The Romance of the Demigods {Excerpt}

Kesh was still growing accustomed to walking around as herself.

Her grin was as wide as her stomach was twisted. The lively wind of late spring that ambled through the market alley did tug through her rusty curls, and at points blew them right into her dark eyes, as if to remind her that she was really doing this. That when she sauntered past the stalls and the wares therein, what the merchants and townsfolk would see when their eyes drifted over her (for truly she looked nothing special) was not the skin of one invented or imitated, but the light brown into which she had been born. And the freckles that stippled her arms, her neck, and her cheeks, blushing from the glee, had been splashed there by no intention save the Sun's itself (or Himself, for they were in Host country).

She had always thought she'd sooner pick a pit to drown in than find herself strutting around in her true face not a full day's ride (even on a shitty horse) from the capital. But Cora had a way of speaking the most outrageous designs into something that resembled reason. Or, at the very least, into something that seemed more worthwhile than lethal. He and his tongue of many talents.

Kesh could not help herself. Every twenty paces or so, she cast a look over her shoulder, just to see that he was still with her. And there he was, every time. Sometimes, she caught his gaze following her—a green that reminded Kesh of lying beneath a tree and looking up into leaves through which sunlight might peek. To this, to his watch, she was more than accustomed.

This time, when she looked back, his eyes were turned elsewhere. Far away. Shifting, as if searching the middle distance for something unseeable. Lost in thought, no doubt dreaming up lyrics. She wondered if he'd sing any more about her—those were her favorite.

Kesh could summon no reason not to take advantage of Cora's reverie. With a deft turn on her leather-clad heel, she slipped unnoticed into the stream of market-goers meandering back the way she'd come.

It was done easily enough. It always was. Bouquets of clustered bodies were a home to her—safe harbor from eyes that would pry and seek in malice. Kesh rarely felt safer—one tile in the mosaic, one fish in the shimmering school. She would even, at her cheekiest, exit a throng of townspeople appearing wholly different than when she'd entered. And they would revile her if they ever knew, but while they didn't, they were as shelter in a rainstorm.

Kesh took her sweet time sneaking up on him. Cora looked different from behind—broader, stiffer. Even beneath his tunic, she could see his shoulders held tensely straight and back. The littlest things about him now became foreboding, even the way his black hair curled just below the nape of his neck—that very lock she had twisted about her finger many a languid morning. Without sight of the faraway kindness in his eyes, he looked the kind of person Kesh felt in her gut and her spine it would be wisest to dodge.

He did not hear her in the afternoon bustle. Kesh threaded an unhurried trail in his wake, running her tongue along the edges of her teeth as she considered how she might reveal herself to him.

After several moments of good-natured sneaking, she spied the unease that had settled over him. Cora's hands worked into fists that flexed and rolled in growing distress. His head swung on his neck to face in one direction, then another.

Her nose wrinkled in amusement, and a grin bloomed beneath. He was looking for her.

Kesh spent a breath imagining those eyes of his in such a frenzy—she would normally have to work much harder for him to let her see his agitation. She might have swooned.

An indulgent moment slunk by before Kesh forewent her stealth.

When an arm soft and sure snaked its way round his waist, Cora visibly jolted. Kesh let her hand rest against his hip, her thumb hooking through the leather that belted his verdant tunic. By the time those eyes came to rest on her, she was beaming. He was not.

"Gods a—bove, Kesh..." He caught himself, for they were in Host country.

"Hail, troubadour."

Her toothy grin failed to disarm him. Cora exhaled soundly through his nose. Where he would typically berate her for disrupting his artistic musings, he now said nothing. Kesh saw myriad expressions tug almost imperceptibly at his eyes, his nose, his lips. The musician was, for once, largely inscrutable to her.

She was proud of herself, however, for noticing the half-moment of his eyes darting towards the middle of the crowded thoroughfare. He was trying to understand what he'd missed. He hadn't recognized her walking the opposite direction—in her woolen skirt, in her plain bodice clasping a homespun shirt low against her torso.

And when his eyes ran over her face—her face—she saw how it unsettled him.

Kesh refused to stand in silence for much longer. "It was your idea," she said, punctuating her reminder with a bump of her hip against his.

With one hand, Cora tucked behind his ear a strand of his dark hair. In kinder light, strands of it shone cherry.

"Aye. So it was." His shoulders rolled a shrug he was not relaxed enough to truly mean. With nary a brush of his fingertips across the skin of her shoulder, nor a playful tug at her curls, he continued walking.

