samar (n.) staying up late long after the sun has gone down and having an enjoyable time with friends.

A lifetime of training had led to this. Khalore had not realised until it was here – red beneath her hands – but she had never killed someone before. Not a living person; not a person with their own will and conscience. The men she had cut down on the streets of Aizsaule had been driven insane, caught between the twin poles of the Radiance and its sister curses, driven outwards to try and destroy any remnant traces of the latter to ease their own torment. She had done them a kindness, as Ina had done. That had been mercy. This had been murder.

It was easier than the stories suggested.

She tore the screwdriver from Nez's head, and one of those horrible piss-yellow eyes came with it; Ina made an awful sound but did not look away as Zoran took the blade and its grotesque burden, carefully, from Khalore's curled fingers and folded it in a handkerchief. The curse, Khalore thought, hollow: they needed to bring back the curse. That had been her pretence, had it not? She had claimed that to be her justification for this act of petty vengeance.

It had not made her feel better. Ghjuvan was still gone.

It had not made her feel worse. Ghjuvan was still gone.

She would thank herself for this later. Whatever version of Khalore returned to Irij would be grateful that she had done this. Better to do it now than to regret not doing it later. Was that a fair way to think of it? She had taken that which had not been hers to take: a full human life, if any xrafstar could be called full, or human, or life, or – she would have only had less than nine years, even if Khalore had never seen her again, Khalore reasoned. And it was Nez. How much more pain would have seemed into the world at her awful behest?

Had Nez justified Ghjuvan's murder to herself thus?

Ilja knew that something had gone horribly wrong without needing to speak; he must have sensed it in their silence, seen it in the blood on Khalore's hands or the grave masque Ina had adopted to keep herself from stammering further about Nez's mouth, whatever that meant, whatever she had seen that the others could not. Ilja put a hand on Ina's shoulder, silently checking whether she was alright. She nodded, mute, glowering. And then – Khalore withdrew but he was undeterred, and Khalore had never known someone but her boys to insist on loving her with such stubborness – Ilja embraced her. He was all sinew; his grey coat smelled like the palace, all sage and soap. She turned her head to press her cheek against his chest, and shut her eyes for a single moment, and pretended he was Ghjuvan.

"It needed to be done," he said, softly, and then she could not pretend anymore. She hugged him a little more tightly, for having ever tried.

Ina must have started crying. The sound was soft, but in such a silent space, it seemed like a physical presence.

"It might mean trouble for you," Zoran said.

"Nothing I can't handle," Ilja said. Each word seemed to vibrate through a different rib; she did not hear it through the air but through his chest instead. Her mother had never held her thus; her sisters had never embraced her like this. Not even her twin, the person with whom she had entered this world for the very first time.

Ilja made it seem like nothing at all.

When Khalore stepped back, he absentmindedly dabbed at her cheek with the hem of his sleeve, and she realised, when she looked at Ina, that it had been the Hanged Man herself, and not the Lover, who had started to cry. Monsters, Lorencio had said about the dead girl in the basement – the first dead girl. Monsters greater even than the druj could ever aspire to be. "As long as you promise me that it helped."

Ina said, "we need to find whatever girl will replace that one. Whichever girl they are going to tithe next. Take the girl, and take the prince."

"Or else," Zortan said, "we hold out another few weeks for the Selection to be finished and take the winner."

When they looked at one another, their silent communication was unlike anything Khalore had seen in any other friendship: it was almost possible to forget the long dark lines gouged into Ina's face, the bruises around her throat, the way that Zoran swayed on his feet as though sleep-walking through an unpleasant dream.

Khalore said, "Fall Day begins tomorrow."

It did not escape her notice that her comrades were openly surprised to hear this contribution from her. She was good for more than murder, she thought bitterly. She had been a Scholar for all of a week. She had been a Scholar for a full week. Commandant wouldn't have believed her capable of it. Commandant would have considered her too stupid to survive a single day in the Schools.

Lorencio had believed in her. Did he believe her capable of murder? He had asked her to accompany him into the palace – had that been a test of faith, or had it been an insurance plan?"

In answer to the Warriors' unasked question, Khalore added, mutinously, "Lorencio told me."

