lodestar (n.) a star that is used to guide the course of a ship, such as the Pole Star.

It was a beautiful day. Beautifully, it was day. After all the nights that had passed – yes, this was blessed day, and it was, blessedly, day.

Had it really only been eleven days since Silas had been taken? That could not possibly be: they had forded many nights in that cursed forest, ever so many, and one had bled and blended into the next like a melody. They were not through it yet, but here was there a clearing, and here was there airy light, and here could they glimpse the faintest strands of sun, sky-kissed, noon-stained.

Their motley caravan came to a stop, and the soldiers contained within stumbled from their carts and horses and positions to crane their faces heavenwards, sunflowers twisting towards the bright. Such a long night. The cursed girl shrank from the sun, as though the ink-black curse-hide over her nose and cheek could no longer bear this simplest of joys; the cursed boy stared, and the sun shone from his marble eyes and gold lips and silver shackles. The soldiers in their jewel-tone cloaks – emerald, and sapphire, and ruby – shed them like snakeskins, flung them to the ground and followed them there, revelling in the simple warmth of soft soil and soft grass.

How far still to go? The maps said this much: they should have been through already. This much had been promised them: they ought to have reached the edge of the island. This much Asenath Schreave could feel pressing against her throat, and her teeth, and the back of her eyelids whenever she blinked, like an imprint of the sun upon her skin: the forest had wrapped its way around them, and choked them tight, and showed no sign of releasing them from its bramble-strangle grip.

"Who thought to bring coffee?"

"I did."

Evie blinked up at him. "Oh," she said. "You are my hero, Mahesar."

"Don't give me the credit." Did all of Hijikata's acolytes begin to resemble him eventually? The young excubitor's hair had grown long enough to curl dramatically about his collar. He had begun to turn up his cuffs in a similar manner as the older soldier. Evanne had always presumed that he must have been much younger than she was but now she wasn't so sure. All of his years had suddenly caught up to him with a violence. "Lorencio snuck it into my bag when I wasn't looking."

The general looked up from his maps and said, very mildly, "what happened to solidarity, San?"

"It's a positive, sir."

"Hmm."

He turned over the map. His lieutenant, Tzeitel, was standing ready with another of the ancient pieces of parchment for the moment he demanded it. To look at the two Scholars, one might easily imagine they were all huddled in one of the great libraries of the central Schools, all marble and carved-gem fixtures, rather than stopped temporarily in this makeshift campsite where the forest all around them was alive with menace. Evie had forgotten how exhausting it was to be so perpetually on edge: she was listening, very hard, to silence, and staring, very closely, at darkness, and when Sanav said something to her, it took a very long time for her to register that he had spoken and what, perhaps, he might have said.

He was good enough to repeat himself. "Do you think he wants some?"

Her hand went instinctively to her wrist. She said, "he doesn't seem to..."

The aide-de-camp, Vsevolod, turned from stoking the dead fire and said, "do any of them?"

"Some of them definitely do," Sanav said. For a moment, he seemed to smile, and he seemed to remember, and then he stopped.

He topped up Evie's metal cup before he moved away. It was the colour of tar, and a similar consistency, and despite herself she drank nearly the entire portion in a single long draw. She was exhausted. She needed to stay awake somehow.

Everyone around her seemed to have something similar in mind: everyone around her was frenzied in their exhaustion, searching for some way to force this forty minutes of respite to feel like more. The Watchers were removing the bodies of dead soldiers from the cart and leaving them in the underbrush of the forest, unable to grant them proper cremation in this place. They were wrapped in their coats; poor Yenna's head had rolled free and she seemed to stare directly at Evanne with those empty eyes. Kane Hijikata was sitting against the wheel of one of the carts, sword resting on his arm and his arm resting on his knee, and if the amber light of the spitting fire had not caught his eye Evanne might have thought he was dead too, so still did he remain, so dark the blood on his cheek.

His comrade Morozova was pacing like something caged, pacing the threshold of their encampment, striding boot-shod and staring into the dark as though in search of a thing upon which they might vent this grim energy. They had shed as many of their overclothes as the princess' presence would allow: the light and shadow twined around the tight cord of their muscles, a constant stretch and release of silent energy.