Urgency tugged her along behind him. "What's pricked you?" she asked. Her manner belied the growing worry pulsing its way through her viscera. As they went, her hand hovered an uncertain orbit above the small of his back.

"Nothing." He would not face her again. She strained to hear him above the din.

Kesh's eyes narrowed, and her lips parted as an impulsive response perched at the ready. Cora was a sensitive bastard—an artist, a master of word and tune. And Kesh would have bet her own accursed lifeblood that he had never, at any point in the twelve moons for which she'd traveled by his side, successfully concealed displeasure from her.

She let her palm fall against his back as she peered up at him, smiling. "You worried for me."

For a moment, he was quiet. Kesh wondered if she'd missed his response beneath the noise. Then: "You are one to worry after."

He said it, for some reason, as if it weren't a compliment.

She swerved fluidly to avoid an oncoming flurry of little ones—a gaggle of wee girls moving with the force and purpose of a lifetime. Likely, they hunted for the source of one of many savory scents that drifted above and through the moving crowd. She recalled an elderly gent hawking some meat pies a ways back. The chatter of the girls fired in Kesh the impulse to turn and follow them.

She refocused on Cora just in time to see him fussing again at his hair—a habit bred from agitation. This time, she noticed the bandage wrapped about his right hand. His strumming hand, still healing.

It was her doing. It had been some two moons ago that she'd decided to take that step with Cora. Only ten days ago had she finally taken the ink to him. Bards, she'd seen before. Traveled with. Tumbled with. But in him she had wanted so badly to see something real.

So, she did.

Kesh tilted her head. "How's y—"

"Fine," he said.

She frowned. "I can take another look at it, if it's—"

"Kesh." At the way his voice bristled, her hand froze where it had begun to dig into her skirt pocket. "It's fine. It's just been sore."

Her practiced hand retreated from her pocket, from what was concealed within.

"Fine." She shrugged, falling into step behind him. She was not unaccustomed to the minor tempests of Cora's moods. Though she was used to earning them readily—typically by rousing him shortly after dawn, when she could no longer wait patiently for him to awaken of his own volition. Or, when she sang the ballads grossly off-key when accompanying his lute, just to make the rest of the troupe laugh.

This day, she had done nothing of the sort. She had been careful. It was no small thing, allowing her to ink his skin—even in this small way. And she was grateful for it. She was fairly certain, after all, that she loved him.

So she had done nothing wrong. Of this, Kesh was certain. She could only assume that it was her appearance what caused his distress. Her appearance, by his own suggestion. It baffled the mind. She resolved, then, to pretend that she did not notice how pissy he was. It was late spring, after all, and Kesh could not spare the whole of her attention on Cora's attitude. For all that she loathed Host country, there was romance abound.

They were left no choice but to alter their path to curve around the various flocks of young hopefuls. The young men and women, boisterous in their contest of strength, crowded now around one such contraption the clergy of the Sonnelic Host would erect for the occasion—a dark wooden tower, no taller than a man.

Kesh sucked in a sharp breath as one of the women brought the solid mallet down on the target platform. The puck rose and rose, and for a moment even looked as if it might ring the silver bell that sat atop the tower. But it didn't.

At once, there was argument. Before the puck had even begun its descent in earnest, Kesh counted several cries of outrage and more obscenities than she could track on one hand. 'It rose to here'; 'No, you dumb cunt, it didn't go higher than there', and the like. They had narrowed their contention down to mere fractions of inches before distance and flowing bodies obscured the youths from Kesh's view. The New Way faithful would always be strange to her, but there was no celebration in all of Brennenhaugh so enticing and red-blooded as Paeonia.

By the vigor pulsing in the space between the close and swarming revelers, Kesh could tell that the Sonnelic courting season was near its peak. The energy heightened as they moved along the way, deeper into the heart of Cill Tossach. Heedless young people jostled Cora as he shouldered a way through them. Close in his wake, Kesh glanced about with hungry eyes. If they were lucky, she reckoned, they might happen by a gods-honest brawl or two, on their way about the market. Paeonia was about the only thing that might bid her whisper the tiniest wish that she might be welcomed among those that kept the Sonnelic Host.

Cora, in his brooding, provided an excellent shield from the excited bodies. He was lean—leaner than she usually preferred—but his forward movement was firm, absolute.

Until a girl barreled into him at speed, knocking him staggering sideways. Kesh stopped, teetering in her boots, only just in time to save her temple from bashing against Cora's shoulder.

