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General Anthony Bridgerton is staring at a map of the Fold when he hears the news. The Fold spreads before him like a plague, dark and threatening but above all, deserved. Shadowy tendrils creep from his fingers to caress the edges of the map, slipping and sliding around the little figures. Knights and castles, horses and kings - all enveloped in his shadows.
There is a commotion at the entrance of his tent and the shadows recede to the palm of his hand. “General, sir!” It is Fife, one of the heartrenders. “It’s her!”
It’s electricity and fire through Anthony then and the single thought - mine.
They pull her from the skiff, a small slumped figure resting near the mast of the boat. The sails have been torn to shreds by the volcra, but half the passengers have survived, which is more than anyone else can say of the Fold. There are great scorch marks over the deck of the ship. The blackened timber forms a perfect silhouette of the girl.
His Grisha are gentle with her, even as they wrench the other passengers off the boat. Most of them are unconscious still but one gaunt woman is watching him as she disembarks: she is all wide brown eyes and hands that tremble.
Anthony is used to people trembling at the sight of him. What he doesn’t understand is the wild spark of energy that shoots through him at the sight of her. His shadows surge but he tamps them down.
“What are you going to do with her?” she says. Despite her shaking hands, her voice is steady.
“Silence otkazat'sya!” Fife jerks her away. His hands are bands around her thin arm. Later, bruises will form.
“That’s my sister, you brute,” she hisses back, undeterred and unafraid.
Fife raises his arm to backhand her across the face, but for some reason Anthony holds his hand up to still him. “Peace,” he says.
He approaches her now. Her hands are burnt, he can see. Yet beneath the ashes, he can smell something floral on her skin and he cannot help but lean in closer. He cannot stay away.
Perhaps there is something of a heartrender in her. If she is related to his sun summoner, then there could be the slightest bit of Grisha in her too - perhaps something he might be able to draw out. Certainly she looks thin enough to be suffering from the wasting sickness.
He dismisses the thought. A minor Grisha not strong to come into her own powers is beneath him. She does not signify. Still, he takes one more deep breath in before he draws away. Lilies and ashes. How strange to smell lilies in this wasteland.
He turns away. It feels like a wrench. “If she is so invested in her sister then bring her along too,” he says over his shoulder.
It is some time later before the sun summoner is awake enough for Anthony to be able to interrogate her. His skin itches with his impatience and annoyance. Really, it’s just that he expected the sun summoner to have more mettle. Instead, it sounds like she has swooned.
Nonetheless, he had employed his time well, interrogating all the people who had survived the skiff. All say the same thing: swarms of volcra had descended the moment they had reached the darkest part of the Fold. They had followed the plan to the last letter, and yet the volcra had sensed them and amassed in numbers greater than had ever been reported before. Almost as though they were drawn to the skiff. Drawn to his sun summoner.
They had torn some men to pieces - of the Grisha, Cho was gone now. A necessary sacrifice, really, if this had brought the sun summoner to him. The largest volcra descended on the skiff, the girl ready to be ripped to pieces in its claws - when it had happened.
The words had varied but the description had always been the same. A flash of light. The feeling that they would never be cold again. Then the burning.
The men had been terrified. Not Anthony though. No, he was exhilarated.
The sheer power described was more than he had ever imagined. It sets him aflame. She is his equal. His summoner. His tool to wield.
Now all he has to do is to convince her of the same.
He walks into the tent now. There is a faint buzz of conversation that stops upon his entrance. A tug of awareness, a stirring of his shadows directs his attention to the corner of the room. The woman from before - the sister - is kneeling in the corner. Her feet are bound, though her hands are free. One of the guards is at her back. Fife is nowhere to be seen. Anthony frowns. He would prefer his heartrender to be on hand, but already he is too impatient to wait.
The girl stands in the centre of the tent. Sophie had Tailored her well - where her sister still has streaks of soot on her face and burns marks on her arms, this girl is impeccably dressed now. Completely unlike the limp figure his men had pulled from the ruins of the boat. Pretty too, but in a soft way, like she has only just bloomed from the throes of childhood. Her cheeks are still plump and rosy, though she fills out her dress well. A stark contrast from her emaciated sister. The fear on her face is all her own as well.
“Closer,” he says. The girl makes no move to approach but one of his men pushes her towards him. Anthony smiles at her like a wolf. “Well,” he says. “What are you?”
The girl’s eyes dart around, until they settle on the corner that he knows her sister still kneels in the dirt. A look must pass between them because the girl straightens her shoulders, stands a little taller. “Edwina Sharma, sir. Royal cartographer. First Army.”
