The captain looms behind his salt-carved desk, his craggy face gone distant with horror. His lips move, but Élan’s not really listening. There’s a sinking feeling in her throat, like a plum stone swallowed by mistake.
“—and that,” he continues, the tap of his thick fingers breaking through her haze, “is why you arrested Her Royal Highness, Princess Nikolia of Myrne, heir to the amalgamate crown of our late king-consort’s foster brother, Archduke Nikolaus, and our closest ally against the depths? For standing in a corridor?!”
Fuck.
Élan has approximately a half-dozen things to worry about right now, but... sink it, did the princess have to be from Myrne? She likes Myrne; their olives and candied citrus are delicious, and their traders know the bawdiest songs.
The princess, whose posture transforms the hard-backed guardroom chair into a throne, coughs delicately into her jewel-ringed fist. “Actually, my title translates to ‘crown duchess’,” she corrects, exquisitely polite. “Myrne has no princesses.” One triple-layered violet sleeve—so exquisitely and fashionably slashed Élan had mistaken them for rags in the crypts’ dim light—falls away from her wrist, which is already blooming into a bruise from Élan’s ungentle grasp.
“My apologies, Your Highness,” the captain says, and bows—bows!—from his seat. “Rest assured, Gendarme Sentienne’s actions do not represent Piegny’s, or His Highness’s, broader view of Myrne.”
“Of course, of course,” the crown duchess murmurs with a wafting gesture of fabric. The scent of foreign flowers momentarily fills the room, and Élan valiantly exerts herself not to cough. “The gendarme was just doing her job, I’m sure. I imagine tensions are running high.”
It has been twenty-three days since Queen Marielle and her consort were laid to rest in the salt caves beneath clifftop Ghiarelle Palace. Their sole heir, Prince Arin, hides in his tower, wincing at the slightest noise. The few surviving gendarmes divide their off-duty hours between hammering dents out of plate armor and scrubbing blood from uniform tunics, now most of the funerals are done with.
You could probably say things were a little fucking tense.
Élan wants to protest, but there’s no point; the captain won’t take it well. Sweat beads on his forehead, catching on angry new scar tissue across his brow. It’s not that warm. This woman scares him.
“If Your Highness is not offended...” he says, cautiously.
“How could I be?” Now she’s gotten her apology, the crown duchess is as sweet as honey. Her accent droops and swirls the words into a soothing music, if you ignore what she’s actually saying. “It’s as you say: Piegny, Myrne—are we not the best of friends?”
“Absolutely.” He’s nodding like a pigeon, but his eyes, when they cut to Élan, are mean as a leashed hawk’s. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Élan swallows. She’s sure he will.
Once the crown duchess leaves, in a flourish of beautiful dark curls and billowing robes, the captain turns beady eyes on Élan.
“It wasn’t just any corridor, Captain,” she blurts, breaking painfully free of parade rest now the enemy’s left the room. “She was kneeling right outside the queen’s crypt, sir; she wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t say anything except some magewaffle about plants, and if she was after their blood—”
“I don’t give a single foundering fuck where you caught her, Gendarme, or what you thought she wanted.” His face is as tight as the seal on a tomb. “Anything short of wrist deep in His Highness’s ribcage, you bow and scrape and make nice, understand? We’re drowning in titled outlanders, and I won’t trust a tidesborn one of them till there’s a head under that crown again. Yes, this one wants a wedding, not a war, but if you piss off royalty too much that might change, Gendarme. Do you want that to change, Gendarme?”
“No, sir!” Élan barks.
“Then get out!”
“Yes, sir!”
As she turns to go, she hears, quietly, “Endless oceans, let’s hope our boy’s head will hold the weight.”
Like the crown duchess’s arrival was a signal, salt-wreathed Ghiarelle goes from fortress to circus overnight. Carriage after carriage, shorecraft after riverboat, by dirigible and even by dromedary train, dignitaries stream through Ghiarelle’s crystal gates and up her cliffs from the perilously hungry sea. There are dukes and marquesses and clan heads, two tussling mage schools from opposite corners of the Saiqur wastes, and a Prince of Flame from clear across the Sundering Ocean, all bound for His Highness’s coronation.
Not that Élan’s seen so much as a glimpse. For her catastrophic fuckup with the Crown Duchess of Myrne, the captain has bolted her to the most depressingly static station upon which he can justify wasting two fully armored gendarmes. She’s pulling double shifts, barely time to stuff bread and cheese into her face before falling into a fitful sleep; the other gendarmes avoid her gaze, like her new station’s the catching kind of curse.
It didn’t used to be this way.
