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Hedda is home with a juicy ox bone for the Sabbat. The foot traffic alone would trample her if I dared be stupid enough to bring her out into the heart of the festival.

And the heart is where Eamon and I have ventured.

Not everyone has sent their messages to the afterlife yet. Parked at the mouths of some lanes and alleyways are tables that house iron bowls of eternal flames and parchments and quills and inkpots. A few folk peel away from the thick crowds and splinter off for those tables—to write to the dead.

I feel freer now that I have written mine.

Aleana is the only one I truly wished to speak to. To tell her I won, tell her I fought to the bone, that I walked away from her brother and his anguish, that I am free of the bond—and that I miss her. I would have liked to keep her, selfishly, in my new life.

Taroh I simply wanted to suffer more.

I do not suffer.

Not this phase.

Hand in hand with Eamon, we walk with the swell of the parade, dancers and screamers and singers all around us; colours blasting overhead.

My chin is lifted, and I search the streets for treats.

Every lane that forks off from the streets is blocked by something. A few of the tables are for the messages to the dead; but others are stacked with fresh fruits for a small price; some have ales and honeywines and tavaraks; most are selling paints, the body kind and the chalk bombs that are continuously blasting above the bobbing heads of the crowds.

Eamon cuts off for a paint table.

He started just a touch away from my arm—and in a sweeping moment, our hands are tugged apart, and he’s at the blocked opening of a lane, and I’m being carried away in the swell of folk.

I swivel, around and around, gaze cutting here and there, searching for a way out of this mass.

I drop to a crouch and scramble around the legs of fae. I am kicked a few times before I make it to the edge of the parade and I’m sucking in a desperate breath.

My bare feet slap on the slippery cobblestone; not dew or moisture, but paint staining my soles.

Eamon turns just as I reach him.

His mouth curls—and he slaps his hands together, hard. The crack startles me, jerks my shoulders, but I do not escape, not before a thick cloud of colour blasts over me.

“That,” he starts, that curl still flicking his mouth, “is for making business decisions without me.”

Arms spread at my sides, I stare down at the rainbow explosion all over me. From yellow toes to blue knees, a crimson smear up my torso—and I don’t even want to know what my face looks like.

I lift my gaze to him, dark lashes fringing my glare. “Did you buy one for me, or are you selfish?”

His smile softens into a faint challenge. He plucks a small rod from his waistband, and I recognise what it is after a moment’s look.

A paintwand.

Aim, squeeze, stain.

I reach out for it, palm upwards, patience stilling me.

The crowd sweeps on behind me, the occasional shoulder or elbow grazing my back.

I pay it no mind. I have eyes only for the paintwand.

Despite the suspicion narrowing my gaze and tensing my muscles, Eamon does give it to me. He rests it on my palm before he takes a step back and spreads his arms.

“Do your worst.”

Oh I will, my dear Eamon.

You simply don’t know my worst.

I start with a sickly-sweet smirk. “After you.”

Eamon’s glittering brow lifts. He shifts his gaze between me, the crowd, and the paintwand.

Then, rolling his tongue over his teeth, gives a smacking noise. “Fine.”

He makes it two steps before I’m on him.

I ram the paintwand down the back of his waistband—and squeeze.

The burst of cold, liquid paint spills down his trousers.

“Oh, fuck !” Eamon’s posture crumples, and I fleetingly think of the red spaghetti from the human realm I sometimes ate. He goes all limp and floppy, knees bent, back reclining in the air, and his boots shuffle with the panicked attempt to escape.

Fool. There is no escape.

I grin, bright, at his back.

His hand whacks at the rear of his waistband, his breath a constant hiss, but it’s too late. That cold paint will be running down his legs already, his buttocks, maybe into more intimate areas.

He spins around to face me, his eyes alight with fiery embers, a sheen of surprise glistening him.

I attack.

In a heartbeat, I’ve lunged for him. my arm loops around his neck, and I swivel around to sit on his back like a youngling clings to its mother.

I hold, tight, then nestle my chin on his shoulder. “You should not underestimate me, Eamon. In case you didn’t know, I am something of a warrior.”

His laugh chortles in his chest. He slaps his hand to my folded ones around his neck, then grips.

“Hold on,” he tells me, then heads back into the crowd.

I do hold on.

