desbundar (v.) to shed one's inhibitions gradually by engaging in amusing pursuits.

The encroaching summer had clothed the earth prematurely, as though swaddling the land in a mantle woven at the sun's own loom, golden light dripping honey across Wall Schreave so seductively that Evanne almost forgot that they were imprisoned behind it. Overhead, the artless song of a sparrow hung above the palace like a guillotine, flat notes spiralling down very slowly to rest among the torn fields of flowers, where the golem had laid waste to the land around the palace.

The aunt for which she had been named, Evelyn Brown, had made a game of humanisation, of playing at pareidolia. They would climb a hill, like this one, on any given weekend, when Evelyn could be spared from her moiling at the mart. They would stand on the precipice, thus, and give the land some dignified name: Grigor or Sinead or Anastasie or Ezer. Then, they would search for its belt – the long beryl-stained river which cut across Ganzir, running in a straight line north-south as though God had struck it through with a bright blue pen – and find its fingers – the long furrowed fields unfolding to the east, the jagged scars of druj attacks to the west – and discern its hair in the thick, tangled forests in the north – what the tagma called Mainyu, the cursed woods in which time ceased to have meaning, the land long ago ceded to the druj, before they had even been called druj.

She found herself playing this game without quite noticing that she was doing so, finding an eye in the curious swirl of black smoke which still clustered along the edge of the Wall, where the golem had fallen. It looked like the eye of a bird, which had always creeped her out for some reason she could not quite put her finger on; if she truly strained her vision, she could just about discern the bright coats of the tagma moving about in its epicentre. More red than green, and far more blue than red – the Scholars had been spared the devastating losses sustained by their brothers-in-arms. Evanne found her chest aching to think of it. The sheer scales of the recent attacks were unbearable, and certainly unsustainable – at this rate, they would run out of soldiers long before the druj ceased their onslaught. That had always been a risk, certainly, but somehow less keenly felt when such a deadly attack occurred once in a generation – when there was always young cadets, young conscripts, who had never experienced the true terror of a druj onslaught.

Now, it was constant. Now, they were all intimately familiar with that fear.

And now, Evanne was sitting here, three walls deep, touring fields of flowers in a pretty dress, missing a leg, missing most of her face.

She was useless.

Useless, and yet the stone druj had apparently – protected her?

She hadn't ridden a horse since she lost her leg; nor had she, in her life before the Selection, had the occasion to master the side-saddle position favoured by the ladies of the court. If Silas had taken note of the unorthodox, slightly contorted, position she had assumed upon the saddle, then he had not mentioned it. He had barely spoken to them, even as Evanne had reached for Eunbyeol's hand to squeeze a silent reassurance – you are alive, and so am I, and somewhere so too is Mirabelle and hopefully somewhere so too is Tereza – and Adeline Toussaint had murmured a quiet greeting to the prince, dipping into a perfect curtesy.

Evanne wasn't quite sure that they seemed real to him. He didn't seem capable of fixing his attention upon them for too long. She supposed he must find it to be akin to watching grass grow. Like watching petals unfold on a flower. She had not entered this Selection with any great plan to seduce the prince – she was seeing the wisdom in that decision. This was not the face of a man who could be seduced, she thought wryly, catching sight of him once again in side-profile. This was not even particularly looking like the face of a man who could be befriended, though hope would spring eternal in that regard. It was strange: she had half-imagined that a lifetime coddled thus, in luxurious comfort, hidden behind the reinforcement of a thousand-thousand lives, would rather make you more open, more trusting, more friendly than less. She had always thought that hardships hardened a person; she had always prided herself on remaining soft, to some degree, on retaining some small ounce of kindness even as the world around her leaked gentleness like blood through a wound.

But here was Silas, cold without ever knowing a winter without heating, hungry despite a lifetime with food aplenty, cruel without ever coming face-to-face with the enemy. An engima, she thought, a contradiction.

No less a contradiction than a druj that could think, or that a monster could wear a human face.

She was trying not to think about it. She was trying to exorcise it by focusing on anything else, as she had kept it at bay by sheer physical effort and labour, when she had gone to help the guards in their desperate dig for survivors. How much longer could she go, ignoring what had happened?

