INTERLUDE: WEB

Mirrebel

Many weeks after the incident at Osheim

“I’m going to kill her.”

“No, you’re not. You’re just angry, and she’s…”

“What?” Lisette asked when Hendry trailed off.

The knight rubbed at his chin nervously, wearing the expression of one who regretted speaking their mind yet knew that — now they had — the opinion needed justifying. “It’s just… She’s always been like that.”

“A smarmy bitch?” Lisette asked icily. “A haughty aristo who thinks she’s smarter than everyone else because she talks through her nose and was born in a castle?”

Hendry sighed and placed a hand to his chest. “I was born in a castle, Lis.”

Lisette opened her mouth, but whatever she’d been about to say died on her lips and she folded her arms instead, grumbling her next words. “That’s different. You’re nothing like her, and thank the Heir for that.”

They moved through the woods as they walked, the thin snow crunching under their boots. Hendry’s armor clicked softly, muffled by the cloth and furs he’d wrapped around the brass-hued metal. His sword was drawn, though he kept it aimed back with his left fist wrapped tightly around the base of the blade, wary of the treacherous terrain and the cleric near his side.

“She’s had it hard,” Hendry said. “And there’s a lot of pressure on her right now. She gets more venomous when she’s stressed. It’s like… a defense, I guess?”

Lisette had to turn her face to hide her reaction. She hated it when Hendry did this. He was always so quick to defend Emma, no matter how cruel she got and no matter how little his prejudice seemed to affect the spiteful girl. Didn’t he realize that she would never return his feelings?

She’d need a heart for that, and Lisette was beginning to suspect that Emma Orley did not have one.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she groused. “Why was she put in charge of the lance instead of you?”

She turned to face Hendry, arrayed then in his faux-gold armor and looking the part. Then she saw the confused expression on his round features, and it made her even angrier. “Damn it, Hendry! You are a belted knight. Right now you’re the highest ranking person in our group, by birth and by appointment. It’s your right to lead. Emma’s just… I mean, she’s barely a squire.”

“Barely?” Hendry asked, perplexed.

Lisette trailed off. She wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that, either, though it did needle her. Who even was Emma? How did she get involved in all of this? No one at the Emperor’s court even seemed to officially acknowledge her as Ser Alken’s squire, though he treated her like one and she’d shadowed him everywhere.

At least, she did before he vanished in the middle of the night on some unknown errand and didn’t return. That’d been three months ago, and winter was close to ending with no word.

Was that why…

Stop it. Don’t defend her like Hendry does, there’s no excuse.

They moved through the night. Though the moons were out and the sky carpeted with stars, the shadows on the forest floor were deep. These were coastal woods, and they grew tall. The snow wasn’t deep — the last storm didn’t have much strength, perhaps a sign of winter finally easing off — but the cold pierced.

They kept their voices hushed. They were hunting, had been for weeks, and their quarry was close. Lisette needed to focus, only…

Even Emma’s name was strange. The Orleys were a Westvaler clan, and according to every record Lisette was able to find they were purged in a conflict with another dead House almost a century ago.

It was all very suspicious.

“She’s even the youngest of us!” Lisette blurted. Emma wasn’t even twenty yet, which made her at least a year younger than Lisette and two less than Hendry. They were all children compared to Penric, and he hadn’t been put in charge.

It made no sense.

“What’s got you so upset?” Hendry asked. “Really, Lis. It can’t just be this quarrel with Emma. You’re usually not this…”

“What?” Lisette raised an eyebrow. “Catty?”

“I was going to say anxious,” Hendry said quietly.

She fell quiet again, because he’d hit the mark. She was anxious. She couldn’t stop pressing her fingertips together and then parting them over and over, working her fingers into stiff arrangements like she were hand signing to some invisible recipient. The elflantern at her belt kept dimming and brightening in turn, responding to the irregular pressure of her spirit.

Every once in a while, slivers of golden light would link her parting fingers before breaking and vanishing again. Forming them had long since become second nature to her.

“She just frustrates me, is all.”

Hendry nodded. Lisette shivered and drew her synodite garments more tightly around her shoulders. They were very much like a nun’s habit, only woven in shades of yellow and white, closely fit around her shoulders, with tight sleeves and long legging instead of traditional skirts. They were little protection against the cold, even with her own warming aura sewn into the fabric. This air gnawed at her with a stubborn hunger.

Her gaze wandered the dark. Winter still clung to the northern realms, though the worst of it seemed to have passed with one final blizzard two weeks past. Since then there’d been no snowfall, not even much wind, like the land held its breath in anticipation of… something.

