THE THING CORDELIA BECAME

She did not run at me. She crawled.

I want to say that plainly, because I have never forgotten it. She came across the black stone of the plateau on her hands and knees, in her filthy robe, with her golden hair dragging in the dust, like an animal that has forgotten how to walk. Her wrapped arms bent at wrong angles. Her bare feet left smears. And she was smiling: a wide, thin, terrible smile, too many teeth in it, stretching her mouth to the edge of her cheeks.

She was laughing, too. It came in little breathy gusts.

"Tamsin," she whispered again. "Tam-sin. I found you."

"Cordelia."

"Do you like it?" She crawled faster. The veins across her face glowed pale. "Do you like what I am? I'm strong now. I can do things. I can do such wonderful things." She giggled. "They took the arms. Did you know? They said they were no use. They said I'd never cast again. So they cut them off, in the dark, in the cold, and they put something else in."

I looked at the black wrappings. I understood.

Beneath the cloth there was nothing human. I saw it through the gaps, in the pale lantern-light: long, jointed, glistening shapes, wet and dark, like the legs of some enormous spider, folded tight against her torso. They twitched.

She had given herself to the Choir. She had offered her flesh as a vessel, and the Hollow had come into it, and it had eaten her from the inside.

"I'm so sorry," said Cordelia. "I'm so sorry about your hair."

"My hair."

"You cut it. It was so pretty." She tilted her head. "Do you remember? I used to brush it. In the dormitory. You'd close your eyes."

I did not answer.

She reached the edge of the outer circle. The white stones flared, a burst of blinding light, and she recoiled, hissing. But it did not hurt her. I saw that. The wards that had held the Hollow held her only for an instant, and then she laughed, and put out one wrapped limb, and the stones went dark.

She had eaten the ring.

"Tamsin!" shouted Declan. He was a hundred feet away, in the middle of the crescent, with three of the Choir on him and the great pale column of the Hollow rearing overhead. "Tamsin, don't—"

She stepped into the gap.

…

I should have been consumed, I think. That was what Declan had said. If anyone enters the gap, the Storm will consume them. I had been counting on it. The gap was a trap, a no-man's-land of raw lightning, between the outer ring and the inner. It was meant to kill anything that crossed.

She walked through it like a woman strolling across a drawing-room.

The bolts struck her. They struck her again and again. I saw them hit her shoulder, her head, her chest, and each one went in and was gone, drunk up, absorbed. The black veins on her cheek glowed brighter. The long legs under her wrappings flexed. She reached the inner circle. She stepped onto the basalt.

I could not move.

I had been sitting in the heart of the Storm for twenty minutes. My body was no longer entirely mine. The lightning was in my bones, my blood, my skin. The Sigil was breaking and re-forming, branch by branch, in a slow agonizing weave. If I stirred, if I broke the stillness, the whole fragile process would collapse. The Gold would fail. The Archmage would never be. I would burn to a cinder where I sat.

I saw her hand come up. Wrapped, black, glistening.

Choose, said the thin cold voice at the back of my head.

If you hold, she will take the Heart. If you move, you may lose the Storm.

Choose.

I let go.

…

It was not a decision. It was a shedding. I took a part of my attention, a thin bright slice of it, no more than a quarter of my mind, and I drew it out of the Storm like a thread from a spool. I left the rest behind. I left the burning, the lightning, the Gold tree cracking on my arm. I let a part of me remain in the center of the whirlwind, motionless, suffering.

And with the other part, I opened my eyes, and stood.

It was the strangest feeling. I was in two places. I was kneeling in a furnace of white fire, and I was standing on a stone disk in the cool moonlight with a sword in my hand. I could feel both. I could not, quite, tell which was real. But the body that stood was steady, and the hand that held Ashbrand did not tremble.

"There you are," said Cordelia.

She was three feet away. Her face was wet. Her black eyes were enormous. The glistening limbs under her wrappings had begun to unfold: one, two, four, six of them, uncurling from her ribs, tipped with something pale and hooked.

"Don't come closer," I said.

"Why not?"

"I don't want to hurt you."

"Oh, Tamsin." A little sob. "You always did say that. You always said it so beautifully." She crept a step nearer. "You hurt me anyway."

"I know."

"You broke my arms."

"I did."

"I screamed for a week. I couldn't sleep." Her eyes did not leave mine. "Alden held my hand. He cried. He's not strong, you know. He never was. He just looks it." She was shaking. "And you stood there and you laughed."

"I did not laugh."

"You smiled."

I said nothing.

"Why?" whispered Cordelia Fairchild.

The question came out of her like a sword drawn from a sheath. It was not a taunt. It was not the soft, sly venom of the drawing-room. It was a raw, naked, broken cry, from somewhere very deep, from a part of her that had been shut away for years. Her face crumpled. The tears ran down her cheeks and left bright tracks in the pale glowing lines. She raised her face to the moon.

"Why do you always have everything?"

…

I stood there, with the Storm roaring above my head, and I looked at her.

I did not know what to say. I had expected hatred. I had expected rage. I had expected a battle. I had not expected a question.

"I had nothing," sobbed Cordelia. "I had a father who beat me, and a mother who drank. I had a name that opened every door and a house like a prison. I was taught to smile. To curtsey. To say the right thing. I was taught that if I cried at the right time, they would love me." She wiped her face with a wrapped arm. "And you came. With your boots, and your brain. You walked into the school like you owned it. You didn't try! You didn't have to! You just were, and everyone looked at you!"