A flutter of golden hair cut a jagged path across the way. The young woman turned back the way she'd come, brushing her mane out of a ruddy and beaming face. In an upward-thrust fist, she clutched a length of leather. A buckle glinted in the sunlight. A belt.

The girl halted, perched on the balls of her feet. Waiting. Chattering townsfolk gave her a wide berth, eager to avoid being bowled over in the fever of chase.

Her pursuer was not far behind—surprising, given his circumstances. The young man was a handsome creature, with a long braid and lovely tan. For all that he might have rivaled a painting standing still, he was an unfortunate thing in motion. He shuffled with haste between person and person, one hand clasped firmly around the cloth of his trousers, holding them up to protect his decency.

Kesh watched his faltering gait with unabashed interest as he shambled by. By the sheen of sweat on his cheeks, they had been at the chase for some time. But his smile was one of irksome amusement. He was not the sort to despair easily. And his girl was not one to make this easy for him.

He called out what must have been her name—Kesh wasn't listening, not really. The girl snickered and disappeared betwixt a pair of cluttered stalls, nearly toppling a simmering pot or two to the pavestones. To the amusement of all, the beautiful young man hurried awkwardly in her wake. Kesh watched him go. It all looked so fun.

She looked to Cora. He had stopped to wait for her, with his arms crossed over his jerkin. He did not face her, but his eyes watched her closely. Noting, she thought with a jolt, that her attention had been pulled away from him. And when he was already so melancholy.

Without a moment's thought, Kesh smiled up at him. As if she hadn't briefly considered snatching his belt right off of him—had he been in more of a chasing mood.

A delighted shriek rang in the distance. In the grand clamor of the city's heart, it was one of many. Cora turned away. She followed him.



For all that a silence grew between them, the weight of it was naught against the noise, the unceasing noise of the marketplace. Squabbling, bargaining, and taunting enticed Kesh from all sides—the infinite promise of excitement that would be hers with the right nod of her head, or gesture of her hand. If not for Cora.

His displeasure compelled her, a hound's leash. As they went, her mind struggled against the threat of overwhelm. No matter where she turned, she could not dispel the heat within her head that attuned to his presence, a compass nestled somewhere inside her skull. And the sounds continued, and continued. And she was openly, entirely herself—in a place such as this. The thrill sent prickles across her skin.

She eyed the hands, arms, and necks of passersby—frequently adorned with charms of iron, as was common in these parts of Brennenhaugh. These parts where paladins patrolled in threes, where those who kept the Old Way were themselves safe, but the Fae they revered were not. Kesh kept her bare arms close, lest the stray brush of a stranger's iron ring send her sizzling and yelping into the arms of the nearest paladin.

Once, years ago, in a tavern back eastward, she had overheard a conversation—an addled New Way fellow blathering with grave urgency to his ale-drowsy companions about the wandering shapechanger. Its cunning. Its wicked designs. Its perverse adoption of human form.

Kesh recalled blushing into her tankard. It was the occasion on which she first learned of her other name: Demifae, they called her.

She would go on to listen, from time to time, to what the commonfolk at large would say about her. There was even truth to some of it. The Demifae menace stalked the eastern moorlands, where it ambled from village to village, seducing men and women away from their families to feed from their flesh and spirits. Or, it haunted the wooded townships west of the capital, entrapping hapless parents in insidious pacts in exchange for the lives of their abducted babes. It slew livestock for the joy of it. It lit whole fields and pastures aflame. In any form, it was utterly indistinguishable from any other human. Or, in the right light, one might catch a glimpse of iridescence on its skin, a shimmer where its wings should be, or the phantasmal image of beflowered horns sprouting from its forehead. There were many of its kind. Or, there was only the one.

The one consensus was that no decent folk ever had to worry about this sort of thing generations past. Not like in these days, when capricious Fae flooded whole towns; when large, aberrant, savage beasts terrorized the roads; when the conniving Demifae might kill your husband and steal his shape just for a lark.

All manner of things she had heard—from the mouths of strangers, traveling companions, bedmates. The Sonnelic Church had been hard at work. And now she orbited close to its heart. On his urging. Kesh could not help herself. As her head buzzed, a frown found her lips. He had been so pleased when he'd first had the idea—turning northward where the long span of the road Vranca split at the heart of the kingdom. Northward, Cora had said, where those 'New Way ninnies' had frightened off all the good bards with their superstition. Where the people would be about starving for a good show. A place that needed a reminder of what made the troubadours so great.

Delighted, he had taken her hands in his, as her mind had churned. And what's greater, he had asked, than a bard and a Fae? They were a pair like the grand troupers of old, he'd said. Now that he had a piece of her name inked into his skin, they would always be so. Just like in the oldest of romances, the most persistent of ancient ballads.