The stillness was getting to her. Something felt wrong, had felt wrong for some time. Lisette was given to this group by the Empress despite her own reservations, and she wanted to make good of it, but then the man who was supposed to lead them left them behind.

There were rumors in the south, dark rumors, but the harsh winter and distance made it all seem very vague and far away.

After parting ways with Doctor Olliard, Lisette swore to herself that she wouldn’t fade into obscurity. She’d been taught to heal, to help people, and intended to use her talents. Her master taught her to use the healing threads those kindly women at the monastery gave her for violence, to hunt, and while she’d made use of those lessons she also knew it wasn’t what her powers were meant for.

When she’d fallen into Rosanna Silvering’s service, Lisette took it as a sign, as a portent. The God-Queen had a plan for her, and by hewing to the mighty woman she could make a difference.

She could make amends for that night. For hiding while her lay sisters suffered and died.

Lisette was a coward. She knew it, had always known it. When the Fox’s Plague took her parents and her brothers, she’d hidden and wept until the other villagers found her. When evil men came and burned down the convent that took her in after, she hid again and learned that men too were capable of being demons. She’d crawled out when the sun came up and all that was left were ashes and ghosts.

She’d survived, but lost restful sleep in the bargain. If the horrors of her girlhood didn’t wake her sweating in the night, then what she’d seen done and helped do during her time with the Priory did.

She was a coward. She knew it, and so did Emma Orley.

The fell girl saw too much with those frightening bird-of-prey eyes of hers, and she’d seen right through Lisette. One never showed weakness to a predator. Lisette learned that lesson early, and the doctor — the vampire hunter — reinforced that lesson time and time again. Olliard showed her that mere mortals could bite back against the evils lurking in the darkness.

And Emma sometimes looked very much like one of those. So they argued, and sniped at one another, but even in that Lisette felt outmatched, like every time she tried to show her steel, Emma perceived the tarnish on it and was merely amused.

I hate her.

And Hendry is right. She’s not doing well either, and I’m probably not helping by challenging her at every turn.

Emma had not taken her master leaving well, even if she tried to mask it. The two were close, in a way Lisette couldn’t fully understand but saw clearly enough. Emma could seem very wicked, but there were times she showed her age and her mentor’s absence weighed on her.

“Where is she anyway?” Lisette asked, making an effort to drag herself from her own brooding. “It’s far too quiet.”

Hendry squinted into the trees. “Maybe they ran into trouble?”

“I’d know if they did.”

The young knight frowned. “How would you know? Did you set up some kind of signal?”

Lisette realized her mistake and tried to find an excuse. “Um… my threads. When there’s a disturbance, they… resonate.”

It was close enough to the truth. Hendry seemed to accept it, even raising his eyebrows in an impressed manner. Lisette turned her face to the snowy woods so he couldn’t see her nervous expression, and for once the boy’s gullibility relieved her.

Lisette liked Hendry. He was quiet, thoughtful, had good manners for a young nobleman where her experience of them was that they tended to be more boisterous and vain. Urnic nobility were a proud lot, martial and theatrical at once, so the introspective young man at her side surprised her. His round, boyish face, with its mop of unruly brown hair, seemed ill matched to his burly frame. Together they gave him a sense of innocence combined with strength.

Though, he was not innocent. He’d experienced hurt, still experienced it. She knew the story about his traitor father, how Emma killed Brenner Hunting in front of his son and how their House was disbanded at the Accord’s decree in punishment.

Hendry was allowed to keep his family name, his crest, and his knighthood, but was otherwise adrift in the world. Apparently, what relatives and allies House Hunting once had in the west spurned him when he’d gone there to settle accounts following his father’s death. The Lance was all he had now.

And yet he still defends her, even after he watched her…

Lisette cut the thought off. Those two also shared history, and she felt unworthy judging it.

“This spot is too clear,” she said. “One moment.”

Hendry waited while Lisette scurried to the trees, her yellow cape trailing behind her like a flash of daylight in the night. The threads appeared again, and with gestures not unlike a maestro conducting an orchestra she began to weave her magic through the limbs of the trees.

Adding to her net, her spider’s web. Very little of this small wood remained untouched by it. Even as she formed the lines, they faded into near invisibility.

“That’s incredible,” Hendry said. “That you can cover the whole area.”

Lisette shrugged. In truth, every single thread of the net still connected to that pattern between her fingers, which itself was connected to the pattern in her mind. She envisioned it, and through concentration and ritual motion she projected it into the world. If any part was snipped, if she lost hold of the whole, then the entire construct would crumple.

