The Dark does not hunger. The Dark does not cradle.
The Dark answers, and the Dark calls.
/
The first of the children who earns them the name of Saintsmaker watches them wait; she may be a Heart-Seer, and she may not. They are not yet certain. She watches the world with a Heart-Seer’s eyes; it is said, too, that she has been found in a trance outside the catacombs—where the air is yet thick with the primal’s aether, even years after its slaying—but she has not yet spoken a prophecy.
The Saintsmaker does not need her to. They have their own prophecies to speak enough, become more vivid than ever in the child’s proximity. In truth, they have taken her into their keeping for the rumour of the catacombs alone: even without a Heart-Seer’s gift, she is an amplifier. Of this they are certain.
When the Dark speaks, it is their duty to listen. In the catacombs it has whispered her into being, called her to its bosom as it once called the Saintsmaker themself.
In the time when they were still purely and utterly flesh and bone. In the time before Blackram’s callous, misguided usurping of the Dark. Now, their right hand is cold and unfeeling—but sensate in its own ways—where Blackram’s was death.
Never will it rot. The Dark will ever live on in the hand they have given to it; they will reclaim it if they must purge the catacombs of Blackram’s primal with their own.
Their little would-be saint says, “What are we waiting for?”
And the Saintsmaker replies, “Why do you say we are waiting?”
“Because you are.”
There: the Dark shows itself through her. She stares at the Saintsmaker as though they are every question and every answer.
“We are waiting, child,” they say, touching their right hand to her hair, “for the blood of the first martyr to return home. And it will, in due time.”
/
“I feel like I’m doing some kind of wrong,” Gawain confessed.
“To the boy,” Avis asked keenly, ripping up the last of the bloodstained floorboards, “or to Wulf?”
“I— Both? Wulf? I’m worried he’ll see it as a betrayal. Like we’re getting rid of…”
“I don’t know about you, Gav, but if I died in a tavern, I wouldn’t want a bunch of drunk bastards trampling and spitting and spilling ale over the place I died. And if I owned a tavern—which Wulfric does—I wouldn’t want to have a blood-covered floor welcoming folks in.”
“I know,” Gawain sighed.
“And maybe it isn’t fair to say, but if Wulf wanted to have a say in what we do up here, he’d have stayed,” Avis said—a remnant of bitterness, of hurt.
Gawain met this with a dark look. “No, it isn’t fair.”
“Well, it’s done. We’re all going to have to live with it.”
He considered the pile of blood-dark wood a moment, then said, “Best burn them. So all of him can rest.”
Avis nodded as she rose, dusting her hands off.
“We could ask Wulf if he wants to be there. He didn’t even show up to the funeral.”
If he hadn’t even been able to get himself up a hill, Avis had no high hopes for Wulfric crawling out from whatever hole he’d slunk into in his grief now, but she didn’t say that. She just put a hand on Gawain’s shoulder and said, “Let’s put them outside while I finish up here, yeah? Then we’ll go look for him.”
Gawain helped her carry out the old wood into the alley, and they laid the new floorboards together, clean and quick. The new wood was far paler than the old, unworn and untouched by years of sun; once Gawain pushed himself up to stand and considered their work, he took the sight in with growing unease. Maybe the blood was gone, but the place wouldn’t let go of the boy Marco’s death. It would not let it be forgotten.
When they returned outside, the bloodstained boards were gone.
/
“See?” says the Saintsmaker, both hands on their little saint’s shoulders. They stand together on the edge of the Saintsmaker’s territory, watching as the martyr’s blood returns home. “It is as I said.”
“How did you get them to find it?” asks the child.
“I did nothing of the sort, my dear; my hands were still, and did not toil towards an end. I only knew he would come back to us.”
Those were the first words Avis spoke to Freyja upon coming home from the palace one afternoon; no hello, no kiss upon her cheek.
“I just put her down,” Freyja replied. Then, before Avis could reprimand her for not being asleep herself, she added: “I was about to lie down.”
Avis just shook her head at the defense. “Good. That gives us a reason to whisper,” she said, something frantic animating her voice: the soldier in her had come alive, turning her gaze sharp and wary as she latched the front door and checked the windows.
Avis opened her fur-lined thaumaturge’s coat and took a compact journal from one of the pockets she’d sewn into it herself—complaining about palace mages and their lack of resourcefulness all the while.
“I was— foolish,” she admitted, and placed the journal on Freyja’s desk, right on top of a pile of papers bearing the seal of the king’s own scribe. “Radulf sent me to the archives to look for some alchemical records earlier; obscure shite. I was alone down there for all of five minutes. I think they’re trying to get rid of traces of… I don’t know. But I picked this up from a desk that had ashes beside it.”
