The wind above the capital at night had a particular taste. Cold iron and chimney smoke, and underneath it, very faintly, rain that hadn't decided to fall yet.
Maze flew through it in her true shape.
Gold at the edges. Ember at the heart. Her wings opened wide enough to swallow the lamplit rooftops below, then folded close as she banked east, toward the dark ridge of hills where the city's light gave up.
Blaze sat on her back.
Sideways, one ankle crossed over the other, as though the sky were a chaise arranged for her convenience. Her hair streamed behind her like spilled ink. The red flower sat in it, untouched by wind. One hand rested lightly on the feathers at Maze's neck.
She wasn't looking at anything below.
She was looking at the moon.
Full, or near enough. Pale and unhurried, hanging low over the hills like something that had been hung there on purpose. The light fell across her face and found nothing in it to warm. Her eyes were cold and clear and steady, and she watched the moon the way other people watched a fire. Not enjoying it, exactly. Not needing it. Just letting it be there.
She does this every time, Maze thought.
Years. Rooftops, deserts, a battlefield once, a burning clan hall. Whenever the sky was clear and the moon was up, her master's eyes found it and stayed.
Maze had never asked why.
Maybe she likes it.
Maybe it's just a habit, the way some people hum.
Or maybe it's the one thing that doesn't need anything from her.
She didn't ask that either.
What she knew was this: when Blaze watched the moon, she was in a good mood. Quiet. Almost gentle, in the way a blade lying in a sheath is gentle.
And that was the trouble.
Years beside her, and Maze had learned that her master's temper came in weathers. Anger was a storm. You could see it coming and brace. Boredom was a long grey winter. Both were survivable.
Good moods were the other thing. Clear skies. Warm, still air.
Right before the earth opened.
"You're flying like you're worried," Blaze said, without looking down.
Maze nearly missed a wingbeat.
"No, Master."
"You've dropped four feet in the last mile."
"The wind—"
"There is no wind. I'm sitting on it."
Maze corrected her altitude.
Blaze's eyes stayed on the moon.
"It's a fine night," she said. Mildly. To no one. "It would be a shame to waste it."
Maze said nothing at all.
The hills rose out of the dark like something sleeping.
Maze angled toward the largest. From above it looked like nothing. A bare slope, a few stunted trees, the rough shoulder of the land. But as she descended the ground parted, quietly, the way an eyelid opens, and a wide stair of black stone appeared beneath her, lit on both sides by braziers burning without smoke.
She landed.
Her wings folded. Gold bled to ember bled to skin, and a sixteen-year-old girl in plain dress stood in the cold firelight, one pace behind the woman who had stepped lightly off her back.
Blaze looked up once more.
The moon hung over the hilltop, exactly where she'd left it.
She took a slow breath of the night air. Then she turned and started down the stairs, and the look on her face closed like a door.
Soldiers lined the stair.
Dozens of them, kneeling in perfect rows, foreheads to stone, not one of them breathing loud enough to be heard. The Flame Army's colors were dark red and charcoal, and tonight they looked almost black.
Nobody greeted her.
Nobody wanted to be the one who spoke first.
The Commander waited at the foot of the stairs.
He rose when she reached him, bowed, and fell into step beside them without a word. The mark above his right eyebrow glowed faintly, the way an ember glows when someone has just stopped blowing on it.
"Status," Blaze said.
"He hasn't slept, Your Highness. Hasn't eaten. Hasn't spoken since the morning."
"Hasn't he."
"No."
"How rude."
The Commander said nothing to this. It was, Maze judged, the wisest possible reply.
They descended.
The corridors were low and carved from the hill itself, ribbed with old fire-stained beams. The air grew warmer the deeper they went, then colder, then neither. Somewhere around the third turn Blaze lifted her eyes to the stone ceiling, as if she could see straight through it to the sky.
Maze noticed.
She always noticed.
Even underground, she thought. She knows where it is.
A door opened ahead without anyone touching it.
The chamber was round.
A single lamp hung from the ceiling. Beneath it, a man sat in an iron chair with his wrists bound to the arms and his ankles bound to the legs, and a chain across his chest for the sake of thoroughness. His head was bowed. A once-fine shirt hung from him in strips.
Yven.
