Brooding clouds filled the grey evening, though Rosa couldn’t be certain whether they belonged to the heavens or her wandering mind. Thought throbbed, diffuse, a complement to parched mouth, aching joints and a stuttering, muffled drumbeat behind her eyes. After a day spent shivering in the crow’s cage – nearly two without food or water – dream eroded reality’s shore. So many times, she’d glimpsed Sevaka through the gloom. So many times, she’d faded into memory.
A stab of pain and warmth across her cheek brought her awake. Eyes opened into a storm of black feathers as the bird scrambled away from its erstwhile feast.
Rosa coughed and bit down, the leather gag bitter beneath cracked lips. Had it been a crow, or a raven? Was the Keeper of the Dead watching?
Perhaps it would be better to close leaden eyes and leave them thus. Defiance was all very well, but who any longer was she being defiant for? Those for whom she’d striven to set example were dead, throats cut by the pale-witch in the marketplace below. Dead eyes and accusing stares glimpsed in dream. Jonas, Mirada… even Drenn, though she’d at least died on her feet at Terevosk, not slaughtered like cattle.
Wind set the cage listing. Commotion in the marketplace drowned the sigh of rope and rusting iron. Carts rumbled from the reeve’s manor, gold bright beneath rope-lashed tarpaulins. Soldiers marched alongside, swords drawn and shields raised. A near-endless procession, driven by trumpet and drum, and then gone.
The streets fell silent and the rain came again, drenching Rosa’s sodden clothes anew, the sweet scent of it maddening for being so close. But the gag refused parched respite as readily as speech. The corners of her mouth were red raw from it.
Little by little, the soft patter bore her into dreams of mist and sable wings.
When a blare of trumpets brought her back, stars blazed in a cloudless sky, the waning moon reigning in the heavens. The marketplace was again full. A sullen Tressian crowd waited beyond a line of rust-coloured shields, white stags shining in moonlight. Immortal gold gleamed on the scaffold, the silver of a hooded pale-witch close by.
A new blare of trumpets, and a dazzling procession descended the manor house approach. More Immortals, the foremost bearing a gilded stag-banner, and all in rich, fur-edged cloaks. Thirava strode at their heart, silk robes iridescent beneath torchlight; the gemstones of his silver crown glittering fit to challenge the stars. The monarch of Redsigor in all his glory.
The cage jerked and plunged. It crashed back as iron struck cobbles, jarring Rosa’s aching knees and spine yet further. The cage door shrieked open. Rough hands dragged her into the open.
Abused flesh refused even to stand when bonds were cut. Feet dangled uselessly as two Immortals, faces hidden behind close-fitting helms, dragged her to the scaffold.
Still, defiance remained. It burned at Rosa’s core. But it was walled in by the same leaden ice that kept limbs shivering and fingers twitching.
“Behold, people of Redsigor!” Arms outspread, Thirava approached the scaffold’s edge. Even his voice hailed from someplace afar. Or maybe Rosa was far away, falling into mist. She could almost smell it – that peculiar scent of yesterdays and lorn memories. “This is the price of insurrection and the fate of all false saviours.”
The crowd offered no reply, or so Rosa believed. The fall of the cage had set her head raging anew; every faltering glimpse shaded red, every sound rushed with the waves of an invisible sea.
She barely felt it when the Immortals hoisted her high by arm and hip – the better for the crowd to see. Even keeping her head up was beyond her. She hated her weakness. The eternal she’d once been would have found the strength to fight. The Queen of the Dead would already have been free, and reaped every soul in the marketplace in retribution. To be those women again, if only for a moment.
Long enough to glimpse the fading horror in Thirava’s eyes as she took his life.
“Tonight the moon smiles upon us.” Thirava’s dry accent thickened beneath the Tressian words. “Ashana will have Lady Orova’s heart. The hands she raised against my rule will go to the fire!”