For a while, we move with the flow of the crowd, and I piggyback through the festivities.

The taste of chalk and burning parchment is thick enough that it tinges every breath I take; spilled sweetness in honeywines, bitterness in the ales, inkiness in the tavarak, it all floods the air; I even taste the occasional tear through the musk of cooked ox meat on the tables.

We tug out of the crowd again, this time for honeywine, before slipping back into it; and we follow for so long that, eventually, we are nearing the town centre, where the paintbombs still erupt, but this time they stain the tall, handsome faces of buildings neither me nor Eamon can afford.

I plant a smacker on Eamon’s cheek before I slip off his back and the dirtied soles of my feet smack onto the chalky cobblestone.

“This—this is magic,” Eamon calls over the songs as he tugs me out of the crowd with him. “I want this!”

A frown pinches my brow. “A festival?”

“A place to honour the dead. Not to rouse them from rest, not to disturb them, but to love them,” he pauses as though unsure of his spiralling thoughts, or even simply unsure on how to articulate them. “In Licht, it’s not a disturbance to speak of the dead, to feel them—it isn’t a harm to do this outside of the Sabbat… so why not at the tavern?”

My fingers are still threaded through his, firm, and my steps shuffling to stick close to him in the push-and-pull of the crowd.

Eamon’s grip on me doesn’t loosen as he draws us closer to the edge—and I sense that he’s taking us to the stall with the candied plums, the sugared pears, the sauced apples.

He flaps his free hand in a gesture all around. “This is what I want the tavern to be!”

“I don’t think everyone would fit!” shouts a familiar, buttery voice—and my heart skips a beat as I push up on my toes and look over the heads for yellow eyes.

Rune ducks out of the shadows clinging to a particularly paint-blasted lane, whose walls run with all the colours of nature—and Rune wears the same, a rainbow head-to-toe.

His grin flashes like a white light. “Didn’t think I was going to leave without a farewell, did you?”

A smile splits my face and, ducking under a fae’s outstretched arm as he reaches for a passed bottle of honeywine, I scramble for him.

Eamon is quick to overtake me.

I scowl at the back of his head.

Eamon doesn’t notice but Rune does, and a faint laugh catches in his throat before he brings his arms around Eamon.

Their embrace earns an added, scathing look from me. My rushed pace dims to a wander as I approach the table lavish with a banquet of fruits.

I eye up the sugared pear slices, the kind that have humans on their backsides with just one bite. Me, being a halfling, I can have a full pear and stay standing. But the lights are brighter, the glitter whispers, faces distort with laughter, and it’s all so wonderous and magical and terrifying.

I lift my gaze to the stall keeper—and startle.

Behind the wispy female who reeks of rotten fruits, a broad and muscular silhouette comes out from the shadows. His steps are slow and cautious, blue eyes gleaming at me from the swallowing darkness of the lane.

My throat bobs.

I should have expected Daxeel to be with Rune.

And I have no buffer.

Eamon and Rune have ended their embrace, but are knitted close together, murmurs low, and neither of them look our way.

I cut my gaze away from the unwelcome intruder and turn my attention back to the willowy female. “Candied plum.”

Her nod is brisk like her movements as she jabs a wooden twig through the fruit, then offers it to me with her other hand palm-upwards.

Eamon has the coin.

I don’t exactly have a place to store monies on my person, not with my cotton chemise set so flimsy.

Daxeel is beside the vendor in a heartbeat, and he drops a shilling into her waiting hand. That is robbery. One shilling—for a piece of fruit on a stick?

This would cost me just three copper pieces on any other day. But, well, Daxeel is paying for it, so I toss the worry out of my mind.

I take the impaled stick—and give no thanks before I turn my back on the lane. It doesn’t save me.

I feel him advance.

I keep my cheek to him and watch the swell of the crowd, the dances, the small scuffles starting to break out between fae tired of being shoved around.

A faint rustle approaches.

I shift a frowned look down at Daxeel’s sunkissed hand, stained with splintered ink lines. Between two fingertips, a crisp envelope is pinched.

“For you.”

My frown darkens into a scowl that I aim up at him. “I am not dead, despite your efforts.” I bare my teeth before I bite down on the crunching candied plum.

Unfazed, he says, “It is my message to our bond.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Then burn it. Bury it. But please, take it.”

