Unchained, Part 1

The whispers had stopped when he came down off the throne. Marissa had spent the quiet since then on her back in the cold, listening to Laura breathe.

She could hear it from the rim: three breaths going in together and coming out together, ragged at the top. Nergal stood over her with his right hand shut in the air, and Laura’s three faces were lifted to him. Above the ash hung the seven of the Fourteen that Anna hadn’t sent down. They had stopped circling when he left the throne. They hung high and loose over the Ring with their hair moving in the wind that wasn’t there. Under everything, so low she had almost stopped hearing it, ran their howl.

Anna lay where his hand had thrown her, on her side past the throne with one arm caught under her and her hair across her face. Marissa kept looking at her. Beside her, Chloe turned her head. The circlet had gone dark in her curls and slipped down over one ear. Her lips were pale with the cold and her eyes were wet, and they were perfectly steady. She looked up at the seven. Then she looked at Marissa.

“Again.”

Marissa’s eyes went to the throne before she could stop them. They had all watched what he did to Emily for pointing a transformation at him. Chloe’s eyes went up again, to the seven, and stayed there. “Not him. Them.”

Katherine lay on Chloe’s far side with her eyes shut, still gray to the lips, nothing left in her to hold with. Anna was down. Nobody up here could say what Anna had said, unless it was the one of them with Anna’s blood.

Marissa turned her head down the rim as far as the cold would let her. Far along it, near where Emily lay, Emi was on her side with all six arms folded under her and her face toward Emily. Marissa found her and held her in her eyes, and let her voice go.

“Emi. It’s Marissa. Don’t look over, just listen.” It came out thinner than she wanted. The drain had taken some of that, too. “Anna’s down. You’re the only one up here with her blood in you. The seven he’s got left—can you do what you did in the Garden? Only enough that they’ll… that they’ll listen. Please.”

Emi kept her face toward Emily. One of her lower hands came out from under her, slowly, against the weight, and opened on the ash, palm up.

Chloe hadn’t waited to be asked. She let her head go back flat. She lay as the Fourteen had put her down, on her back with her chest to the sky, and she had nothing left now but to be looked at. The lowest of the seven drifted over the line with her face turned down. Her eyes came onto Chloe’s cleavage, and stopped there, and stayed. Chloe held still and let them. Her lips were moving again on words Marissa couldn’t hear, the same few over and over. Here. Look here.

Overhead, the other six began to turn. They drew in on the one Chloe held until they hung in a loose ring around her, as if whatever one of them saw, the rest were seeing too. Marissa couldn’t have said whether Chloe was holding one of them or all seven, and from Chloe’s face, neither could Chloe.

She turned her head the other way. Liesa lay on Marissa’s left with her hair spread over the ash and her jaw tight. “Liesa.” Marissa kept it under her breath. “Can you talk to them? Like before?”

“Talk, yes.” Liesa didn’t take her eyes off the seven. “The listening, I don’t know. Last time, she said nothing back.”

“They can’t say anything back,” Marissa said.

“No.” Liesa wet her lips. “So. I tell them what Anna said to her sisters. Where they went. That the way down is still there.” Her eyes went for a moment to the dark patch of ash in front of the line where the six had sunk. “I think is still there.”

Then she spoke to them. It was no language Marissa had ever heard, low and very old, full of small soft stops. Liesa said it slowly and carefully, a piece at a time. In the middle of it Marissa caught a word she knew, because she had heard Anna say it only minutes ago: Alla. And again, near the end, Alla, with something gentle after it.

The one Chloe held turned her face toward Liesa, although her eyes stayed on Chloe’s chest, and the others turned with her. The howl didn’t change. Marissa searched their faces for an answer and found nothing to read. They were listening, even if they weren’t looking.

Liesa stopped. Her breath was coming short, and the fingers of her near hand had spread flat on the ash.

“They hear,” she said. “Is something.”

Marissa lifted her eyes to the seven, took in all of them at once, and let her voice go up to them.

“Look down,” she told them. Nobody else on the Ring would hear it. “That’s where they went. Your sisters, the six. They went down together, and no one’s bringing them back up tonight. There’s room down there for you. You don’t have to hang up here for him. You can stop now. That’s it… let it go quiet.”

The howl came down, like a kettle coming down off the boil. She watched the rage go out of them. She had sat across from it a hundred times in her office, a client’s anger going all at once, and what was under it worse to look at than the anger had ever been. What stayed was pain, old and plain. It had been the same with Anna’s six.

Down the rim, Emi had turned her face up to them. The seven’s faces began to go slack. Their hair stopped moving. One of them sank a foot, and another beside her, with the soft, boneless give of somebody falling asleep. Then Emi’s hand closed, and they stopped where they were, high over the ash. If these slept, they would sleep here, on his ground, in his reach. Awake, they could still go.

So Emi held them there, a breath short of sleep. Anyone who knew what she was doing could have broken it with a word. He would have known. But his eyes stayed on Laura, his fist still shut over her, and every one of Laura’s faces was still lifted to his.