The old ritual, the stuff of Hallowside tales and nightmares. Barbarism the shadowthorns claimed behind them. The heart carved from living flesh and offered as feast to the wolves of Eventide. The hands incinerated so that even in the Light of Third Dawn she could hold no weapon. Better to receive the ripper’s grin given to Jonas and the others.
“Henceforth, this is the price of transgression!” shouted Thirava. “This is my land, and you my subjects. In coming days, when I return in triumph, I will reward faithlessness and loyalty with equal generosity!”
In a swirl of robes, he set his back to the silent crowd. Rosa’s world lurched as the Immortals lowered her to the scaffold. Not one pair of eyes met hers. She forgave them. She wouldn’t go to the mists resenting others’ fear. Essamere, Viktor – even Drenn’s wolf’s-heads – all had owed the eastwealders protection. All had failed.
The Immortals dragged Rosa past the pale-witch to stand before Thirava and stripped away the gag. Lungs heaved, drawing down the first unstoppered breaths in forever. The rich, rose-petal scent of perfumed robes parched her throat anew.
From some heretofore unknown reserve, Rosa found strength to raise her head and meet his preening, self-satisfied gaze. “Thought… I was to… rot.”
He leaned closer, nose almost touching hers. Thin lips cracked a malign smile. “Opportunity beckons, and plans change.” A gloved hand brushed her cheek, his thumb smearing the bloody gouge from the crow’s beak. “I’m sure this will prove just as memorable.”
“I’ll come back for you.” For a wonder, she managed the words without gasping.
A backhanded slap rocked back her head.
“Brave words,” Thirava sneered.
Rosa managed a dry, bitter chuckle. He might have witnessed her deeds at Govanna Field, but he’d not truly understood what the Raven might grant her, if she asked. “No.”
Uncertainty broke the arrogant sneer. Glorious. Better would have been to hear the Essamere battle cry, and see a host of knights in the street, Sevaka at their head. But some things weren’t to be.
“Show the Goddess her heart!”
Thirava descended the scaffold and withdrew to his bodyguard. The righteous ruler, standing proud beneath his heraldry. The crowd stirred to a low growl. More the moan of a tortured beast than anything uttered by human folk. The wall of clansmen turned about, shields and blades levelled at the onlookers.
The growl receded, but did not entirely fade.
Rosa was soon in motion again, held upright before the pale-witch by Immortals’ gauntleted hands.
Again, Rosa cursed sundered strength. Two Immortals and a single lunassera should have been nothing to her, not with her hands free. Yes, escape would have been impossible, but she might have ended Thirava’s sneer. Raven’s Eyes, but wiping the calm, appraising stare off the pale-witch’s face would have been enough.
The lunassera’s dagger came up, raised high above her head with ritual decorum. Behind the silver half-mask, grey eyes remained cold, expressionless. But below the mask’s curlicued lower arc, cheeks twisted to a knowing smile. Cheeks that were somehow wrong. Not quite the olive skin so common among the Hadari. More the weathered tan earned from a life outdoors.
“Until Death,” murmured the lunassera.
Rosa blinked at a decidedly Tressian accent. And not only Tressian, but the drawl of the city’s worst slums.
The dagger blurred. The Immortal to Rosa’s left collapsed, bloody hands flailing at a ragged throat. A second blur, and the other pitched backwards off the scaffold.
Unsupported, Rosa hit water-stained timbers. Fresh pain blurred to old harms.
Bloodstained robes pooling about her, the lunassera dropped to Rosa’s side. “Can you fight?”
Rosa crawled half-upright on trembling arms. Her right buckled, the throb of her scarred shoulder darkly vibrant. “No.”
The first cry tore free from stunned onlookers. Thirava bellowed a slew of urgent, guttural Hadari. The lunassera hung her head. “Don’t go anywhere.”
The dagger left her hand as she rose, a pained scream and heavy thud speaking of a victim found. Stooping briefly to snare an Immortal’s sword, she ran for the scaffold’s stairs.
The crowd’s growl deepened.
Cheeks hot with worthlessness, Rosa again tried to stand. The effort used every scrap of breath in her lungs, but her arm held.
