Everybody needs something to reach for. Even the dead. Given a light to follow, we can drag ourselves from the pit.
All the dead and damned are climbing towards you. I am reaching for you with the hands of an army. They cannot stop me. The dead outnumber the living.
I am coming for you ten thousand souls strong.
Time of Iron, ANONYMOUS
The Emperor broke into the throne room. In one hand he held his sword. In the other, the head of his enemy. He swung the head jauntily, fingers twisted in blood-drenched, tangled hair.
A scarlet trail on the hammered-gold tiles marked the Emperor’s passage. His boots left deep crimson footprints. Even the ice-blue lining inside his black cloak dripped with red. No part of him was left unstained.
He wore the crowned death mask with the First Duke’s jewel burning dark on his brow, and a breastplate of bronze with falling stars wrought in iron. The red-gleaming metal fingers of his gauntlets tapered into shining claws.
In one lethal iron claw, he held another jewel. Small as a teardrop, red as blood.
Her ruby earring.
When he lifted the mask, fury and pain had carved his face into new lines. After his time in the sunless place he was pale as winter light, radiance turned so cold it burned. He was a statue with a splash of blood staining his cheek, like a red flower on stone. She recognized him at last.
He was the Once and Forever Emperor, the Corrupt and Divine, the Lost and Found Prince, Master of the Dread Ravine, Commander of the Living and the Dead. None could stop his victory march.
She couldn’t bear to watch him smile, or the shambling dead behind him. Her gaze was drawn by the hungry gleam of his blade. She wished it had stayed broken.
The hilt of the re-forged Sword of Eyam was still a coiled snake. On the blade an inscription glittered and flowed as if written on water. The only word visible beneath a slick coat of blood was Longing.
The sword’s name was Longing for Revenge. She understood it now.
The girl with silver hands trembled, alone in the heart of the story.
The Emperor approached the throne and said,
“You lied to me.”
His step echoed like the tolling of a funereal bell.
“You betrayed me.”
Giving up without a fight wasn’t in her nature. Evil and treacherous to the end, Rae swung her sword. The Emperor laughed.
“You left me to die.”
As soon as Rae’s blade kissed the Emperor’s, her stolen sword shivered and broke into a thousand pieces. The hilt fell from her hands. Silver dust eddied down to the gold mosaics. Rae had expected nothing less. His was the blade no enemies could withstand. Nothing stood between him and his richly deserved revenge.
“Thank you,” murmured the Emperor. “For teaching me how to please you.”
The Emperor tossed his enemy’s head at her feet. Rae stared at the bloody stump where the neck had been, and the still-beautiful hair. The head rolled until it touched her slippers. Eyes green as lost summer, already glazing over, stared up at her. It was the head of Octavian the king.
“I am only beginning. I will destroy worlds. I will kill gods.”
This wasn’t the beautiful singing voice she loved to hear calling for her. This was the Emperor’s voice, the stone on stone of a tomb scraping open. He was hoarser than the call of crows or ravens, because when she tried in her arrogance to fix the story, she made it worse.
His voice had changed when they cut his throat.
“When I woke broken in the pit, I remembered your face like the worst sin ever committed against me. I held the thought of you as close as a grudge, my lady.”
When Rae tried to run, the dead caught her. A dozen hands grasped hold, fingers sharp bone protruding from ragged flesh, or spongy with rot. They held her so tight she was forced into absolute stillness. Her heart didn’t beat, but shuddered. Terror shook her as if she were a rag doll in the grip of a demon child.
“Master,” the ghouls crooned, in a rotten lullaby.
In another world, her sister had told her, Even when you get everything wrong, you believe you’re right.
At every turn, she had failed him. She knew the sing-song voice the ghouls used to call her name. The sky had raged when he watched his beloved in danger at the Queen’s Trials. The future Emperor had always moved too quickly, healed too fast and fought with divine fury. He had even cured her bite, but every time he displayed his power she never noticed. Because in books people often healed with convenient speed or fought better than ten men. In the story before she broke it, he was the one who suggested heating iron shoes over a fire to kill Rahela, horrifying both the Cobra and her sister. The Cobra asked, “Octavian what?” when Rae said Octavian became the Emperor, because he expected it to be someone else. The Cobra feared the Emperor, but never the king.
