Chapter 71

The lamps guttered out one after another. Like a curtain being pulled, dark fell over the private archives.

Maryam stood alone on the roof before the face of three gods and the absence of a fourth. She did not long have to wait for her enemy to arrive – Hooks formed out of the gloom almost eagerly, like a mouse so hungry it would squeeze through the cracks in the wall to claw at the grain. No stolen looks tonight, neither the garb of the Watch or of a home that Hooks had never truly known save through what she took from Maryam.

Instead her enemy wore a simple pale dress, barefoot and without jewelry. Pale skin on pale cloth, and loose hair like raven’s wings. Hooks looked halfway between a corpse and a princess. A brutally fitting reflection of her nature.

“It doesn’t have to end like this,” the enemy said.

A flicker of annoyance. They didn’t understand, any of them, what it really meant for her to abstain from the ritual. To be forever held hostage to another’s will when tracing Signs, only a single harsh tug on her nav away from disaster if tracing anything dangerous. To live with Hooks was to forever keep a knife at her throat. And to come to an agreement with her…

“What else is there?” Maryam scorned. “Am I to let you swallow a third of my soul, to rob me of the Cauldron all because you think your putting on a white dress ought to make me squeamish?”

Maryam had spent her life learning the arts of the Gloam – Craft and Signs, art and tool. Cutting away her own nav and tossing it to Hooks would be renouncing all those years, destroying the very soul-effigy that allowed her to manipulate the Gloam. Never.

She reached inside her pocket and put them on one after another, her rake-rings. One, two, three – all the way to ten, as she never had before. Tonight it was all on the line. She wound her nav around the rings, Hooks watching her without a word, and twitched her fingers. The strings of her soul-effigy pulled taut.

“All I want is to be whole,” Hooks quietly said. “A person entire, no longer a force-fed collection of your scraps.”

Maryam’s heart clenched. They were so intertwined right now, connected by the ritual, that she could taste on her tongue the sincerity of those words. Too late for hesitation now, Khaimov, she reminded herself. The circle is drawn, the gauntlet thrown. It is victory or death.

“I don’t think you’re evil, Hooks,” she said. “Not anymore. Or even all that malicious, despite how much harm you did to my life.”

Years of thinking something inside her was broken, that she would never be able to signify properly. That she had failed her mother and Captain Totec and everyone who had ever put a scrap of trust in her. It was hard not hate Hooks for that still, even knowing that she’d been unaware of what she was doing. That she had been little more than a seed being watered by every dark and ugly thought Maryam could not admit to herself she was having. Every strain of weakness she knew she could not afford.

Maryam breathed out. Pity was worth less nothing. Pity was the scraps they tossed you when they did not care enough to act, to put their weight on the scales. She would kill Hooks, tonight, but not offer her the disservice of such a hollow thing as pity.

“This isn’t about hate,” she said. “It’s only that you are biting into me and I am biting into you, and at the end there’s only so much of us to go around.”

Her fingers clenched, her nav tensed.

“And if comes down to that, I’d rather have red teeth than nothing.”

“I don’t know how to split off from your nav,” Hooks quietly said. “I tried, when I first woke up, to go my own way into the aether. But there is something at the very root of me that is bound to you, to your soul, and I don’t think I can cut it without breaking whatever lies at the heart of myself.”

Her enemy swallowed, picking at her pale sleeves.

“But if you gave me your nav-”

“A third of my soul,” Maryam evenly said. “My ability to use Signs. And I’d be as a raw wound in the aether until the end of my days.”

A meal for any entity she came across, all the sensitivity with none of the power.

“But you would save me,” Hooks quietly said. “Free me.”

“And when do I get to be free, Hooks?” Maryam bit back. “When do I finally get the strength I broke my back earning, that I scrabbled for in the dirt? Years of my life spent learning what seemed to be one dead end after another. And now that I can finally get what I paid for in sweat and blood I should throw it all away for what?”

She looked Hooks up and down.

“You?”

“For a life,” the other woman replied.

“No,” Maryam replied through clenched teeth. “I choose blood. I choose clawing back what I can of the Cauldron, and maybe it won’t be enough but it was never going to be enough because they’re all dead. Because I’m what’s left.”

Hooks’ blue eyes, so much like her own, faced her unflinching.

“I could win,” she said.

“You won’t,” Maryam said, and meant every word. “Deep down, be both know that.”

They both struck the second the last word passed her lips.