Guarding Prince Arin’s door in the lead-up to the coronation should have been an honor and a joy. It isn’t. Since the funeral, grief has burned their laughing moon-bright prince away to a husk.
Oh, he does the minimum required for the revelry: he sits at high table during dinner, and opens the dances, and welcomes the diplomats before running back to the dark silence of his rooms. But he does so wound tight with clothing, collars pulled high enough to hide half his face, eyes bruised-looking and hands flinching from contact. Even the sound of silverware makes him wince; he eats his meals in private.
It isn’t Élan’s place to worry.
She’s just a guard.
Then again, she’s not sure there’s anyone left whose place it would be. Her partner-at-guard certainly doesn’t seem to. Mind you, it’s entirely plausible Guilhan had all fellow-feeling bleached out of him as a child; if not, then losing his partner to the depth-spawn has certainly finished the job.
“Food’s late,” she says, because it’s true, and because if she stands here much longer she’s going to scream. “I’m going to check.”
She makes it three strides before Guilhan whisper-yells, “Come back here!” after her.
Élan pauses. “We’re to keep him safe,” she says, and keeps it simple, like he’s a child. “Starved isn’t safe. Nor’s poisoned, if someone intercepted it.”
“But—”
“Sundering seas, Guilhan, leave off. I’ll be back before anyone knows it.” Frankly, she could stay away long enough to cook His Highness’s dinner herself and still expect that to be true—and she’s a godsawful chef. “Surely you can hold your piss for half an hour?”
She leaves him there, gaping like a fish, and tries to squash the spiteful flash of pleasure at knocking him off his dignity before she gets tempted to do it again.
Reaching the kitchens kills what’s left of that petty joy faster than snuffing a candle. They’re quiet. The kitchens are never quiet.
Cooks and pages and wood-bearers alike have clotted around a wound in the middle of the floor: a fallen boy, a tray spilled, and a dark-haired kneeling figure in layer upon layer of thin-spun robes.
“What happened?” Élan demands, grabbing a page girl near the back of the pack.
“Simo just—fell,” the girl answers, jaw slack. She can’t be more than thirteen, fourteen; barely as high as Élan’s shoulder. “Cook yelled he wasn’t breathing, and then—the lady, she...” Simo. That’s the prince’s page, isn’t it?
“Air mage,” another woman says, hair braided back and netted like a baker. She nods grimly. “Pulling the breath back, most likely. Lucky she was passing. Poor kid. Run ragged, must be, to collapse like that.”
Élan carefully pushes through the crowd, nudging people apart with her spear butt. It’s the Crown Duchess of Myrne at the center of the circle, dark lashes fanned across those high-boned cheeks, motionless as if she’s posing for a coinsmith. Because that’s precisely Élan’s luck.
Air mage. Huh. All right. Not just a froth of fabric and jewels, after all.
The crown duchess hovers one hand over the fallen boy’s still face, the other over his chest. If Élan listens closely, she can hear a thin, musical hum, wavering like light on waves. The kitchen staff’s whispers easily drown it.
Ah, fuck. If that chef’s to be believed, then the noble arrived only after the boy fell. She can’t have caused it. She’s trying to help.
Élan passes a hand over her face, and turns, putting her back to the pair. Captain’s going to have her head for getting within a spear’s length of the woman, but there’s a child at risk. Élan braces her feet, plants her spear, and lifts her chin.
“Make space!” she says, pulling parade-ground pitch and posture around her like a surcoat. “Step back!”
With the grumbling noise of thwarted gossip, the crowd disperses. Élan glares the last few stragglers into submission, makes sure someone has sent for a physician, and circles to kneel cacophonously on the other side of the fallen child.
It’s undeniably the prince’s page: not only does the royal blue uniform mark his rank, the boy’s a fosterling noble from one of the southern kingdoms, with skin a brown almost as dark as his close-curled hair. She’s seen him frequently, this past week.
His chest moves, though barely. The crown duchess is frowning.
“What do you need?” Élan asks, and the woman’s face tilts towards her.
“I thought I recognized that voice,” she says without opening her eyes. Her smile is thin. “Do you sing, Gendarme? You’ve the lungs for it.”
“Well enough,” Élan replies, bemused.
“Give me five notes, then, ascending and descending. Slowly.” It’s a voice used to unquestioning obedience; if she resents past indignities at Élan’s hands, the feeling has been buried in impeccable etiquette. So Élan sings.
The crown duchess does something complicated with her hand, then her eyes blink open. Simo’s chest continues to rise and fall, tied to the rhythm of Élan’s voice.
