ELLINTHEA

The windcatcher did not belong indoors. Least of all in the middle of the Residence’s great hall. That imposing structure was meant to sing outside, yet its three twisted blades spun around a vertical axis with no sign of wind. To some, the long, monotonous hum recalled wind howling through an abandoned hut; to others, the whimper of a wounded animal.

“That thing makes me sick,” a woman said. “I don’t know how they sleep.”

“First time in the capital?” a man smirked.

“Those border people are mental. Who else uses pure red ice?” She looked up at the chandelier of crimson crystals glowing on silver chains and shuddered. “The Fracture melts their brains, I’m telling you.”

“What would the Vaestar do to you for that, I wonder.”

“He’s not here anyway,” she muttered, still glancing around the hall. The host still hadn’t arrived.

“The Marshal is,” the man said through his teeth, lips barely moving.

“What does he look like?”

“Blue cloak.”

“Half the men here wear blue cloaks.” She rolled her eyes.

“Those are officers. The Marshal’s cloak has a sun on it.”

She found him in the crowd: a golden sun pierced by an arrow. The same crest flew on the Blue Order’s banners.

“That one? With the owl?”

The bird pretended to doze on his shoulder, but its head kept twisting at impossible angles. If there was a reason they kept owls and messenger falcons apart, the scar splitting the right eye of this ashen barn owl was proof enough.

“If you’re going to stare, at least don’t make it so obvious,” the man said, turning away.

Not blue. Cornflower, the Marshal thought. Even when it seemed no one was looking, everyone here watched everyone. All the time. But Elias declared that “Cornflower Order” sounded unserious, you see. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught another guest coming at him with purpose. He knew her without turning his head.

“Rosaline. Welcome back. You look lovely,” he said without looking at her. The Marshal watched the room over people’s heads, giving silent signals only his officers understood. “Especially that charming scent. New perfume?” He worked to keep the sarcasm from his voice. To his nose she smelled as if she had spent a couple of moons in a sooty purgatory.

“Archie, you scoundrel. All these years and I still fall for your flattery,” her gaze slid over his tall, athletic frame. “How is it a catch like you still hasn’t found his heart’s desire?”

Archie did not hear her answer. He let the silence sit, hoping it had not been a question. In the Vaestar’s absence, he was covering for two, meeting guests with a smile that was real—unlike everyone else’s.

He casually caught someone’s white handkerchief mid-fall, dropped by fatal chance as its owner passed the second most important man in the country. Archie reassured himself that the celebration of Kaelon’s rebirth came only once a pentad. This was the third time delegates, barons, and envoys gathered in the capital. Princes who never left their estates sacrificed their comfort, crossing the Mainland for seven nights by steam train for one evening.

Any word at this ball could start a years-long alliance. Or cause a war tomorrow.

“If you feel lonely, we could meet outside these walls,” Rosaline hooked the strap on the Marshal’s thigh and walked away.

Archie longed for a shower to scrub off that sticky gaze from his body.

A door at the back of the hall opened. Frost came in first and wrapped everyone like a coat steeped in winter. The man who followed drew every single gaze. The chandelier swayed and spilled a crystalline chime of red ice into the thin melody of the windcatcher—what the locals took for silence.

Women’s whispers rustled around Archie like fallen leaves:

“Is that the Vaestar?”

“Yes, that’s Elias Tane!”

“Elias is here!”

There he is. Mister Importance, at last, Archie thought. Blue Order officers parted at the foot of the stairs and made the guests do the same.

Elias descended the steps. Slowly, as if he were late for nothing. His stately figure, dark from head to toe, set off his pale face. The mourning-black shirt and jacket broke his own dress code. He walked into a hall of white collars and white gowns with his hands in his pockets. The rules of etiquette were carved into his skull, yet he saw no harm in neglecting them when he did so on purpose.

Countesses made their daughters straighten their backs and lift their chests. Some of the youngest potential brides were half his age, but it did not matter when the man was the Vaestar. A lonely widower. Born aristocrat. Head of state.

A brilliant match for any woman.

A nightmare for the emissaries.

Archie’s hand found the handle of his umbrella-cane. That look. The scarlet glint in Elias’s eyes reminded him of a blood moon. Because every damn time he saw it, someone bled. This time the witnesses would be the highest guests of the Mainland. Wonderful.

