ONE

DREAD

The first time the ship came to a stop, Aster assumed they had reached their destination. She was wrong. Instead, another group of girls were herded into the hold, after which the voyage continued.

Their captors were all male, and some still appeared to be human, or mostly so. The ones in charge, though, the overseers—were more monstrous.

The Sheriff’s boys had come to resemble wolves, in the end. This wasn’t the case with the sailors, who tended toward reptilian traits. Their skin ranged from glossy scales to rough, bumpy, multicolored hide. Some had vertical pupils, like cats or more aptly pit vipers. The one she saw most often, who brought them food and water, had an unusually long neck and lips. His teeth were small, numerous, and sharp, and hair clung to his head in only a few patches. He had a tail.

She heard some of the other girls call them divlings, which made her wonder if they were boys that Vilken had transformed, or if they were actually some other species.

In practical terms, she figured—or at least hoped—it didn’t matter.

By the sixth port, Aster had begun to think the voyage would never end. But this time, when the ship came to rest, a large gang of divlings came down into the hold and began removing the girls.

Aster had been preparing for days, but now that the moment was on her, she had to struggle to reach the right frame of mind, to still her conscious thoughts and drift toward a state almost like sleep, where familiar sounds became strange and absurd thoughts and images seemed natural, the place her books called the marge.

Most spells—Whimsies, Charms, Decrees, Adjurations, Utterances—required a spoken word. Even her father was not certain why, but he’d once mused it had to do with what he called the “fuzziness” of thought and the precision of speech. Without speech, the mind tended to be a chaos of impressions, possibilities, wishes, fears. Thought left to itself, unguided, was a poor tool. But speech—and writing and drawing, for that matter—required thoughts to distill into something simpler, more workmanlike and consequently more powerful. The sorceress wasn’t speaking to the world, but to herself, to the elumiris gathered within her, which had no agenda of its own, but could only be cajoled or commanded by the mind. And that mind had to have the razor concentration usually only found in words to accomplish anything specific.

It was possible to achieve the required focus without speech or writing, but it was far more difficult to achieve the desired ends.

Sometimes powerful sorcerers, like her father, cast spells without knowing it—usually in their sleep or from the depths of madness. These were called Fancies or Dreads, depending on the outcome.

And the outcomes were . . . unpredictable, precisely because they were the product of an unguided will.

So when the boys came and began to unchain her, she was at the marge, gathering magic in a sort of inchoate cloud.

She let it go, and every thought in her mind melted, became the light behind eyelids, salt of sea spray, bruised pines, gulls, waves on stones . . . the slow thrumming of the tide, whale song, the long inhale and exhale of the sea caves, the arc of the stars across the sky, the stately procession of the Wanderers, the whirring of the seasons now broken into cacophony, a sound like a voice, deeper than the rumbling of the Earth’s heart.

Aaaaaassssss . . .

From everything slow, something fast came, fast and hard. Darkness rushed from behind and covered her.

She heard Dusk shriek—not from pain or fear, but from fury, and opened her eyes to see the warrior woman free of her chains and striking about her with her fists. Two divlings lay in heaps against the ship’s bulkhead, with enough blood to suggest they had been hurled there with terrific force. Three more beat at Dusk with wooden clubs; two were on the floor near her feet.

Aster tried to say something, but the gag was still in her mouth, so she struggled, frustrated, as two more beast-boys ran up and Dusk staggered back beneath repeated blows from their batons.

A girl of about ten or eleven dashed up behind one of the divlings and threw herself on its back. She was quickly joined by four more captives. The boys turned and dealt them blows that sent them to the boards, but in the mess, she saw Dusk wrest a baton from one of them. In two heartbeats she struck as many heads, dropping her opponents to the deck. She quickly moved in on the others, who backed away, right into a mob of girls who had already been set free. In moments, all their captors were subdued.

As Dusk knelt in front of Aster, she saw that she still had one leg iron on.

Dusk took off Aster’s gag.

“Quickly,” she said. “I know no spell to unbind us.”

“Ah—n’bendete!” Aster said.

The chains fell off with a clank. So too did those of the other girls who hadn’t already been unchained.

“Everyone who can find a club, pick it up,” Dusk said. “The rest of you find something, anything, and get behind us.”

She helped Aster to her feet.

“How did you do that?” she said.

“What?”