Up in the air the seven looked down at the dark patch where the six had gone, and leaned toward it, all of them at once. They didn’t go. Marissa could see them trying, in the set of them, leaning and held, like dogs at the end of a leash that went up into a hand nobody could see. Then the voice was at her ear again.

“—on the turnpike, in the rain, with your sister asleep in the back seat—”

Wipers going. Red taillights smearing down the windshield. Her sister’s head tipped against the window, and the road coming up wrong. It was not the seven speaking, she thought, but something speaking through them. Their faces held nothing now but pain, and the voice went on anyway, low and patient.

“—old, on the bench, with the lid shut over the keys—”

A black piano lid with dust on it, in a room where nobody came. She shut her eyes against it. On her other side Liesa breathed short and fast. Seven women hung over the ash who wanted to go down after their sisters and couldn’t, and all anyone on the rim could do now was keep them wanting it, and wait for his hand to slip. Anna still hadn’t moved.

Marissa kept her eyes shut, and waited with them.

---

The pain didn’t stop. Riley had given up waiting for it to.

It was everywhere at once, and when it had gone over her it came back and did it again. She knelt at the end of the line with her knees in the ash and the chain drawn up short at her wrists, and she breathed through it as Myra had shown her, in for four and out for longer, because breathing was the one thing the fog had left her to do. Her hair lay flat down her back under the gray. She could feel the whole weight of it, every lock, and she couldn’t lift a single one.

“—the lamp’s still there, Riley.” A voice at her ear, low and patient, as if it had all the time there was. “Still in the spare room. Nobody’s going to plug it in—”

The room came whether she wanted it or not. A bed made up tight. A bare dresser. The lamp on the nightstand, dark, its cord wound round its base.

“—he’ll be tall. Did you know that? He’ll be tall, and he’ll have his own key, and when somebody says your name at the table he won’t look up—”

A boy’s hand on a doorknob. Sneakers kicked off on a mat. A kitchen with every light on and nobody in it looking for her.

JJ was in the Gentle Hearth, down the slope and under the trees, a small warm point she could have put her finger on in the dark. Still. Asleep. Someone down there had him and hadn’t let go. That part was true, and she held on to it and let the rest go past her ear without an answer.

She didn’t know how far down the true part went. She didn’t try to find out.

Along the line Laura knelt in her chains. Riley could see all three of her from here, and past her, at the far end, Myra, cane gone, tails rigid at her back. Riley could have placed every one of them with her eyes shut. She could have said where Laura’s nearest hand was and exactly how far it stopped short of her own. She had been saying it to herself for an hour. Inches.

Nergal stood over Laura with his right hand closed in the air.

He was pulling. Riley could see him doing it, in his shoulder and the cords of his forearm and the set of the whole big body under the robe. But whatever he had hold of in Laura, it wasn’t coming. His jaw worked under the beard. The closed hand had begun to shake, a fine, steady shake, as if the arm it belonged to had been held out too long.

Laura had all three of her faces lifted to him. She wasn’t crying or screaming anymore. She wasn’t asking him for anything. Her eyes were on his, and they stayed there, steady, as they had stayed when he flinched, and nothing he did with his hand moved them off him.

“Riley.” Myra’s voice came along the line under her breath, in pieces. “Riley. Her color. It’s— the silver. It isn’t thin. It’s all the way— all the way through her.”

Riley looked at Laura holding and couldn't believe her eyes. Whatever Nergal was doing to her, however much more pain she was in than Riley or Myra were suffering, she wasn't even twitching. She just held.

It wasn’t courage that came into her then, watching. It was older than courage and a lot less noble. Laura was holding, so Riley was going to hold, because that was how it had always gone between them, since they were girls: whatever Laura walked out onto, Riley walked out after her. Except the one time. She thought about the one time, and set her jaw, and held.

Down the line Myra’s shoulders came square in the chains.

Then Laura got up.

All three of her came up off her knees at once, lifted on one breath. The chains came taut and stopped her short of straight, and she stood in them anyway, as far up as they would let her, with every head up and her eyes still on his.

Riley got her feet under her. The pain went over her twice while she did it, and her knees shook, and the chain at her wrists dragged her forward like a hand on her collar, but she found the ground and pushed against it and stood. She stood bent where the chain wanted her, and she didn’t care. At the far end Myra was coming up too, slowly, a hand’s breadth at a time, her face turned toward Laura as if Laura were the sun.

Standing, Riley could see over Laura’s heads to the throne, and past the throne to the far edge of the Ring. Arabella was still there. She stood exactly where she had stood all night, a little apart from everything, with her hand shut at her side.

Nergal’s face changed.

It wasn’t much. Riley had been watching it all night and had seen it do almost nothing, and now it did something small around the eyes. It was the face of a man who had been sure of a thing a moment ago and wasn’t sure of it now.

“Tell me how,” he said. His voice was as flat as ever, and wrong underneath. “Tell me how you are standing.”

Laura answered him. All three mouths, one voice, and the pain still in it, breaking it up.

“I felt him.” A breath, in all three of her. “Through the— the bond. He— his love came up it. I felt it come.” Her voice caught, and she made it go on. “He came back. He came— he came back. And he’s coming. Here.”

