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The precision work came after, widening the cracks and pulling apart the defences around the Book shard by shard. I could dip out for a bit and let brute force fall down again, but I’d been embellishing the truth when I’d told people that the ritual could end without me. It was technically true, but if I wanted it finished tonight then I’d need to be personally involved. It why I’d rustled up my band of valiant villainous defenders in the first place: one I got my licks in with Hanno and Cordelia, I’d need people to cover for me while I did the labour of smothering the divine Light of hope. You know, metaphorically speaking.

… probably. It would have taken more power than this if I was literally killing hope, I reassured myself.

And the thing was that, deep down, I’d not actually expected this to work. I went against everything I’d been taught: I had cackled atop a flying tower, begun a massive ungainly ritual to destroy something Good while there were heroes in riding distance and just generally monologued at people who might be construed as my rivals should you squint a bit. I had, in other words, behaved in a way that would have made my father roll in his graves if he’d not been given to a pyre. Only now I was standing alone in a room so deeply drenched in shadows it might as well be the night sky, prying apart the shell of the Book as it shone like a furious star, and I was winning.

The Book burned, for a moment washing away even the slightest of shadows, but I snorted.

“Shouldn’t have done that,” I informed it. “Sure, as far as I can tell your source of power is pretty much inexhaustible, but your outflow…”

The burning Light suddenly flickered, and in the moment of weakness Night swallowed all it had lost and more. The Book struggled, burning bright twice more, but every time it burned shorter and ceded more ground afterwards.

“Like I thought, you have a fixed outflow,” I told the Book. “Like veins, yeah? So when you come at me with all that fire, trying to chase me out of the room, you’re cramming a lot more blood in those veins than there’s supposed to be. Making them burst.”

The Book pulsed, shadows shivering around it.

“You damaged yourself,” I tutted disapprovingly.

And it opened the veins wider for me to slither through, not that I’d give it warning over that. I was still unsure exactly how intelligent the artefact was. Not sentient, as far as I could tell, but it was far from inert. There was a will in there, dumb and blind as it might be.

Leaning forward, I pulled at the Night. Picking through later after layer would have taken too long, especially the tighter shell nearer to the Book itself, but I’d been going deep instead of wide: I only needed to get to the artefact to finish this, not strip it naked. My flesh eye was half-closed, blinded by the Light, but under my eyecloth Night roiled and let me see through a hundred more. It was easier that way to pick my angle, slide between two jagged shards – invisible even to my weaves, only outlined by the press of Night against them – and slip into a crack. Not deep enough I thought, but I had a way around that.

“Hooks,” I ordered, frowning.

Like a thousand little mandibles the Night slipped into the crack bit into the shard, anchoring itself to the power. Like a fishing line I spun out chords of Night from it and hung them behind me, into the great currents of darkness, before rolling a shoulder. Now I just had to put my back into it. All my eyes closed, I breathed out shallowly and emptied my mind. Distractions fell away one after another, swallowed up by the dark, until all that was left was a simple thought: pull. I sunk into it, made it fill me up to the brim for what must have been a hundred years.

A loud crack jolted me out of the state, the sound rippling across the fabric of Arcadia. A long, thin shard broke away and flew up from the massive pressure, disappearing into the currents of Night. I could feel the tapestry of Arcadia wane around me, like a tapestry used as a cutting board. Creation would have been more solid, but I’d chosen Arcadia because rules were looser here in the first place. It’d last long enough anyway, I thought as I learned forward even further. Now there was only a small, smooth shell no broader than my thumb keeping me from getting to the Book.

One more good hit and I was in. I sent out my will, Night rippling around me, and found Archer.

“Report,” I ordered.

“Band of heroes coming from the hills,” Indrani said. “Captured the Royal Conjurer, by the looks of it, but they’re having a hard time with horses on the hill paths. The rest of our guests are contained.”

There were only so many bands of five I had it in me to swat away tonight, so it’d be best to finish this as soon as possible. I’d given the would-be wardens every chance I had to spare. If they couldn’t pull through now, it was on them.

“Do what you can to slow them down,” I said.

There was beat.

“Cat, what’s wrong?” Indrani asked.

“Nothing,” I lied, and cut the tie.

