“The official name’s Imperiumite,” Vanth said. “But it’s not widely discussed."

  Cocona stepped next to him. “And how do you know that?”

  “Me? I happen to have official clearance to read certain files. How did you know?”

  I stood up. “He’s not trying to insult you, by the way. He just sounds like that.”

  Honestly, I wasn’t so sure myself. I just figured out it was better to intervene before another argument broke out.

  Quietly, Vanth lifted my hand to his lips, which I took to mean he bowed down to my diplomatic efforts.

  “We keep an eye on things.” Cocona gnced at Amankay. “Or an ear.”

  “Fair enough,” Vanth said.

  He was going to wrap his hair on his hankie again, but I noticed it was stained with blood—Cassel’s blood. So I tied my hankie around his hair, making sure it looked as good as you could expect from such a makeshift arrangement.

  Vanth leaned in to kiss my lips. He gave a couple of steps into the white nothing, unsheathed his knife, and pricked a vein in his left wrist, quickly turning it down so the ensuing spray of blood would fall on that unnatural ground, and pressing his right thumb on the open wound before long. For a moment, I thought maybe the earth would drink—absorb—the blood, but nothing happened.

  He bowed from the waist, and the elegant dip of his body extended his respects to the dead far more eloquently than his words ever could. Or mine, for that matter. Though I’d been the one who insisted in going there, I couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t sound superfluous, so I bowed too. Awkwardly, ‘cause I didn’t have as much practice.

  After that, I turned to Vanth, holding his wrist in both hands. “Let me kiss it better.”

  He smiled—barely, but that was a pretty good Vanth smile. I leaned over his wrist, casting a simple healing spell as I touched my lips to the soft skin. Vanth’s pulse pped up at me, steady and calm.

  Vanth’s wrist looked as good as new. I licked my lips and tasted iron.

  “Does my blood taste good?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” Really, was I supposed to say it tasted bad? It was all his fault for saying weird things.

  I still held his hand, though I wasn’t doing anything to it, just running my thumb over his knuckles. Vanth let me.

  “Just wondering,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “I suppose there’s a reason why the King of the Dying Sun wields an iron bde. Y’know, like in the song?”

  “Ah, yes. Yes, the reason is that iron is very effective against creatures of the Underworld.”

  “Oh, so normal spells can’t harm creatures of the Underworld very well, but iron can.”

  “Yes.”

  “But they feed in blood, which is rich in iron.”

  “Iron can affect them for better or worse. As in every spell, intention is key.”

  “I see. How curious! It’d be interesting to look more into it.” Vanth looked at me with way too much amusement for Vanth standards. I frowned. “Are you entertained by anything I said?”

  “Your enthusiasm is endearing.”

  “Oh. Then it’s fine.” I looked up at the sky, wanting to see if there were any storm clouds near, but thanks to the trees I couldn’t see very far away. It wasn’t too different from being in a city. Being used to the open ground, I didn’t like it much. “But you don’t have an iron bde right now, don’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  I thought of the knife I’d just seen in Vanth’s hand. Something about it looked real familiar.

  “Can I see it, please?” I asked.

  Vanth unsheathed it and gave it to me.

  The handle, as I’d noticed, was ivory, though maybe piner than you’d expect. The bde, though, was smaller than I expected and didn’t look very expensive at all. Smaller than the bde in my utility knife. Other than that, though, they looked practically identical.

  My hands trembled, and I sheathed my knife and returned his before I cut myself.

  It could be a coincidence, of course. If my hands didn’t shake, I could’ve made myself believe it.

  “That bde belonged to me,” I said. “Not the handle. But the bde—I gave that to you when I was in Vorsa.”

  “That’s right.” Vanth leaned closer, gently holding my shoulders. “Do you remember anything new?”

  I shook my head. But, at the exact moment I did that, my mind filled with vague scraps of memories, as if a pipe had burst open and I’d gotten sprayed with a stream of stinking water and partially-decomposed garbage. It all happened in a couple of seconds, ‘cause I wasn’t getting anything coherent, just vague impressions removed from context, and most of all, feelings. A tall blonde woman with an old-fashioned hairdo standing against the crimson dusk, and the overgrown garden of an old house, and the scent of chamomile. I was afraid and disgusted and I didn’t even know why. Except I knew, if I just looked a bit closer—but I didn’t want to.

  And I pushed Vanth away, falling on hands and knees on the dewy grass, and I retched over and over though my stomach was too empty to expel anything. I wished the earth would crack itself open so I could sink there and never leave.

  Vanth sat on the ground and gathered me in his arms. I clung to him silently, though it couldn’t be very comfortable for either of us—I was bathed in cold sweat.

