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  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  I swore silently. If Talisid wasn’t going to budge, that was a very bad sign.

  “I understand you had some information you wanted to offer?” Talisid asked when I didn’t reply.

  “You think that’s why I’m calling?”

  “I was under the impression that you were hoping to present your side of the story,” Talisid said. “I may have been mistaken.”

  “Talisid, your bosses tried, convicted, and sentenced me while I wasn’t even there,” I said. “They waited for me to leave the War Rooms, then passed a resolution authorising me to be brought in dead or alive. They have made it abundantly clear how much they care about hearing my side of the story.”

  “You haven’t been tried or convicted. An indictment has been issued, but no official sentence can be passed until the full procedures have—”

  “Can you spare me the bullshit?”

  “All right, Mage Verus,” Talisid said. “If you don’t wish to present any information, what is it you’d like to discuss?”

  “Mage Verus,” I thought. Not “Councillor” or “Verus.” “I’m here to negotiate.”

  “Negotiate a . . . ?”

  “A ceasefire.”

  “Ceasefires are for wars.”

  “Which is what we’re in right now.”

  “Let me make sure I’m understanding you,” Talisid said. “Are you claiming to be representing Richard Drakh’s cabal?”

  “I’m representing myself.”

  “The Council is not at war with you.”

  “Yes, you are, ever since you passed that resolution.”

  “The indictment against you was issued because there was overwhelming evidence that you had committed multiple and serious breaches of the Concord,” Talisid said. “If you have any evidence to present in your defence, we’ll consider it, but—”

  “You declared me an outlaw,” I said. “Which means, as far as I’m concerned, the Concord’s entirely irrelevant, since I’m no longer subject to your laws.”

  “Are you representing anybody else in these negotiations?”

  “Just me.”

  “Mage Verus . . .” Talisid was starting to sound impatient. “You clearly have some misconceptions about how Council law works.”

  “No, Talisid, I think I have a very realistic understanding of how Council law works. It comes down to how much power you have. You already tried using that power against me directly, and it didn’t work so well. I’m here to see if you’re ready to consider alternatives.”

  “I’m really not sure what alternatives you have in mind,” Talisid said. “You violated the Concord in numerous and flagrant ways, even without considering your involvement in Sal Sarque’s murder. Do you really think all that is going to be swept under the rug?”

  “I think you’ll make whatever decisions are politically expedient,” I said. “A month ago I was sitting in the Star Chamber and I can assure you that the Council are completely fine with sanctioning breaches of the Concord when it works to their advantage.”

  “You are not sitting in the Star Chamber now.”

  “No. The ones sitting in the Star Chamber are the seven members of the Senior Council listening in to this conversation.” I paused. “Sorry, did I say seven? I meant six.”

  The line went quiet for a second, and when Talisid spoke again, his tone was more cautious. “What are you hoping to achieve from these ‘negotiations’?”

  “Right now, I’m still on the Council most-wanted list,” I said. “Which means you keep sending Keepers and hunter teams after me. Which means I have to kill, incapacitate, or avoid them. It’s a nuisance. I’m offering a ceasefire with a view to some sort of permanent treaty.”

  “And in return for this you would offer . . . ?”

  “I already told you. You stop trying to kill me and I’ll stop trying to kill you.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to do considerably better than that.”

  “I’d be happy to discuss terms in more detail,” I said. “I’d be willing to relinquish my place on the Junior Council, for instance. But you’re going to have to end hostilities first.”

  “Verus, be realistic.” Talisid was sounding frustrated again. “I want to help you, but you can’t threaten the Council like this. You’re only making things worse for yourself.”

  “I’m not threatening them. They’re trying to interrogate and kill me. I’m just responding in kind.”

  “You’re one man.”

  “Yeah, that was what Sal Sarque thought too.”

  There was another silence. “I’ll convey your message to the Council,” Talisid said at last. “However, I strongly suspect that they’re highly unlikely to—”

  “You aren’t going to convey anything because they’re listening right now. I already told you to cut the bullshit. Simple answer, please. Yes or no?”

  “As I said, I’ll convey your message to the Council.”

  “Yes. Or. No.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not as simple as—”

  I deactivated the focus, held it tightly for a second, then threw it down into the ground as hard as I could. It dug into the dirt and stuck. “Shit!” There was a tree a few steps away; I stalked towards it and kicked it, hard. Pain jolted up my leg. The tree didn’t move.

  I stormed up and down, venting my feelings. Stupid, self-righteous assholes! I knew how stretched the Council was—to still be chasing me, they had to be spending manpower they badly needed. What the hell had I done to make them hate me this much?

  Okay, I kind of knew the answer to that question.

  I shook my head and focused my thoughts on the present. As expected, the Council had several tracking attempts running on me, and I took a few minutes with the fateweaver to sabotage them. Once I was done, I bent down and pulled the communicator out of the dirt, then started the chain of gates that would take me home.