Behind Riley, along the rim, someone made a sound. A breath let out hard. A name begun and not finished. Riley heard Sam’s voice in it, saying Andy’s name low and rough, like a question she was afraid to have answered.

“It’s on you,” Myra said. She was crying. It didn’t stop her. “Laura. It’s on you. It’s— wide.”

Riley reached for him.

She had reached for him all night. She had reached every few minutes since the Dance Hall, and every time it had given her the same thing: right here, and so far away there wasn’t a word for it, both at once. She reached anyway now, because her hands were chained and this was the only part of her that wasn’t.

It found him. Clear and close and warm. He was in the Garden. The Hollow Garden, near enough that she could have pointed at him with her chin and been right to the inch. And he wasn’t alone. She could feel others with him. Others she loved. Not as strongly, not as exactly, except for one.

Her mother. Andy was with her.

Her breath went out of her in a sound she hadn’t planned, half a laugh, and the pain caught it halfway and turned it into a gasp, and she didn’t care. “He’s in the Garden.” Her voice cracked, and she heard it go along the line. “The Hollow Garden. At the bottom of the— he’s right there. I’ve got him. L, I’ve got him too.”

“That is not possible.” Nergal didn’t look away from Laura at all. “Where I sent him, nothing comes back.”

He said it like a line read off a tablet, flat and certain. But his hand had loosened. Riley saw it go. The fingers of the closed fist eased by a fraction, as a grip eases when the man holding on has started thinking about something else, and the shake went out of his arm. And Laura’s breath went out of her, all three of her at once, long and ragged, and the drag on her eased by the same fraction.

“You sent him,” Laura said. “He— came back anyway.”

Then she said, through the pain, slowly, so that it would land: “And we’ve been— doing something else. All this time.” A breath. “The three of us. Baiting you to — go too far. Keeping all of you— on us.”

---

By the Ring the last of the Fourteen hung where they had waited, barely over the ash, their hair moving in a wind that wasn’t there. They were thinning. They didn’t break apart and come back, as they had in the Garden when a blade went through them, but came apart at the edges first, the rags and then the long hair, like smoke off a fire just put out, and what was left of them sank. They went down slowly, and straight, and without a sound, into the ash where Anna’s six had gone, and the ash took them, and then there was only the dark over the trees.

The voice at her ear said, “—and he’ll never once ask where you—”

It stopped in the middle of the word.

The silence afterward was so sudden that Riley’s ears rang with it. She hadn’t known how loud it had been, all night, under everything. It was like coming up out of water.

She checked JJ before she checked anything else. Still there, still asleep, small and warm and exactly where he had been. Then Chloe, at the edge of the ash: breathing hard, and there.

Along the rim, the household got up.

Riley didn’t feel the cold lift. She saw it go off them, one at a time. Sam was first, rolling up onto one knee with her jaw still locked and her hand already on Thrustworthy’s grip. Sumiku came up behind her and her wings came open, and the line of gold along their edges caught and ran, gold going to red. Norah was on her hands, feeling across the ash for her sticks. Erin stood straight up all at once, as she did everything, her hands open at her sides and her face turned down to the ground under her feet. Katherine got up slowly, still gray, and Eden rose beside her slow and rolling, and knelt there. Marissa pushed herself upright, and her eyes were already going past everyone, past the throne, to where Anna lay. Liesa was on her knees with a hand pressed flat to her chest. Chloe came up on one arm, the dark circlet sliding crooked in her curls, and Riley felt her move: Chloe, the fixed bright point that had been still all night, moving now. Emi unfolded all six arms from under her and sat up. Claire’s hand found her notebook on the ash and closed on it. Dawn’s ears came up off her skull.

At the far end of the rim, Emily stayed where she lay, curled small and shaking.

Anna didn’t move at all.

Nergal was still looking at Laura.

He hadn’t turned. He hadn’t looked up at the sky over the Ring where his Fourteen had been, or round at the rim, where every woman he had laid out on the ash was on her feet behind him. He was still completely focused on Laura.

Sam came across the ash behind him.

She didn’t run. She had Thrustworthy in both hands and the point low, and she walked, as Riley had seen her walk out of a hundred rooms to go and deal with a problem, her shoulders easy and her face as flat as a plate. Nobody on the rim made a sound. Riley held her breath and kept her eyes on Laura’s, and Laura kept hers on Nergal’s, and between the two of them and Myra, they kept him exactly where he was.

Sam stopped a step behind him. She shifted the sword to one hand, reached up, and tapped him on the shoulder with two fingers.

“Hello, shovel-face.”

Nergal turned.

Sam swung.

---

The cold went off Erin all at once, and the ground came up into her through the soles of her feet.

She had been lying on it for an hour and hadn’t let herself feel it. She felt it now. It went into her like water into a dry sponge, without asking, and it was all of it at once: the whole floor of the Ring, the ash and the bare stone under the ash, the burned stubs of roots running down into the dark, the rim trees standing black around the hollow with something still alive in them, barely, far down under the bark. She had grown this place. She had put the wisteria up every arch with her own hands and told the jasmine where to go, and she had felt it die from the bottom of the island with her fingers in someone else’s grass, and not known what she was feeling.

