“Thus the Gods granted us the first boon: as we live we will die, and in dying be granted our just deserts.”

– The Book of All Things, fourth verse of the second hymn

I knelt and ripped the necklace from Akua’s neck, silver links giving easily. The obsidian was warm to the touch and my fingers clasped around it. Black had told me to destroy it. He was not the kind of man to be troubled over the death of a newborn child, if that child served as a tool for his enemies. It was tempting to do as he’d asked, to just tighten my grasp ever so slightly and watch it shatter. But the Empress had spoken a sentence to me, and that gave me pause. It was too early, I thought, to begin closing avenues. I rose and tossed the cylinder to Thief, who caught it without missing a beat.

“Foundling,” she said. “Are you…”

Words failed her after that. I supposed there was no delicate way to ask someone if they were still sane.

“Close enough,” I said. “Stash it. Unless I tell you to admit otherwise, it was destroyed.”

The other woman’s eyes narrowed. She wasn’t like the others, I thought. Adjutant and Hierophant, even Archer, they would speak their minds to me but almost never refuse an order. Thief and I had ties of a different nature. She had only come under my banner when she made a bet on me as the only actor on the stage interested in keeping Callow from being devastated. The moment that was no longer my path, she would turn on me. I could taste the truth of that in the air.

“One hundred thousand,” Vivienne Dartwick said. “At least. Maybe half that again, with the refugees. She massacred and enslaved them, Catherine. Denied them even a proper burial. And you want to keep this?”

I studied her closely, my eyes sharper than they should have been. I no longer needed to force a sliver of my Name into them to better my vision. Claiming the mantle in full had brought consequences more than metaphysical. In the cool air of the room I could feel the warmth of her, a bundle of life that had me disgustingly hungry. Winter did not make, it took. Until nothing was left. Thief had not come out of the day’s butchery untouched, for all her liveliness. Her short dark hair had been licked by fire on the side of her head, leaving the whole of it looking unbalanced, and under the frayed locks I could glimpse skin burnt and blackened. The left side of her leathers was flecked with blood, and close to her leg entirely drenched. I could still see the holes in her clothes where shards of stone and metal had torn apart her flesh. It would pass. Within the month she would be the same as she’d been, her Name smoothing away the wrinkles to her appearance. She was in no shape to fight right now but then fighting had never been what her Name was about.

“Do you know why my arm keeps getting twisted?” I said. “Leverage, Thief. That is what I lack the most. They all have things I want or need, and I have precious little of the same. That little piece is a kind leverage. It may be that I never use it, and that within the month I’ll shatter it. But there’s a knot of choices right ahead of me, and I will not go into it having robbed myself of a card to play.”

“She doesn’t get to come back, Foundling,” Vivienne said. “Not after this. That’s a line.”

Part of me, the same that had eyes turned to the transition ahead, balked at being dictated terms by one subordinate to me. I breathed in and out, then forced that cold anger to the side. It was of no use to me. Anger was a blinder and I already had too many of those.

“Agreed,” I said.

Thief nodded slowly, and with a flourish of the wrist she had the cylinder disappearing into that place where all her loot was kept. It was an aspect, she’d intimated to me more than once. That should be beyond the reach of anyone so long as she lived, and Thief was very good at remaining alive.

“Now what?” Vivienne asked. “I suppose we’ve won but this doesn’t feel like a victory.”

“It’s not over yet,” I said, and looked down at the Diabolist’s corpse.

I could raise it from the dead, I knew. Without the soul lingering she’d be an empty vessel, but a very powerful one. That could have its uses in the wars to come. Another temptation, this. The first of many to come: power obtained always wanted to be used.

“There should be a part of the city on fire,” I said.

“I’m familiar with the Foundling Gambit, yes,” Thief snorted.

Given how often goblinfire was my solution to a thorny situation, I supposed I could no longer deny that name. It irked me anyway, that my signature would be green flames devouring friend and foe alike.

“Toss her corpse into it,” I said. “I need to find Black. He’ll be at the centre of the mess.”

“And when you find him?” Vivienne said.

“Offers are made,” I replied. “And then a choice.”