Evanne had never thought the princess could look similarly, but here she was: there was an ashen look to her face. Her salt-white armour had been bloodied by the churn of an earlier assault. When Vsevolod said, "human druj – are they more one thing or the other?", Asenath's lip curled and she glanced away from the embers for the first time in thirty minutes. Surely she was blinding herself, Evie thought, surely she was driving herself insensible in her own mind.

"Xrafstar," Asenath said. "They are called xrafstars."

"A type of druj."

"No," she said. "It's the other way around. The druj are xrafstar-wrought. They always have been."

Morozova's boots crunched on the black leaves that carpeted the forest floor. Lorencio said something quietly to Tzeitel, and turned over the map again. Evie said, quite impulsively, "so where do the shr - shravztars come from?"

She had begun to imagine a world of wastelands, blighted land stretching as far as the eye could see, where the druj formed in great black pools of malevolence. Eunbyeol would still have her books, even in such a world: she would shelter in a ruined world, and sleep under a blanket formed of stitched pages of poetry, the only human left in a world full of monsters.

Asenath closed her eyes. This was as close to a grimace as such a perfect face could form: she looked pained, for a moment, and then opened her eyes again and levelled a gaze at Evie, cold and wonderful. She said, "we made them."

"You. Personally?"

"It is not a matter for levity, Mahesar."

"It's magic," Sanav said, smiling.

"It was," Asenath said, "once. We should have contented ourselves with that much."

"Why didn't you?"

"Don't ask such stupid questions, Chae."

"How many are there?" Kane's voice was quiet, but it carried like smoke. "How many xrafstars did you make?"

"Thirteen," Asenath said. "Lucky thirteen."

Sanav was getting better at it, but sometimes his emotions still bled through: his mouth tightened, and he turned from the fire to take a swig of his coffee and to hide what this information had done to his eyes. Thirteen, Evanne thought. They had three of them right here – within ten feet of them, three – so, what, they were bringing all these men to contend with a mere ten others?

Lorencio said, "madam, that's forty minutes."

Asenath rose. She walked without a limp, though Evie could see the patch of blood oozing through her trouser leg had darkened and thickened all the forty minutes long. She said, "let us press on, then."

Not for the first time, Morozova said, "we should wait for day."

"We would be waiting a time," said Asenath, and gestured to silent Oroitz that he should come to her side. He did so immediately, and Evie rose and went to the cart, and waited patiently for Sanav to come and affix the manacle to her wrist again. He did so distractedly – he and Lorencio had listened to Asenath's words quite raptly, as though united in a certain abstract cynicism about all that their princess had pronounced.

She said, "penny for them."

He did not tell the truth. He raised the shackle and said, "this seems desperation."

Evie said, as though in levity, "I have half a face still to give for my country."

"Three limbs as well."

"Just so."

He laced his fingers together; she placed her boot into his hands, and he boosted her into the cart. Truth be told, she would have preferred to walk or ride: the terrain was uncertain and jolting here, and she could already feel bruises developing all the way down her legs. Nonetheless, she thanked Sanav for his help, and braced herself against the frame as Vsevolod urged the horses into motion.

Pjotr was awake, but he said nothing.

As they moved away, Evie stared the way they had come. They were at the lead of the contingent: the others, who brought up the rear, were still finding their feet and their weapons and their will, milling about as though contemplating mutiny and a home-cooked meal. Kinga kicked soil over the smouldering ashes of their fire to douse what little light it still gave off. She caught Evanne watching her, and said nothing, and glowered back over towards her fellow human druj – no, another xrafstar – the Watcher with the night-black eyes.

Txori never checked whether his prisoner remained with him. He had faith enough in her fear of the inevitable.

Morozova and Kane came immediately after the cart, both horse-bound, so that if Evie stayed in her position at the rear of the wagon she was facing them, as though sharing a pleasant meal in the capital. She had taken up her crossbow – another of Suero's damned contraptions, but it had proven its use – and had, eternally, a kind of nightmarish premonition of going over a particularly rough bump and accidentally loosing a bolt straight into Kane's beautiful face or Morozova's wolf-gold eyes. She therefore meticulously fixed the safety and kept the bolt trained on the ground, even as the night-dark of the woods melted around them.

