Damp leaves clump together on the broken porch, the tickling wind trying to peel the topmost away with ephemeral fingers. The rain cuts right through Izmeralda’s coat, a piece that had been rather nice when she pulled it off some lady a season ago. The constant beating of the weather left it bare, the tanned leather scrapping away at the dirty hem to reveal ragged burgundy strings scuffed from the inner lining. Somewhere distant in the gloom, thunder cracks across the sky.

  “Come out of the rain,” Tanalious says

  The beasts in the yard of mud in front of the shack watch the man as he approaches her. Some might mistake them for wolves in the starless dark of the rainy night, but Izmeralda sees the way the mud seems almost to sizzle where their claws dig into it, the intelligent glint in their eye, and the way that the drifting wind peels wisps of magic off their gray fur. Some might call the creatures monsters, but to her, they could never be something as crude as that. They are the pure beings, those made from light, far better than the creatures of words and buildings that think themselves superior.

  She makes a small movement with her hand as Tanalious approaches, the boards of the uneven porch creaking beneath his heavy boots. Her boys out in the yard relax, settling once more to the ground, neither the mud nor rain bothering them in the least. Izmeralda hugs her worn jacket tighter around herself as she stands, huddling from the freezing rain as she walks back toward the house. She spares a look at Tanalious, trying to puzzle out the man, if any of those in the coven could be called men or women any longer.

  He was like her in a way, an outcast even among outcasts. The change took the once-handsome face of the man and marred it, forcing a pair of strange eyes to grow on his brow and the skin on the left side of his body to turn dry and scaly. She could tell that he had been good-looking once, but he never gave any sign of regretting the loss of his looks. Not like her; Izmeralda was glad to be rid of the face others wanted to stare at, glad that their gazes slid past her now, afraid to look at her. Life was easier that way.

  “I like the rain,” she says. There is a little bit of truth in the words. Since the change, she has felt as if her skin is made of stone, neither warmth nor pain touching her. Pulling the coat around herself, she sees the tremors in her hands, the way her fingertips prune from the nearly frozen water drenching her, but the kiss of the chill is only just within reach. It helps to moor her, a sensation other than the ones that bubble out of her skull, helps to tell her that she didn’t just die that day almost a year ago, that she is a real being and not some figment of a dying girl’s dream.

  Tanalious leads her away from the edge of the porch, back to the cover of shoddy lumber held together by rusted nails. The house he pulls her toward creaks beneath their feet, but it is the push of wind that pulls the most noise from the broken home. The whole town is much the same, a clump of boards barely holding the shape of houses on the bend of the river, their only purpose anymore to give voice to the wind with their groaning.

  Danger screams in her mind the moment she crosses the threshold into the one-room home. Tanalious feels the sudden tension as well, a hand reaching to the big knife he keeps strapped to his thigh, as if that would do anything.

  He sits in the eave of the far window, a wraith that somehow found the only beam of moonlight in the rainstorm, staring toward the river with his gray, dull eyes. His head lulls back, taking his eyes from the rushing water and bringing them to settle on the two in the doorway.

  “Do you imagine that this is what Sigrid means by taking a town quietly?” Ferro asks, his voice a hoarse rasp as he slips off the sill, landing silently on the fractured boards inside the house. “Can’t find a hair of anyone used to live here. You and your furry critters do that, Iz? Never rightly struck me as the subtle kind of creatures.”

  The familiar face does nothing to ease the anxiety creeping over Izmeralda’s unfeeling skin. The man stalking through the room like a cat in front of her is hardly older than a boy, his wiry frame bearing not even a hint of strength or power. His eyes, the blankness lurking in those dark pits, are what make her want to run.

  He had been the one to kill Caberlin. She hadn’t been there to see it, having already begun to sow chaos in the duchy after finding Les’Kariathan sleeping in an underground lair and waking her up, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t heard. Despite how repulsive that Caberlin had been, everyone in the coven, other than Sigrid, had been wary of him. Fire was the one thing they all knew could still kill them despite whatever promises of immortality had been made, and that melted freak had been a master of it. This lanky boy had ended him at Sigrid’s orders, and Izmeralda imagined that he had done it with the same blank look on his face he always wore.

  She puts the lone table in the room between her and Ferro as she steps fully inside. The boy pauses, his eyes tracking a single drip of water falling from the ceiling to land in the puddle on the table. The echo of that falling drop lingers a moment in the room, the sound of the driving rain outside seeming to drop away. Izmeralda clears her throat, tightening her coat around her shivering body, trying to prepare herself to speak to this creature.

  Go there and scare them a bit, Sigrid had said. Ferro didn’t really get it. Was he supposed to be the one to scare these two? Searching his memories, he couldn’t think of a single time that anyone had ever really been scared of him. Once, he had surprised Ginny Grayson as she came around a corner. He’d done it just to hear her squeal, one of the few good memories he could call up.

