To call the hostel, no this was far grander than that, a hotel then. To call the hotel an extravagant building did not adequately do it justice. Each building on the block looked like it would cost more to build than the entirety of Westgrove put together. A single road, only half a mile long, stretched down one great platform stuck to the great wall of Grim two-thirds of the way up. The people who visited along the road dressed like they had a mind to outdo the buildings of white marble, tasteful gilding, and fanciful statues strung together to perform a story all the way down the block. No doubt masters of their craft had been employed in creating the facades of the buildings and the people both.

  The Gilded Lily stood erect at one corner of the platform, garden vines spilling from its rear to cascade down the side of the platform and hang in the open air. I arrived on the platform itself, staring at the approaching edifice of marble. It looked so much smaller, so much simpler, when that servant pointed it out to me on my way out of Arabella’s mansion. Standing before it now, I find myself unable to believe the detail put into its design.

  The square of hard wood I stand on, a sturdy slab suspended on a framework of ropework, slaps into the edge of the stone platform, bouncing back an inch and making me stumble. No one else on the big square loses their footing. A woman looks over at me, shaking her head, muttering something about foreigners. The team of six donkeys attached to a huge spinning wheel that drug our wooden square from the next platform over paws at the ground, staring at their handler and his crop like they have some nefarious plan in mind. I don’t know how they managed to get the beasts up here, several hundred feet above the ground, and I’m not certain that it is such a good idea. Cities, I have determined, are strange places.

  I hop the gap between the edge of the square and the stone platform itself, a small part of me anticipating the entire street to shake just a little as I land. The noise of the street is strangely muted, the open expanse of air sucking away the chatter of well-dressed people walking down the street, peering into the windows of shops and boutiques, laughing as they lounge on the benches that divide the road neatly in half along with the occasional sapling. Everything smells…clean somehow, like the lingering scent of a passed storm. I realize that there is no dirt here, no mud to be tracked and ground into the cracks between the cobbles, no trash littered about by passersby, and not a single trail of horseshit left pebbling the street with the odd bootprint left smeared in it.

  A bell tinkles as I push open the front door of the Gilded Lily, and a man looks up from an open book from a clean desk just to the side of the large lobby. He flashes me a smile that is impossible to not return and opens his mouth to ask some question which will no doubt come as polite, contrite, and imminently deferential.

  “Charlene!”

  I turn about, finding Jor’Mari sitting at a table near a window, waving to me. I leave the man at the desk behind, whatever he was going to say or ask gone with the wind. Jor’Mari looks good, dressed in silken robes cut in a style similar to those that the giant green-haired people wore, this one a deep purple and littered with curling roots and falling leaves. He tips a glass to me from his seat, unable to bring himself to even lower the front two legs of his chair to the floor.

  “Take a seat,” he says, motioning to a chair with his cup. “Dovik will be back in a moment. We were just in the middle of swapping stories about the tower. He was telling me about his Stoneball match against the big bastard I shoved off the side of the ramp, the one screaming at the sea witch in that strange barbaric tongue. He had a grudge against that green woman or some such thing. I don’t know how Dovik learned of that, since the man apparently never spoke a word of Castinian.”

  “I know, because unlike you imperials, some of us actually attempt to learn the manners and words of other cultures,” Dovik says, appearing from behind a green velvet curtain hung in a doorway and striding across the small cafe set off the main lobby. I consider that a moment as he pulls out a chair for me like a gentleman. I suppose that I am an imperial, though until just a few months ago I had never known so. How did they manage to keep us all so ignorant?

  Seeing the man for the first time in days, my breath catches. Arabella had told me that he too survived the creature’s attack in the tower; the relief that I felt in that moment was immense, but she did not tell me about his wounds. He wears fine clothes, a coat of deep blue over a black shirt and trousers all done up with silver buttons. One would never think from seeing his easy demeanor that the scars were freshly added to him. One, a perfect line of shiny pink flesh, starts in the center of his left eyebrow and runs down between his eye and nose, perfectly vertical, cutting through his lips and dropping off his chin, only to continue along his neck before disappearing into the collar of his shirt. A second line starts on the left side of his head, cutting a thin bald spot through his hair just behind his ear, running down the side of his neck and also disappearing beneath his clothes. I have no doubt that there is a third scar somewhere on his arm or shoulder, that monster did have three blades on its face after all.

  “Dovik,” I manage to say, hand fluttering in the space between us like a carp.

  “Arrested by my good looks? I have that effect on women.” He smiles at me, and I cannot tell if his grin is strained or not. “The new additions help to add an air of ruggedness and danger, do they not?” he asks, gesturing loosely to his face.