Morozova said, "you did kill the fire, didn't you, Hijikata?"

He said, "don't tell me how to do my job, Rei."

"Don't call me that. And if you don't know how to do your job – "

"The fire is dead."

"Good. The last thing we need," Morozova said, acidly, "is another druj attack."

"Don't treat me like that. Don't treat me like a fucking child!"

Lorencio said, "careful, you two. You'll draw the whole forest down around us."

"As if he hasn't already."

Reiko practically snarled the words. She had always resembled a dog in Lorencio's eyes – just a little, the same way he had always considered his wife, Tejal, to be alike to a fox, or compared Kane Hijikata to a bird. She was usually so well-collared, but she had slipped her leash: she had swung on Lorencio as he caught up to to them, and he had believed for a moment that she would set upon him, knives out. Instead, she fixed him with an accusatory finger – she made the simple gesture into an act of violence – and said, "those three things are going to get us killed."

"You almost got yourself killed," Kane said. His hair was dishevelled in the way it always was after a scrap: for a moment, Lorencio could believe that the fight might have been between him and Reiko alone, like the old days, but then Hijikata stepped forward and Lorencio could see the slumped carcasses of the red-robed druj. Children and acolytes sometimes called them abbots, for their monk-like attire. He had cut down two of them. He had always managed to make it look easy. "For god's sake, Morozova, can't you at least – "

He reached for her. She ripped her arm from his reach.

"I'll break your arm again, Hijikata, I swear it." There was a bruise blossoming across her cheek; there was a splash of blood on Kane's face in the exact same position, as though they had deliberately mirrored one another. "How dare you?"

"You're not an excubitor," Lorencio said. "It isn't cruelty to say so."

She levelled him with that mercurial stare of hers. "I'm as good as any."

"I never said otherwise."

"So whence this fit of pique, Mora?" Lorencio hadn't realised that Oroitz had joined them until the Death of Kur had spoken, pacing the march around the druj that Kane had slain so ably. They were, then, a group entire: scholar and excubitor and watcher and guard. The dark pressed in tight. There was only the four of them and, perhaps, an invisible fifth waiting in the shadows, if the black of Oroitz's eyes were any indication. "If you cannot keep your nerve around the druj..."

He joined his hands over the hilt of his blade as though in prayer. He smiled.

"What would your sister say?"

Lorencio watched Kane closely, and understood from the expression that flitted across his face that this was a blow beneath the belt for Reiko, who only drew in a breath, and steadied her hands, and cocked her head, and blew out a long breath with a smile. She said, "It's true. I don't have as much practice killing druj. Shall I practice?"

He scowled. "I am not druj."

"I imagine you bleed the same," Reiko snapped.

The way Oroitz's mouth twisted suggested she was right.

They had travelled long enough that it ought to have been dawn thrice over by now, and yet it was still dark: dark enough that Sanav was not certain at first whether the shadows were playing a trick on him or if – yes, it did – the tree had a human eye embedded in its bark, blinking strainedly in the thin relief of the torch the captain held aloft.

The eye was brown. Sanav couldn't tell if that mattered any. It moved: went left and then swept right, as though taking in the entirety of the small regiment. It fixed on the excubitor, Yenna, and on the scholar, Tzeitel, and then on Sanav, for just a moment that stretched into near-eternity, and then on Kane, and it blinked, blinked, blinked.

It was bloodshot, as though overtired. There was a sheen to it, like a trapped yawn that brought out tears. And yet –

Reiko Morozova said, "keep moving."

She had appeared from behind them, and jabbed Kane, hard, with the butt of her sword. Kane said, "it's..."

"It's weirdness," said Reiko. "That's what this forest traffics in. We can't stop to gawk at every eye in a tree, or circle of monkey corpses, or..."

Kane said, "it's Xye. Xynone Hanover. I'm certain of it."