It wasn’t easy, but she’d become good at it. Very good, to the point that it was second nature and she could brood on her anger towards their surrogate leader while holding the shape of her Art at the back of her mind. So long as she held that image, and did not allow the cold to numb her fingers, it would not break.

Still, she’d rarely made anything so large. If anything went wrong, if even a single line was snipped, the feedback would go right into her.

That wouldn’t be pleasant.

“What did you two argue about, anyway?” Hendry asked. He was holding the lantern up to give her light to see by. A kind gesture, if a bit unnecessary — her magic provided its own light.

“About this plan. I told her the net wouldn’t be strong enough if we made it too big, and she…” Lisette huffed. “She implied that it was a matter of skill. Can you believe that? An adept of her talent who doesn’t even understand basic principles in the conservation of spiritual energies!?”

She turned her glare on Hendry. Though most of a head taller than her, he balked.

“Uh… right. Well—”

“It’s because she’s a Blood Art user! They develop their talent instinctively. They don’t have to go through the same rigorous training, the study. They don’t have to develop an understanding of auratic sciences or simple goddamn physics!”

Hendry had never seen the cleric this angry. He’d never heard her curse before, either. “That makes sense.”

“It doesn’t! It doesn’t make sense at all! She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and those horrible spikes and she thinks she can tell me my business? Imply that I’m not good enough!?”

“Quiet,” Hendry said.

He was right. She was getting too worked up, and her voice had started to carry through the woods. “Sorry, it’s just—”

“Quiet.”

Lisette fell silent. Hendry wasn’t looking at her, and he wasn’t just warning her to keep her voice down. He was watching the woods, and something about his demeanor had changed.

His eyes… normally they were blue, but in that moment they looked closer to flint. To metal. Lisette shivered, and not from the cold.

“Something’s close,” Hendry said in a quiet voice. “I can feel it.”

In that moment, Lisette felt her web twitch.

“It’s here!” She snapped, and already her fingers were working. Hendry spun away towards the nearest patch of darkness, wary of ambush.

But it didn’t come from the shadows.

It came from above.

It fell with almost complete silence. Only the flutter of cloth gave it away. Hendry reacted first, moving without any sort of warning, shoving Lisette to the ground with his shoulder. He was in full armor and big, and it hurt. She almost lost her concentration and her Art at the same time as she collapsed into the snow.

But it saved her life. The thing landed on all fours like a spider right next to Hendry, in the exact spot she’d been standing a moment before. It was draped in a cape that’d once been purest white, but now blood and filth stained it.

It lifted its head to reveal a man’s face. Handsome, if gaunt, the cheeks and eyes sunken and the bones standing out starkly. His long hair, yellow as hers, hung in lank strings down past his chin.

His eyes were a nocturnal green, with no sclera or pupil. They were haunted things, inhuman, belonging to an animal rather than a man. Hungry.

Hendry was already turning, his left gauntlet still wrapped around the lower portion of his sword with his right hand on the hilt. He used that shortened blade to punch down at the vampire, trying to skewer it.

He missed. The undead thing moved impossibly fast, scuttling back like a spider out of his reach. Hendry cursed and put himself between it and Lisette, though she was already scrambling out of the snow to find her feet.

The vampire rose to its full height. He’d been a handsome man in life, and a knight. His armor was silvery steel, or it was before all manner of foulness became crusted to it. Lisette could see rust and other kinds of damage too, places where the chainmail beneath the plate had become exposed and hung broken.

Most of the dried blood on him wasn’t his own. He smelled foul even from ten feet away, smelled like rotted death. Though, past all that tarnish he almost looked like an angel.

“Why are you hunting me?” He asked, and his voice sounded genuinely confused. “Why do you want to kill me?”

Lisette’s fingers never stopped moving as she drew up behind Hendry. “Because you’re killing people. At Gardend, at Elm Cross and Prevale, and half a dozen other villages. Don’t you remember?”

The man’s face scrunched into a frown. “I was hungry. I’m always hungry. Why doesn’t it stop?”

He met Lisette’s eyes, and the hollow confusion and the pain in that gaze tore at something inside her. She didn’t want to sympathize with this crazed mass murderer. She’d seen what he was responsible for, only…

It wasn’t really his fault. The golden crescent remained pin to his left pauldron, just above the heart, his Knight’s Mark.

“Where is your lady?” Lisette asked the man. “Where is Evangeline Ark?”

