“DAMNATION.”

I drop my sword and rip the knife from my chest, throwing it to the floor. There’s a flash of heat in my abdomen, followed by a sharp, prickling sensation. And in an instant, the wound heals. There’s almost no blood; it doesn’t even hurt—at least not much. Seeing this, all five necromancers go still. They know—the moment I came through the door they knew—but it’s different altogether to see it work: the stigma branded into the skin above my navel, a scrawl of black. XIII. The stigma that protects me and shows me for what I am. An enforcer of the Thirteenth Tablet. A witch hunter.

They back away, as if I’m the one to be afraid of.

I am the one to be afraid of.

I lunge forward and punch the nearest necromancer in the stomach. He doubles over as I slam my elbow into the back of his neck and watch him slump to the floor. I turn to one of the others. Stomp on his foot, pinning it to the floor, and slam my other foot into the side of his kneecap. He drops to his knees, howling. In a flash, I snatch his hands and bind them tightly with the brass handcuffs. Brass is impenetrable to magic; there’s no escaping for him now.

I round on the other three. They hold their hands in front of them, backing slowly away. From the corner of my eye, I see Caleb watching me. And he’s grinning.

Snatching another pair of cuffs from my belt, I start toward them. Close up, I can see how old they really are. Gray hair, wrinkled skin, watery eyes. Each of them seventy if they’re a day. I want to tell them they’d be better off going to church and saying their prayers instead of exhuming bodies and conjuring spirits, but what’s the point? They wouldn’t listen anyway.

They never do.

I grab a necromancer’s wrists and clamp the manacles around them. Before I can get to the other two, they twist away, one of them muttering an incantation under his breath.

“Mutzak tamshich kadima.”

The room goes still. The fire stops burning and the billowing pink smoke disappears, receding into the cauldron as if it never existed. The necromancer keeps muttering; he’s trying to complete the ritual. I grab a dagger from my belt and hurl it at him to try to stop him. But it’s too late. The spirit hovering over the cauldron above us, hideous yet harmless before, becomes solid. It drops in front of me with a thud.

Caleb swears under his breath.

Before either of us can move, the ghoul knocks me to the floor, fastens his cold, rotting hands around my throat, and starts to squeeze.

“Elizabeth!” Caleb leaps forward, but before he can reach me, the last two necromancers turn on him, their knives held high.

I grab the ghoul’s hands. Tug at his wrists, scratch and beat on his arms. Try to suck in air, even if it does smell like dirt and rot and death. It doesn’t stop him. I can hear Caleb shouting my name, and I try to call back, but my voice comes out a strangled whisper. I keep struggling, twisting back and forth to try to break his grip. But he’s too strong.

My vision starts fading, disappearing into patches of black. I slap my hand against the stone floor, trying to reach my sword. But it’s too far. And Caleb can’t help me. While he’s managed to get one necromancer on the floor in cuffs, he’s still fighting off the other, who sends objects flying toward him: furniture and smoking logs and bones. I’m on my own. There’s a way out of this—I know there is. But if I don’t figure it out soon, this ghoul will strangle me to death. Not even my stigma can protect me against that.

Then I get an idea.

I summon the last bit of air I have, give what I hope is a convincing last gasp, and go still. Let my jaw go slack, allow a vacant look to slide into my eyes. I don’t know if it will work, because this thing is dead and maybe the dead can’t be fooled. When he doesn’t stop squeezing, I think I’ve made a mistake, and it takes every bit of self-control I have to keep still.

Finally, he stops. In the second it takes him to loosen his grip around my throat, I plunge my hand into the sack of salt on my belt, snatch a handful, and fling it in his face.

An unearthly shriek fills the room as the salt melts what’s left of his skin and penetrates his skull, his eyes, his brain, dissolving it into a gray sticky mass. Warm, putrid chunks of flesh drip onto my face and hair; an eyeball unravels from its socket and dangles in front of me like a viscous ball of twine. Stifling a gag, I roll to the side, snatch my sword off the floor, and swing. The blade cuts neatly through the ghoul’s neck, and in a swirl of hot air and another ear-splitting shriek, he disappears.

The last necromancer pauses at the sound, the objects he has spinning around the room dropping unceremoniously to the floor. Caleb doesn’t hesitate. He grabs him by the back of the head and slams it into his knee, then punches him in the face so hard the necromancer staggers backward and falls into the fire. Before he can move, Caleb drops beside him and slaps bindings around his wrists.

