ghodar-dim (n.) a horse's egg, signifying false hope, that which has never and cannot exist in reality.

Each of their patchwork family had a most distinctive manner of administering aid, and receiving it as well, though they would admit it little. He knew them by heart; he could have recognised them by silhouette alone: Ina was gentle, all soothe and coo, all gentle persuasion and ever gentler laughter; Khalore was dismissive and chiding, all scorn and hold still, would you, you're dragging it out; Kinga was mechanical, her hand pressed to a wound, moving unerringly with whatever poor victim she had found no matter how violently they pulled away or protested, her face like stone. It would have been preferable, Ilja had often thought, to be treated by a statue, because at least their eyes might not hold quite so much judgement.

Ilja found himself wondering who he was aping, if not one of those three, as he pushed a velvet cloth against the young prince's face and said, "I suspect I'm committing some form of treason at present."

"Ensure I do not bleed to death," was Silas's cool reply. "And I will plead for clemency on your behalf."

"I don't suppose it's my place to ask what happened."

"It is not," Silas agreed, "your place."

And yet – the temptation.

Had the boy any friends who would dare to ask? Ilja thought he knew the answer; he thought he knew the cruelty of the question. So he focused instead on the wound in question, peeling back the cloth to inspect the edges of the gash which ran along the side of the young man's face. It was a most curious injury, peeling white along the edges as though his skin had been bleached, smeared over with a sunflower yellow paste, slowly leaking warm wine-dark blood the very same colour as Ilja's. It wouldn't need stitches, he thought, particularly if the prince wished to avoid an unsightly scar – better to just keep pressure on it and hope that Silas's decrepit immune system could manage a single instance of competency. But it wouldn't stop bleeding. It simply wouldn't stop bleeding.

"You look faint," he noted. He hadn't been quite certain that he would say this until he had said it, and he hadn't been quite certain of how Silas would react until he had reacted: the prince had jerked back, and glared at him, and said –

"Do I ever look otherwise?"

Ilja bit his tongue. Repent, he reminded himself. Repent, atone, salvation.

Silas said, "what?"

"Nothing, your highness."

Silas eyed him suspiciously. There was that obvious resemblance to Uriasz again: the uncomfortable feeling that someone knew that you had been a single bad choice away from saying something incisively witty that you could not take back, but which was barely contained behind your teeth.

The blood curled around his veins, ran down his arm in long rivulets, dripped from the very point of his nail like little scarlet flowers unfurling against the grey flagstones. He said, "as I thought."

He covered Ilja's hand with his own, and lifted away from the edge of the bathtub, rising out of Ilja's grip so that he could start to pace – oh, so he was a pacer – from the cusp of the bathroom, across the threshold of his chambers, to the table covered in little cut-out stars, and back again, gripping the cloth to the side of his face with the tight grasp of a man drowning on dry land.

He had the countenance of a wounded animal; he had the look, like Kinga often did, of someone desperate to be asked what was wrong only so they could snarl and refuse to answer and mope a bit longer.

And as with Kinga, the best response was surely to starve him of reaction. God, but he adored that girl and her stupidity and how well she had trained him to deal with other stupid people: it was only as her sibling that he could look away from the enemy prince, and kneel, and pick up the dagger that Silas had left bloodied on the tiles. It was oddly warm to the touch; Ilja could have believed that there was a heartbeat in its handle. He rose, and balanced the dagger on the edge of the sink. It belonged to the boy's grandfather. Had he been given it for this purpose alone?

Ah, but they made it so easy to hate them.

Silas was still pacing.

The devil bled red, Ilja thought, looking down at his hands. He'd known that – the girl, the dead girl, the thing that had been a dead girl, before Eero had made her into something worse – but it was all the stranger to see it here and now, in a moment of calm, in good clean light, when it was borne of a more detached violence – when he encountered it only as outcome.

It was the difference between watching a chapel go up in flames and sifting through the ashes in the smoky aftermath.

He didn't dare ask himself what it was about Silas Schreave that compelled such comparison to a chapel.

Sanav wrenched his arm so quickly and so violently that Kane thought the cadet was at risk of breaking it for the captain's benefit. The tagma weren't trained for hand-to-hand combat – druj rarely had hands to speak of – but if Lorencio was even partway right regarding his hypothesis about the human druj….

Kane wasn't willing to let his men go into combat unprepared.

Even if Sanav did seem determined to do most of the enemy's work for them.

Kane had to move with the cadet to keep him from doing more damage to himself. Little dusty clouds of sand rose about their boots as they scuffled; Kane kept the younger man's arm locked in an absolute vice-grip, not giving him an inch even as he felt the bones and tendons strain beneath the skin. "Keep your calm," Kane instructed, his voice low. "Don't panic – think about where your knife is. Think about your leverage."