"Fall Day," Ina repeated, with a cruelly self-deprecating tone – she may as well have been saying Pekka's name, for all the unspoken sorrow that lay in those two simple words.

"The palace will be basically empty," Ilja said. "Gives someone an opportunity to comb the place."

"And once we find the Radiance," Zoran said, tiredly, "the main issue becomes overpowering it."

The image in Khalore's mind's eye was a startling grim one: the walls would crumble, and the land would blight and it would all have been for nothing. They were here because the Radiance posed an existential threat to Irij, to the entirety of the outside world. What if the xrafstar who held it realised what was happening – what they were trying to do? Were any of them truly powerful enough to overcome the destructive capabilities of the final lost curse?

How many more of them would have to die before this was over?

Kunegunda Kaasik was the only woman he knew who could make knitting look dangerous. It was in the flashing of the needles, like a minor incarnation of her usual twin blades; it was in the click-clacking-clicking of the sharp points against their equals, snapping to-and-fro like a saw. She had volunteered for the watch, and she usually did not need entertaining during the watch – Kane had found her, many times before, simply staring straight ahead like she had retreated deeply within herself. He could not say what she was thinking, or if, indeed, she was thinking of anything: his knowledge of her character suggested that she was thinking, as she often did, of nothing at all.

And now she had taken up knitting. He hadn't expected this of her; most soldiers were a dab hand with a needle and thread when they were required, as they frequently were when one lived under constant threat of claw and fang, but knitting was all about wool and yarn and soft, breathable garments, which were really no use at all to an excubitor in the field. Perhaps this was all just an exercise in mindfulness; she had her legs crossed beneath her, long dark lines in the sand marking where she had dragged her boots, and her spine curved, as though huddling protectively over the paltry stretch of fabric she had produced in the last few hours of watch.

He said, "gloves?"

"Where I come from," she said, and paused, and said, quite dramatically, as though she had to remind him of it: "Mønt."

Yes. He remembered.

"You start preparing for your own death at sixty-five." She had the strangest way of knitting, curling each thread around her thumb in her left hand, and again over her forefinger in her right hand, so that her needles barely moved until that final, fateful moment where she forced either fist towards the other and produced a nice, sharp, click. "You sew the clothes you want to be buried in; you select the place in the cemetery where you wish to be lain. And you knit gloves for the men you have chosen to be your gravediggers, and pallbearers, and buriers."

Kane said, "this is tradition in Ganzir also."

Life in the outer and inner walls had been worlds apart, but death was the great equaliser in many senses. She looked at his gloves; almost self-consciously, he brushed off a speck of sand off his knuckles, to indicate that her gaze had not gone unnoticed. She said, "it saves some effort on my part, then."

He said, purposefully wry, "I'll let you down one final time."

"Put me down," Kinga said, "is more apt a phrasing."

"You have my word," he said, "if I live long enough to keep it. If there's enough of you left to bury."

"Yes," she said, "I'll do my best to keep your work light, then."

Her hands were still bruised. She had done rather more harm to herself than to the druj she had killed in the tunnels. Had she ever knitted something like this for Ghjuseppu? He had never seemed like a man in need of more warmth. Like Rakel, in that sense.

Poor Rakel. Was it warm, wherever she had gone?

There was the scratchy sound of canvas on sand as Sanav turned over in his tent somewhere in the darkness behind them. Good for some, Kane thought. It was good that Mahesar was able to sleep. They needed him as sharp as he could be. If someone in this group could dream sleeplessly, then they ought to entitle him to do so for as long as he could. The day would arrive with its knives bared.

Kinga said, "your father was a tailor."

"He was."

"And you are a soldier."

Kane smiled. He said, "you seem confused by the concept."

She shrugged. That sly smile of hers. She found the strangest things funny; Kane usually blamed the repeated concussions for that fact. "I thought bloodlust was an inherited trait."

"You know me better than to think that my motive, Kunegunda."

She said, "I think you find it easier to lie to yourself than to me."

She was not incorrect. He was not sure he would ever, could ever, keep a secret from her – not by deceit, for she seemed very much his better in that regard. Kenta would appreciate that; he would be glad that, in Rakel's absence, Kane had someone to keep him in check, even if that someone was far more glowering and reticent than the living ray of sunlight that had preceded her. Kane had always worked a little better with a lieutenant.

