‘Thought I might find you here,’ said Alex.

‘It’s nice.’ Sunny put her head back to stare up at the chinks of blue sky between the stirring foliage. ‘The sun through the leaves and the wind through the branches.’

‘An elf who likes plants.’ Alex sat down next to her, stripes of sunlight sliding across her bruised face. ‘What a cliché.’

‘It’s not so much the plants as the shadows. Sometimes it’s nice to just … breathe.’

A silence, then. One Sunny didn’t know how to break.

‘We’re leaving,’ she said, after a while.

‘I know.’

‘Today, most likely. Cardinal Zizka will take us back to the Holy City.’

‘She and I … had a bit of a disagreement.’

‘To know Cardinal Zizka is to disagree with her.’

‘She did try to have me killed.’

‘You’re among some very good company there, if it’s any consolation.’

‘A bit.’ Alex looked over at her. ‘Who wants to be alone?’

Sunny stared at the ground. As if there was something very interesting there, between her boots. ‘Impressed you stood up to her. An Empress can’t be scared, I guess.’

‘An Empress is scared all the time. She just can’t look it. I tried … to get her to let you go, but—’

‘She wouldn’t.’ Sunny was not enjoying this one bit. It was easier, in the end, to feel nothing.

‘I wish you could stay,’ said Alex.

‘I know. But I can’t.’

‘I wish I could come.’

‘I know. But you can’t.’

Another silence. ‘Who’s going to save me now?’

‘Well, if things work out, I guess … you won’t need saving anymore?’

Alex gave her a look.

Sunny winced off into the trees. ‘Father Diaz, then.’

‘That fool can’t even turn invisible.’

‘You might have to save yourself.’

‘I was afraid you’d say that.’

A breeze came up, and shook the trees, and washed through the space between them. A narrow space, but one there was no bridging.

‘What if …’ Alex licked her lips, dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘They find out … I’m not the real thing—’

‘You’re the real thing now. Wherever you came from.’

‘But I’ve done … I’m not good—’

‘It’s not what you’ve done that makes you good or bad. It’s what you do next.’

Alex gave a little snort. ‘An elf giving an Empress lessons on virtue?’

‘Someone has to, and your priest fucked a werewolf.’

Alex gave another little snort, of laughter this time, and Sunny was pleased she’d made it happen, but soon enough Alex’s smile faded. ‘Is there anything … I could give you?’ she asked. ‘You deserve … something.’

Sunny thought about it. She could’ve asked for one last kiss. She got a feeling that’s what Alex wanted. But a kiss is the start of something. A doorway to something else. The fun is all the promise of what’s on the other side. A kiss, when you know it’s leading nowhere … what’s it worth? It’s just a reminder of what you don’t have. The first sentence of a story that’ll never be told.

Sunny looked away. ‘I don’t need anything.’

‘Maybe I’ll see you again,’ whispered Alex. Sunny didn’t want to look at her. She guessed from her voice she was crying a bit, and she didn’t want to see it.

‘Maybe.’ Jakob always said, People rarely want all of the truth, and she reckoned this was one of those times. She stood up, slapping the seat of her trousers. ‘Maybe.’

‘It’s not fair,’ snapped Alex, sounding furious of a sudden. ‘You risked everything for me, over and over! And I can’t do the same for you.’

‘Do it for someone else, then.’ Sunny liked that idea. That she might do a good thing for someone, and they’d do a good thing for someone else, and it’d come back around, one day, in a big circle of goodness. Hadn’t happened yet, but you could hope. ‘Do it for everyone else.’

‘For the people, eh?’

‘Why not? I like people.’ Sunny took a long breath. ‘I wish I was one.’

Alex stared at her. ‘You’re the best person I ever met.’

And that was nice to hear, at least. Could’ve been the nicest thing anyone ever said to her. It wasn’t saying much, but still.

‘Look at that,’ said Alex, tears in her eyes but grinning at the same time. ‘You can smile after all.’