“There’s something...” she murmurs, leaning over the boy’s face. She peels his lips back and runs her fingers over his teeth before Élan can say a word—not that she would, trapped as she is humming Simo’s lungs full and then empty again.
It’s a queer sensation. Magic doesn’t run in her family, and Élan has never so much as stirred the brine in an offering dish. Does the crown duchess feel this powerful all the time?
It would explain the way she holds herself. Even kneeling on the grubby-tiled kitchen floor, the line of her shoulders is as straight as a sword. Her sleeves are rumpled and she’s getting spit on her fingers and she still looks like a statue sprung to life.
Élan yanks her attention back where it belongs. While she’s allowed herself to become distracted, said distraction has stuck half her hand down the page boy’s throat.
“What are you—” Élan says, forgetting, and the boy’s ribs stutter.
“Keep singing!” the noble snaps, though Élan has already realized her mistake and is grasping frantically for lost notes. She goes too fast, too high, loses control, and the boy gasps, back arching off the tiled floor, jaw clenching. The noble swears, or possibly casts—Élan barely knows enough Myrnish to not get swindled—and yanks her hand free, skin scraping against teeth.
There’s a long strand of something sickly greenish-white clutched between her fingers, emerging from the boy’s mouth.
The crown duchess keeps pulling, muttering under her breath. Élan can’t look away, song trailing uselessly off. It’s impossible, it’s nauseating, and it’s clearly hurting the boy.
Eventually, the crown duchess sits back on her heels, hands tangled with a red-flecked mass of strands, and the boy gasps on his own, ragged and out of sync. His eyes shoot open. His previously limp hand clutches at his chest. A look of bewildered shock crosses his face. And then, the tears.
As a cook bundles the child away towards hot drinks and soothing words, Élan leans in. “Is that—” she asks quietly, staring.
The mage doesn’t even glance up from examining the mass of plantlife. “Oh, no, no,” she says, voice sweet. “Of course it couldn’t be anything to do with the strange growths I was investigating when a gendarme so diligently took it upon herself to escort me from the back corridors without so much as a sample.”
The flower has thorns, it seems. Flustered, Élan swallows a strange burst of guilt. “I—” she starts. And stops.
The crown duchess has dropped her pointedly vacant smile and is carefully pinching a segment near the vine’s tip. The fibrous mass from inside Simo’s lungs is largely without leaves, but near the top, where it would have reached the open space of the boy’s mouth and nestled in behind his teeth, several sharp green teardrops unfurl.
Damn it. Élan recognizes those leaves. The forsaken woman had been holding a plant with identical ones down in the crypts. A plant Élan had knocked to the ground, and presumably trampled, when she’d seized, cuffed, and dragged her prisoner before the captain. A plant Élan had assumed the woman smuggled in to use as a pretext for her infiltration.
“Is it... a curse?” Élan asks. Her voice isn’t quite low enough, and a prep chef fumbles a chop on a nearby bench, knocks an onion to the floor. They’re being watched.
If something evil is taking root in Ghiarelle, gossip and panic will only spread it faster. Élan shifts closer to the noble.
“Maybe.” The crown duchess frowns over her sample. Up close, Élan notes golden flecks in her brown eyes, like the speckled feathers of a falcon. Her olive skin is very smooth. “I don’t know yet. But either way, it’s bad.”
Élan is a professional. She is a highly trained, highly disciplined member of an elite armed force of guardsmen and women who have protected salt-wreathed Ghiarelle for generations, against enemies foreign and domestic and suboceanic alike. She needs to report this. Immediately. It’s beyond suspicious—why would a foreign mage, unfamiliar with the palace, be the one to catch a disharmony this severe? There’s an undeniable chance Nikolia’s behind it, or at least familiar with its origins.
But how would the home-grown priests and secular brine mages have noticed? Those who survived the attack which took Their Majesties have exhausted themselves on the repairs; Élan can’t say she’s seen robe nor scepter inside the palace for a week or more. All their fears are turned out to the sea, to the things which lurk beneath the waves. There’s no attention left for trouble within salt-carved Ghiarelle.
The crown duchess’s robes are speckled with blood—she’s ruined them to save a servant boy. And even now, with Élan kneeling before her in full armor, spear close at hand, her attention is on the vine, not the threat.
Élan’s struggling to keep her gendarmerie-trained paranoia pointed where it should be.
Besides, if she takes this to the captain, like she should, he’s going to think she’s holding a grudge. He’s more likely to take back her tunic and put her out to pasture, no matter how little he can afford to lose another spear these days.
No. She’s alone in this. She needs to figure it out herself.