I snatch it with a huff, then stuff it into my thigh holster. “You look rough. You should rest more.”

His smile is small and tight. “I leave at the end of the week for my unit. Rest is in short supply.”

“But I leave in an hour,” Rune says, swaggering his tall, broad-shouldered weight towards me. “Will you wish me luck?”

The face I made crumples my features. “In slaughtering innocents?”

His shoulder lifts, a half-hearted shrug. “In not dying.”

Before I can respond, he has lifted me from the ground and tugged me into an embrace. He holds me for a while, firm, and it feels exactly as it is, being hugged by muscle as hard as stone.

When he sets me down, I flick a glance around and see that both Daxeel and Eamon have left us.

I frown at them as they wandered off together, suddenly on the other side of the parade now, at a different table. Their heads are as low as their murmurs, Eamon’s arm draped over his cousin’s shoulders, and my interest piques.

Rune traces my gaze. “Tris,” he tells me.

That one name earns a quizzical look from me.

“Tris is leaving shortly with Eamon’s parents. She’ll spend her gestation period in the light lands, out of the time distortions.”

“So it worked? She is with child?”

“That is what happens,” Rune smirks, “when a male doesn’t take the seed.”

“Does that mean she finally gave up hope on Dare?”

Rune hums a tune of agreement. “About time. It’s been a decade of that, and she never quite learned that he will still go wherever the desire takes him.”

I lean my temple on Rune’s solid arm. We watch the parade pass us by, but I wonder about Tris, “Will she stay for the babe or come back to Kithe?”

“Melantha transferred her slave papers to Morticia. You don’t do that if you expect the slave back.”

A deep sorrow settles in my gut.

My mouth turns inwards for a beat.

“What?”

“It just…” I shrug, lame. “It’s all changing, isn’t it?”

On the other side of the parade, Eamon makes a gesture to the stall keeper at the table there, he lifts his pinched fingers to his mouth and dabs—a ‘ do you have valerian stalk ?’

Ah. That is why they have left us. A quest for stalk.

“We will return from the human lands in a few months,” Rune reassures me. “It will change, but not for long.”

“But Aleana is gone,” I say, soft, and Rune doesn’t flinch, but rather a small and sorrowful smile tugs at his mouth, “and Tris and Caius and Ridge… Doesn’t it feel just… different ?”

Rune understands me. “Hemlock feels different. It will never feel the same again. But we haven’t lost all our family, and new family can be made.” To emphasise his point, he tugs on a thread of my hair. “Apparently.”

My smile is cocky.

“Narcissa Elmfield.” Rune shifts his weight back onto one boot before he dips into a bow. “It has been an entertaining, frustrating adventure—and an absolute pleasure.”

A too-wide grin smears my face as I lean in to plant a kiss on his cheek.

As I inch back from him, I reveal, “That is more than Dare got.”

Rune lets a laugh rumble him. “I appreciate you letting me know. I’ll be sure to use that against him in future.”

“I knew you would.”

His final bow comes short, curt, and in a heartbeat, he’s gone, melted into the parade dancing through the street now, the beat of the drums louder, the calls ringing higher.

I cast a glance at the lane across the parade—where Eamon should be and where Daxeel should stand with him. But neither of them are there.

Turning my cheek to the lane, I scan the faces packed into the parade. The turn above is sharp and sudden, the winding of this street around and into the next, and it has slowed the movement down. Faces crumple, sneer, loll their eyes, or look overhead for a solution.

There is no solution, not that I can see with a sweeping look over the bend of the street, congested at the turn.

And I don’t see either of them in those faces, not Eamon, not Daxeel, and Rune must be gone too far now and so I can’t see him either. Just strangers, unfamiliar and loud, loud in their calls, their shouts to the dead, the wails of grief—and even speckled shouts of impatience.

No amount of impatient shoving and neck craning is going to move the parade around the bend any faster. Besides, I’m in no hurry. The rush of urgency other fae seem to have, it doesn’t touch me.

I am in no hurry, and that in itself feels like a blessing, a luxury.

Before now—wandering the sidelines of the parade, biting into the crackling candy of my plum, and scanning the faces of the fae in search of my vanished Eamon who I suspect has gone off in search of the stalk—I was in a perpetual race against something, even time itself. Before this new life, I was racing against Daxeel in our battle, against Taroh, my father, the Sacrament…

I raced and rushed and lived in urgency.