Long enough, she thought, determinedly. Long enough. She caught Eunbyeol's eye, a silent plea for colloquy.

They had followed a long, languid path around the palace, weaving slowly through the rose gardens and then through the broader fields of zandik, now on the cusp of flowering sun-soaked. Evanne had noted, as they went, that Eunbyeol was a considerably more adept horsewoman that she had expected, and Adeline considerably less. The latter was looking pale and nervous, unable to direct her attention to keeping her mount under control when every iota of focus was being spent on the prince – or rather, the back of the prince's coat, for he had rather gone ahead of them, and seemed little inclined to converse with any of the three Selected he had hand-picked for this excursion. For her part, Evanne was quietly delighted that she had managed not to fall from her horse, so exhausted did she feel after a whole night-and-day of digging through rubble, searching for survivors, and, at length, uncovering only bodies.

They had, at length, reached a viewpoint from which the whole of the kingdom seemed to spread out before them, as though Silas had unfurled one of the maps upon which Shae used to plan the excubitors' excursions through druj-infested lands. It almost took her breath away to see it again – the first time she had glimpsed her world from such an angle, she had been a newly qualified excubitors, and her hooks had been as wings. The sky could barely contain her; the Watchers had grown tired of her in short time, so frequently would she and the twins ascend the walls to marvel at a view like this one.

But there, like an eye unfolding on the land, like a strange black scar: that swirling cloud of black smoke, and all the tagma rushing about within it.

Even as her chest caught at this quietly terrible sight, at the questions that it left unanswered, Eunbyeol caught Evanne's eye, and gave a short smile and a nod that settled the Obušek girl, very slightly. An answer to her earlier plea, a confirmation that they would speak of all that had occurred, of all that might occur again. There was no rush – not now that she knew both Eunbyeol and Mirabelle were safe. They could wait for a safer place, a safer time, to talk. She was happy to wait a little longer; it felt like her thoughts were still swirling, searching for something concrete upon which they could hook themselves; her arms still felt deceptively light, after so many hours of bearing weight.

She had not known that weight for many years – there was no burden quite like a corpse. It was impossible, once you knew it, to mistake it for any other. She still woke sometimes with the feeling that it was bearing down on her, crushing her, driving all air from her lungs.

She had not dreamed thus for many weeks, but she imagined that, whenever she managed to return to her bed, that dream would be waiting for her.

Silas was moving on again; she had the unshakeable impression that they were merely accompanying him on some strange inspection of the lands, that he was pursuing some agenda of his own for which they were mere adjuncts, less necessary than his gloves. Evanne could live with that – after all, she had an agenda of her own, and Silas' quiet focus on the land rather than on the girls meant that she could pursue this agenda freely.

True, it mostly consisted of staring at him, but she consoled herself with the knowledge that it was for a good reason. She had stared at Pjotr thus, right before that awful golden light had washed over them and she had been lost to the inky black of unconsciousness. Had she seen nothing useful? Had he seen nothing in her?

One could be most enlightened about another by the smallest of gestures – in this case, Evanne could not ignore the way that Silas guided his horse. It was a small point, but Jovan would have pressed upon it most heavily: a clever steed was guided by weight more than reins, and reins more than boots, and boots more than a crop. Perhaps the palace horses were just better trained than this that had been relegated to the tagma on the outskirts of the kingdom, but Evie silently approved of the way that Silas signalled to his horse when he wanted to move this way or that; she had glimpsed courtiers the night before kicking or lashing their horses to bolster them into movement, but the prince only shifted his weight, or twitched the rein, and they were off again. When they moved over the jagged landscape of the broken tower, smashed down by the stone druj when it had defended itself against the excubitors the night before, Silas loosed his reins and allowed the horse to pick its own path, more safely, through the debris. It was a quiet gesture of consideration and respect in a man seemingly incapable of either; it was incongruous.

Evie didn't like incongruity. She preferred consistency, much preferred it: she understood that nuance permeated the world, understood that the universe was painted in shades of grey, and some part of her would forever be silently resentful of that fact. She preferred the simplicity of the excubitor's crusade, how certain one could be that, in pursuing it, you were doing a wholly good, a wholly righteous, thing. In killing druj, you were doing good, truly good. Druj could not think. Druj could not feel.