He lifted his face when the door opened.
Maze saw the exact moment he recognized who stood in the doorway. It went through him like a bell through water. His jaw tightened. His throat moved. He looked, very briefly, like a man trying to remember how breathing worked.
Then he looked away.
A chair appeared.
Gold. High-backed. It settled onto the stone as though it had always been there, and Blaze sat in it and arranged her sleeves. She didn't reach for anything to do with her hands. She simply rested them, one over the other, and looked at him.
She looked at him for a long, comfortable moment.
"Yven," she said.
He said nothing.
"I've been very patient."
Nothing.
"I flew all the way out here. In the dark. Over the whole city. I left my father at the palace, which, you should know, is the sort of sacrifice I don't make casually."
His eyes stayed on the floor.
"Speak."
The room was very quiet.
Maze stood three paces behind her master and counted the lamp's flicker.
Yven raised his head.
His face was grey. His lips were cracked. But there was something steady behind his eyes, the dull obstinate steadiness of a man who had decided what he would and would not do and had made peace with the price.
"No," he said.
His voice was a rasp. It didn't shake.
"Do what you want. I'll say nothing."
Blaze tilted her head.
"Nothing."
"Nothing."
"Not a name. Not a route. Not even to correct me when I get a detail wrong."
"Nothing."
She considered this.
Maze watched her face.
It didn't harden. It didn't darken. If anything it brightened, the way a face brightens when it's been handed an unexpectedly generous gift.
She's pleased, Maze thought. He's refused her and she's pleased.
"Good," Blaze said softly.
Yven blinked.
"I did hope you'd be difficult." She leaned back in the gold chair, and her gaze drifted, briefly, toward the ceiling. Toward the moon somewhere above all that stone. "It's been such a dull season. Everyone folds the moment I walk in. It's very disheartening."
His mouth opened. Closed.
Blaze turned her head, not toward him, but toward the man standing in the corner of the chamber.
A commander. One of the Flame Army's. Broad, silent, hands clasped behind his back like a mourner at a funeral he had been looking forward to. He stepped out of the shadow without being told.
"Your Highness."
"Tear off his finger."
She said it the way someone orders tea.
The commander bowed.
He moved toward the chair.
And Maze, standing rigid behind her master with both hands pressed so tight to her sides that her nails dug into her palms, felt something cold slide down the full length of her spine.
I've watched wars. I've watched whole clans burn. I've sat beside her through things I've never put into words.
And I'm still not ready for this.
The commander's boots scraped the stone. Yven's breath caught, once, sharp, and stopped.
It's going to be cruel, Maze thought.
It's going to be bloody.
And she's still looking at the ceiling.
Like she's waiting for the moon to come down and watch.
The commander took Yven's left hand from the arm of the chair the way a man takes a coin from a table.
He didn't hurry.
He pressed the hand flat against the iron. Spread the fingers with his thumb. Chose the smallest one, and wrapped his own fist around it.
Yven's eyes went to Blaze.
Not pleading. Nothing so useful as pleading. They simply found her and stayed, hard and bright and very, very frightened, a man holding a door shut against the whole weight of a flood.
His lips pressed together until the color left them.
The commander twisted.
The sound came first. A wet, dry, wrong sound, like a green branch being wrung, and then a flat pop that Maze felt in her own teeth. Skin stretched, held, tore. Tendon stood out white and straining through the split before it too gave way with a sound like a cord snapping under a boot.
The finger came off.
It dropped to the stone and rolled once, small and pale and very ordinary, and lay against the leg of the chair with its nail still neatly trimmed.
Blood came up out of the stump in a slow, thick pulse.
Yven made no sound.
His whole body shook. The chain across his chest rattled against the iron. Sweat slid from his hairline into his eyes and he didn't blink it away. But his mouth stayed shut, and his jaw ground against itself, and the cords of his neck stood out like rope.
He isn't going to speak, Maze thought. Not a word.
His face said everything.
Every piece of it. The terror. The pain. The raw animal refusal of a man whose body was begging him to scream and who was holding that scream down with the last fraction of his will. It was written across his eyes and the trembling of his lip and the grey slackness spreading under his skin, so plainly that there was nothing left for words to add.
