"There.” Harri—that was the man’s name, and his ratty scarf and fingerless gloves marked him as a manual laborer, not a waitstaff type—pointed past the fence and the low stone wall to a squat wooden lean-to in the bungalow’s yard. “In the shed. It’s his husband and someone, I don’t know. Family friend, maybe.”
“In the shed. Couldn’t have been so friendly, eh?” Ofelia put her hands on her hips. “Thank you for your cooperation, sir. We will take it from here.”
She led Seth to the shed and opened it to a room full of gardening tools, the scent of pine shavings, and two gaunt, desaturated wraiths in upper-crust garments that were now far more crust than upper.
A man and a woman, both of middle age, standing vacant, the only sign of life on them the shallow rise and fall of their emaciated chests.
Ofelia sucked air through her teeth. “Scarecrows.”
Seth lingered at the threshold. “Should we get Annalise?”
Ofelia shook her head. “They’re harmless enough. Just meat, now. Meat and bones and unfortunate ascots. Might as well get a look at them.”
She strolled into the shed and slow-paced around them. Neither moved, not even to track her with their eyes.
Seth looked into their blackened eyes. So stark and gruesome without the spark that animated the al Ydris’. “So the difference between you and them is that your soul is still around and theirs went back to the wheel, right?”
“The difference between me and them is a regimen of oral hygiene and a sense of fashion in-step with the current century.” Ofelia pinched the man’s lacy collar. “And that, too, yes. Such is the fate of an unfortunate who snuffs out when there is no psychelith to catch the departing soul. It’s why Tiago and I didn’t go unlit until we’d followed Mother to the Necropolis. Otherwise, we’d have ended up just the same.”
She stepped to the closest shallow-breathing zombie and delivered a sharp slap to his cheek. He remained still.
“You see? Nobody’s home.”
“I guess not.”
“The second emergence was when all this guff began. The unlighting. A seraph plague, everyone supposes. Back then, these empty vessels were perfect vessels for a disembodied seraph. They’d force their way into the shell and go hunting elsewhere for more kindred to infect.”
“That’s where the unlit get their reputation, huh?”
“Partially.” Ofelia perused the wall. She found a rope and uncoiled it. “These days, of course, the deathspell prevents most seraphs from working their havoc on the continent. And certainly any that were so weak as to require a vessel, rather than make their own. And so the unlit just stand, spent and still. Like scarecrows. That’s what mother calls them. Fortunately for us, they retain some base function.”
She prodded the man in his black eye. It flickered shut.
“Blinking, for example. And if you leash them…” She tied the rope around his waist. “You can lead them.” She gave a demonstrative tug and he took a slow step toward the shed door. “That’s about the limit. It is otherwise an empty vessel. Perhaps there’s a way to stuff a new soul inside, but the sorcerers haven’t found one. Only possessor-seraphs have ever managed it, and any seraph that’d need a physical vessel wouldn’t make it through the deathspell’s barrier.”
“What is it that decides which seraphs can get through the deathspell, anyway?” Seth asked. “Is it just how strong they are?”
“Not entirely,” Ofelia said. “There’s any number of—”
Tackle her, the Fox said.
Seth plunged into Ofelia, sending her staggering to one side. The pitchfork that would have pierced her heart sank into her midsection instead.
The scarecrow to whom they hadn’t been paying attention ground her pitchfork further into the al Ydris daughter’s midsection. The unlit woman’s face was slack, her head drooping to one side like an inexpertly piloted marionette. No rage on her face. Nothing at all.
“YDRIS,” she howled.
Ofelia stumbled backward into Seth, her mouth ajar with shock and pain. He caught her; her blood coated his palms.
The unlit woman charged. Seth attempted a sort of heroic placing-behind of Ofelia—in practice it was more like he dropped her. He yanked his cutlass from the scabbard and okay, actually he yanked the scabbard off his belt entirely, because it was a mismatched scabbard and the fucking thing didn’t pull right. It rose to its occasion regardless, slamming between two ichor-soaked tongs of the pitchfork and halting the murderous woman in her tracks.