It irritates him, the way she looks at her sister for reassurance. He had always imagined his sun summoner as a force, a partner. Not a child. His irritation makes him terse. “Answer the question,” he snaps. “What are you?”
“A mapmaker, sir.”
The crowd murmurs, laughs a little. She is ridiculous. She is making him look ridiculous. “Quiet,” he says. “Edwina Sharma. Is this true? Can you summon light?”
She is all fear now, shrinking back into herself. It is only her sister’s presence in the corner of the room that seems to stop her from fleeing. He glances at the sister. Her face is impassive. Her freed hands are pressing together tightly.
Let her run, Anthony thinks. It will do her no good. But the sister meets his gaze unflinchingly. He looks away first.
“Well,” he says, advancing on the girl - this Edwina Sharma who quivers and shakes before him. She is near tears, he realises, though it provokes no sympathy in him. “Let us just make certain then.”
The signet ring he wears on his little finger is clawed like a volcra. It slips off easily. He captures her arm, tears her sleeve so that her pretty skin is exposed to him.
She flinches away from him. “Please,” she says. She is so pathetic with her watery eyes. It makes him rough. He drags the clawed ring into her skin mercilessly.
It takes a moment - a moment where he is certain it is not going to work, that there is no possibility he has waited all this time for the pitiable child woman. He is filled with grim satisfaction and disappointment in equal measure.
And then the light starts to blaze.
It doesn’t come from the cut that he is driving into her arm. Instead, it emanates from around her, beginning inches from her skin and floods the room, blazing a path through the tent and into the sky above. Edwina looks terrified as Anthony meets her gaze across the light. Beyond her, he catches a glimpse of her sister as she looks on, hands pressed firmly together, back ramrod straight.
He is silent as he pulls the ring from his flesh. Even as the light fades, he can see that she is bleeding.
She refuses to go to the Little Palace without her sister. “I need Kate with me,” she says. “I cannot possibly go without her.”
Anthony contemplates denying her request, pulling her into the carriage despite her protests, but he decides to acquiesce this once. It can only help his cause if Edwina fancies herself in love with him. He takes great care to smile down at her, standing just that little bit too close. But her face is wary and her eyes are still fearful. Space, he decides. He’ll give her space.
They bundle Edwina into the carriage in her immaculate finery and her sister after her. The sister - Kate - is still in the rags of a tracker. He still cannot look at her too long before his heart starts thumping in its cage. His shadows leap to his fingertips every time she is near. She must be a very powerful heartrender, he thinks, to be able to affect him so, even untrained. Perhaps bringing her to the Little Palace would be useful after all. If she were engaged in her own training, she would be less likely to interfere with his seduction of her sister.
Still, her baleful glare peering at him out of the carriage window does nothing to settle his shadows. “Close the curtains,” he barks at the Squallers accompanying them. “They must not be seen.” It’s true, but a useful excuse nonetheless.
He remains uneasy as he rides just away from the carriage, keeping enough of a distance so he can anticipate an ambush. But when it comes, it is swift and unexpected.
They have distracted him with a sharpshooter, firing at him just enough to draw him away from the carriage. So it is for this reason that he doesn’t see the fallen log that blocks their path. He doesn’t see the guards go down, one after another. He has fallen enough behind to be late to the melee.
Once he has dispensed with the sharpshooter, it is a bloodbath that he returns to. The forest floor is littered with bodies. Kate lies prostrate beneath the shadow of a drüskelle, her eyes hazy and unfocused. Blood is pooling beneath her head. The drüskelle has his axe arm raised high above his head, already on the downswing. The trajectory of the axe is straight into Kate’s heart. Edwina is nowhere to be seen.
It all rises up in him then: his rage, his shadows, a black seething mass that takes physical form. He has no other thought in his head but of the girl lying so still on the ground, and it is with barely a breath that he slices through the air with the Cut. The man’s arm parts from the rest of his body cleanly, thumping uselessly into the ground. The axe is mere inches from Kate. Blood splatters on her face like rubies.
Anthony is powerless to stop his shadows moving towards her, entwining her around her body and caressing her skin. He moves helplessly towards her also, black cloak billowing behind him.
She looks up at him. In this light, her eyes look gold before they float gently shut. His shadows twine around her head, stemming the lazy ooze of blood. He shouts for a Healer; at his yell, her eyes flutter open briefly. She smiles.
He finds Edwina covering in the overturned carriage. There is one small scratch on her tearstained face. “Kate said to stay here,” she gasps. “She said they would not be expecting two women. She said she would draw them away from me.”
There is a bitter taste in his mouth, like cowardice, but still he hoists Edwina onto his horse in front of him and gallops the rest of the way back with her to the Little Palace.