Gods forgive me, but I hoped I’d make the right one.

—

Liesse had been twice claimed by death. First when Diabolist murdered and raised anew the people that dwelled within its wall, making it a house of undeath beneath her throne. And now, as the Ducal Palace burned like a green candle in the penumbra, the city had been made a necropolis in full. No one ruled here now. Not me, not Black, not the Empress. Wights only half-leashed owned the streets as the last of the living rebels huddled in their strongholds, hoping they would be spared the sword of the Tower or the teeth of their own creations. I was not inclined to mercy in this. Examples would be made, would have to be made if I was to keep Callow in hand in the aftermath. This brutal a massacre could not go unanswered. Even if the thought of letting it go had not been repulsive to me, such an obvious and blatant injustice would be the fodder of a rebellion neither Calow nor Praes could afford. It might even make heroes, sent by the Heavens to put down the last of the Calamities. Or me. The days were I could argue my methods were anything but an evil – and perhaps not even the lesser one, I thought as I walked the ruins of what had once been the heart of the south – were long gone. I was not guilty of the butchery Diabolist and her ilk had made, but it had happened under my watch. Not guilty, perhaps, but a part of responsibility could not be denied.

There would be a reckoning for that, in time. Praesi liked to say that the Tower always got its due, but the Heavens were even less often cheated of theirs.

I could feel the centre of the array in the distance, pulsing like a living thing, and I let my feet take me there. It was beginning to sink in, the depth of what Diabolist had done here as mere means to obtain expendable foot soldiers. Liesse had once been a sprawling festival of basilicas and trade, the first destination of the wealth that came pouring out of Mercantis through Dormer. It’d been the largest city in Callow after Laure, and the beating heart of southern culture. Its destruction gutted the entire south. One hundred thousand people. It’d been easier to live with when it was just a number of soldiers Diabolist could field, but now that she’d been slain I was forced to face the truth that a significant chunk of my people was… gone. Irremediably. Men and women and children, the old and the young. Not soldiers but people, the part of this country that actually mattered. It was one thing for the struggles to scythe through soldiers and conscripts, but this? It was something else. It was not to be forgiven, or forgotten. When I’d been a young girl – what an arrogant thought, I mocked myself, for someone not even twenty to have – I’d chosen to put together enough coin for the War College because reformation was the path of least death. Of least damage. A part of what had led me to that decision had been fear, I could admit to myself. I’d been raised to tales of the Conquest, of the overwhelming victories of the Legions, and thought that Praes could not be beaten.

It was now quite clear that it could.

Had Akua meant to sow the seeds of doubt, with her Fourfold Crossing? I was not sure how much I could trust the visions, if they were shaped illusion or truth, but in one of those lives I had driven Praes out of my homeland. At great a cost. Dream-like visions of countless slaughters flickered in the back of my head. But looking at Liesse, knowing the Principate was mustering its armies, I had to wonder if the massacres of that liberation would be worse than what had already taken place and yet would. The Empire was fragile, that could no longer be denied. For all that my teacher had sought to make it a nation that relied on men and institutions instead of Named, that new order was being enforced by the cudgel that was the Calamities. And behind them, the many quiet cullings of Dread Empress Malicia. But that desired metamorphosis was not complete. It had run into old money and old power, and though the Truebloods had been the visible and despicable face of that I no longer believed they were the whole of it. It had been Malicia’s own allies that double-crossed me in Laure, when I went into Arcadia. That she’d either not been able to prevent that or had not bothered to spoke volumes: her grip on the Wasteland was not nearly as tight as she would have us believe.

She’d effectively purged the Truebloods, for now, and muzzled their successors. But that struck me as a nothing more than ripples atop the pond. The High Lords were sill wealthy as a dozen kings, sitting atop fortified strongholds and centuries of accumulated sorcery. They were, for now, obedient. That did not mean they would remain so, and when they did I had to wonder – which Callowan city would get the axe next? This hadn’t been a Callowan war, it’d been a pissing match over ownership of the Tower. But it’d still been one of our cities that got wiped out, a hundred thousand Liessen that got turned into abominations not even as the outcome but as part of a Praesi’s plan. I’d been willing to back the imperial occupation so long as it was the lesser evil, and even now I believed Callow as a client kingdom under the Tower with me keeping the peace would be better off than as Proceran protectorate. But what did it matter that the taxes were lesser and the administration more efficient, if every decade or so a city was wiped off the map in a succession struggle? I couldn’t write this off as an outlier or an exception, not so long as the High Lords remained powerful.