She knew now. She stood at the rim of the Ring with the scorched ground under her bare feet and felt all of it, every dead inch, and it was hers. Her Sanctuary.

Out on the ash Sam’s swing came around.

Thrustworthy met Nergal’s raised forearm and rang off it like a hammer off an anvil. The sound went round the hollow and came back. Sam’s arms jarred to the shoulder with it and she didn’t let go, and there was no cut on him where the blade had landed. He had turned and put his arm up, no more than that, as a man puts an arm up against weather. But he had skidded, one step, and Erin could see the red welt on the arm.

Sumiku came down at him from the dark.

Erin hadn’t seen her go up. She came down out of the air with her wings spread wide and burning gold at their edges, the naginata held crosswise in all four hands, and from the other side Norah closed on him on her heels, a crystal stick in each fist, the light inside them shivering as she moved. Nergal stepped back from the pair of them. One step, on his own ground.

Then he stopped, and his right hand closed into a fist at his side.

“I am a god,” he said.

He didn’t raise his voice to say it. He didn’t need to. It went out flat across the ash, as the cold had gone out, and laid itself down over everything.

Erin reached into the air beside her and closed her hand.

The gun came into it. It came as it had come in the Hall, out of nothing, the trick the whole household had picked up lately: heavy and dark and faintly ridiculous, two barrels stacked one over the other. Mattie had sent it to her in the fan mail, months back, with a letter that called her Bazongas. In the Hall she had fired both barrels into a woman made of rags and wind and watched them go through her like a pair of thrown stones through fog. It was ordinary. Everybody said so. She had said so herself, in the Garden, out loud.

She brought it up in both hands anyway. This was her Sanctuary. He had defiled it. Her father had taught her when she was twelve, his hands over hers. Both hands. Breathe out. Don’t pull, squeeze.

She breathed out, and squeezed.

The first barrel went off like a door slamming in an empty building. The shot took Nergal high in the chest, just under the collarbone, and stopped there. It didn’t go in. Erin saw it flatten against him, a small bright smear of lead, and drop, and roll on the ash.

And he felt it.

She saw him feel it. His whole big body jerked, once, around the place it had landed, and his left hand came up and covered the welt on the spot. He looked down at the hand. Then he took it away and looked at the palm, as if he expected to find something there and didn’t know what, and his face did a thing Erin had never seen it do in the Hall or on the rise or in an hour of watching him from the ash. It wasn’t fear. He looked like a man who had just been told the name of something he’d forgotten existed.

He lifted his eyes and found her.

Out on the ash Sam had turned her head, too. Erin saw her see the gun, and see the lead on the ground, and look back at Nergal’s hand where it had covered the place. Sam’s eyebrows went up a quarter of an inch. That was all. Then her grip shifted on Thrustworthy—a fighter’s grip now, not a guard’s—and she waited.

“Maybe you are,” Erin said. She kept the gun on him. Her hands were steady. She noticed that from a distance, as if they were someone else’s hands and she was pleased with them. “Maybe you are a god. I don’t care.” She took one step down off the rim, onto the ash, onto the ground she could feel all the way to its roots. “This is my Sanctuary. I made it. You came in here and you defiled it, and I want you to understand something, because I don’t think anybody has ever told you.” Her voice had gone very flat. She let it. “I don’t take kindly to that.”

Nergal looked at her across the ash. Sam and Norah and Sumiku had stopped where they were, all three of them, weapons up, waiting on her.

“You killed every plant in here,” Erin said. “The wisteria. The jasmine. The grass. Every single one.” She could feel them, every one, as she would have felt a missing tooth. “You did a very thorough job. But you forgot the seeds.”

He looked at the ground, and back at her. “There is nothing left living in this ground,” he said. “I made certain of it, stone by stone. What I take apart stays taken.”

She didn’t know if it would answer her. She let herself know that, for one breath. In the Garden it had answered, with Nyadia’s seeds in the turf and the whole Garden leaning toward her hand, but that had been living ground, ground that had never been killed. This was ash. She didn’t know what a dead place could still do.

She lowered the gun to her side and lifted her other hand.

She didn’t ask, this time. In the Garden she had knelt and asked. Here she stood on what was hers and told it, and she reached down through the ash for every seed he had left behind in it: the wisteria pods that had split and dropped and lain there since, the jasmine seed gone down into the cracks of the stone, the grass seed, more grass seed than she could count, a whole meadow of it, asleep under the burn and waiting for her. She found them all. She told them to wake up.

Something under the seeds heard her first. Deeper than any seed the Verdant Arches had dropped, the ground itself had been lying in the dark since he stripped it, and it knew her hands. She had knelt in it every morning of a spring with dirt to the wrist, and talked to the roots while she worked, and thanked the wisteria for every inch it gave her. She had only been tending. The ground had been listening the whole time, and it remembered every morning, it remembered her warmth. Nergal had killed everything that stood on it. He had left that.

