vedriti (v.) to shelter from the rain; to wait for bad times to pass; to observe one's misfortunes detachedly.

In the ruined gardens of the palace, the zandik plants had been ripped up from the ground and two graves had been hewn into the dirt. He had not seen much of the sky for the last five days and had imagined it a bruise-grey: it was cornflower, softened at the edge by long flurries of white-pink clouds stained with the memory of the dawn. The day was bright, and cold. The turf of the churned-over flowerbeds clung to his boots. His hands, bare to the air, shook – just a little – as he regarded the graves, and their captives, and their maker.

The gravedigger sat between his two pieces of work, legs crossed, bare-chested and stripped to his scarlet trousers so that his scars glowed, silverlight, beneath the midday sun. It was a peaceable scene, comparable to a gleaner at rest during a harvest noon. The soil was newly turned over the closed grave; the opened one was like a black eye in the earth, staring blindly upwards.

The gravedigger indicated the latter and said, "I have one prepared for you. If you'd prefer it to the cells."

"Is it preferable?" The voice of his guard was carefully bored, studiously languid. She was delighting in this. "I'm not sure he deserves preferable treatment. He's a traitor, you know – a traitor, or a fool, and which would be worse?"

His own voice sounded as though it had been sewn back together in the wrong order, consonants and vowels going to war with his own teeth when he tried to speak. He said, "is she still alive?", and Reiko Morozova's hand tightened over his shoulder when he asked it, a painful reminder, a silent check, an unspoken rebuke: here you are, and there is your disloyalty.

The gravedigger's mouth twitched, and his gaze flickered to the heaped pile of earth to his right. He was not wearing gloves. She had just started knitting pallbearer gloves. He said, "until I wish her otherwise."

Oroitz Txori's throat still bore a crudely embroidered black line where his mistress had reattached his head. Seven deaths, Kane thought dully – seven deaths they had doled out to this druj, and still he sat there, and still he spoke. He could see the scar on the Watcher's chest where Kane had killed him first, and derelicted his duty, and brought this armageddon down atop them all: it was just over the place that a man's heart would be, and the skin had healed like a man's would, twisted and knotted in a mass of scar tissue.

"You should wish," Kane said. He had been spared more than seven deaths by the thing under the ground. It had not saved him for his own sake, but for its violent designs. Mahesar would do good to realise that, when he ceased his weeping. "It would be kinder."

Oroitz Txori's black eyes bore into him. "Kinder than…?"

His lip curled, and she laughed. "You had the chance," she said. She had laughed just like that when Princess Asenath had told him the truth of the thing that he had…. admired. "Live with that, for as long as you are permitted to. You had the chance, and I told you to take it."

It must have been his imagination – for he thought he could hear a sound more pathetic than a scream – a whimper, pressed down beneath the earth, buried beneath it with dirt concealing it like a burial shroud – but her lungs would be full of dirt by now, and the air all gone from around her. Tagma died in slow motion, always. Always. How far did Oroitz Txori's abilities extend? When all the skin had sloughed from her face, and zandik flowers had sprouted from the place her eyes had been, and her organs had rotted within her, would he be able to keep the end at bay or would he – even he, the one burdened with something more than death, the one who carried Death – would he concede?

Kane hoped, selfishly, that he would not – that Oroitz Txori would endure, and draw his fellow druj living from the ground. It would only be right if Kane was permitted to bring down the blade. Just as he had promised Oktawia he would.

Lorencio Suero had seen better days, but Sanav had still wept to see him, alive and bruised, when the paltry remnants of the Nav corps had been brought together in the remnants of the war room above the palace library. The hole in the floor had been patched over with plywood, which flexed and shook every time someone crossed it, and Sanav wasn't completely convinced yet that they weren't going to be dropped to their deaths like a defenestration of old.

The districts were still smoking; through the enormous broken windows of the war room, he could see that the districts were still smoking. In his new twilight world of grey cells and grey interrogation rooms, Sanav could not say how many of the thousands of druj still swarmed the city, or how many tagma had fallen to them, or how many innocents had died. He hadn't seen a familiar face in four days – he thought it had been four days, he had tallied four days – and that was maybe why he had burst into tears when the guards had removed his blindfold from his eyes and he had seen poor Lorencio, lovely Lorencio, sitting in a wooden chair with a blackened eye and shrapnel embedded in his cheek.

"Sit, Mahesar," Lorencio had said, and Sanav had been brought around the chasm in the floor to take his seat, his legs shuddering beneath him as though his muscles were no denser than thread.