But she had stopped listening by then. She had already talked herself into it.

And now they were lodged deep within Cill Tossach, and he wouldn't even look at her. The burning, guiding star in her head, which pointed her right towards his back, would not let her forget, for now.

Thus she was beckoned along, company to Cora's misery, for some time.

When she first caught the music, it was barely audible over the chattering and jesting of a nearby gaggle of young men. Kesh's shoulders straightened. As she jerked her head upwards to listen closer, a few copper curls came free from the loose ribbon that bound her hair. The music wove around market stalls and swishing skirts to greet her like an excited old friend.

Kesh surged forward. She landed the flat of her palm sharp and solid between Cora's shoulder blades. While he whirled to catch a glimpse of her, she was already dodging between body and body. She tossed one look back, in time to see the startle on his face give way to offense, then panic. His arms had just started uncrossing themselves before he became obscured from her sight. She followed the song.

Her body did what was necessary to propel itself forward at speed. At several points, she was forced to twist sideways or toss her hands skyward in order to avoid smacking into any of the warm, breathing obstacles that clogged the way. It was sheer fortune what protected her skin from grazing iron.

After the crowded market street, the plaza felt wide and damn near infinite. But it was far from empty. Its paved expanse allowed several bubbles of excited youth to congregate about. And there—situated by the bubbling marble fountain, the song beckoned to Kesh from behind a scattering of onlookers.

As she approached, the song clarified itself more and more. A string—a fiddle—jovial and lilting, with a voice to match. By the way the tune would abruptly switch between light and brash, Kesh got the sense that she was more overhearing a conversation than anything else. The words were yet indistinct to her.

Her height would not allow her to see over heads and shoulders. But here, in the cradle of savagery, such a simple thing as morphing her stature was like to get her stabbed to death. She was forced once again to worm her way between people. They parted like stubborn, grumpy weeds. The unseen player continued her conversation with herself.

Only it was not so. The unseen player, herself, was two.

A pair of girls, each a fiddle in hand. One sawed lightly away at the strings. As fine and deliberate as her touch was, Kesh was amazed at how it had carried as far as it had. The girl's voice was a prim thing—Kesh thought of a haughty bird preening itself. Her perfect double looked perfectly bored, bouncing the hand that held her bow against her thigh. But the instant before the first sister finished her verse, the second whipped her instrument into position. The duet continued seamlessly.

Twins! Kesh thought, stupidly astonished.

It was a conversation, just as she'd thought. The song was an argument. The more Kesh listened, the more she realized that it was, undeniably, New Way music. It ought not have been so shocking, given their location. But to Kesh, the Sonnelic sound was long defined by their Singers. Their songs of praise, their songs of teaching. She had caught a scattering of their hymns, in her day.

But this was a love song.

In its way. More in truth, it was a Paeonia song through and through. The lyrics told the perspectives of sisters, each vying for the affections of the same young man. Each boasted of those qualities that made her the superior prospect for a wife. One cultivated her beauty like a garden, and was the envy of many. One was a vicious and powerful brawler without equal. The singing twins thusly represented two pinnacles of Sonnelic beauty. As Kesh understood these things.

The girls passed the melody back and forth, iterating on it in the role of their lyrical counterpart. There was clever teasing, and less clever bragging. The audience that swelled around Kesh was an excitable one. When the girls would chirp something particularly scathing, Kesh heard whistles and guffaws ripple around the spot she'd muscled her way into. It was odd.

When Cora had explained to her his grand ambition of seducing the crownlands, she had imagined crowds of hard, stern faces. Scowls unwavering in the presence of something truly delightful. Kesh had resigned herself to sacrificing a pretty slice of her roaming hours comforting him after they'd been run out of town, for they would surely be run out of town.

But they hadn't been. As it happened, the Sonnelic sort didn't shriek and burn in the presence of good, lively song. Kesh had attributed their modest success to the benevolent cover of nighttime. But here, in the daylight, she could see it so clearly. How the twin girls and their mock-bickering were celebrated. Maybe it was the fever of Paeonia. Or maybe it was as Cora had often said—that across the realm, audiences were fundamentally in want of the same thing.

The song went on. The sisters had begun to realize, in espousing the qualities of their shared beau, that he was perhaps unworthy of their efforts altogether. As they did, Kesh observed with distant awareness that the tension in her body had weakened. Her chest allowed her to breathe freely. Her legs no longer held themselves ready to bolt at a moment's notice. Kesh was mightily accustomed to faking—her eyes and ears at constant attention, seeking cues to absorb and mimic. She was a contraption designed for this sole purpose. If only for a song, she was one of the weeds. Part, and not pretender.