It took more than she had ever given anything. Every seed was a thread pulled taut behind her eyes, and there were thousands of them, and she held every one. She set her feet. Her jaw locked. Far off at the rim, down in the black trunks of the blasted trees, something turned over once in its sleep and was still. This was her Sanctuary.

The ground of the Ring split open.

It went everywhere at once, from the rim to the throne, a sound like ice letting go on a pond. Green came up out of every crack. It came up in shoots and in blades and in runners, thin as wire and then not thin, and it came up fast, faster than anything Erin had ever grown, the ash heaving and sliding off it as it rose. Wisteria came first, because she wanted it first. It came up out of the burned ground in long gray-green ropes and threw itself across the ash toward him, a dozen lashes at once, the young leaves still uncurling on them as they went.

Nergal threw himself aside.

He was faster than he looked. He had been slow all night, slow on purpose, a man walking behind a bier, and now he moved like a much smaller man and the first lash went past him by a hand’s breadth and cracked on the stone where he had been. He came down on one knee in the ash. Sam's sword caught him across the shoulder before he had finished arriving. The edge didn’t open him. It drove him down onto his free hand, and the back of the funeral robe split from collar to belt. Where his hand touched the ground to steady himself the new grass went gray and lay down flat in a ring around his fingers.

The second lash took him round the ankle.

It closed on him and held. Where it touched his skin it died. Erin felt it die, a cold gray spreading up the vine from his ankle, the leaves curling and blackening as she watched, the green going out of it a hand’s length at a time. And under the dead part, out of the same root, through the dead part and around it, new growth came up faster than he could kill it. It wound over itself. It doubled, and doubled again. He killed the outer turn and there was another under it, green and tight and alive, and another under that.

Nergal bent and closed his hand on it. The green went gray under his fingers and crumbled, and Erin felt every inch of it go—a burn drawn slowly across her own palm, again and again, as if someone were dragging a hot wire through her hand. She didn’t let go.

Sumiku fell on him from above with the naginata crosswise in all four hands and the blade turned flat, and brought the haft down across the side of his neck. His head snapped over. It was nothing like the ring of the sword. It was a flat, hard crack, a board dropped on a floor, and a red bar came up across the gray of his throat from ear to collar while Erin watched. The skin held. He turned toward her with one hand still half closed on the dying vine, and she was already gone, up and back into the dark. Norah’s sticks came down on the back of his skull, left and right, a bright crystal note on the first and a duller one on the second. Nergal pitched forward onto his hands. Erin gave the vine more. It came up through his fingers and over his wrist, and he had to let go of it or let it have his hand.

It held.

“Erin!” Sam was already moving. “That’s it. Keep him right there!”

Erin didn’t answer. She didn’t have anything to answer with. Every thread behind her eyes was drawn tight and she was holding all of them, and the one around his ankle hardest of all.

Sumiku came down again.

She came out of the dark straight over him with her wings half-folded and all four arms drawing the naginata back, and Nergal saw her coming and lifted his face to meet her. Erin brought the gun up one-handed and fired the second barrel at him.

It took him in the side of the neck. It flattened there as the first had and fell, and his head snapped toward Erin with the pain of it, toward the noise, toward her, for one half of one second. A knot came up under his jaw where it had landed, red and then purple, as big as a plum.

It was enough. Sumiku filled her chest with a breath that lifted her whole small body in the air, and she breathed out fire.

Erin had never seen fire like it. It came out of Sumiku white and gold, gold as the edges of her wings, and it didn’t roar so much as pour, and it washed over Nergal from his bald head to his shoulders in one long sheet, bright enough that every shadow on the ash jumped away from it. He threw his arms up into it with a grunt of effort. It drove him back, as far back as the vine would let him go, and Erin felt the vine take the strain and hold, and she held it. She saw Nergal's jaw set, and his eyes narrow in pain.

When the gold let go of him he was smoking. The front of the funeral robe had burned back to the belt on the left side, and the skin under it had gone red and glossy and begun to lift in blisters. His beard was a black crust along that jaw. Erin could smell it from where she stood: scorched wool, scorched hair. He stood in the smell and breathed through his mouth.

The gun was empty. She opened her hand and let it go back into nothing, and put both hands out toward the growth instead, and the growth came.

Norah came in under the last of the fire on her heels. Her sticks cracked against his raised forearms, left and right and left, each blow ringing off him with a bright crystal note, and on the fourth he caught one stick and threw her off it. She went over backward across the ash and tripped on a root that hadn’t been there a minute ago and rolled. The roll took her under his guard and out the other side of it, and she came up on her heels behind his left knee with her hair still perfect and her stick still in her fist. She looked as surprised as he did. She swung anyway, two-handed, with all her new strength behind it. The stick took him at the back of the knee, and the leg went out from under him, and she hit it again from the side as he dropped.

Sam was on him before he reached the ground. She took the swing from the heel, two-handed, like a woman splitting wood, and put the flat of Thrustworthy into his short ribs under the lifted arm. Erin heard the air go out of him from where she stood. He folded around it. Sam hit him in the same place again, and a third time, and on the third Erin heard a rib go. She stepped back out of his reach with her teeth bared.

“Stay down,” she said.

He didn’t.

