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Chapter Text

    On what was about to be the worst night of Jowd’s life, the moon was waning almost to nothing.

    It wasn’t quite a new moon, which was lucky, because Jowd was in the Forest when the sun set. He hadn’t wanted to leave his wife Alma at all, nor baby Kamila, who had only been born that morning at the tail end of the Longest Night. But the Matron Midwife had promised to stay and watch over them for him, and Alma hadn’t been recovering as well as expected, so Jowd had gone out into the Forest to find the Physik Woman, Galen, who Alma once trained under.

    The medicinal bundle of herbs from Galen, and the accompanying instructions, was safely tucked in his cloak pocket now. Jowd put on speed as he saw the trees beginning to thin ahead of him. The drawbridge usually shut around sunset, and he wanted to get inside the walls before it was pulled up. If he didn’t, he’d have to wait until it was lowered again in the morning.

    Spending a night in the Forest was ill-advised at best, and a death sentence at worst. In the Castle’s early days, when it was only a humble village, Things and other Darke creatures would get in and wreak ruin, spoiling milk and Magyk or stealing babies (Jowd shuddered). The Castle residents had built the encircling stone Wall for safety inside the wide, deep Moat they dug, and only went into the Forest when absolutely necessary. And they definitely did not stay under the trees overnight. Someone protected against Darke Magyk could still get eaten by wolverines, and the Wendron Witch Coven only needed a moment of opportunity to relieve a traveler of their valuables.

    But Jowd had timed himself well, and he got across the still-lowered drawbridge. The North Gate gatekeeper, Rindge, popped his head out of the winch room as Jowd approached. “You’re not going back out, right?”

    “Right,” Jowd agreed, relieved. He dug in his pockets and found a silver penny for Rindge. Being on friendly terms with the gatekeeper wasn’t a free break from the toll. Jowd wouldn’t have liked to leave Rindge without his means of living, anyway.

    Rindge tossed the coin into the till with a clatter. “You’d better get home. It’s a weird night to be out.”

    “Wyrd?” asked Jowd, who had never left behind his Wizardly knowledge even if he had moved out of the Wizard Tower years ago.

    “No, just weird,” said Rindge, who had never been a Wizard and never intended to be one. He saw a lot more interesting things from the winch room than he would from the Wizard Tower. Such as: “Just now I saw this foreign ship sailing up from the south.”

    “What makes you say foreign?”

    “I don’t think they knew they couldn’t sail this way.” Even if Ridge had raised his drawbridge for a ship, the stone One-Way Bridge that crossed the northern branch of the river would have stymied them. “But once they figured that out, the ship just…turned around.”

    “With some trouble, I’d imagine.” Jowd tried to picture anything big enough to be called a ship trying to execute a turn in the Moat. It was a wide Moat, but not that wide.

    “With some Magyk, more like.” At Jowd’s look, Rindge nodded seriously. He didn’t have to know Magyk to recognize it when he saw it. What else could have raised a three-masted brigantine out of the water, turned it around in midair, and set it back on the Moat with barely a splash?

    Whatever the Yonoa was up to, Rindge was glad he’d seen it for no longer than it took to make out the name on the bow. It had sailed right back down south, hopefully to go be the Port’s problem.

    “Thank you for the warning,” Jowd said. He did want to go home, and not be out tonight, wondering about a mystery ship. Rindge touched the brim of his hat, which was drawn low over his eyes as usual, and Jowd hurried off. Behind him, a noisy rattle of chains started up as Rindge and the Bridge Boy began raising the drawbridge for the night. Jowd made a sharp left turn as soon as he could, and in moments the Ramblings were in view.

    It was impossible to look at the Ramblings and assume it had been built on purpose. The higgledy-piggledy sprawl staggered along the inside of the eastern curve of the Wall like a crescent moon, and very little of it matched the rest. Indeed, there was much debate about whether it counted as one building, or several. But despite its homemade architecture, it was solidly built, and it continued growing.

    The Ramblings had, like the Castle, started small. But for every new resident who moved in, more people were drawn by its reputation as a homey, reasonably nice place to live. Soon it was stuffed full to the brim with not just apartments, but schools and workrooms, tailors and carpenters, distilleries and taverns, and any trade a person could run from their kitchen table.

    Now, at night, most of those trades were quiet. Jowd paused to stamp the snow from his boots inside the main door, then set off down the corridor, the rushlights burning brightly on the walls. The halls of the Ramblings swerved unpredictably, and Jowd’s boots kept slipping into the worn imprints of a thousand other boots that had tread the floor before him.

    It was good to be home.

    The room behind The Big Green Door, at the end of Thataway Street (all the hallways in the Ramblings were named like streets), had been Jowd and Alma’s home ever since he’d brought his new wife to live with him in the Castle. It was nothing like Galen’s Forest treehouse, or the Magykal Wizard Tower apartments, but it cheered Jowd to see the warm green paint.

    Except when the door burst open like it did just then.

    The Matron Midwife who had thrown it open paled at the sight of Jowd. But she was bigger than him, and rushed out with a cry, and Jowd instinctively stepped out of the way.

    Jowd immediately doubted himself. Why instinctively? He’d…seen she was carrying something, something small wrapped in white cloth, and he hadn’t wanted to make her drop it. He was a big man, tall and handsomely fat, and he’d trained himself over the years to be careful of other people who weren’t as sturdy. The Midwife cried out again as she disappeared down the hall, and the word she was saying resolved itself in Jowd’s ears: “Dead!”

    The green door was still standing open, and he could hear crying inside.

    Jowd threw himself through the door. Alma was crying, curled around her belly on the bed, and she only cried harder when Jowd dropped to his knees beside her.

    “She took her,” Alma sobbed, “she took Kamila, Kamila’s dead.”

    That was how Cabanela found them, when he appeared into the darkness of the room. His white robes made him look like a ghost.

    “What’s happened?” he gasped out. Neither mourner noticed that he had arrived at their door pre-alarmed, his hair falling out of his favorite upswept style and into his face.

    Jowd couldn’t speak. Alma was still incoherent with sobs. Cabanela’s gaze went to the empty baby basket, then desperately to Alma on the bed, as if the baby were only hidden behind Jowd’s head, as if she was crying from the pain of nursing. Surely, it had to be that.

    It wasn’t that.

    Cabanela fell to his knees. Or, almost did; his cloak squeaked when he tried.

    Jowd turned only from many, many years of habit. His muscles engaged while his mind was elsewhere, barely coherent, unprepared to see Cabanela ease the door to their room shut and fold his cloak back from the child hiding underneath it.

    She was barely as tall as Cabanela’s hip, and staring at the sobbing Alma with wide, frightened eyes. Her hair had been cut close to her scalp. The rich red of her dress was black in the unlit room.

    “I didn’t know who else to go to,” Cabanela said.

    Jowd had no words to answer him with.

    The girl stayed frozen in one spot until Cabanela put her on one of the chairs at the table. Then Cabanela could kneel at his friend’s side, a shadow of warmth that Jowd truly could not tell if he felt or not. There was a creeping numbness all through his body.

    “Jowd, I don’t know when I’ll be able to come back,” Cabanela said, gripping Jowd’s shoulders tightly. “I have to go—I have to make sure I wasn’t followed. But this girl is yours, do you understand? As far as anyone else must ever know, she was born to you as much as Kamila—was,” he choked out. Alma wailed, long and thin and pained, and barely felt the two different hands that reached for her.

    “I’m so sorry,” Cabanela said, and he kissed Alma’s temple. Then he rose and was gone. The door shut itself firmly behind him and locked itself. It would bear no more bad news and strange guests to come inside; the family had been through enough, tonight.

    It was not until long after Cabanela left that Jowd realized he had been wearing white robes. Not the lapis lazuli blue of an Apprentice’s robes, which Cabanela had spent the last seven years and a day in, but the white ExtraOrdinary Wizard’s garments, complete with the silver-and-platinum belt and the polished lapis lazuli stone of the Akhu Amulet. Jowd had seen it gleam in the scant light, briefly; seen and been too addled to understand.

    Cabanela was now the ExtraOrdinary Wizard. But what had happened to the last one?

    At some point, someone thought to ask the child in Jowd and Alma’s room her name. She said it was Lynne.

    Neither Jowd nor Alma asked—Memry did. Memry was a cheery, nosy young woman who happened to be a friend of Alma’s. Alma did not have many close friends in the Castle, so only Memry showed up in the Ramblings a day later to hear about the new baby.

    Once there, once she heard, Memry had no intention of leaving. She stayed to take up even more space in their single room, sleeping on the floor next to the box bed built into one wall, which Alma hadn’t left since the night Kamila died. She organized a rota of neighbors to bring food which she forced Alma and Jowd to eat. She found the bundle of herbal medicine, and followed the instructions, and made Alma take them. She tiptoed around Lynne uncertainly and put her to bed earlier than Lynne ever fell asleep.

    And she also sent an urgent Long-Distance Message Rat to Alma’s sister in the Port. When Catrina turned up, she bustled enough to make the room seem homey, and not full of unswept floors and unwashed people. Memry, in deep relief, regained her cheer now that she was not the only one sitting up at night to keep watch over the couple.

    It was later, after Catrina put Lynne to bed at a reasonable time one evening, that she sat down with Memry and asked, “Have you heard about the Queen?” It was the first time in a while that the two women had nothing to occupy their minds or their hands with.

    “What about the Queen?” Memry asked. Lynne clutched her pillow over her ears. She had her own privacy curtains now, which Catrina had made for her equally makeshift bed. But they didn’t block noise at all, and neither did the thin pillow. She could still hear Catrina say:

    “Have you heard that she’s dead?”

    “What? No,” Memry gasped. “She can’t be. She’s sick from her pregnancy. I wouldn’t be leaving the Palace, either.”

    “Would you be locking yourself in the Palace with that bunch of brutes calling themselves the Custodian Guard, and letting the Supreme Custodian be your regent?”

    The fire flickered in the thoughtful silence. Memry asked, “Who told you this?”

    “Terry Tarsal.”

    “That tailor who lives off Wizard Way?”

    “Her cousin lives down the row on There-and-Back-Again Lane,” Catrina said. “She came by to ask after Jowd, and she told me something that happened when she made a delivery to the ExtraOrdinary Wizard. You know the ExtraOrdinary is supposedly Jowd’s friend?”

    “There’s nothing supposedly about that, they were both competing for the ExtraOrdinary Apprenticeship years ago,” Memry said, smug at knowing something from Alma that Catrina didn’t, and went on: “I guess Alma was wrong when she said there weren’t any hard feelings between them about it.” Cabanela had not turned up, among all the neighbors and relations and friends coming to take care of the couple.

    “Anyway,” Catrina said disapprovingly, whether of Cabanela or Memry it was hard to say, “Terry said she overheard a conversation there. The ExtraOrdinary was talking to some Ordinary Wizard, his deputy maybe, and she said the ExtraOrdinary said the Custodian Guard weren’t protecting the Queen; they were the ones who shot her.”

    “What? Shot?!”

    “The Queen’s consort, too, and the last ExtraOrdinary Wizard.”

    “When?” Memry demanded, alarmed more by the news that the old ExtraOrdinary was dead than by the death of the consort. The Queens and their daughters were all that mattered in the line of succession; the men of the royal family generally wandered off to do whatever they felt like, and nobody in the Castle paid much attention to them. The Queen’s marriage two years before had only attracted attention because it implied there would be an heir forthcoming, which was exactly why nobody had been surprised at the news of her pregnancy.

    “Weeks ago, maybe,” Catrina said. She had now been at the Castle for a week or so herself. “However long the current ExtraOrdinary has been the ExtraOrdinary.”

    “And he said this in front of Terry?” Memry asked, suddenly suspicious. Terry Tarsal was hardly a Wizardly confidante. And Catrina was from the Port, what did she know?

    “He didn’t realize Terry was there at first,” Catrina said. “According to Terry, anyway. She thought he might have tried to do a Forget Spell after, but Terry saw him muttering and got around a corner, and it mostly missed. She was pretty upset about it, actually, she said she couldn’t remember if the ExtraOrdinary had paid her for his clothes or not.”

    After a long silence, Memry said, “I didn’t even know the Queen’s consort was here in the Castle.” Much less, left unsaid, that someone had shot him.

    “He must have just arrived,” Catrina said. “His ship was in the Port a few weeks ago.”

    “Are you sure?”

    “Of course I am,” Catrina said, insulted, and it took Memry a few compliments to smooth over the ruffled feathers of the Castle-Port rivalry (“I would never say I knew boats better than you.” “Ships.”) But Catrina did eventually say, “I didn’t see his ship myself, but folks closer to his mooring say he was bringing home a Princess as a surprise for the Queen.”

    “A Princess??” Memry sat back in her chair. “That really would be a surprise, if the Queen wasn’t involved in making her. But then—where is she? The Princess?”

    “Nobody knows,” Catrina said. “Or at least, Terry said it didn’t seem like the ExtraOrdinary had her.”

    “Hard to imagine that old guy taking care of a baby,” said Memry, failing to picture it.