As long as they existed an influential entity, sooner or later the next Akua Sahelian would be born. And the next one would be a little smarter, a little more careful in her rise to power. Worse, while awaiting that I would have to fight tooth and claw with the same people who’d back that coming Heiress to make sure my people were not murdered and robbed for the profit of foreign highborn. I was getting tired, these days, of begging and scraping for the bare essentials of my people’s survivals from people who it was becoming evident needed me to remain in power. It could be that Malicia would reform the Wasteland, one ploy at a time. That the institutions Black had built would overtake the old nobility in power and influence. But banking on that was a gamble, and I was running out of reasons to make it. I’d grasped, over the last year, that the way to finally leave that endless cycle of war between Callow and Praes was if one side finally won. With the Empire already occupying my homeland, working within those boundaries had struck me as the better choice. But now it was having to consider the costs of that position, and they were not light. Even if Praes was tamed, as much as such a place ever could be, there would be war with the Principate. And that war would be fought on Callowan borders.

Procer alone, I believed we could beat. The Red Flower Vales could be defended even against the massive armies the First Prince could field, and the Principate could not afford long and costly wars. It had borders to the north that could not go undefended, and sooner or later the princes would start squabbling again. For now, the memory of their recent and vicious civil war kept the peace. But that wouldn’t last forever, and keeping a few border principalities at bay was no impossible task. But if the Principate came knocking again and again as the heart of a crusading host, that was an entirely different game. I had no guarantees that Cordelia Hasenbach’s successor wouldn’t continue pursuing her policies of making war abroad to keep peace at home. Crusades had never been kind to Callow, even when it stood on the side of Good. I’d sworn my oaths to the Tower to keep my homeland from being made a battlefield every few decades, but I was not having to consider I might just have changed the face of the invader – without even sparing Callow massacres at the hands of Wastelanders. None of this could continue as it now lay.

I loved Black, for all the horrors I knew he’d committed. The Woe as well, and the family I had found in the Fifteenth. But I had not begun treading this path for love, and I would not remain on it for sentiment. The Empress had spoken a sentence to me, sorcery riding the wave of Diabolist’s workings. She had earned the right to make that offer, for the favours she had done me. That did not mean I would take it. I’d told Hakram once that I had not been chosen, that I instead I chose. Yet for all the power I now had at my fingertips, I was no closer to seeing what I’d chosen come to life. The echo of the final defeat I’d almost been dealt at Akua’s hands still lingered in me, the realization of fragility. I could be wrong, just like anyone else. I might be the worst thing to happen to Callow yet, the very thing I was trying to kill one ruinous battle at a time. And if that was the case… Choices needed to be made and pride had no place in the making of them.

Even as that thought touched me, I found the heart of Diabolist’s grand design. Deep in the palace behind arrays that welcomed me: I had the key Fasili had made and Robber taken from him. How Black had entered I did not know, but suspected his imprisonment of Akua’s father had opened doors for him. He was not above bleeding men for answers. This was the core, I thought, but not the room from which she would have controlled it all. That would be hidden elsewhere. But it was the keystone, were her own soul had once been the tool she used to rip apart Creation before she’d hidden that as well. It’d been a courtyard, before, walled in but spacious. Now runes carved into stone covered everything, power trickling towards the empty array in the centre like tributaries to a river. Transparent panes of force jutted upwards high in the sky, up to the distant place where the souls of centuries of Deoraithe roiled under containment. There was an altar of obsidian among a circle of carved stones, and at the edge of that circle I found Black standing in silence. I knew, objectively, that I was now taller than him. Yet as I watched his lone figure, decked in plain steel and threadbare black cloak, I felt as if he was the one who towered over me. His hand rose to acknowledge my arrival, though he did not turn. I came to stand at his side, the two of us watching the core of the device that had caused so much death.