Kesh even had half a mind to make a special request of the girls, next. It would cheer Cora up, she thought, to hear their song. It had to. Nobody could be that moody. She turned this way and that, peering over her shoulders to try and catch a glimpse of him. Had he lost her? What a pain in the ass.

It took her several fatal moments to recognize the silver ghost that menaced the edge of her vision. If not for the song, if not for the ease she felt among the people, she might have fled in time.

Her head froze in place. In truth, her whole body went rigid. Then, in the space of an instant, Kesh forced herself to relax again, to sway and smile as the crowd did.

She dared not turn her face towards the paladin entirely. From her periphery, she tried to take in as much detail as she could: His head was hairless, his arms crossed over his chest, clad in a steel breastplate. It was so thoroughly polished that even beneath overcast skies it gleamed. She saw, blurred in the corner of her eye, the length of a dark scabbard belted at his waist. He stood beyond the fountain, a ways away from Kesh and the crowd in which she sheltered. His eyes might well have been fixed on her—or on the musicians. Or on any others who had crowded around to listen. Or on anything else. She wasn't to know. She knew only that it was safest for her to take leave, whether he suspected something of her or not.

The girls were fast approaching the height of the song, their voices entwined more often than not. The ecstatic harmony ferried words that no longer reached Kesh's ears. All was distant beneath the pounding of her startled heart. She started to move. As quickly as she dared, Kesh began to pick her way backwards through the crowd. It had swelled in the time since she'd first pushed her way through it.

Cora. She had to find him—where was he? She couldn't have outrun him by much. She had to find him, while not being found, while steeling her nerve against the part of herself whispering Find him or die. Focus and find him or die.

A tall ask. Between fighting her way free of the throng, and trying not to flinch violently every time she was jostled about, Kesh could hardly focus on placing one foot afore the other. Part of her insisted: Save existing, she had done nothing wrong.

But she knew it didn't matter.

She would find a quiet place, Kesh told herself. A place to hide, to find her breath, and to find that impulse that burned somewhere in her head. That heat that would point her to him.

She broke through the edge of the assembly. Kesh took inventory of her appearance as she went—she was not too short, nor was she over- or underdressed. There were plenty of folk about with her complexion, her curls, her freckles. To any unknowing eye, she belonged in Cill Tossach as much as any of the hollering and cavorting youths she wove between.

It was unfair—yes, it was unfair. But it didn't matter!

She would change out of herself, clothe herself in the safety of another skin, and she would find Cora. They would go back to the Sweetmoon, and she would feel at ease among the others of their troupe. She could try to convince them to leave this place. Hopefully forever.

For, as it happened, Kesh quite liked her true face. If she was of a mind to start gallivanting around in it, it was not going to be here, in this great iron cage of folk with their iron rings and iron charms and—

Steel breastplate. Kesh stopped short, reeling on the balls of her feet to avoid marching her face right into the torso of a waiting paladin.

A second one. Fear solidified, cold, in her gut. She did not look up. Locking eyes with them meant a certainty—that she had been discovered. But I've done nothing. I've done nothing—

She had no time to wonder what had given her away—she had caught the eye of danger. Such was her fortune.

Her mouth opened, preparing to quickly and politely excuse herself from the holy individual's presence. But alarm lanced through her. Three! she thought. The paladins went about in threes.

Behind her, an approach of metal on stone.

Kesh whirled in time to see the third armor-clad figure thrust toward her, with gauntleted arm outstretched. With a gasp, her body lurched sideways of its own volition, and then she was running.

On any normal afternoon, the streams of bodies might have parted easily for the paladins. Kesh imagined that upstanding citizens of the crownlands would never get in the way of the Host's holy swords. But the young and unwed, with an excuse to be drunk before the day was done, were not so easily moved. She ducked between several girls who were perhaps a hair's breadth from coming to blows, and then another several who were trying and failing to sing a drinking tune in time with one another.

Gods around, smile on these fucking kids, she thought. She could hear a clamor erupt in her wake, quickly absorbed in the city bustle. It became distant, and more distant.

Kesh abandoned the plaza for one tight alleyway, and then another, picking her way with haste over the dirt and loose stones of these unkept passages. The wind blew towards her, in the narrow space between alehouse and pawn. It smelled of beer, something fried, and a lurking hint of rains to come.