At Archie’s order, the servers on pneumorollers quickly delivered stronger drinks, while the lights dimmed – a welcome for those who hid in the shadows.

One could not swarm Elias like an annoying bee, so Rosaline chose pointed indifference and found a place at a solitary round table. More than men in power, she loved authoritative men—the kind that made other men nervous. Elias was both.

Clamping a cigarette between red lips, she clicked the lighter. The sparks died in a cold draft. A gentleman’s hand offered her a blue flame, only it burned on the tip of his finger. Rosaline looked up, startled. Elias. He watched her and waited for her to draw, as if the flame caused him no harm.

She caught the cigarette as it slipped. She had hardly expected her ploy to work this fast. Elias’s palm steadied her elbow. The touch through the leather half-glove on his left hand was distant. His breath that brushed her neck was hot as smoldering coals.

Elias came indecently close, leaning to her ear so only she would hear. “Tell me,” he said. “Is that acrid smoke coming from you? It brings back certain memories. Not pleasant ones, I must say.”

“Wh-what?” She surfaced from her own thoughts into ice-cold water.

“Morellyth is a rare plant that does not grow on living soil,” He went on. “It soaks the ash of burned forests. You’ve worn this scent so long it has grown into your hair and skin.”

“I don’t understand...”

The stares that clung to them were everything at once: from envious curiosity to open condemnation. Elias ignored them the way he ignored the windcatchers that filled the city at night.

“Morellyth...” he repeated with measured hatred. “Its resin is extremely poisonous, and old monarchs used it in their rites. Only one person I know ever liked that bitter smell of charred wood and despair. Give Toby my regards. He’s here now, isn’t he? On this side of the Fracture?”

She turned her head slowly, met the scarlet moons, and jerked back as if scalded. He opened his fingers, leaving no mark on her skin.

“So what? Your business with him has nothing to do with me!” Rosaline’s voice carried across the hall.

The gossip died. Archie’s hand tightened on the cane. Shadows flickered high along the ceiling, unseen and silent. The scarred owl turned its head.

“Your business with him poses a direct threat to the state,” Elias said, keeping his voice perfectly level. The conversation now belonged to the public. “My first duty as Vaestar is to stop disorder before the thought of it enters anyone’s head. Tobias Crawford is chaos given a name. I ask everyone present to remember that name and strike it from their lists permanently. Therefore, I, Elias Anderlen Tane, sentence you, Rosaline Arvad, to exile into the Fracture.”

The hall gasped as one. Archie was stunned—but not Rosaline.

“Go to hell!” She tore the necklace from her neck. Scarlet beads scattered across the floor like rowan berries. Two great white wings unfurled from her back as if space itself had unfolded with them. Her fitted white dress split at the seams and left her chest bare.

One beat of her wings swept the hats off heads. The crystals of red ice burst and hailed down in shards with light cores. Archie snapped his umbrella open and shielded the ladies nearest him.

Rushing onto the terrace, Rosaline soared off the Residence with grace. The delegates poured after her into the street in a single stream. While everyone stared at the sky, a man in crimson never took his penetrating eyes off the Vaestar, waiting for his response. Elias did not move. Gave no order. Two human-sized shadows shot after the fugitive.

Rosaline felt no danger in the air. Each beat of her wings carried her toward the constellations and thin clouds. No one matched aeriths in their territory. The sky.

The air compressed on both sides of her and spun an unnatural vortex that stirred her white feathers. Two grim figures came out of the wind, emerging from fissures in the fabric of matter. Their night-black cloaks billowed without a sound. Animal skulls looked out from the deep hoods instead of faces.

Hissing, Rosaline pulled pins from her hair and threw them. They cut the air but passed through the pursuer—he vanished and came back faster than she could blink. The knot of her red hair came undone and spilled across her shoulders.

The guards raised their hands. Steel straps unraveled from their bottomless sleeves and wrapped her wings, taking the air from under her. She dropped and bunched for the impact. It never came. The straps, lighter and more flexible than silk, set her smoothly to the ground. The cloaked guards landed beside her.