Blaze watched him with her chin resting on her hand.
"Continue." she said.
The commander bowed.
He took the next finger.
Maze had watched wars.
She had watched battlefields after the fighting, the long grey hours of crows and flies. She had watched a hall full of kin go up in a single roar of white fire, and had listened to the sound it made.
She had never watched this.
War was loud, and fast, and over. This was slow and attentive and quiet. It was work.
The second finger came away in a spray of dark blood that spattered across the commander's wrist. The third left a ragged, glistening gap where the knuckle had been, the bone tip showing like a chipped white tooth. The fourth broke before it tore, and he had to take it twice, and Yven's heels hammered once against the iron legs of the chair before he stilled himself again.
Four.
The sound of them hitting the stone was the worst part. A small, soft, almost polite tap, each one, as though they were being set down for later.
Blood ran down the arm of the chair in thin lines and pooled in the groove where the iron met the floor. It was bright. Brighter than she'd have thought. In the lamplight it looked like something spilled from a jar of paint.
The commander took the thumb last.
Thumbs were stubborn. He braced his knee against the chair, set both hands, and leaned. The joint resisted. Resisted. Then gave all at once with a crack like a branch in a frost, and the thumb ripped free with a long ribbon of sinew trailing behind it, and the whole hand was a ruin of red meat and bare bone.
Yven's head dropped forward.
For a moment Maze thought he was gone.
Then she felt it, a thin bright thread of her master's power, threaded into his chest like a needle, keeping the darkness from taking him. He couldn't faint. He couldn't die. He could only sit there, wide awake, and feel every bit of it.
She's holding him up, Maze thought, and her stomach turned over.
The commander straightened.
He held the last piece of the hand in his fingers, the thumb, with the blood running down his wrist to the elbow, and looked at Blaze for orders.
His face was perfectly empty.
"Continue," Blaze said.
The commander moved to the feet.
Someone had already removed Yven's boots. His bare feet sat against the cold stone, thin and pale and shaking, the toes curling against the floor in a last useless instinct.
The commander knelt.
He took the right foot in his hands the way a man takes a bird. He looked at the big toe for a moment. Then he slid something thin and flat under the nail, and pried.
The nail came up with a tearing, peeling sound, slow and wet. Yven's whole leg locked. His breath went in with a high thin whistle, and the whistle broke, and a sound came out of his chest that wasn't a scream yet, but was the thing that came right before.
It came off in one piece. Curved. Edged in red. The pink bed beneath it shining raw and wet in the lamplight.
He took the second.
The third.
Maze's mouth had filled with a sour, rising wetness. She swallowed. Swallowed again. The room had tilted a little at the edges, and the lamp's flicker had acquired a faint sickly halo, and somewhere under her ribs a cold fist was slowly closing.
Don't, she thought. Don't. Not in front of her.
She locked her knees. She fixed her eyes on the back of her master's head, on the dark spill of her hair and the single red flower, and held there as if it were a rope.
The commander finished the right foot and started on the left.
Yven's face was streaming. Sweat, tears, and something worse, a thin bright thread of blood where he'd bitten clean through his own lip. He wasn't looking at the commander anymore. He was looking at the ceiling, at the black stone above the lamp, at nothing.
Blaze watched him.
Her expression hadn't changed once. Not at the first finger. Not at the toes. She might have been sitting in a theater, waiting for a particular scene she had been told was coming.
Then, very slightly, her head turned toward the ceiling.
Toward the moon somewhere above all that stone.
She's thinking about the sky, Maze realized. While this is happening.
She's thinking about the sky.
The last toenail came away.
The commander sat back on his heels and wiped his hands on his thighs. He didn't ask for orders this time. He only looked up.
Blaze brought her eyes down from the ceiling.
She looked at Yven.
Yven was looking at her.
His mouth moved. No sound came out of it, only breath and a thin red froth, but the shape of the word was there. No. Or perhaps please. It was impossible to say. They looked the same on his lips.
"You've been very brave," Blaze said.
His eyes closed.
"It's a pity it's so tedious." She rose from the gold chair. The chair vanished the instant she stood. "Commander."
"Your Highness."
"The limbs."
The commander went completely still.