The first rule stabbed crudely into the lintel over the gendarmerie’s barracks is very simple: if there’s a threat in the palace, odds are it’s aimed at the royals.
So Élan watches every step of the preparation for the prince’s lunch, then carries it up herself instead of appointing a replacement for Simo. It’s as clean as can be hoped. Even so, as the door creaks open beneath her cautious knuckles, Guilhan glaring from the side, Élan’s palms sweat.
“Your Highness?” she calls into the dim, silent chambers.
There’s a slithering rustle of cloth on cloth. “Simo?” It’s a little hoarse.
“No, Your Highness,” Élan says softly, and, praying she hasn’t caught him crying, crosses to the table by what once had been crystal-clear salt-paned windows facing out across the depths. The paysans had been called to crosshatch them first thing, and when that had proved insufficient for her prince, the staff had depleted half the wing of carpets to keep away the light. It’s cursed effective: the room’s sepulchral. She can see shapes, but nothing small or detailed.
“Simo had a bit of an... accident, but I’ve brought your lunch, Highness. I’m Gendarme Sentienne.”
“Ah.” There’s no recognition in his voice as the prince shuffles out from behind the bed curtains. “Thank you, Gendarme.”
It’s a dismissal.
Sink it, she still can’t see. She will not leave without confirming he’s safe.
Clumsy, Élan bows, and contrives to knock the window hangings askew. A blade of light slices through groggy darkness, and Élan scans the chairs, the floor, even the carpets, looking for any sign of the curse. White vines against milk-white salt—there’s nothing, and nothing, and nothing.
“Drowning depths, Gendarme,” the prince swears, one hand thrown up to shield his eyes, and Élan, guilty, flicks the curtain closed.
“Sorry, sir,” she says, unthinking and terrified, and backs away, because:
There’s a tiny twist of teardrop leaves curling amongst the lace of her prince’s embroidered cuff.
“Well?”
All in all, the crown duchess has dealt gracefully with getting dragged wrist-first out of a lazy afternoon cocktail reception. She’d smiled and bowed and made excuses; she’d left her wine and her circle of enraptured fellow diplomats with a flutter of cloth and perfume. She’d let Élan pull her through servants’ passages and narrow archways until they’d emerged in the chill dim crypts beneath. Even now, her question is composed as much of worry as irritation.
The effort of keeping upright and silent through the rest of her interminable shift has turned Élan’s voice to salt. Her neck muscles feel like iron from clenching her teeth. She can barely swallow, let alone answer.
Even in the heart of the palace, despite the brinecraft purifications and the rituals of cleansing after death, her prince is under attack.
She should have gone to her captain, but this isn’t his kind of battle. A half-seen glimpse of a leaf clinging to her grief-stricken liege? The captain would never impose on His Highness’s privacy at such slight evidence from a currently disgraced junior guardswoman. A servant child afflicted by some strange infection? All too common, this close to the malevolent deep. He’d think her saltstruck, afflicted with battlefear. Jumping at shadows.
Which is why she has to cast her lot here. With the only other person who has noticed the trouble. And known enough to cure the page boy, besides.
“This one wants a wedding, not a war.” The captain’s words hadn’t been meant as an endorsement, but they will have to be approval enough.
Élan licks her lips. Draws a breath. Tries again.
“I saw...” No. Not that. “My prince, he had...” Or that. Sink it, where are the words? Her heart is pounding, palms sweating.
“You came down here,” she manages. To the crypts. “Before. Is it...?”
The crown duchess looks around, lips firming as she registers where Élan has brought them. “The origin? Possibly. There’s only one way to find out.”
Élan swallows again. “This isn’t your duty, Your Highness,” she says, staring fixedly at the noble’s left ear. “I’d understand if you didn’t—that is, I can’t ask you to—”
“Oh, stop that,” the crown duchess says, and grasps Élan’s arm until she’s forced to meet the noble’s eyes. They’re deadly serious. “There’ll be time enough for diplomacy later. I don’t want to see this spread any more than you do.” She waits until Élan nods, then pushes away and starts down into the darkness. “And don’t call me ‘Your Highness’,” she says, voice echoing against the naked stone. “Surely by this point, you can use my name.”
Élan’s not sure she dares.
It’s odd how much she wants to.
There’s no chance to dwell on it. In the days since Élan last patrolled here, the vines have grown past hiding.
The deeper the pair of them walk, the less inclined they are to speak, stepping carefully around the spots where falling light has coaxed leaves from the embedded growth.