Looking down, I saw that my hands were trembling. From the exertion, I told myself. Not from what I was about to do: attempt to steal Above’s power and devour it whole. I clenched my hands.

“It’s the best of the bad solutions,” I told the Book. “My foundations will be weak, sure, but I’ll have the power to take on the Dead King.”

Just not, I thought, the power to survive him. When two peerless monsters entered the ring, only ruin ensued. I wasn’t sure, couldn’t be, but that was my gut said and these days it was so rarely wrong. I’d be fragile strength I took into the fight and the Hidden Horror would make me pay for that. Maybe I’d make it out anyway, merely crawl out broken, but the odds would be leaning the other way. I stared down my hands until they stopped shaking.

I was a few graveyards past a happy ending.

“So let’s take a swing,” I murmured, “and see where it gets me.”

The power came easy: Night loved a winning battle. The Book’s power felt smooth as an eggshell, without flaw, but I had broken through that before. The battering ram came down, the mangled globe creaking under the weight as I wielded the power in the most simple, brutal way it could be wielded. I waited and watched through a hundred eyes and one, following the shape of the power as it distended under the pressure. And, eventually, fissured. A small break, more along the curve of the last shell than inside it, but there was a slight indent.

I flexed my will, turning pressure to liquid as Night poured down through the slight opening before it could close. It would do. It was weak leverage, but when you had enough strength to wield that could be enough. I wove hook after hook, tightened the weave and raised my arm. I took the deep currents in hand, closed my eyes and pulled. Was I in the dark, or was I the dark? It was hard to tell where the border was. My own heartbeat felt distant, as if I’d been submerged, but I had a lifeline. The chords of Night in my hand, pulling at me as I had pulled at them.

I came back to the world to a splintering sound that echoed of a scream, the shell cracking and breaking as I breathed out and Night tendrils pulled and picked and ripped it all apart. All that effort, I thought as my eyes opened, to expose no more than a thumb’s worth of the Book of Some Things. But exposed it was, and I reached out for the leather-bound book with my hand. Light burned, a sun howling in indignation that I dare to darken it, but I had veiled greater suns than this.

“Fall,” I ordered, and Night obeyed.

The Light did not give an inch even as I drowned it in darkness, but the dark was patient. Like a candle starved of air I watched it burn and burn and burn until there was nothing left to consume but itself, and then that pride ate itself hollow. Until there was but a speck left, an ember, and the light dimmed. I had won.

Damn me, I had won.

My fingertips found the leather cold to the touch. Blindly angry, I ripped out the ember from the book and watched it wilt. I held the speck of Light in the palm of my hand and looked through the Night, to the threshold of my tower in this realm and another. The moonlight was blinding, a curtain of pale, but through it cut two stark silhouettes. The First Prince and the Sword of Judgement, crossing the threshold together.

“Good,” I said. “Good. Now we end this.”

They climbed the stairs unhindered, I saw to that.

The dark parted for them, like a tide receding, and I heard the sound of their steps on the stone long before they passed through the gate into the tower’s heart. Neither of them hurried, neither of them slow: it was a pace like the beat of a drum. It had the taste of the inexorable to it. And when they came at last, entering a sea of Night broken only by the glow of the ember in my palm, the play of shadows cut the figure of them to the bone. As if only the crux of them was being shined upon, the rest of it claimed by the dark.

Hanno of Arwad, the tall knight with a workman’s calloused hands. The sword at his side was little more than a line, his eyes a single streak of calm. Cordelia Hasenbach, the princess with the arrow-straight back. A raised chin and blue eyes burning cold.

Neither of them flinched away from the dark.

“You’re late,” I said.

My voice echoed across the Night, the only thing it did not swallow. No, instead the words reverberated across the room until the very last note faded, somehow faintly sounding of the cawing of crows. I felt talons digging into my shoulders, the presence of Sve Noc a tangible weight. I had the attention of my patronesses.

“But not too late,” he replied.

His movement drew shape from light, the cut of his jaw and the length of the sword still in the sheath.

“Not so sure about that,” I said. “Though at least the both of you made it here.”

“Bears in the pit,” she evenly said. “We saw. There is blinkered and there is blind.”

A slash of pale gold across her brow, the whisper of long skirts against the stone.

“And what is it you see?” I scoffed.

