A Magic of Twilight

similarity in their faces.

They were all statues crafted by a flawless artist. The power snarling in her head, she went to the Hirzg. She pulled the knife from its scabbard.

So easy. . Draw it hard and deep, and he will die, and then do the same to ca’Cellibrecca and cu’Kohnle, and the starkkapitan as well. .

But she stood there, staring at the tableau, the power within Mahri’s spell buzzing insistently in her ears. Allesandra was gazing up at her vatarh, her mouth half-open, and there was such deep love and affection in her gaze that it stopped Ana’s hand.

Once it was that way for me, before Matarh became sick. Vatarh loved me, and I loved him in return, and he would hold me on his knees and play with me and I never, never wanted to leave. .

She almost heard the girl’s chuckle. She saw the Hirzg’s hand, ready to brush away an errant curl from her forehead, and in his eyes was the same affection, the same love.

Ana’s hand trembled. The tip of the knife wavered just above the Hirzg’s flesh. The Ilmodo seethed and crackled around her, as if Cenzi Himself were laughing.

You don’t have time. Mahri told you. Kill him. Leave. . She imagined the aftermath and how it would be for the girl: one moment laughing with her father, then a breath, a waver, and the blood would be pouring from him and her vatarh would collapse on her, dead in an instant.

Impossibly taken.

A breath, a waver. . A brief instant of disorientation and reality dissolving around her. As Ana had felt when Mahri came to her with the glass ball. “It’s just my finger. It might as easily have been a knife. .”

The brief instant of disorientation. .

The dissolution of reality. .

So familiar. .

Ana gasped.

She knew. All in that instant, she knew. This was what Mahri needed. Not what she needed.

She glimpsed another way. A better way, she hoped.

There was little time left. The Ilmodo screamed in her mind, a rising wail, and she could not hold the spell together for much longer. She slid the knife back in its scabbard and went to the field desk, spreading out a piece of thick paper that seemed to fight her hand, taking a quill and dipping the end into the inkwell.

Even writing was a struggle, as if the ink itself were fighting her.

She wrote a brief, scrawling note and signed it. Returning to the table, she tugged the Hirzg’s arms away from Allesandra-they moved reluctantly, as if he were loath to allow this. She tucked the note in his hand and closed his fist around it.

Finally, she took the unaware girl in her arms.

Hoping she could make her way from the encampment before she could no longer hold the spell together, she fled. Carrying the stiff body of Allesandra, it was as if Ana were fighting her way upstream against a rushing, white-watered current. She stumbled from the encampment with the burden of the young girl, past the campfire and beyond the line of guards, and out into the open field between the two armies, pausing a few times to rest and recover her breath.

The campfires of the Nessantico defenders edged closer.

There was a man standing between herself and the campfires, though, and he stood where there had been no one before. “Kenne?” she breathed, hoping somehow it was true and knowing it was not.

“Karl?”

“No,” the apparition answered, and the shock of his speech was enough to tear away the remnants of the spell. The world returned to motion around Ana, the impact of it causing Ana to drop Allesandra to the ground.

“It was you, wasn’t it, Mahri?” Ana said.

Allesandra ca’Vorl

“You are my little bird, and I love-” her vatarh said, but then the world lurched around her and she wasn’t there on his lap anymore but somehow lying on the cold, wet ground in the night. Someone-a woman’s voice-was growling at a black figure in the middle of a meadow. Allesandra tried to get up, but she was disoriented and could only struggle to her knees.

“It was you, wasn’t it, Mahri? The Kraljica didn’t die because of ci’Recroix’s spell-it was you who killed her.”

Dizzy, feeling nauseous from the strangeness, Allesandra stared at the speaker. It was hard to see in the dim, fleeting moonlight, but the woman was dressed in a teni’s robes-robes that looked similar to those the fat Archigos wore. She was speaking to a man: he was little more than a beggar. His face, when the moonlight caught it under the hood of his cloak, was horrid: all twisted and scarred with one eye missing, and the smile he gave the woman was hideous.

“Yes, it was me,” he admitted. “This won’t do, Ana. I can’t have you take the girl back to be ransomed. That would leave the Hirzg alive. .” He smiled again, and the coldness of the expression made Allesandra shiver. She would have cried out, but they were both ignoring her. She remained still, but her fingers crept to where her vatarh’s knife was tucked under her tashta. “But I can remedy that problem.

After all, finding you out here with the girl’s body will tell everyone who killed the Hirzg-that will work nearly as well for my purposes, I think.

There’s still time. In fact, there’s all the time I need.”

He lifted a hand; in it was a small glass ball. He closed his eyes and spoke a word; but the woman had done the same-gesturing sharply with one hand and speaking a phrase that boomed loudly in the night air. The glass ball shattered in the man’s hand. Green-and-yellow light shot through the air, sending shadows racing over the ground. The man shouted and staggered backward.

“I didn’t come entirely unprepared, Mahri,” the woman-could she really be Ana, the false Archigos? — said to the man. “And I’ve learned from Karl, too.”

“You’ve not learned enough,” the cloaked man told her, cradling his arm. “Not enough. .”

He lifted both his hands, sweeping them through the air, and speaking a sequence of words in a strange tongue. The attack came so quickly that Allesandra was certain that the woman would be consumed by it: crackling blue fire streamed from the gesturing man to envelop the woman. But Ana had raised her own hands at the same moment and the blue fire split into two streams just in front of her, hissing and fuming as they struck the ground on either side of the Archigos.

But the firestream continued to pour toward her, and Allesandra heard the woman gasp as she held her shielding hands before her. Her mouth was moving, but the words were unheard over the fury of the spell; her eyes were closed and lines of effort creased her face. The sundered firestreams began to close, threatening to drown her in the blue flames.

Allesandra wanted to believe this was a nightmare, that she had simply fallen asleep suddenly in her vatarh’s lap, but it couldn’t be a dream. And she knew that when the cloaked man killed Ana, he would look next at her. .

Georgi had told her that a starkkapitan must know when to make alliances, even with those who might the next day be your enemy. Vatarh had shown her the same.

Allesandra closed her fingers around the knife Vatarh had given her.

She pulled the blade free of the scabbard. Gathering all her strength, pushing away the dizziness, she rushed toward the man, screaming. His gaze shifted to her and the firestreams began to curl, but she was already beside him and she thrust the blade into his cloak blindly.

The firestream nearly touched her, but in the instant she thought she would feel its touch, the blaze shifted as if someone had taken hold of it, and the flames instead wrapped around Mahri himself. He screamed, and Allesandra flung herself away from him, dropping the knife. She struck the ground hard, the breath taken from her. As she tried to breathe, to move, she saw the firestreams crackle and flare, covering the man’s entire body and