That broken wail again: “YDRIS!”
The unlit man staggered toward Seth’s flank, snatching a cane knife from its peg on the shed wall as he came. Ofelia’s legs scissored around his calf and swung him to the ground. She hissed in pain as she rolled atop him and pulled her dirk from its place on her hip, and then Seth’s attention was arrested by the woman wrenching the pitchfork to one side, binding his cutlass in its barbs. Well, fine. Stabbing was new to him; he was well acquainted with kicking.
His foot connected with her sternum and sent her sprawling back. The scabbard went with her and now Seth’s blade was bare and ready for its grim work. He kept the cutlass tip pointed at the dirty boot print he’d left on her chest gave up a silent prayer to St. Silas that he’d hold up his end of the partnership.
The woman hunkered back from his blade, circling with a wariness at odds with her inanimate, empty face. Her pitchfork’s tines glistened with Ofelia’s steel-colored blood. It’s a broomstick. It’s not a pitchfork, it’s a broomstick. Remember Tiago’s training. The feet, the shoulders. The loading of the muscle, and then—
The woman lunged. Seth bolted backward, blade up and out, and the center of the woman’s gravity shifted and the impact went all along his arm to the shoulder, and he didn’t so much stab her as hold his cutlass in the right spot for her to stab herself. The edge raked across her chest and bit into her collarbone, and St. Silas help him, Seth knew he’d never forget how that felt, blade biting into bone.
He scrambled out of the way. She half-fell forward, the pitchfork thunking into the wall with enough force to stick in the warped wood. Her left arm, the one beneath her slashed-open shoulder, spasmed and lost is grip on the pitchfork haft. With her right she snatched a machete from the wall and spun back around, and then suddenly the edge of a cleaver had buried itself an inch thick into her face, splitting the lip and popping the eye.
Ofelia was on her hands and knees over the man unlit’s corpse, whose sawn-through neck stained his shirtfront and slack jaw. She pointed at a pair of shears, sliced her finger through the air, and they rocketed from the wall into the woman’s chest. Had to be one of her hexentats.
“No,” she gasped at Seth, blood bubbling out between her lips, and Seth didn’t realize what she’d meant until the woman came lurching back at him, gurgling murder and sprouting blade hafts like a gruesome textbook’s wound diagram come to life.
Seth took hold of the shear handles that stayed stuck in her chest and heaved; the skewered woman twisted to the ground and he was upon her, the cutlass biting into her arm where she raised it not to defend herself but to reach for Seth’s throat, and the cutlass stuck in her, and now she was bucking upward to bite him, the mad thing, how was he supposed to make this monster stop moving?
How’d you do the last monster you fought?
His pulse leapt. There it was again in his boot, his beautiful little firestarter. Out it came, a thin whisper of steel, and in it went to the woman’s stomach. The woman did the predictable thing and erupted into a flailing pyre.
His tremulous fingers scurried across the wood, found his cutlass—for all the good this fucker’d done him—and with a crossguard chak he slammed it back into its scabbard. “Ofelia.” He crouched next to her where she slumped against the wall. “We gotta move. Shed’s burning down. Can you get up?”
“Your knife,” Ofelia slurred, as Seth threw her arm around his shoulder and hauled her to her feet. “Seth, your—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Seth dragged her to the door. Smoke was already hanging above their heads. “Your stomach. How bad?”
“I’m okay,” she mumbled, though it was patently untrue by the look of her. “My tortoise hexentat, it toughens my skin. I’m—”
She coughed a streak of black blood onto Seth’s shirt.
“That’s not good,” she noted.
“What should I do? Should I get Annalise?”
“No. No, I can stand. Just—help me get to the carriage. Please.”