"He's telling you to shank him." Kinga offered up the words in a purely lazy tone, as though not fully awake. They sounded entirely too natural in her voice; if he didn't trust her as he did, it would have seemed almost alarming.

"I am," Kane agreed, amused, "telling you to shank me."

Sanav, to his credit, managed alright. He turned into Kane's grip so that his shoulder drove into the captain's solar plexus and spinning his short blade to drive it upwards in a wild stab – true, Kane smacked the knife from his hand before it came within an inch of flesh – but it wasn't bad for a fifth attempt.

If he did it fifty times, then he might be able to ensure his death was a slow one. Dignified. On his feet.

Was that all they were teaching these children? How best to die?

He released Sanav more brusquely than he intended; the cadet staggered on his feet for a split second, clutching his shoulder. Nonetheless, recovery was swift: it didn't take longer than a second or twenty for Sanav to straighten up, shake out his arm, and bound up the steps of the stadium to greet Kunegunda as she descended.

"You're alive," Sanav said. Kane hadn't realised how much fear and tension the cadet had been wearing in his shoulders and back until it dissipated; he seemed to know better than to try to hug Kunegunda, but he did clasp her hand and pat her gingerly on the back, which she allowed with some good humour. Sanav had nearly wept that morning, when Kane had encountered him again en route back to the Wall, so terrified that he had, by surviving, condemned them to a far worse fate.

He had nearly wept – but he had not.

"I'm so glad you're okay," he said now, with that restrained sense of wry truth-telling which permeated the words of most tagma.

Her eye roved over Kane, dark with some unspoken humour. "Didn't he tell you?"

"He did," Kenta said, "but this is Kane we're talking about. Trust, but verify."

"I don't know what you mean. I've never met a more honest man."

"I'd question the number you've met, then."

Kinga sat back on her heels on the seat next to Kenta, who had taken a seat in the fourth-from-last row of the stadium. It was an old open-air amphitheatre, not so much abandoned as requisitioned as a place of emergency shelter. With so many buildings destroyed in the last six short months, most of the tagma barracks had been converted into emergency housing for the refugees, and the tagma themselves had been turfed out to eke out shelter where they could.

Sanav and Kane sparred now between the forest-green tents that they had set up for the night, on the territory that Lorencio had issued to his co-conspirator for the benefit of its proximity to the tunnels, for the easy access it allowed to the roofs of the city in the case of an emergency. They had four tents, and a little ring set up for sparring, and swords laid out on the front-row seats for sharpening and repair, for they had lurched from one battle to the next without pausing to regroup at any stage.

It looked, if Kane was as honest with himself as Kinga thought him, utterly pathetic.

"How's the shop?" Kunegunda was asking Kenta, who was shaking his head and telling her to avoid the topic entirely. The druj had taken the roof off of the building; the shockwaves of the explosion in the capital had shattered the windows and splintered the floorboards, so that the entire place looked like a broken eggshell. Their father's lifetime's work had come so close to obliteration in a single moment. Kane knew it shouldn't have mattered much – just a place, just things, nothing compared to the lives which had been lost – but it had still oddly ached to see it. How easily a lifetime's work was uprooted.

Rakel was dead. It shouldn't have mattered. What was a lifetime's work compared to the prospect of a life to work on more?

Kenta had come just to apologise for not being able to host the tagma, as he had hosted them before; as it was, he was sleeping on the floor of his boyfriend's aunt's pub in Leptir District, running the gauntlet of the paqudus at the Wall every time he wanted to come in and pick more garments off the floor of the ruined shop. Just in time for Fall Day too, he had remarked with pitch-perfect ruefulness, which meant they were heading into as joyless a holiday period as they had ever experienced. He had arrived with a set of boxes of leftovers, which he had parcelled out amongst Lorencio and Kane and Sanav like distributing mana. He had been brotherly in his irritation at seeing them all so badly battered.

And the expression he had worn when he had heard that Kane and Kunegunda had spent the night outside the Walls, in the wastes of what had once been Tiamat, with only Åsmund Falk to watch their backs…. Kane didn't remember the last time his brother had been so angry with him.

What other choice did they have? It was this or oblivion. Oblivion for millions, for generations.

It would have been selfish to let that anger lead him. Kane had anger of his own; it mandated a different path.

Kunegunda leaned her head on her arm. He did not chide her for her lateness; she looked like she had been sleeping, and she looked like the sleep had been much needed. Her knuckles were healing black-spotted where she had not bothered to pick out the gravel from her wounds. She said, "where's Åsmund?"

