Epilogue
The Kingdom of Storms — Three Months Earlier
The night waited. Humans flared like sparks in it, their lives quick and bright as lit matches. The pub clinked, their doors opened, cheers poured in and drunkenness stumbled out.
Their gazes passed over me as though I didn’t exist, and what drops of magic I possessed never needed calling on to evade their weak eyes. Here beneath the wall, the shadows stretched long and dark and faithful any time of day.
They had no idea of what came.
Behind the pub, the alley lay quiet except for the skulking rats. Quiet and dark, but for a single window on the second story where a faint candle’s glow made a picture in the window.
I climbed. Maeronyx had no real name for me—she didn’t know the one I’d been given—but she did sometimes call me skivh. The one who climbed, who ran, who slipped out of shadow and back into it.
If Gawain was her sword, I was her shiv.
I came to the sill of a second-story window and hoisted myself onto it.
Unlocked, sliding upward like butter for me.
No curtains, no light, a made bed. A wishful inn room that smelled of must because these poor fools hadn’t the coin for such a luxury.
They called this place the Dip, and I didn’t need a history book to understand why.
I came to the inner wall and set my ear to it. No noise on the other side but the faintest scratching, like someone had set a single fingernail to wood. On the other side, by candlelight, a singular scholar. Somehow this great sty for pigs had produced a capable mind.
Still a human. Still a matchstick in the night.
I stepped into an empty hallway. The revelry bled through the floorboards into my boots, floated up the stairs, made my footsteps only a part of the drunken pounding of the tables.
At the door, the knob didn’t turn under my fingers. Someone inside lived with a constant strand of fear—or a thick rope of it.
I reached for my tools. My hand froze, my gaze caught by the panes of the hall window overlooking the alley. Green. A fucking forest of green reflecting off the glass.
Of course Rhiannon could not wait. Of course she would be early to her own ball.
Before me, only a locked door with my quarry behind it. I raised my leg, thrust my boot into the knob. It shattered, and the door opened so hard it slammed into a pile of books and knocked them over.
Books, books, books. Through a winding path of floor, between a thousand thousand pages of scribbled ink, on a small stool beside a tiny candle’s flame, sat a whisper of a woman.
A woman.
She spun with her white-feathered quill in hand, her pale fingers blackened at the tips. A thick brown braid hung to her waist, and she wore nothing except a cream nightgown. Her feet were bare, just the toes touching the floor.
Maeronyx’s scholar, the student of the ancient language…
…was a maiden.
Paler than Noctere snow, wrists like bird’s bones. The smell of her filled the room, swirling with the heavy scent of ink and old paper and, under that, her skin. Just her skin. Warm and clean and faintly salty, the way a body smells when it runs hot despite being so small.
She stared, curling into herself. “Who’s there? Jo?”
Weak eyes. Human eyes. I hadn’t even touched shadow, and still she couldn’t see me.
I shouldn’t have stopped. My muscles twitched to move, endless years of training propelling me forward. Hesitation meant mistakes; it meant problems. Yet I stood as if I’d never moved in my life, never conceived of it as a statue never conceives of stepping off its pedestal.
I had intruded on the wrong room, the wrong life. She couldn’t possibly be the Black Frost’s goal.
Yet on the desk behind, sheaves of inked parchment danced under the candlelight—the strange, sharp markings of the ancient language as written by her hand.
Behind her, from the grimed window, the green hue seeped into the crowded room from the sky above. It overtook the candlelight, delivered everything into a terrible Unseelie light. The parchment, the books, the quill still in her hand, her angular face.
No time. The autumn wraiths would chase her through the street, cut her down as easily as any other human. They heeded only power, and she had none of it.
I came forward, and she rose from her stool. I had no idea what she saw; the last time I’d stared into my own reflection hadn’t been my choice. The particulars of my own face had been lost to me years ago. I had no need for a face, only feet to carry me and hands to grasp.
She must have seen something horrible, though. Because in the moment before I took hold of her, her lips parted and her eyes went round as the full moon.
No matter. I had one job:
Bring Elisabet to the citadel. Save the scholar from the night-bitch’s assault on the Kingdom of Storms.