Hook’s hand carved through the air, leaving behind an oily trail of darkness that formed into a flock of birds and Maryam, Maryam kept it simple. She pressed her palm at the enemy and formed as large and fast a Bayonet as she could, the sharp spike of Gloam cutting through Hook’s elaborate working of Craft. Both working collapsed in a heartbeat and with mirrored snarls they tugged at the nav, trying to bring it fully into them like tugging rope, and-

The ringing sound slapped them both down against the ground. Gods, the noise. Like a bell being rung right in their ears. Maryam, knees aching as she forced herself up, realized after a heartbeat it had not been a physical sound or even something going wrong as she fought Hooks. The aether was going mad inside the room, like a storm in a bottle. No, a bottle being shook – the aether around them was battering at the boundary of the temporary shrine she had built. She caught Hook’s considering look and cursed. She could not stop. Her enemy wouldn’t.

It was like slugging it out on a falling bridge.

The fluctuations in the aether were dizzying – a bursting geyser against the walls one moment, still as a grave the next and then convulsing violently. It made signifying difficult and Craft impossible. Neither Maryam nor Hooks were allowed the courtesy of tricks and plans in what ensued, or the slightest bit of elegance. They pulled at the nav that lay between them like children fighting over a piece of string, tugging and shouting and cursing the other.

The rake-rings dug into her fingers like the nails of a crone, just shy of blood spill, but Maryam snarled and tightened her grip. She was tired and Hooks was not, but at the end of the day the entity was… young. Naming her had strengthened her borders, defined her in an intangible sense, but her depths were still shallow. She could not want the win the way Maryam did. She did not have the years of fear and hatred and blame that Maryam could pull on, the bitter determination to go anywhere but back.

It wasn’t like killing a child, Maryam told herself. It didn’t count. The thought loosened her grip for a moment and that was already too much – Hooks let out a cry of triumph and a length of nav sunk into her. The loss was… Maryam could feel it leaving her, what had been loss. Taste it like a scent on the wind even as it was stolen out of her. Pomegranate flowers on the heights, come summer. The tremble of nerves as Captain Totec guided her through her first Sign.

Fury strengthened her grip and she stole it back. The memories burned in her mind, searing bright, and she gulped them down. Some of it was worn down, edges frayed, but it was still hers. She wrapped her nav around her ring-bearing hand, like a thread around a spool, and pulled until Gloam burned at the edge of fingers.

Hooks fought her and Hooks broke: a crack, the ice lake fractured.

Maryam greedily sucked in the power, the secrets. They flickered through her mind, sweet as honey. The art of shaping Gloam into seeds to be sown, of using it to paint like a brush-

Weeping in the dark, cold and alone, hand over mouth. What if the hounds heard? Would they even bother to catch her, or let the beasts run her down like a rabbit?

-Maryam gritted her teeth, eyes pricking with tears. She would take it all, even the bad. It was all hers, down to the last poisonous drop.

“No,” Hooks whispered.

“Yes,” Maryam snarled.

The wound was in the flesh. It was all downhill for Hooks now and they both knew it. She struck again, smashing her fist on the ice, and the fissures spread. She dug in, devouring further secrets, but did not stop there. She plunged deep, to the heart of it. To take something of Hooks’ as the enemy had taken so much from Maryam. She found a kernel, a foundation, and ripped it out to see what lay inside-

It strangled her. Choked the life out of her, slowly but surely.

-and croaked out a laugh.

“My nightmare,” she said. “Even that was you?”

She ripped again.

Not hands but a rope, a cord. Tightening, tightening, tightening.

Again.

It was dark and warm. She was floating even as she died. Began to fade. But something sharp bit into her, sunk into her flesh.

“No,” Maryam whispered.

Devoured her whole, bite by bite. Kept her bound, soul to soul.

“No,” Maryam screamed, stumbling back.

She fell on her knees atop the tower, halfway to retching. Hooks stood across the roof, as terrified as she was.

“You’re,” Maryam began, then swallowed bile. “I killed you. In the womb. Pulling at the cord, strangling you.”

Like she was killing her now, pulling at the nav.

“You’re not some spirit,” she forced out. “You’re my sister.”

—

Angharad woke up tied to a chair, head throbbing.

She was no longer in the concert hall. The room was smaller, the lamps too bright for her eyes, and it took a moment for the silhouettes to come into focus. They were in one of the palace salons, the walls a string of colorful mosaics, and she was not alone. Lord Gule was here, a hard-faced Cleon by his side, and eight more. Lord Arkol. Four traitor lictors. Minister Floros. And in the corner by a table, picking at stolen plates of morsels, a familiar pair. Lord Locke winked at her roguishly, Lady Keys merely pushing up her glasses. What were they doing here?

Fingers were snapped in front of her face, most rudely.

“Eyes here, Tredegar.”