    “She might have been older.”

    “Poor kid’s probably in Dungeon Number One,” Memry said, very easily picturing the notorious dungeon’s horrors in all their glory. Then what she had said caught up with her, that she was talking about a child in that place, and she and Catrina both fell silent.

    And Lynne, who had been trying hard to fall asleep so she didn’t have to hear any more, squeezed a few silent tears into the thin material of her straw mattress. She wished she was deaf. She wished she was anywhere in the world but here. Here, in this room, she would not be getting any sleep tonight.

    Alma had not been asleep, either. She’d heard the whole conversation.

    Alma was a clever woman. She was also tired, down to her bones, and sadder than she’d ever believed a person could be. But Catrina had heard a rumor about a Princess.

    No adopted Princess had appeared in the Castle, or been heard of in the Palace. But Cabanela, in white robes, had brought them a little girl and told them to say they knew exactly where she came from. And that little girl was curled up in the corner of Alma’s home, where Alma had forgotten she existed.

    Alma’s heart squeezed. It had been doing that in a lot of ways lately, each one subtly different than the last but no less keenly felt.

    Alma got up the next morning. Catrina stared at her in painful hope, and Memry was suddenly afflicted with an inability to make eye contact as she mixed up that morning’s medicine. The herbal stuff had run out after a few days; Memry had found Alma a replacement prescription. The dregs tasted bitter, but Catrina would check her cup when Alma put it down to see that she’d drunk it all.

    Catrina brushed Alma’s hair for her, and put it up the same way she did her own, to keep it from getting tangled again. It made them look like twins, in Memry’s opinion, except for Alma’s green eyes, but she sensed that now was not the time for a lighthearted joke.

    “Lynne,” Alma said, and Lynne jumped. “I have some old clothes in the chest under our bed. Why don’t we see if there’s anything that might fit you?”

    Lynne looked uncertainly at the two women who had been running things so far. To her, even young Memry seemed very adult. Catrina said, “That sounds lovely, Alma, I’ll give Lynne’s things a wash while you do that.”

    Lynne shivered in her underclothes while Catrina heated up water for laundry, Memry was dispatched to bring back more buckets from the pump, and Alma took out folded clothes from what had once been her trousseau chest.

    It was a little silly to have kept old clothes for so long, and not handed them down to neighbors. But she’d come from the Port and then the Forest with so little else, and then she had thought there would be a little girl to give them to which there was, in front of her right now, and Alma fixed her gaze on Lynne until the girl looked frightened at her intensity.

    Alma tried to be gentle. Maybe it helped that she couldn’t speak very loudly after so long of not speaking at all. She helped Lynne try on several dresses that were far too big for her, and an old cloak which suited her very well. Alma told her she could wear hand-me-downs until her hair had grown in enough for its color to be visible. “Then we’ll be able to see what colors suit you best.”

    Lynne, in a pale blue dress Alma hadn’t worn since leaving the Forest, hiked the too-long skirt up around her waist. It was nearly her size, if the bodice could be taken in as much as was necessary. “I like this one.”

    Alma could do this. She could focus on the little girl who needed her, who needed someone to be paying attention to her and taking care of her. Surely she could do this.

    Just…not alone.

    Alma reached a hand over the stretch of mattress she’d left empty when she got up. “Jowd, what do you think?”

    Jowd moved as slowly as a mountain trying to shift its own base. He looked at the two of them. Alma took Lynne’s hand, directing her to pull the skirt up and show Jowd the length of it.

    He leaned forward wordlessly until his head came to rest against Alma’s, where she was kneeling just outside the bed. Alma closed her eyes. She kept her hand fastened around Lynne’s, one little hand pressed against her palm, and she breathed in Jowd, who smelled stale and medicinal. His once-curly beard needed to be washed.

    Jowd said, “She looks lovely.”

    The first morning after Catrina went home, Alma made their morning brew herself. Jowd had not been paying attention to how it was done.

    Alma said, baldly, when they had both swallowed their medicine, “The Chief’s dead. Catrina told me.”

    She didn’t tell Jowd everything she’d overheard, yet. She wasn’t sure if Lynne was still asleep or not, behind her bed curtains, and Jowd might not want to know about more death. But he deserved to know that his old friend—and potential Master—hadn’t retired after all. Alma didn’t know the man’s name; everyone in Jowd’s circle called the former ExtraOrdinary Wizard ‘Chief’.

    Jowd put his mug down. He looked to the door for a second, then back at her ruefully, and then down at the table. The Chief, if he was a ghost, should have come to see them; but there were Rules of Ghosthood that she and Jowd both knew. The Chief had to spend his first year and a day as a ghost in the exact spot he had died before he would be at liberty to visit. Right now, he was still in the Palace, somewhere.

    “He’ll come by,” Jowd said, voice rough from disuse.

    “When he can,” Alma agreed, and they held each other’s hands as tightly as they could.

Chapter Text

    Jowd and Alma told everyone that Lynne was Alma’s daughter from a previous relationship.

    Some people paused and did the math when they were told this—after all, Lynne was getting quite tall, and Alma was still young herself. But the numbers worked out tolerably well for a baby who had been left behind, perhaps, by a young mother who had needed to do some growing up before she was ready to have a daughter.

    Lynne called Alma ‘Mom’. She didn’t call Jowd ‘Dad’, just ‘Jowd’. Lynne wasn’t always sure if Alma was her mom, especially in the beginning. But she kept saying it, even after she outgrew treating Alma like someone who might keel over at any moment.

    Lynne outgrew a lot of clothes, too, over the next ten years, though she didn’t grow as tall as she would have liked. She grew out her brilliantly red hair, which stuck straight up as a permanent exclamation point to her youthful enthusiasm. But no matter how hard she tried, Lynne did not grow up to have green eyes.

    Wizards—and only Wizards—had brilliantly green eyes from using Magyk. Both Jowd and Alma had them, from their respective studies, though Alma’s were a slightly darker green. And they did teach Lynne Magyk at home, since she had no patience for the after-school classes when she could be out digging for bugs by the Moat, or setting fires because outdoor roasted vegetables “tasted better” than making them by the fireplace. But Lynne’s eyes stayed stubbornly brown, and she never got her head around more than a handful of Basyk Charms.

    Jowd never said aloud that that might be for the better, but Lynne knew he thought it. The Supreme Custodian banned those after-school Magyk classes, later on, and the boys at the boatyard where Lynne got her first job peered for a little too long through the sun at her eyes.

    Lynne wrestled all those boy Apprentices into submission, and got most of them in headlocks pretty quick, but she remembered the looks. The boys never grew much friendlier beyond a grudging respect—she wasn’t a proper Apprentice, so she wasn’t a threat to them, but neither did they pay her much mind.

    Jannit Marten, who ran the Castle’s boatyard and oversaw the construction of all the best boats (so there, Port), had offered her an Apprenticeship. But Lynne, who could only maybe afford it, said no. Apprentices lived with their Masters, and she had to stay at home, with Mom and Jowd.

    Not that they needed her to check their cups in the morning or make sure they ate. They didn’t need that, and Lynne didn’t need the security of living at home now that she was making money. Lynne just couldn’t leave them alone with an empty nest. Alma only had her herbalism work, and Jowd only did unsatisfying odd jobs, ever since he’d gone to the Wizard Tower and officially resigned his position as an Ordinary Wizard.

    He didn’t say they were unsatisfying. Lynne just knew he thought that, too.

    Lynne liked that Alma said what she thought (in front of Lynne and Jowd, at least, in private, because you couldn’t trust anyone these days). She was the one Lynne talked to about the Young Army, and how most of the boatyard boys had taken Apprenticeships to avoid conscription, and about the Magyk class ban, which they both worried was going to turn into an outright ban on Magyk itself.

    Jowd said, to the last, that the Supreme Custodian could never take on the ExtraOrdinary Wizard in a fight, when it came down to it.

    Lynne wasn’t sure.

    So Lynne worked at the boatyard, and she liked the muscle it gave her, and she got a dog, which she said was for protection but was really just a ball of fluff she’d impulsively spent all her first pay on because half-drowned puppy looked so sad and in need of saving.

    Missile liked Jowd and Alma, but he always jumped on Lynne as soon as she came home, his barks resounding down the corridor as the door swung itself open to welcome her in. Jowd had to pointedly clear his throat to interrupt Lynne’s welcome-home rolling on the floor with the now grown-up dog (“Whosagoodboy? That’s right! It’s you!”). “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

    “Oh!” Lynne threw one arm over her eyes.

    “Not that.”

    “Your present is still hidden,” Alma said, amused. Lynne got up with her eyes shut and dramatically flailed her arms to navigate blindly around the kitchen table, and heard Alma laugh, under Missile’s barking.

    “What am I forgetting, then?” Lynne asked, opening her eyes. Jowd raised an eyebrow. “Oh! Right.” Lynne went over and hugged him. “Hi, I’m home.”

    “Hello, Lynne, thank you for that polite greeting. How nice to see you after you’ve been away all day.”

    “She's away all day every day,” Alma said, but accepted her own hug and gave Lynne a peck on the cheek. “You could always race Missile to the door; you might get a hello first that way.” Jowd’s mustache twitched tellingly with a smile.

    Lynne went up the ladder after dinner and into the loft. It was not, strictly speaking, an actual loft so much as the space between the roof of the room below and the more slanted roof of the Ramblings itself. When Lynne had gotten too big for all three of them to bear how much space she took up any longer, Jowd had knocked a hole in the ceiling so she could have a bedroom all to herself.

    The loft held a worn mattress, a mess of blankets, a quantity of white and tan dog hair that had gotten stuck on Lynne’s clothes, and a large number of illegal Magyk books. They had been slated for burning after the ban on classes, and Jowd had stolen as many books as he could from the Ramblings schools before they could be taken by the Custodian Guard. Lynne had already searched them for any interesting-looking Charms or pages in need of repair, and these days was using The Compleat Fish-Charmer as a nightstand.

    Missile whined pitifully from below. “Night-night, Missile,” Lynne called down to him, which was his command to go to his basket to sleep. He kept dragging the basket over to the ladder, and Lynne had to keep putting it back by the fireplace, where he’d be warm. The bottom ladder rung was covered in puppy tooth marks; Missile had tried to chew the thing that kept taking Lynne away from him to pieces.

    Lynne heard Missile’s claws pattering across the floor. She couldn’t sleep, either, from childish excitement. Somewhere downstairs was her present for her birthday tomorrow, and she might have to pull the ladder up behind her to keep herself from going back down and looking for it.

    The floorboards creaked, and then Alma said “Shhh,” audibly on the edge of laughter. Oooh, they were setting up for tomorrow, and Lynne couldn’t look! She wasn’t going to be able to sleep at all.

    Lynne went for a walk.

    She wasn’t stupid; she went for a walk on the roofs of the Ramblings, so she wouldn’t get caught outside after curfew, and stayed away from the edge so she wouldn’t be seen. She left tracks in the snow, but nobody could catch her, specifically, from just that.

    A lot of the Ramblings roofs were slanted to let the snow fall off, but from her loft Lynne could squeeze between two heavy wooden beams and some loose insulation out onto one of the flat stretches, where the rain barrels were left out to collect water (and, at this time of year, snow). Lynne remembered helping Alma in rooftop gardens when she was younger, but those were all gone now. Probably because of the Custodian Guard, somehow.

    “Mrrw?”

    Lynne spun around. There was only barely enough moonlight to shine off the snow, and show a tiny flash of reflection behind one of the rain barrels.

    “Hey there.” Lynne crouched down and held out her hand. A pair of small eyes flashed again, and then a cat slid out into the open, black as shadow.

    He sniffed her hand, and his ears and tail suddenly perked up into view. “Mow!”

    Lynne winced at the way his tail bent sharply in the middle. It looked broken. “What happened to you?”

    “Mrraw!” The cat ignored her in favor of ramming his whole body into her, purring so loud she could feel it rumbling through him. He circled her, pressed as close as possible like he was trying to share his fur coat.

    “I have a cloak,” Lynne told him, “I’m warm enough. Aw, you’re just the friendliest little kitty-kitty, aren’t you.” The cat accepted under-the-chin scritches, pawing at Lynne’s arm to keep her hand close. “Are you someone’s rat-catcher?” The Ramblings had a lot of communally-cared-for cats for pest control. This one was friendly enough that he had to have spent a lot of time around nice humans.

    “Ma-a-a-ow.” The cat bit down on a fold of her cloak and tugged. Lynne pulled back, but the cat let go when she tried to play tug-of-war, chirping little squeaky noises. He tried the same thing on the other side of her cloak, and then on the edge of her nightgown peeking out, but he was too small to actually pull her anywhere if that was what he wanted.

    “You’re silly,” Lynne said, standing up. It was cold out, and her warm bed sounded good right now.

    “Miiwww,” the cat said pitifully. Lynne leaned down for one last ear scritch. The cat fastened his teeth around one of Lynne’s fingers and pulled.