He pauses there for a moment, head down, breathing hard. His sweaty blond hair is plastered across his forehead, his face smeared with blood. I’m still sprawled on the floor, my hands and clothes covered in dirt and rot and God knows what else. Finally, he lifts his head and looks at me.

And we both start laughing.

Caleb steps outside and whistles for the guards. They storm into the house, clad in their black-and-red uniforms, the king’s coat of arms emblazoned across the front and a red rose, the flower of his house, embroidered on the sleeve. One by one they haul the necromancers outside, toss them into the waiting hurdle, and chain them in. When they get to the last one, a look of dismay crosses their faces.

“He’s dead,” one says to Caleb.

Dead? That can’t be right. But when I look over at the necromancer I flung my dagger at, I see him lying faceup, eyes open to the sky, the knife I’d meant for his leg impaled in his gut.

Damnation.

I shoot a horrified glance at Caleb, but he ignores me and begins speaking.

“Yes, he’s dead,” he replies calmly. “It’s unfortunate, of course, but we got lucky.”

“Lucky?” the guard says. “How d’you mean?”

“Lucky that only one of them died,” Caleb continues smoothly. “They tried to kill each other the moment we arrived. I suppose they had some sort of pact. You know how necromancers are. Obsessed with death.” He shrugs. “We spent half the arrest trying to keep them off one another. I mean, look at this place. And look at poor Elizabeth. She’s a mess.”

The guards look from Caleb to me, as if they had forgotten I was there.

“I’ll have to report this to Lord Blackwell,” one of the guards says. “I can’t very well deliver a dead prisoner.”

“Certainly,” Caleb says. “In fact, I’m headed back to Ravenscourt myself. Why don’t I accompany you? Less paperwork for us both if we go together, don’t you think?”

“Paperwork?” The guard shifts uncomfortably. “On a Saturday?”

“Of course. After we deliver the report in person, we’ll have to write it all up. Shouldn’t take too long, a couple of hours at most. Shall we?” Caleb walks to the door and holds it open.

The guards look at each other and begin speaking in whispers.

“Maybe it can wait. Not as if he’s going anywhere—”

“But what about the body? Someone’s bound to notice if he’s not moving—”

Caleb smiles. “I wouldn’t worry about that. No one pays much attention to prisoners once they’re inside. And you’re right, he won’t be going anywhere. After all, no one gets out of Fleet. Unless it’s to the stakes.”

The guards laugh, and Caleb laughs with them. But I feel a sudden shiver. I stuff my hand into the pocket of my cloak, clenching it into a fist.

Caleb escorts them outside, watches as they mount their horses. After a minute they shake hands and the guards ride away, the hurdles’ heavy wooden frames dragging divots through the mud, the thud of the horses’ hooves the only sound in the still-empty alley.

He comes back into the house, his expression once again unreadable. I watch as he begins righting the furniture, retrieving our weapons. I know he’s mad I killed that necromancer—he’s got to be. It was stupid and it was careless; it was a mistake after he warned me not to make one. Worse still, I have no excuse. At least not one I can give him. Any minute he’ll start yelling. I can’t stop him, but maybe I can soften the blow.

“Okay, I’ll admit it. It wasn’t my best work,” I say. “But look at it this way: At least you don’t have to pay me the two sovereigns now. I’ll settle for just the one.”

He sets down the chair he’s holding with a thud and rounds on me.

“What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess I made a mistake.”

Caleb frowns. “I warned you about that.”

“I know. And I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.”

He peers closely at me, his eyes searching mine as if he might find a better explanation there. Then he shakes his head.

“You know that’s not good enough. If anyone asks what happened today, you’ll need to tell them the same story I told the guards.”

“I know,” I repeat.

“It’s important,” he continues. “If anyone finds out, it’ll get back to Blackwell. You know what’ll happen if it does.”

I do. He’ll call me into his chambers, stare at me with eyes as sharp and black and cunning as a crow’s, and demand to know what happened. Not just what happened here, today. He’ll demand to know everything. The things I’ve done, the people I’ve seen, the places I’ve gone. He’ll demand to know how I lost focus. He’ll wear me down with his questioning until I confess it all and he knows everything.

And he can’t know everything. No one can. Not even Caleb.

“Let’s get out of here,” Caleb says. “The fire will be over by now, and we can’t be seen.”

He takes my arm and leads me out the door and into the streets. We wind through them the same way we came until we reach Westcheap, the wide, paved road that leads from Tyburn all the way to Ravenscourt Palace.

We’re blocks away, but I can still see the mob stretching from the gates into the surrounding streets. Throngs of men—women, too—all of them shouting and chanting, denouncing the king, his advisors, even the queen for their unrelenting policy against magic.