“Another rival dead,” he said. “Though you paid a dear price for it. You reek of Winter, Catherine.”

“She wasn’t my rival,” I said, disinclined to discuss the other issue for now. “Not truly. Her story never had much to do with Callow, did it? And that is where mine lies.”

After a moment of silence, Black lowered his head in acknowledgement.

“She should have been killed years ago,” he softly said. “I regret that I did not proceed regardless of permission. A few months of madness uprooted decades of work. What an utter waste. The south will take decades to recover.”

I had not expected him to express grief over the death of my people save in matters where they affected his own designs, and so was not disappointed by the nature of the sentiment expressed. Love was a fine thing, I thought, but it did not blind me to the nature of this man. It had not been coyness or affection, when I’d called a monster the night we first met. It was the truth of him. Charming at times and so easy to love, but a monster nonetheless.

“It ends now,” I said.

“So it does,” Dread Empress Malicia softly agreed.

There had been changes in me, and that I saw through the illusion she had come to us through was a herald of them. Whatever trick the Empress had employed to turn Diabolist’s own device to her purposes was but a pale imitation of what glamour could do, and even as I thought this I suddenly knew I could use glamour as well as any fae. My fingers clenched. Mantles never leant power without a price.

“Malicia,” Black said. “Your presence is no longer unexpected.”

“Amadeus-“ she began.

“The Closed Circle, Alaya,” he said calmly. “You cannot possibly have missed that. You own two of the members.”

I turned to watch the illusion. It was no meat-puppet, this time: this was the Empress in her full glory come to grace us with her presence. Even through sorcery she was lovely beyond compare. Tall and sculpted and more perfect than any mortal could truly be, her favoured colours of green and gold silk dipping into a low neckline it was hard not to glance at. The most beautiful woman in the world, many called her. Any other time, I would have allowed myself a guilty moment taking in the sight. But right now words had been spoken that forbid me such distractions.

“That’s why you asked,” I said. “Because you realized Diabolist wouldn’t have pulled all this off without being noticed.”

“That she unearthed Still Waters was beyond my predictions,” the Empress said. “It blindsided me as much as you.”

“That’s not a fucking excuse,” I hissed. “That’s what the two of you are supposed to do. Keep the Wasteland under control while I keep Callow willingly in the fold. Black was in the Free Cities most of the year and I’m not even giving him a pass here because Scribe’s people should have picked up on this. The two of you have spy networks that cover half the godsdamned continent. This goes beyond mere failure. I’ve kept my part of the bargain. You haven’t.”

Black was watching Malicia, and something passed between them wordlessly. My fury spiked.

“No, this doesn’t get swept up under the rug,” I said through gritted teeth. “The two of you don’t get to settle this with each other behind closed doors. A hundred thousand people died. A major city was made into a tomb, and now I’m learning this was part of a plan? There is no part of this that’s acceptable. I’ve gone along with everything because you’re supposed to be the reasonable ones, the kind of people who nip this shit in the bud. Fucking Hells, I didn’t declare war on Diabolist a year ago because there was an understanding that she would be contained. My sympathy to your ‘political concerns’ doesn’t extend to allowing your troublesome elements to commit fucking genocide.”

Black’s face was grim.

“There is no excuse,” he admitted. “In this I have failed you utterly.”

If he’d said anything else, even pretended he actually cared about the dead, I might have struck him. But that flat admission of failure took the wind out of my sails for heartbeat. My heated gaze turned to Malicia instead. Black and I could settle our own accounts after the rest of this was addressed.

“You’re not in charge,” I said. “She is. And she seems like she knew what was going on more than you.”

“I failed to grasp the full scope of the matter,” the Empress said.

“You think?” I growled.

“How we came to current situation is regrettable, and for this I will make appropriate redress,” Malicia said. “It does not change the choices that must now be made.”

It was a practical way of thinking, that. At least on the surface. The truth of it was less pretty.