Sunny put her fingers to her cheeks. They did seem a different shape from usual, somehow.

‘Huh,’ she muttered. ‘Who knew?’

Vigga lay in her cage.

They hadn’t dragged her in. She crawled in by herself. She burrowed into the straw more rat than wolf, and lay in the darkness, and didn’t move, and didn’t speak, and didn’t think, and was just meat, and not good meat.

She was cut and gashed and chewed all over. Ragged wounds left by giant teeth, stitched closed by an idiot. She’d worried at the bandages and peeled them off, then worried at the scabs and opened her wounds, then another idiot had stitched them closed again, then Cardinal Zizka had put an iron collar on her and said if she worried at the bandages again she’d flog her tattooed hide off, so she’d let them be.

She’d been flogged before and it was horrible.

Her leg was fucked. It might heal. Or not. For now she couldn’t stand and didn’t care. She was an animal and didn’t deserve to stand. She was an animal, and deserved to wear a collar, and crawl on her belly in the filth, and she pissed there in the straw where she lay and didn’t even roll away from it.

Baptiste had been her friend and the wolf had killed her. The wolf had killed her, but it was Vigga’s nails that her blood was still crusted under. Vigga’s mouth that still tasted of her meat. She scraped her tongue raw and spat and sobbed and retched and stuffed her mouth with straw and spat again but that taste was always there. Would always be there.

She’d seen no more terrible and no more pitiable monster than the leftovers that slithered from beneath the library, but she was more terrible and more pitiable yet, because she pretended to be a person, and sometimes, for a little while, even tricked herself.

But then she was a fucking idiot, and easily fooled.

She wasn’t clean. She wasn’t safe. She was as unclean and unsafe as anything God or gods or whatever was up there suffered to live. If there was anything up there.

She began to doubt it.

There were voices in the darkness. ‘Does she have to be in the cage?’

‘Of course she does, Father Diaz. You’ve seen what she is.’

‘The wolf … is not her, Your Eminence. The wolf is … a curse!’

A snort of scornful laughter. ‘Do not fool yourself that it is one that can be cured. Even before the bite she was a monster. A Viking spreading terror down the coasts of Europe, who burned churches and killed monks for the sport of it.’

‘She deserves our pity, not our hate—’

‘She deserves neither. No more than the dogs who guard the Celestial Palace. She can be made a weapon to smite the unholy, to strike righteous terror into the enemies of the Church. That is why she is suffered to live, and only that.’

The pagans had chained her in a cage, and starved her, and goaded her, and used her to kill their enemies. And Vigga saw now the pagans and the Saved didn’t hate each other because they were so different, but because they were so alike.

‘You saved us,’ said Diaz. She heard him move closer, speak softer. ‘You saved me.’ She heard him slip his fingers around the bars. Softer yet, almost a whisper. ‘In more ways than one.’

‘I’m glad,’ she grunted, into the straw. ‘But I can’t save me.’ She didn’t turn. She didn’t want to see him. Zizka was right. She couldn’t be cured, and deserved neither pity nor hate. She could feel the wolf inside, whining to be let out. Never sleeping. Never satisfied. Always, always whining to be let out.

‘I’m not safe,’ she said. ‘I’m not clean.’ She burrowed into the straw and hid her face. ‘I never will be.’

As Balthazar edged, somewhat gingerly, across the gangplank, he winced in anticipation of some withering barb. As he hopped, somewhat inelegantly, to the deck he glanced up, expecting to see that infuriating smirk, the gleam of the gold tooth behind the scarred lips—

But he saw no such thing, of course, and never would again. How often had he wished for her gone? Now that she was, somehow her absence seemed enormous. He kept thinking of things he should have said. Rehearsing things he might have done. Spinning out ever more unlikely scenarios. He had always imagined he would win some crushing final victory over her. Or that, perhaps, they would come to understand, to respect, to admire one another. Or … who knew what? Something, anyway. Some outcome. And now there was merely a tantalising prologue, cut off mid-sentence, abandoned in the writing, never to find completion.