In the relative quiet of the alleyway, it occurred to Kesh just how frantically her heart railed against the confines of her chest, how her palms had gone cold and damp with sweat. If she stopped moving, she did not doubt that she would find a deep quivering had taken hold of her limbs. Or maybe that the paladins had taken hold of her mortal flesh.

So she did not stop moving. Had it not been for a few witnesses—a scattering of couples seeking a quick hideaway—she would have changed. Kesh could almost feel it, in the same way that one might envision making a fist without actually doing so. She could almost feel her limbs changing, her hair lengthening in the bind of its ribbon, the intricate details of her face pushing and pulling into something entirely new.

But she did not. Any one witness would spell her death. With haste, Kesh went on.

This street was perhaps busier than any other. Clusters upon clusters of young people clotted the entranceways to the handful of taverns within view. The aggregate chatter was dizzying—it echoed off the stone facades of the myriad establishments that lined the way. She would not be able to hear the solid paladin footsteps above this clamor. If she were quick enough, this would not be a problem. So, she would be quick.

Pulse pounding in her ears, she took a deep breath before plunging again into the masses. Somewhere nearby, something glass shattered. The paladins were going to break her to pieces, if they caught her. Someone cackled. The paladins were going to set her on fire and laugh while she burned and cried and died.

The fluidity of her movements began to degenerate. Her hand grazed someone's bare, sweaty arm. She felt her hair pressed closer to her neck by a body behind her. She fully stumbled over an errant leg.

In her recovery, she collided shoulders with someone who may as well have materialized in that exact spot out of the ether. She hurried onwards—rather, she made to. In a moment that would replay in her mind for the next several hours, her movement was halted, abruptly, by a hand closing around her forearm.

"Hey!"

He was a young man, one of the many hundreds that roved about. He had jerked her closer to him, and his breath smelled of strong drink. The details of his face were lost on her, for they swam and blurred together in her vision. Iron. Iron. Pressed into the soft skin of her arm was an iron ring, situated on one of the fingers that clutched her limb.

It felt as if someone had pressed a hot poker to her flesh. Her shoulder ached and screamed at the strain of her trying in vain to rip her arm away. Where this failed, her free hand came down on the man's fist. Again and again. It held her fast.

"You try to take my fuckin' purse, girl?"

She barely heard him. Kesh's lips pressed firmly together as she struggled not to cry out. If she cried out at the iron, they would know her for certain. She had already been stopped. They would catch her any moment.

Her nails dug into the skin of the man's hand, trying desperately to claw it off of her. Perhaps it was that her hand was too clammy, or her strength too little—it was as if she had been caught in a burning vice. The hand held firm, the ring with it.

Tears further obscured her vision. Her breathing became sharp and shallow. Where was Cora? Where was Cora?

The man was yelling at her. The words were nothing to Kesh. People were stopping to stare—at him, at her. Inhuman words threatened to blow out the back of her skull. Sounds were escaping her, now, she could tell. From her throat came first an urgent whimpering, then something guttural and grating. Her jaw ached with the effort of clenching her teeth together. Her arm burned. It burned. It burned.

Her whole body involved itself in the task of wrenching free. From her torso, to her hips, to her legs, she was pulling, tearing herself away from the man who was burning her and would not cease. Finally, to maintain his hold on her, he was forced to grab hold of her arm with his other hand. And on it, two more iron rings.

A shriek ripped itself from deep in her gut. In her own ears, it sounded as if some animal was being thrashed violently to death by something bigger and stronger.

It was enough. Surely shocked beyond reason, he released her. Kesh felt the relief of the metal parting from her tortured skin in the same instant she felt the pavestones slamming against her back, and then her head.

How long she lay on the ground in the middle of the otherwise crowded street, Kesh could not be certain. At some point, she curled in on herself, holding her limp and wounded arm close to her chest. She felt her tousled hair sticking to her dampened cheeks as she lay still for long and precious moments.

Beneath the dense ringing that filled her head, Kesh could barely hear concerned murmurs above and around her. She felt the soft vibrations of footsteps inching closer to where she lay, uncertain about what had taken place, or how to respond. Her eyes remained screwed shut.

Through the ground—the heavy, rhythmic thudding of approaching doom. Kesh felt the expeditious withdrawal of those few who had come close to help her. Reveling kids might get in the way of the swords by happenstance, but never on purpose. Not in Host country.

Her sobbing intensified, only in part for the residual burning in her arm. The rest of her wept at the futility of her position. She could not rise—her body was gripped by a pain far too great. Her legs felt leaden, the fear-swiftness having abandoned them, displaced by an anchoring dread. The tromping gaits drew closer, and Kesh felt wholly unprepared to die. She hadn't yet even begun to consider her goodbyes.