He got his good foot under him and pushed, and the bad leg took his weight and shook. Sumiku came sweeping down at him from above again, the naginata swinging, and he had to take that on his forearm too. It raised a second ridge beside the first. He stayed up.

He was fighting now. Erin could see it. He wasn’t standing over anyone any longer with his hand closed and his mind on a tablet. He was a big man held by one ankle in the middle of a burned field, with three women coming at him from all sides, and he was turning and blocking and striking back with that sweep of his right hand that had thrown Anna across the ash.

Erin reloaded the gun. Sam took one sweep of his right hand on the flat of her sword and skidded a yard and came back. Wherever he set his free foot the new grass went gray around it in a ring, and Erin sent more up through the ring, and more. The rings were smaller now. They stopped a hand’s width out, as if they had come up against a wall, and the green beyond them stood. She shot him again and again. Every shot left a bruise the size of a coin, and where they overlapped the bruises ran together. The oldest marks were already going. The welt Sam had put on his forearm with her first swing, before any of this began, had faded to a pale stripe. While Erin watched it went out altogether. The gray skin under it was as smooth as when he walked into the Ring. The wisteria climbed his good leg. Sam and Sumiku and Norah never stopped. Every exchange cost him something, and he paid it, and stayed on his feet.

The sweep took Norah first. She was watching his knee and saw it late. She got both sticks up crossed in front of her face, and it came through them. The crystal gave one high, cracked note. Norah left the ground backward and came down on her shoulder ten feet off and slid, and the ash heaped up against her. When she stood she had a raw graze down one cheek and blood on the hand she wiped it with. She spat grit, rolled the shoulder once to see what it would do, and went back in.

Sam’s turn came next. She got Thrustworthy up flat, the way she had the time before, and this time it wasn’t enough. He had learned her weight. The sweep came through half a step sooner than she was ready for. It took her across the chest, blade and all, and put her down on her back in the ash. Erin heard her try to breathe and fail. When she rolled over her lip was split against her teeth and the blood ran down her chin in a line. She wiped it off with her wrist, looked at the wrist, and got up with Thrustworthy already swinging.

Something came over the rim at her back, low and fast, and was past her ankle before she had turned her head.

It was Samson Drei. Andy’s corgi went out across the new grass with his ears flat to his skull and his short legs pumping, blue and white under a coat of ash, and Meatball came over the rim behind him, the whole gold length of her stretched out flat, running as if she had only just been told she had legs. They went straight for the man who had put Sam on her back.

Meatball got there first, because her legs were longer. She snapped at the nearest thing she could reach, one of the burned strips hanging from his belt, and set all four feet in the grass and hauled on it, growling deep in her chest. Nergal looked down at her. He turned his hip, as a man turns from a gate banging in the wind, and the strip tore loose in her mouth and sat her down hard in the grass with it.

Samson went for the leg.

He came in low under the sweep of the right hand, behind the knee Norah had already found, and shut his jaws on the calf below it, and held on.

Nergal made a sound Erin hadn’t heard out of him all night. It came up from the middle of him, short and high, and the left leg gave under him by half its height before he caught it. He looked down at the corgi hanging off his calf as he had looked at his own palm after the first barrel, at something that had no business being able to do that.

The teeth hadn’t gone in. Erin could see that much from the rim: the gray skin had sunk deep around them, and held. But a Host had made that dog to live as long as Andy did, and whatever she had put into him was in his jaws now. It hurt Nergal as the sword did.

He swept the back of his hand down his own leg. Samson came off it like a stone off a sling, went twenty feet through the air and hit the grass rolling. He came up on all four feet, shook the ash out of his coat, and went back in.

Meatball had found her feet. She dropped the strip of robe and went in after him, low and silent, straight at the hand that had thrown him.

“Meatball!” It came across the Ring from the chains, from Riley, cracked down the middle and sweet anyway. “Meatball— no. Come. Here, girl— here. Come here.”

Meatball stopped a yard short of him with her front feet planted. Her ears went up. She looked at Nergal, and then over her shoulder toward the voice, and then she turned and went, low to the ground, around the edge of the fight and out across the ash to the middle of the Ring, where Riley stood bent in her chains.

Nobody called Samson back. He had the leg again.

It was costing her. Erin could feel the cost now, not in her hands but further in—a tremor starting low in her legs, her breath coming short and high, as if she had been running uphill for a long time and hadn’t noticed the hill. Every ring of gray he left on the ground was a small cold death she felt go out. She sent green up through every one of them. She didn’t let herself count.

She took a step back toward the rim, and then another. She needed all of it in front of her. She needed to see the whole Ring at once to hold it, the vine and the four of them and the dog and the ground she could feel under all their feet.

From there she could see behind the fight.

Marissa and Katherine were on their knees beside Anna, where she had fallen. Marissa had gathered Anna’s head into her lap and was holding it there with both hands, bent low over her, and Erin could hear her voice under the noise, barely, the kind of near-whisper that made a whole room lean closer without meaning to, pitched now for one person. “Anna. It’s Marissa. I’ve got you. I’m right here, you don’t have to do anything. Just stay.” Katherine had taken one of Anna’s hands in both of hers and was holding it against her own chest. She was still pale from the drain. Her lips were still a little blue. She held on anyway.