The stricken girl leaned on Seth. He helped her limp from the shack as the smoke thickened. By the yard gate, Harri watched their approach with gawking horror. “What happened? Saints and fucking seraphs, what happened?”
Seth tore the scarf from Harri’s neck; he grabbed for it on an overwhelmed delay and then meekly allowed Seth to use it as an impromptu bandage around Ofelia’s leaking middle.
“Get the fucking fireguard.” Seth jerked his thumb at a wheelbarrow sitting idle by the stone wall. “And I’m commandeering this.”
“The fireguard—” The man noticed the smoke rising from the shed. “Oh, saints.”
Down the street Seth charged, wheelbarrow squeaking as it carted the dazed unlit girl. Ofelia’s blackout eyes drooped. Her hands knit over her punctured midsection, as if the wheelbarrow were a funeral bier.
“You’re okay,” Seth panted, with what breath he could spare. “You’re okay, Ofelia.”
“I’m okay,” she repeated. Her voice was so small and strained.
Seth rolled into Sondam’s square, and looked wild-eyed around it. “The Verdugo,” he cried, to nobody in particular. “Where’s the Verdugo?”
A munition-plated hermandati officer atop the scaffold pointed with his bill toward the coaching inn abutting the square. “At the Halted Hart.”
Seth carted Ofelia closer to the building. “Annalise,” he bellowed. “Ofelia’s hurt! She’s hurt really bad!”
The inn’s coach house entrance slammed open. Annalise filled its doorway. Her eyes went round as moons as they beheld the carnage. “Tiago.” she bellowed over her shoulder. “The circle. Now!” She rushed to her daughter’s side.
A clattering sound from within the coach house as Tiago ransacked the carriage. He emerged onto the lawn with a folded gray cloth, which he threw across the ground and flattened out until it was the size of a picnic blanket. Stitched across it in black embroidery thread was a circle of spidery runes and interconnected lines.
Annalise lifted her daughter from the wheelbarrow. Ofelia came up with a yelp of pain. “Mom.” She sounded like the sixteen-year-old girl she wasn’t. “It hurts.”
“I know. I know, baby.” Annalise dropped to a knee and painstakingly placed Ofelia in the middle of the cloth circle. She tugged a corner to straighten out the circle’s runic diameter. “Can you move your leg over?”
“I can’t—I can’t feel it.”
“That’s okay. That’s okay, honey.” Annalise shifted it instead. “We’ll fix you.”
Faces peered from nearby buildings. People paused on the road beside the inn. When they saw the tableau before them, many picked up their pace into panicky avoidance.
“Sunshine.” Annalise beckoned Tiago. “Sword.”
Tiago hunkered next to his mother. The executioner blade—freshly wiped clean of the blood it had spilled today—sat across his lap. “Ready.”
Annalise whipped her open longcoat off and laid her palm on an unadorned piece of the blanket. Seth craned his neck to see what the al Ydrises were doing, and beheld a cuff tattoo on Annalise’s forearm aligning perfectly with a gap in the circle.
The Verdugo rested her other hand on the wide steel plane of her sword. “Do it, Tiago.”
Tiago reached for the abacus set into the fuller, took a lit dynamo bead between thumb and forefinger, and with visible effort, as if fighting a magnetic field, clicked it from its glowing row into the darkened dynamos opposite it.
The sword flared with a lambent green. Ofelia let out a pained, exhausted groan. The blood in her throat crackled and popped in her exhalation. The leg she hadn’t been able to move folded upward, knee to the air.
Annalise’s fingers gathered in the cloth. “Talk to me, Feeli. How’s the pain?”
“I can deal,” Ofelia said, through a jaw so clenched Seth feared for her enamel. “I can—”
“Tiago.” Annalise interrupted her agonized daughter. “Give me another one.”
Tiago’s brows were low and stormy. “This gets rid of all we gained here.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” Annalise snarled. “Another.”
“I just want it known.”