"It might have been," Morozova said, in an exaggerated pastiche of agreeability. "Once."

To Sanav's surprise, Kane nodded, and pulled at the reins of his horse, guiding her beyond the fir tree whose eye, still fixed on Kane, followed him until it could follow him no longer, and blinked all the more crazedly when Kane had gone out of its line of sight. Sanav, his chest tight, followed his captain around and beyond. It was all very silent except for the soft footfall of hooves on soil, and it was silent then for another while except for soft breaths all around him and the soft hiss and crackle of Kane's torch. The light, caught on Asenath Schreave's white cloak, shone like a lodestar.

This was a bad patch: the forest seemed to have woken up to their presence, and seemed determined to drive them out again. Only an hour earlier, Sanav had felt a strange feeling on his scalp, as though there had been string attached to each of the hairs on his head and those strings were being moved, very gently. He had looked up to find that there was a hand hanging from the air, its fingernail tracing across the top of his skull. It had taken everything he had not to scream. Kane had cut the hand in half, and the ichor had splashed across Sanav's face in a long slash of black like warpaint.

For now, it was quiet a little longer. Their carts were running a few hundred metres away from them, where the land was smoother. The suicide track, they called it, and what few glimpses Sanav had gathered of those driving the wagons had confirmed they knew they were running a dangerous gauntlet: their faces had been set, mask-like in a forecast grief, and their grips on their weapons had been knuckle-splittingly tight.

The trees were too dense here to see them anymore. The thickets had a muffling effect as well; Sanav was quite certain that his own breathing was not so loud, except for the fact it was being reflected back to him a few times over. Ahead of him, Kane raised his hand in a silent signal for stillness – Sanav stopped immediately, and hoped that they were at least, at last, resting – and all the tagma around him stopped immediately. Sanav realised belatedly that he had held his breath as well, as though in the hopes of disappearing entirely.

The footfalls continued. The breathing continued. It was Sanav's own breath he could hear – shallow inhale, deep exhale – and it was Kane's footsteps, that familiar boot-tread with which Sanav had become so well-acquainted at Kenta's. Kane drew his sword, quite silently, and Sanav did as well, and even Morozova, with cocked eyebrow, complied, and drew. All around them, there was a silent readying, and then that silence was split – cracked down the middle, sure as a lightning strike – as Yenna shrieked from behind, and her shriek was lost to her own shriek reflected back on her, ten or twenty times over.

She was gone in the same moment. Something had torn her from her saddle, and dragged her into the forest as quickly as it had taken Sanav to turn and search in her direction.

"Shit," said Reiko, and the panic in her voice was a reminder – a realisation – that this was all new for her. She had never before dealt with the druj. Not like this – not out here. She wasn't tagma, not like Kane or Sanav or Kinga, and she remained, for a moment, fixed in place, staring at Yenna's empty saddle even as Sanav tore his boots from his stirrups and leapt to a standing position – one foot on the pommel, the other on the seat. He balanced, quite effortlessly, even as his steed baulked at the shadows and the screams, and wondered if his mother would be proud to see him now.

He fired his hooks – blindly, though he would never admit it – straight upwards, and when they found him purchase, he rose straight upwards as well, disappearing from his saddle as cleanly and quickly as poor Yenna had. He could only go so high before the boughs and leaves and foliage obscured the ground from view, and rather eliminated any utility from the manoeuvre.

He remained thus for a moment, scanning the ground. The silence had reasserted itself. The thing which had so perfectly mimicked them had fallen quiet, or retreated with Yenna to busy itself with its quarry. So perhaps that was it: perhaps it was sated.

The scream would have brought other things looking.

Here was one of them now: there was, far below, a black figure floating through the forest as though hanged upon the air, neck bent at a strange, broken angle. It was featureless but for eyes and a smile that had been cut into the black-smoke surface of its face, and it was joined – swiftly was it joined – by three, six, ten more of its kind. When they opened their maws, their teeth, too, were carved slashes of light in an empty space a face ought to have been. Sanav thought of the hanged traitors under which they had ridden out to glory that morning, and wondered whether Mainyu was conscious of these reflections. If any forest breathed and dreamed – certainly it would be this one.