Nikolia crouches by the largest patch, tracing her fingers along the walls. “Here,” she says, and hums. The tips of her fingers glow, and the rock turns just translucent enough to follow the bundle of vines down into the floor. It vanishes beneath the carved lintel of a locked crypt entrance.
“This matches what I pulled from the boy.” She grimaces like a child reminded they had to eat the hated seagrass they’d prayed the parent had forgotten, and says, “So much for hoping I was wrong.”
It’s wry and inclusive and utterly human. All at once, Élan is struck by how much she likes the woman. She laughs, unintended, and it feels a little like choking.
Nikolia stands, concerned, and Élan waves her off. “Nothing, nothing,” Élan tells her. “Are you certain?”
The mage clicks her tongue. “I’ve forgotten more about horticulture than your entire salt-blighted nation has ever conceived of,” she says, drier than Piegny’s admittedly drought-prone soil, “and this is no kind of gods-given plantlife, to grow so fiercely here without the sun. Who knows what it’s feeding on.”
“I... might have some idea,” Élan says, much as she hates to give her morbid suspicions a voice. She busies herself with the keys at her belt, unhooking them and fumbling through the ring. “This is where I caught you, last time.” Her fingers are clumsy in her armor, and it takes three tries to recover the key for the door in front of them. “That’s Queen Marielle’s crypt.”
This is almost definitely treason. No foreigner should so much as breathe into the royal tombs, let alone set foot there.
But a choice between honoring the dead and preserving the living is no real choice at all, or so Élan tells herself, leading them down towards the light.
Salt-pale vegetation dips in and out of the walls as they walk. It means one of two things: either the barrier spell didn’t take, and the crypt’s been open to sky and sea for a month, allowing this thing entry, or the curse was seeded when the depth-spawn ripped Queen Marielle’s head from her body and tore the king consort’s chest open from navel to neck. She’s honestly not sure which option’s worse.
The stink of rot rises with the sunlight as they round the last corner into the open burial cavern.
Élan has never seen one in person. They’re sacred, secret places, meant for priests and family. It’s smaller than she’d imagined. Calmer. More picturesque, with the twin crystal biers and the blue of sky and sea not ten yards from their feet.
Chill afternoon air blows in through a silver-flecked filtering barrier, carrying the cries of sea birds and the crash of waves. Beautiful it might be, but one step too far, and it’s a long, tumbling death onto the rocks below.
Nikolia trails her fingers over the encasing crystal as she walks, vines crunching under her sandals. “Ugh,” she says, one sleeve pressed over her face. “Should it smell like that?”
The vines underfoot flinch from Élan’s armored feet as she reaches the crown duchess’s side. Élan draws a breath, as shallowly as she knows how.
The smell nearly chokes her. Boiling swamps and tide pools long abandoned by the sea; something like iron, but sweeter. It clogs her throat like crematory smoke.
“No,” she manages, swallowing against a sudden rush of nausea. “The salt, it... preserves. It’s meant to, anyway.” Seal a body in a chunk of salt three times its size, and very little disintegrates.
Nikolia rounds the end of the biers and drops to a crouch, one sleeve held as a mask. Her fingers trace the strange, brown-flecked symbols painted onto the smooth chalk floor.
“Gendarme...”
“Élan,” she corrects. She’s either coming out of this one a hero or unemployed; hearing the title right now is a little too pointed a reminder.
That earns her a quick, bright glance back over Nikolia’s shoulder. “Élan, then. Can you clear these?”
“These” meaning the vines covering the floor. Élan turns her spear blade-down, gets it under the matted plantlife and starts flipping clumps of vines towards the heaped mass of the things piled near the open edge of the cliff. She turns her head back towards the biers whenever her burning lungs force her to inhale. She’s taking no chances of picking up a parasite; Simo’s blood-flecked tangle is prominent in her memory.
Is the cliff the answer? Did some creature of the depths manage to send its tendrils up the rockface? The way the vines flinch and shrivel from her blade’s salt-blessed metal suggests something otherworldly. The smell grows worse.
The uncovered symbols Nikolia is tracing are too detailed to be depth-spawn work. She makes a low, worried noise.
“Well?” Élan asks, planting the butt of her spear. “Is it a curse?”
“Not... quite.” Her voice is tight. “Dear gendarme, perhaps you could... step towards me. Slowly.”
She’s looking past Élan.
Élan turns.
At first, she can’t tell what the crown duchess is staring at. There’s nothing standing or moving behind her; no threat that she can see. The floor below her feet is mostly clear of vegetation, and flaking glyphs spread in a circle no wider than the haft of her spear. She’s a foot from the biggest lump of plant matter, and her scraping has nudged up the edge of it. Long white strands are writhing slowly back towards the drop, unveiling even thicker roots below.