Eden came down beside them, slow and rolling, the only kind of movement her body would give her, and knelt there with her ankle-length hair spilling over the ash. Erin understood her plainly; anyone watching would have. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m here with you.

Erin couldn’t tell from where she stood whether Anna was breathing. She looked at Marissa’s face instead, and Marissa’s face didn’t tell her either.

At the far end of the rim Emi was on her knees beside Emily, all six arms folded around her, holding her close against her chest and rocking a little. “Shh. Em. It’s over, he can’t—he’s not looking at you anymore. I’m right here. Six arms. Nobody’s getting through six arms. Just breathe with me.” Low and steady, over and over. Emily was still shaking, but the shaking was slower than it had been.

The air near them had changed. Erin smelled it before she knew what it was: cut grass, and something flowering, and sun on a wall at the end of a long afternoon, coming across the burned ground from where Emi knelt. Erin’s own new grass leaned toward it. She didn’t tell it to.

Claire and Liesa and Dawn and Chloe had stayed with them, close round the women on the ground. Claire had her notebook pressed flat against her chest with both arms, as if it might be taken off her again. Liesa had a hand spread on Chloe’s back. Chloe sat on her heels with the circlet dark and crooked in her hair, saying nothing, because she had nothing left to say anything with, and watched the fight with her mouth set. Dawn knelt with her ears straight up and her eyes going from Emily to Anna and back.

Mildred stood apart from all of them, where she had been all night, with her hands folded in front of her. Nobody had laid a hand on her all night, and nobody touched her now.

And in the middle of the Ring, beyond the fight, Laura and Myra and Riley were on their feet in their chains, straining against them to see, every one of them leaning as far toward the fight as the links would let them go. Laura’s three faces were turned toward Nergal. Riley was shouting at Sam over the noise. “Left—Sam, left!” Meatball was pressed against Riley’s legs, as close as she could get, and stayed there. The chains were still on all three of them, gray and solid at their wrists and throats. Whatever had let go of the household had not let go of those.

The burn came back into her palm all at once, and it was worse than before.

She looked out over the fight and saw why. Nergal had stopped trying to break away. He had both fists closed on the vine above his ankle and was hauling on it hand over hand, and the gray was coming up the rope toward her faster than the green could answer, a foot at a time, then a yard. He was walking up the line of it. Samson had the bad leg again, and Nergal walked on with the dog dragging from it, the leg shaking under him at every step. Sam went in at his side and he took the blow on his arm without turning his head. The sweep of his right hand sent her stumbling a dozen feet with her sword arm flung wide. Norah went in at his knee and he turned his hand over, and the force of it took her legs out from under her. She landed on her hip with a cry that Erin heard from the rim. Sumiku dropped onto his back, and he reached up without looking and caught the haft of the naginata and swung it, and Sumiku with it, and let go. She hit the ash on her wings thirty feet off and rolled. When she came up, the edge of her left wing was torn and trailing.

Erin let the gun go back into nothing and put both hands out to the vine, and held. The ash plowed up under her feet in two furrows, because he was pulling her in. She was the one who stayed where she was put, and she stayed. Her palm was on fire to the wrist. She was angrier than she had ever been, and it was the cold kind, and the cold kind holds.

Her left leg started to go. A swell of new turf came up under it and took her weight. She hadn’t told it to. The earth of the Sanctuary came for her, because it remembered. She leaned on it, and it held.

The voice came from behind her.

It was barely above a breath, and the hollow carried it anyway, from rim to rim. Erin felt it go past her ear and out over the ash, and the back of her neck went hot.

“Look at me,” Marissa said. She was where she had been, on her knees with Anna’s head in her lap and both hands cradling it. But her face was up now and her eyes were on the middle of the Ring, and the voice that came out of her was the one she had been using on Anna. It had not changed by a note.

“There you are,” Marissa said, soft, as if she had walked into a dark room and found him there. “I’ve got you. I’m right here. You don’t have to do anything. Just stay.”

They were nearly the same words. Erin had heard them a minute ago, in the same voice at the same pace, laid over a woman who hadn’t answered. Marissa’s hands were shaking in Anna’s hair. Her voice stayed level.

Out on the ash, Nergal stopped in the middle of a pull.

He still had both fists on the gray rope. His weight was back on the bad leg. His head turned, slowly, toward the rim, toward the sound.

The gray stopped climbing the vine. Erin felt it stop. The burn went out of her palm, and she spent no breath being glad of it.

“Just stay,” Marissa said again, lower, and the cords stood out in his neck. His mouth had come a little open. Color was coming up under the gray of his throat, slow and dark, and his breath had changed. Erin looked away from it fast. Whatever Marissa’s voice did to a room, it was doing to him. It wasn’t doing it well. He was fighting it, and he was fighting it with the part of him that had been fighting everything else, and for the length of one breath, and two, he forgot there was any woman on the ash but the one who was speaking.