It lasted perhaps a second. The small, human stillness of a man who had been told to do a thing he'd known might come, and who hadn't, until the moment it was said aloud, entirely believed it would.
"All four?" he asked.
"One at a time," Blaze said. "I'd like to see how he takes it."
She walked past him.
Past the chair. Past the lamp. She came to a stop beside the door, with her back to the room and her face turned toward the corridor, as though she'd grown bored of the whole thing and wished only to listen.
"Begin with the arm," she said.
The commander moved.
Maze couldn't look.
She did look. It was the only way to bear it. She made herself watch the commander's big hands close around the bound wrist, saw him brace one boot against the chair, saw the muscles in his forearm gather like rope.
He pulled.
The first thing that gave was the shoulder.
It didn't tear so much as unseat, with a sound like a wet stick being forced from a socket, and Yven's body arched against the chains as if someone had put lightning through it. The tendons stood out across his neck. His eyes flew wide open and went on opening. And then the sound came.
It started low. A thin, cracked, rasping noise, torn out of him in strips. It climbed. It broke. It climbed again, and became a single raw ragged ribbon of pure sound, the sound a man made when every careful wall he'd built inside himself finally came down at once.
Yven screamed.
It filled the chamber. It beat against the round stone walls and came back doubled. It went on, and on, past the point where any breath could have fed it, a jagged animal wail rising and cracking and rising again.
Beneath it came the other sounds. The slow, grinding, tearing give of the muscle. The wet crunch as the joint finally parted. The heavy, final slap of what had been an arm landing on the stone.
Blood fanned across the floor in a wide dark arc.
Maze's knees went.
She caught herself against the wall, one hand flat on the cold rough stone, and bent forward, and her whole body clenched around a retch that did not quite come. She stayed there with her forehead nearly touching her wrist, breathing in short sharp pulls through her nose.
Master.
Master, how can you stand there.
Blaze hadn't turned around.
She stood at the door with her hands loosely folded, head tilted slightly, as though listening to a piece of music that was proceeding more or less as she'd expected.
Yven's scream ran out of air.
It cut off in a thin bubbling gasp.
Then, from somewhere deep in his ruined chest, he found more.
The commander took the second arm.
Then the legs.
Maze did not count. She'd stopped counting somewhere around the first knee, when the sound of the joint parting had come up through the stone floor into the soles of her feet and she had understood that her body was going to remember it whether she wanted it to or not.
By the end the iron chair held only a trunk.
Wrists, ankles, shoulders. The cuffs still hung from the arms and legs of the chair, with nothing left in them to hold. Blood ran down the iron in sheets and gathered in the shallow groove around its feet, and from there crept across the floor in slow dark fingers, feeling for the drain.
Yven's chest still rose and fell.
His head hung forward on its neck. His mouth was open. A thin line of pink spit ran down his chin.
He had screamed through the first arm and the second and the first leg. After that the screaming had worn thin and cracked and finally just stopped, as though something inside him had run out of voice. Since then he had made only a low, wet, rasping noise with every breath.
He hadn't said a word.
Not one.
A name, Maze thought, dully. A route. Anything. Anything at all would have ended it.
He just keeps looking at her.
Blaze stood at the door with her hands folded and her head tilted. She turned around.
She regarded what was left of him for a long moment.
"Ah," she said. "What a stubborn mule."
The commander straightened. Blood had soaked him to the elbows. It was drying on his sleeves in stiff black patches.
"Your Highness?"
"He's making a fool of the effort." Blaze lifted one idle hand and made a small cutting motion, the kind one makes to dismiss a servant. "Take his head off."
The room was silent.
Then Yven moved.
Not a twitch. A lurch, the whole ruined trunk heaving against the chains, his head snapping up with eyes gone huge and white-rimmed. A sound tore out of him, nothing like his earlier screams, high and thin and shapeless, the noise of something that has just understood it is going to die.
"No—no—wait—"
The commander had drawn a long, flat blade. It was a plain thing, unornamented, with an edge that caught the lamp. He stepped to the side of the chair and set his feet.
"Wait!" Yven's voice cracked down the middle. "I'll talk! I'll talk! I'll— ah—" A spasm took him and bent his whole body against the cuffs. "I'll tell you— everything— please—"
The commander paused with the blade lifted.