Sundering seas, this smell. It crawls down the back of her throat, meaty and sweet. Like something’s died and been abandoned to rot.
“Gendarme. Élan.”
Élan bends, creaking, at the knees. Twitches back one more knot of weed from the pile.
Ah. Not roots. Not roots at all.
Fingers.
Hadn’t she just seen this lace cuff, those rings? The hands have swollen in death; the flesh is distended with weeks of rot, soft to bursting, wrapped and wreathed in vines.
Élan stumbles back, gorge rising, as the shape becomes clear—there a leg, a foot, here the torso, vines dipping in and out of flesh like a needle through cloth.
“Be careful!” Nikolia cries, but Élan can’t; her feet scuff against the floor and something in the air comes suddenly taut. There’s an unheard noise, a plucked string so deep she feels it in her bones, and the shapes below her feet turn as hot as coals.
“Élan!” There’s a burst of sound—a song?—and a gust of air flings her back. Élan loses grip on her spear, on the floor; she hits Her Majesty’s bier with a sound like a horse kicking over a smithy and clatters to a heap on the ground.
Get up. She has to get up. Her head is ringing.
The vines are moving.
Where is Nikolia?
One hand to the floor. Roll onto her side. The stone is shuddering. Glowing red, too, which is deeply fucking problematic, but if she stretches—Élan gets her fingers against the butt of her spear, grabs, fails. Curses as it clatters away. Scrabbles a little farther. Succeeds. Gets the spear in her hand, plants it against the floor. Shoves. Makes it upright.
Across the crypt, the silver-thin glinting barrier shudders once, twice, then shatters into a thousand sharp-edged fragments. Tendrils of green-leafed vine appear around the cliff-edge, weaving like snakes tasting the air.
Nikolia’s by her side, safe, steadying Élan when she stumbles. “What...” Élan tries to ask, but there’s blood in her mouth. She spits. “What is it?”
“A resurrection array, as far as I can tell,” the mage says, stepping in close against Élan’s non-dominant side as the vines surge closer. She’s gained a lightness to her tone again, but it’s clearly taking her some effort. “An attempt, anyway. It never works.” Her eyes are more whites than iris. “That’s your prince? He’s a few weeks dead, I’d say. He must have really loved them to try.”
It hits like a stave to the ribs, the sixth or seventh in a day, when your body is burning and it takes a second to even realize you’ve been hit.
He’s dead.
Prince Arin is dead.
That pile of flesh and torn-apart fabric, the smell, the black smears on the floor—it’s her prince. Her liege. Her duty.
“Stay close,” Nikolia says, low-voiced and sharp. The trickle of vines has become a wave, a waterfall of sharp-leafed greenery cascading in from the ledge. Élan puts her back to the mage’s, raises her spear. Adjusts her grip. Braces herself, as Nikolia begins to hum, eerie and double-layered.
Air whips in from the sky beyond, tearing through the vines and making them writhe. Élan narrows her eyes against the gale as the mage wraps them in loop after loop of wind. Nikolia’s silks billow and surge like edged weapons themselves, and the rush of vines hesitates, slows, and coils to a stop.
It can’t get to them, is Élan’s first thought.
And then:
It doesn’t want to.
The vines have stopped in the center of the circle, coiling in and in. The sun-warmed greenery is joined by white tunneling vines from the walls and floor, by brown flesh-stained strands which tug free of Prince Arin’s remains with wet, slurping noises. The mass presses together like baby rats in a nest, pushing into and somehow through one another, growing fatter and taller inch by inch.
Élan swallows. The sigils’ red glow is rising.
“Nikolia...” she says slowly. “I think maybe we should. Leave. Now. Quickly.”
The mage’s shoulders shift against Élan’s armor when Nikolia pauses to draw breath. The ribbons of air slow, but don’t stop.
It’s too late, though. Much too late.
Prince Arin steps from the circle, pale and nude and flawlessly human from crown to sole. He brushes a leaf from the corner of his mouth, and it flutters to the ground.
“Ah,” he says, tilting his head. His voice is hoarse. “The guard. How unfortunate.” On the ground behind him, unearthed by the transformation, the corpse’s distended face lolls. Its cheek, pressed against the ground, has darkened with pooling blood. The crypts’ preservative barrier has kept insects from her prince, at least. His eyes are whole, grey-filmed and blank as they stare into hers across the magic he wasted his life to buy.
“Your Highness,” Nikolia says behind her, exquisitely polite, and Élan shudders.