“The lady of long strings, pulling at them still,” he said. “Poisoning the chalice we are all to drink from.”

Lips firmly set, the dull shine of a belt buckle.

“Too little,” I said. “And much, much too late. If all you hold is what I hand you…”

My fingers closed around the ember of light, shadows like ribs cast on my face. I did not finish, crush it entirely and eat it whole, but the warning was plain. Better tyranny than a lackluster opposite. That mistake, at least, most of Calernia would live through.

“And what would closing that grip make you, I wonder?” she asked.

Curls like a river going down brocade, a tooth digging into skin to the very edge of piercing.

“The necessary evil,” I smiled, all teeth under the hood. “You ought to be used to it by now.”

“You are,” he replied, blunt. “It is why you reach even when you should not.”

Hair cut short I could make out the skin under, cloth hanging loose on his arm.

“What else is there?” I challenged. “I gave you warning. I bet you might live up to the boasts of your Gods, share a victory, but I see none of that before me.”

“You see nothing,” she said. “Because you are still in the pit.”

A cheekbone like a crossguard, a blue sleeve hiding a hand. I almost laughed in Cordelia’s face. Of course I was still in the pit. I’d started there, bleeding for silver, and odds were I’d die in there as well. Just because the pit got bigger and the toughs tougher didn’t mean anything had changed.

“You’ve failed,” I said, the regret in my voice honest. “Neither of you will stand. There is only one way left now.”

Through, I thought.

“That is true,” he acknowledged. “If you act alone.”

The entire relief of him, for the briefest moment as he passed between two ribs: bruised but not beaten. A bearing of a fragile certainty. They were not yet done. I narrowed my eye at them, staring them down from all sides, but they were half shadows themselves in the depths of the dark.

“So I ask again,” I said. “What else is there?”

“Bargain, Warden of the East,” she said. “Do you not have the West before you?”

Half of her stood in the light, like she had been split in half: gold and winter and blue, for a heartbeat shone upon.

“Bargain instead of taking.”

And she was gone, dress trailing a flutter behind her as she returned to the dark. My fingers, the ones still holding the Night, clenched. Knots formed around them. She was serious, I thought, and Hanno was not contradicting her. They were mad.

“Half the world?” I mused. “That will have a hefty price.”

“Is that an excuse for stealing instead?” he asked.

The good hand on the Good sword, a shoulder pulling tight.

“I’ll bite,” I languidly shrugged. “What is it that you want for your half?”

“Give up power,” Cordelia Hasenbach challenged. “Your hands should only hold so much: another must lead the Damned.”

A glimpse of light, but all I saw was the eyes: cold and blue and hard as the iron her people had once named kings for. You want me to step away, I thought. To become the sole keeper of the Accords and bind my hands with my own rules. There would be captains for Above and Below but I would not be one of them, instead an arbiter between. My fingers clenched even further. Did she even begin to understand how much power she was asking me to throw away? Already I was abdicating my throne, was I to burn every last scrap of influence I held along with it? What she described, it would leave me no authority save through the Accords. While they kept their followings intact, giving up empty claims in exchange for the root of my own power.

“And while I cut my own legs the two of you will keep your seats, of course,” I replied.

I shook my head, darkly amused.

“You people can never really lose, can you?” I said, smiling my father’s smile.

“Can you?” Hanno of Arwad retorted.

All I saw in the light was his hand, the fingers cut to the phalange. Hanno’s own bargain.

“On the cusp of your oldest trick, another ruin of a victory,” he said, “do you have it in you to compromise anyway, Catherine Foundling?”

Night roiled with my anger. Another hero coming out of the cold asking me to meet them halfway after having stepped an inch to my mile. Another fairweather friend demanding my cloak. My fingers closed further around the ember, the shadow ribs pulling closer.

“Compromise takes from both sides,” I bit out. “What is it that you’re giving up?”

The two of them stood at the edge of the light, little more than silhouettes. The three of us around the heart of the Book, like three strangers huddled around a fire.

“I will abdicate all power in Procer,” Cordelia said. “And spend the rest of my life in Cardinal serving the Accords.”

“Their laws will have to be enforced on Named,” Hanno said. “I will pledge my sword to the duty, under your authority.”

