THE POISON AND THE FLAME

I reached the flag at noon of the second day, and found that I was not the first.

Three had come before me. A heavyset young woman from House Brandt, leaning on a spear with the look of one who had spent her last reserve. A pair of brothers from a coastal House, filthy and triumphant, passing a flask. They looked up as I came over the crest of the black hill, and the brothers raised their flask in a weary salute, and I nodded and walked past them to the flag and put my hand on the pole.

A bell rang somewhere. The Glass Relay overhead flared with light, and the voice of the announcer rose in glad astonishment: "And the Free Entrant, Miss Tamsin Reeve, takes the flag! Unharmed! Unmarked! Her first trial, the first of the Free list to pass in nineteen years!"

The roar of the crowd came down through the ceiling of the Greenwood as a distant surf. I did not look up. I gave the flag a tug to be sure it was fast, and sat down on a stone, and waited for the rest of the world to catch up.

By nightfall, fifty-nine contestants had made the crest. By midnight the number was seventy-one.

The Gauntlet's early rounds, like all things designed by committees, were wasteful.

…

"The Second Trial," announced the voice, in the morning, "is the Marsh of Mirrors."

We were rounded up at the foot of the hill and conveyed in groups of twenty across the Greenwood by Marshal's carts, under a grey false sky. The Marsh lay at the western edge: a wide flat tract of mud and reed, studded with pools, bounded on every side by walls of dead cypress. The pools shone like glass. Each one held a perfect reflection of the sky above it, and when you walked past, the reflection did not follow. It turned, and looked at you.

The rules were simpler this time. Cross the marsh. Reach the far shore. The pools would do as they pleased.

I was given a place in the third group. We lined up on a sort of dike of black planks, a tight little column of aspirants in assorted colors. I took a position at the back. The Shade drifted at my elbow, and Nimbus, who had been forbidden to fly in the Marsh by an official with a clipboard, sat on my shoulder, radiating disapproval.

I felt it before I saw it.

It was a prickle at the base of the neck, the cold sensation of a drop of water finding a collar. I knew it. I'd had it in the Gorge, on the ledge, with the silver eyes above me.

Someone is watching.

I turned my head, slowly, to the dead cypresses on my left.

A small blonde figure stood among them, in a dress of palest green, with a lace parasol over her shoulder, perfectly framed by the gray trunks. She seemed to have stepped out of a painting. She was alone. She was smiling.

Cordelia Fairchild lifted her gloved hand and waved.

…

"Tamsin!"

Her voice came across the marsh, clear and sweet, ringing through the still air. A few of the contestants turned. I did not.

"Tamsin, wait for me!"

She came lightly along the edge of the dike, a vision in green, with the parasol turning idly, and I watched her come. She was beautiful in the way that a bright poison is beautiful. She had her hair done up in a coronet of braids. There was a ruffle of lace at her throat. She stopped three paces away and tilted her head.

"I've been looking everywhere," she said. "I was so worried. When you disappeared, we all thought—Alden and I both—we thought something dreadful had happened. And then I saw you on the Relay, and I said to myself, I must go to her."

"How kind."

"Oh, don't be like that." Her eyes brimmed. "I know you're angry. I would be, in your place. But I wanted to say—I do want us to be friends again." She pressed her gloved hands together. "We were so close once. I only want to make things right."

Behind me the other contestants had gone quiet. The nearest, a stout boy in House Aldrin green, was staring with open admiration. A girl from Brandt looked embarrassed. In a corner of the marsh, a camera crystal rotated, slow, bright, drinking it all in.

I understood the play. It was a beautiful play. Cordelia did not intend to fight me in the open. She intended to perform a reconciliation, here, before the Relay, under the eyes of the Republic. A sweet, weeping girl and a cold, silent one. A hand extended; a hand refused. By tomorrow the broadsheets would have my name beside the word ungrateful.

I did not take her hand.

I looked at the pools instead.

They were very still. They shone in the gray light like plates of pewter. Each one held an image of the sky, and the sky was wrong. In the nearest pool the clouds were moving the wrong way. In the next, a faint pale smear, like a face under water, had begun to rise.

I turned my head, very slightly. Behind Cordelia, in the cypress shade, I counted figures. Four. Six. Eight. They wore the colors of House Fairchild and House Whitlock and a number of lesser houses I knew to be in their pay. They had not come out onto the dike. They were hanging back, patient.

And Cordelia's parasol, I noticed, had begun to glow.

"Withering Veil," said the Shade quietly. "A face-curse of the Third Rank. It strips the skin from the flesh. They will have chosen it for the cameras."

"I know," I said.

"You have not moved."

"I'm waiting."

"For what?"

"For her to finish the sentence."

Cordelia smiled at me, tenderly, tears on her cheeks, her hand pressed to her heart. "Oh, Tamsin," she whispered. "I'm so, so sorry."

And the parasol opened.

…

It was not a parasol. It never had been. The lace unfolded in a ripple of pale green and a cloud of gray mist burst from its ribs: a roiling, silent, spreading fog that hissed and glittered and rolled over the dike like breath. It struck the first contestants. A boy in Aldrin green made a surprised sound, put a hand to his cheek, and screamed.

I did not see what happened to him. I was already moving.