A woman’s voice, Angharad thought. And when she looked up it was at the unusually stern face of Lady Doukas. The groggy part of her noted that the daring neckline was back even on the tailored priestess robes she wore. Angharad spent a moment wondering what she could possibly have told her seamstress when ordering – cult standard, but don’t skimp on the cleavage? One had to admire the commitment.

“What are the blackcloaks up to?” Lady Doukas demanded. “Speak, and quickly.”

“Lady Doukas,” Angharad croaked out, then frowned.

She coughed, clearing her throat though regrettably there was nothing to do about the coppery taste against her tongue. Cleon’s second blow had not been held back in the slightest.

“Lady Doukas,” she repeated, tone steadier now. “You are found at last. I am pleased to inform you that you are also under arrest.”

A snarl and the noblewoman’s hand reared up for a slap but a click of the tongue stilled her. Doukas turned with a frown and Phaedros Arkol sighed at her, folding the arms against this silver-and-yellow doublet.

“And what will that achieve, Petra?” he asked. “Not a thing, I wager. One does not achieve those pretty silver lines on her arm by fearing a few slaps.”

Oh, Lady Doukas’ first name was Petra. Angharad had never happened to learn it, having barely ever spoken with the other woman.

“If they are even true,” Lord Cleon Eirenos coldly said. “Much else about Angharad Tredegar seems to have been a lie.”

She shot him an offended look.

“I have not lied to you,” Angharad stiffly said. “You were misled, that much is true, but at no point did I ever lie to you.”

“You were a guest in my home, rook,” Lord Cleon hissed, hand falling to his blade. “And you dare pretend you never-”

“Too much garlic on the meatballs, I think,” Lady Keys said.

“Truly? I was going to venture too much lemon, mi corazon,” her husband replied.

Cleon glared angrily at them, as much about the interruption as the implicit indifference to his anger. That had to have been done on purpose, Angharad thought. Not to help her, if anything they seemed amused at her situation, but out of some urge to throw matches at any oil patch in sight.

“Why are they even here?” Cleon bit out at Gule, gesturing at them. “They should be in the storeroom with all the other late hoppers.”

“We are waiting for someone,” Lady Keys informed him. “That simply wouldn’t do, Lord Cleon.”

“I am quite indifferent to what you believe wouldn’t-”

Lord Gule coughed into his fist. Angharad, belatedly, realized that he had been listening to the conversation without his usual horn. Not just the leg, then. The ambassador caught her look of surprise and his lips thinned. He had promised her healing once, even given her a drop of the Golden Ram’s blood – that she had given to Officer Hage shortly before he disappeared. Evidently the cult had fulfilled their promise to Lord Gule of Bezan. The ambassador did not address her before turning to Cleon, gone beyond frost into the pretense she did not exist.

“We have an arrangement with our foreign guests,” Lord Gule told his protege. “We are not to involve ourselves in each other’s business.”

An interested noise drew Angharad’s eye. Minister Floros watched them all from the back wall, leaning back with her armed crossed under her chest and an unreadable expression. Her dress was the richest Angharad had seen all night, exquisite Jahamai velvet patterned in the colors of House Floros. The matching slippers she had worn earlier, however, had been traded for squat leather shoes.

The knife and sword at her hip were also new.

“Oh, do proceed with your coup,” Lord Locke said with an encouraging smile. “A little rough around the edges, but I can feel the enthusiasm! I’m sure you will soon secure the Lord Rector’s throne.”

“They are overthrowing the Lord Rector, darling,” Lady Keys loudly whispered.

“-and go he must, the base tyrant!” Lord Locke immediately pivoted. “Good work fellows, well done.”

Lord Gule sighed. Angharad found it telling that he chose not to address the mockery. He must know they were devils, or at least suspect that drawing a blade on Locke and Keys would be courting disaster.

“Enough time wasted,” he said. “The lifts need our attention. Petra, I leave the interrogation to you. If the Watch intends to move against us, it is imperative we know before they do.”

Lady Doukas acknowledged his words with a nod. Not a particularly deferential one, however. Gule’s earlier words, about the true power in the cult lying with the priesthood and not the heads seemed to be an accurate assessment.

“The lifts are a distraction,” Lord Arkol calmly said. “We need to secure the private archives first. Something went wrong there.”

Lord Gule eyed him skeptically.

“The lifts are the key to the palace, Phaedros,” he said. “And our man says there’s only a single signifier up there, hardly a threat.”

“The troops were supposed to emerge in those archives, Gule,” Lord Arkol said. “They were, instead, shunted two levels below through a significantly more difficult crossing. Whatever that signifier is doing, it needs to end.”

Angharad’s jaw clenched. Maryam, they were talking about Maryam.