    “Ow,” Lynne hissed. “Let go, you little—come on,” as she tried to gently shake him off. “I want to go to bed, let me go.” She was trying so hard not to swear at the top of her lungs and get reported for breaking curfew.

    He would not let go. The cat was biting down just hard enough to hold on but not puncture, his pointy kitty teeth catching on her knuckle as he tried to pull her. Lynne had to yank her hand away, and came free with streaks of red immediately welling up. She stuck her finger in her mouth while the cat stumbled back at the sudden lack of counterbalance. “Rude,” she mumbled around her hurt finger.

    The cat yowled, running after her when Lynne climbed back into the roof. “Nuh-uh-uh,” Lynne said, sticking the wooden planks she’d moved back in place. She pushed one flailing black paw out of the way. “You stay outside.” If the cat followed her home, Missile would go nuts.

    The cat wailed, audibly clawing at the wooden planks. Lynne made sure they were set firmly in place, stuffed a bunch of straw insulation back where it belonged, and shuffled through the under-roof back to bed.

    “My Lord?”

    The Supreme Custodian did not turn.

    The quaking Night Attendant gathered his courage for a second attempt. The Supreme Custodian stood a head and shoulders above anyone else in the Castle, and the strange light coming through the open door of the Throne Room cast his blue skin in an even bluer, unearthly hue. It unsettled the Night Attendant, who had been told that the Throne Room was kept locked and bolted at all times for Palace residents’ safety.

    The Supreme Custodian, however, was holding a key.

    “My Lord?” the Night Attendant managed, and felt that it was, arguably, worse to have the Supreme Custodian turn to look at him. The metal half-mask he wore made his eyes gleam redly from underneath it. “Th-the spy is waiting, that is, she’s come to make a report to you. She says it’s about the Queenling.”

    “Is it,” the Supreme Custodian said.

    “She said that, that she had good news to report.”

    “Does she,” the Supreme Custodian said, with what might have been close to satisfaction. He raised a hand and beckoned the Night Attendant forth.

    Reluctantly, the Night Attendant approached, coming within the glow of the open doors. It was a blue glow. It couldn’t be Magyk; such a thing wouldn’t be happening in the Palace itself, not when the Supreme Custodian was right there. Surely if he looked, there would be nothing unusual within.

    He looked, out of the corner of his eye, and flinched.

    The Night Attendant turned to run.

    He was seized by the collar and dragged, close to sobbing from fear, back to the doors. The Supreme Custodian grabbed the back of his head with one huge hand and made him look. “Tell me what this is,” the Supreme Custodian ordered.

    “I don’t know, my Lord, gods in heaven, I don’t know!” the Night Attendant gibbered. “Please, don’t make me, oh, gods, it’s Darke, it must be some Darke Magyk, please don’t let it have me—!”

    The Night Attendant’s wails were cut off when his head hit the wall, as the Supreme Custodian tossed him bodily aside. “Take him away,” he ordered, and the guard standing at attention hurried to obey, giddy with relief at having a reason to leave the spooky hallway. He hated standing guard outside the Throne Room. He’d seen what was in there, once, and wished he hadn’t.

    In the silence of being left alone, the Supreme Custodian stood for a moment longer in the glow of the Magyk that ended at the Throne Room’s threshold.

    He did not put a hand up to mirror the one hanging, seemingly motionless, just inside the blue field. He was no longer certain that a touch would not risk breaking the barrier that had held since the day of the coup d’etat. The hand was already so close to the threshold that it was the clearest part of the figure lost in the Magykal haze.

    The Supreme Custodian’s Master was not satisfied at all by the situation in the Palace, and had not been for years. A loose Queenling was bad for the business of throwing coups, so he said at every one of the Supreme Custodian’s yearly in-person reports. This year, however, the Supreme Custodian would be able to bring him a satisfactory conclusion. The golden bullet which had been Named for the Princess would finish what had been started ten years ago. Soon, his Master could safely arrive.

    Soon, the tantalizing secret in the Throne Room would be his Master’s to discover the nature of.

    The Supreme Custodian closed the doors, locked the locks, and slid home the bolts which had been hastily added to the outside, after the coup. He tucked the key into the secret pocket of his navy robes, under the red double-crossed sashes of his Master. Then he went to hear from his Master's spy, waiting to tell him about the Queenling, and passed a far less restless night than the Night Attendant, who was in the dungeons not two floors below.

Chapter Text

    Under the pyramid roof of the Wizard Tower, inside the apartments at the very top, the ExtraOrdinary Wizard stopped pretending that he’d be able to go back to sleep and got up.

    The wardrobe heard his feet on the floor and opened itself, revealing the mirror inside the lefthand door and swishing its hangers to put the thick woolen winter robes front and center.

    The arms that were stuck into the wardrobe shoved those robes out of the way and went digging for the long underwear first. These things had to be done in proper order, and the Big Freeze was getting closer every day. The hangers apologetically reshuffled themselves.

    Thus dressed, and robes firmly over his underwear, he turned to the mirror. The mirror showed his robes in perfect, pristine white.

    Cabanela frowned, and tapped the mirror with one graceful gesture in irritation. “Try agaaain.”

    Sulkily, the mirror changed to show what he was really wearing: the long scarf over his robes wasn’t white, but red as a slash of fresh blood. The mirror didn’t see why he kept up the idiosyncratic habit. White robes were what every ExtraOrdinary had worn for hundreds of years without feeling the need to accessorize. And the red scarf wasn’t even filled to the brim with Magykal power, unlike his Charm-filled belt, or the Akhu Amulet. He could have at least done a silver scarf, or a blue one.

    Cabanela, who was very aware that his scarf was rather bloody in appearance, nodded at his reflection and went down to the kitchen for breakfast, where the stove was already busy lighting itself and warming a coffeepot.

    Cabanela looked up from his breakfast at the sudden appearance of a spectral, translucent figure coming through the wall. “Heeey, Chief!” His old master’s ghost was a familiar sight, though Cabanela often felt that he still wasn’t used to the balding man being so see-through. The white robes of office made even a new and fairly solid ghost look as faded as an Ancient, especially in winter, or against a white kitchen wall. “What brings you to—”

    “They know where she is,” the Chief said. “They’re sending another Assassin.”

    Cabanela fled the table. His chair had not fully hit the ground before the front door of his rooms slammed shut behind him.

    It would have been worth his life to be caught running so urgently by the sentry that stood outside the Wizard Tower. Cabanela stood leaning against the inside of the Tower’s double doors for agonizing minutes before he could gather himself, speak the password, and stride outside without letting the trembling in his limbs break into an all-out sprint.

    He was still moving too fast for the Young Army sentry at the base of the stairs, who could not stop in time to avoid hitting him with a snowball that had been meant for the stray cat that kept sniffing around. The sentry quailed as the ExtraOrdinary Wizard spun around with a glare. “Watch it!”

    Cabanela immediately deflated. The sentry was staring up in terror, realizing who the snowball had hit, and the ceremonial sentry uniform of a candy-cane striped tunic with purple ruffles, big floppy yellow hat, and knee-high yellow boots looked so stupid that Cabanela felt automatically sorry for any person forced to wear it in public.

    The person in question looked very small to be a soldier.

    Curse the sentries, or more correctly, curse the Supreme Custodian. The Wizards could guard themselves, but the Supreme Custodian had insisted that the sentries were there “out of concern” for the Wizards’ “safety”. Concern for the tyrant’s ability to watch who left the Tower and when, more like. The comical young soldier would probably trot off at the shift change and tell all about what Cabanela had been doing this morning.

    “Shouldn’t you be in schoool, baby?” Cabanela snapped out, itching to be moving, unable to walk away. Something about the sentry was itching at him, too, and he wanted to figure out what. The floppy hat was too big for the kid and was falling over his face, and the white cotton pants were so small that Cabanela could see a tear bursting open the seam at the knee.

    “N-no,” said the sentry, teeth chattering. “I don’t need school. I’m in the Young Army.” That skinny chest puffed up. “We are the Pride of Today, the Warriors of Tomorrow.”

    The Warriors of Tomorrow could have used some long underwear, by the frozen tint of the sentry’s bare hand, which might have been actually frozen in that grip around the heavy ceremonial pikestaff. The sentry looked like a winter cold had already wrung him out, but Cabanela wasn’t at all surprised that the Young Army would order a child out into the cold without regard for his health. What was the kid, eight years old? Ten?

    “Humph.” Cabanela stormed off. The trembling that wanted him to run all the way to the Ramblings and back won out over the questions. He’d spent a long ten years learning to live with the questions buzzing around his mind that were too dangerous to be asked aloud.

    Cabanela had lived in the Ramblings as a young Hopeful, competing along with all the others for that slim chance of a Wizard Apprenticeship. He hadn’t enjoyed it, not the crowds nor the noise. But it meant he knew his way, now, taking the path along the open-air battlements on top of the Wall until he reached the North Side door. The battlements path was not technically open to the public, but who was going to stop the ExtraOrdinary Wizard?

    Cabanela strode in as the North Side Door flung itself open for him, and balked at the smell. The Ramblings was NOT a dump; its residents took pride in its “home-made” halls and rooms (all however-on-earth many there were by now). But the hallway that greeted him was dank and cold, the few rushlights anyone had bothered to place burned low and guttering. It smelled like mildew, and—thankfully his brain intervened before he could identify every awful smell, and reminded him he was here for a reason.

    Times had changed, indeed. Cabanela gathered his fur-lined white cloak around him, and strode in.

    Morning in the Ramblings were a chaotic time, as everyone piled out of their rooms all at once to go to work or school or, in some cases, back home after being out all night. Cabanela was so focused on his task that he barely noticed the absence of the normal morning traffic—or rather, its absence in a certain radius around the ExtraOrdinary Wizard. The halls were still full of the riptide of elbowing and shouting and struggling people trying to get around their turn or through their front door before the famous crowd carried them far past it. But that tide staggered and quailed at the sight of Cabanela.

    Some people froze like rabbits, or vanished down side passages if they could; a few muttered protective spells furtively to themselves. Gaping stares followed Cabanela. Ramblings folk might have hung around the Wizard Tower on a day off, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ExtraOrdinary, but he didn’t come to them. What was he doing here?

    Cabanela was letting his feet carry him down the well-remembered turnings to the same old door as before.

    Some time ago the Paint Patrol had covered the green door in the regulation black, and stamped the new address on it: Room 16, Corridor 223. Cabanela saw it and mentally substituted the old address; he liked that one better.

    “Open,” he told the door. The door did not open, and in fact firmed up its hinges. It still held a grudge over the last time it had seen Cabanela, and he had not reappeared in the intervening ten years to dislodge that one incident. Cabanela glanced it over, and then applied a One-Second DryClean to the door before he touched it to knock.

    A flurry of barking responded. Immediately after, Cabanela heard brooms and fists banging against neighboring walls and ceilings, and muted shouting that his mind automatically translated to “Quiet that thing down!”

    “Missile, calm down!” a young voice said behind the door. Cabanela’s gut twisted. He wished he wasn’t here for her.

    Jowd opened the door.

    Everything Cabanela had been rehearsing on his way there suddenly vanished out of his head.

    Jowd saw him and didn’t even blink; he cast a quick glance down the hallway in either direction, then got an arm around Cabanela to sweep him inside.

    The room inside was spotless—but only in a small area centered on the kitchen table, which had been scrubbed within an inch of its life and set with what Cabanela recognized as the nicest plates. Lynne was at the head of the table, wrestling with a fluffy dog that was still barking his head off. There was a wrapped present sitting on her plate.

    Alma, sitting next to her, was staring at Cabanela.

    “You can’t stand in the hall and wait until somebody sees you coming in here,” Jowd said, closing the door firmly behind them. “You do have a key.”

    “Jowd, I…” Excuses were piling up on Cabanela’s tongue. How could he begin to explain himself? He couldn’t turn away from Alma to look at Jowd. He knew exactly where his key was: under the false drawer bottom he’d Sealed shut years ago, to remove the temptation.

    “I know,” Jowd said. “What happened?”

    He knew. He knew why Cabanela hadn’t come before now, that Cabanela hadn’t dared draw the scrutiny that followed him every damn day to this family’s door. Jowd knew that something must have happened to make Cabanela come here in person. Relief swept through Cabanela, strong enough to loosen his jaw.

    “The Supreme Custodian knows Lynne’s here,” he said.

    Alma suddenly put her arms around Lynne.

    “He is the Supreme Custodian,” Jowd said. “The Palace has all the tax rolls and the census and so on. Is that all you came here to say?”

    “Jowd.” Cabanela was sure Jowd knew all of it—didn’t he? Cabanela was still looking at Alma, and the terror in her face made him sure that she knew.

    “Lynne hasn’t done anything wrong,” Jowd said stubbornly. He stepped in between Cabanela and the ladies at the table, and oh, Cabanela recognized that look. It was the Jowd versus Reality look, and Reality had better shape up and get out of the way. Jowd had to at least suspect the truth, to be so strictly refusing to look at it even out of the corner of his eyes.