“It is fucking known, Tiago. Now by the hairy left nut of St. Hallas, give me another.”
Tiago clacked another bead from its place. Another burst of glowing green.
Ofelia pressed her fingertips to her abdomen. Through the torn black fabric Seth could see the wound was gone. Not even a scar to mar the ink on her skin. Her breathing evened. She sighed and lay flat, arms wide like a starfish. “You didn’t have to do that,” she mumbled. “That second one. You didn’t—”
“You’re all right?” Annalise prompted, and when she nodded, seized her into a bearhug. Ofelia was so thin, and her mother so broadly shouldered, that she nearly disappeared into the strength and the softness.
Seth wondered how many holes he’d be willing to have poked in him to be held like that.
“What happened?” Annalise asked, her infinite gentleness so at odds with her brawny embrace.
“A man came to us on our way to you. Pointed us to a pair of scarecrows.” Ofelia wriggled partway out of Annalise’s bosom. A limpness remained in her despite the repaired flesh. Whatever the al Ydrises had just done had evidently taken a great deal out of her. “I don’t know how but they went mad. Possessed by seraphs, I think.”
“One of them said Ydris,” Seth added.
His words reintroduced Annalise to the world outside Ofelia. Her head snapped around, with a look of fury that dropped Seth’s heart into his stomach. She released her dazed daughter onto the sheet. “You,” she barked. He felt the syllable like a slap. He fought his feet to a standstill as Annalise stood.
“Mom.” Ofelia reached weakly for her mother’s departing arm. “No, mom, he saved me—”
Annalise’s massive hand snagged Tiago’s shirt collar and tugged his face to within an inch of hers. “You do not hesitate when I give you an order, Santiago al Ydris.” A muscle in her jaw twitched with her barely stoppered anger. “You understand? Not when your sister is in pain like that.”
Seth felt the hairs on the back of his neck settle.
“Mom.” Tiago’s hands balled into fists. “It’s been years since we’ve been this low coming into Fall. I don’t want to do ‘36 again. If we want to stay out of the Winter War—”
“It’s not we. I’m the Verdugo. I face the consequences if we don’t hit quota. I go out past the deathspell. Not you. And I’m your mother, and I’m your commanding officer, and when I give you an order you follow my fucking order, you understand?”
Tiago’s breath whistled through his nose. He nodded.
“Tell me you understand.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
Annalise stepped aside. “That you tell your sister.”
Tiago lifted his gaze from the ground to his sister with strongman effort. “I’m sorry, Ofelia.”
“That’s quite all right.” Ofelia gingerly felt around the patch of graphite blood on her stomach. “A reminder of how it feels to be stabbed is worthwhile every handful of years, I suppose.” She stuck a finger through the puncture in her shirt. “I liked this tunic, though. Damn.”
Annalise underwent a whole-body unclenching. Shoulders dropped, muscles relaxed, and the warmth returned to soften the sharp lines of her face. Her meaty hand delivered an affable thump to Tiago’s back. “Love you, Sunshine.”
“Love you too.” Tiago managed a deflated grin. “Even if you blew up my spot in front of il Gutierre.”
“He’ll keep mum.” Annalise threw an arm around Tiago’s shoulder. “Won’t ya, Seth?”
Seth sealed an imaginary zipper over his mouth.
“Apologies aside, we’re banjaxed for Sondam.” The Orwinese slang was peculiar in Tiago’s bone-dry central continent accent. “We have to make up for it.”
“I know we do.” Annalise mussed Tiago’s hair and released him. “My little taskmaster here.” Her face grew solemn again as it turned to Seth. “Il Gutierre. Come with me.”
He tried not to feel like one of Annalise’s condemned clients as he followed her into the coach house.
“I’m sorry too,” he said, as she shut the door behind them.
“What?”