  “Seriously, he’s a mess.”

  Him again! Why couldn’t he just leave me alone?

  You know who I mean.

  “Stick your nose elsewhere,” Vanth said. I was so, so grateful for the naked contempt in his voice.

  “I don’t think he’s lying.” Willka raised his hands, as if that proved his innocence somehow. “I’m saying, if talking about the Megarchon, or seeing the Imperiumite, or whatever the fuck makes him react like that, I don’t think he’s going to be very useful.”

  “I’m going to wring your fucking neck.”

  I clung to Vanth tighter.

  Willka waved an arm in our direction. “And the other one keeps threatening me.”

  “Nobody’s going to attack anybody else,” Nina said. Vanth wouldn’t go against her, and I didn’t really expect him to. But also, I doubted she’d side with Willka against us. That was fair.

  “You could have a tiny bit more tact,” Sara told Willka.

  “This isn’t about tact. This is about trust.”

  “Fine,” Vanth said. “Let’s discuss why should we trust any of you.”

  Amankay huffed. “See what you’ve done? Now we’re going to be like this all night.”

  “She’s right.” I didn’t move from my safe position. “Vanth and me want to kill the Megarchon. Y’all want to kill the Megarchon. I don’t see the point of arguing.”

  “No,” Willka said, “this isn’t about killing the Megarchon. It’s about ending the Protectorate.”

  “Well,” I said, “you really can’t do that without the other thing, can you? If you don’t like me, though, you can always wait for the next person who enters the Megarchon’s inner circle for you, it’s fine.”

  “So you can enter the Megarchon’s inner circle,” Willka said.

  “Yes. She loved me, or at least she thought she did.”

  “Yeah, that’s real trustworthy.”

  “Well, I know the Megarchon and you don’t! And she’s summoned me for a reason! Seeing how I’m going to see her again, I might as well help you however I can.”

  “She won’t touch you again.” Vanth talked to me, as if everyone else had vanished. “She can’t.”

  “And how do you even know that?” Willka, on the other hand, was sounding pretty exasperated at this point.

  “Because I’m the reason she released him the first time. That’s all I will say.” He gred at the Snakes, but especially Willka. “Until you earn my trust.”

  “That’ll be enough,” Nina said. “I trust that we’re all in the same page?”

  Everyone shrugged, except Amankay, who tossed her head and pretended she wasn’t acting superior, and Willka, who kicked a pebble and scratched his head.

  And T’ika, who paced with her hands on her pockets. “So we’re letting him know our pns?”

  “What’s your problem?” Nina asked back. It was a very friendly sort of question. You could even believe it’d been made in simple curiosity.

  And, Nina being Nina, I might even believe she was only feeling curious, after all.

  T’ika sighed. “Don’t you think it’s too much of a coincidence for him to come into the city looking for us?”

  “No. I was going to look for him in Vorsa. As he said, we have the same goal. It only makes sense for us to work together.”

  “It’s not as if I expected to find a conspiracy to murder the Megarchon,” I said. “At best, I hoped for a few people who’d support me while I did it.”

  “And how did you expect to survive murdering her?” T’ika asked.

  “I didn’t.”

  This time, Vanth hugged me tighter. Oh, yeah: if I died, he died too. I wasn’t too comfortable with the idea. Though it’s not as if you could bme it on me.

  Still, it wouldn’t hurt to take better care of myself.

  “This is getting unpleasant,” Moreira said. “Doesn’t Mamani have to take a flight? We should leave him to it.” T’ika was about to retreat, but he grabbed her arm. “Why don’t you show them the way to the airport?”

  T’ika was the one who’d given me that token thing, wasn’t she. When I went into the abandoned factory searching for the necromancer. And she was the one who’d propelled the raft with a wind spell. Those were her speciality, all right.

  Too bad I didn’t find the necromancer before leaving the city. Maybe I should tell Nina about them—or maybe not. I still wanted to be the one who killed that necromancer. Bad enough that Vanth was compelled to kill them before I did.

  Speaking of, Vanth clearly wasn’t compelled to kill any of the Snakes—he wanted to kill Willka, but so did I. That’s a different thing. So none of them was the necromancer.

  T’ika was searching on her pouch for something—a token, I supposed, though I wasn’t paying the Snakes a lot of attention. She held a small ft thing on her hand, then blew on it to make it leap into the air.

  The crystallized murder was now useless, and that bothered me, ‘cause it was the only link to the necromancer I’d found. The necromancer themself never reached our hills; Vanth and me didn’t even know how they’d summoned the needleteeth from afar. How was I supposed to find them? When I tried to bait them, I ended up summoning a whole new group of people!