A hand closed around the back of her shirt, near to the collar. A part of her with better humor was reminded of the manner in which she had seen, from time to time, wild cats carrying their young by the scruff of their necks. Despite her lethargy, she flinched with some force at the sensation of the gauntlet's knuckles grazing against her skin. Steel armor, she recalled. Steel armor, iron weapons.

Kesh was almost surprised at the ease with which she was dragged upwards into a sitting position. The two paladins were lightly ribbing one another above her lolling head—she didn't care to listen to the words. It continued as she was hoisted to her feet by a hand beneath either of her arms. Her head ached and spun from the force of her fall. Her throat felt raw and ragged. Her arm felt as if it had been gnawed through by some beast with fire for teeth.

If the paladins even registered her feeble attempts to resist being handled, they made no show of it. While one held her upright, their partner set to binding her wrists tight behind her back with a length of coarse rope.

With her eyes closed against the brightness of the world, Kesh became aware of a familiar urge, heated and pulsing and pointing. Pointing ahead. Cora.

She jerked her head upwards in a motion that sent her vision spinning. Kesh felt the paladins' surprise in the slight tightening of the grip on her arm. Her gaze swung and swam one way, then another.

When she was at last able to focus, the first figure she recognized was the paladin she'd seen beyond the fountain. Broad, imposing. He was not close—several yards away, he lingered. Space enough for the bravest or least attentive folks to pass between Kesh and where he stood.

At the sight of him, her stomach tied itself in knots. But it was not her upon which his attention was fixed. In truth, he was facing away from her entirely.

At first, Kesh assumed beyond reason that the heat in her head, the compass, was somehow mistaken. But as she blinked the blurriness from her vision, she felt ill with the recognition of Cora's figure standing close by the paladin.

They were in conversation. Kesh's mouth fell open. Cora, with his tongue of honey, surely meant to convince the paladin authority to release her. Mayhap on the condition that they leave the city at once, or some other such thing. Kesh could imagine it so easily—what Cora would do. How he would come to her aid.

She was, after all, fairly certain that he loved her.

But as she watched, Cora was not saying much at all. She could see the paladin's solid jaw in motion as he said something to Cora. Kesh felt her stomach damn near drop out of her body as the paladin turned, pointing with two fingers in her direction. He spoke again. Over the babble of the paladins binding her wrists, Kesh could make out the vague, deep and heavy sound of their superior's voice. She strained her ears and heard the unmistakable inflection of a question. He had asked something of Cora.

When Cora did not so much as glance in her direction, Kesh knew that she was doomed.

Her open mouth had gone dry. However much she so desired, she could not shield herself from the truth written in the language of his body, his face. Had it not been this face what she had devoted these past moons to learning and loving? She had come to know his countenance better than her own. How many times had she traced the subtleties of his expressions with her eyes? His calculated, unsubtle self-assurance; his veiled concern; his earnest pride.

Her reward for her keen and hard-won insight was the privilege of beholding from afar his pale guilt.

She watched his lips move. Unlike the paladin to whom he spoke, his voice was lost entirely beneath the din. What were his final words to her? Kesh could not recall. Oh, Gods around. She would never hear his voice again.

Kesh felt her body convulse in the slightest, as if preparing to dry-heave. With a final tightening of a knot, her wrists were bound firmly together behind her. Cold bled through her fingertips with an uncaring quickness. The gauntleted hand that gripped her upper arm did not release her.

The paladin superior dismissed Cora with a wave of his hand. The armored man started towards her then, but Kesh had eyes only for the one she'd called herself loving.

Cora hovered about. His business was quite obviously concluded, yet he did not leave. Kesh watched the clenching of his jaw, the furrowing of his dark brows. There was a part of him that doubted what he had done. There was a part of him that did love her.

Kesh wondered what had overpowered it. She thought back—no, she had been good. Of this, she was certain. Since their arrival in Cill Tossach, she had been as sweet a companion as she could be. Or damn well close to it.

"Demifae."

Kesh did not look up to regard the paladin superior until the sheen of his armor pulled her eyes away from Cora. He was as tall as she'd guessed him to be from far off. Unsurprising, for all paladins were tall. A robust, wheat-colored beard obscured much of the lower half of his face. It was quite intricately braided, she observed numbly. She did not raise her eyes past his nose, but she could feel the judgement of his gaze boring into her.