Kane said, "I've never lied to you."

She curled her lip and narrowed her eye. He could tell that she was trying to think of an example to disprove his point but didn't seem to have a sharp enough memory to conjure any such incidence.

Darkness, a late hour, and tiredness had blunted his usual tactfulness. He said, "you never told me what happened to your eye."

"I assumed that you had guessed."

He said, "druj don't tend to be so particular about the damage they do."

She said nothing.

He said, "men do."

She smiled.

Overhead: hiss.

The unmistakeable sound of escaping propellant and hooks on stone as someone arced overhead, traversing the abandoned colosseum in a single flash of black-and-green. Kinga had tilted her head back to trace the path of the silhouette with a silent watchfulness. Kane said, "there is no action scheduled for this evening."

"Do you think there's something…?"

"They would have fired flares," Kane said. "We would have heard the bells."

He sounded, even to his own ear, utterly resigned. A lifetime spent in defence of this walled world, and now the anthem of the panicked was as familiar to him as his own heartbeat. There had been a time that being an excubitor was rareified: the only ones to see a druj five, ten, fifteen times. It was no longer so.

The city, and its defenders, had grown accustomed to their place on the precipice of the end of days.

Gjöll had seemed a beautiful town in daylight, but under the warm shroud of dusk it became positively ethereal. The buildings, carved of pure marble, were ghosts clustered together for warmth over the tiny veins and arteries of the streets, which had been paved with stones in which had been embedded tiny flecks of glowing colour, all the brighter awash thus in the silvery sheen of the moon which hung low in the sky as though suspended there by a gallows.

Evie was beginning to better admire the onyx statues which lined the steps of the buildings, posed as though living. There were so many of them; they loomed from the shadows, silhouettes arranged so life-like that Evie kept mistaking them for townspeople lurking here or there. Here, a young woman was sitting on the edge of the fountain, her skirts gathered up around her knees, one leg laid across the other as she adjusted the strap of her shoe, utterly real in the detailed carving on her face and hands – Evie could even perceive on her features the legacies of a life hard-lived. She had a scar which led from the edge of her eye to the very corner of her half-smiling mouth and two wedding rings: one shone from her finger, and one hung on a chain around her neck. So many of the statues had some superstition attached to them, some good luck gesture performed before meeting with a lover, or attending an examination, or even simply going to the market: Evie could not help but wonder after whom this statue had been modelled, and whether there were any good luck gestures associated with her. She seemed melancholy, but she did not seem lonely; there was a quiet dignity to her. Evie was reminded of Eunbyeol, though she wasn't quite sure why that was.

Evie had begun to think that Silas had been lying about not having left the estate before, but the expression of wonder he was wearing on such a typically stoic face would have been all-but-impossible to fake; it would have been difficult to fake in earnest, but even more so given that he was clearly trying to keep it tamped down. They were moving through the city at a fairly leisurely pace, blending in nicely with no one, for the streets were largely deserted this close to the palace, this close to midnight. Nonetheless, it was obvious to Evie – and she suspected, to Eunbyeol – that Silas was silently waiting for a hand to land on his shoulder as a guard – the lieutenant themself, Reiko Morozova, perhaps, or his personal guard, Ilja Schovajsa – accosted him and dragged him back to the palace. There was, Evie thought, absoltuely no chance that they would get away with this; they would, surely, get caught.

They would have to make the most of the night until that happened, then.

Evie seized Eunbyeol's arm and said, sotto voce, "a publican's, then?"

Eunbyeol said, her voice full of amusement, "all of this trouble and you only wished to imbibe – we could have just raided the wine cellar, you know."

"I'd rather that you didn't," Silas said, "that's where we keep our skeletons."

Eunbyeol rolled her eyes. "On second thoughts."

Evie grinned approvingly. "If we have to put up with him for the whole evening, you'll want some liquor in you."

Eunbyeol said, "caper?"

"Caper," Evie agreed, her voice bright. "Silas?"