    “It’s never been about her doin’ anything wrong,” Cabanela sighed. “But you caaan’t stay here, baby—any of you.”

    “But this is our home,” Lynne said.

    “I’m afraid it’s true,” the Chief said, making them all jump.

    The Chief, belatedly, Appeared, sitting on one of the empty chairs at the table. Jowd glanced down out of habit to see if he was wearing shoes. For years the Chief had suffered from incurable foot itching brought on by nerves, and rarely wore shoes indoors. Now that he was dead, nothing itched, and he had sorted out his ghostly appearance to avoid any repetition of the many, many complaints he’d received while alive.

    “Sorry,” the Chief said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” Ghosts could choose when and by whom they could be seen, and the Chief spent so much time lurking in the Palace, trying to overhear anything that might help Cabanela stay one step ahead of the Supreme Custodian, that he often forgot to make himself visible again when visiting friends. He had DisAppeared on his way to the Ramblings out of habit, and though he had arrived before Cabanela, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to disrupt the cheerful birthday celebrations.

    “What’s true?” Jowd asked him.

    “What Cabanela said. And what Lynne said, too,” the Chief said with a rueful nod at Lynne. Lynne was trying hard not to look at the dark gray bloodstain just over his heart, or think about where it had come from, as she always did when he visited. Most days she managed it; not today. “This is your home, and home is precisely where the Supreme Custodian expects to catch you. Their spy told them everything.”

    “What spy?” Alma demanded, holding Lynne even tighter.

    “The one next door.”

    “Beauty? But—she—”

    “They sent her here specifically to watch Lynne, and you two,” the Chief said. “I’m so sorry, Alma. If I’d had any idea before now, I would have warned you.” The Chief had only found out about the spy at all because she’d reported to the Supreme Custodian in a room that he could enter. And he knew very well how they’d gotten it past him before.

    The cavernous Committee Chamber was impossible to heat in the Castle’s cold winters, and the wind had a tendency to whistle straight through it. The Supreme Custodian, at his underlings’ pleading, had moved most of their conferences to the Ladies’ Washroom. It had a wood-burning stove, was comfortably small, and was completely unnecessary for use as a Washroom for Ladies ever since Day One of the Supreme Custodian’s reign, when he had banned women from the Castle government.

    But as the saying went, ‘A ghost may only tread once more where, Living, he hath trod before’. The Chief had simply never been anywhere near the Ladies’ Washroom as a living man, and couldn’t get close enough to overhear anything said there.

    “This Beauty woman doesn’t know anything,” Jowd said. Cabanela closed his eyes in frustration. Even if there was nothing to know, they should be running anyway! The Supreme Custodian didn’t care if what you were accused of was true. All three of them could end up in Dungeon Number One just for being vaguely suspicious—or having green eyes.

    But the accusation was very, very true.

    “She knooows Lynne’s birthday is today,” Cabanela said, “and how old she’s turnin’. What other pieces of the puzzle do they need to figure it out?” He saw how pale Lynne had gone; the dog was whining, trying to lick at the bottom of her chin. When he took a step closer, Lynne flinched.

    “Please don’t take me away again,” Lynne said, her voice very small.

    “No one is taking you away,” Alma said fiercely. “We’re coming with you. We’ll go to—”

    “Me,” Cabanela said, leaping in. “Come with me.” He could protect them, in the Wizard Tower.

    “You?!” Lynne said. “You don’t even like us!”

    Cabanela could not begrudge her the frantic edge to her voice, any more than he could change the way those words settled in his bones. Jowd put a heavy hand on his shoulder, and asked, “How much time do we have?”

    “Until tonight,” the Chief answered. “They’re sending the Assassin at midnight, with a golden bullet.” Lynne shuddered in Alma’s grip. “But you must get away as soon as possible. If they hear word that Cabanela was spotted here, they may suspect something’s up.”

    “Why a golden bullet?” Alma asked, and then, seeing the expressions on Jowd’s and Cabanela’s faces, “Why a golden bullet?!”

    “You have to go,” Cabanela said. “Now, as quickly as possible. Please.”

    The detritus of a lifetime was pushed up against the walls to make room for the spotless birthday breakfast table. Jowd and Alma filled two bags quickly with only a few things from the whole mess; Lynne tied Missile into a sling across her front, trying to shush his excited yapping.

    Alma pinned Lynne’s cloak so tightly closed that she could barely see out of the hood. “Mom,” Lynne protested, struggling to undo and repin it herself, but Alma said,

    “Don’t let them see your hair. People might not think it’s you if they can’t see you well.”

    Lynne went quiet. Even Missile, sensing the mood, whined softly and nuzzled into Lynne’s chest.

    “I’ll stay alert at the Palace,” the Chief promised, already DisAppearing again. “You all stay safe.”

    Cabanela took them via cramped side streets and slipways back to the Wizard Tower. The battlements walkways were quicker, but exposed, and the ExtraOrdinary traveling with a crowd when he’d arrived alone would draw attention. Cabanela muttered an Attention Diversion under his breath as they walked, and paid the price for it when the few people whose paths they crossed walked right into them, not seeing the group coming around a turn. But no one stopped to point at them and shriek, “The Princess! The Princess is escaping!”

    Lynne was clutching Missile to her chest under her cloak, and tried to focus on the fuzzy warmth of him as much as possible. It had started snowing heavily, and the flakes whirled past, turning her vision fuzzy, too. She could feel snow soaking through the loose sole on her left boot, getting her sock wet.

    With her head ducked low, Lynne could only see the snowy cobblestones under her feet, and the swish of Jowd’s cloak ahead of her, Alma’s feet to one side darting out from her own cloak one step at a time. Lynne still used the bright yellow cloak Alma had given her years ago, with its odd creases where the hem had been let out repeatedly to accommodate her height.

    Lynne usually had good birthdays, but this was a pretty bad one. Almost as bad as—as—

    Alma’s steps slowed next to her. Lynne looked up.

    The Great Arch was above them, and beyond it, the Wizard Tower.

    Lynne had seen the Tower once before. She’d gone to look at it once, to see what the big fuss was that meant Mom and Jowd’s old friend never visited.

    It was exactly as she remembered: the tall white tower going up, up, up higher than anything else in the Castle, taller than anything Lynne had ever seen in her life. And the golden Pyramid at its peak shone, so high it was half lost in the low snow clouds. The distant windows flickered purple, glass reflecting light in sudden facets of changeable brightness, and the marble walls and buttresses were nearly iridescent with the powerful Magyk that lived within.

    The usual feeling most people experienced, on seeing it for the first time, was fear.

    Jowd and Cabanela had slowed and dropped back nearly at the same time. They both remembered what it was like; Jowd had warned Lynne, before she went to see it last time. Jowd put an arm around Lynne’s shoulders, half enfolding her in his green cloak and the warmth underneath it. Cabanela took Alma’s hand. “Nearly there,” Jowd murmured. Lynne took a step forward, then another.

    They almost ran into Cabanela, who had stopped dead at the foot of the stairs. “Somethin’ ain’t right,” Cabanela said. Jowd turned, pressing his back against Lynne’s as he looked for whatever threat Cabanela had Felt.

    Cabanela dove for the pile of snow shoveled out of the path to the stairs.

    “Cab—” Alma didn’t get farther than that.

    “Help me!” Cabanela was digging in the snow. “He’s under here.”

    Jowd wheeled around and was at his side in an instant. Three pairs of hands, Alma at his other side, made quick work of uncovering what Cabanela had feared—the sentry from before, who was not supposed to go off-shift for another hour.

    Alma made a strangled noise at the sight of the small body curled up in the snow. Lynne’s grip on Jowd’s cloak went white-knuckled. Cabanela leaned over the sentry, murmuring, even as Jowd was putting two fingers to the child’s pulse point.

    Cabanela looked concerned, and murmured louder, “Quicken, Youngling, Quicken.” He was silent for a second; Lynne thought he looked like he was listening to something. Then he exhaled.

    He kept exhaling, a slow rush of pink cloud that tumbled out of his mouth and covered the sentry with a haze. Almost like the haze around the Wizard Tower. Where was he getting all that air? Lynne gulped in several sympathetic breaths before he finally stopped, and the pink cloud glimmered and sank into the sentry’s body.

    Lynne saw the sentry’s chest rise, shallowly.

    Cabanela was already unpinning his own fur-lined cloak. “We’ve gotta take him inside,” he said. “He’ll neeever survive if we leave him out here.” Jowd pried the sentry up, last night’s snowfall already half frozen underneath the fresh flakes, and helped Cabanela wrap the child in his cloak.

    The sentry looked even smaller in Jowd’s arms, only a pair of small booted feet hanging from one end of Cabanela’s pristine cloak and a shaved head peeking out the other. Jowd pulled the hood over the sentry’s head as they hurried up the steps. Cabanela whispered the password, and ushered them all in as the doors swung open.

    Lynne stopped to gape.

    Walking past to look at the Wizard Tower from the outside was one thing. The inside was another wonder entirely. The interior walls were covered in what looked like hundreds of paintings, but they were moving!

    What she’d taken for paintings faded into new scenes and new people before her eyes, Wizards in white and green and blue robes performing spells of—Lynne realized with a jolt—ages past. The Magykal pictures had to be the history of the Wizard Tower, old ExtraOrdinaries and the things they’d done here.

    Even as she watched, the walls rippled with a wave of new moving images. There, the Tower’s doors were opening to welcome shivering people in ordinary roughspun clothes; on the other wall, a woman in white robes and a gleaming silver-and-lapis amulet was doing something that flashed purple. Close to Lynne, a tall, dark man in white was speaking at the doors of the Tower with a crowned woman in red and gold, who looked up, and seemed to look straight at Lynne with her deep purple eyes.

    “Lynne!” Alma called anxiously. Lynne jolted. The adults were already gathered on the silver spiral staircase in the center of the Tower. As Lynne hurried to join them, the floor under her glittered like sand, letters sweeping across it that spelled out Welcome, Princess, and then, Hurry!

    “No need,” Cabanela said when Lynne tried to climb the stairs. “You can stay where you are, baby. Good? Top floor, quickly!”

    The stairs began to rotate around the central pole at his command, gaining speed with each turn as they whizzed the group up the height of the Tower. Jowd closed his eyes, gripping the railing tightly with his free hand. The stairs alone were enough to give him terrible vertigo. It was a large part of why he had moved out of the Wizard Tower. Any Wizard worth their salt was afraid of heights, but Jowd was unlucky enough to have a particularly bad case, as more powerful Wizards often did.

    The purple door to the ExtraOrdinary apartments at the top of the tower flew open as soon as the stairs deposited them on the landing, and Jowd stumbled through, unable to catch himself with his hands full. Cabanela steadied him, Alma grabbing the back of Jowd’s cloak to help.

    “Put him by the fire,” Cabanela said. He snapped his fingers, and the fire in the hearth sprang to new life from its low embers.

    Jowd knelt to lower the sentry to the floor, as close to the hearth as possible. “I think I’ve got a Clothes-Drying Charm I still remember,” he said.

    “Leave it to me. Wet Clothes Off, Dry Clothes On,” Cabanela commanded. Lynne blinked, and the sentry was wrapped in dry pajamas, the snow-soaked uniform gathered in a dismal pile on the floor. The sentry was wracked with sudden shivers. “You’re Trash,” Cabanela told the pile, and it dripped over to the trash chute and threw itself in.

    Jowd sat back on his heels. “Are those your pajamas?” he asked, because they were pitch black and clearly a matched set made to order. He did not say, Did you just switch the kid’s clothes, summon down your own pajamas as the warmest and most comfortable thing you could think of, shrink them to fit perfectly, and do that all with a single spell?

    “I’m nooot havin’ the ‘conjured matter versus summoned’ debate with you right now, baby,” Cabanela said, following Jowd’s thoughts in entirely the wrong direction. Back by the door, Lynne finally managed to let a wriggling Missile down without dropping him, and he shoved his nose to the floor. There had been SO MANY smells on the way in, and now he was in a room full of things he’d never sniffed before.

    Jowd did his Clothes-Drying Charm anyway, to get the snowy residue off the inside of Cabanela’s cloak, which the shivering sentry was still lying on. He tucked it around the sentry more securely. Between the warmth of the fire and the movement, the sentry stirred, eyes blearily opening. Cabanela leaned down to see what the sentry’s condition was, and abruptly realized what had made him stop earlier on his way out: the sentry had gray eyes.

    Alma used to have gray eyes, too, before she went and learned Magyk, but had no kid to match them. Cabanela turned away, trying to put it out of his mind. He had enough problems right now.

    “You’re all right,” Jowd said to the sentry. “You fell into the snowdrift outside, so we brought you in to warm up. Once you get some rest and something warm to eat you’ll be just fine.”

    The sentry was more alarmed by being spoken to gently than if Jowd had shouted. And those Wizardly green eyes! Looking around only revealed that the situation was worse than she imagined: the whole room was full of shades of purple and white, and the ExtraOrdinary Wizard was standing right there, which meant she had been ‘brought in’ to the Wizard Tower itself. She was consorting with the Enemy.