  They don’t. If anything, they make him look like a hurt boy to my eye, one that is afraid to show his true feeling to the world for fear of getting hurt again. I realize that maybe I am just trying to dress him in those feelings, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where they come from.

  “Perhaps, try growing a beard if you want to look rugged and manly,” I say.

  “A beard.” He nods, pursing his lips in thought. “They aren’t quite the fashion in Grim, but if my objective is a kind of rustic danger, there are few others I would look to take tips from than a farm girl from the middle of nowhere. Do the men on farms commonly wear them?”

  “They help keep the chill off when their chewed-up shirts can’t manage it I’m told. Some women have even been known to keep them for that reason,” I say.

  “Do they indeed?” He looks like he actually gives that some real consideration. Then he blinks and notices the back of the chair in his hand. “Will you not join the two of us for drinks Ms. Devardem?”

  “What a well-mannered young lord,” I say, parking my butt in the chair, gliding forward as Dovik slides it into the table for me.

  “I am not a lord,” he says. “I am a commoner, just like you.”

  “Yes, exactly like me.”

  “And as a correction to your story,” he goes on, throwing himself down into a third seat at the small table, pouring himself a glass of amber liquid from the decanter in the middle of the table. “That man very much understood Castinian, he merely deigned not to speak it.”

  “A fine distinction,” Jor’Mari says, swilling his glass. “Completely worth taking the effort of correcting me over. It makes the story all the better to know that bit of information.” He tosses the drink down, and the front legs of his chair smack harshly against the tiles as he leans forward to pour another glass. He looks up to me, pouring another glass and sliding it over. “Local toxin. They ferment it from beans or something.”

  “They aren’t beans,” Dovik scoffs, rolling his eyes.

  “I don’t see anything wrong with bean spirits,” I say, taking a sip from my glass. It is like getting kicked in the face by a mule with a slightly sweet and sour after taste. I wonder how many cups these two already have had to not react in the slightest. “You shoved him off?” I ask. I remember seeing that man for a moment, saving me from having to face the wrath of Lady Forendous after I knocked her monster over the side.

  “Well, I thought about letting him keep that woman tied up for a bit, but he started swinging his huge fists this way and that. More a danger to the structure of the tower than anyone in particular. He caught her around the arm at some point, and I saw that as a good opportunity to do away with them both. I pushed him off, and he pulled her off. Not the most elegant victory, but I would still say it was my win. You can guess what happened after.”

  “I can.” I have to say, the more of the bean juice I sip on, the more the flavor grows on me.

  “You know,” Dovik says, waving his glass Jor’Mari’s way, “you have a certain unearned bravado about you that is so charming.”

  “Unearned?” Jor’Mari asks, arching a brow.

  “I doubt anyone so young could properly earn so much pomp. I find myself liking it.”

  “He is the pompous one.” I can’t help but snort at the idea, looking between the two. “I am surprised that this building could fit either of your egos inside of it.”

  “My fine lady.” Dovik holds a hand to his chest. “I will have you know that my pomposity is of a subtle and subdued nature. You are meant to infer it rather than me having to tell you about it outright.”

  “Here, here.” Jor’Mari holds up his glass to that.

  “You think yourself subtle as well?” I ask him.

  “Exeter’s balls, no.” He laughs. “Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a preening cock when I find one. Birds of a feather and all that. Do you have cocks in Grim?”

  “I believe there is a baker's wife in the lower third that keeps chickens. By all accounts, she is a truffle pig for cocks if you are looking,” Dovik quips.

  Jor’Mari spits his alcohol back into his glass, wiping his mouth with a sleeve while he chokes on laughter. “Finally, a man of words. How I have missed enlightened company.”

  Dovik turns to me. “I have heard a bit of your story from Jor, but I would have the word direct. What became of you after we parted ways?”

  I look down into my glass, swirling the mixture. “Nothing good.”

  “It can’t have all been bad,” he says. “When I saw you again at the tower, you were like a changed woman, all fire, brimstone, and the incineration of innocent monsters. My uncle always said, telling bad stories over sufficiently strong brandy has a way of putting a sweet shine on things.”

  “Is this a brandy?" Jor’Mari lifts the decanter, inspecting it.

  “Not strictly speaking. I think that jeva is in a category all its own.”

  “Bean drink.”

  I sigh, tipping the remainder of my drink into my mouth before looking back up to Dovik. “A lot happened. Quite a lot.”