At the top of the stairs, the lunassera’s kick sent a clansman tumbling into the marketplace. Steel scraped as she turned an Immortal’s blade. Gasping, daring her ailing body to betray her, Rosa gathered one knee beneath her, then the other.
The crowd’s fury found bitter crescendo, the rolling, rumbling sound of surging floodwaters, or an avalanche gathering pace. Harsh shadowthorn voices rose in contest.
Silsarian shields buckled as men and women came forward with fist, stone and boot. The outer marketplace descended into anarchy, Haldravord’s abused populace finding their fire in a moment of doomed courage. Some hurled themselves at Thirava’s retreating escort and died for their bravery.
“Send to the castle!” howled Thirava. “We need cataphracts!”
A stone caromed off the side of his head and he vanished behind his men’s shields.
A clansman died on the scaffold stairs, a knee bent beneath him by the stomp of the lunassera’s foot. Another went to the Raven with his mouth agape and a sword in his throat. An Immortal, chancing the opening, barrelled into the gap, taking the steps two at a time and his sword hacking down. The lunassera brought her sword about to parry. Steel chimed, and the sword ripped from her hand.
“Get up,” Rosa hissed to herself. “You’re not dead yet.”
The Immortal’s blade hacked down. The lunassera’s mask split in two. The sword crunched through bone. She dropped to the top step, a hollow cry tearing free.
The sound of a woman dying in her stead drove Rosa to her feet, no weapon but momentum and the will to act.
She struck the Immortal, the motion half shoulder charge, half outright collapse. He clubbed at her with an armoured sleeve. The world bucked, precarious balance lost. It took all Rosa had left not to fall. The Immortal’s sword came about.
“No!”
Impossibly, the lunassera lunged between them. Her empty hand formed a fist. Steel gleamed beneath moonlight, metal talons hissing free from the robes’ voluminous sleeve and punching through the shadowthorn’s scales. He sagged, and was gone.
The lunassera staggered. An empty hand tore the ruin of mask and hood free. No horror of mangled flesh and bone lay beneath, just a pale, ragged scar drawing steadily closed, and a wisp of black blood steaming silver in the moonlight. Rosa had seen such wounds before. She’d borne such wounds. The lunassera was an eternal – delivered from death by divine patronage, and bound to the living world by obsession.
More surprising was the face revealed. A likeness impossibly similar to one Rosa dearly loved. Auburn hair where Sevaka’s was blonde. The cast of features older. Harder. Uncertain.
Trumpets shook the night sky. Fresh screams rang out as hooves clattered on cobbles. The darkness of the street shone with cataphract scales. Spears dipped as they goaded horses to the charge. The marketplace became a tide of surging, desperate bodies, running for safety that didn’t exist.
“Who are you?” gasped Rosa.
“I’m family.”
Rosa glared at the bloody talons bound to her would-be saviour’s wrist. “You’re a kernclaw.”
“Once.” The eternal’s expression shifted, adopting earnest cast of brow. A perfect match for whenever Sevaka believed Rosa was being difficult. Which was often. Her voice grew in confidence. “I came to get you away from here.”
Rosa backed away from her grasping hand. The dizziness returned, worse than ever. The pounding in her head tinged everything black. Even the moon seemed darker. “No, the others… we have to help.”
A street could be held, maybe horses stolen. Some could escape. Some would live. But even as sluggish thoughts formed, she knew Thirava wouldn’t forgive this. He’d fill Haldravord with blood.
Again the eternal reached for her. “It’s already over. They had their moment. It’s more than most get.”
The words were rational, for all the woman’s urgency. But Rosa had never done well with reason. “I’m staying,” she rasped. “If you want to help me, you’ll stay too.”
She bent, fingers straining for a fallen sword. Fatigue and injury finally lost their patience. The scent of Otherworld stronger than ever, the world rushed black. Her last memory was of arms beneath hers and the eternal’s weary voice.
“Why are the selfless always so stubborn?”