"Sir," he said, "I'm so glad to – where are the others?"

"The others, Mahesar?"

"The captain," he said, "Kinga. She went after the stone druj – he went after her."

Lorencio's eyes bore into Sanav's, and the younger man felt something like certainty alight upon him, as one feels the warmth of a new day creep through the window and across skin. Sanav had come unwounded from the ruck; he knew that was part of the reason that his guards eyed him so suspiciously, as they had once suspected Evanne Chae for her survival. His wholeness was itself suspect – it smacked of conspiracy. Fighting at the palace, he had been spared the worst of the last and final fall: the Fall of Illéa, total and final and awful. Kane and Kinga might have been spared the same, if they had not done as they did.

"Dead," he said dully. "Dead?"

"One of them – condemned to death. The other – the queen will decide."

The air went out of the room.

"You must think," Lorencio said. "Quite carefully about… regarding your next answers. Leave nothing out. Speak no falsities."

Sanav opened his mouth, and shut it again.

"Do you know why you were arrested?"

His words tumbled out, chasing one another like prey. "They thought we were attacking a tagma. It wasn't a tagma, sir, it wasn't a Watcher – he was, but he wasn't anymore – Oroitz, he was trying to – Oroitz Txori – he was a human druj, he was going to kill the king..."

"Why did you come to the palace?"

"Kinga…."

"How long have you known her?"

He shook his head. "Months. A year. I don't know."

"And the captain?"

"A little less. Maybe."

"And when did you first meet Captain Hijikata?"

"The incursion at Aizsaule."

"Had you met him previously?"

"No, sir."

"You had."

"No."

"Mahesar."

"Briefly," he said, "briefly, maybe, at the beginning of training – not met. Seen. I had seen him previously. I knew of him."

"And Kaasik?"

"Training. We trained together. Cadets."

"You bunked together."

"Yes."

"Name your bunkmates."

"Ghjuseppu Mannazzu and Torsten Müller and Kinga –"

"Where was she from?"

"Mønt District. Sir, she did nothing –"

"Where in Mønt?"

"I don't remember."

"You must."

"Kol - Kolesnitsa. The oblast, maybe. The countryside."

"And where are you from?"

"Tiamat District."

"A fallen district," said Lorencio. "Another fallen district. How convenient."

His face was very hard, and his voice was very sharp. His tone brooked none of the sympathy or curiosity which usually so characterised the Scholar. Again, a keening uncertainty wormed its way from Sanav: "sir?"

"Where was Torsten from?"

"Kelch," said Sanav, and felt much more confident of this answer, and felt his heart falling away from his chest at the way the commander just stared at him, silence stretching between them as though to fill up some hidden deficiency in Sanav's response.

At last: "and Ghjuseppu?"

"The same place as Kinga. Wherever that was. They knew each other growing up..."

Lorencio said, "who else was from that place?"

"Who else…?"

"Did you know anyone else from that town?"

"No," Sanav said hollowly. "No, sir."

He paused. Lorencio watched him. He let the silence stretch, long and useless.

"Ghjuseppu had a friend from there. A Scholar."

"What was her name?"

"She was your assistant," Sanav said.

"What was her name?"

"She was your assistant – I don't remember."

"What was her name?"

"After Rakel… she was with you. When you were examining the stone druj. I don't remember. Katherine. Something like that. She was from Kolesnitsa as well."

Lorencio nodded. He pressed his lips together. He drummed his fingers on the wooden arm of his chair, and looked as though he were rolling his next set of words around his mouth, deciding which he should rid himself of first.

Sanav had to force himself to keep drawing in breath, keep pushing out, just keep breathing. His head was spinning; his stomach churned.

Lorencio said, finally, "Kolesnitsa was gutted years ago."

Sanav shook his head. "What do you mean?"

"Our men found the remnants of the town," said Lorencio. "It was destroyed by druj ten years ago. They could not have been refugees from Kolesnitsa a year ago. It did not exist. It fell long before the rest of Mønt did."

Outside the door, there was the sound of manacles. Quiet voices.

Lorencio said, "there was never a Kinga Kaasik in Kolesnitsa."

"She wasn't from Kolesnitsa," said Sanav. "She was from the countryside. And Kinga is a nickname…"

"There are no records of anyone by the name Kaasik living in that oblast for the last two hundred years."

Sanav could not help himself. He smiled.

"There was never a Khalore Angelo," said Lorencio. He removed his glasses, and ran a hand across his face, like a man resisting the urge to tear away his own skin. "Never an Inanna Hämäläinen, or an Azula Hämäläinen. Never a Zoran Czarnecki, or an Ilja Schovajsa, or a Seo Eun Byeol."