She always searched for the good in those around her, but sometimes it threw her utterly off balance when she found it. Less dramatic, of course, than the opposite – and the image rose again in her mind – his blue eyes stained that strange gold colour, fractures creeping across his sallow skin, his jaw jagged as though a piece of him had broken off, granite spreading across his cheekbone like a bruise – and she swallowed it back down again, tightening her hands over her reins to silently urge the horse on, for she had, quite without noticing it, rather drifted behind her companions.

They had come downhill towards the lesser wall that encircled the palace; unlike its sisters, this wall had no name, for it was intended only as a bulwark against the people of Illéa, rather than against the druj. If the druj ever made it this far into the kingdom, Evanne thought tersely, then there were far bigger problems at hand.

Of course – they had. There were.

The first thing Silas said to her was, "you've bled through your bandages."

Oh. She wasn't certain how one responded to such words; he wasn't particularly carrying any judgment in his tone. He was just letting her know. Kindness, she supposed. She should take politeness where she could find it. She reached up to the bandages which swaddled right side of her face; her fingertips came away bloody. She was in competition to marry him, she thought, and now this would forever be the first thing that he had said to her. Ever.

When she spoke, it was with the slight slur of a mouth only half-usable.

"Thank you, sir."

He frowned. He didn't seem to know why she was thanking him.

She wasn't entirely certain herself.

He reached and took hold of her horse's reins, so that she could awkwardly shift herself out of the saddle, her prosthetic resisting all efforts at flexibility or contortion, and forcing her into a strange, straight-legged dismount. She was enormously glad that Eunbyeol was waiting for her, and half-caught her as she hit the soil, and steadied her.

"Alright?" Evie murmured.

"Could be worse."

"Ever the optimist."

They were at the gates of the palace walls now, where a few grey-suited guards had been startled into a semblance of alertness by the appearance of the crown prince. They had been chatting easily with some merchant on his way up to the servants' entrance of the palace; he was caught now in the shadow of a still-open gate, straddling the threshold, half-in and half-out of the royal dominion, with rather the same expression as a rabbit when it had a torch trained upon it abruptly. One of the guards elbowed him to bow, and he seemed gratified for an excuse to hide his face as he did so.

Silas was gazing past the man; the gate was still open, and accorded them a straight-eyed view of one of Ganzir's main avenues, one of the iron-rod roads that spiralled out from the palace at its heart. Had he ever ventured outwith the palace? Evie could not ever hearing of such an instance. His sister toured the provinces; his father visited, on occasion. But, like his reclusive mother, the crown prince had always been declared too fragile for such journeys, for such excitement. A bad omen, if you believed the superstitions.

He didn't look fragile now. Perhaps he had outgrown whatever childhood illness had so ailed him; perhaps he stayed within the walls now more out of habit than from any true rationale. One could be trained to accept nearly anything, Shae had taught Evanne, even the most grievous of indignities, the most grotesque of contortions. She had meant it only in reference to the saplings that they would plant along the boundary in springtime, which had to be tied firmly to stakes to ensure they grew straight and tall, but Evie had, in her time, seen it apply to any number of human scenarios.

One could accept absolute unreality, if they were eased into it slowly enough.

"Your Highness," said one of the guards, when he had managed to rouse himself from this state of stunned silence.

"One of you might escort Lady Kass back to her province," Silas said, brusquely, weaving his way between the four horses, adjusting the cuffs of his gloves as he did so. "I've decided to eliminate her."

Adeline Toussaint blinked blearily from her uncomfortable perch atop the enormous piebald to which she had been entrusted. "Your Highness?"

Silas didn't look at her. He was still gazing, slightly forlornly, at the world outside the walls – these small grey walls, which did not even have a name of their own, so minorly did they feature in any narrative of the kingdom – and then, as though he had silently become aware of the eyes upon him, he glanced down at the ground. There was a deep imprint in the ground here, where the pavement had been torn away by the sheer force of the figure which had strode across it. They were standing in the shadow of the golem, Evie thought, even when it was gone – especially when it was. It had disappeared.