Balthazar was obliged to wipe his eye, pretending at irritation by the wind. He had to shake himself free of these self-defeating, self-indulgent, maudlin meanderings. He was one of Europe’s foremost necromancers, for God’s sake, a master of the grave’s mysteries! Why should a single death perplex him so completely?

He clenched his fists and dragged in a lungful of salt air. In the past, he had always disdained the sea. He had always disdained all outdoor odours save the tantalising miasma of the graveyard, but his feelings on that, as on so much else, had undergone a radical change over recent months.

He was a new-forged man, animated by a new purpose! He realised now that he had made himself small, in his long years of study. He had constrained his potential within narrow jealousies and cramped ambitions. But confinement to the service of the Pope, in a paradox worthy of some antique philosopher, had freed him from his self-imposed imprisonment. Now he stood ready to grow! The world burst forth with possibilities, and he was intent on marching forth to seize them!

He strode over to Jakob of Thorn, leaning against the ship’s rail with that perennially pained expression of his. ‘When can we expect Her Holiness to assign us another mission?’

‘When she needs our talents,’ grunted the ancient knight. ‘The voyage back to the Holy City will take two weeks at least. Maybe three.’

‘But never fear!’ Cardinal Zizka had followed Balthazar across the gangplank onto the deck, two burly manservants helping with her luggage. ‘You will be travelling in style.’

‘Indeed, Your Eminence?’ asked Balthazar.

‘The best stateroom has been prepared.’

‘Truly?’ He had hardly dared imagine that others, least of all the Head of the Earthly Curia herself, would be so ready to reward his change of heart. ‘Then, in the spirit of cooperation, I have some momentous information to share! I apologise that, given the events … concerning Baptiste …’ Something was caught in his throat. He thumped his breastbone, and soldiered on. ‘It did not heretofore seem the proper moment, but it is a revelation concerning Lady Severa—’

‘Ah, the one that got away,’ said Zizka.

‘Indeed, though the astonishing thing—’

‘The one you let get away,’ said Zizka.

Balthazar awkwardly cleared his throat. ‘I believe you will want to hear—’

‘Then you should be properly dressed while you tell me.’

Balthazar’s face fell as, with some effort, the older of the two manservants – who he now realised could, in fact, have more accurately been described as jailers – produced a set of mighty iron fetters, runes crudely stamped into the black metal of the bracelets. Runes of containment and control. Bonds intended to prevent sorcerers from using magic. Or magicians, naturally.

‘Hands,’ grunted the man.

Balthazar did his best to produce a watery smile. ‘These really are not necessary.’

‘But they are expedient,’ said Zizka.

‘Your Eminence, please! May I speak briefly?’

‘Can you speak briefly?’

Balthazar gave that false little titter. Even after all his recent triumphs, it seemed he could not avoid it when nervous. ‘I have come to a profound realisation, Your Eminence. An epiphany, one might say! I must confess that, on our journey from the Holy City, I three times tried, and three times failed, to escape Her Holiness’s binding. On the final occasion, indeed, at a set of standing stones near Niksic—’

Jakob gave a sharp intake of breath, and Balthazar realised, as Zizka narrowed her eyes yet further, that the summoning of a Duke of Hell might not land so very well with a leading member of the clergy. ‘Well, er … let us not dwell … on the precise nature of the evidence, but I have become convinced that Pope Benedicta is indeed the Second Coming of the Saviour herself!’

His confession did not elicit the delight he had hoped for. Zizka took a long breath through her nose, and raised one lethal eyebrow at Jakob of Thorn. ‘Our necromancer has found religion?’

‘Faith is not necessary, Your Eminence! I am a man of reason, and it is reason that has led me to this conclusion! I no longer need to be compelled to serve Her Holiness!’