"What are you talking about?" His heart pounded. It was a solitary sound, in such a quiet room; it seemed to push all the strength out of his limbs, that heartbeat. He was still smiling. "You're wrong."

"These people did not exist before Wall Alliette fell."

"Sir – "

"They entered our kingdom with the druj." Lorencio smiled, a little faintly, and put his glasses back on. "They are druj, Sanav."

Sanav said, "where is Captain Hijikata?"

"The rumours were right. Monsters in human skin, the lot of them. And Khalore –"

"I won't say anymore," Sanav said, as firmly as he could manage, "until I see my captain. Where is he?"

This, at last, produced a response. Lorencio said, "he was with the princess."

Sanav stared at him.

"He'll be in shortly," said Lorencio. "He'll come to see you then."

"You don't sound certain," said Sanav. He realised, belatedly, how stupid this sounded. He grimaced. He collapsed back in the chair. He exhaled, and then realised how little air he had in his lungs, and then gasped in air again like he was dying, and said, "I don't understand."

"I didn't expect that you would."

Lorencio relaxed back – or pretended to, for Sanav could not ignore the fact that his fingers were still beating on the arm of the chair like a war drum. "We're still trying to unravel it all," he said. "They seem to have infiltrated every level of the tagma. The palace. The Selection itself."

"They," Sanav said.

He stared at his hands. He smiled.

"I don't understand," he said, which felt pathetic and redundant by then. The door to the war room opened then, and Hijikata came in. Like Lorencio, he had seen better days – Sanav rather expected that he hadn't seen many worse. He was pale and drawn; his face was all pointed bone and black shadows. His dark hair clouded around him, blood-stained and ichor-matted. He looked like a man frozen in a tableau of struggle, a tagma soldier who was still locked in battle with a druj even as he came in, and acknowledged Lorencio with a nod, and gave Sanav a look that left the younger excubitor feeling hollow and uncertain and cold.

"He's told you?"

"I don't know," Sanav said, "what he's told me."

He stood. They had taken his green coat from him, so he was dressed only in his pale green shirt – it had been Kenta's first – and his trousers. They had emptied his pockets and taken his boots so that he could not hang himself with the laces. The new floorboards had a thin layer of gritted dust over them. It scoured his soles as he rose, and paced to the wall, and found nothing there to occupy him.

Lorencio said, "what part don't you understand?"

"He's wrong. He's saying all this stuff about… there must be some mistake."

Sanav turned, and searched his captain's face.

"If they were working together," he said. "If they were… captain, if she was some human druj all along, why would she want to kill Oroitz? She went after the golem with us..."

"Yet the golem lives still," said Lorencio.

"Not because…!"

It was grief that had seized him, not shock but grief, full-bodied, firm-gripped. He could not focus on the room around him. He could only think of that awful day in Mag Mell, when he had frozen on the threshold of the province and could go no closer. Ghjuseppu had seen him, and landed beside him, and shaken him from his stupor: there are people down there that need us. They had been miles away, and they had raced to the district when so many had gone in the opposite direction, when so many had frozen where they stood. If we save even one life, Ghjuseppu had said.

Kinga had said one life, one person, and a world entire.

Start with ours, Ghjuseppu had said. And get to those cannons. We'll save hundreds of thousands yet.

"Captain," Sanav said. He was smiling still. "Please. Tell him."

Kane looked straight through him.

"Tell him," Sanav said. "He's made a mistake. It's something else."

"Mahesar," Kane said, "they have killed millions of people."

Lorencio closed his eyes.

"Everyone," Kane said. His voice was an awful thing to behold: a strangled sound, a furious sound, barely contained. "Everyone that has died since the fall of…."

Sanav shook his head.

"Blood on their hands," Kane said. "And destruction of worlds entire."

"There's been a mistake."

"They killed Lorencio's wife," said Kane, "and they killed Ghjuseppu, and they killed Rakel."

Lorencio must have known that some part of that didn't make sense – the sympathy had returned to his eyes, the kindliness Sanav so associated with the older Scholar – but he said nothing, and only shook his head sorrowfully.

"She saved your life," Sanav said. He advanced on his captain – he could not help it. "She was your second, she was our friend, we know her, and we should be looking for her –"

"I saw it," Kane said. "I saw what it is. When it fell."

That drew Sanav up short.

"It's druj," Kane said. "Druj that learned to speak and smile. Druj nonetheless."