The vampire started, blinking at them both. “My lady… why…”

His face became a ruin of misery. “Why did she abandon me?”

Hendry took a step forward and spoke in a soft voice. “Listen to me, Ser Ivan.”

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The dead knight’s gaze fixed on him. “What did you just call me?”

“Ser Ivan Covey. That’s your name. You’re a Knight of the Bannerlands and the father of two sons and three daughters. You tried to convince my father to match me with your eldest girl, but he thought you were too low ranking and he spurned you. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for not standing up then and demanding he not speak to you that way.”

Ivan staggered back. “They are alive? They’re alright, my children?”

Hendry let out a frosted breath. “The ones who were in Garihelm are still there, in the Emperor’s care. As for your kin who remain in the Bannerlands… we don’t know. That country is a mess right now. We were hoping to learn what’s going on there from you.”

“Lady Evangeline…” Ser Ivan looked drunk. He swayed in the moonlight. Lisette watched him clutch his head as though he’d been pierced by a sudden migraine. “Evangeline! She cast me out. She called me an animal, mocked me for not being able to control myself.”

His lips peeled back from flat, yellow teeth. Lisette had expected sharp canines, fangs, but they looked very human.

Yet… his gums were black, like a dog’s, and those eyes…

“We’re losing him,” Lisette said. “I need to bind him up.”

“Wait,” Hendry pleaded. “We can get through to him. He’s sick, he’s not a monster, he just needs help.”

Oh, Hendry. “I have no Art that can heal this. No one does. He’s already dead.”

“Remember Catrin? She was normal, or near enough.”

“She almost killed you.” Why was he suddenly so adamant about this? It wasn’t part of the plan. “We’ll lose him and our chance to find his mistress.”

Hendry took a deep breath and stepped forward. His voice was firmer when he spoke again, this time directly to the other knight. “Ser Ivan, I need you to surrender yourself. We want to stop Evangeline, and if you help us—”

“I am not an animal.” The other knight wasn’t listening. He was talking to himself, a low ramble that grew more clear as he worked himself up. “I am not, I am not a beast, I can be of service. We are strong, we are the Banner, we are… She is…”

Lisette’s fingers worked swiftly. Hendry took another step forward, his voice tightening.

“Please, Ser, just—”

“Evangeline is my queen. The rightful Queen of the Bannerlands, of all the western realms. Markham Forger will regret dismissing her right. We see clearly now. We see what we must become. The night is always darkest before the dawn, and we will herald it.”

Ser Ivan’s werelight eyes fixed on Hendry. “I will hunt the hunters and then she will see that I am of use.”

He sprung with preternatural speed, moving from a still posture to blurring aggression in the blink of an eye. It shocked even Lisette, who’d been ready for it.

Hendry didn’t use his sword. His fist shot out and he punched the lunging creature. His gauntleted fist struck Ivan’s skull just as the vampire’s nails lashed out. There was an odd sound, almost a screech. A metal sound.

Hendry staggered back as Ivan went rolling through the snow. The white-caped and white-armored hemophage snarled and started to rise, though he’d been injured. The side of his skull was blackened as though from a bad burn and emitting smoke.

Lisette flexed her fingers, and her threads closed in from the surrounding trees. White lines appeared in the night, brightening to palest edges of gold, fragmenting the woods in a hundred fractal shapes. Triangles within squares within prismatic abstractions formed between her shifting fingers, a kaleidoscope of images that changed even as she stretched her hands apart to widen the pattern.

And the same pattern tightened around the vampire, catching him. He was tangled up, a fly in a spider’s web, and he let out a howl of rage as he leapt again only to stop short.

Hendry found his balance and turned to face the night creature. He’d been clawed across the lower right half of his face, three red grooves parallel to his jaw that stopped just short of the lip.

“Damn, but he’s fast!” The fist he’d struck the vampire with was also smoking.

“It’s alright,” Lisette breathed. “I’ve got him…”

Sweat beaded beneath the tight cowl she wore beneath her veil, despite the cold. She had to keep tightening her pattern as the undead knight struggled.

Too thin, she realized. I’ve stretched it too thin, and he’s too strong…

A sound like tortured steel wire filled the woods. Her web was struggling against Ser Ivan’s strength, and failing.

Too weak. Too unfocused. Olliard’s scornful reprimands echoed in her memory.

You must do better, girl!

I’m trying! It’s hard. The magic isn’t meant to do this—

The magic does as your heart demands, and your heart is wavering. Do you wish to be eaten? To see others devoured? Become colder, Lisette. Make your soul as barbed wire.