It could, therefore, appear.

This was, she thought, the logic of the druj.

One of the guards had walked forward, and taken hold of the reins of Adeline's horse. Still mounted thereupon it, she was led, slowly, miserably, out of the gate and down the avenue beyond. It was a pitiable sight, Evie thought, all the moreso for how little reaction Adeline seemed to have to the news – or, so she thought at first.

Clearly, Adeline thought that she had waited until she was out of the prince's sight, for she was a few yards down the road before she burst into tears, and collapsed forward to hug her horse's neck tightly, and cried out, "thank god, thank god, thank god."

When she aimed a quizzical gaze in his direction, Silas averted his eyes from Evie's – and seemed enormously irritated to realise that this meant that he, instead, met Eunbyeol's glance rather squarely instead.

He said nothing. Eunbyeol said, "my eyes deceive me. A kindness?"

"Tell no one. I beg of you."

Was that a hint of mirth in his voice? Evanne hadn't believed him capable of it.

She must have requested to go home, after the ball, after the attack, after all the misery that had ensued – all the misery that still hung in an invisible cloud over the palace. Evie hadn't realised that it was in their powers to simply… opt out. To go home. To stop.

Or perhaps it wasn't. It did not escape her notice that they were at one of the most minor thresholds of the palace, in sight of only two guards, easily chastened, easily silenced; but then, why would he bring the two Selected along, if he wanted this elimination to stay quiet, if he didn't want the other girls to know that this was an option? More enigma, Evie thought, more contradiction. Tell no one.

Her face was aching, like it had, abruptly, remembered that it ought to hurt. Adrenaline kept it at bay, Evie thought, as it had when she had injured her leg. She hadn't even noticed that it was wounded until it was gone and her only duty had been recovery, and then it had been utter agony. She touched the bandages again, almost compulsively, knowing that the result would be only blood on her fingertips and a jolt of pain through her cheeks but doing it anyway.

Eunbyeol said, in that dull, emotionless way of hers: "do you have fresh? I could change them for you."

Evie shook her head. That damned slurring again, her words emerging half-formed: "It's fine. I need to pack it again, that's all."

Eunbyeol's eyes were tracing across her, utterly unreadable. "Were you very close to the explosion?"

Evie widened her eyes infinitesimally to try and signal to her friend. "Yes," she said, "quite close."

Silas said, "you must have been quite close to me, then."

She glanced at him. "Is that so, sir?"

What had Reiko Morozova said? They are safe. Certainly, amongst the guards, there had not been very much concern about the royals – an unspoken assumption that they were all fine, for surely if they were not, it would have been made clear. They would not have been permitted to go on in utter ignorance, would they? Then why did Silas wear that expression? If she had been as close to Petja as he had, why was she standing here with half a face while he looked so utterly untouched?

A slight curl of a smirk. "That is so."

"I didn't see you at the ball."

"I was a little late."

"A shame," Eunbyeol said. "Perhaps you should have been a little later."

"Such wisdom occurs only in hindsight, it seems."

"Yes," Evie said, "personally, I always thought two legs were one too many. More fool I, I suppose."

He seemed slightly bemused at this jape. For a split second, Evie wondered if he knew so little of the Selection, and of the Selected, that he might not realise that she was an amputee. Then, those dark eyes upon her, and she understood that he was, like her, taking note of much more than he would let on. "It must have been a little nostalgic for you, Lady Obušek."

"You know, I hadn't really missed all that screaming..."

"Not sure how you could miss it. It was rather loud."

Evie smiled, almost reflexively. What a terrible joke. What a terrible joke.

So the king of the druj was human after all.

Eunbyeol said, "are we riding a little farther, then?"

Silas hesitated. Evanne said, "I shouldn't see why not."

He couldn't possibly be worried that it might look callous, could he? Evie hadn't believed that such thoughts ever crossed the minds of the royals, but yet he lingered. He was a little pale, she thought, though perhaps he always looked so; he was tired, though perhaps he always was. He had been a sickly boy, and some of that liverish hue still clung to him, almost unnoticeable except when contrasted against one as hale as Evie herself.