"That's not—"

"And Alden." Her voice cracked. "I loved him. I loved him since I was nine. I would have done anything. And he looked at you. He looked at you the way I wanted to be looked at. And you didn't even want him! You were just kind to him! You were kind to everyone!"

"Cordelia."

"I wanted to be you!" she screamed. "I wanted it so much!"

The black eyes flooded. She stood there, trembling, in the white light of the Storm, a small broken wretched creature with a smear of dirt across her chin. I thought of a girl of seventeen in a dormitory, frightened of thunder. I thought of the way she had held on to my hand.

I felt, for the first time in a very long while, something move in the hollow place in my chest.

It was not pity. It was not forgiveness. It was simply recognition, quiet and sad and clear. She was not a monster. She was not a villain. She was a person who had wanted what she could not have, and had been told by everyone around her that she could take it. She had taken it. She had taken everything, in the end, including herself. And she had not got what she wanted.

"I don't have anything," I said.

She stared at me.

"I want you to understand that." My voice was gentle. It surprised me. "I never had it. I had a cold bed in a rented room and a scholarship I was afraid to lose. I had a talent that I thought was a curse. I had a man who said he loved me." I breathed. "I did not have everything. I only had what I kept."

"What does that mean?"

"I didn't lose it." I lifted Ashbrand. "That's all. That's the only difference. Everyone loses it. Everyone. You and I and Alden. Every single person in the world. We're born, and we start losing, and it's only a question of how much we hold on to. I held on." I looked at her. "I was lucky. I was stubborn. I was loved, once, by a man with a screwdriver. I don't know why that was enough. But it was."

"I don't understand."

"No," I said. "I know."

…

She screamed.

The sound ripped out of her like the cry of something being torn in half. The limbs under her wrappings burst free in a spray of black cloth. Eight of them, long and jointed, tipped with pale hooks, arching over her head like the legs of a spider. Her face stretched. The mouth went wide, wider, a hinged gape of teeth. The golden hair floated up as though in water. From her chest, from her ribs, from the places where the arms had been, there poured a thick dark vapor, and the vapor took the shape of a face.

The Hollow had her.

It came at me with a rush, a wild, shrieking, boneless thing, all hooks and teeth and tearing cold. I met it with the sword. Ashbrand took the first leg, and the Cinder ran up it, and the limb fell apart in a cascade of black ash. I took a second. A third. The thing recoiled, shrieking, and came again, from above, from behind, from every side. A hook raked my shoulder. A tail of vapor wrapped round my leg and I felt the flesh go numb.

I was fighting with a quarter of myself.

I felt the rest of me, burning in the Storm, begin to fray. The Gold tree was cracking faster. The lightning was in my heart. In the distance I heard Declan's voice, raised in a cry, and the thunder of the Hollow, and a gun, and Josie's thin shriek.

Quickly, said the thin cold voice. You have a minute.

I stepped inside the thing's reach. I looked up into the vast, gaping mouth. And behind it, deep within the cloud, I saw her: a small pale shape, curled up like a child, with her arms across her face and her golden hair floating.

I could not see her expression.

I raised Ashbrand in both hands. The red tracery down the blade flared white. I put every scrap of the Cinder I had into the stroke, the Gold, the Heart, the Storm, all of it, and I brought the sword down in a single clean arc through the center of the Hollow.

The sound was a bell.

The thing split. It opened from crown to heel like a ripe fruit, and the two halves fell away, one to either side, and dissolved in a rush of pale smoke. The smoke drifted. It rose. It carried, for a moment, in its heart, a small, bright, glimmering form.

Cordelia hung in the air before me, whole, naked, white. Her arms, her real arms, were folded across her chest. Her golden hair streamed about her. Her eyes, wide open, were brown.

She looked at me.

She did not speak. She did not smile. I thought for a moment that she was going to say something, and I held my breath. But she merely looked, with an expression so simple and so strange that I did not recognize it for a long time afterward, until years later, in a different room, I saw it on the face of a child waking from a dream.

It was surprise.

Then the smoke closed round her, and she was gone.

…

I stood on the basalt disk with the sword in my hand.

I felt nothing.

I want to be exact. I looked inward, as one does, for the pleasure, the grim triumph, the sweet cold flood of revenge. I had been promised it. I had thought it would come. I had dreamed of this for two lives, and now the moment had arrived, and I stood in the moonlight with a dead girl's ashes on my sleeve, and there was nothing. There was a quiet. There was a faint, sad, distant ache, like the memory of a song.

It is over, I thought.

It is simply over.

Behind me, in the Storm, the other part of me screamed.

I turned. I had forgotten. The thin thread of attention that held me to the body in the lightning had stretched and stretched and was about to snap. I felt the Gold tree on my arm, bright and cracking. I felt my heart miss a beat.

I let go of the sword.

It rang on the stone. I sank to my knees on the disk, and the two halves of me rushed together, with a shock like a collision, and for a moment the whole world was white.

I heard Declan. I heard him shouting my name. I heard Hawk's gun, and Josie, and the dry rattle of the Choir's retreat. I heard Nimbus, somewhere, yowling in triumph.

And above all of it, vast and slow and terrible, I heard the sky open.