She watched him attempt to school his features into a cold mask. It might have been humorous, had the Emperor’s words not still been whispering in her thoughts.

Maybe he was watching them even now.

Jessamyn glared at her muddled reflection in the scissors’ blades.

“I understand,” Remy told her, his voice carefully even.

“You understand nothing.” Jessamyn stepped back to check her work. “And if you want to survive, you will do everything I tell you. You will study, you will practice, you will train. You will eat what I eat. You will sleep when I sleep.”

Remy fell silent, watching her as she tidied the room and swept the hair from the floor.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked quietly.

Jessamyn did not look at him. When she had first been assigned to Varos, she had been a mere child. She had slept on a hard pallet on the floor of his bedroom. Many a night, she had lain awake, listening to him breathe and fighting sleep, for she knew she would wake with Varos’s hands around her throat and would have to fight him or fail yet another lesson. At first, she had been afraid of such tests.

Later, she had come to crave them.

Remy would be the same. And someday, Eliana Ferracora would see that light in his eyes and know all was lost. There was no reason to fight. There was only the Empire, and the glorious purpose of serving His Majesty the Emperor of the Undying.

Jessamyn found her old pallet under the bed and threw it to the floor. It was brown with dust; the edges were frayed and patched.

Then she turned and found Remy standing very near her, a placid expression on his face.

One glance at the mirror showed her the scissors clutched behind his back.

Fool boy.

And she was even more the fool for letting memories distract her.

With a snarl, Jessamyn snapped her hand to Remy’s throat, jabbing him in his windpipe. He dropped the scissors and staggered back, gasping for air.

She followed him, smacked her palm hard against his ear, punched him just below his chest. He cried out with pain, fell to his knees. She had seen him favor his left side; he had a bruised rib, she suspected.

In an instant, she had wrenched back his head, one hand in his hair. The other held one of the knives from her belt. She pressed the blade to his throat and leaned so close that her lips brushed his cheek.

“Why am I doing this?” she asked, repeating his question. “Because He has chosen me to guard His works.”

She yanked him to his feet, kicked his thigh. He fell once more, onto the pallet she had laid out for him.

Jessamyn followed him. “He has chosen me to receive His glory,” she continued. It was the induction oath of Invictus, one she should have uttered before the Five with Varos standing proudly behind her.

Remy scrambled up at her approach, tried to run. She grabbed the stool and threw it past him at the door. It smashed against the wall and splintered; Remy ducked to avoid the flying wood.

“I am the blade that cuts at night,” Jessamyn said, following him. “I am the guardian of His story.”

She grabbed Remy by his shoulders, forced him back toward the mirror. Standing behind him, her hands hard on his arms, she made him stare at his wide-eyed, tear-streaked reflection. Across his throat, a thin line of blood.

“Someday, you will be too,” she said to him. “So the Emperor commands. It’s been done, Remy. The order has been given.”

Then Jessamyn turned him around, caught him by his chin so their gazes locked. His mouth trembled; his eyes glistened with tears.

“I will help you survive it,” she told him, and at least this much was true. “But try to hurt me again, and I’ll make you wish you were back in that cell, rotting away in the dark. Do you understand?”

After a moment, Remy nodded. Tears spilled down his cheeks, and Jessamyn fought the urge to scold him for it. This was no ordinary student. She would have to tread carefully.

“Good,” she said instead, and nodded toward the washbasin. “That was our first lesson. Now clean yourself up.”

15

   Eliana

“Bring me two hundred musicians. The ones we just disposed of were entirely inadequate, and you knew that when you presented them to me. Bring me composers who write their helpless mortality into every melody, singers with storms of grief in their lungs. Bring me people who wish they could stop listening to the music boiling in their blood but cannot, so they tear it from their bodies the only way they know how—through air and strings and drums and pen.”

—Letter from His Holy Majesty, the Emperor of the Undying, to Admiral Ravikant, dated May 11, Year 1018 of the Third Age

The words drifted through Eliana’s mind on a faint breeze: Will you hurt me to get her back?

She stirred from a deep sleep and opened her eyes to a thick white fog. Her tongue was dry and fat, her limbs heavy. She wanted to walk, but she could not stand.

So she crawled.

• • •

She reached a courtyard, then a clean hallway padded with a thick blue carpet. Sunlight streamed through arched windows bordered with colored glass, and Eliana found the strength to rise. At the end of the hallway stood a door, and through it, Simon’s office.

Her palms tingled at the sight of it.

Inside, she found him beside the open windows, dozing on a chaise with an open book on his chest. A breeze ruffled the pages.

Eliana moved the book aside with a grin, climbed atop him, reached for his face—and then went very still, her hands hovering over his skin.

He had opened his eyes and now gazed up at her with a sleepy smile. “What a sight to awaken to,” he said softly.

She scrambled away and fled the room, her heart pounding. She clenched her hands into fists, ordered her buzzing palms to quiet. Around her hands, the chains of her castings shivered and sparked.

Not here. She formed the thought and pushed it down her arms. Not ever again.

• • •

Eliana opened her eyes.

Will you hurt me to get her back?

“I don’t know who you are!” she cried. “Who are you?”

No one answered.

She stood at the edge of a strange leafless forest. She did not like the look of it, but there was no choice but to enter.

Moving through the trees, she realized too late that they weren’t trees at all. They were bodies in all colors and sizes, naked and staring. Their eyes were black and lidless.

Angels, waiting for her to save them.

The empirium had punished them, had stripped magic from the world.