He was unfriendly and he was lonely and he was, it was becoming clear to Evie now, dying.

Eunbyeol had mounted her horse again, with the quiet tidiness of an experienced equestrian. She said, "security issues?"

"Oh," Evanne said, "if we can't outrun any security issues, we might deserve what comes to us." She was able to lead her horse over to the abandoned guardspost, and use the stool there to clamber, slightly unwieldily, onto her own mount. "I don't need to be faster than the druj, Seo, just faster than you – and his Highness, of course."

He arched an eyebrow. Evanne remembered, belatedly, that Reiko Morozova had stopped just short of accusing her of conspiracy. Of communicating with the stone druj. Of helping him.

Him?

She said, quickly, "a race, maybe?"

Silas said, "one gets bored of circling the palace grounds over and again."

Evie said, "so?"

After all the gate was still open; the guards had not even paused to wind it closed again, so hastily had they melted away in the face of the king of druj. That had to count for several security violations, Evie was certain. Military discipline was really going to shit these days. But – they had a straight shot down the avenue, if they wanted it. And she did, desperately – some part of her just wanted to feel the wind in her hair again, as she had as an excubitor armed with her hooks, to see how fast the world was willing to carry her, missing leg or no, maimed face or no.

But Eunbyeol clearly saw an uncrossable line that Evie, in her enthusiasm, had not. She said, "perhaps not without Schovajsa. When does he start work?"

"Tomorrow."

Evie mouthed, Schovajsa?

Eunbyeol nodded. Ilja.

Oh! She had met him – at the ball, and then afterwards, the guard with the strangely detailed tattoo, the guard with the… hair? And eyes? And a face, possibly. Arms, certainly. He must have been promoted to personal guard, after the death of Björn. Well, wasn't that fortunate for Eunbyeol? Mirabelle would be delighted, utterly thrilled, to learn that they had this "in" with the prince. A friend, whispering in his ear…

It sounded exhausting. Evie was glad she wasn't competing, truly, in that sense. No, she just had a human druj, and several serious injuries, and the accusation of treason, to worry about.

Be sensible. If they were going to accuse her of treason, would they really have let her out to ride with Silas? Unsupervised. Unchaperoned, Evelyn might have murmured, sotto voce - though perhaps Eunbyeol was intended as a chaperone. A shame. Mirabelle would have rather lightened the tone a touch more expertly.

So perhaps she was not under such a heavy cloud of suspicion as Reiko Morozova had made it seem.

Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.

She was so caught in this net of thoughts that she had almost missed Silas wheeling his horse about and speaking quietly to Eunbyeol. "A race is worth as little as the wager set against it."

"I have nothing to wager," she said. "Ev?"

"Only my dignity."

"Lady Obušek has nothing to wager either."

Evanne laughed.

Silas said, "then I am set to lose all and earn nothing."

"You would think you'd be used to it by now."

He said, thoughtfully, "yes, at some point – " and like that he was off, his words hanging in the air, hooves pounding and tearing up chunks of soil and gravel as his horse's stride lengthened almost instantly from canter into pelting gallop. Eunbyeol almost flinched at the suddenness, and then laughed, reflexively, at how unexpected it had been from the otherwise miserable young man.

Evie swore. Younger siblings. You could never trust a younger sibling.

She really hadn't expected it of him, but then – it was apparent that this was one of his only outlets, like perhaps his books.

Perhaps not so surprising, either, that he would take the fastest possible route of a conversation.

She was almost as quick to react as Eunbyeol – that was a nice boost to the ego, that even after all this time, her reflexes weren't all that rusty – and with a whoop that Eunbyeol stubbornly did not echo, they were off, chasing back up the hill with a speed and verve that she had not truly expected to find again. Certainly not here. The wind grabbed at her hair with a real physical force, and her eye streamed tears, and she wasn't quite sure she could have spoken if she wanted to – at a certain point, like on the plains near Mainyu, you could only set yourself in a particular direction and cling, desperately, for dear life.

She could think later. She could stress later.

There would be time for all of it later.