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  So she moved slowly, soundlessly, letting one movement flow into another—a slow, sinuous unfurling of her body as she emerged into the cave and the night.

  She stood stock still—a shadow among shadows—and took stock of the cave. She had only glimpsed its contours in the mad dash to hide. It was larger than she had expected, the floor smooth and sandy. The bulk of the cavern was curled away from the portcullis, so she could see neither Mattrax nor his pile of gold, only a faint red-yellow glow smudging through the deepening shadows.

  She herself stood near the cave entrance, within arm’s reach of the portcullis. Moonlight spilled between the iron beams, painting a chessboard on the floor before her. There were only two guards. That was a stroke of luck, at least. There had been far more earlier. Two guards simplified things considerably.

  Moving at an almost imperceptible pace, she crossed the mouth of the cave. Her feet were silent on the sandy floor. Her shadow fell away from the guards. The rumble of Mattrax’s snores stayed constant. Neither guard turned around.

  She let a knife drop into each hand. She cocked one arm. She threw.

  The blade whistled between the grille of the portcullis and landed with a solid thwack in the back of the first guard’s neck. He dropped with a slight gurgle, and the heavy thump of lifeless limbs.

  The second knife was already in her hand. She cocked her arm once more.

  “Cois’s cock!” The second guard shrieked, jumped almost half a yard. Lette tracked her with ease.

  Her?

  She hadn’t had much time to observe Mattrax’s forces, but he seemed as blinkeredly misogynistic as the armies belonging to most rulers she’d met.

  And didn’t she recognize that voice?

  “Quirk?” she whispered.

  “Lette?”

  It was Quirk. Lette could even make out the bloodstains she had made when stealing the woman’s armor. But…

  “What in the name of the Hallows are you doing outside the cave?” she said. “Wasn’t the whole plan that you’d be hidden in here helping me move the gold until Firkin and Balur arrived with the wagon?”

  Quirk hesitated. Lette gathered breath for a whispered harangue. Then she noticed the other woman’s shaking hands, her ragged breathing. Quirk kept looking over at the dead guard, kept opening and closing her fists.

  “It’s okay,” Lette said. She needed Quirk calm and functional. This wasn’t the end of the world. She could get Quirk inside easily enough. Then another thought struck her. She looked over at the body.

  “Wait…” she managed. “Will?”

  Quirk shook her head vehemently. “No. No,” she said. “He’s trapped inside.”

  “Trapped?” That was not the sort of word Lette liked to hear when in the middle of a job.

  “That’s not what I meant.” Quirk shook her head with the sort of violence Lette usually reserved for jobs that required particular prejudice.

  “Maybe,” she said, “you should start at the beginning.”

  So Quirk did. Then she jumped to the end. Then to some point in the story halfway through, and from there leapt about like some deranged jackrabbit until finally Lette could piece the whole mosaic of disaster together.

  “But is Mattrax actually drugged?” she asked finally. Quirk had proven elusive on this one point.

  Quirk worried her hands several times. Lette cranked up the intensity of her glare several notches. If Quirk couldn’t manage calm, then cowed would be a close enough approximation.

  “I don’t know,” Quirk said miserably.

  “And is Will inside this cave?”

  “I don’t know,” Quirk said again, equally miserably.

  Lette clenched her jaw tight and did not say a number of things that she would have liked to.

  “Right,” she said eventually. “Well, in that case, the first thing to do is to get this portcullis up. You’re sure there are no other soldiers about?”

  Quirk shook her head. “They seemed stretched a bit thin after Mattrax killed off the previous guards. They just put the two of us down here.”

  “Okay. Let me get back down in the mechanism so I can open up this portcullis. That way if everything goes to shit, at least I have a way out of here.” And without waiting for a response, she slipped down the hole back into the portcullis’s inner workings. She wriggled forward until she found the fist-size gear she had identified earlier. Five swift blows with the hilt of her dagger and it fell out of alignment.