  * * *

  —

  It was late afternoon when I returned to the Hollow. The floating island was peaceful in the yellow-gold light, the sky a deep blue, fading to green. Birds sang in the trees as I followed the path through the woods, the grass rustling under my feet.

  Once upon a time, I’d had lots of places where I felt safe. My home in Camden, my safe house in Wales, Arachne’s cave beneath Hampstead Heath. Now the Hollow was all that was left, and calling it safe was overselling it. Shadow realms are hard to track or lay siege to, and the wards we’d placed made it harder still, but if the Council wanted to get in badly enough, they could do it. I’d already had to flee the place once, and only constant vigilance and use of the fateweaver had kept me from having to do so again.

  Now that my temper had cooled, I could see that trying to ask for a ceasefire had been stupid. To the Council, I was a criminal and a rogue. I’d thought that Sal Sarque’s death might have shaken them, but I hadn’t considered how it must look to them. As far as they were concerned, it was Richard and Anne who had killed Sarque, not me. I was vastly more dangerous than I had been when they’d attacked me, but they didn’t know that.

  So why had it pissed me off so much? Because I didn’t want to be dealing with this. I had Anne’s possession to solve, with Richard in the background. I didn’t want to deal with this shit from the Council as well.

  Well, what I wanted didn’t matter. Like it or not, the Council was my enemy, and that wasn’t going to change unless I did something about it.

  My cottage in the Hollow is a simple place, not much more than one room with a bed, a chair, and a desk. I made myself some dinner, taking it to the desk by the window to eat alone. The stores in the Hollow had mostly been laid in by Anne, and with her gone I’d been gradually eating my way through them. I needed to get more, but I’d been putting it off—it was one more step towards accepting that she wa
s gone. Once I was done I cleaned the plate, put everything back in the cupboard, and went out to find the Hollow’s other resident.

  Karyos was near her tree, sitting cross-legged on the grass. She was studying a small sapling, touching it delicately with the tips of her fingers. She glanced up at my approach, then back down. I sat down on a fallen tree.

  Karyos looks like a young girl, with features that are almost human, but not quite. Her skin is a pale gold, and her hair the colour of bark, though both could pass if you don’t look too closely. If you had to guess her age, you might say nine or ten. Her real age is either two weeks or a couple of thousand years, depending on how you count it. We’d been sharing the Hollow for a few weeks, and I was still feeling out how to relate to her.

  “How was your day?” I asked.

  Karyos shrugged.

  I nodded at the sapling. “Making it grow?”

  “My tree is alone,” Karyos said. She spoke English fluently, though with an odd accent that didn’t match any country I knew. “There should be a grove.”

  “Camouflage or tradition?”

  “Both.”

  There was a pause. Karyos didn’t look up from her sapling.

  “How are you finding the clothes?” I asked.

  Karyos glanced down at the blouse and skirt she was wearing. Luna had picked them up for her. “Uncomfortable.”

  “Are they the wrong size?”

  “I dislike wearing them.”

  “It’s a good habit to get into.”

  “They feel restrictive,” Karyos said. “As though they are shaping me.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” I admitted. “But I suppose they are.”

  “It was not always like this,” Karyos said. “I remember the groves in Greece. Humans would come with offerings, baskets and amphorae.” She looked up at me with big dark brown eyes. “Would they bring me offerings now?”

  “If you showed yourself outside?” I hesitated, thinking of what would happen if she stepped out of the Hollow into its reflection in the Chilterns, with its villages and motorways and big industrialised farms. “I don’t think it would go very well.”

  Karyos nodded sadly. We sat for a little while in silence.

  “I could try to find you something more comfortable,” I said. “Clothes aren’t really my speciality, but there’s probably something out there that would suit you better.”

  “Arachne used to tell me that,” Karyos said. “I wish she were here.”

  It was a simple statement, but it hurt. I missed Arachne too, and talking like this to Karyos was when I missed her the most. Karyos might share some traits with Arachne—she was an ancient magical creature, with strange powers and an otherworldly lair—but our relationship was very different. If Karyos had been Arachne, instead of me asking about her day, she would have asked me about mine. Before I’d opened my mouth, she’d have noticed that I was upset and ask how the conversation with the Council had gone. I would have told her, and she’d offer advice. She wouldn’t have given me easy answers—most of my problems don’t have easy answers—but she’d help me to see things more clearly, and I’d always leave her lair feeling better.

  But Karyos wasn’t Arachne. The hamadryad had spent most of her lifetime entirely isolated from human and mage society, and she was hopelessly ignorant of the modern world. With Arachne, I’d felt as though I was the child and she was the parent; with Karyos, it was the other way around. Instead of looking to her for answers, she was the one looking to me.

  “I miss her too,” I said. “But as far as that goes, I might have some good news. I think you’ve got a good chance of seeing her again.”

  Karyos looked at me in surprise. “I thought she was gone.”