  Then, I begin my story. I tell him everything, can’t think of a reason to hold anything back. I tell him about the betrayal, although it seems that he already knows about that somehow. I speak about running from those beasts, jumping in a river, and washing up on a little island. I talk about finding some kind of direction forward, dabbling in enchanting, hunting my way through the woods. I even speak about the lost dungeon I discovered, the monsters I encountered there, the strange structure I found in the cave beneath. The full telling takes quite some time, more time than I expected, and by the end I have a good buzz going.

  “Still not quite certain who they screwed over more.” Jor’Mari reaches for more drink, notices the bottle is empty, and uses two fingers to motion for another bottle from the man at the front of the lobby.

  “I got stabbed,” I say, focusing on not slurring my words.

  “You get stabbed a lot,” Jor’Mari says.

  “I do.” That probably says something about me. I look over at Dovik, finding him sipping his drink with a relaxed smile on his face. “Where is Macille?”

  He winces. “Upstairs still, I think.”

  “What room?”

  Dovik pads around, eventually finding a brass key in his pocket and holding it up to the light. “309, it looks like.”

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  “You two are sharing a room?"

  "No, he's in the one next to mine."

  "Don’t you live in this city, somewhere?”

  “Go home to my mother after not dominating the trial and knocking at least a score of other contestants out of the competition? No.” He makes a sour face, turning the key over in his hand. “And we are not sharing a room, he merely has the one next to mine.” He shows off the key stamped with the number 308.

  “I need to speak with him,” I say, moving my wobbling chair back and getting to my feet.

  “You should,” Jor’Mari agrees. “Want your glass?” He had already begun to pour another cup for me.

  “Better not,” I say. “This bean juice has a kick.”

  “Like a mule,” Jor’Mari agrees. “Not that I’ve ever been kicked by a mule. A donkey once, and I saw one of my brothers kicked by a hart, but we didn’t have much use for mules at the main house. Your glass will be waiting for you when you come back.”

  “My genuine thanks.”

  Sauntering out into the lobby, I can’t immediately find the stairs. I am left to loiter for a moment until doors at the back of the lobby open wide and a couple with heavy bags come strolling out, not that either would deign to carry their own bags of course. That was left to a man in a smart looking red outfit. Instead of stairs, I find an ornately decorated box waiting for me, another uniformed man standing inside with a polite smile on his face.

  “Some kind of magic box?” I ask, looking around, seeing my warped reflection staring back at me.

  “Not much magic to it,” he says. “Mostly just ropes and pulleys. Carries all the way up the hotel, can bring you to any floor you like with no strain on your part.”

  I shrug, take a step into the odd box, and feel the entire thing sag and bob beneath my weight. Jumping back, I stare at the man.

  “That is quite normal,” he tells me.

  “I think I will take the stairs.”

  He points them out to me, hidden behind a door for some reason, and I start my climb. Dovik told me the wrong room, if the slightly confused and incredibly short woman that opened the door of 309 is anything to go by. I make my apology, step back and study the remaining options, and land on the door labelled 310.

  I listen at the door, hearing footsteps approach from inside, and then he is there, standing with the door thrown wide, a bit of shock on his face. “Charlene,” he says.

  “It’s good to see you,” I say, stepping into the room. And it is good to see him. He is dressed in simple clothes now, a long black shirt and a pair of pants to match, expensive but simple.

  Macille moves aside, allowing me into the room where I am given to admire all of the finery. The bed is absolutely killed with pillows, eighteen of them I think, all gold and purple atop a fat velvet cover. The wall is paneled with brass and buffed to mirror shine, and a drink cabinet stands open in one corner of the room.

  “You’ve been in your spirits,” I say, noticing the glass out.

  “Dovik was here earlier,” he says, scratching the back of his neck. I notice a mark on the left side of his neck, a bit of ragged red. He notices my noticing and pulls his tight black collar a little higher. He looks so different out of his armor, still a big man, but smaller somehow.

  “I met him downstairs,” I say. I move closer to him, reach out for his arm, but he moves back and away, trudging over toward the bed. That hurts me, more than I thought it would. “How is Kendon?” I ask. My feelings about the man still confuse me. It feels like just yesterday I hated him with all my being, but now there is no trace of that anger left in me. How could I hate the man after what I have done?

  “Better, maybe. Not certain how well I can expect him to be.” He sighs, brushing back his hair and looking at the bed like he wants nothing more than to crash down into it just then. He doesn’t. He stands half-turned to me, eyes looking everywhere in the room except at me.

  “Good,” I say, only barely meaning it.

  “We will be returning home,” he says. “I think it's best for him, and it is all he wants now. He remembers it, what he did, what she made him do. Some of it he forgets, but he wouldn’t believe that I was really me for days, said he remembered holding my dead body, said I had died so many times. He will be better at home, better there.”