“I can’t…” She was on the verge of sobs, just like in that faraway clearing. “Hendry, be ready.”

Ivan keened, a pitiful, high sound that rose to an impossible pitch. He twisted in the air, lifted up by the net, and arched his back as he tried to force his arms apart.

The threads — the Sutures of Saint Cyprian — broke. It made a sound like a thousand mirrors shattering as the pattern came undone across the small forest. Lisette reacted quickly, tucking her hands under her arms and folding in on herself, waiting for the feedback of that blast to reach her. She did not want to lose fingers.

It hit her like many snapped wires whipping against her body. Her fine yellow cape was shredded, her synodite uniform splitting in a score of places. She felt the skin beneath cut, felt the cold slam in as the enchantment woven into the wool died and stopped protecting her from the winter air.

The damage wasn’t wholly physical. The sutures were connected to her soul, made of it, and she gasped at that spiritual mauling.

But she’d trained for this, experienced it before. She weathered the backlash, and felt the damage was minimal. It would be hours before she could use her aura again, though.

Ivan fell to all fours, limp golden threads draped over his body and still shimmering in the moments before they faded back into unreality. His face, half covered by unkempt and filth-matted hair, lifted to stare at Lisette.

He scuttled forward in that spider-like fashion, then leaped at her with bared teeth and unsheathed claws.

Just as the arrow took him through the neck.

The vampire twisted midair and collapsed in the snow directly in front of Lisette. She’d fallen when her broken magic lashed her, and stared at the still body from a seated position, her arms up to cover her face. She bled from more than a dozen shallow wounds, and the air in front of her face was turning foggy from her panicked breathing.

Hendry got in front of her again, though he’d have been too slow to stop the mad knight from ripping her throat out. The arrow in Ivan’s throat was a length of ash a yard long, clothyard length, a war dart tipped in a bodkin point and treated with holy water and wrapped in vine-of-gold.

Ivan was gone. His spine had cracked just beneath the skull, the shock of impact from the aura-infused arrow scouring his ghost from him.

Lisette had prepared that arrow herself. Her eyes shifted to the right and up, and under the moonlight she could see a high hill overlooking the woods. It stood more than half a mile away. An impossible shot, at least for mortal eyes and a mortal arm.

She stood shakily, allowing Hendry to help her. “You’re hurt,” he said.

“So are you.” She looked at the young knight’s face and winced. The flesh of his lower cheek was nearly hanging off him. His chin and neck were drenched in blood, and beneath it…

She could see bone, or what passed for it beneath Hendry Hunting’s flesh. The iron in him glowed slightly, as though red hot, and his blood steamed in the winter air.

“I need to get that stitched up,” she breathed. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

Hendry considered a moment, his brow furrowing. “Yes. Always. That was Penric’s arrow, wasn’t it?”

“Only he could have made that shot in the dark. The others will be here soon. Let’s—”

Before she could finish, movement caught her eye. She let out a grunt of shock — more a squeak, really — thinking at first the body was getting back up.

Instead, it rolled over and something crawled out from beneath it. It had many limbs, or tentacles, a coiling mass that flopped itself into motion and began to undulate through the snow. It moved fast, like a serpent. More a bundle of serpents moving in imperfect unison.

“Shit!” Hendry lifted his sword, but hesitated at the uncanny thing. It was deep gray and oily, like a mass of sewage come to life.

“Don’t let it get away!” Lisette snapped. She wanted to form her sutures and catch it, but she couldn’t work aura. Her soul was discordant, still ringing inside her like a struck bell. She wanted to vomit, felt unsteady on her feet.

Hendry moved to stab down at the thing, but it was too fast. Within a moment, it slithered over the snow and then buried itself beneath it, vanishing from sight.

But before it did, Lisette witnessed something that would live in her nightmares. The mass paused at the last moment, and beneath its shifting tendrils she saw human teeth. They moved, and her ears itched, and in them was a voice.

“Stupid cunt I wasn’t done with him you’ll die screaming.”

It went under the snow, leaving silence.

Hendry stared after it a minute before speaking. “What was that?”

Lisette let out a breath as her rapidly beating heart started to settle. “I think it was a demon.”

“Correct me if I’m mistaken, but wasn’t the plan to use your charming strings to capture him alive?”

Lisette felt her lips press into a thin line, and she made a conscious effort to keep her voice level. “They are sutures, not strings. And as I told you before, covering the entire forest was foolish. I could not hold him.”