‘Because you thrice tried to break her binding and thrice failed.’

‘Exactly!’

Jakob gave that sharp intake of breath again.

‘Well, no … not because of that.’ There was something about Zizka’s basilisk glare that made it very hard for Balthazar to keep his thread. He had faced drawn swords he found less worrying. ‘But because, I mean … I will serve her willingly. I have been searching, you see, perhaps all my life, for a purpose. A mission. A cause to which to apply my talents!’ He smiled. Zizka did not. He had yet to receive any evidence that she was capable of it. ‘And what higher purpose can there be, after all, than to serve the very daughter of God?’

Zizka’s eyes did not un-narrow by even a fraction. ‘At last,’ she said, ‘we have found common ground.’

‘I knew we would!’ he replied, smiling wider.

‘Well done you.’ She waved to the jailers. ‘Now take him to the cages.’

Balthazar stood, mouth open. The older jailer held out the weighty fetters.

‘Hands,’ grunted the man.

‘Your Eminence, please! The cage really is not necessary—’

‘Necessary, expedient, convenient.’ Zizka dismissed him with an im-patient wave, as if even that was more than he deserved. ‘That’s hardly the point. The cage is where you belong.’

The older jailer closed one bracelet on Balthazar’s wrist with a scraping of unforgiving ratchets. The younger one stepped forwards silently to make sure they were secure. Balthazar could already feel the effects. Like slipping one’s head beneath the water, from a magical point of view, the senses suddenly dulled.

‘You are a heretic, Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi,’ said Zizka. ‘Tried, convicted, and sentenced by the Celestial Court. You are a summoner of demons and a fiddler with the dead.’

‘I really must object to fiddler—’

‘For the crimes you have committed – crimes against God himself – there can be no atonement aside from your death and righteous commitment to hell.’

The other bracelet scraped shut, the deadening effect intensified.

‘I thought the Saviour rejoiced at the redemption of a wrongdoer …’ muttered Balthazar.

‘The Saviour might,’ said Zizka, turning away. ‘But she’s not holding your leash.’

Balthazar gave something close to a wail of dismay as he was flung onto the straw with entirely unnecessary violence, the gate thrown clanging shut behind him, the keys turned in the several locks, then the hold plunged into almost total darkness as the trapdoor was sealed.

Not merely a cage, but an oppressively small one, lined with dirty straw, deep in a lightless hold. ‘Curse them!’ he snarled, and punched the floor, and immediately regretted it, then startled as he heard something shift, peering into the thick shadows. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Only me,’ came Baron Rikard’s papery wheeze. Could Balthazar detect, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the faint twin gleam of his ancient eyes?

‘And me.’ Pale fingers showed in a chink of light, wrapping gently around the bars opposite. A slice of pale, scabbed, bony face and one huge eye, ringed with bruises. Sunny nodded sideways. ‘And Vigga.’

‘Uh,’ came a grunt. Almost a sob.

Balthazar felt no rancour towards her for Baptiste’s death. She was helpless before her own nature. It was the corrupt cardinals, the infant Pope, the whole rotten Church that he blamed! On which he would be revenged!

‘Treated like livestock,’ he snarled, sucking at his abraded knuckles. ‘Worse than livestock. After all we sacrificed! They confine us in the darkness! In cages!’

‘Where else would I go?’ said Sunny, softly, and she slipped her fingers from the bars, and retreated into the shadows, and was gone.

‘I should be caged,’ he heard Vigga mumble. ‘Best for everyone.’

‘Suit your fucking selves! But Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi will not take this lying down!’

From somewhere in the darkness, the baron gave a weary snort. ‘By all means take it standing up. But you’ll be taking it, that I promise you.’

‘No …’ whispered Balthazar. What practitioner worth their salt does not keep their deepest secrets for themselves? As luck would have it, Lady Severa’s true identity remained a secret known only to him.

‘No …’ He began to smile. The binding worked upon the soul, and who knew more of the soul than the mistress of the arcane who had transferred her own into another body?