“But it does,” I said. “All this, the oaths and the compromises? It works because I can trust you. To keep the Reforms going, to keep the highborn in check, to not tacitly allow an old breed villain to mass murder and turn Callowan cities into magical gate-making weapons. Did this really sound pragmatic, up in the Tower? Because looking around me, I see six legions all but gutted on the eve of a crusade and a story that’s the best rallying cry for rebellion I’ve heard since the godsdamned Conquest. Now, I’ve fucked up quite a few times since being put in charge of Callow. I’ll own that. But I have to say, I’ve yet to manage to fuck up quite this badly.”

“We cannot,” the Empress said, “weather a crusade.”

“Praes cannot,” I corrected coldly. “Convince me that Callow shouldn’t open the godsdamned Vales to the Principate because, right now? I’m thinking it might actually be the lesser evil. How many of your own legions would stick with you, if it gets out you willingly allowed the Diabolist to rise? I come out of this room promising to hang every High Lord and make peace with the Principate, and I’m guessing no legion west of the Blessed Isle stays with the Tower.”

“If you do this, Callow ends as a nation,” Malicia said. “There is no ruling class left in this region, only the dregs of previous nobility. The First Prince will arrange marriages to these in order to bind her new border protectorate to Procer and station all her dispossessed fantassins in Callow as a garrison force. As a villain, you will naturally be killed or exiled. Your home will be ruled by royal second sons and daughters from then on, as permanent a battlefield as the northern principalities. Within three generations Callowan culture will remain mostly as some local quirks, while in every other matter Proceran law will apply. Callow will be fresh principalities in all but name, until even that is disallowed.”

My fingers clenched until the bones turned white. So that was a blow against rolling over for Cordelia Hasenbach. My own fate was ultimately a side note: if I had to go for Callow to finally stop bleeding, then I’d pull that trigger without hesitation. I’d had a good teacher when it came to the lesson of not getting in your own way. But trading Praesi occupation for Proceran annexation wasn’t what I’d signed up for. It did not escape me that Malicia was responsible for a lot of what she predicted – she and Black had been the ones to shave away Callowan nobility one assassination at a time, and it was them who’d ensured there would be restless former soldiers in Procer by feeding the flames of civil war. But responsibility wasn’t how any of this got solved, much as I despised the notion of cleaning up a mess not of my own making.

“That might be true,” I said. “It still doesn’t make sticking with you shine in comparison. Callow still gets fucked under the Tower, even with me in between. The Principate are pricks, but at least they don’t turn cities into graveyards. ‘Low taxes but the occasional spot of genocide’ is a pretty low bid to beat.”

“There will be no second instance,” the Empress said. “It was an extraordinary occurrence – and mistake – allowed to meet an extraordinary threat.”

“The High Lords-“

“Are broken for a generation, now that you killed Akua Sahelian,” Malicia said. “A generation is more than I need to ensure they never rise again.”

“And what happens when the next extraordinary threat comes around?” I pushed. “Does Vale get it next?”

“Ah, you misunderstand me,” the Empress smiled. “There is no next threat. So long as we are no longer the aggressor, which can be ensured in way satisfactory to you, we have the deterrent to effectively smother in the crib any call for a crusade. The weapon does not need to be used, Catherine. It just needs to exist.”

That was what she’d said, just after Diabolist spoke to me. Her one sentence. Take this city without destroying it, and there will be no more wars. And she might be right, I thought. If any mobilizing invading army was immediately sanctioned by a Hellgate opening in that nation’s heartlands, it would put a hard damper on the calls to go crusading. And if she never gave them a banner to rally around by attacking neighbouring countries, how many rulers were really going to be willing to risk that mess for a point of principle? It wouldn’t be the pretty peace I’d envisioned, but thinking this could be done cleanly has brought nothing but disaster at my feet. And yet.

“Reparations,” I said. “If you’re really serious about this, everything that got wrecked in a Praesi war gets rebuilt on Praesi coin. And we’re done with compromise within the borders. Callowan law as decreed by the crown is paramount. No more legions garrisoning our cities or Praesi ruling them. Callow is now sanctioned to raise its own army, answerable directly to me.”

The Empress studied me.

“You ask for an independent nation under nominal Tower authority,” she finally said.