  She threw herself backward as, around her, the mechanism blazed to life. Cogs whirled, chains shrieked, and counterweights fell with a resounding crash. A moment after it was all over, Lette heard Quirk’s shriek as a brief punctuation to the whole event. Alone in the darkness, she permitted herself a roll of her eyes.

  Then she waited. Waited for the roar. For the crash of Mattrax’s feet as he descended upon the gate. For the heat of his flames roasting the rock around her.

  But all she heard was the slow, steady rumble of his snores.

  She smiled. Despite it all, something had actually gone right.

  21

  Something Going Right

  High above Lette, in the belly of Mattrax’s castle, an alarm bell rang loudly.

  “What’s that?” said a guard, looking up.

  Much to Will’s chagrin, however, he did not remove his knees from Will’s kidneys.

  “What’s his bloody nibs doing opening up the gate?”

  Will thought this was an excellent question and one that the guards should probably go and investigate posthaste, and he would have happily offered up that opinion had not his mouth been, at that precise moment, pressed directly into the mud by several meaty hands.

  “Who gives a fuck?” said the guard Will had come to identify as Kurr. He, Will had also discovered, was the guard whose face he had burned with soup. There were, he thought, extenuating circumstances surrounding that situation, which, again, he would have been willing to discuss at considerable length. The dialogue Kurr was more interested in, though, was the one going on between his steel toe caps and Will’s ribs. He kicked Will again. Hard.

  Will brayed pain into the mud.

  “If Mattrax wants to go flying, let him go. Give us another hour before he comes back and eats someone,” said one of the guards holding down Will’s legs.

  Another kick. Tears ran down Will’s cheeks.

  “He don’t go bloody flying about at night,” said the first guard. “Sleeps for bloody hours that bastard does.”

  “That is true,” said another voice.

  Another kick.

  “I said, who gives a fuck?” Kurr was a man of narrow focus, Will was learning.

  “Well,” said the first guard, “all I’m thinking is that here we are with this intruder—”

  “This whoreson,” said Kurr, giving Will another kick. Will bucked ineffectually.

  “Yeah,” said the first guard. “This whoreson. But he’s an intruding whoreson.”

  “You got a point?” said the guard up by Will’s head.

  “Well, it just seems,” said the first guard, “that here we are with this intruder—”

  “Whoreson.”

  “Intruding whoreson—”

  “Seriously, just get to your fucking point already.”

  Will couldn’t agree more.

  “So here we are with this intruding son—”

  “Yeah you said that already.”

  At this point the first guard seem to lose his patience a bit. “I bloody know I’ve said it three times, but every time I say it you go and bloody interrupt about how you want to know more. If you shut your fucking trap you might actually learn something. Like how to wipe your arse probably, you smelly arsehole.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “Uncalled for,” muttered the guard near Will’s head.

  “So an intruding whoreson. And we know Mattrax sleeps through for a solid night’s sleep every night.” A pause, which allowed Kurr to get in another kick. �
��Except now the alarm is going off to say his portcullis is opening.”

  Another longer pause. Will braced for the next kick.

  “Oh,” said Kurr at last. “Balls.”

  “Shit,” said the guard at his head. He let up with his hands. Will pulled his mouth out of the mud, gasping and gagging.

  Kurr filled his vision. “Who did you come with, arse-wipe?” he spat. “Who’s down there?”

  “There’s no bloody time for that!” yelled the first guard, grabbing at Kurr’s shoulder. “He’s tied up. Let’s just get down there, kill whoever is crapping on our evening’s entertainment, and then come back here and finish him off. He’s not going nowhere.”

  Kurr’s face twisted in irritation. Then finally he spat in Will’s face and stood up. “Go anywhere,” he growled at Will, “and I’ll kill you.”

  That, thought Will, was not much of an incentive considering his other option was to stay exactly where he was so Kurr could kill him.

  He watched his trio of torturers run from him, heard other boots pounding past. Everyone heading to the portcullis.