It was something in his eyes: certain, and barbed, and hateful. It curdled the blood; it killed whatever nascent rage had been nurturing in Sanav's heart, seeking out oxygen. It extinguished all of his indignation, and the rest swept in to take its place, cold and awful.

"I don't," Sanav said, "I don't –" and whatever word was going to come next was lost in the tears that overwhelmed him. The other two men did not move to comfort him, and he would not have expected it: he crouched on the ruined floor of the war room, and he wept, and it did not seem to him that he would ever stop weeping, or that things would ever be alright again.

Asenath Schreave had garbed herself for war: her sleeves blood-red and the gold cloak of a paqudu around her shoulders. Her gloves were ichor-drenched; she had tracked blood-drenched feathers into the room. She was aglow with an awful fire within; the traces that tears had streaked down her pale face glowed silver in the torchlight, and her eyes shone with more unshed, but her voice was strong and steady as she said, "that has been three days – three days, and nothing useful."

Kasimira had braced her hands on the table, staring at schematics of the walled kingdom. If only she stared at it hard enough, she thought, if only she scrutinised it, it would unfold before her and she would perceive exactly where it had gone. As an excubitor, she had possessed an unparalleled ability for tracking druj – it was as though she were part monster herself. And yet no sign of the stone xrafstar, and the corpse that carried it. "It will not talk?"

"I'll kill it," Sena said, "before we get anything useful from it. Even under Oroitz's eye – I might kill it."

"Worse fates," Kasimira said. "Another curse recovered."

"No worse," Asenath snarled. "It knows what has become of Silas – "

"If your brother is still alive –"

"Mother."

" – it may be cruelty to wish so."

Asenath said, "don't."

"They took the curse, Sena, not Silas. Don't forget that. Never forget that."

Asenath turned aside sharply, and inhaled a shuddering breath. Kasimira did not have to wonder what her daughter was thinking. She was cursing her little brother and his folly. Why had he ever taken the Radiance? What sense had that made – what good had it done? Sena had always been sister and mother both to the boy, and had known him better than anyone, and she had not seen this coming. Silas had always been a prince and wraith both, and had never been given reason to stray, and he had betrayed himself and the family by stumbling so.

And now the Radiance was taken, and the prince was gone, and Kasimira's son was dead or dying, even if he didn't know it yet. Kasimira rather hoped that they – the nebulous They, the Others, Those Without – were ruthless enough to kill him quickly. They had killed poor little Azula, after all, and after she had refused to give them up, after she had clung to what little remained of her sanity and loyalty. Wherever They had taken Silas, it seemed that duty only cut one way.

"I'll put it in the ground for a while," Sena was saying, "drown it in the dirt."

"Think about putting the others in there while you're at it," Kasimira said. "Hijikata. Morozova. Suero."

Sena shook her head.

"Each had one of these things under their supervision," Kasimira said, "and protected Those who would destroy us."

From his seat at the wall, the cursemaker sounded a note of warning. Priscus could not but sound wearied, and just a little disappointed in his former apprentice. "Oh, Kasi – how can you blame them for not recognising a xrafstar? You yourself have reaped any who learned of their existence these last long years."

Kasimira said, quite simply, "they sheltered Them that hurt my family."

Sena nodded, locking eyes with her mother. In her grief, she was perfected: her beauty, so keenly honed, needed some impression of ruin to be truly ethereal. "I know, mama. My instincts are the same as yours – but we cannot move according to instinct alone. Those people know the xrafstars better than any other."

"They know the masks."

"No mask is perfect," Asenath said. "They sent children to do this work, and it was done childishly."

"Children," Kasimira said. "Well then – let us hope Their whole army is composed so."

Priscus said, "who would lead the counter attack, then?"

"I," said Sena, at the same time that her mother said, "the princess, of course."

The cursemaker raised a white eyebrow. "Oh?"

Sena smiled. Kasimira knew, quite without asking, that her daughter was thinking of the tongue she had sealed in a ceramic box in her laboratory – the tongue that had belonged to the Sun of Kur, the tongue that had borne the girl that had borne the curse, the last remnant of the person the Sun had blighted. Kasimira cast her daughter a silent warning that was silently acknowledged: Sena was long past the age that one could shoulder such burden and stand. Besides that: the Sun was not the Radiance, and sweet Sena deserved more in this world than ten years. No matter if she eschewed it. There were soldiers enough to choose from – traitors, or near-traitors, that needed a way to claw their way back into favour – young men and women who would be willing to kneel and die. Young. Very young. But not children.

The Illéans, then, clung to more humanity than They did.