“You summoned something,” Dusk said. “Something invisible. It crushed those two against the wall as they were unchaining me.”

“I don’t know,” Aster said. “I’m not sure.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Dusk said. “Are you ready to fight? Can you spell?”

“Yes,” Aster said. “I think so.”

“All right,” Dusk said, pushing her way forward, mounting the first step of the stairs, and turning to address the rest of the girls.

“We have to hurry, before those above know something has happened. Push through the hatch, and stay behind us, but do not fail or flag. Yes?”

Aster stepped up beside her. From there, she could see most of them; in her chains she had only been able to observe those nearest her. There were probably more than a hundred, ranging in age from nine to twenty or so, although she guessed most of them were under fifteen. Some looked angry and determined, others were clearly frightened. Most just looked bewildered.

Dusk turned and started up the stairs to the hatch, and Aster went right behind her.

There were plenty of divling sailors on deck, but only a handful looked their way as they emerged from the open hatch. Beyond the ship she saw docks, white cliffs, green hills, and neat buildings of clapboard, some with thatched roofs, others covered in shingles. It was morning, with the coral sun barely peeking over the horizon through a gauze of pink and gold. The ship itself was on the water, not in the air, and had been pulled up to the dock by a stout rope wound around an immense wooden reel.

Dusk charged the nearest sailor, a fellow with wide, froglike eyes and grey-green skin.

He gawped at her for an instant before drawing his sword; it was too late. Dusk smashed his elbow with the club and had his cutlass in her hand before he hit the ground.

By that time more than half of the girls had climbed out of the hold. Dusk brandished the sword over her head, and that set something off in the girls. Whatever individual trepidations some of the might have, as a group they were suddenly of one mind, charging across the deck toward the rest of the divling boys.

This got the attention of the sailors, who drew weapons and formed into a rough line. Although the girls outnumbered them three- or four-to-one, most of them weren’t armed. It was, Aster thought, going to be a slaughter.

A slaughter she had no intention of allowing to happen now that her mouth wasn’t stuffed with a filthy rag.

She uttered a word, and the air between Dusk and first line of divlings took fire and rushed in a wave toward the beast-boys. The flame vanished almost as it hit them, but the hot air and shock broke their line and sent many of them sprawling to the deck. Unfazed by the fiery display, Dusk continued her charge and in moments was striking at the dazed enemy with her newly acquired weapon.

It might have ended quickly, then but more of the changed boys—some armored, all armed—came swarming up the gangplank from the docks. Dusk and the girls—many of whom were now armed—turned to meet them. In an instant there was such a confused mess of fighting that Aster couldn’t think of an Utterance that wouldn’t harm the girls as much as the boys. The one thing she could so, she did: challenged the sea to rise in a wave and sweep the gangplank away, so no one else from shore could easily board—which was fortunate, as she saw more divlings arriving on the dock at each moment.

She didn’t know what their chances were in the best case, but if they stayed moored, they would ultimately lose. Another plank would be thrown up or grapples or whatever, more divlings would board. For them to have any chance, they had to be unmoored.

She faced the wooden reel and sent fire scurrying along the rope that held them to the dock.

Bodies now covered the deck, and lots of blood. Many of the dead and wounded were girls, but they were pushing the divlings back.

Her gaze fastened on a girl with amber curls, lying in a pool of blood. She could tell by her eyes she would never breathe again. How many had died already? How many would die?

For a moment, the terrible reality of what was happening paralyzed her.

The rope burned through. Aster took a deep breath and considered the ship. The sails were down, and even if she knew how to put them up, she knew she couldn’t do it alone.

Instead she turned her effort to the sea, proclaiming an Utterance of the Deep. The ship suddenly surged away from the dock, carried by an enormous swell.

A ragged cheer went up from the girls as they drifted—not only away from the dock, but upward, lifting out of the sea so the bullets and arrows now being fired from shore were no longer able to reach them on deck, as the hull of the ship now shielded them.

Weakened from her efforts, Aster staggered and caught herself on the rail as the deck tilted a bit. She saw the crowd below, uniformed soldiers reloading their guns through the barrels, archers taking aim.

And she saw him, his ice-blue eyes, staring up at her. She tried to look away, to push herself back from the rail, but she couldn’t; she saw his mouth moving. Her legs and arms refused her will.

“No!” she gasped, through clenched teeth. “No!”

She was too weak. Her resistance broke, his eyes drew her on, the sea rose to greet her.