I took half a step back. Lose everything, they’d demanded of me. And now they were offering everything in return. A simple solution, but the intricacies spun out along with my thoughts. She’d build Cardinal as a city and the skeleton of the Accords applied, the schools and the bureaucracy. And he’d make himself into the enforcer of the laws all Named must abide, the one sent into the breach when horror got loose. The both of them would grant legitimacy that I simply did not have, warlord that I was. And they would also be a noose around my neck: I could not ask dark deeds of that enforcer, I could not plot conquest past that chancellor.

Wings and an anchor at the same time. An elegant, balanced solution.

It just required me to be willing to give up every speck of authority I held beyond treaties that were still nothing more than ink on parchment. To let slip from my grasp every single thing I’d fought for since the night I had almost been strangled to death in an alley. Talons dug into my shoulders. My goddesses were watching, waiting. Wanting to hear my answer. I looked at the two silhouettes in the waning light, feeling the weight of their gazes and silence, wondering. Had the Sisters had felt like this that night in the Everdark, when I had offered Winter and asked for salvation in return?

I got no answer from them but expected nothing else. After all, it was my turn on their side of the altar.

“Crabs in the bucket,” I murmured. “It always comes back to that in the end, doesn’t it?”

Having to trust that the others wanted to leave the bucket too, that they didn’t just want to drag you back down. The leap of faith. And I still remembered what it was like, kneeling before silver eyes and asking the only thing you really could. Help me. Please.

“It might fail,” I told them.

They waited, silent. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them.

“But that’s we always say, isn’t it?”

My father had never understood, to the end, that sometimes it wasn’t about winning. It’d gotten him killed. And maybe, I thought, this would get me killed too.

But it was the only way out of the pit, and what else could I do but try?

I released the Night, the knots around my hand unmaking themselves. The sea withdrawing around all three of us until the last ember of the Book shone like a firefly cradled in my hand.

“Half the world,” I quietly said. “Bargain struck.”

Cordelia stepped forward first, reaching out and gently unclasping my fingers. The ember burned against my palm, free. Hanno met my eye, leaning forward over the altar and smiling.

He blew out the Light.

Darkness swallowed whole the room, then it swallowed me too.

I woke up standing on ashes.

In the distance the wind howled, kicking up great clouds of ash and dust, and my leg was throbbing. My sword was at my hip, my staff in my hand. Both were cold to the touch. I pulled my cloak tight around me, shivering, and looked ahead. There was a great stone ramp there, leading to a broken city. It had been built in a tall plateau, which lay shattered as ash rained down from the sky and the wind whipped at hollowed out husks. I’d been here before, I knew. I’d fought to defend this city and lost.

“Hainaut,” I murmured.

The wind gave no answer. The sky above was an endless stretch of storm clouds, red lightning crackling above and making itself known through the flashes of light. The whole world seemed coated in bleak grey light. I sighed,

“At least it isn’t Liesse,” I muttered. “We have haunted each other long enough.”

Around us was a vast plain of as, so there was only one way to go: forward, into the city. My leg felt like nails were being driven into it, but I pulled my hood down and limped towards the ramp. With every excruciating step, I could not help but think I had been here before. Not Hainaut, but the rest. This plain of ash. But I could not tell when or how, no more than I remembered how I had come here. All I knew was that my answers lay ahead.

The journey was long. The sky began to darken as the hours passed, shadows lengthening around me. But I reached the bottom of the slope, and there at last it all fell into place. Half-buried in the ash, revealed by a careless twist of wind, I found a corpse. A legionary, one of mine. Just some boy who couldn’t have been older than eighteen, his skull split open and his eyes unseeing.

Come to a foreign field to die for strangers.

“Name dream,” I said, then shook my head scornfully.

I glanced up at the sky.

“Death did not shake me when I was barely more than a girl,” I told it, “and I’ve waded through oceans of it since. What did you expect?”

“For you to learn.”

It had been many years since I’d last dreamt one of these dreams, but the woman who’d called out to me still felt like I’d seen her yesterday. Why shouldn’t she, when she was wearing my face? Older than me, her hair cut short and her robes pure white, but we were still twins. At her hip a long and slender sword hung from her belt, pure silver, but that wasn’t what drew my attention. She was holding some sort of case with a cloth draped over it.

“Added to your arsenal, I see,” I amiably replied.

The doppelganger glared at me.