    No rescue would come, the sentry thought miserably. The Young Army would shoot her as a spy when they caught the Wizards.

    “What’s your name?” Jowd asked, missing the sentry’s growing alarm completely.

    “Boy 412,” the sentry whispered. Rule One of being captured by the Enemy: Recite your designation, and say nothing else. Boy 412 was not, in fact, a boy at all, but she had never ascended past the rank of Expendable, and all Expendables were ‘Boy’s.

    The reassuring smile slipped off Jowd’s face.

    “Sleep It Off,” Cabanela cast, and the sentry’s eyes closed again as she fell asleep.

    Jowd shot Cabanela a look. “That was unnecessary.”

    “You’re the one who said he needed rest. Would you have preferred he catch a glimpse of Lynne and take that information back to the Supreme Custodian?”

    Jowd didn’t want at all to picture sending the tiny slip of a child back to the Young Army, where they issued numbers, apparently, instead of names. He’d heard things about the Young Army, of course, but…

    Missile, sniffing his way around the room to catalogue all the new smells, made it to the fireplace, and the sentry. He sniffed her, sneezed without turning away, and then curled up on a free corner of Cabanela’s cloak. The warm fur lining and warm fireplace felt nice.

    “What next, then?” Jowd said, rising to his feet. “We can’t live in the Wizard Tower forever.”

    Cabanela had, in fact, imagined them living with him in the Wizard Tower for as long as it took for the danger to pass. They had so much to catch up on. Where else was there for them to go? Cabanela couldn’t imagine a Queen—even if she was still a Princess—up and leaving the Castle.

    “You never answered my question,” Alma said, visibly trying not to look at the unconscious sentry. “How much danger are we really in from a golden bullet?”

    Lynne stifled a thin noise. At once Alma went over to her, soothing, bringing her to sit on the sofa together. Jowd, seeing the corresponding tired look on Cabanela’s face, said,

    “Maybe you should start at the beginning, and catch us up on everything you know.”

    Cabanela looked at Lynne. Lynne was staring fixedly at her own knees.

    “It staaarted ten years ago,” Cabanela said.

Chapter Text

    “The Chief and I…just the Chief, reeeally, were called up to the Palace so he could do the Welcome Ceremony for the Princess that the Queen had just made her Heir. He asked me to come along so I could see how it was done, since I might need to do it someday, or at least teach someone else how it went.”

    Really, it had been an excuse to keep working together. Cabanela had passed his final exams the week before, and was poised to officially graduate from his Apprenticeship, but neither Master nor Apprentice was ready to call it quits after seven years and a day.

    Alma said, “There were rumors. That the Queen’s husband had brought someone home, to be a Princess.” She was stroking a hand over Lynne’s back.

    “I didn’t know anythin’ at the time. When we got to the Palace, there was just the Queen and her husband and a little girl in the Throne Room, waitin’ for us. They muuust’ve come straight from sortin’ out all the legal documents, and the diplomatic mess earlier in the day, because the Queen had ink stains on her fingers.” Cabanela remembered they’d all looked tired—but happy.

    “Diplomatic mess?” Jowd questioned.

    “Ambassadors from another country,” Cabanela said. “They were…weeell, they’re where the Supreme Custodian came from.” Jowd frowned. Cabanela continued his story. “I saw the little girl had a shaved head, so you couldn’t see what color her hair was. The Chief was the one who asked about it while he was setting up, and the consort laughed and said pests were a rite of passage for every sailor. I fiiigured that meant he’d picked her up somewhere overseas, what with the traveling he did. The Queen said she was beautiful no matter what, and hair didn’t make one a good Princess.”

    That was the last thing the Queen had said.

    Cabanela swallowed, wishing he could do more than make Lynne hunch in on herself on his sofa. “They both looked so pleased to be doin’ the ceremony,” he offered. “One of the first things the consort told us was that it was their Princess’s birthday, so we could say happy birthday.”

    Lynne didn’t look up.

    “I…wasn’t doin’ anything important, so I was in a corner out of the way when someone burst in. I saw he was wearin’ red and black, that he had blue skin, so I thought it was some fresh nonsense from the Ambassador we’d heard about. But he had a golden pistol.

    “The Chief was faster than me on the uptake. He got halfway through a SafeShield before the Assassin shot him. I ran to help, but…he just pushed the Akhu Amulet into my hand.”

    Cabanela touched the silver amulet that hung around his neck. He remembered the heavy white robes he hadn’t been wearing a second ago tangling around his legs as he’d thrown himself to his knees beside the Chief, a rare Transformation overtaking him as the mantle passed in an instant from Master to Apprentice. The Chief hadn’t even had time to cough on his own blood, or whisper the last few words of the SafeShield. His priority had been giving Cabanela the authority to act.

    The first thing Cabanela had done as ExtraOrdinary Wizard was get blood all over the white.

    Cabanela cleared his throat. “I heard a click, and when I looked up the Assassin had reloaded. We were all so shocked nobody had moved an iiinch. When he aimed, I did the first spell I could think of and tried to Transmute the bullet to something else, but I…”

    What else was there to say? He’d failed. Cabanela had fumbled the spell, the second thing he’d ever done as ExtraOrdinary Wizard, and when the Assassin had fired at the Queen’s consort he’d screamed for help instead of the real last word. He could have turned the bullet into cotton. The consort could have fled with his new daughter. The Queen might have stayed where it was safe…

    “He shot faster,” Cabanela said. “The Queen’s consort took it straight to the chest right as I finished.” He didn’t doubt it was as fast a death as the Chief’s had been. “I tried to change tack, but Magyk can only move so fast.”

    In truth, Cabanela could not remember every one of those seconds clearly. He stuck to what he was sure of. “I finally stopped bein’ stupid and finished the SafeShield that the Chief started, and for a few minutes we were safe. But the Queen had run to her husband when he was shot, and the ooonly person on the same side of the shield as me was the Princess.

    “I could hear the Castle guard fightin’ outside the Throne Room. Someone asked what was goin’ on, and the Assassin shouted back that he’d already loaded the Princess’s bullet and they’d have to get the Queen later.

    “I knew they had to be Named bullets, then. It’s Darke Magyk, the kind that ensures that it finds its target.” Cabanela shook his head at Alma’s gasp. Jowd, who had guessed the Named nature of the bullets when Cabanela said ‘golden’, sank onto the sofa and gripped Lynne’s hand. “They dragged the Queen out, and I saw him hand off the Queen’s bullet to another Assassin, and…I heard a shot out in the hallway.

    “The SafeShield was keepin’ us from gettin’ shot at, but it was also between us and the door. The Assassin must’ve knooown that it wouldn’t last forever, he was just standin’ there waitin’. But I was ExtraOrdinary, now—then—and I had all the Magyk I wanted. I got the Princess under my cloak and held as tight as I could, and Transported us out of the Palace. And then I…”

    There Cabanela faltered.

    “And then I went to you,” he said at last. “You and Alma—knew kids better than me. You wanted kids.”

    Jowd was holding Lynne’s hand very tightly. Alma’s hand had gone still on her back.

    Lynne wished she’d had the courage to run before Cabanela started talking. The memories were unfolding in her head, the ones she’d tried so hard not to remember, but now it was there, as easy as recalling the time Jowd had taken her fishing, or sitting with Alma matching the shapes of fallen leaves to the illustrations in Alma’s plant book.

    She remembered the way the Queen had screamed as she tried to catch her husband.

    Jowd exhaled slowly, and squeezed Lynne’s hand before finally letting her go. “The least we can do is remember that it is your birthday today.” He reached inside his cloak and took out the wrapped present that had been sitting on the kitchen table, what felt like weeks ago.

    Lynne stared at the bow, which was crumpled from being shoved in Jowd’s pocket. She’d forgotten about her present in the frantic rush to pack. “It’s not my birthday,” she said.

    “It’s the same day it was last year,” Alma said, concerned.

    “H-he asked me when my birthday was. When they were writing up the papers. I said I didn’t know and he said maybe my birthday could be that day, because it was like the start of a new life. And I said okay.”

    “The consort?” Jowd asked her gently. Lynne tried to nod. “Do you want to open this now?” She managed a nod the second time.

    The sound of paper crinkling attracted Missile, who came over, tail wagging, and whined until Lynne gave him a strip of paper to play with and shred into the carpet. Cabanela winced.

    “Oh,” Lynne said, staring down at the notebook in her lap. It was a shade of pink so bright that it had to have been Magykally dyed, with a star in gold leaf on the cover next to the little brass lock.

    “There’s a pen,” Alma added. It was slipped into a pink loop inside the band of the lock, where it could be safely stored. “It should write in whatever color you ask for.”

    Lynne said, soggily, “I love it.” Jowd patted her comfortingly, and gave the rest of the wrapping paper to Missile.

    “You know, baby,” Cabanela said with forced brightness, “I’m suuure I’ve got a birthday present for you, too.” Lynne watched him in surprise as he rifled through the room, cabinets popping open at invisible prompting. The few interactions she’d had with the ExtraOrdinary Wizard hadn’t left her with the impression of a man who gave presents to people he barely knew.

    “Ah! Here we are.” Cabanela turned around, showing off what he’d unearthed.

    A golden circlet glinted in his hands.

    Lynne nearly threw herself off the sofa scrambling away from the sight of it. “No! No, that’s not mine—it’s not,” she cried, as Jowd caught her before she could topple backwards and crush the Fragile-Fairy Pots on the bureau that stood behind the sofa.

    “Breathe,” Jowd commanded, getting both arms around Lynne and pulling her back down where Alma could seize her, too. The pink notebook had gone tumbling to the floor. Lynne tried to breathe, she really did, past the sight of the circlet she had last seen in a pair of dark hands, being presented by a smiling face under another crown. The circlet that signified everything about why there was an Assassin, coming for her even now, with a Darke bullet enchanted to make sure it killed her.

    “Lynne,” Cabanela said blankly, astonished at the violence of her reaction, “it’s not a trap. It’s just the Princess’s circlet.”

    “I’m not—I don’t want to be—"

    Cabanela’s heart twisted in sympathy. But: “The last thing the Queen did before her death was name you her Heir. Whateeever’s come of that, you are important to the Castle. The Castle needs a Queen.” Lynne couldn’t escape Reality any more than Jowd could, no matter how long Cabanela had spent trying to hold it back from pouncing on them.

    “Nobody knows about that. Nobody has to know!”

    “It’s not so simple as lettin’ it be forgotten. If I could do anythin’, I would, but you swore an oath; oaths are the real deal, since long before there were ExtraOrdinary Wizards.” Cabanela sighed. “More importantly, at least for today, the Supreme Custodian doooes know.”

    “Can’t it be over?” Lynne begged. “They said I only had to try. The Supreme Custodian probably has those papers somewhere. Can’t we just make him find those and prove that I’m not the Heir anymore?”

    Surprised, Cabanela said, “What do you mean, ‘try’?”

    “Cabanela,” Alma snapped.

    Cabanela put a hand up, placating. “I only mean…Lynne, it might be veeery important. What exactly did the Queen say?”

    Lynne swallowed, getting her breathing a little more under control. “When I agreed to come,” she said. “He said I only had to try. If I didn’t like being—being a—” She skipped the consequential word entirely. “They’d let me leave.”

    Come be a Princess for a year and a day, he’d said. If you can’t stand it, we’ll let you go. We’ll pay for your Apprenticeship in a trade, whatever you want to do. But if you don’t mind staying—and he’d looked so hopeful, even with his weird smoked-black glasses in the way—we have room.

    “For a year and a day,” Cabanela guessed keenly, and Lynne nodded.

    “What does that mean?” Jowd asked. He was turning over the implications in his head: had the year and a day begun and ended before any of them but Lynne knew about it? Or had it never properly begun at all?

    “I don’t knooow.” Cabanela looked troubled.

    “No amount of legalese is going to keep the Supreme Custodian from doing whatever he wants to,” Alma burst out. “Haven’t we learned that by now? We have to do something!”

    Lynne sniffled. Alma gave Jowd a significant look, and he stood, bringing Lynne with him with one arm around her shoulders. “Why don’t we get you something to eat? We never finished breakfast. I know there’s a kitchen around here somewhere, it’s not the first time I’ve been in the ExtraOrdinary’s rooms…”

    Jowd’s inconsequential chatter faded out of hearing as he took Lynne out of the room. Cabanela sighed, and put the circlet down on a side table. He hadn’t meant to scare her like that.

    And he hadn’t missed that Alma let Lynne go upstairs without her. He eyeballed Alma, trying to judge the cause. “What is it?”

    Alma hugged herself. “Beauty befriended me,” she said. “I let her into our home.”

    The spy. “Baby, she would’ve found out somehow,” Cabanela said, easing into the spot Lynne had vacated. “You’re a nice person who’s nice to people. It’s no fair that someone used that to hurt you, but we’re fixin’ it.”

    “Are we?” Alma hid her face in his shoulder. “What are we going to do, Cab? You couldn’t even come visit us.”