The thing inhabiting Prince Arin’s form barely looks her way. “Inconvenient,” he says, stepping daintily over the painted lines. “But not insurmountable.” He moves almost correctly, but there’s something off about his skin. It’s writhing strangely, pulse pressing up from underneath in ways no heartbeat ever would. Wherever light touches flesh, green wells up and is quickly suppressed.
Do something! Élan shouts at herself in horror. You have to—
The prince reaches out. His hand is, as ever, delicate, and his wrist curves as elegantly as a dancer’s. The tip of his finger bulges.
“Lift,” Nikolia’s voice, a thread of a whisper, “your godsdamned spear.”
And Élan does.
She gets it between them like a barrier, and the prince’s eyes narrow at its engravings, even as vines burst from beneath his skin. They’re fast, but Élan’s faster. Two hands on the haft, and block, and twist—the plant-prince-monster hisses with pain, vines withering against the blessings, but that won’t last for long; the haft is only wood. Élan steps back, gets her blade between them, and slashes. The monster flinches.
“That’s it,” she says, barely hearing herself. “You can’t beat—”
The flesh of his back begins to writhe.
Ah, fuck.
“Run!” Élan shouts, raising her spear as the prince-thing’s flesh bursts like rotten fruit. She’s answered only by the sound of song and wind, the hiss and tear of steel against vine—and slice, and parry, and lunge—and the sound of a monster laughing.
Nikolia’s not backing off. Élan can’t protect them both. The vines are fast, and agile, and their master is clearly enraged by the singed ash a holy weapon makes of its tendrils. Élan can’t spare more than glances.
They’re enough. She catches moments: the crown duchess by the royal biers, ferocious, her robes a seething whirlwind of silks slicing vines to shreds. Ducking towards the wall, the melisma of her voice tearing away strands from Élan’s spear-haft, cutting it free when Élan’d thought she’d have to lose it. Catching Élan’s eyes over the thing’s shoulder, determined, blood on her cheek, drawing breath for another attack as Élan pulls the monster’s focus.
“Hey!” Élan yells. Nikolia creeps along the smooth-carved wall. The monster’s face is Élan’s prince’s, even now. Scorch marks pucker down its chest, left arm gone and the right a sea of writhing vines, whipping out to fend her off. Its naked feet are smeared with her prince’s blood and rot. “What’d you think was gonna happen, tidescum? You think we wouldn’t catch you? You think you were gonna get to rule?!”
This thing, it’s foul and it’s cursed but it’s impatient, bad at pacing itself; it doesn’t understand the ebb and flow of combat. If the mage can bind it long enough, if Élan can get blessed steel through its heart....
It opens its mouth, and the tongue is as pale as clam flesh. “I like crowns,” it says, and smiles, boyish and aloof, turning its head like an owl. “I like killing people who wear them.”
And in a burst of plant-flesh, it knocks Nikolia back into the wall so hard that the dull thunk of her head against stone echoes louder than the sudden absence of her song.
The monster says several things after that. About loyalty and rewards. The contract between knight and monarch. It tries to bribe her. Steps in close, like it thinks her silence is defeat, is acceptance. Lowers its guard.
Élan’s not really listening. There’s a heavy rushing noise drowning out its words, like she’s stuck in a tidal cave and the ocean’s roaring in, tugging at her knees, her waist, her shoulders.
All she can see is Nikolia’s body, crumpled and silent. A statue of a different kind. An effigy.
It’s not even her kingdom.
She’d sensed something wrong, and Élan hadn’t listened, and now—
Élan raises her spear.
Gets the blade up against its gut while it’s busy tempting.
Shoves.
There’s some yelling, at first. Once it realizes. Screaming. Thrashing.
Vines burst from its trunk and scrabble up her gauntlets, her spaulders. One gets into the gap beneath her left armpit and makes it through the gambeson, then two, stabbing; another gets into the hinge at her side, weaves deep beneath her skin. She crushes her left arm down before the tendrils can reach her lungs, grits her teeth against the burning, and holds.
The pain hovers somewhere out of reach, sickly and searing. She’s going to pay for this.
But she’s gotten the broad blade of her weapon up deep into its guts, and she’s pierced the green, underwater glow hiding beneath its mockery of a ribcage. Light spills out, cascading down along the etched blessings like blood down a butcher’s runnels.
The noise fades down to a crackling desiccation. The flesh blackens, then crumbles, then falls to dust.
Élan falls too. She goes to her knees before her prince, whose poor corpse has been knocked back across the floor. It’s much the worse for wear, trampled and broken by the fighting. Not suitable for clear salt, anymore. Better, perhaps, for burning.