“It’s getting worse,” Caleb says.

I nod. Burnings have never been popular, but they’ve never been protested before. Not like this. It used to be if you disagreed with the king’s policy, you did it quietly: handed out pamphlets in the street, whispered your complaints over drinks at the tavern. It seems impossible that the entire city would now gather in front of the palace gates, armed with sticks and rocks and…

Sledgehammers?

“What are they doing?” I can just make out a group of men, hammers held high, spread out along a stretch of gate where twelve stone slabs hang: the Twelve Tablets of Anglia.

The Twelve Tablets are the laws of the kingdom, etched into stone and posted along the gates of Ravenscourt. Each tablet details a different law: property, crime, inheritance, and so on. After Blackwell became Inquisitor, he added the Thirteenth Tablet. It listed the laws against witchcraft and the penalties for practicing it. It gave rise to witch hunters, to pyres, to the burnings being protested today. It disappeared two years ago—vandals, probably. But even though it’s gone, the laws, of course, remain.

Destroying the other twelve tablets won’t bring about change. They have nothing to do with witchcraft; it wouldn’t matter even if they did. But the men continue to pound away, though they haven’t made a dent. No wonder. The tablets are huge: six feet high and at least a foot thick, solid stone.

Caleb shakes his head. “He’s completely lost control,” he mutters.

“Who?” I say.

“Who do you think? King Malcolm, of course.”

My eyes go wide. This makes the third time in as many months Caleb’s spoken against the king. He’s never done that before.

“He’s doing the best he can, I’m sure.”

Caleb tsks. “Hard to put down protests or stomp out rebellions when you’re too busy hunting or gambling or spending time with women who aren’t your wife.”

I gasp and feel my cheeks redden. “That’s treason.”

He shrugs. “Maybe. But you know it’s true.”

I don’t reply.

“Malcolm’s got to get rid of him,” Caleb continues. “Or we do. It’s the only thing that will end these rebellions.”

Him is Nicholas Perevil, a wizard and the leader of the Reformists. That’s what those who support magic call themselves. Not all Reformists are wizards, but all Reformists seek the same end: to reform the antimagic laws, to abolish the Thirteenth Tablet, to stop the burnings.

Nicholas Perevil should have been just another wizard we hunted and captured and tied to the stake. But before Malcolm became king, his father turned to Nicholas for help. Invited him to court, sought his advice, tried to find a way for Reformists and Persecutors—what Reformists call those who oppose magic—to coexist peacefully.

He soon became the most powerful wizard in Anglia. Not just in his magical ability, but also in his influence. He had the ear of the king; he was changing the policy of Anglia. He was appointed to the king’s council and even brought in his own men. It was unthinkable, his opposers said. Impossible.

They were right.

And five years later they were dead, along with half of Anglia. Killed by a plague Nicholas started, a plot designed to kill his enemies, weaken the country, and put him on the throne, all in one convenient curse. But Nicholas hadn’t planned on Malcolm’s surviving, on Blackwell’s surviving.

And he hadn’t planned on us.

“Maybe,” I say. “But it’s hard to catch someone you can’t find.”

“Then maybe we should try a little harder.” Caleb glances down at his rough wool tunic and grimaces. “I didn’t go through a year of training to dress like some broken-down squire. You can’t be happy about wearing that thing, either.” He points to my ugly brown maid’s dress.

After the rebellions started, witch hunters became Reformist targets. It’s why Blackwell ordered us to stop wearing our uniforms, to lie about our identity, why he sent us to live at Ravenscourt to blend in with the rest of the king’s servants. And it’s why I lost focus today, why I made a mistake. Because if I’d never come back to Ravenscourt…

I squeeze my hand into my pocket again.

We turn off Westcheap onto Kingshead Alley, a dark, dank street filled with tiny shops, their shutters closed and doors shut tight. At the very end is a battered wooden door, above it a green wooden plaque that reads THE WORLD’S END in gold block lettering. Caleb pushes it open. Inside, it’s packed with people: pirates and thieves, drunks and vagrants. Most of them are already drunk, even though it’s not much past noon. There’s a loud card game in one corner, a fight breaking out in another. A trio of musicians cowers between them, trying in vain to play above the brawl and the crowd that cheers every time someone gets punched.

We spy Joe, the old, white-haired owner, pulling drinks behind the bar, and we head straight for him. As soon as we walk up, he slides each of us a foaming glass of ale and watches as we take a cautious sip.

“Well?” He folds his arms across his chest.

Caleb chokes, sputtering ale all over the counter.