She was patching up Hendry, using ordinary thread to stitch the flesh of his mauled cheek back together. It wasn’t pretty, and she didn’t like using cruder material than her own aura, but the wound needed tending to and she couldn’t wait for her magic to recover.

“We did our best, Emma,” Hendry said reasonably. “He was just too strong.”

His face had swollen badly, so the words came out garbled and barely comprehensible.

Emma let out an exasperated sigh which she managed to make sound theatrical. “Too strong for the mighty Breakblade? Oh dear, he must have been a nightmare!”

Hendry’s cheeks reddened. Lisette snipped off a length of thread with more force than necessary, causing him to wince. “And where were you?” She demanded of the other girl. “You and Ser Myrice were supposed to be ready to ride in as soon as I gave the signal, which I did. Did you not hear the music?”

“I heard your strings — sorry, sutures — plucking away. Penric said he had a shot, and didn’t want us to scare the bloodsucker off.”

Emma lifted her shoulders in a shrug. She leaned against a tall rock just a few feet away. They were back in their temporary camp, a small ravine hidden in the hills near the woods where Lisette and Hendry fought the vampire. Penric sat on another tall outcrop near and above them, watching their surroundings — or doing whatever he did in place of watching. His tall war bow was propped next to him.

Lisette stood, her work done as best she could with the tools at hand, and turned to face their surrogate leader fully. Emma refused to meet her gaze. The young aristocrat watched the surrounding cliffs with catlike laziness, eyes narrowed and expression bored. She wore a fur-lined coat over her chainmail, very much like the garb of a trapper, and her customary high boots with her leggings tucked in just below the knee. Her sheathed saber, its ornate hilt sporting the image of a horned hawk, was propped against the rock at her side.

“Hendry is hurt,” Lisette said in a low voice, feeling the anger she’d been holding onto surging up into her throat, very much like bile. “We almost died. That poor man was driven to insanity by what Evangeline did to him. I warned you that the trap needed more testing, but you demanded we improvise and it almost cost our lives.”

Emma’s eyes — those uncanny amber eyes with their too-large pupils, subtly like the very hawk depicted on her heirloom sword — rolled to Lisette. It was a dangerous look. Seemingly relaxed, but Lisette recognized it. She felt herself quail inwardly, but held onto the anger and fought that anxiety down.

“We should have used the ravines,” Lisette continued. “Like I said before, it’s a narrower space that I can cover more easily, and—”

“And we knew he was using those woods, not what direction he goes in and out of. Covering the whole thing was the only way to be sure, and look!” Emma waved at the body nearby. They’d covered Ivan in his own cloak. “We got him.”

“Barely,” Lisette snapped. “And that’s not the point. If you’re not going to heed our advice, then—”

“I don’t need to heed your advice, choir girl.” Emma’s expression hardened. “I am in command, and if you don’t like it, then you can run back to Garihelm and hide behind the Empress’s skirts.”

“That is not your decision to make!”

Before the argument could escalate further, Penric spoke up from above them. “They’re here.”

Almost on cue, four mounted knights entered the ravine. They were fully armed and armored, ready for a fight now denied them by the old archer’s uncanny marksmanship. Emma glared at Lisette a moment longer, her mask of indifference broken to show the dark temper beneath it.

Lisette managed to match that glare with her own. Hendry looked between them, and let out a weary sigh.

The leader of the newcomers rode an eel-like chimera with a long neck and blind head, which “saw” by tasting the air with its pink tongue. It stopped in front of them and the rider dismounted. She was tall and leanly built, which she displayed with cleverly crafted armor of deepest green metals fashioned to evoke the musculature of a nude woman. Her helm was a feminine mask with puckered lips and crystal lenses over the eyes, the sallet crawling with jade-eyed serpents.

Myrice Gorgon removed her helm to reveal her olive skin and bluntly cut black hair. Her eyes were serpentine too, as were the sharp canines she flashed. Lisette shivered, thinking then that this woman looked even more the vampire than their quarry.

“You got it?” Myrice asked breathlessly, her notable lisp dramatized by her excitement.

Emma waved a lazy hand towards the covered body of Ivan Covey. Myrice skipped over to it and moved the cloak with her foot. She let out a bark of laughter.

“Ah, Ser Ivan! What a sad sight you seem. Shame. He was a handsome one.”

“He was sick,” Lisette said. “What his liege lady did to him drove him insane.”

“He was undead.” Myrice shrugged one shoulder. “Now just… dead. Who did the deed?”

“It was a joint effort,” Emma said lightly. She’d reclothed herself in aristocratic armor. “Ser Hendry and my lance’s cleric subdued him, and our archer delivered the killing shot.”