‘I will find a way free …’ If he could get a message to her, enlist her aid, perhaps between them, a sorcerer of her talents, a magician of his … ‘I will break the binding.’

If he had to tear down the pillars of creation, he would find a way. He forced down an acrid burp and clenched his fists around the bars so tightly his knuckles ached. ‘I swear it!’

Jakob clenched his fists around the weathered rail so tightly his knuckles ached. Sometimes it almost seemed, if there was a moment when he wasn’t in pain, he had to hurt himself. He frowned back towards the city, Saint Natalia’s Flame a flickering pinprick in the evening, casting a faint glimmer on their wake.

‘Do we really have to keep them in the dark?’ he growled.

‘Of course. You have forgotten what they are, Jakob.’ Zizka glanced across at him. ‘I begin to suspect that you need to be reminded of a great many things.’

‘It could’ve come out worse.’ Not a statement you could make about every cause he’d fought for down the years. ‘Troy was a great bastion against the elves once. I saw it. With the right leader, it can be again.’

‘Oh, I am in wholehearted agreement.’ Zizka’s lip curled. ‘Which is why I wished to install a dependable ruler. A predictable ruler. One who would bring an end to the great schism and reunite the Churches of East and West. Emperor Michael would have served our purposes admirably.’

‘Those were not the terms of Her Holiness’s binding,’ grunted Jakob.

Zizka gave a disgusted hiss. ‘For a man who has sworn an oath of honesty you have turned mealy-mouthed, and for a man who has sworn an oath of poverty your arrogance is astonishing. Were it not for the oath of temperance, one would wonder whether you were drunk.’ Cardinal Zizka worked her mouth and spat over the rail into the sea. ‘Her Holiness, who let us not forget is ten fucking years old, asked you to see Alexia crowned. On that I congratulate you. On that and nothing else, because all that came after was your personal project, one that has laid waste to years of careful planning. Do you know your problem, Jakob of Thorn?’

‘I was cursed by a witch so I cannot die?’

‘Oh, let us be more specific. You were cursed by your lover so you cannot die.’ Cardinal Zizka stepped closer, glaring up at him. ‘And there is the key to it! Despite all your scars, all your bitter experience, all your professed cynicism, you still entirely lack the thirteenth virtue. You remain an incurable romantic.’

The temptation to bundle the Head of the Earthly Curia over the rail and into the churning sea was very great. As a younger man Jakob would likely have done it, and God damn the consequences. But down the long years, he’d learned to resist temptation. He kept his aching fists locked to the rail.

‘As always, it will be up to the pragmatists among us to repair the wreckage the idealists leave in their wake.’ Zizka turned scornfully away. Back towards Troy, already dwindling into the distance. Into the past. ‘You would not want me as your enemy, Jakob of Thorn.’

‘Of course not, Your Eminence.’ Jakob humbly bowed his head, wincing at the twinge in his neck as he straightened. Then he caught her eye. He held it. He made sure there was no misunderstanding. ‘But you wouldn’t be my first.’

‘Sorry to bother you.’

Brother Diaz turned to see Alex in the doorway. Or Father Diaz turned to see Empress Alexia. He suspected it would all take some getting used to. ‘Not at all.’ He waved towards the stained-glass window. ‘I was just … talking to the Saviour.’

‘Much to say for herself?’

‘No more than usual. But she’s an excellent listener.’

‘You’ve got that in common.’ She loitered, on the threshold. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Of course!’ Father Diaz stood, raising his hands to encompass the chapel. He’d already spent far more time there than in his previous benefice in the Celestial Palace, and much preferred it. It might be modest in terms of size and decoration, but he judged his chances of being roasted by a fireball, or sucked dry by a vampire, or drowned in a giant charnel pit to be a good deal lower here.

His chances of coupling with a werewolf were, for that matter, close to nil. He cleared his throat as he beckoned Alex in. ‘It is your chapel, after all.’