“Don’t mind him.” I jab my elbow into Caleb’s side. “It’s very nice.”

Joe fancies himself an ale connoisseur, and each week he brews up different concoctions to try on his clientele, with varying results. Last week’s brew, infused with the essence of roasted pig, was the worst to date. “Why eat supper when you can drink it?” he’d asked. Today’s has a hint of rosemary—and something else I can’t quite place.

“What is that?” I say. “Licorice?”

Joe snorts. “Not quite. I hope you two don’t have much to do today.”

We spot Marcus and Linus sitting at our usual table in the back and make our way to them. Caleb reaches around me to pull out a chair, and I flush with pleasure, thinking it’s for me, until he slides past me and sits down. I stand there for a moment, feeling foolish. Then I pull out my own chair and sit down.

“What happened to you?” Marcus gestures at me with his glass.

“What are you talking about?”

“You look like the dead.” He wrinkles his nose. “You smell like it, too. Did you arrest the necromancers before or after they killed you and dug you back up?” Marcus laughs at his own bad joke, and Linus joins in.

“Maybe if you cared less about the way I look and more about catching witches, you might be half as good as me,” I snap.

Caleb laughs at this, but Marcus glares at me and mouths a filthy insult. I ignore him. But when he turns away, I quickly smooth my hair and tuck it behind my ears. I wince as a chunk of bloodied flesh falls from my hair into my lap.

“She was incredible. Her best arrest yet.” Caleb lifts his goblet in a toast to me, but the other boys don’t join in. Of course not. Linus hasn’t spoken to me since the summer, after he cornered me in the palace gardens and tried to kiss me and got a punch in the face for his efforts. And Marcus… well, Marcus has never liked me. Tall, black-haired, and brutish, he never expected to find competition in someone like me: short, blond, and girlish.

Even still, Caleb doesn’t seem to realize that the more he boasts of my success, the more the others grow to hate me. Besides, today’s arrest was hardly something to boast about. I consider joining Joe back at the bar when Linus says something that stops me.

“We were just talking about the Yuletide masque,” he says to Caleb. “Have you decided who you’re taking yet?”

Caleb smiles and takes a sip of ale. “Maybe.”

Maybe? My stomach twists into a hopeful little knot.

Marcus whoops. “Who is it?”

“I’ll tell you after I ask her.”

“It’s Cecily Mowbray, isn’t it?” Marcus says.

“No, it’s Katherine Willoughby,” Linus says. “I saw them together last weekend.”

Caleb laughs. “We’re just friends.”

Friends? I think. Since when? Cecily is the daughter of an earl, and Katherine is a viscount’s daughter. They’re both ladies-in-waiting to Queen Margaret, both terribly snobbish, both terribly beautiful. Especially Katherine. Tall, dark-haired, and sophisticated, she’s the kind of girl who wears gowns instead of trousers, jewelry instead of weaponry, who smells like roses instead of rot.

“You looked more than friends to me,” Linus replies. “Unless you go around kissing all your friends,” he adds, smirking.

I know this bit of spite is aimed at me. Right after I punched Linus, he accused me of liking Caleb. I denied it, but I guess he didn’t believe me.

“Ah.” Caleb scratches the back of his neck, and I’m shocked to see his ears turn pink. I’ve never seen Caleb blush before. “I guess my secret is out, then.”

Something inside me goes flat.

Marcus and Linus start laughing and teasing Caleb, but I don’t pay attention. Caleb and Katherine Willoughby? How is that possible? I know Caleb is ambitious, but he’s always hated people like Katherine. People who were given everything, people who never had to fight for what they wanted, as he did.

I guess he changed his mind.

I’m so lost in my thoughts I don’t notice the other boys getting up until Caleb is standing above me.

“We’re going back to the palace,” he says. “To visit the queen’s rooms. There’s supposed to be dancing later.”

I shrug. I’d rather not think about Caleb dancing with Katherine Willoughby. Caleb doesn’t even like dancing.

“What are you going to do?”

“Stay here,” I say. “Listen to music. Drink ale.”

Caleb raises his eyebrows. “Why? It’s awful.”

“I like it.” But he’s right. It is awful. It’s heavy and flat and has a strange metallic taste that burns my throat when I swallow. Though it’s nothing compared with the churning in my stomach and the terrible prickling behind my eyes, the kind I get when I’m about to cry.

“Okay.” He frowns. “But be careful with it. It feels a little strong, and—”

“I’ll be fine.” I wave him off. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I always worry about you,” he says. But then he leaves. I watch him go, wishing more than anything I was the kind of girl who could make him stay.