If jealousy flares when he sees Dorset doing the same for Kate, albeit with more care for her limp body, well. Anthony has been many things in his many lifetimes, but he has never been a nice man.
It is fortunate that the Queen is away from court with her family for the summer, for it gives Anthony time to ready Edwina for her presentation. There have been whispers of war all season, so Anthony spends most of his time in the map room pouring over the territories and boundaries. It all feels useless, but still, it is a way to occupy his time until Edwina is ready.
He stays away from her for the better part of the fortnight, biding his time and plotting out the course of the Fold. Botkin, who has been overseeing her training is decidedly unimpressed.
“She is too meek,” he tells Anthony. “She’d sooner thank her opponent than hit them. Is this truly the sun summoner you’ve been looking for?”
Anthony is tempted to choke him to death for questioning his judgement, but he does have a point. Since the first day, Edwina has shown no more inclination for summoning the sun than her sister. He’d excused it away as shock at first, but when Botkin comes to him day after day with a dismissive shake of his head, he decides to take matters into his own hands.
He seeks her out in the Palace. The library seems like the most likely place for his bookish summoner, but it is only the Apparat lurking there. The odious man waves a dismissive hand somewhere in the direction of the gardens, so it is there that he seeks her out. Moving silently through the trees, he sees two figures sitting by a fountain and he slows his pace to listen in.
“-don’t know what you want me to do Didi,” Edwina says.
“Hush,” Kate says. “You are my wonderful sister. Why shouldn’t you be adored, lauded, looked after?”
“This isn’t real. This is someone’s version of me.”
“I will be right by your side, Bon,” Kate says, but she looks so stooped and hunched in that moment.
“There you are,” Anthony says, choosing that moment to interrupt. His voice is overly loud and cheerful. “I was hoping you would accompany me to meet Danbury. It’s time we unlocked your power.”
As usual Edwina looks frightened, but it is Kate’s turn to retreat when Anthony dismisses her.
“Can Kate come with -“
“I shall be right by your side,” he interrupts, but the words are wool in his mouth. “You and I are going to change the world.”
In the end he only spends half a hour in Danbury’s cottage. No matter how long he leaves his hands on her skin, the sun does not rise. He could pierce her flesh again with the claw ring, but a sun summoner he has to control with pain is a slave not a weapon. A cloying headache had developed from Danbury’s heavily perfumed fires, and she had dismissed him with a disparaging shake of her head. The pain echoes behind his eyes now, his forehead a big crease. Edwina had sent him a plaintive look when he had exited, but he had no sympathy left to spare her.
She is all wrong, this sun summoner who does not respond to his touch. He cannot draw her light out of her. But it is more than that. It’s the way his shadows don’t recognise her either. The way they lurk just beneath his fingertips, sullen and waiting. He has waited for her for eternity but she does not bring him to life.
He skips dinner that night, choosing instead to dine in his rooms. But the night is long and his dreams are full of horrors, so he peels himself out of bed to head back to work. But when he passes the library, lamp in hand, he notices that it is awash in a bright flickering light.
“Hello?” he says, and there is a clattering, and then a silence. The light goes swiftly out. His shadows swirl ominously around his feet. He peers in, illuminating the room with his lamplight.
Kate is crouching on the floor, picking up the pieces of a broken lamp. “I apologise,” she says. “You startled me.”
“I saw the light on,” he replies.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she says. Her arms are bone thin. Yet again, he wonders what would happen if he touched her, tried to draw out any power lurking beneath her skin. He won’t though. She is irrelevant to his plans and her sister’s reliance on her is grating.
She has dropped her book. He kneels down next to her and picks it up. “Some light reading?” he says wryly. It is a history of Ravka.
Kate avoid his gaze. “I wanted to know more about the Fold,” she admits. “How it came to be. I thought it was important to know more about it. Especially if you want Edwina to help take it down.”
He leans in. Smells the lilies and sunlight again. It is intoxicating, which is his only explanation for what he says next. “The Black Heretic that created it. He was my father.”
She is so close to him now, just barely a breath away. “Why did he create it?” she whispers.
“They killed the only person he ever loved. They killed my mother.”
Her gaze is warm, unflinching. He could touch her skin. Has never felt such want before. He doesn’t though. “That seems like a good reason,” she says.
The next he hears of Kate, she has gotten into a fight with Siena, one of the Squallers, and broken her arm. It brings to mind that grey day in the forest, drüskelle looming over her, except this time it’s her arm that he Cuts in half. It is this image that sends him storming to her quarters. Her room is cramped. A narrow pallet is layed out next to a barred window Her meagre pile of clothes are haphazardly heaped over a rickety chair.