  Lette must have opened it, he realized. Because she hadn’t known about the alarm bell. Because he had never told her about the alarm bell. Though, to be fair, he’d never known about an alarm bell. Firkin had never mentioned it.

  In the end, though, he was forced to conclude that trying to figure out his own level of culpability was probably less productive than actually sitting up, escaping, and attempting to rescue Lette from the castle’s-worth of guards that were about to descend on her.

  On the other hand, his ribs were making a pretty convincing counterpoint about the merits of curling up into a fetal ball and sobbing.

  The process of sitting up was long, laborious, and punctuated with curse words that he thought even Firkin might shrink from.

  Getting from his arse to his feet was even worse. He tottered across the keep grounds, gasping, head spinning.

  Lette. He needed to get to Lette. He wasn’t sure why, or what help he could offer, but surely… surely that was what he had to do. He couldn’t just leave her to die. Will didn’t know much about what was going on anymore, and perhaps the middle of a robbery was an odd time to find his moral compass, but still, he knew that you did not run from a fight and let your friend take all the blows.

  More blows. He cringed inside. He wouldn’t be surprised if he pissed blood tomorrow. But he kept moving.

  He staggered toward the keep, a plan forming in his mind. Inside the torchlit entrance hall, he searched desperately for a sharp surface. He found it in the form of an axe lying abandoned in a weapon rack against one wall. Carefully he backed up to it, then pushed his bound wrists against the blade.

  A minute later, taking a break from massaging life back into his numb hands, he tried the pad of his thumb against the blade of the axe. It was far sharper than the sword his captors had confiscated from him. He hefted it, tested its weight. He nodded to himself. Perhaps not as good as his father’s old wood-cutting axe back on the farm, but he suspected it was good enough to do some damage, and it was light enough to be wielded single-handed.

  So armed, he turned to the dark spiraling corridor and began to descend.

  22

  The Beast Wakes

  Quirk stood in the depths of Mattrax’s cave and gaped. She had never seen anything like it before in her life.

  “Betra’s sagging tits,” Lette breathed. “I’ve seen gold in my time, but this…” She trailed off with a small sigh of contentment.

  Quirk took note of the gold for the first time. Yes, she supposed, there was a lot of it. Coins, crowns, medallions, necklaces, brooches, bracelets, scepters, gilt frames, earrings, emeralds, rubies, topaz, diamonds, pearls…

  She looked away, disinterested. She looked back to him.

  Mattrax slumbered atop his treasure trove. A vast coiling column of muscle and scale. His wings drooped down forming leathery blankets over the slopes of his hoard. His head was a vast angular wedge. Each nostril was wide enough that she could thrust a clenched fist into it and barely tickle the fine hairs that lined it. Each claw upon his foot was longer than her forearm.

  She could hardly breathe. Her chest felt full of air, the confines of her ribs too tight for her lungs. The room was bright despite the cloying night. The edges of the world were fading to mist.

  She walked toward the dragon as if in a dream. Coins and jewels gave way beneath her feet as she mounted the hills of his fortune. She stretched out her hand. She had to touch him.

  Would he feel rough? Smooth? Warm? Hard or soft? Would the skin give beneath her hand?

  She remembered the first time she had touched magic. A child in the dark of her parents’ hut. Hiding from her brother, Andatte. Curled up in a nest of dirty laundry while he tried to seek her out. Half-asleep. The heat of summer mounting where she lay. Becoming almost unbearable, almost beautiful. And then the sense of something pushing through that heat. Some vast, unknowable intellect manifesting in it. And it was reaching out to her. Pressing through layers of reality. And she had reached out, pushed back. And then… they had touched. Been briefly connected. She had touched something that had redefined her utterly. Left her branded. Left her different.

  This felt like that moment.

  She was vaguely aware of Lette scooping vast armfuls of wealth into her pockets, letting out small giddy noises.

