Chapter 123: Freedom

“Damn it!”

The curse tore out of me before I could stop it. My mind went white, and then, almost at once, cold and sharp.

There was no time for Moon’s Door. There was no time to climb down four floors of stairs and explain to a guard why a one-star soldier needed to leave the palace. Rashford was forty-five feet from the gate, and Arthur was dragging his feet in the grip of a man whose entire world was shaped like a king’s suspicion.

I reached inward, into my Core, where a cluster of Gifts sat waiting like knives on a rack. I did not look for the strongest one. I looked for the right one, and I found it, a thin silver thread that I had never dared to use.

I pulled.

The world split.

It was the strangest sensation I had ever felt.

My awareness stretched like a sheet of cloth caught between two hands, and for one dizzy heartbeat I was in two places at once, looking through two pairs of eyes.

Then, the stretching stopped, and the pressure eased, and I understood that I had become two equal halves of one mind.

There were two of me on the balcony.

I looked at myself. He looked back. We were the same height, the same tired face, the same single star on the same green shirt. It was like staring into a mirror that had decided to nod.

‘Go,’ I thought.

‘Obviously,’ he thought back.

The one on my left closed his eyes.

His features rippled like water struck by a pebble. A beard sprouted along his jaw, dark and neat.

His nose thickened, his ears grew long and pointed at the tips, and his eyebrows thinned into two slim, elegant lines that swept up toward his temples.

In three seconds he had become a stranger, a bearded, sharp-eared stranger with no connection to a boy named Peter.

I stayed as I was. Peter would remain on the balcony, trembling slightly, a witness to nothing.

If anyone ever asked where the one-star soldier was that night, the answer would be simple, and it would be true.

We shared one Core, so we shared one pool of spiritual power, and I felt it drain the instant the stranger moved. He vaulted the railing without a word. Midway through the fall he touched another Gift, and the wind took him like a leaf.

He was light. Not figuratively. Literally.

He drifted down the wall of the palace in a long, soundless slide and landed in the dust a good distance from Rashford and Arthur, so softly that the dead grass did not even bend.

Then he ran.

I felt every step of it through the bond, the cold air stinging his lungs, the swamp mud sucking at his boots. He drew Fury as he went, and the black blade came out of its sheath with a low, hungry sigh.

He saw the stranger. And I saw, through the stranger’s eyes, the captain’s lips curve into a smile.

It was a terrible smile.

Not cruel, exactly. Satisfied. The smile of a man who had been told for days that an enemy was coming and had finally been given someone to burn.

My double jumped.

Rashford raised his free hand.

What came out of it was not a spell.

It was weather. A column of flame as broad as a house roared across the gap, blue at the heart, orange along its flanks, and topped with a crest of scarlet that curled over itself like a wave.

It was beautiful, in a way I will be ashamed of for the rest of my life. I had never seen that much fire in one place.

For a moment, it was all I could see.

‘Idiot,’ I thought bitterly. ‘I jumped into the air. I cannot dodge.’

But I was wearing the Serpent of Luck.

I felt it stir. Somewhere, a thread of chance pulled loose and rewove itself.

A gust of wind came out of nowhere.

It had no right to exist. The night had been still. But the gust hit the wall of flame sideways, and then another followed it, and another, until the whole column bent and tore and scattered into a hundred streamers of sparks.

Ninety percent of that inferno was ripped away into the swamp. The remaining tenth struck my double’s arms and chest, and it burned, a sharp, bright sting that made him hiss through his teeth, but it was nothing.

Rashford’s smile dropped from his face.

He flung Arthur aside. I saw my friend hit the ground and roll, bound in spiritual ropes from his shoulders to his knees, his blond hair full of dust. He was alive. His chest was heaving.

Rashford drew his sword.

Clang!

Fury met steel in the air, and lightning leapt between the two blades, white and violent, spraying sparks in a fan around us. The shock ran down my arm like a bell. I felt the stranger’s bones rattle, and I felt Rashford’s too, and for an instant we hung there, locked, eye to eye.

My double drove a boot into his stomach.

The air left Rashford in a grunt. He staggered back, and before he could recover, my hand shot out and seized his left arm, twisting it in a way that arms were not meant to twist. Something cracked.

The limb went slack. He bellowed, but I was already moving, and with my free hand I reached into my Core.

The dagger came out like a snake from a basket.

Hunger of the Creepy Dagger.

It was cold. It was always cold. It hummed in my left palm with a low, greedy pleasure, and I felt that familiar whisper curl into the back of my mind, the whisper that wanted me to finish things. I did not push it away. I had no spare strength for that.

Fury in my right hand. Hunger in my left.

I charged.

Rashford was bleeding from his nose and his sleeve, one arm dangling, his face twisted in fury, but he was not finished. He rolled sideways, and as he rolled, his thumb flicked. A thin, almost transparent streak of wind whipped past me. Illusory. Harmless. I would have ignored it.

The next instant, he was gone.

He reappeared exactly where the wind had landed, ten feet to my left, standing straight and perfectly composed, as if he had never moved. His sword was in his good hand. His expression was stern.

“Who are you?” he asked, in Euniscopian.

It was an old man’s question, and a tired one. I answered it with the only truth I could afford.

“A servant of Valemont.”

Fwoosh!

I threw the dagger while I was still running.

It spun through the dark like a black fang. Rashford saw it coming and threw himself to the left, rolling over the dirt. It missed him by an inch. It would have sunk into the road behind him.

It never reached the road.

I felt the bond between us, the thin invisible line that tied the dagger to my Core, and I pulled it. The blade vanished in midair. It reappeared in my Core, and in the same breath I drew it out again and flung it toward the exact spot where he had landed.

Rashford was still on his side, still catching his breath.

The dagger went through his bicep.

It pinned his arm to the ground like a nail through a moth. He screamed. It was a raw, shocked scream.

I walked toward him.

My double did not hurry. There was no need. Rashford lay on his back in the dirt, gasping, his sword fallen from his fingers, his one good hand clawing at the hilt of the dagger and finding it burning cold. I reached into my Core a third time.

My muscles flooded with heat. My strength rose like a tide.

I was using too many Gifts at once. I felt it in the pressure behind my eyes, in the ache of the shared Core, in the way the second body was straining to keep up with the first. But the price was small. A headache. A tremor in the hands. I was safe, mostly, and that was all I needed.

I knelt over him and punched him in the face.

Thwack!

Again.

Thwack!

A third time.

Thwack!

His nose broke. His lip split. Blood ran out of his nostrils and his mouth in dark ropes, and when I drew back my fist, I saw that his face was no longer a face. It was a crimson mask with two eyes in it.

I raised my fist again.

“Wai… wait.”

His voice was thin and wet. I stopped.

“What?” I asked with a high-pitched voice.

He coughed, and blood sprayed from his lips. It was obvious that he was nearing the end. His chest rose and fell in short, shallow bursts, his ribs were wrong under my knee, and the blood he had lost was pooling in the dust beneath him.

“Why?” he whispered. His good hand fell open on the ground. “Why do you people do it? Can’t you see… how much blood… this will cause?”

“Even a few moments of freedom,” I said, “are better than a lavish life of slavery.”

Rashford looked at me for a long moment before nodding. “Do it.”

I drew the dagger from the ground, and stabbed him in the chest.