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I was late; the meeting had likely already started in my absence. I couldn’t summon the energy to be at all worried about it.
A strange atmosphere hovered in the dark corridors – not panic, but something headier, the sense of hundreds of people holding their breath for news to arrive. Little groups were standing around wherever I walked, more and more of them the closer I got to my destination. Some of them turned to ask questions – ‘Is Zerareallyalive, Emelin?’ – but most of them just whispered among each other as I passed, and none of them seemed surprised when I didn’t stop to answer them. No one pressed for a response. I couldn’t tell if I had my own growing reputation to thank for it or Alyra, who sat perched on my shoulder and glared murderously at everyone who made the mistake of coming within five feet of me.
Definitely me, her huffy look at me said.
‘Probably you,’ I muttered.
She contently ruffled her feathers.
The corridor that gave access to the Svirla home was, hardly surprising, the busiest of all. Without an audience, I might have hesitated when I reached that rune-covered front door behind which handfuls of people were waiting to tell me I was making the wrong choices in roughly every inhumanly imaginable way. Now, with a few dozen nymphs and alves staring at my back, I bit away my doubt and grabbed the doorhandle without faltering, pushing into the narrow hallway beyond.
A cacophony of voices washed over me.
I slipped inside and hastily closed the door behind me, even though it seemed unlikely that anyone outside would be able to make out a sensible word from the noise, let alone a full string of thought. It took me a minute and a half of standing therebetween the boots and the coats to get some idea of what the fuss was all about – not the phoenixes, surprisingly, or even me, but rather …
The bindings.
‘… deserve to get priority …’ a shrill nymph’s voice shrieked on the other side of the door. ‘After that massacre …’
‘… no children before the battle anyway …’ someone else was arguing – a vampire, judging by the guttural accent.
‘… perhaps a lottery …’ a female voice sounding on the brink of tears weakly suggested.
The order. The realisation rose in me too slowly, with an incredulous, strangely detached sensation of bewilderment – they were fighting about theorderin which they might be unbound. Which would presumably have to be decided at some point, for practical reasons if for nothing else … but good gods, was that really the first thing to start bickering about?
Then again, at least it wasn’t those gods-damned phoenix demands.
I sucked in a final breath for courage and opened the last door to step into the brightly lit, glittering heart of Valdora’s territory.
The Svirla living room was like a magpie’s nest, every free inch of it filled with spoils of war and ancient heirlooms. Against that backdrop of swords, helmets, and richly detailed golden armour, the mayhem of the conversation seemed even more surreal: vampires stood shouting at each other with fangs bared, nymphs were banging their little fists on the marble table, and several alves gave the impression that nothing but guest rights and house sanctuary was keeping them from shedding blood. There couldn’t be more than twenty people in the room altogether, but theysoundedlike half an army, and through the throng of sweeping and gesticulating limbs, it took me a moment to make out any familiar faces at all.
But they were there. Of course they were there.
Lyn was sitting on the other side of the room, quiet but with a glower that suggested she wouldn’t need much encouragement to set some coats on fire. Next to her, Tared slouched in his chair, staring unfazedly at his nails as a blue-haired nymph wailed about her mother’s legacy. Naxi had curled up in a leather chair in the back of the room, looking small and morose, and Nenya was sitting straight-backed on the left side of the table, back to her usual impeccable and mildly frightening look – bright red nails and lips, perfectly drawn eyebrows, black hair braided into a crown-like structure. She looked ready to gnaw a few more heads off, and after the state in which I’d seen her at Zera’s temple, that was oddly reassuring.
None of them seemed to notice me.
‘I’mtellingyou,’ a blond vampire male in ruffled shirt and waistcoat bellowed, every word sharp with frustration, ‘that it makes no sense to start with anyone but the vampires! We can create new vampires inminutes! If we need a larger army before the battle starts—’
‘And what about our magic, then?’ snapped a nymph with scaly skin and pearls dangling from her ears. ‘I’d rather have ten nymphs who know how to use their unbound magic in a fight than a hundred brand new vampires who haven’t even figured out how to bite yet!’
‘Has anyone considered,’ an alf female drawled, ‘that we aren’t getting anywhere if fading turns out to be restricted by binding magic, too?’
‘Fading hasneverbeen restricted by—’
‘But didn’t Lyn say the bindings might start taking wider effect as the war progresses? Lyn?Lyn?That is what you said, isn’t—’
‘Evening,’ I said.
They whipped around as if the Mother herself had blown open the door to join the discussion.
If I hadn't been tired and furious and frustrated, it would have been amusing to see the lot of them inelegantly fall silent – eyes widening, jaws sagging, their furious stances suddenly comedic as they froze in their places. It felt like interrupting a poorly written play. Like catching a bunch of children red-handed with their fingers in the cookie jar, spoiling their little game … except the children were immortals with centuries of life behind them, and the cookies might or might not be the advantages we desperately needed to win a war.
None of these people, my thoughts decided to remind me in that moment, had been drinking tea with a goddess mere days ago.
None of these people had ever carried the hurt of the world in their hands.
My tired, overburdened mind seemed to spin away from itself as that realisation spiralled out of control. I could see myself standing in the doorway all of a sudden, in violent red, my little familiar on my shoulder – in no way resembling the twenty-one-year-old girl I knew from the inside, the girl still wrestling to make sense of the world around her. The woman standing there, head high and back straight, looked like a godsworn mage in all her glory. Like a weapon, like someone who knew exactly what she was doing, like—