  Quirk was almost annoyed. Such petty concerns in the face of such… such… magnificence. Was the woman blind to the beauty of the world? Did she spit in its eye on purpose?

  No. Quirk stilled herself. Nothing was going to spoil this for her. This moment would be pure, unsullied by the world, by her past, by her need for constant control. This was what she had worked so hard for, for all these years. She wouldn’t let anything ruin it now. She could feel the heat of Mattrax’s breath gusting over her hand, playing between her fingers—

  A noise from the mouth of the cave. A shout. And another.

  Quirk froze.

  “Shit,” Lette cursed.

  And no. No. This couldn’t be happening. This was her moment.

  Another shout.

  “Balur,” Quirk breathed. “It’s Balur. And Firkin. With the wagon and the sacks. That’s all.”

  She reached once more for the beatific peace of biological rapture. Toward epiphany. Toward Mattrax.

  From the cave entrance came the sound of steel clashing against steel.

  “Lawl’s balls!” Lette cursed again. Then the mercenary was moving. She dashed along the contours of the golden hoard, heading back toward the cave entrance. Rivers of coins tumbled and tinkled in her wake.

  As she dashed past Quirk, the ground gave way.

  No. No!

  Quirk lunged, desperate, grasping. Her fingers were almost there, almost touching Mattrax’s skin. But there was nothing to gain purchase on. She felt herself falling. She screamed. Everything was slipping away from her. Epiphany fluttered away.

  Then she was tumbling, arse over heel, landing unceremoniously, feet in the air, hands splayed and empty.

  For a moment, Quirk lay and seethed. She recognized the signs, felt the mask of control slipping away. No! screamed some last rational part of her. No! That’s not what this is. Not what this was meant to be! This was my moment.

  She picked herself up. Her teeth gritted. Her palms hot. Steam rising from between her fingertips.

  Someone was running around the corner of the cave. A guard, chain mail glinting in reflected moonlight, mouth open in a yell, sword raised. He saw her, let loose a fresh howl, and charged.

  Quirk did not see the man. Not as he was here and now. She did not see the cave around her. She did not feel the hot breath of Mattrax gusting over her.

  Instead, she felt the hot breath of the Tamathian scrublands blowing at her back. She saw the shallow sloping hills of her childhood, dotted with scrubby bushes that held more thorns than leaves. She saw a bandit dressed in tatters charging, scimitar raised abov
e his head, the desperation of a starving man glinting in his eyes.

  No! screamed the voice. This is over. This is past. This is not who you are.

  But the mask of control was slipping, almost gone. And in her rage, her frustration, her fear, Quirk reached up and tore it away.

  She reached out her hand. Heat rose in her palm. She felt divine power within her. She felt words she had never learned forming on her tongue, words that pushed back at the skin of reality stretched over the world. Felt them punch through.

  The guard was almost on her. His sword hung above her head.

  The heat in her palm became a physical pain. A scalding, searing expression of hate and rage. She howled, loud enough to match the guard’s battle cry.

  And then, there, in the darkness, she gave birth to fire.

  23

  Hammer Time

  Fire Root, Balur thought in one of his increasingly rare lucid moments, is being the absolute shit. He had heard certain whores discussing the improvements certain herbs and powders could bring to their area of expertise. But, honestly, they were going to have to try mass murder while high on this stuff. This was being absolutely fucking great.

  “Whee!” he cried, spinning in a circle, war hammer held out at full stretch, feeling his shoulders take the weight, his heels spinning on the sandy floor, watching the bodies flying through the air. Their blood painted the air in spiraling arcs, glistening like streams of rubies. He could smell it, like a shooting star exploding in the back of his throat.

  He hadn’t expected to find guards here. He was unsure what he had expected now. But it hadn’t been them. Not that he was sad about it. Rather, when he had come running out of the woods below the cave and seen them streaming out of the castle gates, he had let out a howl of joy. At his back, the villagers had echoed the sound.

  The guards had turned, seen them, charged. The two forces had crashed into each other like newlyweds.