He’ll never be her king. Not now.
Maybe he never wanted to, to try something like this.
It’s not his fault, she tells herself, and mostly manages to believe it. He thought there was a chance. He must have been desperate.
Her eyes sting. She’s weeping.
A breeze from the open sky beyond blows dust up off the floor. Light as ash, it dances back towards the salt-rock biers, staining Their Majesties’ tombs with grit.
It’s time to get up. Time to stand, and turn, and climb the stairs; find a priest. Turn herself in. Let the wheels start turning. There’ll be council votes and pledges of allegiance, royal cousins fighting cousins for what’s left of the throne. War, if that goes badly. Death.
In a moment. Everything hurts.
It seems distant. Insignificant, somehow, against the weight of what’s been lost.
Nikolia.
Élan staggers upright. She uses her monster-killing weapon as a crutch with every step. There’s no one to see. Nikolia’s eyes are closed.
Élan lowers herself to the floor, free hand pressing her gambeson up against the ooze of blood she’ll have to deal with eventually. Up close, she can tell the woman’s breathing.
Something hot and burning rushes up her throat: relief, or hysteria, or maybe anger, who the fuck knows. “Wake up,” Élan says, and if her voice is shaky, she’s earned it. “Come on, princess, there’s no drowning way I’m carrying you.” She puts her hand on one limp shoulder. Squeezes.
“‘M not a princess,” Nikolia says, eyelids twitching, and bats Élan’s hand away. “By the mountain, my head feels like I tried to outdrink Niko.” She blinks, and shifts farther up the wall, pain creasing deep valleys into her face.
Her pupils are lopsided, but she seems aware. “Not... quite,” Élan says, not sure how to explain what’d actually taken place, but the crown duchess’s gaze catches on the dead prince, the ash-strewn floor, the blackened scorch where the beast had burned away.
“Ah,” she says, straightening with a wince, and retrieves a smile from some hidden reserve. “Really, now. You couldn’t wake me for the fun part?”
Her hair is a bird’s nest and there’s blood smeared down the side of her face and those gold-brown eyes are still struggling to focus and her robes really do look like rags, now, and—
Oh, Élan thinks, quiet as a stone dropped in a pool. She’s beautiful.
“I, uh,” Élan says. “Maybe overreacted. A little. When you fell.”
Nikolia laughs, briefly, then flinches, pressing one hand to her forehead. “Oh, you know,” she says, and waves airily. “Under the circumstances I might be inclined to forgive your presumption. Just this once.” Her eyes dip. “I might even admit to being... impressed. Gendarme.”
“Élan,” Élan whispers.
“Élan,” she repeats, solemnly. “You’re far too tall, you know. Kneeling like that.”
“What?”
She laughs again, nose crinkling, and says, “Come down here, sink it. I can’t reach.”
So Élan does.
When they kiss, it’s with the taste of blood and salt hot between them. Despite the fear and desperate horror, Nikolia is soft and warm against her. The scent of flowers clings beneath the char.
But, “Wait,” Élan says, pulling back. “I thought... Prince Arin.”
“This one wants a wedding,” her captain had said. She glances back across the room and winces. There will be no weddings here. Not for quite some time.
When she looks back, Nikolia’s watching her, centuries and kingdoms heavy behind her eyes. “It could have been, in another life,” she says slowly. “What’s happened here will kill more futures than that one.”
Élan swallows. The sea behind and beneath them is very loud.
Over time, even the tallest cliff might fall to the relentless bite of waves.
Piegny will fall far faster than that.
“Will you... stay?” she asks, words dying on her tongue. “Will Myrne...?” It’s not her place to ask this; it’s a question for councilors and regents and bishops, not soldiers bleeding in the crypt of those they failed to defend, wreathed in rot and ruin. But she’s here. And they aren’t.
Nikolia’s eyes are wide. “I—” she starts, and falters. “I can’t promise that.”
Élan looks away. “Of course,” she manages, and fumbles back, gets a hand underneath herself. Starts to stand. “Of course. I shouldn’t have— We should—”
“I’ll try, though.”
Élan pauses.
Nikolia is looking up at her, chin raised, jaw set. “I can’t make promises for my brother,” she repeats, and lifts her hands, imperious.
Élan raises her gingerly to her feet. She’s unsteady, her bare fingers slipping against Élan’s gauntlets. But she makes it.
“But I want that,” she says, firm as the mountains. “And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, my dear gendarme”—she lifts her hand, presses her thumb against the ridge of Élan’s cheekbone, wipes away the salt that’s dried there, and smiles—“I tend to get what I want.”