“Diabolist took a ride on the crazy side,” I said, “but she was right about one thing: there’s always a cost. You want me to keep Callow in the fold? Fine. Here’s my price.”

“I will require Liesse to be under direct Imperial control,” Malicia said, and it tasted like triumph.

“I’ll want soldiers in the city as well,” I bluntly replied, mastering myself. “Your people already pulled that trigger once. It’s not happening again without my permission.”

“You can’t be serious,” Black said, and he sounded genuinely appalled.

I turned to him, but his eyes were entirely on Malicia.

“Catherine is young, and so I forgive the impulse of seeking easy solution,” he said. “But you, Alaya? We built this empire on the bones of men who make fortresses like this. We have seen them fail.”

“We have seen them use those weapons and fail, Amadeus,” the Empress said, and it was like I wasn’t even in the room. “This is different. We avoid the conflict entirely.”

“This is a clarion call for every hero on the fucking continent,” Black harshly said.

I almost flinched, even now. It was rare to hear him curse, much less in a tone that icy.

“Think beyond your precious war, Amadeus,” the Empress bit out. “It cannot be won. It cannot even be fought or we risk everything.”

“This risks everything,” he spat. “Let’s not even talk about how it will look to keep a weapon built on Callowan corpses – this is foolish, in and of itself. It would have us dependant on a device not of our own making we barely control, and the dependence alone is enough to bury us.”

“It will draw heroes,” Malicia said. “I will not deny that. But we have killed heroes before, a great many of them. And now they will lack rulers backing them. A hero without a kingdom’s backing is just a dangerous vagrant, Amadeus. A lesser threat than a full crusade, by any objective measure.”

“It will not be green boys and scrappy orphans who come calling, Malicia,” Black said. “Every old monster hidden in some faraway corner will crawl out of the woodworks to end us. You think the White Knight is the sharpest blade the Heavens have to bare?”

“You speak of beating back half the continent and tell me this is the threat?” Malicia replied, tone growing sharp. “Set aside your bloody pride for a moment and think. We did not build this empire so you could throw it all away because you want to bloody the eye of the Heavens over some philosophical point.”

“We did not build this empire so you could bet its fate on a magic trick instead of preparations forty years in the making,” he said, tone just as sharp and twice as contemptuous.

“Your way has Callow a battlefield for the fourth time in three years, Black,” I said, and from the way both of them twitched I saw they’d entirely forgotten I was there. “I can’t accept that. You can’t ask me to accept that, looking at what’s around us and who’s responsible for it. It’s… enough. Too much has already been done. If the heroes come, we’ll kill them. Hells, the fortress doesn’t have to stay here. We can fly it halfway into the Tyrian Sea and sink their boats as they come. The heroes will come with the crusade anyway. What do we actually lose by doing this? If the weapon is broken, well, the armies haven’t gone anywhere have they?”

“Your own apprentice agrees with me,” Malicia said. “It is not your way, but what does that matter if it works?”

Black closed his eyes. I could feel the weight of this settle onto both our shoulders, the pivot of this empire.

“Maddie,” the illusion softly said. “Trust me. One last time. One last leap.”

He flinched like she’d struck him, and it felt wrong for me to see this at all. Like I was looking at them stripped of their skins, of all the many layers of deception and protection they had accumulated since they were young as I was. But the gears at work were greater than any of us. With the pivot came more. My mantle stirred. Queenship would be granted to me by the Tower, by Name and by right. But not like the rulers of the Old Kingdom, no. Mine would not be so pristine a reign. If I was to be queen, it would be a queen cloaked in black with hands bloodied red. Though young and half-formed, the Name was taking shape. Beckoning. Behind my teacher and the Empress, I glimpsed a silhouette leaning against the wall in the back. A woman, with long dark curls and sloppily stained leathers. She had a silver flask in hand, and was taking a long pull from it. She met my eyes while wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. I know you, I thought. Not this face, but I know you. She winked, and just like that she was gone. I saw Black had opened his eyes, and that his hand was raised.

“I am done,” the Black Knight said, “with half-measures.”

I moved, Malicia spoke, but we were both too late.

“Destroy,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said, and his Name pulsed.

The array broke and the souls of the dead swept us all like a tide.