Freyja, like any good politician, only eyed the journal before her: if she didn’t look, she would not know. Even if her wife was but moments from involving her, irrevocably. Avis opened the journal and tapped a finger against the pages.
“This is Queen Eivor’s hand, Frey. The whole thing. And someone was going to get rid of it.”
“So you stole it,” Freyja finished for her, as though this were not the most obvious part of their whole conversation.
“I wasn’t thinking. It was in my hand, and then it was in my pocket, and by the time I realized what a monumental fuck-up it was, turning back would have just made it worse,” Avis said. She was aware, then, of how very much she sounded like Wulfric—and that just made her feel as though she were pressed against something too sharp, so she turned her mind firmly back towards the book.
“I didn’t have much time to look inside,” she went on, “but I think it has to do with the Glaive. Not officially; she always used the same ink for official Glaive business, and this isn’t it. I think she and Ysbrand—” she made a warding sign as she spoke his name; had she been outdoors, she would have simply spat— “liked operating like spies.”
More of the same bitterness. Freyja knew to identify it from the sound of Avis’s voice alone, and to address it without words. She touched her wrist and made her sit, taking upon herself to flip through the pages.
“Please tell me I haven’t stolen state secrets,” Avis said, pressing her fingertips to the bridge of her nose. “I’ve had enough of being one step removed from high treason for two lifetimes.”
“In fairness, you got a wife out of the first time, so it can only get worse from here,” replied Freyja distractedly through her inspection, like a reflex.
For a foreigner, she had a masterful grasp on Ala Mhigan humour, and it made Avis smile; the knot in her shoulders came loose, if only for a moment. And then Freyja paused over one specific page, her brows knitting together as she sat up straighter, and Avis knew to dread what was coming even before she opened her mouth to speak.
“She wrote of the gift of her magic and how she passed it on to the Glaive.”
“She wrote about it?” Avis said, her shock palpable. “What—so someone could replicate it?”
“No. Not intentionally, at least. I don’t think she meant to leave a record; this reads like a woman talking to herself. Not to posterity.” Freyja read on. “The toll it took on her…”
Avis couldn’t bear stillness anymore; she stood and began pacing the floor of Freyja’s study. She remembered the toll the queen’s gift took on her Glaives, if anything: the vomiting and nosebleeds of warping and overexertion, the chills and tremors that had racked Gawain from disuse after the loss of his leg had taken him from active duty. The emptiness they had felt once the magic died with her. In that, she had been lucky, to always have her own magic. It had tempered the queen’s, kept her whole, helped her cheat death.
“Avis,” said Freyja quietly. “I think I understand what she did. How she did it.”
She had her forehead cradled against her palm, her gaze lost in the distance: a familiar state for Avis to witness. Here, they named the gift fate-walking; in Nhalmasque, it had earned her the royal title of Oracle. Avis remembered the reverence Wulfric had shown it, in spite of the knot Nhalmasque had formed inside him.
Avis bit down on the inside of her cheek and watched her wife walk across the lines of Queen Eivor’s memories.
“You could replicate her gift? The queen’s magic?” she heard herself ask, unthinking. Through another who should have been queen, the Glaive could live on—but that was a pointless hope she didn’t want to have.
As if the Queenglaive could be put back together, splintered inside the few of them who remained.
“She wrote of her gift like water in a stream. Suitable candidates for the Queensglaive acted as vessels—she would touch her gift to this vessel, and fill it to the shape of her peculiar magic. I can see that shape in my mind.”
When Avis said nothing in reply, Freyja looked up, her pale blue eyes steady on her wife. “Would you want it?” she asked in turn—and Avis knew that if she said yes, Freyja would give it to her.
Not Freyja, perhaps, but rather Celes: the Oracle Queen-in-Waiting of Nhalmasque.
“No,” Avis replied, her voice hoarse. The queen was dead, her Glaive no more, and it had cost them everything. “Never again.”
She had a gift of her own, and a life beyond the horrors of the past; let it be enough. For her, it could be. Like she and Saskia were to Freyja, and all of them and Rinomy’s were to Gawain.
She didn’t want to think of the hollows of Wulfric’s absence and all the ways it screamed that to him, nothing would never be enough again.
Gawain lingered in the antechamber longer than he should. By now, the whole of the Glaive was already lined up inside the Hall of the Griffin, awaiting the beginning of the ceremony—and here he was, still in front of Avis, fussing with her collar like a mother at her daughter’s nuptials.
She was strangely calm; if she’d been nervous herself, she would have swatted at him until he stopped hovering around her. Instead her eyes were rooted in focus, her spine straight: gone were the rounded shoulders, the half-bowed head, the hair worn long and messy like a veil to obscure her face. She looked like a soldier.
