53
The second day of the Saturnalia
Three days after the Ides of Saturnalis
Delphine was underneath half of Via Silviana, and the other half of the street was apparently lodged in her throat. She tried to move and cough, and realised with a sudden scrabbling fear that she could do neither.
Surely her chest wouldn’t feel so heavy or so sore if she was dead?
‘Up you come,’ said a voice that sounded reliable, and Delphine gasped in a deep whoosh of air as the weight was relieved and she could breathe again. Everything hurt. Was that a good thing?
She was clutching someone who turned out to be Kelpie. ‘Street fell on me,’ she managed to say when the world was the right side up again.
‘Good to know,’ said Kelpie.
Delphine looked beyond her and saw Livilla — a new dust-smeared and heroic Livilla whom she was pretty sure she didn’t like any more than the last one. Livilla was holding something, an armful of stones and sticks and tree roots, and when Delphine realised what it was, her legs almost gave out from under her.
‘Rhian.’
‘She’s not dead,’ insisted another demme, a slender blonde whom Delphine struggled to place before realising that if her hair and clothes were tidier she would look a lot like the Duchessa d’Aufleur.
‘Then what is she?’ Delphine asked in a voice closer to a screech than she liked.
‘Inside my head,’ the Duchessa said. ‘She says it’s not over yet.’
‘Oh, I like that “yet”, full of hope,’ Delphine snapped back. She took a step and found it possible. Nothing was familiar. ‘What happened to the street?’
‘Some explosions south of the Lucretine brought on a landslide,’ said Kelpie. ‘We were lucky to find you. Are the others safe in the nest?’
Delphine looked around, searching for a fencepost or something that separated her own house from the rest of this chaos. She saw a body flung flat on the ground some way from them, one leg twisted grotesquely out of sight. Her body reacted, knowing it was Macready even before her mind identified him. ‘Oh, no.’
She leaped across the wide crevasse in the street and ran to him, breaking her nails on the stones that pinned him to the ground. She held her breath, remembering that boy in the Vittorina Royale and how quickly he had died once they’d pulled the stones clear. She might not love Macready any more, but that didn’t mean he was allowed to be dead.
It began to rain, huge dollops of water that splashed on his dusty body. Delphine tried to check his pulse, but realised halfway through the process that she didn’t know how to do it. He was warm; was that good?
‘Let me,’ Kelpie said roughly, kneeling on the other side of him, running her hands over him with an air of confidence. ‘Alive,’ she said finally.
Delphine started breathing again.
‘No offence, sweetlings, but we’re going to need to get undercover soon,’ called Livilla. ‘The rain is starting to burn.’
Delphine could feel the heat of the water as it splashed onto the back of her head and arms, but the sting she felt was nothing to what it would do to the Lords and Court.
‘Get to the nest,’ she yelled, letting Kelpie scoop up Macready.
She looked around wildly, and then realised that she was a sentinel, stupid. She didn’t need to use her eyes to find the nest she had wrought out of that funny little shop she had lived in for so many years. The nest was hers — the house was hers — and she let the skysilver on her back draw her towards it.
‘There,’ she cried, pointing at a heap of rubble and broken remains of the next-door bakery.
Topaz threw herself at the heap and tore it apart, throwing charred pieces of stone and brick aside until the kitchen was revealed, the warm light of Delphine’s kitchen.
They ran inside, all of them, Delphine ensuring that she was last. As the rain gave way into a thick, pounding downpour, she sealed the nest behind them.
Sealed off like this, apart from the storm and the war and the crumbling city, it was almost possible to forget everything that had happened. Ashiol leaned against a wall and watched them all gather into Velody’s kitchen, dusty and wounded and damaged. Not a group of people he would ever want to see in the same room. He made no move to greet Isangell or Kelpie. How broken was he that he felt nothing at knowing they were still alive?
The city was calling him. It itched under his skin and hummed in his ears. You didn’t hide when the sky fell, not even during daylight. Not if you were Creature Court.
Ashiol watched Velody as she tended Macready as best she could within these muffled walls. Saw her avert her face from the twisted statue of a thing that remained of Rhian. She took the time to give a word or a hand-squeeze to everyone, even Livilla.
He had to get out of here. This was no time to nest.
Of all people, it was Livilla who met his gaze and nodded in agreement. She looked so different shorn of her false black hair and coloured eyelashes, thick cosmetick and elegant props. Her smile was warmer, and there was humour in her eyes.
She left Velody’s side and came to him, shaking back that oddly natural brown hair. ‘Driving you crazy, isn’t it, my cat? You never liked to be contained for long.’
‘There could be other survivors out there,’ he said, trying not to remember the sight of Mars burning up before his eyes.
‘Yes,’ Livilla said. ‘It’s an excellent excuse. Shall we tell them that, or just slip away?’ He must have given away his surprise in his face, because she laughed at him. ‘I’ve been at this almost as long as you, dearling. I won’t die in a cage.’