  It was tainted somewhat by the beating that came after. He remembered that part far better, the way Callum Black had held him down in the road and made him eat dirt in front of the other boys. He’d even had a tooth knocked out that time and was left to cry bloody-mouthed in the street as the other boys ran off. Callum’d said that Ginny was promised to him, their pa's agreed on it. He still thought that beating had been a bit much for scaring a pretty girl, even if she was intended for another boy, but that was how people dealt with him.

  When his pa was tired of looking at him or he’d done something bad, a beating. When the preacher caught him slacking in church or peeking in places he ought not to, a beating. Even girls beat him. The shame he felt as Maddy Lester knocked him over in the street and beat on him with a thick stick still stung enough in his heart that he could even feel the barest touch of emotion at the memory. No one had ever been scared of him, but he knew fear real well. Iz has been a bad girl, Sigrid said, make sure she won’t do that anymore.

  He shudders, eyes slipping away from the shallow pool of water on the table up to Iz. Ferro hates to look at her. She is one of the ones he hates to look at most. Her eyes are black, pupils yellow and square like some kind of sick goat. A curly horn even sprouts out of the right side of her head, and her face is distended in an odd way that makes people uncertain if she is supposed to be a human or a beast. Ferro knew she was neither, same as him, but he didn’t want to be put in the same category as this one.

  “Say again,” he says. “I apologize, was caught up thinking.” Ferro pretends not to see the way the woman shakes beneath her torn coat; it was cold and raining after all.

  “My boys didn’t do this,” Iz repeats. “These people were evacuated to Maidenlake a few weeks ago. Not that I imagine they will miss all of this squalor.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Ferro takes a step forward, ignoring the flinch of Tanaliousat the sudden movement. The surface of the table is rough beneath his fingers, the sodden wood pricking at him as he runs his hand over it. He lingers a moment, the tips of his fingers splashing in the shallow water pooling in the indent in the center of the table. “People have sunny memories of their homes, don’t matter how bad they look to others. Home is something you have.” He looks up, gray eyes capturing Iz. “Well, except people like us. Our home is with our people, not places. Ain’t that right?”

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  “Tha…That’s right,” Iz says.

  “You think so too, Tan?” Ferro asks, turning his gaze on the man trying to blend into the shadows.

  “I serve,” Tanalious says, no hint of fear, suspicion, doubt, or anything else in his voice.

  “Course ya do.” He looks back to Iz. “You’ve not been doing as you were told.”

  “As I am told!” A hint of defiance creeps into the disfigured woman’s voice. “You might be content to be Sigrid’s dog, but that doesn’t mean that I will. She is not my master.”

  Ferro’s head tilts at the words, his eyes roving over the darkness in the room as he digests them. “Dog am I? Well, I suppose you could look at it that way.” He nods, a mirthless laugh rasping from his throat. “Yes, yes, I suppose you could.”

  The sound of Ferro’s laugh sets something off in her mind, dredges up ancient instincts that tell her to bolt right there. She held herself back, forced herself to listen to what could only be some alien creature trying to approximate laughter. The remark she planned to spit at him died on her lips, but Ferro didn’t notice as he gave her no time to speak it anyway.

  “He won’t like that when he arrives.”

  “He?” But of course, she knew who he was talking about. There was only one he that it could be.

  “The master will be coming. He arrives soon, Sigrid says. I’ll make sure to tell Sigrid when I make it back to Danfalla that you don’t serve her. Want me to whisper the same thing to the master, see what he thinks about it?”

  “No!” The sudden terror Iz feels at the mere suggestion makes her scream the word. Her cry continues to bounce around the little house for a moment, becoming smaller and more pleading each time.

  Ferro plasters on a smile, but like his laugh, the wrongness about it makes her shudder. “I am just foolin’, just foolin’ is all.” Opening his coat, he pulls out a bundle of oiled papers bound in leather, setting the bundle on the table. “I know you’re going to do it right now that he’s comin’. There are times that I don’t like getting told what to do either, I get it.” The man stills, letting a silence lapse for a bare few seconds before continuing, his voice once more devoid of any emotion or interest. “You were supposed to have destroyed Maidenlake already.”

  “It isn’t that simple,” Tanalious speaks up, catching the young man’s attention. “Paths to the city have been severed, and every time the monsters begin to muster, the adventurers react immediately.”

  “Is that right?” Ferro asks, turning to look back to Izmeralda.

  “It is,” she lies. “They are too quick to respond. It isn’t easy to control this many monsters, Ferro. They spawn faster than I can leash.”

  He nods. “Yes, yes, of course they do. Sigrid has a plan, though, Iz. It has been working so far, we found the Pillar of Sovereignty. Well, I found it, right where you might expect it to be. The plan was for Maidenlake to be demolished more than a week ago. They have no barrier there, Iz, nothing to keep your little beasties out. I don’t want to know what might happen if he arrives and finds us still not to have the pillar. I don’t want to know what his disappointment looks like.”