She is sitting crosslegged on the pallet, staring wistfully out the window at the sunlit grounds below. Though a Healer has set her arm, she is still nursing it gently. There are bruises over her face. She is startled to see him, but not quite as startled as he is to be there.
“What were you thinking?” Anthony spits. “Siena is extremely well trained and has full control over her powers, and you are neither. You’re just an otkazat'sya. What were you even doing at training?”
Kate flinches. It’s the first sign of hurt he has seen from her in the month that the sisters have been at the Little Palace and he finds himself instantly deflated. “I was thinking that when the war comes, I’d prefer not to be on the receiving end of an axe,” she replies coolly. “I was thinking that as long as I’m forced to be here that I might make myself useful. Learn some things.”
Anthony opens his mouth and shuts it again.
“She didn’t really want to break my arm though. She wanted to break Edwina’s. But I stepped in for her because - can you imagine Bon fighting? I can’t.” Kate laughs a little, a short unamused laugh. “I think Siena was jealous though,” she says thoughtfully. “Rumour is, you used to tumble her quite regularly and you’ve stopped since you brought Edwina back here.”
He stares at her. Her face is upturned towards him expectantly. He had been spending more time with Edwina recently, though he’d absolutely no inclination to try to tumble her. Danbury had made no progress with unlocking her summoning and had called upon Anthony to come to try amplify her powers. So far he had stopped shy of hurting Edwina but it felt inevitable given their lack of progress. The ever-looming threat of the Queen’s return was quickly materialising.
“You’re very protective of your sister,” he says at last.
“Wouldn’t you be?” she shoots back. “All I ever wanted was for her to be cared for. Edwina is a soft soul - all she wants to do is read her books and draw her maps. Do you think she thrived in the First Army? Do you think she is thriving here?”
Anthony is silent. Mostly because he doesn’t know how to tell her that he doesn’t think about Edwina at all. Mostly because he doesn’t know how to tell her that he hasn’t tumbled Siena in many months. That ever since that night in the library, he keeps waking up in the middle of the night with her name on his lips and his cock hard and aching. That he is half hard now, just from her closeness. The smell of her.
“Anyway,” Kate continues, oblivious to his thoughts. “That’s why I picked a fight with Siena. Sorry if that makes things difficult with her.” She turns back to the window, dismissing him. Across the lawn, the last of the sunlight glimmers through the trees, casting dancing shadows across her face.
“It doesn’t,” he says before he can help himself. “There isn’t any - there aren’t any things between Siena and I.”
He leaves before he can see her reaction. Later that night he strokes himself to completion and it is her face that he pictures, all fire and brimstone, illuminated in his mind as though lit from within.
The Queen returns in the fall, and the atmosphere at court changes rapidly. King George is with her, but his eyes are vacant and staring. It makes the Queen colder and harsher like the Fjerdan lands she so craves. As he expected, she demands a demonstration from Edwina at first available opportunity. She would have summoned the girl to her that moment, had Anthony not put a stop to it. Edwina has made absolutely no progress in the months that she has been here. She seemed to enjoy living at the Palace though. Most days when she was not required at training, she would be in the library with the Apparat and his apprentice, a young man named Bagwell. He had passed the library a few times to keep an eye on her. She was always laughing. He’d never heard Kate laughing.
“Are you sure you were not mistaken,” Danbury had sneered at him the other night. “I feel nothing in her. Not a skerrick of magic.”
Botkin had said essentially the same thing just days before. But Anthony recalls the warmth of the light that had emanated from her skin. The way it had caressed and lit the icy cockles of his heart. The pull of his shadows towards the blaze. “You’re mistaken,” he snarls. “If you cannot draw the light out of her, I shall have your head.”
Still, there had been no progress. And without the right incentive, it seemed that it was unlikely that there ever would be.
These are the thoughts filling his head as he prepares for the banquet. There is no guilt as he slides his signet ring onto his finger. The blade of the ring is newly sharpened. The fighting at the borders had intensified with the return of the Queen. The ever present threat of Zlatan, the rebel general, looms. He knows that war is afoot.
The veil they’ve placed over Edwina’s head looks like a shroud. He avoids touching her as they navigate the halls together. There is nothing but disappointment in that touch, nothing but emptiness when his shadows and her light do not rush to meet each other. She is tense and wary beneath the veil. He can see it in the set of her shoulders.