‘People keep saying that,’ she said, stepping through the doorway. ‘My chamber. My palace. My city. When you grow up with nothing, it’s hard to think of anything as yours. Let alone an Empire.’

‘No doubt that will come. You always struck me as a quick learner.’

‘I’ve had good teachers.’ She ran a fingertip along the arm of one of the high chairs built against the walls, and gave an approving nod. ‘You’ve been dusting.’

‘Clean chapel, clean soul, my abbot always used to say. Not that he did much scrubbing himself. From the state of the place, I’ve a feeling your predecessor didn’t spend much time at prayer.’

‘Eudoxia? No. But likely more than I have. I grew up in the Holy City, after all. None of the locals go to church. Unless it’s to filch from the collection plate.’

‘What could be nobler than to cut out the middleman, and convey the funds directly to the needy?’

‘That’s what I always said.’ Alex grinned, for a moment, but it soon faded, and left her thoughtful. ‘So … they’re gone?’

‘I watched their ship depart from your window.’ One more white streak on the dark sea. ‘I prevailed on Jakob to take a letter for me, in fact.’

‘You finally managed to send one!’

‘Just a short note to Mother. Let her know where I am. How it all turned out.’

‘What will she think? When she hears you’re chaplain to an Empress?’

Brother Diaz thought about that for a moment, then raised his brows. ‘Do you know … I find I really don’t care.’

Alex was looking solemnly towards the stained glass. ‘I wish … we could’ve done more for them.’

‘We can pray for their redemption.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Perhaps while we’re praying for our own.’

‘They’re not beyond it, then?’

‘I don’t believe so. Even if they do. Who is without sin, after all?’

‘Not me, that’s for damn sure.’ Alex frowned at the floor for a moment, then reached up to clutch her head with both hands. ‘What the fuck do I know about running an Empire?’

Brother Diaz would likely have deplored the language, but Father Diaz saved the deploring for when it really mattered. ‘Running an Empire is hardly the job of an Empress,’ he said.

‘What is her job, then?’

‘To pick the people who’ll run it for her. In my humble opinion, Her Resplendence has already made one excellent choice.’ Father Diaz patted the lump on his chest, where the vial still sat against his skin. ‘I shall pray to Saint Beatrix that she continue to guide your hand.’

‘I’m surprised you’re still sending her prayers. After all we went through.’

‘More than ever! She delivered, didn’t she? How many times did we face death? And here we are, both still standing, both strengthened by our trials, both guided to a place where we can do … some good. If you cannot see the hand of the divine in that—’

‘The divine?’ Alex looked far from convinced. ‘Saint Beatrix didn’t save us at the inn. A werewolf did. Remember?’

Father Diaz swallowed, his heart suddenly thumping almost painfully hard. ‘Not an episode easily forgotten.’

‘And Saint Beatrix didn’t save us at the monastery. A necromancer did.’

Father Diaz thought of the plague pit, a chill sweat prickling at the small of his back. ‘Another moment to linger in the memory.’

‘Did Saint Beatrix dive through Saint Natalia’s Flame to save me? No. It was a cursed knight.’

‘I will admit—’

‘And in the rigging of that ship, and in the war-torn wilderness, and in the secret passages of this palace, was it Saint Beatrix who risked everything for me? No. It was …’ Her voice cracked, and she took a moment to compose herself. ‘An enemy of God, supposedly.’

There was a silence while Father Diaz considered these facts. ‘I must admit … theology was never my strongest suit. Honestly more of a numbers man, but … perhaps the werewolf, and the necromancer, and the cursed knight, and even the enemy of God … are the tools Saint Beatrix chose?’

‘A saint sent a set of devils to turn a thief into an Empress?’

‘Well, when you boil it all down …’ Father Diaz kept one hand on the vial for a moment. Then he let it drop, and shrugged. ‘That seems to be about the size of it.’