“She’s not dead,” Hennan said.
“How can you tell?” I stared hard, raising the lantern, looking for some small signs of breath being drawn.
“She hasn’t got up and tried to bite your face off.”
“Ah. True.” I looked left then right down the alley. “Let’s get out of here.”
I led off and Hennan followed. Any small pang of guilt I felt at leaving Kara unconscious in the gutter washed away with the thought that if there were dead things stalking us in the dark then we were leading them away from her. The blood, continuing to run from my nose, dripped from my chin and left a pattering trail behind us. I could taste it running into the back of my throat, hot and coppery. I swallowed without thinking. Blood triggers the spell—the only thought I had time for before I pitched forward into my own darkness.
? ? ?
The night swallows me and I rush through it, blind and reckless, the wind tugging at my clothes. For some endless time there’s nothing, no sound, no light, no ground beneath my feet though I’m running fast as I can, faster than is safe. A pin-prick of brightness pierces me, so thin and sharp I wonder that it doesn’t hurt. I race toward it—there’s no other direction here—and it grows, becoming larger and brighter and brighter and more large until it fills my vision and there’s no rush, no running, no motion, just me at the window, leaning across the sill, looking out, out onto a sunlit city far below.
“Vermillion looks so small from here.”
The voice comes from beside me, a boy’s voice, though cracking with the rumours of the man to come. I turn, and flinch away. The child is deformed. A boy of maybe fourteen, his arms twisted into unnatural positions, straining and tight against his body, wrists bent at painful angles, hands clawed. His skull bulges out above his forehead as if overburdened with brain . . . just like—
“What, Garyus?” A girl’s voice on my right.
“The city looks so small from up here, like I could hold it in the palm of my hand,” he says.
“It looks that way to me when I’m down there in the middle of it.”
I turn and it’s the Red Queen, just a girl, no more than eleven. Jaw set, staring out into the sun-bright distance.
Garyus seems unconcerned. “The world though, sister . . . now that looks big wherever you stand.”
“I could conquer it,” says Alica, still staring out across the palace walls into the streets of Vermillion. “I could lead my armies from one end to the other.”
“When you’re older,” says Garyus with the superiority of a big brother, “you’ll understand how the world works. You don’t conquer it with the sword. Armies are the last thing you use, when the result is no longer at issue. Money is the lifeblood of Empire—”
“The empire is broken. It was broken before we were born. And merchants grub after gold—wars are won by soldiers. You’re just obsessed with money because Father gave you those hundred crowns and you bred them into more. You only care because—”
“Because I was born broken, yes.” Garyus’s smile seems genuine. “Broken like the empire. Even so, I’m correct. Money is the lifeblood of Empire, and of each part of it, and of any kingdom, or nation where there exists sufficient industry to arm and equip a military of consequence. Money is the blood of nations and a person who understands that, who controls that, controls the future. Let the blood out of any country and it will collapse soon enough.”
Both of them turn and look back into the room. I turn too, blinded for a moment by the change from the brightness of the day.
“I’m right. Tell her I’m right, ——.” Garyus speaks a name but it slides past me as if it is deliberately evading my ears.
It’s Alica who replies though. “He’s not right. Wars decide, and when I’m queen I’ll lead my armies to Vyene and remake the empire.” Her scowl reminds me of the expression she will wear when she gazes out across Czar Keljon’s forces from the walls of Ameroth, less than ten years from this day.
I can see who Grandmother and Great-uncle Garyus are addressing now. A pale girl, painfully slim, hair lank and colourless, of similar age to Garyus. She’s not looking at them—she’s looking at me. Her eyes are startling, one green, one blue, both unreal shades that seem to have been taken from some alien place.
“Don’t be so sure you’ll be queen, little sister,” Garyus says, his tone light but hurt behind his smile. “When Father sees what I’ve made of his investment in me he’ll—”
“He just gave you the money to give you something to do up here,” Alica says, her scowl half-frown now as though the hard truth doesn’t taste as good on her tongue as she thought it might.