"I don't…. know why you're…. helping me."

This was what he had said to her on the first day, and she hadn't been certain either. She had been in shock. She had not been able to reconcile the man before her with the stone druj which had so ravaged the kingdom only hours earlier.

That must have been why.

Now it was the second day, and she still had no answer. In the ruin that had followed the fall – some were calling it The Great Fall, for every Wall had been broken through and the entire place was druj-stricken, overrun with the beasts, and it was a kind of new apocalypse day after day, without safe place left to escape to – the Selection had fallen to the wayside. There was no prince left to compete for, after all. The druj had taken Silas, and Belle had tried to defend him, and had been taken also, and they had all but salted the earth after them.

That must have been why.

If she turned him in, she knew – he was the stone druj they all feared, after all, the concrete monster that had blotted out sky and sun alike – she knew he would vanish into the churn of ordinary petty vengeance, and would never live long enough to say what had become of Silas or Belle, where or why they had been taken, how Evie could find their remains to put them into the zandik gardens where they might belong. There was, at least, some hope that he might tell her: if she brought him food, as she did on the first day, and on the second day. If she covered the entrance to the collapsed atelier where he had found shelter. If she did not scream as soon as she spotted his staring golden eyes, and bring all the tagma running to her side.

That must have been why.

It would, perhaps, have been better to find her dead. He had realised before Reiko did that her very hooks bound her to the stone druj, and that had told him something he was unwilling to know. As the excubitors from Kass and Leptir had rose to assail to the druj, she had driven them back with that silver shine of her swords and the blood had fallen to the ground almost reluctantly, as though it knew as well as any of them how final the choice she had made.

Lorencio's trap had fastened the stone druj in place quite firmly: there seemed to be no surface of granite skin that those enormous steel hooks had not pierced, and the wires that held it in place were as thick as a man's body. The druj strained to move its limbs, and could not, and there was a desperation in the silhouette of his defender that none but Kane Hijikata would have noticed on so dark a night.

She was losing. That was unlike her – and the instinct rose in him, tightened his hands over his swords, that he ought to go to her defence, to hold off this onslaught for long enough that she could catch her breath and reassert herself.

He had killed a man – what he believed a man – for her. He thought he would have done more. Wouldn't he have done anything for his lieutenant?

And then, as they drew closer, there had been the sound of something shattering and Kinga Kaasik had dropped to the cobbles like a falling star, trailing ichor and hook in her wake. She hit the ground hard; even this far away, he heard the crack of bone against stone.

In the dark, he could not be sure: the shadows conspired against him, and forced his imagination into strange shapes. A druj form seemed to strain itself over her, black blood slowly matting her hair into the unmistakeable shape of feathers.

He had hit the ground without thinking. It was as though gravity itself had seized him: he had landed in a scramble, gloves torn on the ground as he caught himself, knees hitting the cobbles in a wild skid forward, and forward again. She had run to Ghjuseppu like this, and he had held her back. Reiko ought to have held him back now, but they hung back, horrified and, for once, silent.

For a split second, he thought her dead and something moved within him, visceral: fear and relief knotted fingers around his heart in his chest and grasped tight.

The moment passed.

She was still alive; her body racked with coughs and gasps, drawing in short breaths and bringing up only blood. It was instinctual: he dropped to his knees, and gathered her into his arms. Had he ever held her like this before? Once, he thought, once – then, as now, it had been a moment of ruination rather than intimacy. But there was something intimate about it: something about realising how warm her skin, how dark her eyes, how small her frame.

Was this really what they had feared?

Behind him, Reiko said, "leave her. They're getting away."

He had been quite unable to do so.

"Hijikata," Reiko said.

"Go," he said. He had torn open his gloves, and his skin touched hers, cool to warm.

"Not like this." He had not expected them to argue, but their mercury eyes were all ablaze despite the gloom. "I won't have it like this."

Eyes. She had been right to cover one: it would have made it obvious what she was. Did all druj have bodies that betrayed them so?

"Morozova –"

"Kill it," Reiko snarled. "Kill it, and come with me, while you can, while we can..."

They were already moving away, and preparing to give fresh chase to the others. They were unbalanced on their hooks and wires – they had never been tagma, after all. Reiko had been passed over for unsuitability of temperament, and Kane had taken Rakel instead, and Rakel was dead, and Kane had taken Kinga instead, and Kinga was druj, and maybe Reiko would have been the best of them instead.

"Reiko," he said, as softly as he could manage. "Please."

What was he asking for?

"Remember this," Reiko said. "Remember: you had the chance, and I told you to take it."