He balanced his sword in his hand, and he released his hooks, and he dropped as fast as gravity would allow him. He caught the first druj with his outstretched boot, and they went to the ground together; Sanav twisted the blade in his hand, and pressed it to the druj's broken neck. He did not stab or thrust, but pressed the sword home, one hand laid over the other on the hilt and his whole weight placed into it. Where the blade opened up its smoke-thick skin, white light poured from it anew.

They were being made into a beacon for more and greater attacks.

Kane was still astride his horse, and slashing at the druj as they approached, blade and torch alike arcing through the air. Why didn't he take to the harness? Sanav himself had fired his hooks again to escape the twisting grasp of his chosen druj quarry, who had risen into the air anew, bleeding moonlight. Sanav balanced for a moment against the bark of a nearby tree – god, but he hoped this one was eyeless – and then readied himself for another strike.

Before he could move off, the first druj had been impaled by a bolt from a crossbow. It fixed it to the tree next to Sanav, thrashing and splashing silver light this way and that. Someone was finally acting like an excubitor.

Asenath had kicked her horse and disappeared into the dark. Reiko had, with an oath, given chase, and Kane, looking mutinous, had followed her. Sanav did not want to be left alone, and so he went in their wake, twisting around the outstretched reach of the broken-neck druj and then turning and moving around invisible obstacles in the air, terrified of being grabbed by something worse and larger.

Larger loomed: Asenath had made it perhaps eight hundred yards before her horse had drawn up short. Sanav was too far behind to make out clearly what happened, but he suspected that Asenath's horse had thrown her: she was on the ground, and scrambling back, her white cloak shining like the light of the druj, and the enormous bear-thing – it had antlers and a long snout like a crocodile, but the enormous muscled body, fur-coated, looked like a wolf or bear and that was the first word that jumped to Sanav's mind, like something instinctual, bear – it had reached out one enormous paw and planted it on her leg, hard, and pinned her in place as simply as one might a fix a butterfly beneath glass.

The princess had produced a needle-thin dagger and driven it into the druj, as simply piercing a bit of meat on her plate. The druj had made no sound, but its lips had drawn back over blackened fangs, and it had withdrawn its paw, and Asenath had scrambled upwards and sprinted for her horse again.

Where were Kane and Reiko?

The bear-thing had recovered, and now lunged for the princess with renewed urgency. Sanav met it before it could reach Asenath; he placed his blade at the corner of its maw and ripped along its jaw, his hooks pulling himself along the length of the bear-thing's body, so that he tore open its mouth like a great involuntary grin.

That was enough to bring its attention from the princess to the excubitor. Sanav rather regretted it as soon as he had accomplished it. Nonetheless did he steel himself: he bounced off the ground as soon as he had hit soil, and rose into the air again, zig-zagging as best he could in the vain attempt of evading a strike from those table-sized paws. No good: he was batted from the air like a swatted fly.

He went again, sword first, which did little good; he tore another strip from the bear-thing, and was only barely able to avoid its maw as it snarled and snapped at him, long flaps of flesh hanging from its mouth where Sanav had cut it open. It roared, and a smell like a rotting corpse rolled over Sanav and ruffled his hair. His hair was growing too long. He wouldn't be able to ask Kinga to cut it anymore. He might, at last, have to learn to cut it himself.

When next the bear-thing lunged for him, Sanav feinted upwards and then dove low, dragging his blade along its abdomen and belly. He was all ichor and soil and blood now, no green at all left, and the silver of his sword was near-invisible beneath the grim and viscera.

The cut was too shallow – it bled, but did not fall – and Sanav found himself twisting back to his feet, and running again, and being knocked to the floor for the umpteenth time as the bear-thing roared, and shook, and stumbled, and fell, and….

Sanav stopped. He walked back to the druj. He kicked it.

Dead.

Asenath said, "poisoned stiletto. My apologies, Mahesar – I should have warned you."

Sanav could not help but laugh. He tested his arms, and found that he was bruised but without serious injury. "I won't complain," he said, "this time."