  “Oh.” Honestly, I don’t know what to say to that. “That is good. You should do what you can for him. I was going to invite you on a trip I am making, back out into the wilderness, but you should look after your brother.”

  His head snaps up, and he finally looks at me. “Why would you invite me?”

  I fumble for an answer. Damn, I shouldn’t have had so many drinks before coming up. “I thought…” What did I think exactly? “I thought that there might be something, something between us.” I move to him, laying a hand on his arm.

  Macille looks down at me, at my hand like it was some offending bug that had landed on him. He winces, the same wince I saw on Dovik’s face just a bit ago, and he swallows hard. Oh no.

  “Maybe there was,” he says. “Before the tower. Before how everything turned out, I thought that there might be something. Now though…”

  “What changed?” I realize my fingers are gripping his arm tight. I back away, making distance, and seeing the sadness in his posture for the first time.

  “You killed her, Charlene. I watched you murder her.”

  It couldn’t have hit me harder if he had slapped me. “Coriander. She tried to kill me! You are going to try and defend her for it?” I’m yelling. Gods, I know I shouldn’t be.

  “I know that!” he spits back. The sudden harshness in his voice catches me off guard; I have never heard the man raise his voice before. “I know that,” he repeats, fingers trying to strangle the air as his voice strains to hold itself back. “I saw it for myself, didn’t I? They showed it off in front of everyone at the tower. Everything slid into place then, how my brother was acting, how he had suddenly decided that she was the most important thing in the world. I was so stupid to not notice. I just thought that this was the latest girl he decided to obsess about.”

  “Then what?” I want to move forward, put my hand back on his shaking arm, but I can’t.

  “That doesn’t make it right,” he says. “Just because someone wrongs you doesn’t mean you have permission to do whatever you like to them. Murder is still wrong, no matter how justified you might see it. Would she not have been punished for what she did after? Could you not have kept that sin off your soul and allowed the world to find the just course?”

  “Sin.” I spit on the nice floor. Venom starts boiling up inside of me. All the terrible things I have learned in the past weeks, all the ways I have been kept in the dark, taught to be docile, taught that I should always harbor some secret self-hatred come churning up like bile. “I do not want to hear any more horseshit about sin, about right or wrong, about my place. How many years did I nod along to sermons telling me to ignore common sense, to accept my lot in life, to be thankful for the privilege that my kind has to toil in the dirt. I am not sorry that bitch’s blood was spilled by such stained hands like mine, human hands, and I relish the thought of her turning in her grave for having such a base creature be her end.”

  “That isn’t what I am saying,” he tries. “Do you think I agree with what the Empire does to your people?”

  “I don’t remember you ever trying to show me otherwise.”

  “It is illegal! It is against the law to try and educate humans in Gale. Do you think they would not know if I made an attempt like that, if I tried to point out everything done to your people to keep them ignorant and feeble? I cannot afford to take risks like that, to break the law, it wouldn’t…” he trails off, afraid of his own words.

  “It wouldn’t be right,” I finish for him. "Did you somehow forget what she did to your brother then? I saw him broken, acting like a madman, crying over you because he remembered so well watching you die!"

  "You don't get to tell me about him!" He steps forward, face red, stabbing a finger at my face. "Have you needed to listen to him at night? Were you the one that had to pick him up and carry him from that tower, carry two people out? Did you...Did you..." I see the veins in his neck strain, like the words choke him. Then, the anger drains from his voice. "Did you need to pull him off the ledge last night?"

  And what can I say to that. Nothing good, nothing smart. Any more words from me will just fall like daggers into either him or me, but I can't stop myself. I know that it isn't Macille I argue with, just myself, just that narrow spark of bumpkin deep inside that wants so desperately for things to be right and fair, but that girl has been dying a long time. "Knowing that, you would still tell me it's wrong, condemn me?"

  "It is wrong, Charlene. You wanting it not to be so doesn't change that. There is no amount of hate that I can have for her that would make it right."

  I stare at the man for an uncomfortable moment, suddenly seeing a stranger standing in front of me. “I thought you were different. I thought that you saw me. I thought that there might be something there.”

  “I do see you, Charlene,” he says. “But I can’t see anything there between us, not anymore.”

  I find Jor’Mari still lounging at the same table I left him at before. Dovik is gone now, leaving the man to drink alone, but he doesn’t look like he minds the solitude in the least. I dab something wet and embarrassing from the corner of my eye before he sees me walking out of the stairwell. He looks up as I approach, studying me for a silent moment before sliding my half-filled glass over to me, kicking out a chair at the table.