Erin took the half second. Two ropes of wisteria came up out of the cracked ground, one for each of his wrists, and she hauled them out and apart until he stood between them with his arms spread like a scarecrow in a burned field.

Sam hit him first. She came in on the left, where the ribs were bad, with blood drying on her chin and Thrustworthy in both hands and the flat of the blade square, and put every pound she had behind it. Erin felt it in her teeth. Nergal’s breath went out of him in a rush. Sam hit him in the same place again, and again, short and ugly, shoulder and hip and the whole of her weight, and he sagged between the ropes.

Sumiku came back out of the dark at a dead run. Erin hadn’t seen her get up. She went in low with the torn wing dragging a furrow in the ash behind her, and came up under his guard with all four arms, and the haft of the naginata swept his good leg out from under him, and the butt of it came around into the side of his head on the way past. He went down on one knee in the ash, between the ropes. The left side of his face was swelling as Erin watched: the cheekbone coming up, the lid dropping over the eye, the skin pulled tight and shining.

Norah went in behind him for the leg she had already found, a half step late on the bad hip, and Samson was on the same leg below her, his jaws locked on the calf. Left stick, right stick, outside and inside, every blow with a hard crystal ring and a duller sound under the ring. Nergal grunted through his teeth.

Then he tore himself out of it. He couldn’t reach his ears with his hands tied out wide, so he threw his head sideways, hard, and the voice went off him. The color left his throat. His good eye came around to the rim and found Marissa and stayed on her. He closed his hands on the ropes. The gray ran up each one from his grip, and they fell in pieces on the ash, and Erin felt both go, one burn in each palm. He came up off his knee and took a step toward the rim, dragging the whole length of the vine, and the vine took him by the ankle and held him there, at the end of it, with his eye on a woman who had already bent her head back over Anna’s face.

“Eyes front, shovel-face,” Sam said, and hit him across the jaw.

His head went with it. It came back.

He was still standing straight.

It was the one thing the four of them hadn’t taken from him, and Erin looked at everything else they had. The left eye was shut under a lid swollen tight and black. The cheek above it had puffed out of true. There was the knot under his jaw and the bar across his throat. The beard was burned off along one side, and the funeral robe hung from his belt in smoking strips, and the skin under it was purple and black from collarbone to hip where Thrustworthy had landed, and red and shining on both forearms where the fire had been. He held his left arm clamped to his ribs. When he shifted his weight onto the left leg, it shook. Below the knee the calf had gone black, and in the black were two curved rows of dents, deep as thumbprints, where Samson’s teeth had held. He breathed through his open mouth in short pulls, and each one stopped at the top. The first marks were nearly gone. The welt Sam’s first swing had left on his forearm was only smooth gray skin. Under his collarbone, where the first barrel had struck, a small yellow stain was thinning at the edges.

Erin looked for blood. She went over every inch of him she could see, and the gray skin was whole, all of it. He was bruised from his scalp to his belt, black down the bad leg where the dog had held on, and it had never once parted.

Her own side had not come through it clean. Sam stood with her mouth smeared red and her sword point an inch lower than it had been. Norah had her weight off one hip and a hand on her shoulder. The graze on her cheek had stopped bleeding and begun to swell. Sumiku’s torn wing trailed on the ash behind her. Samson stood off the bad leg with his lips drawn back and ash to his belly, the only one of them with no mark on him. Erin’s palms were burned raw to the wrist and her legs shook. The vine in her hands was the only thing holding him in the Ring.

Then Erin looked the other way, along the rim, and found that she was not alone at the edge.

Arabella stood a few yards from her.

She stood a little apart from everything, at the edge of the Ring, exactly where she had stood all night, very straight. Nobody was looking at her. Everybody was looking at the fight, or at Anna, or at Emily, or at the three women in their chains. Erin was the only one looking at Arabella, and Arabella wasn’t looking at anyone at all. She was looking at Nergal.

Her face had nothing in it. Erin had seen her smile and tease and play the Host across a hundred days. None of that was here. Her mouth was set, her chin level, and she watched him fight four women on the ground he had stripped as she might have watched weather come in over the water: closely, and without hurry, and to the end.

She spoke. Not loudly. Not to Erin. To Nergal, whether he could hear or not, in a voice so level it hardly seemed to be meant for ears.

“You struck down Anna,” Arabella said, like judgment. “You struck down Emily. Both of them have passed through this Hotel.” She paused. “You overreached, and the Law's protection is broken. But you have done more. You are threatening Laura's soul and brought her to the brink of death. None who has passed through the Hotel can do so to another who also has. That is the Cardinal Rule, and you have finally broken it. Under that rule, the choice of your punishment is mine.”

Arabella lifted the hand she had kept shut at her side all night.

She turned it over and opened it. Her fingers came apart slowly, as if they had been closed so long they had forgotten how. There was a scar across the palm, an old one, and it was open. It was wet and dark along its whole length. It had been bleeding into her closed hand, Erin thought, for hours, and she had simply let it.

A single drop gathered at the end of the scar, at the heel of her hand. It hung there.

“But I leave your judgment to another.”

Then it fell, and landed on the ground of her Sanctuary, and something opened.