“I’m sorry. We should have come and gotten you, we—”
She pulled him into her arms. She held him there. The same vast, encompassing embrace she’d given Ofelia, no poked holes required. He felt the horrible tension of the afternoon flee him like an exorcised possessor-seraph.
“You saved her,” she whispered. “You saved my daughter’s life. My whole fucking world. You saved her.”
“I’m the reason—”
“Seth,” she rumbled, low in her throat. “Shut up.”
He shut up.
Her thumb drifted up and couched at the shallow cleft of his chin. Her tongue peeked out to dampen the pillows of her lips. “If I kiss you,” she whispered, half to herself, “it ruins everything.”
“Probably should have thought of that before you got this close,” he whispered back.
A smile flickered faintly through the unvarnished desire dominating her face. “I was kinda countin’ on something interrupting us by now.”
A second’s stillness. But nothing did.
The prominent peak of her nose brushed his. Her breath had a honey-sweet tang to it, like mead.
One inch. One minuscule inch between him and a vast, impossible new life.
She’ll kiss you back, and then she’ll panic. You have to give her an out.
“If you don’t wanna kiss me,” he said, “I’d happily just cop a feel.”
She shoved him away, laughing. “You little fuckin’ pest, you.”
He grinned back, even though it had been two-thirds a joke at most. “Front or back. I’m not picky.”
“Got such a horn on you.”
“Me? What happened to all that right here against the wagon stuff?”
“That was a turnip wagon.” Annalise slapped the carriage’s driver seat. “This is flash. Can’t knock boots against a carriage. I’m still making payments on it.”
“So you’re not mad?”
“Sure I was. Mad and scared and all. But only pieces of me, and not the sensible ones. As tempestuous as all the head malarkey can be, it gives you good practice on filtering all the little bits of you.”
“We should have come to get you,” he said.
“Lay off that, il Gutierre.” She rolled her eyes. “Cosmically speaking, you should’ve, yeah. But how were you to know those husks were gonna go after you? I still don’t understand it myself.” She sighed. “Fuckin’ seraphs. Bastard things. We’re gonna need to do another hunt, I think. Tiago’ll skin me otherwise, sure, and he’ll be right to.”
Seth recalled Tiago’s trembly rejoinder. “What happened in ‘36?”
“Missed quota,” Annalise said. “Long story. But I ended up in the Winter War that year. Served a couple weeks on the front, killed a few seraphs to make up for the difference.”
“Shit.” Seth had heard many tales of the Winter front. None of them good. “Thank the saints you made it back.”
“Wasn’t so bad. I’d already been through it once, after all. And this time I had my own fancy tent and a rank of spearmen at my command. We did some pretty work. And we’ll do more of it on the way to Fontana. If there’s unlit in the area, that means there’s a seraph to find.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “You’ll be all right?”
“I fight seraphs now, remember?” He tapped the side of his nose. “Anna, I’m less sure about.”
She snorted. “I will be less of a cunt this time. I’ll chant it at myself during the changeover. No cuntery, no cuntery, no cuntery.”
“Does that work?”
She waggled her hand noncommittally. “I might try and give you some shitehawk line about getting Ofelia hurt. I am telling you face-to-face right now that if I do, please remember what I said here and invite me to eat shit.”
“I would, but I worry for my neck.”
“I’ll be a sore bitch at you, maybe. But that’s all. Believe this, Seth, ‘cause I swear it on my sword.” She dared to draw close to him again. Her voice dropped. “Keep faith with me and mine, and none of me will raise a hand to you. All my strength is for protecting the ones I love. Never, ever, ever for hurting them. All right?”
His legs went into that mid-dream numbness again, like they had when she’d seemed so full of rage at him. “All right.”
“Good.” She smiled and leaned back against the door outside. “C’mon now, ‘fore I get all breathy at you again.”
She opened the door back to Sondam, and he followed, her voice ringing through his mind with a rhythm that nearly drowned out the whole world.
All my strength is for protecting the ones I love.
The ones I love.