    Words caught in Cabanela’s throat. He’d expected Alma to say…something else. Anything else. He’d expected her and Jowd to be angry at him for being gone, and the anger’s absence tricked him into treating them like they were twenty-somethings again, and he barely thirty. But Time travel couldn’t be done; there was no going back.

    “Jowd’s right,” Cabanela said. “Go eeeat somethin’, baby. I’ll make sure this Young Army kid doesn’t wake up and, I don’t know, set anythin’ on fire.”

    Alma’s daughter was a more powerful lure than the opportunity to sit with Cabanela. The same was true for Missile, who, finished sowing Cabanela’s carpet with slobber-soggy paper scraps, followed Alma out.

    Cabanela sighed into the empty room. He Vanished the damp paper scraps. After a moment’s thought, he got off the sofa and transferred the sentry there from the floor. He wanted the kid asleep so nothing incriminating got overheard; discomfort wasn’t a requirement.

    He decided against putting the circlet away. No matter how little Lynne wanted to do with it, it might be needed, soon.

    Breakfast did little to soothe anyone’s anxieties. Jowd fixed Lynne’s loose shoe sole, dried her sock, and then he and Alma and Cabanela sent her downstairs to ‘keep Missile occupied so he doesn’t poo on anything’.

    The three of them in privacy had gone back and forth about what to do with Boy 412, and how to keep Lynne safe, without coming up with any useful, concrete plans. Cabanela didn’t understand why they couldn’t all hole up in the Wizard Tower, which could outlast a siege; Alma grew frustrated enough to throw up her hands and wonder aloud why Cabanela hadn’t just used Magyk to kill the Supreme Custodian years ago.

    She’d apologized, but she’d said it.

    Lynne interrupted then to exclaim that the dishes in the sink were washing themselves. Cabanela (who had spent seventeen years getting used to the Magykal apartment) did not find that particularly worth exclaiming over, but he was unduly relieved for the excuse to end the conversation.

    The sentry was the only one who could sleep that night, though probably not through till morning. The spell Cabanela had used couldn’t put a person in a coma, just enough sleep for them to Sleep It, whatever It was, Off. The rest of them were all too anxious to rest.

    It was technically only ten past eleven, not midnight, when the cat yowled outside.

    Lynne had opened one of the windows and then, obeying proper caution, sat well away from it and still tried to enjoy the winter breeze. The fire for Boy 412’s health had made the room hot and stuffy, but the boy wasn’t shivering, so Lynne had figured it was all right.

    The yowling was loud enough that Boy 412 sat up with a jolt. She was dismayed to see that it was all real. She was still trapped in the Wizards’ hideout, not waking from a nightmare in her narrow, thin cot in the Young Army barracks. Worst of all, there was a ghost sitting right there, staring at her.

    The Chief had shown up hours ago, after haunting the Palace for as long as it took to make sure the Supreme Custodian had not instantly discovered the family’s hiding place. He noticed with some feeling that the poor kid, clutching the blanket Alma had put over her, looked more terrified than reassured to wake up in warmth and safety.

    “What was that noise?” Lynne asked. “Can you look, Chief?”

    The Chief drifted obligingly over to the window to peer out. “I assume it was the cat that was hanging around when I arrived,” he said. “It…” He abruptly fell silent.

    “Chief?” Lynne asked.

    The Chief said, “I thought I saw someone go through the doors who…excuse me, Lynne, I’ll just go downstairs and check.” He sank through the floor.

    That left Lynne with Alma, who had been debating going to Boy 412, but now crossed the room to Lynne. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Alma said. The tight grip she had on Lynne’s shoulder said she was lying.

     “It was probably just some Wizard,” Lynne said. “Only Wizards have the password, right?”

    Alma did not say, Wizards can tell anyone they want what the password is. Jowd had told her what it was, years ago when they were courting.

    Missile finally realized they were upset and started howling to match, which brought both Jowd and Cabanela scrambling into the room to see what was wrong. “The Chief just saw something odd at the doors,” Alma said.

    “I’ll CharmLock them,” Cabanela said at once.

    “Too late!” The Chief gasped, shooting back up through the floor. “He’s already inside! They’ve found out where you are and sent the Assassin!” Boy 412, still on the sofa, went as cold down to her bones as she had been that morning. She was sure this Assassin was meant for her.

    “What?” Several people demanded at once. “He can’t have the password,” Cabanela said, over Jowd saying, “Where did he get the password?”

    “That spy!” Alma said.

    “We’ve got to go, now,” Jowd said. “Cabanela, are there any other doors out of the Tower?!”

    “The trapdoor into the Ice Tunnels,” said Cabanela, startling everyone in the room who didn’t know about the Ice Tunnels’ existence (which was everyone except him). “But that’s down in the Entrance Hall—”

    “It’s better than nothing!”

    “We’ll never make it!”

    “For pity’s sake!” The Chief yelled. “There’s no time to argue! He’s already on the stairs.”

    There was not a single noise in the room after that, except for breathing, and the slight, sibilant noise of the stairs outside rotating around their central pole.

    The Assassin had not commanded the stairs to move at full speed; he knew there were no exits for the prey to leave by except the windows. And if they took that exit, no need for bullets, except to make sure of the Princess’ body.

    Cabanela wouldn’t make the mistake of another SafeShield like the last time. He Locked and Barred the door. The lock slammed home with a heavy kachunk. A long bar jumped out of the doorframe and snapped into place as silver settings folded out of the barring on the door to receive it.

    Jowd rounded on Cabanela. “How many people can you Transport?”

    “Not all of us,” Cabanela said. He’d done the math on that several hours ago. And also several weeks ago, and about a year ago, just in case. It paid to keep checking in; he’d practiced with some volunteer Ordinary Wizards and could still only manage two people alongside him safely. McCaw had gotten stuck halfway through a wall when he tried taking three, and it was a nasty business Disentangling him from the fouled Transport, though McCaw had kept up a good attitude about it once he could talk again.

    “I can take myself—”

    “That still leaves everyone else and the dog,” Cabanela hissed. “Even if we leave the dog—”

    “We are not leaving Missile,” Lynne whisper-shouted in outrage, sounding exactly like Alma at her angriest.

    BANG!

    The bullet bored straight through the purple wood of the door and buried itself in the opposite wall, missing Alma by inches. Jowd cried out, belatedly yanking a frozen Alma behind him.

    Boy 412 was shaking as she got up. Better to turn herself in and get it over with quickly. If she sat here and waited, she would get cold feet and run, and then they’d really draw it out when they killed her.

    Lynne, for a moment, saw her younger self overlaid on the small figure walking towards the door. “No!” She tackled Boy 412 before she could get to the door. “It’s not safe! You have to come with us!”

    Jowd and Cabanela were shouting now about Transports, if they could risk multiple trips when the Midnight Minutes were half an hour away at least, who should be taken first if they did risk it. Lynne looked frantically around the room for another option, something that could take all of them away as quickly as possible, and landed on the square silver door set into the wall.

    Lynne whipped her head around to stare at Jowd, looked back at the trash chute, and decided her math worked out. “We can escape through the trash chute!” She shouted over them.

    “What,” Cabanela yelped in dismay, but Lynne was already yanking open the door of the chute. Boy 412, in her secure grip, had no choice but to go with her. Missile loyally sprang for the opening in the wall, and was as dismayed as Cabanela to find that there was no floor inside. A howl echoed up after him, along with the scrabbling of tiny claws for purchase.

    Alma jumped after Lynne. Cabanela windmilled his limbs as Jowd got an arm around him. “I’ll Transport myself! I can do just myself!”

    “Name where the chute lets out,” Jowd said.

    “It’s—ah—” It was exceedingly hard to think on his feet while wearing all white and being towed threateningly by someone he was supposed to be able to trust towards a very long fall full of very, very dirty trash. “Jowd, don’t you dare—”

    Jowd shoved Cabanela down the chute, ignoring the choked protests, and swung in himself. He got in a quick LockFast and Weld as he pulled the door to the chute closed behind him. He’d pay to see the unMagykal Assassin get through that.

    Then the bottom dropped out of Jowd’s stomach from vertigo, his grip slipped, and he spent the rest of the fall trying not to throw up on everyone ahead of him.

    There were, in fact, Magykal enchantments on the Wizard Tower trash chute; after the first few days of its existence, the first Wizards had very quickly realized that it was no fun for even a small piece of trash to reach terminal velocity when it hit the turn at the bottom of a not-quite-vertical twenty-one-story fall. Those enchantments and the smooth, perfect joins of the panels that made up the square trash chute meant it was near impossible for a person to be injured by (the Master Masons who built the Tower hoped accidentally) falling down the trash chute.

    It was, however, quite easy to get incredibly filthy very quickly.

    The trash chute, when it began to level off under the Wizard Tower, turned and ran under the Palace as well before it finished emptying into the Riverside Amenity Municipal Dump. When the chute finally disgorged its cargo into the wintry night air, there was no one among the piles of trash to see the ragtag group stagger out and to their feet again.

    Except one, who caught the glimpse of movement through the window.

    Memry frowned and squinted out into the darkness. The Chicken Kitchen was as well-lit as possible once the sun went down, and that made it hard to see out through the glass panes, but she was sure she’d just seen people walking around on the Municipal Dump. Maybe the Castle authorities were finally listening to the many complaints she’d put in about how close the Dump was to the restaurant.

    Memry moved to the back of the Chicken Kitchen. The far corner was darkest, and easiest to see out of, on account of being closest to the Dump and therefore the occasional smell that wafted over; nobody wanted to sit there, and there were fewer candles lit.

    The Chicken Kitchen was, other than that corner, usually humming with activity. It was built on pontoons at a prime spot on the Moat, neighboring the Palace Landing Stage. It was the second thing travelers saw as they came up the river, and therefore was where everybody stopped when they arrived. The Chicken Kitchen’s reputation had risen via the mouths of travelers over the years until a visitor to the Castle would be crazy not to go there for the famous chicken and a drink as soon as they disembarked.

    Memry considered it her restaurant, and indeed, hers was the face most people saw and remembered. Nobody had ever gotten the name of the tall man who served the fancy drinks, and the only hints that a chef existed was the chicken itself and the beautiful singing from the kitchen.

    There was barely anyone at the tables so late at night. The Northern Traders who usually made up the bulk of travelers for the season had all gone back to their ships, preparing to sail home before the Big Freeze; the only ones left were a couple ensconced by the fireplace and some guy on his eight millionth black coffee. Memry safely ignored them, squinting harder against the candlelight reflected in the mullioned windowpanes.

    There were definitely people moving around on top of the Municipal Dump. Was that the ExtraOrdinary Wizard dancing around up there? Who else would be wearing all white? Who’d go with him for whatever weird Magyk (or, possibly, personal kink??) he was out there for?

    Now flattened against the window, with her hands cupped around her eyes, Memry could make out more details. Surely that was Lynne’s ponytail, sticking up from her yellow cloak, but why—? Was that Jowd out there? Dear gods in heaven, Jowd was eloping with the ExtraOrdinary Wizard and taking the kid with him.

    Memry was out the door so fast she left skid marks behind her.

    Jowd threw himself in front of the others when he saw her coming, until he realized it was only Memry and relaxed. “You!” Memry yelled, to a chorus of “Shhhhhh!”s and some quickly muffled barking. “I knew it! Ohhh, you thought you were SUBTLE! How dare you?”

    Cabanela didn’t answer. Instead of dancing (or rather, in addition to,) he had been chanting an urgent One-Second DryClean that was turning into a One-Minute DryClean. For good measure he’d been widening its radius, to catch everyone else and make sure there was nothing that could leave a stain if he bumped against them.

    “Memry, what are you talking about,” Alma said.

    Memry deflated abruptly. “Oh, you’re here too, Alma. Wait, why are you all out here?”

Chapter Text

    The basic explanation, as they stumbled out of the dump, was enough to send Memry rushing into motion once again. There was a bunkhouse at the back of the Chicken Kitchen for travelers who needed a rest after their filling meals, which was empty that particular night, where a chest of spare clothes was kept for emergencies. Memry pointed out the chest mostly for Boy 412’s benefit; the sentry was still in pajamas. Cabanela’s spell had washed a good portion of the mess from everyone’s clothes, and Jowd found the water pump to rinse away the remainder.

    “I’ll get my boat, you can take it down the river, meet me at the dock in ten minutes!” Memry rushed back out.

    Boy 412 refused to budge out of the thin, impractical Wizard pajamas. They had already stolen her regulation uniform and put her in these Wizard clothes, but she was not going to get herself in even deeper trouble willingly. Cabanela, impatient to get moving before the Hunter could be sent after them, used a Change of Dress spell to get her into replacement clothes from the chest. Jowd winced and almost said something, but the replacements included a thick sheepskin jacket and a cozy yellow knit cap. He’d prefer the kid upset and warm than indulged and hypothermic (again).

    Boy 412 also refused to walk with them. Jowd got her in a fireman’s carry, and they all went down to the dock just outside the restaurant.