  I looked at T’ika again.

  Sometimes I could be really slow!

  I jumped to my feet. Almost at the same time, Vanth did the same. The Snakes stared at me—I think I looked absolutely insane. It’s a good thing I couldn’t see myself.

  “Sorry, I’ve gotta pee.” I grabbed Vanth’s arm, dragging him to the looming trees.

  “Nobody’s gonna look at you pee!” Willka shouted after me.

  I was too busy loping over the wet vegetation with loud stomps to pay him any attention. My right boot slipped on something I couldn’t see, but Vanth grabbed me, steadying me.

  “We’re far enough,” Vanth whispered in my ear. “What is it?”

  So he hadn’t been fooled. Better to do this quick, before anybody got any suspicions.

  I tried to catch my breath, one arm slung around Vanth’s shoulders.

  “You said you thought I was an accomplice of the necromancer, ‘cause you didn’t feel compelled to kill me.”

  “Yes.”

  “If someone used a wind spell to transport a crystallized murder from one pce to another, and the crystallized murder shattered on arrival, could that summon some needleteeth?”

  “Someone would have to summon the needleteeth separately, but that person could theoretically be located elsewhere—and the one who did the wind spell wouldn’t count as a necromancer, no.” He gnced over his shoulder; it was dark enough the Snakes wouldn’t see him. “You suspect the one with the wind spells?”

  “Yes.” I grabbed his arm. “Let me have her.”

  “Sure, but be careful.”

  “I will. I’ve gotta make sure she’s the one, anyway.”

  I hurried back to the Snakes, pretending I was zipping myself up.

  “Excuse me?” T’ika wasn’t looking at me, so I shook her shoulder. She took a step back. “Sorry, sorry. I just wanted to ask you a thing—it won’t take long.”

  “What do you want?”

  She really should’ve hidden her discomfort with me better. Guess some people can’t help being bad liars.

  “I was thinking my family is gonna hear about the whole mess in High Tomenedra—sorry, New Tomenedra—before they find out I’m alive. And I was worried sick thinking they’d be worried sick, so I wanted to send them a telegram or something, but it’s gonna be a very long time before the telegram or something reaches them—“

  “Be quick.”

  “Fine. Can you send a message to I Doronte? With a wind spell.”

  She gave an exasperated sigh. “Do you have any idea of how complicated the thing you’re asking is? Of course not, or you wouldn’t expect me to do it for free.”

  “I never said it was for free.”

  “Well, you don’t have anything I want, anyway.”

  “Do you think it can be done, though? Sending a small, light object from here to I Doronte with a wind spell? I’m not asking you to do it. I’m pretty good with wind spells, myself.”

  T’ika gave an even bigger, more exasperated sigh. “Can it be done? It depends. I might be able to do it, with focus and care. You can’t. Don’t you think most people would do it if it was so easy?”

  I nodded. “I see. I see that you’re the one who did it.”

  She opened her mouth to ask what in the hells did I mean, or to call me an idiot again, or something else I’ll never find out. ‘Cause I didn’t wait to hear what she was going to say. I had my utility knife in my hand, and I lunged at T’ika, and she was taken by surprise so that she couldn’t use a spell against me, just put up her hands up to stop me and scream, and we both slipped and fell.

  “You almost killed my family!” I yelled. Someone had jumped on me, and was trying to wrap a pair of sweaty hands around my neck, but someone shoved them off of me just as quick, and several people were screaming all at the same time, T’ika and some of the other Snakes and me, and Amankay was asking what in the hells was going on, and I was about to stab T’ika but she cast a wind spell and sent me a few meters back.

  I scrambled to my feet. She scrambled to her feet, too—bloodied, eyes bulging, looking fucking terrified. Well, that wasn’t enough. I was going to kill her.

  “See? See?” Willka shouted. Vanth had him on a vise grip, and though Willka struggled like an angry cat, he couldn’t free himself. “I told you this fucker couldn’t be trusted!”

  “Me?” I jabbed an accusing finger in T’ika’s direction. “That fucker is doing a necromancer’s dirty work! Did you even know that? She almost got my family killed! There’s children at home! And today, today she used a wind spell to drag me away from my hiding pce and dump me somewhere Cassel’s guards could find me! I bet she told them my location, too!”

  Going by the way Cocona, Sara, and Moreira stared at T’ika and me, they didn’t know. And by the way Willka gred at me only, he didn’t believe one word I’d just said. Amankay, however, stood quietly and calmly—too calmly for someone who is surprised by the entire situation. And Nina—I couldn’t tell what Nina was thinking. At all.

  broccolifloret