Velody was distracted with the wounded. She might not even notice they had gone, for a while. It wasn’t her that they would have to convince, in any case. Delphine stood with her back to the door, arms crossed and a defensive look on her face.
‘No,’ she said as Ashiol and Livilla sidled up to her. ‘I’m not opening it again. Everyone I love is in here and I won’t endanger them so you can pretend to die heroically.’
Ashiol had never liked her. ‘You’ll be rid of us, at least,’ he suggested.
Delphine gave him a dirty look. ‘Don’t think I’m not tempted. This is a new world order, Ashiol Xandelian, and I don’t give a flying frig how many titles you people make up for yourselves, or who is claiming to be Power and Majesty now or for eternity. I answer to Velody. Take it up with her.’
Ashiol opened his mouth to continue arguing, but a familiar cry from outside the door snapped him to attention. ‘There’s someone out there,’ he said.
Isangell sat on the floor of the kitchen beside the twisted form that the others insisted was Rhian. ‘The others’ included not only Kelpie and Delphine but the voices in Isangell’s head.
Ashiol was here and he was alive and she was damned if she was going to admit to him that he had the right of it — that she was part of this sorry mess of a Creature Court.
Is that what is going to happen to me? she asked the voices, looking down at Rhian. The former Seer was partly formed from marble and partly from granite, with plant roots twisted wetly around her limbs. Her face was barely recognisable as human.
Not at all, said the voice she had come to distinguish as belonging to Rhian.
But if I’m the new Seer …
You’re not.
Isangell blinked. But the voices, and the visions …
I lied to you. I’m sorry about that. It’s true that Heliora made the error, that the Court was calling you and not me to be the Seer. But once it came to me, there was no changing that. I am the last Seer of the Creature Court. But I am something else, as well, and the futures were getting in the way of that. I needed to get rid of being Seer for a while.
So you passed it on. Will I be stuck with it forever?
When the time is right, you can give it back. I’ll tell you when. And you’ll be free of it, Isangell. I promise.
The other voices were sounding fainter and fainter in the background of Isangell’s mind.
Don’t trust her, Heliora said suddenly. What she’s doing, it’s not right … But then her voice was overwhelmed by others, voices and visions, and try as hard as she could, Isangell could not hear Heliora again.
Velody could not heal Macready. He remained unconscious, and though she had stopped the bleeding everywhere she could, his left leg was still a mess.
The nest numbed more than her animor. The sounds of the storm were dampened in here. The mice were mostly quiet inside her. But if she concentrated, pushing her senses beyond the thick, blanketed walls of the nest, she could hear the screams of the city.
Quite clearly, a single voice cut through her like a knife. Time to pay back what you owe, little mouse.
Velody looked up and around.
Ashiol was shouting at Delphine, threatening her. ‘Open the door! Can’t you hear them? They’re right outside.’
Delphine shook her head resolutely. ‘We can’t risk everyone.’
Ashiol turned to Velody as if seeing her for the first time in hours. ‘You can hear it, can’t you? Poet is outside. Make this bitch let him in.’
Livilla gave a hollow laugh. ‘After all this time you expect us to believe you would risk everyone to save Poet?’
‘Garnet is with him,’ Velody said steadily, staring Ashiol down. ‘The sky infected him, you know that. For all we know, it’s taken Poet, too.’
‘Is that who you are now?’ Ashiol accused. ‘Saint Velody, who saved Poet from my claws, who saved Garnet after he was swallowed by the sky. Now you’ll let them burn?’
‘Would you risk everyone in this room to save them?’ Velody shot back, hating that she was on this side of the argument. She owed Garnet for saving her neck back in Bazeppe, before the city fell.
Ashiol did not reply, but his face said everything.
Velody spoke quietly to Delphine. ‘Let them in.’
‘Let the enemy into the one place in the f*cking city we’ve managed to keep secure?’ Delphine said in amazement. ‘I betrayed my own army to bring you all here, to keep you safe. But saints forbid we abandon the man who left you both in a pool of your own blood!’
Velody looked at Delphine. ‘Letting them die is not who we are,’ she insisted. ‘It took me long enough to drill that into the Creature Court. I can’t become the monster now, in the last moments.’
Delphine released the catch.
A blast of rain and ice-cold wind burst through the doorway and two half-dead figures stumbled forward, crashing on the floor. Poet had burns down half his face and body, and he was hanging onto the limp, bloodstained figure of Garnet as if he had forgotten how to let go. Garnet’s body glowed with light, and waves of cold poured off his skin.
Delphine closed the door up again. ‘Of course, that does mean we’re shut in here with him,’ she said pointedly.
‘You still have the cage,’ Poet gasped. ‘Don’t you?’
Ashiol was almost gentle as he prised Poet’s fingers away from Garnet. ‘You would have made it faster if you’d left him there,’ he said.
Poet laughed. ‘The thought honestly never occurred to me.’
‘That was your first mistake.’