His face had changed.
Maze saw it from where she stood against the wall. The flat, empty professional calm had slid off him like a mask, and what was underneath was plain, cold contempt. His lip curled. His eyes narrowed with something close to disgust.
Now, his face said. After all that.
Now you're afraid.
"Please—" Yven choked on it, and blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth. "I'll say it— the names— all of it— just don't— don't—"
Maze's stomach turned over.
She had held it through the fingers. Through the toenails. Through the shoulders and the knees and the long wet grinding give of the last bone. She'd held it by staring at the back of her master's head until the room swam.
But this was too much.
The way he said please. The way a man who had endured everything else folded in an instant at the sight of one clean line of steel.
A wave of heat and sickness climbed up through her chest, fast, and she knew with perfect clarity that she was about to lose control.
She bolted.
She hit the door with her shoulder and was through it, stumbling into the corridor, one hand slapped against the rough stone wall for balance. She made it eleven steps before her legs folded and she dropped to her knees beside a drain in the floor and was violently, helplessly sick.
In the round chamber, Blaze watched Maze go.
She didn't comment.
She turned back to the chair.
"Yven," she said.
He stared at her. Tears had cut pale tracks through the blood and sweat on his face. His chest was heaving. His eyes burned with a ghastly, desperate, hopeful light.
"I'll tell you everything," he whispered. "I swear it. Everything. The plan— the timeline— I know it all— I'll—"
"It's a pity," Blaze said.
He stopped.
She walked toward him with her hands folded in front of her, unhurried, and halted a pace from the chair. She looked down at him, and her eyes were as cold and still as the moon itself.
"I don't need it."
His mouth worked. No sound came out.
"Let me tell you something," Blaze said. Gently. Almost kindly, the way one explains a simple fact to a child. "I know every detail of your plan."
He stared up at her.
"Your conspiracy. Every name. Every route. Every date. Every coin that moved. Every person on the list, and the order they were meant to fall." She tilted her head. "I've known since the first day. Before you even sat down."
"That— that's not—"
"It is. You were not clever, Yven. You were close. That's different."
His lips shook.
"So why—" His voice cracked. "Why would you— if you already—"
"Because I've had no thrill in years."
She said it simply.
It was not cruelty, exactly. It was too honest for that. It was the plain tired admission of someone who had stood at the top of a very high tower for a very long time and had finally, quietly, gotten bored of the view.
"I needed something to play with," she said. "You were convenient."
Yven's face went slack.
Whatever he might have said died somewhere behind his teeth. The hope drained out of his eyes all at once, and what replaced it was something very quiet and very old and very afraid.
Blaze looked at him for a moment longer.
Then she lifted two fingers from her folded hands, and made a small, neat motion in the air.
She did not look at the commander.
She did not need to.
The blade moved.
It made a very light sound. Hardly any sound at all. A single clean hiss through the thick air, and then a soft heavy thud as something fell against the stone and rolled.
The head came to rest facing the wall.
The trunk in the chair gave one last small shudder. Blood rose from the neck in a dark, steady, almost gentle surge, and ran down the front of what was left of his shirt.
The lamp swayed.
The room was very still.
Blaze studied the thing in front of her with a faint, distant frown, as though a perfectly good evening had been spoiled by a smell.
"Clean it up," she said. "It reeks."
The commander lowered his blade.
"Yes, Your Highness."
She turned and walked out.
The corridor was cold.
A narrow slit near the ceiling let in a thin blade of moonlight. It lay across the stones like a spilled ribbon, pale and silver and clean.
Maze lay in it.
She'd dragged herself away from the drain. She had pulled her knees up, and was curled on her side on the bare floor with one arm thrown across her face, hand pressed over her eyes. Her breath came in short shallow pulls. A sheen of cold sweat clung to her forehead and the nape of her neck.
She didn't hear the footsteps until they stopped.
Blaze stood over her.
She had folded her hands in front of her again. Her gaze rested on the girl on the floor, not unkindly, not kindly either. The moonlight fell across half her face and left the other half in shadow.
"You've watched cities burn. You've seen things I've never asked you to describe." Her voice was calm, level, faintly puzzled. "And still."
She tilted her head.
"How are you still not used to this?"