The doors opened from the inside, just wide enough for the captain to slip through, twice as imposing in his dress uniform as he was on any given day. He gave Gawain a jerk of his head towards the hall.
“Shift it, Everard.”
“Aye, sir,” Gawain said, smoothing his hands down Avis’s arms one last time. He gave her a nod, and though he should have dearly wanted to be at her side in Ysbrand’s place, he went and waited with the others.
Ysbrand gave Avis’s uniform a quick once-over—unnecessary, given Gawain’s fussing, but he was a man who left nothing to chance—then nodded.
“Ready?”
“Aye, sir.”
He readjusted his own sash and collar and rested a hand against the hilt of his sword. Then, instead of simply opening the door and walking in, he paused.
“I have to admit,” he said, in his deep wind-gust voice, “I had my reservations about you. Mostly your age, and the Greyhunt-Everard factor—I run a unit of elite soldiers, not a schoolyard. But you surpassed both my expectations and your initial promise.”
Avis blinked in surprise; her mouth went dry, unused to praise as she was. “Thank you, sir.”
“I wasn’t finished, recruit,” Ysbrand said. A hint of a smile showed on his lips—and from him, that was something even greater than praise. “What I meant to say is: I will be proud to call you a Glaive.”
“So will I, captain.”
With that, he opened the doors and strode into the hall—and Avis followed, two steps behind him as tradition dictated. The light inside the throne room blinded her, golden-white through the high windows; she brought herself into sharp attention with the shadows of her fellow Glaives standing in a row of black with only the flash of white sashes around their waists. Gawain stood at the very end of the line, nearest to the dais.
Beside him, Wulfric caught Avis’s eye and winked, conspiratorial.
As they came to a halt at the foot of the stairs, the queen drifted in. She stood beside her husband’s throne in her white dress, with its flowing silks and high collar, and the griffin feathers at her shoulders—like pauldrons on armour. It was Avis’s first glimpse of the Griffin’s Bride, and it cut her breath short: the halo of light that seemed to cling to her, the sharp promise of the rapier at her side, the enthralling surety of her black eyes looking down on Avis.
Desperately, she wanted her queen to see the woman who would serve her, and not the little girl she felt she was in that moment. She was glad for the protocol that bowed her head and obliged her captain to speak for her. When he knelt, so did she.
“My queen,” he said, high and clear—like the voice that gave them orders, but deferential, almost loving. “I present Avis Emery to be your blade.”
Ysbrand stood and stepped aside; Avis now knelt alone before the queen, and her breath trembled in her lungs. She unsheathed her lance, and as it sprung to its full size with a smooth click, held it in her open palms to surrender it before the queen. Only once it lay at the foot of the stair and out of her reach did the queen descend to stand over her.
Avis’s body hummed at her proximity—down to her very bones, the well of magic in her called to that of her queen. Her fingers itched to grab her hand, to feel the surge the others had told her to expect, to submerge herself within it.
She spoke with a dry heaviness in her mouth. “I am yours, my queen.”
“If you are to be mine,” said the queen, commanding even as she spoke softly, like telling a secret, “then I shall take you for my glaive, and wield you with honour. If you give me your oaths, I shall forge them into a blade.”
With this, the queen took up her rapier; and like Avis had presented her with her lance, she presented Avis with her own sword. Avis took the hilt with one hand and the blade with the other. She hadn’t decided, yet, what she might do with it; Gawain had given his knee, he said, and Wulfric his hand. The gift of flesh was theirs to choose, and to ponder at will.
But in her queen’s presence, Avis thought nothing. Her mind was empty, filled only with instinct and that buzzing thrill of whispering magic.
She thrust the blade into her abdomen, just above her hip. Not deep, but the pain was blinding; her hands shook around the queen’s rapier, and her breath came in a tremor. She wouldn’t make a sound, not a whimper. Let her queen see nothing but her strength.
The queen bent over her, and covered her hand at the hilt with hers so that they held it together. And there, joined, she poured a bit of her gift into Avis: it shot through her in a burst of colour, her body alight with sparks, the blood thrumming in her ears with the force of an ocean.
Avis did not scream. She only gasped, gulping air through her thirsting lungs as though she were drowning, her hands cold as ice under the queen’s burning touch.
The queen guided her hand to pull the rapier from her body, leaving behind no wound—only blood on the blade.
“Rise, Glaive,” said the queen, “and be welcomed by your brothers.”
“For hearth and home,” Ysbrand declared, his words echoed by the whole of the Queensglaive.
“For hearth and home,” Avis said, dizzy and feverish and swelling with pride—and if Ysbrand or the queen noticed how her eyes went to Gawain and Wulfric as she spoke the words, she never knew.