"It took a little longer than I expected," Asenath said. "It was a large dose."

"Well, he's a big bastard," Sanav said.

He remembered, quite belatedly, that one probably should not swear around a princess.

Thankfully, Asenath showed no offence. "Very," she agreed, her voice like silk.

Sanav started back into the gloom, and then drew up short, and turned back to Asenath, and cleared his throat, as though to exorcise all the awkwardness which had, quite abruptly, stolen across him. He said, "we should find the captain and Lieutenant Morozova."

"You are quite right, Mahesar." Asenath wrapped her fingers around her horse's reins, and encouraged it forward. It baulked again at the dead druj, but otherwise followed its master quite meekly until they were level with Sanav. Asenath said, "please do lead the way, Mahesar."

"You are as capable as I, your highness."

"Less disposable." She managed to make the words sound veritably honeyed. Sanav was not sure what it was about the way she shaped those words that prevented him from taking too much offence, but lead on he did.

Here was the churned path of hooves, laid over an old stag-path: they followed it a few hundred yards until they came to Kane's torch, dropped and doused in the dirt. Sanav picked it up, and tucked it into his harness. Asenath raised her hand – they listened together, quite intently, to the silence, and then she nodded and gestured that they should continue.

Yenna dropped from the foliage. Sanav clearly heard the sound of innumerable bones breaking as she hit the ground, very hard. He was glad that she seemed to have already been dead when it happened.

Certainly, she was dead now.

"What is your name, soldier?"

"Yenna, sir. Yenna Czarnecka."

Kane said, "Rank and district?"

"Third class excubitor from Mag Mell."

"Which means she's a coward."

Reiko could see the roll of his eyes in the way he set his shoulders and twisted his head. He glanced down at young Yenna's papers, and nodded sharply, and handed them back to her, and as they proceeded further down the line, he hissed, as close to venomous as he ever got, "must you breathe down my neck like that?"

"You have a problem against breathing now? That would explain some things about the company you've kept."

Reiko deliberately kept pace with him as they continued down the queue, a shadow almost as tall as he was and distinctly more muscular. Try as he might, he would never quite be able to shed the distinctive ranginess of one from the outer walls. He would always look a little hungry – he would always look a little bit like the boy Reiko had kicked about in training. A shame he had not stayed so. He was beginning to develop notions well above his station; he was beginning to carry himself like he was larger than he was.

"What is your name, soldier?"

"Tzeitel Txori."

Kane said, "rank and district?"

Reiko said, "why aren't you in your colours?"

The general's lieutenant was not in her Scholar's coat, but was wearing the green of an excubitor. She said, "we're going into Mainyu Forest. Anyone who's not an excubitor or guard is going to be spotted from a mile away regardless."

Reiko said, "rules is rules."

"Not out there."

Kane said, "that's sensible, Tzeitel."

Reiko glanced at him, voice exaggeratedly disbelieving. "Oh, I think I should have you written up for that."

"Please do," Kane said. They were standing in Central Square in Gjöll, and there were long ragged lines of volunteers to work through before they headed off into the deep dark woods. Kane was working his way down one queue; Suero was working his way down another, near enough that Reiko could occasionally catch snippets of inane pleasantries as the scholar greeted each tagma in turn. Kane was not managing so well: he might have tried to hide it, but he was exhausted, and unhappy, and finding the quality of cannon fodder to be very much lacking on this occasion. Perhaps it was no surprise that he had, quite inevitably, snapped. "Please do, run off and tell Lorencio –"

Reiko barked out a laugh, and jabbed his shoulder, quite hard. "Lighten the fuck up, Hijikata."

He drew in a breath. They went on to the next.

"What is your name, soldier?"

"Agnar Mäkinen."

Kane said, "Rank and district?"

"Second class guard from Ganzir."

Reiko laughed. "You're not second class, Agnar."

He blanched, and stared at her, and did not dare contradict her.

"He's a dreg," Reiko continued. "Fourth at most."

Kane raised his papers up to Reiko's eyeline. "This says he's second."