What followed, Aster remembered more like a series of snapshots than a continuous sequence. The cold water, flashes of sky, being dragged up on the wooden dock, the cries of gulls and other, stranger-sounding sea birds, being bound and gagged again, a ride in a bumpy cart, shadows, darkness, stone halls.

Then hot water, and someone scrubbing at her flesh, soap that smelled of ash. She was given something to drink, mild and sweet and with a faint taste of alcohol. She spit out the first mouthful but she was thirsty. She swallowed the next several.

Time came back in the tub. Two girls were washing her; one with hair as sleek and black as a raven’s feather, the other with wide cheekbones and watery-looking eyes. Both looked to be on the younger side, nine or ten.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“Oh, you can talk,” the girl with the black hair said. Aster focused on her, saw she had a small nose and a long, rounded jaw.

“I can talk,” Aster said. “Where am I?”

“Where we all are,” the girl said.

Aster sorted back through to where her memories became unreliable.

“I fell off the ship,” she said. “Where is he?”

“He?”

“The man with the blue eyes. Vilken.”

“Oh, you mean the chancellor. Well if you want to see him, you’re in luck. That’s who we’re cleaning you up for.”

“I don’t want to see him,” Aster said.

The two girls shared a glance between themselves.

“I reckon you don’t,” the black-haired girl said.

“What are your names?” Aster said.

“I’m Magpie,” the dark-haired on said. “This is Violet.”

“My name is Aster,” she said. “I need to get out of here.”

“Yeah,” Violet said. “Don’t we all. But there’s no way out, except that ship you fell off.”

“You probably should’ve stayed on,” Magpie said.

She poured some powder in the water and swirled it around. It smelled like perfume.

“There’s another man,” Aster said. “He has red hair—”

“You mean the king?”

“Yes.”

“He doesn’t come here,” she said. “This is the chancellor’s place.”

“And where is that?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” Magpie said. “Us girls, we call it the Kingdom of Birds.” She stood and pulled up a towel.

“Think you can stand? It will make it easier on us.”

They dried her off, and dressed her in a robe woven of yellow and red silk, so it looked orange at a distance. Then they conducted her up a flight of stairs to a room of white stone, with a single window, a bed, a small writing desk, and a stand with a pitcher of water and two glasses. She went to the window, which had a crosshatch of metal bars, and looked through. She was someplace high, looking out over verdant hills, fields, copses of trees growing along streambanks. It was still morning, and it seemed likely this place, like her father’s kingdom, was also stuck in time. Far in the distance, she saw what might be the sea, or else an illusion created by low clouds.

Had Dusk escaped with the ship? The girls who bathed her thought so. If she had gotten away, Aster was glad. Not so much for Dusk, with whom she had some . . . issues . . . but for the other girls. She hoped they sailed as far away from this place as they could get, so far that her father and Vilken could never find them.

Of course, their escape didn’t help her at all, or the other girls here. How many had Vilken collected. Hundreds? Thousands?

She felt calm, too calm, and she began to wonder whether there had been something in the drink or the bath to blunt her anxiety. She also felt sleepy—but that might be natural. She hadn’t had much real rest on the boat.

She realized Magpie and Violet were gone. She tried the door, but naturally it was locked.

Aster sat on the bed. The sheets were soft and inviting. She lay down, thinking. There ought to be a way to loosen the bars or crack the stone. She did not know any spells which would allow her to fly, but maybe if she called a wind it would slow her fall . . .

She woke, and realized she’s been asleep. Someone was stroking her leg.

She sat up, violently, and backed against the headboard.

It was the Sheriff, or Mr. Watkins, or Vilken—whatever he was. He wore a robe similar to hers.

“Hey, now,” he said. “No need to panic.”

The horrible thing was, she still wasn’t panicking. Her head and mouth felt as if they were stuffed with cotton, and her body torpid, difficult to move.

“What have you done to me?”

“I don’t have quite your father’s facility with word-spells,” he said. “But I am knowledgeable about herbs and the grains of the earth, and such. Witchbane, if you know what that is, and a few other ingredients I retain the right to keep secret.”

He reached to touch her again.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Aster, you gave me quite a chase,” he said. “But it turned out well, in some ways, less well in others. I expected to net Dusk and Veronica since they bore the orbs. Instead I found you.”

“But Dusk got away.”