A lone shutter dared to break the silence. Elias walked up to the man, opened the back of his camera, and exposed the film. That was not enough. He touched it with a finger tipped by a blue flame and burned every frame from that evening.

The newshounds would have given their careers for the first-ever shot of the Midnight Cloaks. They hid their cameras. None of them ever learned that the uncatchable guards did not register on film, and that Elias was protecting the last dignity of the woman he was about to send to her death.

In the general confusion, Archie was already at Rosaline’s side, having crossed guests’ backs, the high balcony, and the stairs into the courtyard unnoticed. Faster than a man should move. She cursed and thrashed like a caught bird. Metal braces ringed the line where the wings grew from her shoulder blades.

“Please try not to move. It only hurts more. That’s how the bonds work,” Archie put his blue cloak around her. Growling with helplessness, Rosaline broke into bitter sobs. “Holy goddess, I can’t stand a woman’s tears,” he smiled.

***

A long belt of polar lights without beginning or end girdled the planet, splitting the world into two halves ignorant of each other. The Fracture’s auroras never faded by day. Even at night their deceptive beauty gave Elias nothing but an oppressive melancholy. He turned a glass sphere in his fingers—a miracle it had not shattered. Smooth and round, it sat perfectly in the hollow of his palm. Beneath its surface, a black haze pulsed, searching for a way out. He had never seen a legacy like it. Rosaline had nearly bitten the fingers off the officer who took it from her.

“I hate you, Vaestar!” Rosaline spat hotly. Walking past every barrier and the warning signs—mortal danger, distorted zone in ten paces, no one will save you—they had brought her to the edge of the Fracture. “Damn you! You and everyone you love! Die in agony! All of you!”

The guards in black cloaks stepped in. Elias stopped them.

“Let her speak,” he said calmly, slipping the sphere into his pocket. He lit a cigarette, flicked his hand, and the blue flame died. “Anything else?”

“Oh, yes! You’ll regret ever crossing me. Toby will find you. And he’ll kill you. Just like he killed your wife!”

“That’s enough,” Archie cut in. “Will you walk in, or shall I escort you?”

“Keep your hands off me, Frey!” Rosaline twisted away from him, faced the auroras, and shivered. The Fracture breathed ozone and a chill no cloak issued for the last journey could keep out. Her knees trembled. She looked at Elias and Archie one last time. “Damn you!”

Beating her wings, Rosaline plunged through the smoky wall of the boiling matter and vanished into the Fracture’s glow. Those left at the border watched in silence.

“Leave us,” Archie said, without waiting the usual time.

“Yes, sir,” the Midnight Cloaks said together, and dissolved on a gust of wind.

“So, Toby is here...” Archie said it carefully as he watched Elias’s face.

Elias took a drag that turned half the cigarette to glowing ash in one pull. He kept the smoke, then slowly released pale streams through his nose. “I want to know exactly how he made it to this side,” he said.

“You can’t cross the Fracture safely without a wormhole.”

Elias glanced at him.

“I said safely, not desperately, on the edge of death and madness,” Archie sighed. “What are your orders? Send out search parties?”

“No. He’ll find us.”

“And that’s it?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“That you won’t run at him headlong. Or that you won’t put everything we’ve built at risk.” Archie didn’t meet his eyes. “Elias!”

“What makes you think I would?”

“That we’re talking about Toby and you’re pretending you don’t care.”

Elias said nothing. For twenty years he had waited for this. He hated every second of the waiting, but he was patient. His darkness was tender, like the dagger of his vengeance, hidden all these years in the silk of his late wife’s dress, waiting for the one who had stolen her from him.

***

The Fracture creaked like a disturbed glacier, swallowing the voices of Archie and Elias. Rosaline was now alone amid the electric crackle that came from the deep and rolled out in fading waves. When the auroras vanished behind storm clouds that dragged over the burned ground, the cold found her.

She could not see her hands. Rain lashed her face. Her wings, pressed tight against her trembling body, quivered with every feather.

Sheet lightning painted monstrous shadows, staring out of the black. The gaping maws. Sharp claws. With every mute flash, they drew closer.

A searing touch burned her hand. Crying out in pain, Rosaline stumbled back, drawing her palms to her chest.

In the middle of a dead wasteland, her wings met something.

Something hot... and alive.