Reiko took the papers from Kane's gloved fingers, considered them thoughtfully, and, with a smile, tore them in half. Agnar looked like he was about to cry.

Kane said, "welcome to the service."

They proceeded.

Reiko spoke, belatedly and a little bit lamely, as though trying to justify the action: "Agnar would get someone killed, you know. He wouldn't last ten seconds in front of a druj."

"And you would?"

Reiko drew up short, and bared teeth in a smile much wider than that which had proceeded it. "You've learned to bite back, Hijikata."

"This isn't about some childish rivalry, Mora."

"I'm trying to keep us alive. Only the best."

"The best are dead," Kane said.

"That's hardly true. You're here, aren't you?"

That had knocked him for a loop. Reiko thought for a moment that he was going to reel back physically.

"And I'm here," Reiko said. "So." A shrug. "Shall we continue?"

They did.

Another three soldiers cleared for service, and it was clear that Kane Hijikata was not fully focused on the task at hand. There was a distraction laid over him, as physical as any cloak or coat. It was most unlike him. It would get them killed.

Reiko said, after they had cleared the sixth soldier, "we shouldn't bring them with us."

He didn't have to ask what was meant by them. He said, "I agree with you."

Most unexpected.

"We should put them down now."

He said, again, "I agree with you."

Most unexpected. And yet he meant it – Reiko had known him long enough to know when he meant something, and Hijikata had pronounced this in a venomous voice. Reiko blinked, and was not able to form a sentence to chase on the heels of the last, so it was in silence that they moved on to the seventh soldier in the column.

"What is your name, soldier?"

"Hisayo Morozova."

Reiko's sister stood with her shoulders back and her back ramrod straight, her gold cloak shining brightly despite the storm clouds threatening overhead. She was staring at her sibling with a faintly derisive expression on her face; Reiko flinched and instinctively straightened, and then wondered why.

Kane glanced at Reiko before he said, "Rank and district, ma'am?"

As if he did not know already. As if everyone did not know. He still called her ma'am, did he?

"First class paqudu from Gjöll." Hisa smiled. It was not a warm expression. "It's good to see you, Rei."

"Yes," Reiko said. The other Morozova's lapels suddenly seemed quite fascinating. "And you, ma'am."

Kane looked at Reiko, quite hard. It was almost physical: Reiko nearly stepped back beneath the weight of that gaze, and could not quite meet his eye. Why did he insist on staring thus? He, at last, folded over Hisa's papers and said, "I don't think your services will be required, Colonel."

Hisayo raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Too senior for a job like this."

"We were told you needed bodies."

"Indeed," he said. "Disposable bodies."

He handed her back her folded papers, and offered her the traditional Illéan salute: clenched fist over heart.

Hisa said, "surely this is as desperate as we can get?"

"Not yet," Kane said. "Not while a single Wall still stands."

The colonel smiled. "I await the day."

Reiko stared at the ground, and bristled, and, for once, said nothing, Kane seemed quite glad of it as they moved on. He, too, pretended not to sense Hisa Morozova's gaze burning into their backs as they continued down the line, suddenly feeling their whole sparse twenty-five years, suddenly callow cadets once more beneath the iron stare of their commandant and trainer.

"I don't like this."

"I didn't ask if you liked it," Lorencio said. "Orders are orders. Shall you heed them?"

He always did. He always had. He said, "she has betrayed us once."

"That's true," she said. "I have."

She said it with a lightness. She said it like they were still at Kenta's apartment, and taking turns to make dinner for the others. She said it like a lieutenant might have said it. He swung on her, and could not summon the words to hurt her quite enough. She widened those awful black druj eyes, quite dramatically, and smiled, just a little, when he came up short.

When she smiled, she still looked like Kinga Kaasik.

Lorencio heaved a sigh. "You're not helping, Szymańska."

"Good."

Still that name, which he hadn't found the energy to question: named for a Wall, which meant she was from a very ancient family or she was a liar twice-over. More than twice. Even she must have lost count.

"She wants to go home," Lorencio said. "She knows the conditions. She must take your orders, or suffer the consequences. She must stay in line."

She spread her hands wide. "Exactly."