He was walking about three paces behind them, casting his gaze about with earnest curiosity that sat uncomfortably on such a sharp, hollowed-out face. For a split second, Evie wondered if he would consider that they were wasting his time – his very first time out in the city, a strange unveiling to the world from which he had been kept for so long. As Evie had spent so long corralled by the walls of the city, and broken free with a sword in her hand and a horse beneath her, so now was Silas free of the shackles of the walls of the palace. Was it wrong that they were going to sit, and drink, and do little that they could not do in the palace?

These thoughts did not persist for long, however, for they were shortly in a brighter, busier part of the city, where men in suits and women in long gowns busied themselves in tight groups abuzz with gossip and chatter. It was not far from here that Mirabelle had brought the girls to the opera; the publican house in whose garden they settled themselves was one that Evie had noticed that very night. The grass was slightly damp with dew, but the air was warm, and the stars overhead were beautifully bright; Evie folded her legs up underneath herself as Eunbyeol pulled a set of bronze coins from her pocket and handed them to Silas, looking rather doubtful that he would know what to do with them.

Eunbyeol said, "this should feel more dangerous."

Evie smiled. "We've been contending with a human-shaped druj and more invasions than the city has seen for a thousand years. A little foray after curfew won't hurt anyone."

She watched Silas navigate his way across the garden and across the threshold of the building, looking characteristically haughty at the prospect of winding through the crowd which had gathered around the door. It was fortunate that it was Silas, Evie mused; if it had been his sister, she rather imagined that they would have passed half-a-dozen murals of his face already.

"It might help," Eunbyeol said. "Our chances, I mean."

Evie tried not to show how surprised she was at this line of thinking. She had believed that she and Eunbyeol were the same in this regard: that the Selection, at this point, was nothing more than the pretext under which they could enjoy their strange proximity to Silas, rather than an aspiration in itself. She just nodded, and turned over the napkin in her hands, and watched the stars twinkle between the long wreathes of cloud which tangled the sky like so much climbing ivy.

Somewhere overhead, there was a soft hiss, the sound of an excubitor's flight in motion. The nostalgia it stirred in Evie was sudden and complete; it was a reminder of an entirely different life, an existence which seemed now more akin to a dream than a real memory in which she had lived and breathed and grieved. Swords drawn in the depths of the sky, she thought. Was there danger stirring, somewhere on the edge of the known world? She had never so missed a blade, for the comfort that it accorded in moments of such unease; she would have much preferred knowing that, if the worst came to the worst, she would be able to protect her friends.

Silas must have managed his first ever commercial transaction – that, Evie thought, or perhaps he had just grabbed these off someone else's table when they had been looking elsewhere, for it was a motley assortment of drinks he was balancing so carefully as he threaded his way back towards the girls, taking the seat next to Evanne and sliding the least suspiciously neon drink towards Eunbyeol. She thanked him in that quiet voice of hers, as Evie allowed her gaze to roam around the garden, tracing the silhouettes of the wealthy men and women who had gathered here before or after some other glittering event.

It didn't take her long to see something she didn't like the look of and for all of their talk to seem rather cheap.

"Shit!"

Evie dived down in her seat, ducking her head down behind Silas's shoulder.

"Is that Mirabelle?"

Eunbyeol engaged in no such theatrics; she merely turned her head towards the door and nodded. "It is."

"Eun-byeol-ah!"

Eunbyeol's eyebrow crept up. "She seems to be enjoying herself." The slightest smile. "Yeah... I don't think she's quite able to see straight right now, Ev."

"You don't know that."

Evie pressed her face into the sleeve of Silas's coat; the prince was silently laughing, all ashake with chuckles at how sudden and dramatic her reaction had been, and trying, fervently, to pretend that he was not. "Is that your chaperone?"

Eunbyeol nodded.

"She's very sweet," Evie said defensively.

"She's gone back indoors," Silas said laconically.

Evanne straightened up again, and then, with some degree of self-consciousness, straightened Silas's sleeve again with an abrupt tug of the fabric. He was looking at her with an inscrutable expression that she could only recognise as fond amusement by the way his eyes turned up at their edges.

"A narrow escape," she said.

A twitch of his mouth. "May it be the first of many."

Evie raised her glass and indicated with an impatient gesture that splashed wine onto the hem of Eunbyeol's sleeve that her fellow Selected and her prince should do the same. "To capers," Evie said with a smile.

"To friends," Silas said.

"Skål," Eunbyeol said simply.

And they drank.