    Memry was late to her own ten-minute deadline, and hurried out of the dark with a big hamper that took both hands to haul into her small sailboat, the Ladybug. The boat bobbed threateningly in the water under the weight. “You’d better get going,” Memry puffed. “And there’s some paddles if the wind gives out on you. And—” Memry abruptly cut off as Alma hugged her tightly.

    “Will you be okay?” was the first thing Alma said when she finally let Memry go. Unsaid was the mutual knowledge that Memry was going to be one of the first people the authorities asked. Everyone knew the Chicken Kitchen’s location. Whoever was sent after them would follow the trash chute to its end sooner rather than later.

    “I’m always fine,” Memry said breezily.

    “Take this,” Cabanela said, his hand at his belt. With a faint click, one of his belt Charms came free, and he held it out to her.

    “Huh? What’s this?”

    “A KeepSafe.”

    Memry’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t you need that?”

    “We’ll have me,” Cabanela said, dryly (and a little smug). Jowd, behind him, closed his mouth on a protest. “You, however, might need a little help.” He kept the offered hand outstretched until Memry took the platinum Charm and tucked it securely down her bodice.

    “All right, thanks,” Memry said. “Now get a move on.”

    Lynne jumped down to take the seat by the tiller with relief. She knew boats; boats made perfect sense and never tried to kill her. She recognized Memry’s sailboat as one of the senior boatyard apprentices’ work, too, which heightened her opinion of its solidity. The Ladybug would get them where they needed to go.

    Cabanela watched to make sure the rest of them got aboard safely, Jowd putting Boy 412 in beside himself, before reluctantly stepping in and immediately wobbling as the boat rocked.

    “Sit down,” Lynne advised, “you’ve got to lower your center of balance.” Cabanela sat down more abruptly than he meant to, and the boat rocked again.

    Memry watched them go, relieved that Lynne at least seemed to know what to do with the sail. The wind was blowing south, and hopefully it could get them down the river as quickly as possible. She hadn’t asked where they were going, for the plausible deniability, so she could honestly say she had only suspicions. But even if the Hunter caught up with her and they threw her in the dungeons until she talked, Memry would never, ever say a word about Catrina at the Port.

    The little sailboat, however, was not going to the Port.

    “We’ll go to Emma’s, then,” Jowd said, and this time there was no argument from Cabanela. He’d argued against leaving the Castle at all, earlier, but they could hardly round the Moat and come in again from the north when there was an Assassin willing to break into the Wizard Tower to get Lynne. “Lynne, do you remember the way?”

    “Sure, if you point out Deppen Ditch for me,” Lynne said, hand steady on the tiller. Missile pattered away from her and up to Alma at the prow, to put his nose into the wind and pant happily.

    Aunt Emma—not Jowd’s sister, but somehow she was called Lynne’s aunt anyway—lived in the Marram Marshes, the broad stretch of uncertain land between the Castle in the north and the Port in the south, just off the wide river. Lynne didn’t remember the old Witch’s cottage where Emma lived being particularly roomy, but Cabanela and Boy 412 weren’t too many extra guests, and Emma would have more people to dramatically read aloud to.

    “I’ll keep an eye out.” Jowd settled back, his eyes indeed on the water. Water did not give him vertigo like heights did, but Jowd preferred it no deeper than the bathtub.

    Then they rounded Raven’s Rock, and the current grew deeper and quicker, and they sailed out of sight of the Castle.

    Memry wished the couple cozied up by the fireplace would get a move on, like the coffee guy who’d finally left. Then she could close, and be anywhere but at the restaurant.

    She’d been pointedly cleaning tables around them for a while now, but hadn’t yet graduated to trying to clean their table. That would be rude, and she’d lose two happy customers.

    A powerful light gleamed through the windows, then swept away. Memry left fresh skid marks on the floor as she plastered herself against the window in the far corner, trying to see what was going on.

    There was a new party on the Dump now, with a steady torch magnified into a Searchlight. No doubt it was the Hunter and his Pack.

    If they saw her watching…well, curiosity was natural…but did she look scared, or was she acting suspiciously…wouldn’t it be more suspicious not to noticeably wonder who was getting arrested out there? That was it, if she hadn’t done anything she’d be wondering who the Pack were after, offering them a place to rest their feet for the evening. And then, of course, seeing them off again before the trail got too cold.

    Memry checked in the back and found that the drinks guy had gone home already. Typical. No need to tell the chef (the real owner of the restaurant) to keep cooking; he did whatever he wanted, hence the Chicken Kitchen’s strange hours of operation. Memry made a mental note not to wake up too early tomorrow; he’d be sleeping in.

    No drinks but water or ale, but chicken was definitely available. Memry went to smile at the couple by the fireplace and offer them more water, but was waved away before she could get too close. Ugh, fine. She hoped they enjoyed staring into each other’s eyes, or whatever.

    The bell over the door rang cheerfully. Memry turned with a smile. “Welcome to the Chicken Kitchen! What can I get you?”

    The one at the head of the Pack didn’t look much like how she’d imagined the Hunter. Ruthlessness and mercilessness did not generally come, to her mind, in the shape of a man too tall for his pants to fit, and who hunched awkwardly as if to make up for his height. The rest of the Pack shuffled in behind him, mangy dogs of boys with their teeth showing at the potential for violence. They had not asked for a way to wash the trash from the Dump off before coming inside.

    And they wouldn’t get violent. This was a nice, clean place of business, too popular to rough up like the Custodian Guard did some of the smaller places inside the Wall. Memry swallowed. The man in front didn’t look sturdy enough to hold the Pack back if they pounced. Why did they even…have a kid with them?

    Memry frowned at the small figure in overlarge robes the same nearly-black navy as the Custodian Guard. The newest Expendable for the Pack, getting dragged along to prove himself or die trying? But there were frills and lace poking out from under that robe, much nicer than the stuff the rest of them were wearing, and only a bit of mud at the hems, not trash. There had been no crawling around on the Dump for this kid. So who…?

    “You can get us information,” the pathetic scarecrow of a man said. His breath was awful, and his tone of voice more pleading than threatening. Definitely not the Hunter. Maybe the second in command?

     “I can tell you all about our chicken special tonight, but I’m afraid the sun has set on drinks specials for—”

    “Not that,” the man, who was indeed the Deputy Hunter, interrupted. “A group of fugitives came through here recently. Where did they go?”

    “Fugitives?” Memry widened her eyes, and tried to look at him admiringly, for his bravery in chasing after…no, that was hopeless, she couldn’t do it. This guy sucked. She tacked towards disingenuous naïveté instead. “I haven’t had any new customers arrive for hours. I don’t think I know anything about who you’re talking about.”

    “Are you sure?” The Deputy Hunter tried for menacing. It didn’t work; he was snapping his fingers irritatingly at the same time.

    “Why am I here?” the little kid in the overlarge cloak suddenly whined. “Just make her tell you what happened so we can go home.”

    “Shut up.”

    “Make me, toady.”

    “Take her outside,” the Deputy Hunter growled at one of the men, but when the Pack member reached for the kid she nearly bit his fingers off. Memry jumped a little at the spark of what looked like Magyk accompanying the chomp. What on Earth…?

    The woman at the table by the fire said, “You let her talk back to you like that?”

    They all looked over at the couple. Memry realized she was the only one who was surprised to hear them interject.

    “You can’t expect everyone to be as good as you, Beauty,” the man sitting there said to her.

    “Sir,” the man said nervously, and Memry went cold all over. ‘Sir’. A position of authority over the substitute leader of the Pack. He’d been sitting there the whole time.

    The Hunter stood up from the table. “I think I can take it from here, my dear,” he said to Memry. “But if you’ll tell me where, exactly, your friends went, I may be able to pull some strings and make things a little more comfortable for you, in what’s to follow. It’s only fair to treat a lady as gently as she deserves, don’t you agree? What do you say?”

    Memry kicked him in the balls and tried to run for the door.

    Stupid! She should’ve jumped out the window. Beauty struck her hard across her face and Memry barely missed their table on the way down. She hit the floor, numb with shock. She’d seen the table corner whistle right past her eyes. If she’d been a centimeter closer—if she’d hit her head hard enough—

    “Pull yourself together,” Beauty said, somewhere over Memry’s head.

    “Y-yes, Beauty,” the Hunter gasped out. “I’ll be there in just a moment…”

    Beauty might as well have ignored him. She started directing the Pack. “Go find some kindling, and get the doors boarded up. And one of you take that brat outside.”

    No. Not the restaurant. Memry tried to push herself to her feet, and dropped again when one of the hurrying Pack aimed a kick at her wrist, rolling out of the way. By the time she staggered to her feet the door was closing behind the last of the Pack, a flash of Beauty’s impassive blue face all she saw before it slammed closed.

    Almost immediately someone started hammering. Did the Pack have a bunch of planks ready at all times, just in case they needed to wall up someone in a building?! “Get this restaurant surrounded!” the Hunter’s voice cried from outside.

    She was surrounded. They were going to set her restaurant on fire.

    Memry got a running start and jumped out a window.

    They were close enough to the Marram Marshes that Jowd had started really looking for Deppen Ditch, which would mark their turning off of the river, when the Searchlight swept across the river behind them.

    Cabanela immediately tried to stand, and nearly unbalanced the Ladybug and tipped them all into the river. Jowd flailed to compensate for the weight, and Cabanela crouched low again in an abashed hurry.

    “What was that?” Lynne asked, gripping the tiller with white knuckles.

    “No doubt the Hunter and the Pack,” Cabanela said grimly. Less than ten minutes down the river, and they were already being pursued.

    “Do you have an UnSeen that can cover the boat, too?” Jowd asked, his mind already running down the list of potential Magykal solutions.

    “We can’t just go UnSeen,” Cabanela said. “They want a chase, and they’ll Hunt after it for as long as it takes to find one. We need them to think we’re somewhere other than where we are.”

    “A Projection?”

    “Decide quickly,” Lynne burst out, trying to keep quiet as she watched the water behind them. “That light’s getting closer fast.”

    Cabanela leaned forward, gripping the mast as he began to mutter. Not just a Projection, but deflection. Projections were always backwards anyway, as though reflected, so take the sight of them and throw it somewhere else, like a ventriloquist throwing his voice. Nothing like it…

    Alma gasped as, suddenly, another ship appeared on the river with them. Painted the exact same cheerful green, her sail billowed to catch the winter wind, she was carrying a crew with a red-haired ponytail at the tiller and a figure in white leaning his forehead against the mast. Alma even saw a woman at the prow, turned to look in the exact mirror image of Alma herself as she stared over at the Projection.

    Alma tried to look back at the real boat, and the real people with her, and couldn’t. The river’s tide washed past her feet and there was no boat under her. Alma squeezed her eyes shut as hard as she could, and reassured herself that she could still feel the wooden seat underneath her, and hear the faint squeak of wood on wood and the sail pulling on the ropes—under the sound of Cabanela muttering Magyk. Missile’s fluff brushed against her, and he whined; Alma hastily put a hand out, until she felt the little dog’s face, and put a hand around his muzzle before he could start barking.

    Boy 412 also had her eyes closed. She had seen the boat and everyone else vanish, and braced herself to fall into the river, as she nearly had so many times on the midnight Do-Or-Die Exercises. Being crammed into a boat with the Chief Cadet and sailing through the Forest was nearly as bad as huddling in a wolverine pit all night, waiting to find out whose hole the wolverines would fall into first.

    The cold embrace of the water didn’t come. Boy 412 cracked one eye open. She knew she was huddled in the bottom of the boat, but she couldn’t even see herself, not her hands clutching her knees or the stupid warm clothes the Wizards had forced her into. The Hunter’s Searchlight swept past them, bright and red with firelight, then over them, not even showing their shadows, or the boat’s.

    They were completely invisible. Down the river, Boy 412 could see the other boat as clearly as Alma had, with the mast no longer blocking her line of sight. That boat, some trick of Magyk, was headed the complete opposite direction of them, and the Searchlight had locked onto it with all the baleful glee of the Hunter’s chase.

    The Hunter would never find them, not like this, with the enemy Wizards being so good at hiding.

    But…if Boy 412 helped, then maybe the Young Army would believe her when she said she’d been kidnapped, and wasn’t a conspirator or aiding and abetting enemies of the Supreme Custodian. Maybe she could go back and things would go back to normal, instead of having to worry about being thrown in Dungeon Number One for the rest of her life.

    Boy 412 howled, “THEY’RE OVER HERE!”

    The Hunter, kneeling at the prow, whipped around at the sound of the shout. “Hold!” he commanded the rowers, two neat lines of them on either side of the narrow bullet boat. It was painted a sleek, oily black, perfect for cutting through choppy water, and it had brought them to their quarry in only a few minutes.

    At his command they paused; the Hunter ignored their grateful sighs at the rest. He could see his quarry, still sailing downriver towards the Port, but that shout hadn’t come from the boat. What kind of tricks was he dealing with, here?