She was sitting on the steps leading to the throne. She was wearing a green coat that didn't belong to her. She looked tired.

"You're not stupid enough for this to be believable, general."

"Trust the process, captain."

Trust had brought them here. Trust had purchased misery and treason for them, that and only that.

She said, disbelievingly, delightedly, "are you scared of me, Hijikata?"

"Did Ghjuseppu know what you were?" He should have physically struck her. It probably would have wounded less; she would have less resembled a kicked dog. He found that he cared little. It was meant to hurt.

The mask was starting to slip. "No," she said. "I don't think he had a clue."

She stood. He put a gloved hand on his sword. Her limbs seemed longer than they had been. Her mouth, certainly, stretched wider than it ought, like a smile that had been cut there. The black birdlike quality of her deadened druj eye made it impossible to read what she was thinking.

When she took a step towards him, he could not help himself: he tightened his grip on the hilt of his blade.

She said, "I don't think you do."

"I know a druj when I see one."

She let out a low, mirthful whistle. "Oh, but I know you're wittier than that, sir."

Kane turned to Lorencio, who was observing the pair with the paramount detachedness of a true Scholar. "What does she get out of this?"

She interrupted whatever answer Lorencio hoped to offer. "I want to go home." She sounded like she meant it. Where had she learned to lie like this?

He laughed. "You'd betray your cause for that?"

"I'm very selfish," she said.

She made it all sound like some enormous joke. Kane could only think of poor dead Rakel, sprinting into the smoke to save her from her own brutish allies; he could only think of Oktawia weeping in an unfinished house, and the bells tolling over Mag Mell, and Ghjuseppu holding her up when she had drunk too much of Lorencio's whiskey. "Very," he echoed, quite faintly, and quite without meaning to.

Lorencio said, "so it's agreed."

He smiled at them both, and he turned on his heel, and he left the room. The sound of the door closing echoed all around them, time and again. Kane could not help but wonder if the general was creating some plausible deniability for whatever occurred in his wake – whatever viscera found its way to the tiles, whatever place its blade found itself embedded.

He would leave before that happened. He could not shake the faint air that he was being goaded into something.

But first, he turned back to the druj wearing his friend's skin. "If you transform without permission," he said, "if you so much as put a foot out of line – I will take the other eye."

She flinched, and she blinked, and then she relaxed and said, "oh, that's quite ironic."

He wasn't certain why, until she turned her head from him to look at the walls of the throne room, and her hair hung to hide her eye. She had given up on wearing an eyepatch and aping human frailty. She had given up on pretending to be so perpetually wounded, feigning vulnerability.

He thought of the last time he had killed a druj with a blade to the eye, and – oh.

"Even if I don't," she said. She was making a game of how mildly she could say such things, how inoffensive she could make mass murder. "Even I stay like this… you might kill me anyway. That's the sort of tone you have."

She knew him too well. He said, "I suppose so."

"And you think you can take me?"

"I did once," he said. He had offered once to let her down – to put her down – if there was enough of her left to bury – and she had treated that promise with more gravity than it had deserved. He knew why, now. "I did before."

"Yes," she said. "Well. I let you."

"Let that thought comfort you at the end."

She exhaled. Her voice wavered with irritation and something a little bit more bitter. "Would you believe me if I told you it wasn't personal?"

He thought of haircuts and gloves and teacups and dancing. He had always found it easier to lie to himself than to her. He said, "I will not let you hurt anyone else, Kunegunda."

"You let me do everything else? Is that it?"

"No."

"You did," she said. "You did – you could have stopped me, and you didn't. You know that, don't you?"

He took a deep breath.

"Shut up," he said. "And behave yourself."

He hadn't realised how close they had drawn over the course of their short argument; she was near enough to him now that he could count the faint flecks of gold in her eye, and spot the vein jumping in her jaw like something living and trapped. She had the vague air of wanting to tear his throat out with her teeth; if she looked at him like this for a moment longer, he might have let her try. "I'll take that as an order, then," she said, tersely; though she spoke softly, dangerously, the throne room caught her voice and reflected it back to her thrice over. "Sir."