He shrugged. “For now. But I have her orb, and that is more than half of what I wanted. I will find her and the ship she took from me. You can be sure of that. Soon my reach will extend to furthest corners of the Kingdoms. So there’s that. Veronica? I’m disappointed to have missed her again. But that is also temporary.

“On the balance, I have you, and far from your father’s watchful eye. That is more than enough to put me in very high spirits. And you—you are better off, I think, than you would have been if your father had had his way with you. Since he doesn’t know you’re here, you need not worry about him. I cannot imagine how terrible it would be to be tortured to death by one’s own father. I am so happy I can spare you that.”

She tried to bolt forward, knock him aside and reach the hall beyond. But she was so slow and her limbs so heavy, that instead he caught her by the shoulders and gently forced her back down upon the bed. She finally felt a little panic, and kicked at him with her feet. He forced her legs down onto the bed and then straddled them. He smiled, slightly, but his eyes were dull stones.

“This isn’t going to hurt,” he said.

“Oh, no, don’t,” she said as he began to undo the tie on her robe. She tried to think of a spell, something that would burst him from the inside out, but she couldn’t focus.

Once she was exposed, he sat down next to her again, gently stroking her here and there. Her skin did its best to crawl away from his touch. There was nothing comforting about it. It only made everything more horrible.

“You can’t know how much I’ve wanted this,” he said. “Part of it’s your father’s fault, you know—the curse he put on me made me obsessed with finding you. But to be fair, it was an easy sell—I’d had my eye on you for a long time. Waiting for the right time.”

He leaned over to the desk and fished out a bottle of something and took a drink from it. The all too familiar smell of liquor filled the small room.

“The Reign of the Departed,” he sighed. “I was stuck there for so long. Generations. I can’t even remember how and when I got there. Every time I’m reborn, I lose a little something.” He tapped his head. “I have Vilken’s memories rattling around in here, too, making everything even messier.”

He took another drink.

“Have you ever wondered why magic works so well here, but almost not at all back in the Reign? Vilken wondered about that a lot. He had some theories about it.”

“Please,” she said. “Mr. Watkins!”

He laughed and took another drink.

“You see, almost everything in the Reign of the Departed can be explained by physics. Life, consciousness, art, science—all the products of electrochemical processes. There’s no need for magic, for the thing we call elumiris. Everything that happens there can be explained by gravity, magnetism, the weak and strong atomic forces, and so on. It is a world that doesn’t need magic, like here, like the real world. Back there, computers and robots imitate life, you know? They can play chess and write poems and carry on conversations—but none of it ever seems quite right to a human being, because a computer isn’t human—it’s a bunch of circuits trying to appear human.

“Similarly, the people in the Reign of the Departed are like imitations of real people, higher people, the ones who shine with elumiris. They look like us, act like us—but it’s all a little flat because they don’t really have souls—just electrochemical processes pretending to be souls. And when they die—pfff! They’re gone.”

“And that’s where I was exiled, where I was consigned to. Me—who love beauty, gorge on it, keep it safe within me—adrift in a world without beauty.”

He flashed her a doting smile.

“Or at least without much. Sometimes a little flower sprouts in that barren soil—girls like Veronica. But their light is so feeble and dies long before they do. Then there are the visitors, like you. Oh, you shone so bright, even there, Aster. Even in that dead, awful place. At the time I didn’t even know what I was sensing. I even felt a little bad about it, like it was inappropriate. Now I know what I am, and you know what are—so everything is fine.”

“My father,” she said. “He wants me alive.”

“He does, but only to torture you. He doesn’t remember you, and he won’t.”

He leaned down and kissed her belly. It felt like a spider walking on it.

“I am the cure for the curse,” she said. “Only I can end it.”

“I know that very well,” he said. “But you see, I have no interest whatever in ending the curse. I like things just as they are. If things were perfect, I would wait, save you for a special moment, the night of my triumph—my wedding night, you could call it. But you are far, far too dangerous to keep around for that long. You slipped away from me once, and nearly escaped again. No, it must be now. I have waited long enough. I deserve this.”

He pulled himself back on top of her; his weight crushed her breath away. She tried to close her legs, but he put his knee between them and pushed.

Then she saw a gleam of light, and realized he had something in his hand—a curved knife, polished to a mirror finish. She could see herself in it, her wan, terrified face.

“It won’t hurt,” he said. “I’m very, very good at this.”