"With Lorencio." It was more than apparent that the young Watcher was petrified of reprisals from the royals now, terrified that they would come slipping after him in the shadows to punish him for saying what he ought not have said. He had the look of a man who would self-immolate just to avoid the inevitable – but the Scholars would keep him safe. None would think to search for him beneath the ground.

Under the ground, as the royals were keeping a girl, or maybe girls, plural, doing god-knows-what god-knows-why. Lorencio had found the corpse of one, which had just confirmed what Åsmund had told them.

Kane had never wanted, so badly, to be lied to.

"How is Lorencio?"

"He didn't get much sleep."

Kinga understood what he intended to communicate without needing to be told. She was acting like a lieutenant already – though the prospect of replacing Rakel so soon galled him as surely as an open wound.

He'd lose her too, wouldn't he? I'll lose as many as you will accord to me. The queen had been right. After a certain point, it was mere bloody cruelty to insist on company when one ran headfirst at the horrors of the world.

Kinga, he could almost forgive. He suspected she would end up in that place regardless – it was better that she did so at his shoulder, where they might, combined, hope to achieve something. But Sanav?

He picked up the knife where it had fallen to the sand of the amphitheatre, suddenly quite dull and unthreatening. They had blunted its edge, and painted it with blue chalk, so that they might be able to distinguish clearly when it had struck true against Kane's skin or clothes or hair. He had painted his gloves in tones of sapphire with it by this point; it was the dirtiest that had become in a very long time. "Mahesar," he said. "Let's go again. No one is eating until you manage to kill me."

Each night, he dreamed of dreaming. It was a particularly caged manner of spending his sleep, so tightly circular that his mind at times felt like a labyrinth that his conscious mind spent the whole of the night trying to escape. He was sure there was some meaning there, if he cared to search more fervently for it, but Zoran Czarnecki had too little time to probe too deeply into the machinations of his own mind. Life in the Warriors Programme allowed so little time for introspection; if the ache in your muscles and the tasks in front of you weren't taking up all of your focus, then you weren't working hard enough.

The only reprieve from the drudgery of their daily regime was, occasionally, their mornings sheltered in the barracks, preparing quietly for inspection, but even that peace was occasionally fragmented. So it was now; the whole training corps had become inured to waking with the sun, sensing its rise as a dog senses a thunderstorm on the horizon, but today, before dawn, their sleep was broken by a piercing scream from the other side of the barracks.

This morning, for Zoran, it was a clumsy wakening from the dreams-that-were-not-dreams; it was a sudden rising to consciousness, reeled back to reality in an abrupt rush of sound.

Shit. Ina.

But when he woke, bleary-eyed, it was not to the familiar set-up, the matrix of the boys with which he had grown up, the young men whose faces had become as familiar – more – than his very own: Ilja Schovajsa beside him, always sleeping on his side with his face tilted towards Zoran's, as though watching for his reactions even in sleep, and Eifion Rhydderch on his other side, curled up as though attempting to embrace himself; Ragnar Kaasik on the other side of the room, head burrowed beneath a pillow to blot out any sign of the light; Ghjuvan Mannazzu beside the door, door wedged between Uriasz Chrzanowski and Myghal Enys; Pekka Hämäläinen at the very end of the room, usually taking up only half a bed to make room for the tiny girl next to him.

No: instead he was just lying on a bed, softer than those at the compound had ever been.

Had Ina really been screaming at all? He couldn't hear it anymore, though its imagined spectre - the howl that had ripped from her throat when Pekka had died - chased his heartbeat into a manic desperate gallop, like it was trying to rip free of his chest.

This was still a nightmare, surely still a nightmare: her face, suspended above him, had been gored with two black holes, so that her lovely golden eyes seemed like a mere little flicker of light in a very dark pit.

That wasn't what Ina usually looked like. This was what Ina looked like in the darkest visions Matthias whispered to his mind, when he was trying to spur Zoran into some particular path, as malevolent as it was strange; this was what Ina looked like whenever Dimitar Hristov murmured his malignant prophecies: you're going to die, in pain, and slowly, and screaming.

Just a nightmare.

Ina said a word which was not a word: "Gijs?"

A pause.

She said, "Zor?"

He said, "Ina?"

When Inanna smiled, the creasing of her eyes split the half-scabbed wounds on her temples and chased charcoal-cement tears down her cheeks. It was like a portable star, that smile. There were tears pooling on her eyelashes, clinging to them like so much silver dust. Her shirt was gaping open, just slightly, to bare the long scar she wore across her neck; it reached down to twine around her collarbone.

Once upon a time, Zoran would have tried not to look. There was no question of trying now: he could not have torn his eyes from Inanna's if he had wanted to.

She said, "are you actually back now?"

"I think so."

"For good?"

He had no answer.

She rocked back. He saw, for the first time, the bruises on her throat.