In the story before she ruined it, Lord Marius and Princess Vasilisa loved the king but hated the Emperor. The Emperor, who Rae had always loved and never been able to see in Octavian. The evidence had been staring her in the face all this time. Octavian, who discarded one sister for another, was not loyal past death. Octavian frequently removed his gauntlets, and Rae knew the Emperor hated taking them off.
King Octavian and the Emperor weren’t the same person. They never had been, not in any version of the story. The Emperor was always Key.
Even now, seeing his face in a flash of lightning made her heart leap with joyous revelation, followed by the long fall into despair. Her favourite character. She’d always thought if she met him, she would understand and believe in him as nobody else could.
When she met him, she didn’t even recognize him. She betrayed him. Her schemes got his throat cut.
She’d wanted to believe the story could be fixed, the sick could be healed, and darkness transformed into something beloved. She knew the heroine belonged with the guy in the crown, remembering only the figure he cut when he first entered the throne room as the Emperor. She had filled in the spaces where the story should be with what she believed already. Rae had looked at costumes and thought she saw truth.
She forgot the clue of his name.
Key. The key to the narrative. The hero of the story. Enough blood and tears could buy a life. After centuries hurling sacrifices into the ravine, finally the payment was enough. Yet when the Emperor returned, nobody noticed.
Everyone looked to the king, though they were warned the crown was not his to keep. Octavian was simply the child of the king and queen. The child of the gods had been reborn from the abyss, a miracle raised not in a palace but the gutter. The ravine woke not when Octavian was crowned, but when Key was born.
The Emperor said, “Be terribly afraid. I come to swear love undying.”
Lightning made the sky shiver without cease. The hollows under his eyes were dug deep as graves. His eyes were red-rimmed from centuries of smoke.
The line where they cut his throat was a braided scarlet ribbon wrapped around his neck, twisted thread still too raw to be scar tissue. He was an uncanny and awful creature, a glorious ruin of what could have been. Her eyes were dazzled. He had died so young.
He had come back so wrong. He should have lived years longer, should have chosen to climb down into the pit. She had ripped his choice away. She had done worse. He needed time under Lia’s gentle protection, learning goodness. Instead he had the vipers. Emer, coldly telling him words changed reality, the Cobra laughing as he spoke of blood and circuses, and Rae. The Beauty Dipped In Blood, the woman who lied and betrayed and killed.
She had taught him how to please her.
The Emperor made a gesture of command to his ghouls. “I love you as a knife loves a throat,” he murmured as the dead overwhelmed her. “I crawled out of hell to fall at your feet.”
Dead fingers crept across her skin as if they were worms and she already in her grave. Elaborate chains draped and chilled her as she stood violently helpless. Cold hands fastened the jewel around her throat, twin to the one shining darkly in the crowned mask. He gave her the Abandon All Hope Diamond.
He spoke of love, but she knew him. He called her ‘my lady’ when he was furious. She knew him, and he was a nightmare and a catastrophe, doom she could not hope to control.
With the Emperor’s rage came ruin on the world and blood on the moon.
“The burning city is mine, and I am yours. I changed the story for you. So tell me the lie that you love me.”
There was brutal tenderness in the hoarse love song of his voice. His promises grated like stone on gold as the ghouls dragged in the marble throne. The seat for a dead queen, intended for Rae now.
The ghouls placed the queen’s pale chair on the shining dais beside the Emperor’s throne with its darkly brilliant wings. He made a gesture of invitation towards their thrones, courtly as if he were raised to be a gentleman.
She dropped her burning gaze to the dust. She couldn’t bear to see what she’d done.
He reached out.
The blade was hot with blood, the steel beneath cold as the grave. The Emperor used his sword to lift her chin, so they stood staring at each other before the black and white thrones.
“Be happy. Be my evil queen.”
The horror was relentless. So was she. At the edge of desperation, all she needed was to live long enough to craft one last scheme.
Stolen silver made her fingers shine cold and glowing pale as a ghost’s. The Emperor’s armoured claw closed, heavy as a cage, on her gauntlet when she offered him her hand. A monster, clinging to a shade.
Rae vowed, “I will.”
When they ascended their thrones, she held her head high on the dead queen’s stone seat. He sprawled with insouciant grace, one leg hooked over the throne’s arm, still looking at her.
The Emperor’s eyes had once been the grey of ashes, but the ash had woken to burning new life. Fire and smoke rose in the dark red imperial gaze. A crimson ravine yawned wide. She stared into the abyss, and saw her death in his eyes.
Key smiled. “Evil wins at last, my lady.”