“Where is Kate?” she asks as they stand outside the great doors. The familiar question irritates him. For the most part, he has tried to avoid Kate. Yet somehow, he is always aware when she is near. The fluttering of the curtain at a windowsill that she has just vacated. The way her scent lingers in a room. His shadows creeping, curling under a closed door that she is behind. And his skin, always his skin, burning, tingling when she is in the same room.
“How should I know,” Anthony snaps.
“She promised me she would be here. I need her here.” There is rising panic in her voice.
“You do not need her,” he says. Decades of frustration makes him mean. Weeks of pent up lust makes him cruel. “She will not always be around for you. One day she will wither and die because she is not Grisha like us. Only you and I will remain. She will be nothing more than the withered bloom easily removed from the blossoming forest of our lives.”
“I need her,” Edwina repeats. It is clear she has heard nothing of what he has said. She pushes up her veil so that he can see her whole face and her wild darting eyes. “I can’t do this without her.”
“You’re about to,” he says, and yanks the veil back over her face, pushes her into the great Hall. To her credit, Edwina does not fall over, and her steps are not faltering as she proceeds down the aisle next to him. When the attendant hovers, she removes the veil calmly and gives it to him.
Anthony chances a glance at her. Her face is blank now, a mask of resignation.
“I thought she’d be taller,” the Queen says. Her voice echoes up to the high ceilings. “Charming enough though, I suppose. If she is what you say she is.” The expression on her face is detached, disbelieving. It hits him then, the utter stupidity of having to kowtow before this queen, though she knows nothing, though her court is mired in frivolity. While she sits in her summer palace, whiling away the days with wine and mirth, the Grisha - his Grisha - are being hunted around the world. Dying. Murdered. The fury is ember in his throat, when Anthony speaks.
“She is Edwina Sharma. The sun summoner and she will change the future. Starting now.” He raises his hand and his shadows creep through the hall, stifling the light from the windows. Choking the life from the hall. He can barely see Edwina’s face, though she is standing before him. Nor can he see the Queen’s, or any of her attendants. He takes her hand, willing her light to obey him. Willing their souls to recognise each other.
Nothing.
Well. Anthony closes his eyes momentarily. If it is not to be kindness, then it must be cruelty. He slips his ring off his finger. Prepares to plunge it into her arm.
It is only because she is so close to him that he feels her head turn. He follows her gaze, though he is not sure what she is looking at in this pitch dark. Somehow though, he sees her. Kate. Though his shadows weave a matted nest around the room, somehow she is clearer than anyone else. As though his shadows are nesting just that bit tight, and just that bit closer to her. Outlining her in his dark. She is panting a little, as though she has run to be in the room. Breathless like he has imagined her, bouncing on his cock.
His desire makes him stupid, he decides, and pushes the blade into Edwina’s flesh. She cries out, a sharp cry of prey. He can feel the blood pooling around his fingers. Maybe he had pushed the knife a little too deep.
Or maybe he has plunged it just deep enough, for a blinding light pulses forth, stronger than it had been back in the tent, back on the army front. It blinds the room, the Queen and her couriers throwing their hands up to shield their eyes from the blaze.
Not Anthony though. He stares through it all, takes it into himself, entwines it in his shadows. It feels like an embrace. It smells like sorrow and flowers. It caresses him, setting his heart ablaze and his skin on fire. He notices however, that Edwina has her eyes screwed shut, as though the light is blinding even to her. It still hovers that bit just above her skin, slightly apart from her.
Although maybe it is just the pain that she screws her eyes shut against. She is openly crying now, tears running prettily down her face as he twists the blade one last time. When he pulls it out, he makes sure to clamp his fist around her arm to stem the tide of blood. When the light fades from her, his shadows rush back in, so that they are still mostly shrouded.
The applause starts then, the Queen’s loudest of all. “Bravo,” she shrills. “What a gem. What a diamond. Bridgerton - good work. ”
The look on Edwina’s face is betrayal. Anthony has pulled her out of the room under the guise of needing to get her ready for the banquet. Her arm has opened up into a gash, a maw. He releases her into Sophie’s arms. “Fix her,” he demands. “Make her perfect for the banquet. It’s in your honour after all.” The last to Edwina.
“You hurt me,” she says wonderingly. “Kate said you would never hurt your sun summoner.”
“Kate is a fool,” he growls. “What did you expect when you have been so utterly useless? Did you think we had the mercy of time? That the Queen would let you play with your little priest boy in the library until you decided that you were ready to train?”
Sophie’s hands are pressing into Edwina’s arm, flesh knitting together, but it is her trust that is broken. “I thought you would be kind,” Edwina says. Her voice is so small now. “Kate said you would be kind.”
Sophie is pulling her away. She goes willingly, eager to be away from him. Anthony lets her. He is left standing in the middle of the long stone corridor by himself.