On either side of her, Kesh felt the lackeys stiffen, minutely. She looked back to Cora.

The paladin went on, his voice raised enough for any nearby to catch: "By the will of the exalted Host, the holy swords are charged with the seizure of the Fae abomination."

In the expanse of otherwise energetic townspeople, Kesh reckoned that she and her paladin captors made for an odd oasis of gravity, grim ceremony. As folk passed them by, Kesh saw bodies slow down, or stop all together to observe. A renewed warmth rose in her cheeks.

It occurred to her, then—why Cora had so passionately insisted on her true face, this day. Identifiable, she mouthed to herself. My face. Her true face would never be safe for her in these parts again. Not that it mattered, given her impending murder.

"The creature is remanded thus to the keeping and will of the paladins of the Host..."

Cora was moving. Kesh was at once deafened to the paladin's words. Her eyes watched Cora with a growing desperation. She watched him take a few cautious steps back, watched his gaze flit from the paladin superior to the moving crowd of people.

Look at me, she thought, begging him to hear her, somehow. Look at me. Cora, look at me.

He did.

From yards and yards away, Kesh felt as if she'd been struck. The shame she saw, writ plain on his face. Knowing that it was not enough to spur him into coming to her rescue. That trading her life away was ultimately, for one reason or another, worth it to him.

Cora turned away and disappeared into the flow of people. All in an instant, Kesh envisioned him returning to the Sweetmoon, perhaps drowning his guilt for a night or two in spirits. But he would get over it. He would get over killing her, one day. And she would be dead.

Kesh could help herself no longer—a gasping, half-sob escaped her throat. She felt her knees weaken, but she was held firmly upright by apathetic hands.

The paladin superior had said something more. Something directed at her. Maybe he'd asked her something—she didn't know. For a long moment, no words were spoken.

Slowly, Kesh cobbled together the words to represent herself. "There's been a mistake." It came out softer than she'd intended. Meek. Something in her torso recoiled, revolted.

There was a twitch beneath the paladin's beard that might have been a hint of a smile. "There has been no mistake," he said. He spoke as if briefly humoring the imagination of a child.

But only briefly. He jerked his head towards one of the lackeys. "Fetch the horses," he ordered.

They were going to haul her to one of their freakish compounds and cut her head off. As one of the lackeys released her to do as they were bid, Kesh felt an urgent fire lance through her nerves. She began to struggle feverishly in the grip of her lone captor. With a terror-fueled force, Kesh wildly thrashed every part of her body that wasn't held fast.

The younger paladin barked something at her—presumably some sort of command—but beneath the air whistling past her ears or the blood pounding in her head, Kesh paid it no heed. They were bigger than her, and far stronger. It was a losing game. But she thrashed away.

A snort. "Gods above, Colum," Kesh heard the paladin superior scoff. "It's damn near just a girl."

"Aye, captain, I'm trying to—"

"Paladin CUNTS!" Kesh felt the force of those inhuman words come swelling back, begging to burst forth from her mouth.

How cursed she was, to know the Fae tongue and lack the ability to conjure its full force. They would laugh at her, she knew, if they could see her now.

But for mere moments, beautiful moments, it worked. Her captor froze—they had felt the unnatural twinge in the air. They felt the unseen thrumming that threatened to reach into their ribcage and constrict their still-beating heart.

Even the captain stopped, half turned away from her. Kesh looked, for the first time, into the eyes of a paladin. She saw the coldness that she'd always known to be there. And she spoke on.

"Look! See me!" she hissed. "You, you rotten-hearted sickness! Poison in the blood of the Earth!" Already, she could feel the light-headedness, the frenzy. For a reason, the Fae tongue was not a thing frivolously wielded. Onlookers began to murmur and shuffle about in their discomfort.

The paladin superior had turned back to face her. Beneath the veneer of authority, Kesh was deliriously thrilled to see the expression of horror he hid. He could feel it, she knew—the squeezing in his bones, the fragility of his skull. The smallness of his being against the vast will of the Earth.

"Take my head off, scum. Run me through!" Delight bubbled in Kesh's chest. One look at the sheer distress of those assembled bystanders, and she felt stronger than she'd ever truly been in her life. She felt it pulse between the people, infecting them with fear like a plague, more powerful than human words alone could ever be. "End my life, and doom your wretched people! Drown and die! Earth erupt and take this town into its unceasing dark! Fire rain down on your vile heads! All you know and've ever known—"

Kesh barely felt the solid thud of the young paladin's gauntlet against the back of her head. Her consciousness was extinguished like a candle.