  “I understand,” Izmeralda manages to say. The reason she hadn’t yet led her tide against the city was not wholly a lie; the adventurers spilling into the region had acted with more alacrity than she thought them capable of.

  They had confounded her when she gathered the mindless and worthless dregs of the tide, wiping them out every time they grew into a horde. Taking the city wasn’t impossible, but if she really wanted to do it, she would have to commit her children to it, the ones she cared for. They would die, and she would find herself weeping for days.

  She would do it now though, knowing that the master was coming. The idea of earning his displeasure scared her more than anything.

  “It looks like you do,” Ferro says, nodding, patting the bundle of papers he had placed on the table. “Sigrid said you wouldn’t, but I told her that you were a smart girl. I’m glad that I’m right. These papers lay out how Sigrid wants you to move the horde about for the next few weeks. Keep the adventurers runnin’ about, stuff like that. We go for the pillar in five weeks. You should remember what to do then, eh?”

  “Right,” she says. “I know.”

  “Makes me happy to hear.” Ferro turns, taking steps back toward the shaft of moonlight sprinkling in through the window. Halfway to the window, he stops, sighing as he lifts his face toward the ceiling.

  Pain. Izmeralda registers first the pain of a vice-like hand around her throat an instant before her back and skull crash into the wooden boards of the wall. Ferro’s emotionless face stares back at her as she tries to gasp, time almost suspended by the speed and violence of the attack, splinters from the demolished table that had once been between them still twisting and turning in the air.

  Takila, a viper beast and her closest guard, hisses as it strikes from the shadows of the ceiling. Izmeralda tries to cry out, to tell the snake to stop, but not even a faint sound can escape her clenched throat. Ferro’s free hand lashes out at the striking snake, his fingers tight around its scaled neck and sinking into its flesh. The beast hisses a deathly wail as its body roils and contorts, the beastial scream morphing into a metallic whine as its body straitens and turns to dark iron in a fraction of a second. Before Tanalious can even take a step forward, Ferro has the edge of his new sword against the man’s throat.

  The three still, the splinters of the table falling from the air and clattering to the floor. “You said somethin’ to me,” Ferro says, his grip on Izmeralda’s throat tightening. “Somthin’ that I didn’t like much.”

  Izmeralda kicks, her feet scrapping the floor. Her hand wraps around Feero’s forearm, her nails scratching into the man’s flesh. Despite the gashes she digs into his arm, his fingers don’t relax in the slightest. She sputters, trying to choke out words, but he won’t let her.

  “I don’t much like being called a dog,” Ferro says. There is something in the creaking of her vertebrae as he turns the pretty side of her face toward him that almost sparks emotion in him. He can’t rightly place why, but there’s something to it. “If ugly women start talking down to me like that, what am I to do? It hurts me down in my heart, Iz. Hurts me somethin’ fierce.”

  “I..ack…aaak.”

  “Hmm?” Ferro lessens the tension in his hand just a bit, just so much that her face might not turn so hot as that. “Somethin’ you want to say?”

  “I…I am….I’m sorry,” Izmeralda chokes. Tears leak from her eyes as he scratches at the arm. “I’m sorry.”

  “You know, I think I believe you.” The smile that spreads over his face is genuine in the most terrible way. His grip on the woman’s throat does not relent. “You know, Iz. You’re more of a dog than me, aren’t ya? Out there all the time with the beasts, must got you confused. It weren’t me you meant to call a dog, was it?”

  “No.” Her voice comes out dry and cracked.

  “That’s what I thought. You’re the dog, aren’t you? Why don’t you bark for me? Bark like a dog should.”

  She can barely see him anymore for the water in her eyes. She doesn’t need any time to throw away her shame as she kicks in the man’s grasp as she tries to choke for air. Izmeralda does what he wants, she tries to bark, she whines. The sounds are so pitiful to her own ears that she can’t imagine she is the one making them. Just as the world begins to swim into the dark, the terrible pressure on her throat vanishes, and she falls to the floor. Izmeralda stares up sideways through a hazy world as Ferro walks over to Tanalious and shares a few words with him, but whatever they’re saying comes as indistinct to her ears.

  Her body begins to recover quickly, but she doesn’t dare to move from the floor. Ferro’s boots pace back into view, the man stopping in front of her until she looks up at him.

  “I’ll be taking Tan; he has a job to do back in Danfalla. We’re moving toward the end of this, so make sure you start steppin’ right. You’re going to have to find your way back.”

  The two men walk away from her, Tanalious stopping at the wall of the house and sparing her a sad glance before he begins to draw symbols on the wall. A moment later, a rectangle of light stands out against the wooden facade, a portal elsewhere that Tanalious steps through.

  Ferro moves to follow but pauses a moment, turning back to look at her. With a flick of his wrist, the crude, iron sword he carries sails across the room, stabbing and sticking into the floor in front of her. “That’s yours, I think,” he says before stepping through the portal in the wall.

  Izmeralda curls in on herself, pulling her coat tight, her body shaking from more than just the cold now.

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