When he opens his fist, it is full of blood. When he looks up, Kate is standing across the hallway from him. Her face is full of horror.
“Fine,” he snarls. “Make me your villain.”
She turns and flees, disappearing around the corner. Her footsteps are fading, but still the echoes linger. He tastes the ashes in his mouth. Has to fight the urge to give chase. Instead, Anthony lets his hand fall by his side, the opposite unbloodied one reaching helplessly towards the place where Kate had stood.
The blood drips steadily. It sounds like rain.
Kate and Edwina both avoid him for the duration of the banquet. Or at least Edwina tries to, but he will have none of it. There are noblemen to win over and foreign dignitaries to flatter. He hangs her off his arm like an accessory. Though she is a pitiable summoner, she is charming and the men he takes her to meet are all instantly beguiled.
When they have a moment alone however, she shakes him off. “You’re hurting me,” she says. It comes out as a whine to his ears.
“Is that all you’re going to say to me from now on?” he says angrily. “How much worse do you think the Queen would have done to you if she had realised that you have no control over your power?”
There is something hesitating in the twist of her fingers, entwining guiltily. There is a secret pressed behind her teeth, he is sure of it. She opens her mouth to speak, but her words are swiftly interrupted by Kate’s approach. He looks up, distracted as Edwina’s mouth snaps shut.
“Edwina, are you well?” she asks, ignoring Anthony altogether. Unusually, she is attired in a teal gown instead of her usual tracker’s rags. It shimmers and clings to her bosom, flowing enticingly as she walks. Anthony swallows. He cannot remember what he had just been speaking with Edwina about.
“Didi,” Edwina breathes. There is still guilt in her mien. “I do not - I cannot do this anymore.”
Kate is gentle and resigned as she runs her palm over her sister’s face. “I understand,” she says. “This is too much. This is not what I wanted for you either.” A look passes between them that Anthony cannot understand. “I will stand in for Edwina,” Kate addresses him suddenly. “Have your Tailor alter me to look like her. She is too tired and in too much pain to stay up much longer.’ The glare she sends Anthony is hateful.
Anthony considers fighting her, but the night is long and tomorrow is a new day. A new day for him and Edwina to start over. He shrugs his acquiescence.
When he next sees Kate, she is wearing Edwina’s face. He hates it. It is not right in the way she moves or the way she smiles, but the noblemen are drunk and don’t notice. He notices though. He would know her anywhere.
It is that wrongness that makes him keep his distance, and it is that distance that proves her downfall.
Anthony is standing by the Queen’s shoulder, pretending to believe in everything she is espousing. Grisha as second class citizens, the Fold turned inside out for her purposes - he can barely stomach the sight of her. This is how he explains the clench of his stomach at that very moment, and the stabbing pain that shoots through his right shoulder blade. Something feels wrong. His shadows seethe at his feet.
“Control yourself,” the Queen barks at him as though he is a pet, instead of the stuff of her nightmares. The urge to blight them all eats at his veins, but he tamps it down. Soon.
He cannot control the shadows though, when Fife appears at the door. There is blood on his kefta. Anthony knows instantly, has known it since the pain lanced through his shoulder. It is Kate’s blood.
It is rage and terror shooting through him, but he manages to keep his composure and beg his leave of the Queen. His feigned obsequiousness makes him all the more nauseous.
“She was attacked,” Fife whispers to him, as they leave the room. “The man responsible is dead, but he stabbed her through the back before we managed to restrain him. She was wearing Edwina’s face.”
Sophie and Dorset are kneeling over Kate’s limp body when he enters. Their hands are knitting, weaving, the same way that Sophie had held Edwina’s skin together after the demonstration before the Queen. But while that had been slow and steady - lazy almost - this time, their hands are flying. Urgency laces the room. And the blood - so much blood.
He cannot help himself, dropping to his knees by her. His hands reaching out to her. He has never touched her skin. What if she dies before he ever lays hands on her?
“Don’t touch her,” Sophie says. “We’ll knit her together wrong if you move her.”
He wants to seize Kate by her shoulders, shake the life back into her, but he knows that he cannot. “Who did this to you,” he demands. “Tell me!”
“I’ve slowed her heart down so she loses less blood,” Fife says. “She cannot answer you,” but Anthony knows that already.
“Save her,” he orders Sophie and Dorset. “Save her, and give her her face back.”
The assailant has the look of one of Zlatan’s men - one of the rebels who have been causing havoc at the border. Or at least the unburnt half of him does. He is lying half in the fireplace when they fish him out. There are scorch marks all over his body. Part of his clothing is still on fire. It takes them several rounds of smothering his body with blankets before the flames gently licking at him go out.