The Gorgon glanced up at Penric, who hadn’t come down from his perch. The archer tipped his bycocket to the noblewoman, and she let out a quiet laugh.

“Ah, but your group is scary! Good work, my sweets, very good. The Marchioness will be pleased, as I am sure will her nephew.”

“This is not over.” Emma caught Lisette’s stare and let out a quiet sigh of defeat. “This… poor creature was just a castaway. The jackal is dead, but the lioness remains at large.”

Myrice nodded slowly. “True. Evangeline has proved elusive. She always was a haughty bitch.”

She passed off her helmet to her squire, a full-lipped young man whose surcoat sported the sulfur yellow sky and bloodstained fields of House Redmoor. She then paced a minute, chewing on her thumbnail.

“It is obviously a distraction,” Emma said. “She sends these creatures to sow chaos while she focuses on securing her power in the Bannerlands. We should invade.”

She said this with brutal casualness, and Myrice gave the younger woman a fond look. “I don’t disagree with you, my cruel hawk. Alas, the whole point of the Accord is to do everything in its power to avoid wars. Or at least make them a last resort. Besides, I hear armies are gathering in the south to fight that creature in Elfgrave. A war on two fronts…”

She tutted. “Forger is no fool. We are at war, my friends, but it is not like the wars we are used to, not the shield wall and the charge of chimera. It is this.” She pointed at the body. “It is blades in the dark and the actions of small groups like our own, the scalpel instead of the hammer.”

“Or the poisoned fang?” Emma quipped, arching an eyebrow.

Myrice just smiled.

“There’s something else.” Lisette hesitated as all the eyes in the ravine turned to her. “Something came out of Ser Ivan after he died.”

“His ghost?” Myrice waved a hand dismissively. “It’s common for such creatures.”

“No!” Lisette tried to hold onto her nerves. Myrice was much like an older Emma, and in many ways even more eager to wrap herself in that shroud of wickedness. With her, Lisette wasn’t at all certain it was just a front.

Hendry gave her an encouraging look, and Lisette continued in a calmer tone. “We think it might have been a demon. Abgrüdai.”

The attitude of the group changed at that taboo word. Emma frowned, and Myrice suddenly paid the cleric more heed. The other knights shifted uncomfortably.

“How are you sure?” The Gorgon asked.

Lisette glanced at Hendry again, hesitant to explain. The way he’d reacted before the vampire attacked… she believed it had something to do with his curse, but she didn’t want to say as much in front of these others. Only Emma and Penric knew that the young Hunting was corrupted by the touch of the Iron Hell.

“We have faced such creatures before,” Emma supplied. “Remember that it was our lance that battled the Carmine Killer that night, when the Vykes attempted to take the Emperor’s castle.”

Myrice nodded. “True. Well, if you’re certain. You believe it was possessing him?”

“I think it might have been dramatizing his vampiric hungers,” Lisette explained. “Making him a worse monster than he would have been otherwise. Remember all the things we’ve seen, the horrors? He isn’t the only one we’ve seen wrong like this.”

“Like those poor wretches at Prevale,” Emma mused. “They were eating each other even before we tracked Ivan there.”

Lisette ran her gaze across the group. “Perhaps this isn’t simply a case of a single mad noblewoman turned hemophage. What if something darker is behind Evangeline?”

“Occult conspiracy and fiends in the dark?” Myrice hummed a moment in thought. “Well, it’s not like such cases are entirely novel, or new. Cannibalism, diabolical rites, invocations to the old powers… We have never truly been free of such troubles, have we?”

Lisette couldn’t help herself. “Was your family not involved in some of that, Lady Myrice?”

Emma gave her a sharp look, but the Gorgon was only amused. “Yes! We were Recusant after all, good sister, and thus in rebellion against the God-Queen’s order. That is what that quaint moniker alludes to, is it not?”

“I only meant to imply that you have insight the rest of us lack,” Lisette said diplomatically.

“Insight.” Myrice mused on the word a moment. “Insight is one way to put it, I suppose. You should have seen the festivals House Gorgon hosted before we were compelled to mellow out for the Accord. Is that the insight you desire, Sister Lisette? To know how we once honored our ancestors, what we had to sacrifice to avoid being purged?”

Lisette lifted a hand. “I did not mean to give insult.”

Part of her had. What was wrong with her? Why was she so irritable lately? This wasn’t like her at all, not dependable Lisette, not the Empress’s personal attendant and trusted spy.

