I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

The last thing he fully hears before the world falls to chaos is the shiver of whisper the golden man (the invisible man) blows into his ear.

Of course Abel does not have time to explain the lie, or the plan he has conjured with the speed that had kept him fed and whole on Denocte’s tsunami-ravaged streets. He wonders if the stranger will understand that there is no catching him, not in the commotion of the fire with the ability to vanish his only with a thought. It was only ever Abel in danger.

And now he is caught.

The bay’s only recourse is to stick with the plan, as the flames and throw shadows and faces into stark relief. Before he can scramble to his feet a second mare arrives, and he is surprised she doesn’t throw up sparks with the speed of her hooves striking stone. He has no intention of answering her, and though his ears are pinned, his mouth is a drawn line and his eyes are dark and glassy with nerves. Abel has possessed a primal fear of fire ever since the pass burned, though the scent of Denocte’s ever-burning bonfires is still a strange comfort.

His chest and face are burning, but whether due to the mare or the fire beyond her he couldn’t say. Shut up, the first mare barks, but Abel has said nothing more.

Still he manages at last to his feet, shoulders hunched and neck arched like an alley dog waiting for the kick. Beyond them he  sees others begin flocking to the building, shadows of legs and bodies breaking the scattered light through smoke. Something like a meteor slashes through the dark sky. The room is filling quickly and the taste of ash is thick on his tongue; Abel coughs.

He wonders if his partner is out beyond the city walls now, breathing clean winter air tasting of pine. He wonders how Raum might choose to kill him, if Isra does not first.

Abel shivers despite the mad heat at the thought of the unicorn queen. She could place him at once; he was there in the cave when she woke. Sometimes, when he dreams, he is driven awake with the feeling of a thousand hornets stinging at his skin. Such paltry smoke as this could never smother them.

The boy wonders then if either of them can win, or if they can only drive the rest to their deaths.

It is not the time for such thoughts. He shakes his head like a man coming out of a drug haze, smoke a physical thing in his nostrils and his eyes still stinging with tears. One of his ears is trained on the horned mare, listening to her plan for him as his skin itches with a heat not even the Solterran sun could match.

He jumps at the crack of a beam, the rush of sparks like fireflies or hornets. There is a pit in his stomach and acid in his throat and he walks stiffly ahead of the mare, making no attempt to evade her. Abel is only concerned with one escape right now. There is still chaos. There is still time.

Somewhere in the night a dragon screams. Beneath that, like a heartbeat, is the sound of the drums, and Abel searches for the light of other fires too large to be the Night Market’s customary celebrating. Between his ribs his own heartbeat is shuddering, lungs heaving in air that burns cold but clean. It is a relief, like dunking his head in a barrel of frigid water. It helps him think.

Abel has memorized every last dog-legged dirt street part of the city. He knows the map of it like he knew his mother’s markings, and he recognizes the alley the mare shoves him toward.

Though he makes a faint show of resisting, as soon as he allows himself to be pushed into the alley Abel darts forward like a ship-rat, dark and quick. Here his small stature of all angles is a boon, and the boy doesn’t glance back as he takes a hard turn through a doorway of black cloth - the back entry to one of the Crow’s final haunts before Raum killed the last of them.

The dim bar is empty, its patrons spilled out into the chaotic night to see why the drums beat with such urgency. Tables are scattered and littered with half-empty mugs of ale. Beyond the front door Abel can see a crowd beginning to gather - and it is that he heads for, and a last grab at freedom.

I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

Abel’s escape does not last long.

He hadn’t really expected it to - he wasn’t a boy who had that kind of luck - but if there had been no part of him that thought I can do this than he never would have tried at all. For a few moments sweet as air after being in a cave (a cave of stalactites, a cave of hornets-from-bones) all the noise around him faded to background chaos and his heart soared above the smoke and he could see the route he would take out beyond the city gates and free, free, free.

The noise is thunderous as the paint mare bursts into the bar after him; the air is full of the tang of smoke and liquor. Her hooves catch him across the side and he whirls like a cat, sucking in a tight, shocked breath at the burn of the blow; her blue eyes seem to glow like sapphires and he falls back a step, his eyes darting like a coyote’s between her and the doorway. Abel pays no more attention to her words than he would at the bite of a horsefly, only turning back his ears and snapping his tail. All he can think is There is still a chance -

And then the other mare looms up out of the smoke like a devil, big and made bigger by the strange burning light of the night, and Abel knows that he is beaten. The snap of the wood is loud as a shot in the dim tight space of the bar, and the boy ducks his head just below her swing and reaches up with his telekinesis like a hand to try and slow it. Her tail he can do nothing for; it falls across his haunches like the blow of a whip, but Abel has suffered worse than that. What is one more bar across his shoulders, his legs?

He does not cry Stop, does not say Please. The bay only backs up into the corner he has been pressed too, shoulders hunched like a cornered dog, his dark eyes staring somewhere between them both. No more does he look toward the door for escape; there is chaos around them yet but Abel can only hear Toulouse’s whisper just inside the shell of his ear.

I’ll be sure to send Raum your regards.

He thinks: I will be reported as a traitor twice-over and I will be killed for it.

There is no more Abel can do to fight - he is small, and unarmed, and possesses no magic or weapon of his own. Only his wits, and his weary ragged stubbornness, and neither of those were more than average to begin with.

When he closes his eyes and slumps against the rough wood of the wall it is with relief and not exhaustion.

I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

He does not meet their eyes, does not look up, even when he can feel the burn of the paint’s gaze on him, the violent promise in her stare. He finds, with surprise, that all his fear is gone; maybe he is too weary for it, or maybe he has used it all up, these last few weeks, these last long months. It would be good, if terror were a thing you could run out of, if even dread (round and heavy in your belly like a cannon ball) flaked away with time and familiarity.

Then, of course, there is the knowledge that he deserves all they heap on him.

It isn’t until the light in the bar changes that he turns his dark eyes up. Then the air feels too dry on his tongue, all the moisture burned out of it, as the glass turns to iron and becomes a cage. He knows what it means, he knows who is coming -

he presses further into the wood, but when the queen speaks he looks her in the eye. Just for a second, long enough for those words to fall around him like two dropped coins, or like a sentence.

Raum had convinced him that she was the monster, the unnatural thing, both savior and source of Denocte’s woes. See what becomes of a fairy-tale? he had said. To Abel, magic was a frightening thing, rare and strange; he had been a child at the fall of the last regime and well remembered the stories of the gypsy-king and his regent’s dragon. When word had passed up from the inner city that the new queen had found a dragon of her own, it was perhaps the final stone to tumble from Abel’s altar.

But when he looks at Isra all he sees is a unicorn. And when she turns away from him, he is relieved, but he is something else too.

He hopes it is fear. If it isn’t, this dark and barbed emotion crouching within him, then he knows it is something worse.

There is nothing now to do but wait.