skin to get close to us for the last six months."

Oh, and that – yes, that looked like a gut punch. Khalore couldn't blame him. She had felt similar.

No. She had felt precisely the same. Whoever he was, this World, the man who held the twelfth curse of Irij, the man hiding god-knew-where behind his adjuncts and Eero's smiling face… he had been the person with whom she had lived and fought and hunted the Radiance for the last two months. He was the one she had grown to know. To like. And Ilja had been closer to him again, more trusting and, in truth, more trusted.

This man was a stranger, but for his relation to the dead man upstairs. Like starting all over again, one hundred chapters in, like propping up the Tower and expecting everyone to recognise it as Pekka – god, it was wrong of her, and Ghjuvan would not have forgiven her if he was alive, but he was dead and some part of Khalore, buried deep, just wanted the World back.

He, at least, seemed to have some certainty about all of this madness. He would have known what was going on. He would have known why their curses weren't working, why they had been made useless all over again.

Ilja said, "we're meant to believe that this version is the truth?"

"He's quite keen," Khalore said, "that we not believe him about anything from here on out."

Ilja's lip curled. A liar knew an honest man where he saw one.

"Convenient," he said.

Eero said, "I've made tea."

"Fucking tea," Kinga said, from that strange, contorted position. Nonetheless, her tone was hopeful. "Tea of Saint Brygida?"

"No."

Kinga inhaled deeply, and then exhaled in what sounded like a painful rush. "What the fuck do you have against my family, Hämäläinen?"

Eero was smiling, though Khalore suspected that it was an expression born, in large part, out of sheer relief that someone had acknowledged him as something other than a problem to be solved. "We ran out of swordroot."

Khalore found that she couldn't blame Inanna for going starry-eyed over these blond boys: it was something special, to see Eero smile.

Something nudged her shoe. She looked up, to find that Ilja had, not entirely subtly, kicked her.

"Lore," Ilja said. "Can I speak to you?"

Khalore nodded. "Roof."

They rose, and they went together. Ina grabbed Ilja's sleeve as they passed – a silent exchange went between them, the kind Ina usually resolved for Zoran – and then they continued up the stars, up past the bedroom where the thing that had been Pekka, the thing that had been Pjotr, still lay, dead for as long as the World's power had been banished from this place, and then up onto the roof, where a pile of blankets and pillows packed neatly under a waterproof tarp belied the fact that Zoran and Ina still spent, even now, most nights sleeping together up here, a single stranglehold apart.

Khalore was shocked that she had enough self-discipline to hold back what she had been desperate to ask all of this time. Only Ilja. She could only ask Ilja.

"This isn't it," she said. "Right?"

Ilja looked at her. The dawn was rising. What time was it – perhaps just after eight in the morning? It was a late sunrise, drowned in the grey mass of clouds brewing on the horizon.

"What?"

"This isn't," she said. "The end. I need you to tell me that this isn't the end."

This was how it happened sometimes, wasn't it? Decebal Nicolescu had fallen apart into dust, and Matthias had gone so blind and mad that his prophecies had been mere ravings, and Avrova Vovk's curse had simply, like a clock that had wound down… stopped.

"I don't think," Ilja said. "That this is the end. Not yet. We have another seven or eight years left in us, kid. There will be time for despair yet."

She nodded, and she sat down at the edge of the rooftop, closely enough that her bare feet dangled into nothing, and she felt l'appel du vide curl a tendril around her ankle and gently, gently, tug. She nodded, and she put her hand to her eyes to keep from crying, and she felt her phantom arm ache, and she watched the sunrise, and finally she just had to say, "what happens? When's it's over? When we burn out, from the very bottom of the wick?"

"We start over," he said. His eyes gleamed like mercury, like chains. "It goes again."

Again. All over again. Didn't they get tired? Didn't they ever get tired? She said, "I wonder how often I've ended up loving you."

"Every single time."

"Really?" Her smile was as weak as the rest of her.

He returned it. "What are the odds?"

Better now. Khalore would be happy to take credit for that. She said, "do you think one curse loves another?"

"No," he said. He sat down next to her. He had blood on his cuff. "I don't believe that."

"No?"

She put her arms around him, and shut her eyes, and pressed her face into his shoulder. He said, "I think that does you a disservice, Khalore. The Hanged Man means nothing to me if you're not holding it."

"If I'm not swinging from that noose?"

"Exactly," he said. He could not help but sound amused. She didn't blame him. It was a funny image: even hanged, she imagined that she might still find some way to complain.

"I know you used to hate me."

"Hate is a strong word."

"You found me," she said. "Deeply annoying."

"In my defence," Ilja said. "You were deeply annoying."

She smiled. "And now?"

"It's marginal, Lore, very marginal."

The rooftop door swung open behind them. Zoran and Kinga, partway through a conversation that Khalore suspected she did not want to hear the start of. "We hurt what we love," Kinga was saying. There was a smile in each of those barbed words. She found it all so amusing. Sometimes Khalore really worried about her. "We both know that."

Zoran looked as though he seriously regretted that they had not concluded their conversation on the stairs. He paused, in the middle of the roof, and tilted his head towards the sky, clearly despairing for rain, and said, "no one thought to check the date."

Khalore wiped at her eyes – she suspected she was just smearing dirt across her face, but it was better safe than sorry – and said, "what?"

Kinga said. "It's Fall Day today."

Ilja frowned, and Khalore frowned with him. She couldn't remember seeing a calendar in all her days here in Illéa. Time had ceased to have meaning; she usually just approximated the month in rough terms, and hoped that Ina had been carving a proper tally somewhere. "How do you know that?"

"I grew up in Siarka," Kinga said. "We lived and breathed and ate Fall for dinner."

Khalore couldn't follow this conversation. She looked at Ilja, and nudged his shoulder encouragingly. "You know what this means," she said. "Don't you?"

He didn't. He, quite unabashedly, did not. Even Inanna, who had come up the stairs a few paces behind them, did not seem to have a firm grasp on what was happening, though she was clearly doing her best to piece it together, her thoughts racing ahead of the others, her golden eyes darting back and forth as though searching their faces for answers: "if none of our curses…"

Not to worry. Kinga was grinning widely. She said, "today is the only day we might be able to get the Radiance without it blasting us all to kingdom come."

She spread her hands, mockingly generous, her dark eye alive with a kind of vicious mirth.

"Happy Fall."