“Loyalists still hold most of that sector, they dug in behind barricades,” Lord Gule pointed out. “It would take more than a single squad to dig them out.”

“We had our reinforcements through the layer,” Lord Arkol said. “What are they for, if not scatter Palliades’ last men?”

Lord Gule sighed.

“I’ll send two squads,” he compromised. “We won’t need more if they can get into the archives: she’s a student, not full-fledged Akelarre.”

Part of Angharad, the one that never ceased to consider those around her, noted that Gule seemed uncomfortable facing Phaedros Arkol. As if uncertain where the other man ranked compared to him. The rest of Angharad had her fingers clenching, because those jackals were discussing killing her cabalmate.

“Maryam Khaimov is a blackcloak with connections to several high officers of the Watch,” Angharad said, stretching the bounds of truth.

But Maryam was connected to Angharad and Song, who did have such connections. She had not spoken as to the strength of those ties, only their existence.

“Harming her could have grave consequences,” she added.

A snort.

“She’s a Triglau,” Lord Gule dismissed. “Even if she is someone’s pet savage, that is a minor thing. The rooks know not to overplay their hand, they have been taught that lesson the hard way.”

“She’s not a savage, you traitorous shithead,” Angharad snarled. “May you choke on that lie.”

Gule looked at her as if she was some hysterical creature, like he wasn’t the one who’d just called a woman he had never spoken to in his life a savage.

“The Watch ruined you, I can see that now,” he sighed. “It is a genuine shame.”

Angharad would have snapped his neck if she could. Instead she struggled against the ropes, the tight knot ripping into her skin. Lord Arkol yawned.

“I’ll have a look at this Triglau myself, I think,” he mused. “Lady Apollonia, would you care to accompany me?”

The tone was light, teasing. Angharad narrowed her eyes. But not flirtatious. It was as if Phaedros Arkol was making sport of the very woman he intended to make Lady Rector of Asphodel, though she could not find where the jest lay.

“I would hear what the blackcloak has to say,” Apollonia Floros declined.

“Suit yourself,” Lord Arkol shrugged. “I’ll send some escorts to you from our reinforcement should you change your mind.”

The older men made to leave, Cleon lingering to shoot her one last hateful look.

“They are lying to you,” Angharad told him. “It is not the Odyssean they worship. You are being tricked.”

His jaw clenched.

“It must be the season for it, then, Lady Tredegar,” he said.

He followed his patron out without sparing her another glance. Angharad grit her teeth. The hate was not entirely unwarranted, but it was blinding him. Not that she was able to keep her mind on that for long, as Lady Petra Doukas soon demanded her full attention.

Angharad almost expected her to pull out some torturer’s kit, or at least smash a bottle and threaten her with the glass, but the dark-haired cultist instead came uncomfortably close. The Pereduri scowled at her, working on the knot with her wrist. It was looking like she’d have to dislocate it to get it out, and even then it would be tricky. She did not have much practice getting out of bindings, in truth. Perhaps something to ask Tristan about should they both live through the night.

“This won’t hurt,” Lady Doukas smiled, laying a finger on her forehead.

It took a second for Angharad to understand what she was up to. She was a priestess of the almost-Odyssean, and thus preparing to call on its power to… well, do something. Angharad felt her blood cool.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” she said.

“Oh, but I will,” Lady Doukas said.

There was a ripple in the air, like a sword whistling past your ear, and Angharad felt something seep into her. Inhaled smoke, filling the inside of head with a burning haze.

She met Doukas’ dark eyes.

“I warned you,” she said.

It came like a flood. A broken levee, the sea suddenly snapping up men who had thought themselves safe from the storm. A voice ripped through her, filling her veins with salt, but it was not a voice. It was a handhold slipping through your fingers, it was an oath broken in the dark, it was crabs scuttling through rotting guts.

“Carrion,” the Fisher mocked.

Petra Doukas withdrew her finger from Angharad’s forehead like it’d been burned, rocking back as she coughed and choked. She spat something out, after a heartbeat.

Saltwater, she knew without even having to look.

“Odyssean preserve me,” Lady Doukas gasped, “what was…”

She shivered, flinching away from Angharad. Whose eyes had moved from the priestess to a sight that made her shiver: across the room Locke and Keys were observing her with unblinking eyes. Heads cocked to the side a little too sharply, mirroring each other.

“Well now,” Lord Locke mused, sniffing at the air. “Someone’s been quite the naughty girl.”

“My my, Lady Tredegar,” Lady Keys said, pushing back her glasses with an impressed look. “I genuinely didn’t think you had it in you, child.”