“And you still avoid the reproaches to which you have no answer,” my twin said.

“I’ve learned a lot of things,” I told her, half-smiling. “Just not the sort you like.”

“Not the sort anyone should like,” my twin said. “How many cities’ worth of dead now trail in our wake, Catherine? Enough of them it might make up a kingdom. Your very own graveyard crown.”

“Better my graveyard than the Dead King’s,” I flatly replied. “Mine, at least, will sleep in peace.”

“They should have drowned us at birth,” she said. “Evil as the act would have been, it would still have been better than the plague of a woman we turned into. Again and again you were given the choice to turn away, to do better, and where did that lead you?”

She gestured up at broken Hainaut.

“Ruin heaped on ruin,” my twin said. “You are the worst of what we were as a girl, honed to a fine edge.”

“You never learned how to compromise either, did you?” I asked. “You still think it’s better to accomplish nothing than to do bad things.”

“Look around you, Catherine,” she gently said. “What is you’ve accomplished?

My fingers clenched around my staff.

“You were wrong then,” I replied, “and you’re wrong now. Doing nothing is worse than being Evil. It’s just going along with everything that’s wrong with the world.”

“And is it a better world you’ve made?” she asked me.

I breathed out, looking up at the sky. I could have been flippant, have made a joke of it, but it would have felt wrong. This is the last time I’m ever going to see you, isn’t it? If I was to face my doubts manifest, I would face them honestly.

“Ask me when the war’s over,” I finally said. “When I’m no longer holding my sword.”

Face unreadable, she slowly nodded.

“What now?” I asked her.

“I guide you into the city,” my twin replied.

She pulled away the cloth, dropping it into the ash and revealing the wooden lantern below. There was no flame inside, I saw. It was an ember of Light, the same I’d seen Hanno blow out. Around us, night fell over the world.

“Follow me closely,” she said. “The way is treacherous.”

She was not lying. The streets were cracked, houses and towers falling apart as the wind mournfully twisted past them. The rain of ash blinded the view of the sky, the rare lightning and distant starlight crowning the clouds. Hainaut had been turned into a monument to ruin and death, corpses dangling from every edge and crammed in every nook and cranny. Under the lantern’s light I glimpsed faces I had known, soldiers I’d once laughed with or ridden by. Once I thought I saw Nauk’s face, scarred with Summer fire, but it was too far to be sure.

I made certain never to look too closely at any goblin’s face.

“Usually I meet the other one first,” I said, following her into the deeper city.

“Evil has always come easier to your hand,” my twin curtly replied.

“But not tonight?” I asked.

“It was not it that bought you entry,” she said.

Her tone made it clear the conversation was over and she ignored my other attempts to talk. I followed her in silence through the tomb of a maze, recognizing where we were headed: the heart of the city, where there had once been a reservoir of water. It’d been broken during the battle, the plateau split by sorcery and the wrath of the Firstborn. We found the other one there, sitting on a broken pillar by the edge of the drop as she ran a whetting stone along the edge of her blade. The clouds parted as we padded across the dust-covered stone, moonlight peeking through and wreathing her silhouette.

The other twin still had that pink scar across her nose, her long hair kept in a braid reaching down to her coat of mail. Regular’s armour. She had a mangled look about her, worn down from war, but for once I was more worn than her. She wore a blood-specked tabard over the mail and a knife at her hip that I recognized even sheathed.

I would not soon forget the knife I’d used to kill my father.

“Ah, Cat,” the Evil twin grinned. “Welcome back, my girl.”

“’evening,” I drawled. “You look in a fine mood.”

The Good twin stepped to the side, silent and glaring.

“Shit, why wouldn’t I be?” the scarred twin laughed. “It’s been a long few years, Catherine, but look at us now.”

She waved around the sword, enthused.

“We’re basically Queen Bitch of Calernia,” the Evil twin said. “Sure, it took a damned lot of killing to get there but that’s why we’ve got a Hell of a throne to lounge on.”

Ugh, a pun. There was a reason I’d killed her half the times we’d met. She leaned forward.

“And just between you and me, my girl?” she said. “It makes our legs look good.”

“I don’t do a lot of lounging these days,” I noted. “It’s actually pretty painful on the leg.”

She rolled her eyes at me.