  “You found him then,” he says, brow arching.

  The chair creaks as I fall into it. “That was stupid,” I mutter, taking the glass, swirling it on the table, making a rhythmic scratching sound as it glides over the wood. “Silk on my dick, that was stupid.”

  “You are young,” he says, shrugging while I take a sip from my glass. “The young often are stupid. You were referring to yourself, yes?”

  “Referring to everything, the world probably.” I slouch in my chair, tasting the sourness of the drink and coming to like it more and more. I look up at him, narrowing my eyes. “You can’t be that much older than me.”

  “Nineteen as of two and a half weeks ago,” he says.

  “Congratulations.”

  “You’re the first one to acknowledge it.”

  I notice for the first time that he is holding a metal ball in his hand. The thing looks to be made of silvery string, though its luster is far too bright to actually be silver. He spins it over his fingers, almost dropping it, and catching it with an easy grace that lets me know he has been at the activity for some time.

  “Is that what you took from the vault? I expected you to snatch one of those big swords off of the wall.”

  He looks down at his hand, seeming to be surprised to find it there. “Yes. Gorman’s Knot is what it is supposed to be called. It is supposed to strengthen the mind, like some puzzle that makes you a better person the more you work at it.” That much I know right away from what my eye tells me. Such a strange little ball, probably incredibly useful too. “Sorry that I couldn’t leave it for you, privilege of entering second I suppose.”

  “I will have to console myself somehow.”

  “What did you take?” he asks.

  It takes only a second of running my fingers over the boxes of my inventory to produce the item. I pinch a small square piece of white stone between my finger and thumb, holding it up for him to see, allowing him to inspect the pleasing green lines that run over its surface.

  “You didn’t,” he gawks. “I was tempted myself, but it seemed far too extravagant. Too…gaudy.”

  “Perhaps I like gaudy,” I say. “It serves a purpose as well. I am going on a trip.”

  “A trip?”

  “Arabella arranged for me to have a mountain out there all to myself. I still need to catch up to you,” I say.

  “So, your trial isn’t over yet.” He looks down at his own glass, the knot stilling in his hand. “I want to thank you again for giving me that soul cage. I don’t think that I could have kept my head if I wasn’t at my best in the tower, at the end.” His eyes are hard when he puts them on me again. “I heard off-hand that she was dead, that she was gone, but I would hear it from you.”

  I nod, nail tapping against my glass. “She is dead. I am certain of it.” And I am. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, I know that Coriander Mel’Draven’s life has ended.

  “No body was recovered. They only found a smattering of blood and some gore at the bottom of the cliff, claim some monster had at the corpse, at what was left. Still, without a body…”

  “She is dead, Jor.” I look him hard in the eye, needing to have him believe me. “It is over.”

  He hisses out a sigh, slipping the knot into a pocket of his purple robe. “I believe you. Despite myself, I believe you. I guess that’s the end of it then, everything made square.”

  “I guess so.”

  Outside, people pass down the street, their smiling faces totally lost in their own little worlds. The sun struggles to put light to the street, the street suspended on the side of a massive wall, and somehow manages. I imagine for a moment what it must feel like to be a normal girl, out on the town, sipping a drink in a cafe and thinking about simple problems like I used to. But I’m not normal, not anymore, and it is about time that I realized that.

  “About the body, the one you tried to keep me from seeing,” I say.

  “You shouldn’t ask about that,” Jor’Mari says, his eyes also on the window. The man looks almost like a statue with the soft light lying across him, a sad statue but a beautiful one. “I remember asking you a similar thing before. The answers gave me nothing but took away so much. Do you really want to know a thing like that?”

  Exeter knows that I don’t. For the last three days I have been working up my courage to ask about that charred hand I saw on the stone, knowing that I had been the one to make it that way but being unable to remember doing so. He will tell me if I ask. I can see it in the stubborn set of his jaw, muscles on the side of his head standing out as he chews on words that will cause me nothing but pain. Shouldn’t I have to know? Shouldn’t I have to live with the knowing? But then, I already know the important part.

  He is the only person that knows. Can I really leave it all with him?

  “No,” I say. “Forget it.”

  “I will if you do. It will die with me,” he says. “We have been through hard days. Take some time to sit back and admire life as it passes by, try to find something good to look at, something to look forward to.”

  I do try as we lapse into a silence that stretches. The people come and go. They certainly have things to be happy about, anyone could see that at a glance. I want to be like that too, to look happily forward, but I don’t think today is that kind of day.

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