Get a grip, she ordered herself.

Myrice sighed and relented. “It is no great matter, good clericon. Though, if I’m being honest, I do miss the orgies.”

Hendry coughed. Lisette suspected she was being mocked, but her troubled thoughts distracted her from snipping back. “I don’t think the Vykes were our only enemy. Things have only gotten worse since summer.”

“There have always been pagan cults at work in Urn, dear priestess.” Myrice patted the side of her nightmarish chimera’s head. The eel-like thing made an odd warbling noise at its mistress’s touch. “The Heir’s power is felt, true, but She remains absent. Your own scripture says as much, and there are other powers that are still here. We brought them with us from the west, within us. My family carries that old order in our blood, as do many others.”

“She speaks the truth,” Emma said. Her mood seemed dark again.

The serpentine woman met Lisette’s eye, and that slitted pupil seemed to constrict even narrower. “The Execrated were not destroyed, only subdued. Now they sense we are vulnerable, torn apart by infighting, and they creep back in. Some have been here all along, waiting. When you become hungry enough, even the most profane power might seem an angel if it heeds your prayers and assuages your appetites. Trust me, Sister Lisette — our world remains very full of demons.”

The Execrated. An older name, one Lisette knew from study. It was what the Recusants called the beings who’d dwelt in the world before the God-Queen’s advent, the false gods and hungering spirits who lorded over mortals and battled the Sidhe before there were angels.

The gods the Recusants still worshipped, still refused to deny even after most of a millennium. They’d once done it in secret, in insular cults and pagan ritual brought over from the continent before the Exodus. But Lyda’s Plague and the original Inquisition angered them, created divisions between the Church and those older practices, and set the groundwork for the great war between the Houses of Urn.

It struck Lisette then that she’d never actually spoken to a Recusant like this. Myrice might be reformed and pardoned, but she was a look into that history. Those snake eyes held secrets of a very frightening and very ancient world.

Yet… You saw the dungeons beneath Rose Malin. You were part of that, even if as a double agent. There is rot on both sides of that line.

Emma cut in, thankfully ripping Lisette from her fit of doubt. “Well, it’s true that the Ark woman wasn’t a vampire during the tournament. I watched her fight. She was a beast, but very much alive and human. Something happened that night…”

“Back to Gardend, then?” Hendry mumbled. “Report to House Dance?”

Myrice hesitated, which drew a questioning look from Emma.

“I received a letter at the village,” the Gorgon said. “I believe it’s for you.”

Emma did not answer immediately. Lisette watched her school her features, retreat back into herself. She suddenly felt a sympathetic flutter of apprehension

“A letter?” Emma asked quietly.

“Delivered only a few hours ago,” Myrice confirmed, producing the letter from her chimera’s saddlebags. “I believe they might have been an elf, but I am not certain. They had that feel to them, though.”

The letter was sealed with a mark Lisette recognized, and immediately she knew who it was from. She kept her silence and waited with baited breath. Emma stared at the letter with an intense expression, then almost violently broke the seal and opened it. She read for mere seconds, and her lips parted.

“We must go.” She started moving to the back of the ravine, where their own mounts and gear were kept.

“What is it?” Lisette asked as she followed after the other girl. “What did she say?”

Hendry kept close in tow while Penric slid down from his overhang to fall in behind them, smoothly shadowing the cleric. In the shadows of the ravine, Lisette’s golden sutures dimly glowed on the archer’s pallid skin, marking the spots where they held his ruined body together.

Emma stopped in front of her own chimera, a gift from Faisa Dance. It was a demigriffin, a wingless cousin to the fabled griffons often depicted in old alchemical texts. She started to get its tack ready while the beast nipped the air impatiently, chirping at her.

“Emma?” Hendry asked.

Emma wheeled on them and held the letter up, speaking in a rush of excitement. “It’s from the Empress. Her caravan has left Garihelm and is en route back to Karles. She wants us to join her.”

Penric hummed. “A personal request from the Silver Queen herself? Ominous.”

Emma turned her back to them, probably to hide her own expression. None of them would say it out loud, but they’d all held the thought. Three months without word, and talk of a city burning in the south. Talk of a new war and the Sidhe gone mad and a cathedral being destroyed in Osheim.

Emma had tried several times to find that inn, the one that catered to ghouls and vampires and other dark things. She’d failed every time, and they’d watched her grow more withdrawn.

If the Empress wanted to see them…

“We must not refuse the Empress’s request that we attend her,” Emma said lightly. “Good job, everyone, but it’s time to go.”

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