He remembered calling after her now. He remembered the source of the throbbing, aching pain in his thumb. He remembered how scared she had looked.

He remembered how scared he had made her look.

He had made her scared.

He would not allow Matthias to draw him out of this moment again – if that was even Matthias. Maybe it was merely the Curse of the Hierophant, given Matthias's face to make it seem more palatable. Maybe it was his own weakness and selfishness, thrown under the name of a dead man so that Zoran could continue to think of himself as a good person. Whatever the answer: he would not allow himself fall out of this moment and into the unravelling strands of time.

Not when Ina needed him. Not when Ina had been hurt.

Not when he had hurt her.

She protested, when he wrestled himself up out of the bed, and staggered across the room – his legs did not feel like his own, as though they had been borrowed – to where Khal kept the first aid kit. She moved to the bed without needing to be told to do so, and those silver tears of hers continued to fall, soundlessly, as Zoran silently sorted his materials onto the bedspread: the gauze, the saline solution, the iodine.

Maybe she had already done this for herself. It was Ina. She certainly knew how to clean a wound – she had cleaned theirs for years: every scraped knee Azula had sustained on the concrete courtyard of the academy, every bruise Pekka had earned in sparring on the fighting fields, every bone Nez had broken in and out of training. She knew, but she had not cleaned her own, and perhaps had not permitted anyone else to. It had seemed the right thing to do for her – it had seemed a kind of redemption – until he pressed the gauze to her face, and saw how she flinched.

And all he could do was apologise. Over and again. She said, "you weren't yourself," and he said, "that doesn't matter," and she said, "you didn't mean to," and he said, "I hurt you, I am so sorry, I hurt you," and she said, "no more than anyone else has," and maybe she intended it to sound self-deprecating but that was when the tears began to fall for Zoran as well.

There were a few moments then, where they were both silent. Zoran's heart was a strange jagged rock in his chest; his hand was unsteady, despite how desperately he wished to still it. She wasn't looking at him – that was fair. The bruises on her throat were plum-purple, freshly painted there. He couldn't not remember doing it, but…

He could hear the carts rattling across the cobblestones outside the window; he could hear merchants and their customers speaking across the street. There were birds nesting somewhere nearby; there was a cool breeze drifting gently through the window, stirring the strands of Ina's hair, gently lifting the edge of the gauze folded neatly on the bed.

Downstairs, Khalore was humming to herself, some sea shanty from the docks of Opona, and after a moment, someone – a man – had started to hum along with her. It was a song that Ina had taught them when they were younger, something she had heard Kaapo singing to his dying wife; it was a song about redundancy and obsolesence, about being made useless by the march onwards of technology. What use are the stars with a compass in your hand? How can you dream of heaven when you're anchored to the land?

He said – whispered – "how do I fix this?"

"I don't know if you can."

He swallowed. Nodded. Fair.

"We just move on," Inanna said. "We just…"

He stared at her cheekbone, and continued – fixedly – to clean the burned skin from her face. He said nothing.

"That's what Warriors do, right?" Inanna smiled, wanly. "We're not meant to be friends. We're comrades. Caring about one another has never made this whole thing any simpler."

He nodded. He couldn't remember a time that Inanna had ever been wrong.

She had always been smarter than him.

The version of the song downstairs that Inanna had taught them had been about hunger as well, which had not been something Zoran could really relate to, not in the way that the others could, not the way Azula and Khal and Nez could. It had always had a desperate keen to it, when Ina had sung it over the campfire, but she had made it sound quite beautiful nonetheless: factory fires need stoking, the horizon holds no smoke, the landlord's come a-howling so come join us on the yoke –

She said, "but I still love you, Zor."

He looked at her.

He had not dared to admit to himself that he had expected the contrary.

He did not now dare to admit to himself that he didn't think that he could believe her.

"You're my best friend, Ina," he said. "I hate the idea of… I shouldn't have done this. You didn't deserve it."

"No," Ina agreed, "I didn't."

She set her head very carefully on his shoulder, as though she thought she might be able to slice herself open on the very lines of his form. He marvelled, silently, that she might still be able to trust him enough to do so – or hide her fear enough that the contrary was not obvious.

"You didn't say it back," she murmured.

"I didn't…?" He turned his face into her hair, half to hide the tears that had not ceased to slide down his face, half just to ground himself with her mere presence. For all he sometimes compared her to an angel, there was something so utterly human and lovely and real about Inanna Nirari. Realer than anything else. Realer than any of the thousand-thousand visions he had spun through in the time that he was gone. "I love you too, Ina."

As though there could be any doubt, he thought, looking down at the little bits of black scabs and dried bloods now clinging to his fingertips. As though there could be any doubt at all.

As though he would ever be himself if he did not.