“Why was she alone,” Anthony asks, staring down at the body. He feels nothing but a cold hatred.
“She was tired. She wanted a little time to herself,” comes the reply. “We had guards posted outside, but he must have come through that passageway. We had to break through the door when she screamed, but by the time we managed to get in, she’d already used the last of her strength to, I suppose, throw him into the fireplace.”
“Would that she were the summoner instead of her sister,” Fife says dismissively.
“Someone should check on her sister,” It occurs to Anthony that that someone should really be him. “Someone needs to make sure she’s safe, after all, she was the intended target.”
But Anthony does not - cannot leave Kate’s side as Sophie and Dorset work in silence. It is only after their hands still and her eyelids slowly flutter open, that he feels truly able to breathe. She gazes at him and he can see the moment her memories come back, because she tenses. She is taut as a bowstring, wary as a rat eyeing its predator. He dismisses the others with a tilt of his head.
“Breathe,” he says, when they are alone. “No one’s going to hurt you. The man who tried is already dead.”
Kate’s hands rise then, a defensive motion. Her eyes twitch towards the fireplace, but they have removed the body and all that is left are the burn marks on the fireplace and on the wall behind. Now that he is staring at her face - hers, not Edwina’s - he suddenly realises how beautiful she is. How much time he has spent denying it.
“I’ll kill anyone who tries to hurt you,” he says, and means it.
“What if it’s you,” she replies tiredly. Still she fights him. He is charmed .
“I’d never hurt you.”
“You did Edwina,” she points out.
“That’s different,” he says, but what he means is she’s not you.
Kate huffs out a small disbelieving laugh. “I don’t believe you. You would really stop at nothing to have your way. To achieve your aims, whatever they are. You talk of bringing the Fold down, but nothing you do makes me think that that’s all you want. Or that that’s even what you want. Why should I trust you when you won’t be honest with me?”
She is telling him something important, but for the life of him, he cannot figure it out. Not when her lips are so plump and red, so near his face. Not when he’s picturing what she would look like on her knees for him, hot mouth wrapped around him, his fist in her hair. Or how she would taste on his tongue, spread wide and open.
“I must have my sun summoner,” he says, when it becomes clear that Kate expects an answer. “It is imperative that she obey me.”
There is a moment when it feels like she might lean in, might cover his mouth with hers, might sweep her tongue ravenously along his teeth to gain entrance. The possibility crackles between them. His shadows rise, and a strange heat with it.
But a knock on the door breaks the moment, dousing his ardour. When he thinks about it later, he will realise that she was already drawing away.
“What is it,” Anthony calls out, not taking his eyes off Kate. She has turned towards the fire now, the glow behind her illuminating her curves. She is no longer as gaunt as when they’d first met, he realises. The weight of her breasts would fill his hands.
“It’s urgent, sir.”
He looks back at Kate. “Stay right there,” he says. “I will return.”
“She is gone,” Fife says the moment he steps out of the room. “We went to check on Edwina Sharma, like you said, and she is nowhere to be found.”
“Show me.” But he knows in his heart of hearts she is no longer there.
Fife takes him up to darkened room where Edwina had been staying. The luxurious quarters are so different from the tiny cellar room that he had found Kate in. Yet never once had he tried to seek Edwina out here. Maybe it would have been different if he had - maybe it would have been different if he had spoken softly to her, crowded her against the wall. She had been young and impressionable after all. Overly fond of romance novels.
It strikes him then that running away from a cruel master was probably stuff of romance indeed.
“Where is the boy - Bagwell,” he asks. “Find him.”
Bagwell is nowhere to be found of course. His belongings and Edwina’s have disappeared. His guards tell him later that they were seen climbing into a carriage, accompanied by three people - a woman who moved so quickly that she barely had a shadow, a pale man with a cane and a limp, and a wiry boy with pearl handed revolvers dangling from his hands. They had been relaxed and unhurried. Almost as though this had been planned. Almost as though someone had summoned them to take Edwina away.
He knows then. Knows who has betrayed him. Does not know what he will do to her now.
He almost expects her to be gone from the room when he returns, but is surprised to hear voices from inside. Pressing his ear close to the door, he wonders grimly what other treacherous secrets he may learn today.
To his surprise, it is Danbury’s voice from inside. “You must leave the Palace,” she is saying. “Without Edwina, he will kill you tonight.”
Kate’s reply is too soft to hear, but whatever she says makes Danbury laugh.