Her lips thinned. Best to ignore them, there was nothing to gain from engaging. Lady Doukas had mostly calmed, anyhow, though she was still panting and wide-eyed. Two of the traitor lictors were with her, quietly talking, and one unsheathed his blade before glaring at Angharad.

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“Put that back in the sheath, soldier.”

The flat, matter-of-fact tone ripped through the room. Apollonia Floros pushed off the wall, and under her stern look the traitor faltered. He still looked at Doukas for instructions, who turned a sneer on the minister.

“They do not answer to you, Floros,” she said. “Not yet.”

Minister Floros eyed her, visibly unimpressed.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you’re hiding cleverness under the hedonism, Petra,” she said. “It’s just that there’s not nearly as much of it to hide as you think.”

She turned green eyes on the lictors.

“By the end of the week, you will be either dead or sworn to me,” she said. “And I’ve no use at all for disobedient hounds.”

She leaned in.

“Make your choice.”

They looked at Lady Doukas again, who nodded through gritted teeth.

“Take a walk, clear your head,” Minister Floros told the priestess. “I’ll talk with our friend here.”

The lictors made to move and follow her, but she dismissed them with irritation. Lady Doukas, face red with anger, stormed out of the room. She tried to slam the door, Angharad noted, but it was too heavy. It took a solid ten seconds to hit the threshold, though it did so quite loudly. Apollonia Floros came to stand before the prisoner, ramrod straight and with a soldier’s stern bearing.

“Warrant Officer Tredegar,” she said. “I expect you know who I am, though we have never spoken.”

“I do,” Angharad agreed.

Floros hummed.

“I was not aware of the coup,” she said. “Save as an abstract intention in some of my allies. I did not, in fact, intend to seize the palace like this.”

“But you did intend to seize it, one day,” Angharad said.

The minister inclined her head in agreement, not even pretending otherwise. Angharad could respect that, if not the oathbreaking.

“Evander’s shipyard will make us the plaything and battlefield of the great powers,” Minister Floros said. “I’ll not suffer the first and bloodiest battles of the next Succession War to be fought on Asphodel’s soil.”

“The Watch does not involve itself in matters of succession,” Angharad said, though she did not hide her disapproval.

A flicker of amusement passed through Apollonia Floros’ green eyes, like light playing on emeralds.

“How rare it is, these days, for someone to give me such a look of censure.”

She lightly moved to the side, leaning her back against the wall again and looking forward as Angharad did – as if the two of them were comrades, instead of a figurehead and a prisoner. Ah. Perhaps in a distant way they were birds of a feather.

“But then I know what those silver stripes mean,” she said. “I expect you understand what death is better than the fools who put together this madness.”

Angharad’s brow rose.

“You accepted the coup’s backing,” she noted.

“Better to be on the tiger’s back than in its larder,” Apollonia Floros said. “But these fucking children seem to have missed that if I wanted to wage and win a civil war to seize the throne I already would have.”

Her jaw was set with what was, Angharad thought, genuine fury.

“None of them ever fought in a war,” she said. “Not even Cordyles, for all that he pretends playing at the pirate means he knows death.”

“And you have?” Angharad challenged.

“I was once merely third in line to inherit House Floros,” the older woman said. “When I was thirteen I ran off to a mercenary company just in time to serve as a raider for King Raul in what everyone figured would be a short tussle with the Izcalli.”

It took a moment for Angharad to place the name.

“King Raul of Sordan,” she said.

The king who had fought the Kingdom of Izcalli and lost in the Sordan War.

“He paid us with Malani gold,” Minister Floros said, “but the coin was good. Two years I spent in the raiding fleet, then another three on the ground. I was at the Battle of Narba, in the second of the three armies Doghead Coyac broke that day.”

The older woman looked at the wall on the other side of the room, but her eyes were far away.

“When dark fell, there were so many corpses on the field that they looked like hills,” she said. “I will not turn Asphodel into such a butcher’s yard for a throne.”

Her jaw clenched.

“Another year and Evander’s closest allies would have turned on him,” she said. “Either over ties to Tianxia or for fear of the wealth flooding Palliades coffers. Another year and it could have been done bloodless.”

Floros looked like she wanted to spit.

“Instead now it is to be war, and with his death on my head half the nobles will stand against me,” she said. “The worst of all worlds, and my backers appear to be just as bad as the rest of the tale.”

She shot Angharad a look.

“You claim this cult of the Odyssean broke the Iscariot Accords,” she said.

“Breaks,” Angharad corrected. “On at least two counts: human sacrifice and purchase of theistic murder.”

She pitched her voice high enough that the lictors would be able to hear, but none seemed moved by the accusation. Zealots, or thinking her a liar.