  “For me. Maybe not for you.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the way that dragon took her away,” I said. “Arachne’s lived a very, very long time, and I think that dragon’s part of the reason why. So if that’s the way it protects her—spirits her away when she’s in danger—why was she still around?” I leant back, resting my hands on the tree trunk. “Dragons exist outside time as we perceive it. If you were a dragon, and you wanted to save the life of someone like Arachne that had a lot of people trying to kill her, how would you do it? Well, seems to me a really easy way would just be to transport her forward in time eighty or a hundred years or so to a point where all her attackers were dead of old age.”

  “Was that what it did?”

  “I don’t have any proof, but it fits,” I said. “Arachne told me in her letter that we weren’t likely to meet again, but I’m human. For you, though?” I nodded at the young tree behind Karyos, its leaves silhouetted against the sky. “A hundred years probably isn’t even one full rebirth cycle.”

  “I’ll be able to see her again?”

  “I’ll have to do some research,” I said. “But I think so.”

  Karyos smiled, her face lighting up. It transformed her from a grave, silent creature into a happy one. “That would be wonderful.”

  We sat for a little while, the silence more companionable this time. “Are you comfortable with me living here?” I asked Karyos.

  “Yes,” Karyos said. “Why?”

  “We’ve never really talked things out,” I said. “I mean, when we first met, you were trying to kill us. And we kind of killed you. Obviously it didn’t stick, but you were living in this shadow realm for a long time before we moved in.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t have a problem with that?”

  Karyos looked confused.

  Okay, apparently I need to spell this out more clearly. “Are you angry about what we did?”

  “Why would I be?”

  I tried to think of a good answer to that and failed.

  “You took this realm by right of conquest,” Karyos said. “You could have slain me.”

  “That would have made Arachne unhappy,” I said. “Besides, there aren’t many magical creatures left. I didn’t want to cut that number down without a really good reason.”

  Karyos nodded. “I was damaged and unable to renew myself. When my tree died, my life would have ended. Leaving me alone would just have been a slower and more complicated way of killing me. You preserved me, and I am grateful.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “Though . . .” Karyos hesitated. “Now that my mind is clear again, I feel lost. This world is so different. So much has been forgotten, so much is strange. When you tell me about this new England, it makes me feel . . . helpless. I do not know if there’s a place for me here.”

  “I think the world would be a smaller and duller place without creatures like you in it,” I said. “And there are plenty of other humans who feel the same way. They might not always be easy to find, but they’re there.”

  “I hope so,” Karyos said. She looked at me. “What are you going to do?”

  “For now?” I said. “Find Anne, and deal with the Council. I’ll work out the rest as I go.”

  * * *

  —

  It was an hour or two after sunset when I returned to my cottage. I closed the door behind me, drew the curtains, then took off my jacket and shoes and socks. My gear was laid out on the desk, my trousers folded over the back of the chair, then I cleaned my teeth and washed my face. Only at the very end did I take off my shirt.

  With my clothes on, my arm could pass for normal. Anyone who looked at my right hand would notice that it was too pale, but pale skin can be explained. Stripped to the waist . . . not so much. It wasn’t just my right hand that was pale, it was also the wrist and most of the forearm. Just above my elbow, the colour changed to my normal skin tone. Mostly. White tendrils reached up from the forearm like vines, spreading around the joint so that their tips touched my upper arm.

  When the fatewe
aver had replaced my hand, the border between it and my flesh had been at my wrist. That had been eighteen days ago. Ever since then, it had been spreading.

  I stroked my left hand along my right. The surface felt smooth and slightly yielding, like a cross between flesh and some harder substance. I could feel the touch of my fingers, but the sensations were muted. From testing, I knew my new hand was far stronger and tougher than my old, and that wasn’t counting what the fateweaver could do. There was just the little question of what it was going to do to the rest of me.

  I flexed my arm up and down. There was a slight stiffness in the elbow that I’d noticed as of yesterday, at around the same time that the tendrils had reached the joint. It didn’t hamper my movements, but it was a constant reminder.

  I switched off the light and lay down on my futon. I lay awake for a long time before going to sleep.

  chapter 3

  I woke early the next morning. The Hollow was peaceful and quiet, birds singing in the early light, the sky a mix of pinks and yellows. I dressed and ate breakfast, then sat down at my desk with a pen and a sheet of blank paper. The window above the desk had a view out onto the grassy clearing beyond my front door. I picked up the pen and wrote three words.

  – Anne

  – Richard

  – Council

  With my free hand I tapped my thumbnail against my lips. I needed to deal with all three. How, and in what order?

  In a perfect world, I’d be able to resolve all three conflicts peacefully. That was not going to happen. My best hope for negotiations had been the Council, and yesterday’s talks had put an end to that. Talks with Anne would be faster and probably less unpleasant, but our long-term goals were not the same, and she knew that as well as I did. That just left Richard, and I strongly suspected I’d burnt my bridges with him already.

  So the how was simple. I had to neutralise all three as potential threats. That just left the question of order. I kept writing, ink scratching across the white paper.