Now, I wander, back and forth, back and forth, sticking close to the table with the candied fruits, and when I manage to break through the hard surface of my plum, a purple grin steals my face, stained teeth and juices leaking out the corner of my lips.

That is how I spend the start of the First Wind, with the still-warm air starting to pick up from the Breeze, watching the congested crowd shove by.

It’s when the blaring horns are passing me by, and I cringe against the assault on my eardrums, that I spot a glimmer of gold, not Dare-gold, Eamon -gold. Honey and cinnamon and embers.

There he is—across the parade, two lanes down from where I last spotted him. I only find him because he flaps his hand in the air, and the glint of his golden blade and wrist brace are glaring at me.

Eamon stands on the uneasiness of stacked crates, and they wobble beneath him. His hand is flat on the stone wall as he lifts his chin—and waves right at me.

I blink on him once then scramble for the nearest window-ledge. I arch my neck to better make him out.

Eamon waves again, then starts a slow-moving theatre of gesture. First, he brings his pinched fingers to his kiss, then gestures to the lane behind him. Blocking that lane is a stall selling all sorts of musical instruments, little metal triangles and sticks of rubber, and flutes and mandolins.

Eamon finishes the gestured instructions and flattens his hand against the air. He gives me a pointed look.

I nod.

He’s going down the lane to buy grimroot or valerian stalk, and I’m to wait here for him to return.

Got it.

Satisfied, he jumps off the stack of crates—and lands next to Daxeel.

My eyes narrow on him.

Daxeel’s cheek is turned to me, chin tucked down, that withering cloud of defeat and misery still haunting him. He follows Eamon into the lane, both slipping by the edge of the stall, then sucked into the thick shadows.

In a heartbeat, maybe two, I can’t see them.

The dark swallows them.

Still, I stand on the ledge and watch the blackness beyond the stall.

My teeth sink into the exposed juicy plum surface, and it bleeds down my hand. Trickles travel further down to my elbow, and I have the distant desire to wash, to soak my sticky flesh in soapy water.

But that will come later.

After more of the festival, after the smoke that Eamon will get for us, and after honeywine and dances and songs in the heart of the town.

I might have no sleep at all, since we are opening tomorrow—and we are so very unprepared.

Still, the tavern doors will part, the sign will rotate from CLOSED to OPEN , and I will take the orders of our patrons, while Eamon sticks to the bar, and Forranach moves around the kitchen with the new wheeled chair that Eamon purchased for him.

It’s not the hardest work, since we are only selling basic, starchy foods that we can keep up with. Sliced potatoes, cuts of meat, fresh bread and cakes from the bakery down the street.

The thought of it, all that food, is watering my mouth. I swallow back the hunger and bite into my plum again. It doesn’t hit the same as it did before thoughts of a hearty meal.

I huff and watch the dark mouth of the lane. I watch for only a heartbeat before a frown starts to dig into my face.

Shadows move. There, reaching up the walls of the lane ahead, shadows move, warp, flitter. I watch the distortion of light for a moment, then I realise. No, it isn’t the shadows that move, but rather two fae who come out of them.

From the rooftops of the two shops, one on each, two fae slip down the walls, landing on either side of the table smeared with musical instruments.

My eyes narrow on them, the strangers.

Grip tightening on the stick, fingers slick with plum juice, I am stiff as those two fae, sheathed in inky black gear, not leathers, not like the dark warriors, but black linen that is padded to them, moulded like a second skin.

It is a curious sight.

I assume they are dokkalves… until they both turn for the lane, and I see that their ears aren’t as sharp as a dark one’s would be; their complexions not as striking, not marble and stone; their bodies not as bulky and tall; their nails not black and pointed like talons…

The strangers are litalves.

Light males dressed head to toe in black.

My hand starts to lower, the plum on a gradual decline to my side.

They strangers are moving for the lane.

Their muscles ripple with the silent, deadly turns of their bodies, and—

My heart slingshots into my throat.

Their waistbands carry the gleam of weapon belts.

Before the panic can settle or surge, I stagger off the ledge. The plum hits the cobblestone, and I leave it behind for the parade.

I shove my way into the crowd.