“You fool,” the crone cackles. “Why would Anthony look at you when he has the sun summoner at his disposal? You are nothing - nothing more than a means to an end. Nothing more than access to her. You had better leave with me now.”
“Enough,” Anthony barks as he bursts into the room. His shadows billow around him, snuffing out most of the light in the room. They are standing in front of the gaping hole in the wall, a covert passageway stretching behind them. The fireplace is flickering next to them. In barely a blink of an eye, Danbury turns and flees, moving faster than he has ever seen her bent body move in his life.
Kate is left standing there, staring at him. She backs warily away towards the flames, putting the table between them. As if it would protect her from him. The glow of the fire paints her face golden. Anthony feels wild. His blood is coursing through his veins and the darkness rising in his heart. How dare she take the sun away from him. How dare Danbury try to take her from him. He has come too far to fail now.
“You sent her away, didn’t you? You helped her escape.” His voice is dark and menacing, as he stalks her around the table.
“I thought that if she was important to you you would protect her. I never thought you would hurt her.” She inches away from him, but the room is a dead end. Their story is a maze that only ever led him to her. “I didn’t know what you would do to her. I still don’t. I still don’t know what you want.” Her back hits the stone wall. She is cornered between the fireplace and the table. He advances.
“I want to finish what my father started,” Anthony says. There is still a good amount of space between them, but that will not hold. Her hands are outstretched, palms up towards him, like she wants to push him away. That will not do either. “They think to destroy the Fold. They think to destroy the Grisha. I will never let that happen. The Fold is mine to command - it is my birthright. With the sun summoner’s protection, I will move the Fold to destroy Zlatan, and the Queen, and all the filthy otkazat'sya who seek to control the Grisha.”
“You will kill thousands of innocents.”
Anthony laughs cruelly. “Innocents? Were they innocent when they stood by and watch the Grisha die? Were they innocent when they came after my father - when they slaughtered my mother? There is no such thing as innocents in a war.”
Anthony steps closer to her. His footsteps echo like a heartbeat in the small room. She is pressed up against the wall now. Her bosom is heaving. His gloved hands fall on either side of her head. He lets his head fall towards her neck, cannot stop himself as he inhales deeply. All he can smell is the burning of wood, the fire in its grate coursing through his pounding heart. The blood rushing to his groin.
“You know I will find her. I cannot let her go,” he whispers silkily.
“And me?” She is breathy now, curving her body up towards him like she cannot help herself. Like he is the sun, when he has only ever been shadow.
“I cannot let you go either.”
His lips hover a breath from hers. She looks up at him, eyes blown with a desire that he cannot help but match. When they move, it feels like an answer to all his prayers. His lips crash down on hers or maybe she surges up to meet him. It is not soft nor gentle, but a furious claiming. His hands are all over her, feeling the soft curves of her body through his gloves, through her dress. Her fingers press into him too, sharp nails scratching down his back and over his arse, as if to draw something akin to love out of him. He seizes her around her waist then, lifts her bodily up to throw her onto the table next to them. He parts her legs with his knees, licks a blazing trail down her neck, over her bosom. Tears her gown so that she is revealed before him. She cries out when he captures a nipple between his teeth. Bites down.
All the while, his shadows are rising, pressing between her legs and caressing her where she is wet and open for him. Her hips surge off the table reflexively, thrusting against his swollen cock. He grinds down punishingly in return. She moans, but he swallows that too. He can feel it when she comes apart but he wants to feel more, so when she stills again, panting, he rips off his gloves, shoves his pants down, and plunges deep into her with a shout that he cannot contain. She clenches around him, kisses him filthily, all messy tongue and teeth. Pain and pleasure.
He presses his hands into her skin, pulls her deeper to him. Rising and falling like waves. Ebbing and flowing like the sun. He is cruel in his thrusts, but generous in her pleasure.
Something is rising up in him or something in her - something deep and dark and lovely that he cannot name. It feels like night then, the blackest part, just before dawn. Squeezing like a vice around his heart. Like her flesh pulsing around him.
She is coming apart around him now, all lovely cries that he claims - every single one. He follows her over the edge then, spilling into her. Holding her to him like something precious. It happens all at once then, the fiery light emanating from her, blinding him like pleasure. She is luminescent and he is helpless before her, crying out his pleasure into her hungry mouth. When it is over, he is still holding her to him but she is clutching him in equal measure. Like she’ll never let him go either.
She is still blazing too, like the sun, no, brighter than the sun. She might burn him, but instead she leans in to kiss him deep and long. Her gaze flickers up to meet his, something ancient burning within her eyes, like she has known him for all too long. He is enthralled.
“It’s you,” he breathes. “It’s always been you.”