I had perhaps a second. The mist rolled toward me, a veil of death, fast. And as it came, the eight figures in the cypress shade stepped out onto the dike, and spread, and raised their hands, and the air filled with the click and hum of spells. Chains of light. A net of silver. Lances of frost.

An ambush. Eight against one.

I laughed.

I do not know why. It was not a thing I decided. It rose up out of me, short, sharp, genuinely amused, the pure delight of a woman who has been waiting for a particular thing and has finally been handed it. Cordelia's smile wavered.

I stopped running.

I turned. I planted my feet on the planks. I raised my left hand, palm out, with the Bronze mark blazing, and I said to the Cinder, in the clear flat voice of a woman asking for her coat: "Burn."

…

It was not a burst. It was not a blast. I have tried to explain it since, to people who ask, and it is a poor sort of word, but the closest I can say is that it was a stillness. A flat wave of red, silent and complete, rolled out from my palm across the marsh. It touched the mist.

The mist stopped being mist.

Every structure in it, every thread of intent, every careful bit of malice woven into the vapor, came apart, and what remained was only steam. A white gust that blew away on the wind. The eight attackers' spells reached me in the next instant, the chains, the nets, the lances, and each, as it touched the red, went out like a lamp. Silver nets became scraps of gray ash. Lances of frost were simply water. A fire-bolt hissed, fizzled, and fell at my feet as a cinder.

The eight stopped. They were not stupid. They stood very still.

I took a step forward.

Cordelia's parasol, a skeleton of burnt ribs and ragged green, fell from her hand. Her sleeves were smoking. Her bracelets, a pair of charm-chains, a defensive amulet, an emerald brooch with a Silver shield-rune, had turned in an instant to black, brittle crusts. Something went out of the air around her, a faint shimmer I had never noticed because it had always been there: a thousand small wards and glamours, the silk-thin scaffolding of power that had propped up her face and her figure and her name.

It was all gone. It had been burned to ash.

She stood in the green dress in the middle of the dike, looking like what she was. A small, thin, frightened girl with ordinary eyes. She put up her hands to her face and found it was her own.

"What," she whispered, "what did you—"

I walked up to her.

I did not hurry. I took my time. The eight had begun to back away, one by one, with the dull animal prudence of rats. Nobody tried to stop me. The camera crystals were close now, and bright. They hung in a circle around us in the gray air, their red lights winking. The announcer, somewhere, had stopped talking. The marsh was silent.

I reached her. I looked down into the brown eyes.

"You said you wanted to make things right," I said.

"Tamsin—"

"I'm going to help you."

I drew the Ashbrand Blade, and reversed it, and laid the flat of the crossguard against her left forearm.

I broke it.

It was done neatly. A single sharp crack, like a branch in winter. Cordelia's mouth opened. For a moment nothing came out. Then the pain reached her, and she screamed, and I took her other wrist in my free hand, and rapped the pommel sharply across the bone, and broke that too.

I felt nothing. I felt nothing at all. I watched the tears pour out of her eyes, real tears, the first she had ever cried, I think, without calculation. I watched her collapse onto her knees on the black planks, cradling both arms to her chest, sobbing like a child.

"Tamsin." The Shade's voice, at my shoulder, was quiet. "She will not forget this."

"I should hope not."

I sheathed the blade and wiped my hands on my coat, as a maid wipes her hands after clearing a table. I looked down at the girl on the planks.

"I think you were right," I said. "You did only want to make things right. I'm obliged to you. I find I've been in need of a clean-up."

Cordelia raised her face. It was swollen, and blotched, and streaked with snot. Her eyes were wild.

"You're a monster," she whispered.

"Yes," I said. "I know. But the thing about monsters, Cordelia, is that we are made. You might ask yourself who made me."

I turned my back on her.

There was nothing to say. I'd said it all, in the last life, in the arena, with my last breath, to a box where a girl in a white hat was sitting with her hands folded. I had said it to the empty air. Now it was said.

…

I walked off the dike.

The crowd of contestants parted before me like water. They said nothing. Some of them looked at the ground. Some stared. A girl from Brandt, whom I had passed on the hill, bowed her head slightly as I went by, and I did not know why.

I had gone perhaps fifty paces along the shore when the Shade spoke.

"There is something you should know."

"Mm?"

"That did not feel like revenge."

I considered it. The marsh was quiet around me. The pools lay flat and silver. I could still smell the ash.

"It was not," I said. "It was housekeeping."

"Hm." A pause. "I am not sure which is more alarming."

"Nor am I."

I stopped. Nimbus had shifted on my shoulder, and his claws pricked through the coat. I felt his thought, tight and small, a warning like a thin high note.

"Behind you."

I did not turn at once. I listened.

Footsteps. Heavy, deliberate, on the black planks of the dike. They came at a steady pace, unhurried, a man's tread. And with them came a faint, bright ring of metal, the long hiss of a sword leaving a scabbard.

I knew the step. I had walked beside it for three years.

I turned.

Alden Whitlock stood at the end of the dike, forty paces away. His face was white. The golden hair was disordered. His coat was torn at the shoulder, and in his right hand he held a long straight sword of House steel, and the blade was shaking. Behind him, in the cypress shade, there was no one. He had come alone.

He was looking at Cordelia, on the planks, in a heap, whimpering. And then at me.

I watched him decide.

It took a long time.