    In the red glare of the Searchlight he’d seen a figure at the tiller lunge forward, and now the boat ahead of them was drifting, unguided and slow. But the heavy thumps of fighting in a boat had come from confused directions. He hadn’t heard the noises from quite the same angle as the helpful shout, but had they come from the boat he could see? Even as he thought, he noticed the purple light flickering around the figure in white, seated right where the Hunter had a clear shot…

    His fingers twitched for the golden pistol laid within easy reach, and the tray of bullets. But the Queenling was the priority, and the golden bullet etched with P for Princess. He could take care of the ExtraOrdinary later. Especially when, whatever else was going on with that boat, there was some kind of fight happening…

    Lynne had tackled Boy 412 to the floor with some flailing; it was hard to get a grip on an UnSeen opponent. But she had a hand firmly over the kid’s mouth now, which was a shame, because she didn’t have any hands left to get back to the tiller, and she couldn’t even see where the handle was to try and push it with her foot.

    The Searchlight swept over them. “They’ve stopped,” came Alma’s whisper, “they’re looking for us again.” Lynne’s heart sank; then she had to squeeze tighter as Boy 412 tried to thrash again and get away.

    There was a heavy creak of wood, and then a boot nudged Lynne’s head and stilled. Jowd, trying to move around the invisible boat, had almost tripped over her. “I can’t get to the tiller,” Jowd whispered, trying hard to stay quiet. “Are you lying on the oars, I can’t see them at all.” He had the uncanny feeling, despite knowing they were invisible, that the Hunter was staring straight at him.

    Cabanela drew in a breath, and started chanting under his breath again. The tense line of him, leaning with his forehead against the mast as he gripped it with both hands, was only visible in the Projection. Only the Hunter, looking carefully around the river for any hint, saw the redoubled glimmer of purple Magyk—and frowned.

    “Give it up, my friends!” The Hunter called out loudly. Alma went even more still on the boat, convinced that he’d spotted them. The boat, unsteered, was listing randomly in sort of the direction they’d been going in, but if they were turned any further by the river’s current, they were going to get stuck in the opening of Deppen Ditch. “Why make it harder than it needs to be? This could all have been over hours ago.”

    On the floor of the boat, where she was pinned down by the larger girl, Boy 412 felt Lynne shudder. For a moment she thought it was herself who’d shuddered; a similar feeling had worked its way down her spine, in fear for her life, more than once before. The Do-Or-Die Exercises were named literally, and not everyone was fast enough to Do.

    “Blow,” Cabanela breathed, and the sail billowed full with a snap of cloth.

    The wind gathered itself up and hurled it where Cabanela commanded. A sudden wave caught the bullet boat, rocking it dangerously and forcing the Hunter to crouch. The Projection of the Ladybug lunged forward—completely contrary to the conjured wind—as the real Ladybug was caught before she could turn far enough to run aground, and sailed straight through Deppen Ditch and into the Marram Marshes.

    The hill of the Ditch was tall enough that in the dark they were out of sight. Cabanela let go of the Projection with a gasp for air, and Jowd found himself visible with Alma in front of him, clutching a wriggling Missile.

    “Keep hold of him,” Jowd said at once, recognizing that Missile was desperately trying to bark. He jumped out of the Ladybug, splashing into the shallow water, and hauled her by her prow until she was no longer at risk of drifting. He gave Alma a hand out, since she was occupied with Missile, and went to help Cabanela.

    Cabanela was not shaking from overexertion; he was already scrambling out of the boat with fluid energy, up the side of Deppen Ditch, pausing only to crouch and make sure his white robes weren’t visible behind the low roll of the marsh grass.

    The Searchlight was swinging around again; the Hunter had seen the Projection vanish and not bothered to follow it further. But he hadn’t seen where they really went, and now Cabanela pointed his finger and hissed,

    “Dive!”

    And the Hunter, unconscious of any irregularity, found himself putting his hands together, crouching, and making a perfect ten-point dive into the freezing water of the river.

    Someone stood abruptly at the back of the bullet boat, a tall figure who barked a command even as the rowers were wearily reversing themselves to row back and pull the sodden Hunter from the water. Cabanela grinned, all teeth, and watched their retreat, crawling back against the current towards the Castle. No chance to pursue the chase now, not unless they wanted the Hunter to die of hypothermia. For now, they’d won.

    The robed child had been sitting in the back of the bullet boat, but now that the rowers had turned around to go back, she was in the prow, the chill wind whistling in her face. Beauty was drawn up tight where she sat next to her, keeping her under guard, and watching with eagle eyes as the Hunter shivered and sniffled in his seat.

    “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said, but it wasn’t a scolding; merely a statement of fact. Her eyes moved, briefly, past the Hunter to the haze of marshland already gone invisible in the dark.

    The girl looked, too, towards where the other boat had vanished.

    She knew why they’d brought her along for this Hunt. Her Master and his servant the Supreme Custodian hadn’t bothered keeping it a secret, if Commander Sith ever bothered to remember whether his Apprentice was in the room or not. So the Apprentice’s eyes stayed on the spot where the people on that boat had vanished, and she thought, they were escaping to live. A person could freeze to death if they got soaking wet in this weather, but if she made it to shore, and they saw her, they would take her with them to keep her from dying, and then she’d finally meet them, just to see what they were like, at least…

    Beauty said, “Don’t even think about it.”

    The Apprentice could have. But instead, she shrank into her robes. Beauty always knew when she had any kind of idea, and put a stop to it.

    With the Searchlight gone there was now only the faintest light of the moon and the weak glow from the Akhu Amulet that, ever-present, was only visible in such pitch dark. Cabanela slid back down the side of the Ditch some minutes after the Hunter’s bullet boat had vanished from sight. “They’re gone.”

    Jowd said, “Lynne, you can let him go.”

    “And then what?” Lynne demanded. “He tried to get us killed!” She was still pinning down Boy 412. “And after you saved his life in the snow outside!”

    “What’s done is done. You can’t keep him in a headlock forever.”

    Boy 412 made no attempt to get up when Lynne grudgingly stepped away. Her mind was spinning. Saved her life? In the snow? She’d just fallen asleep on guard duty, and the Wizards had taken advantage to trap her inside the Wizard Tower…right?

    She couldn’t remember anything in between dozing off outside and waking up shivering.

    Lynne did take Jowd’s helping hand out of the Ladybug. “Why are we gettin’ out of the boat?” Cabanela demanded as Lynne splashed to shore. Alma finally let Missile go, and he immediately started yipping frantically, dancing around Lynne’s ankles. “We’ve got to keep movin’. Aren’t we hidin’ out with this faaamous wine Witch of the Marram Marshes?”

    “White Witch,” Jowd said severely, but he subsided the next moment. Cabanela had combined a Projection with an UnSeen, on the fly thrown sound across the river along with the sight of the Projection, and on top of all that conjured up a wind in a bare sixty seconds. ExtraOrdinary or no, Cabanela had been carrying an incredible amount of Magyk all at once…even if he didn’t look it. “We need to eat before we try to cross the marshes at night. Memry packed us food.”

    Cabanela’s stomach growled. “Fine,” he said begrudgingly.

    Jowd hauled out the hamper Memry had packed them, and then Boy 412, when she wouldn’t get up from being curled on the floor of the boat. Boy 412 sat as small as she could and noticed Lynne pointedly not looking at her as the older girl unpacked the hamper by the light of a small fire Alma conjured.

    The top layer had some plates, the wooden camping kind, as well as utensils all tied into a bundle with a washrag. Under that was a package sweating condensation with one of the Chicken Kitchen’s best chickens, much more carefully wrapped for its preservation. Lynne sighed happily at the mere smell of it, stress melting away.

    Lynne was the one who liked chicken the most (Jowd only nibbled; Memry had not packed any ketchup), but Cabanela put her to shame with the speed at which he devoured his share. As usual, he’d been hungrier than he realized. Jowd tried to feel a little warmth at Cabanela acting the same as when Jowd had known him before.

    And then under the chicken, with a little can of milk, was a solid square of chocolate that melted over the fire and made the best hot chocolate any of them had ever tasted—especially Boy 412, who was given her own taste as the can was handed around. Lynne gave Missile Jowd’s chicken scraps to distract him from trying to get his own sip of hot chocolate.

    Jowd and Alma had their heads bent together, trying to figure out how to sail the Marram Marshes at night without being drowned (“Wait till morning?” Lynne had suggested, and been roundly condemned with “NO”s—camping out in the Marshes at night was worse than trying to travel through them), so Cabanela saw the glimmer of ghostly light first. He shot to his feet, staggering on the uneven dirt, and then relaxed. “Chief,” he said, “what is it?”

    “I came to see if I could find you,” the Chief said. “This is as far as I can go into the Marshes; I didn’t know if you’d be deeper in already.” He had not made a habit of visiting the Marshes when he was alive, except to occasionally go fishing in the Ditch with Jowd.

    “Find us why?” Jowd asked. “Did something happen with the Hunter?”

    “No,” said the Chief heavily; he hadn’t known the Hunter had tracked them so quickly. At the very least all who had left the Wizard Tower were still present and accounted for, even Missile, snuffling and having chicken-y dreams in Lynne’s lap. “No, I’m afraid it’s worse than that. The Supreme Custodian’s Master is here.”

    “What?”

    “He can’t be,” Cabanela said immediately, before Jowd had finished exclaiming.

    “He is,” the Chief said. “The Supreme Custodian has announced him as the new ExtraOrdinary Wizard.”

    “The new—I’m the ExtraOrdinary!” Cabanela said in a fury. “He doesn’t even have the Akhu Amulet! How could he? McCaw knooows he’s in charge when I’m gone! He’d never allow this.”

    “McCaw’s dead,” the Chief said. Into the terrible silence that followed that pronouncement, he said, “McCaw tried to Barricade the Tower, but he stayed outside the doors to guard them. The Master—the Supreme Custodian calls him Commander Sith—killed him with a ThunderFlash and Removed all the other Wizards. I saw them go shooting off towards Bleak Creek.”

    “His ship,” Jowd murmured, remembering Rindge’s strange sighting of the Yonoa the night that—the night of the coup. Lynne darted a look at him; she had been the one to carry home tales from the boatyard of the infamous harbor at Bleak Creek. It was supposed to be long abandoned, now infested with Things and the remains of the spells that had made it a comfortable home for Darke Wizards to moor their ships.

    “I have to agree,” the Chief said. “Why this Commander Sith should have been waiting ready at Bleak Creek, to arrive so quickly…I don’t know. Their plans tonight must have been in motion for longer than we dared suspect.”

    Lynne shivered. Alma put an arm around her.

    Cabanela said, “I have to go back.”

    “Don’t be a fool!” The Chief said, loudest over the cacophony of objections that followed. “There’s nothing you can do.”

    “I am stiiill the ExtraOrdinary Wizard—”

    “And so was I,” the Chief said. Cabanela’s eyes dropped to the small, bloody hole in the ghost’s chest. “You must not hare off like this. There are no other Wizards to reinforce you, no Magyk left in the Wizard Tower even to keep it functional.”

    Cabanela swallowed his objections. It had been all they could do, some days, to keep the Tower running, with the steady ebb of Magyk and the Supreme Custodian’s reforms—banning classes, harassing Wizards—contributing to a lack of new Apprentices to take up the mantle of retiring Wizards. Now, after all that effort, the Tower was broken down with a Darke sham of a Wizard in Cabanela’s place? How was he supposed to do nothing about this?

    The Chief put a hand on Cabanela’s shoulder. Cabanela felt the faint warmth that was all a ghost could muster. “We will not find a solution to this by running around in a panic in the middle of the night,” he said. “You need to get to safety, first; and who knows if the Keeper of the Cottage may know something helpful?”

    “It’s Keeper’s Cottage,” Cabanela corrected, dying for something to set right.

    “Ah. I misspoke.”

    “Keep us updated, if you can,” Jowd said.

    “You’ll have to come back out to the Ditch to see me, but I’ll try,” the Chief said.

    “And you stay safe,” Alma said. It was a silly thing to say to a ghost, but the Chief smiled.

    “I will try,” he said again. He wafted over to kneel and touch Lynne’s shoulder, trying to offer the same warmth he’d pressed on Cabanela. “Have heart,” he said quietly; but there was little assurance he could offer that they didn’t both know was untrue.

    The clouds scudded away from the moon as the Chief flew off through the night air; flying, the Chief said, was one of the only real benefits of ghosthood. The moon shone down with a strange luminosity which didn’t match its barely-waxed phase. A beam seemed to strike down and, in the distance, illuminate the tiny shape of a house.

    “Ah!” Jowd said in relief. “Emma’s realized we’re here.” He’d hoped that some of her own Magykal instincts would give her a warning. He started moving back to the boat. Moonlight was a reliable guide, especially in Emma’s hands.

    Boy 412, with a belly full of warm food and hot chocolate, climbed back into the Ladybug herself as they reembarked. Alma pried open Cabanela’s tight fist to slip her own hand into his grip. “Let’s go,” she said. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

    They’d been talking, Cabanela did not say bitterly, nor It’s already morning. He got back in the boat.