“Yeah, that’s the one part I’ve some issues with,” she said. “You need to cut that out. Fix your leg, put on your big girl pants and properly take this continent in hand.”

“Should we now,” I flatly said.

“You know we could,” the Evil twin grinned. “It wouldn’t even be that hard. A few clever choices while we pull down Keter on Neshamah’s head and there’ll be no one left who could stop us. Besides, we both know they’re all going to be so pathetically grateful once we pull them out of the fire again.”

“So the bargain I just made,” I said, “I ought to discard it.”

She smiled at me.

“Do you why I sit here?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“The view?” I guessed.

“That’s one word for it,” she said. “Come closer.”

I limped forward, the lantern’s light burning behind me and the moon above, until I stood at the edge of the drop. The plateau had been shattered, I knew, but down there I saw not a single loose stone. There might be some at the bottom, but how could I tell when a kingdom’s worth of mangles corpses had been piled over it? I’d seen a lot of death, since I became the Squire and in the years since, but that sight still gave me pause. How many thousands were down there?

“Who are they?” I quietly asked.

“The city’s the people who got us here,” the twin said. “Those, they’re the people we’ve killed. With wars, with choices, because it would have cost too much to save them.”

My fingers clenched. They should have drowned us at birth, the other spirit had said.

“And that’s the view you chose?”

“It’s what we are, Cat,” the spirit smiled. “The girl who did that. I just want you to stop fucking around and own it.”

I looked down at the dead, unblinking.

“You never learned to lose,” I finally said. “That’s your mistake.”

The spirit eyed me, unimpressed.

“Why would I want to?”

“Because when you look at these you see victories,” I said. “It’s the only way you know how to live: going from one fight to another, hoping that one more battle will fix it all.”

I shook my head.

“It’s prayer,” I said. “Below’s favourite kind. All in every time, until inevitably you lose it all.”

“We haven’t lost yet,” the twin said. “I’ll take those odds.”

“They’ll take you,” I replied. “It’s a rigged game. It’s how they’ve always gotten us.”

I looked back at the other spirit, who stood watching us with her lantern in hand. I stepped away from the edge.

“The first time I met you two,” I said, “I killed you both.”

“Good times,” Evil twin grinned.

“The second time,” I continued, “I left you behind.”

“And the demon broke you,” the other spirit replied.

Mistakes, I thought. Both times it’d been mistakes. And I’d never seen them with the Beast.

“It’s the end of the road, you know,” I quietly said. “There won’t be another one after this.”

Neither of them answered. Their gazes were on me.

“It’s the third time,” I said. “Let’s make it count.”

I breathed out, looking up at the moon through the parted clouds, and let myself loosen. Stopped trying to trick my way out of this, to win it, to use it as a tool. It was a journey, nothing more and nothing less. A hand gripped my right shoulder.

“Do better,” she whispered into my ear. “Remember the girl who wanted to save her home. She was always the best of you.”

A hand gripped my left shoulder.

“Don’t flinch,” she whispered into my ear. “Remember the girl who wanted to be the storm. She’s the one who got you here.”

We stood the three of us under the moon, in the heart of broken Hainaut, as below us the corpses began moved. Not as a horde but as one, a behemoth of a creature rising from the cradle of death made of a hundred thousand corpses. It stood tall and terrible, blotting out the sky, watching me through a sea of dead faces.

“Hello, old friend,” I softly greeted the Beast.

It opened a gaping maw, baring fangs made of broken swords and spears and banners. It was a beast, I thought, fit to swallow the world whole. West and East, what did it matter? It would devour it all.

“I once told you I wasn’t afraid of you,” I smiled. “But it was a lie. Did you know?”

It laughed, the sound a thing of horror.

“Let me tell you again, then,” I said. “I’m not afraid of you.”

The behemoth of corpses climbed out of the pit, standing over me. An entire world of death enveloped me on all sides. I cocked my head to the side.

“Is it a lie now?” I asked it.

Its massive head lowered and it watched me, suddenly snapping out. I did not flinch.

“You know what we are now,” I told it. “Who we are.”

I looked up into its eyes.

“The Warden,” I claimed, and the world shivered with the truth of it.

The Beast roared in approval. Time to wake up, I thought, and the great maw of death opened wide.

I never felt it close around me.