Chapter 1.

The one who helped me went North.

Maybe you didn’t know about that. It’s not the sort of thing gets talked about – not in polite company, anyway – but the urchins know because we have to: how to recognize someone who sees with dream-clouded eyes, who to keep clear of when there are no witnesses. But I was never good at wisdom when it comes to friends or debts, and when I saw her one last time in the streets of Spite, looking haggard and half-wild – when I saw her catch my eye and veer towards me – I didn’t steer clear.

For you, she said, in a voice like cracked earth. The truth. She shoved a sheaf of crumpled, wax-stained paper into my hands, all of it covered over with cramped, angular script. While I was blinking down at it, she pushed past me into the crowd, and I lost her when I tried to follow. Next I heard, she was gone, and I don’t think I could have stopped her.

I don’t know if she was ever – what they say all Seekers become, sooner or later. I know about my brother, though, and that’s worse.

The Face and the Teeth. Somebody’s idea of a joke, my Northbound friend wrote in that letter she gave me, but not hers. Not mine, either.

They’re not believers in easy lies over cruel truths, Seekers. Wouldn’t be what they are if they were. I think she thinks she was doing me a favor, telling me what she learned, and maybe she’s even right about that, but it doesn’t change the questions she went and left me with.

I read her papers over that night, by lantern light after the others were sleeping, and then I read them again. After that, one by one, I burned them, and when all was ash, I let myself cry for a long time, silently into my sleeve. When I was done crying, I began to plan.

.

I knew my brother was with the Foreign Office; I’d been invited to join him there, in Wilmot’s End, and I knew enough of the city’s hidden ways to find the place on my own. Back when I’d believed there was nothing worse to the Songbirds than spying, that hadn’t mattered – if he had found the life he wanted, it wasn’t my right to drag him away from it because I missed him and I liked my kind of life better. Now I needed to know where in the complex to find him, and whether I could reach him without getting caught, and that, I hadn’t been told.

But one thing about London that anyone who lives here learns quick is that information can always be found, for those know who – and how – to ask. Some paid for detective work with more coin than any urchin had to hand, or traded in favors with spies. All I’d need was a lot of luck, even more patience, and the freshest fish at market.

.

The cat who found me was a grey one, small and quiet, with one tattered ear. I sat on the edge of a rooftop with the plate of fish at my side, not looking at her, and she sat nearby, cleaning her whiskers and not looking at me, until eventually she padded over, sniffed at the gift, and took a careful bite. I let her eat without saying anything. Most cats respect silence, and they like you better if you do too.

When she was done with everything but scraps and bones, I said, “I’m looking for a secret, and I’ve a few to trade in return, if you can find it for me.”

The cat made a curious mrow sound, and licked her paw delicately. A good sign, that.

“The Foreign Office,” I said. “There’s a boy who lives there, a – a Songbird. My brother, the Shieldmaiden. I need to find his room.”

The cat said nothing, but walked a little closer along the edge of the roof, until she was in arm’s reach – though I wasn’t fool enough to try to pet her – and looked attentively up at me.

“He looks like me,” I said, “and probably smells like me too,” and that seemed to be enough. I’m not sure cats care overmuch about human faces, but they seem to have their ways of recognizing us. This one meowed again, then leapt past me and onward, into the labyrinth of rooftops. I knew she’d understood the deal; I was even confident that she’d accepted it.

That cat returned late on Sunday, jumping down from the rafters at Heorot to land soft as a shadow in front of me. I told her about why I was asking, and a few other things besides, and she told me what I wanted to know.

“You should be careful,” she said, with a flick of her tail that I didn’t know how to interpret.

“I know.”

.

Wilmot’s End was – still is, really – a maze of ruins and winding lanes wreathed in thick, drifting fog, full of odd echoes and the distant sound of black water running. It’s not a safe place to be after dark, not even now with some of the monsters gone. Back then it was worse, and I was smaller.

I went quietly, darting from shelter to shelter, and kept the light from my lantern low. Something in the air there made me feel hunted, and I was glad I had gone alone.

I knew where I was going, vaguely. The cat had given me a direction and the general look of the place, and at first, my path was uneventful. I passed the pond and turned north along a tiny, crooked lane, my way lined with monuments: a jade orb, and towering onyx mausoleums with no doors, and chimes that shivered and sang though touched by no wind. More of them, of great variety and peculiarity – all beautiful, all stolen, all worth returning to see after they light the daytime lamps. But just then, amid all that night and silence, the feeling they left me with was serene but eerie.

I don’t know what it was that warned me. A sense of stillness, maybe, insects going suddenly quiet, a change in the quality of the air. Maybe just instinct, or luck. Whatever it was, it sent a prickle of danger up my arms and down my spine, and I knew I had to hide quickly. The closest place I saw was a high arch in a stone wall overgrown with tendrils of hanging fungus; I ran for it and pressed myself back into its shelter, in the shadow of an eroding column, hunkering down with my arms wrapped tight around my knees, holding my breath and waiting. I didn’t look at the sky, but I didn’t need to see to know that something was there.

I heard the rush of great wings overhead, felt a gust of wind strong enough to send debris scattering across the cobbles, and I huddled in the archway and tried to make myself small and still, because I knew just then, more than anything else, that I didn’t want the monster to see me. And I heard a sound in the distance, almost too faint to catch: music, woven of voices lifted in choral complexity. I wondered if my brother’s voice was among them.

Maybe, I remember telling myself, maybe it’s not too late. But I don’t think I believed it.

Then the winged thing was gone, flying northward towards the source of the song. I saw it in the distance when I dared to look up – an empty spot in the sky, it seemed at first, but there were points of light there, cold and remote, the way I imagined stars must look on the Surface. A sense of vastness receding. I let out a shaky breath, and stood, and stepped out again into the open, deserted street. But there was no time to go dwelling on luck or close shaves; I hurried on.

By the time I reached the Foreign Office building, it was long past midnight, and the windows were mostly dark or dim. A few gas lamps burned low along the paths, but the complex was swathed in fog and shadow. That was good. More dark meant more places to hide in, and less chance of being seen. But I was a child back then, hero or no, and that didn’t make it any less frightening.

It was like sneaking into a giant’s castle, I told myself, on a quest to rescue a princess – or a shieldmaiden, in this tale, a faithful knight stolen and enchanted. It was very probably likely that I could get in and break him out without either of our bones being ground to make anyone’s bread. I shivered at the thought, listening for the footfalls of guards and hearing nothing. If there was anyone watching, they were well out of sight. And scared or not, there was no use waiting for them to find me; I shuttered my lantern, gave my eyes a moment to adjust to the near-dark, and crept closer through the tangle of fungus and statuary until I reached the base of the wall. There I paused to search for the path the cat had given me, and the room she had told me belonged to my brother – sixth from the the southernmost corner, second from the top. No ground floor entry, but I wouldn’t have taken the front way in anyway. I tied the lantern to my belt and started to climb.

I was no stranger to heights, but the rooftops of Spite and the Flit were easier going than feeling my way up this sheer edifice in the dark. My palms and fingers stung from gripping rough stone, and my foot slipped once, sending bits of mortar tumbling down to hit the earth a long way below. But I hung on, held my weight with aching arms and tried not to think of falling, until I managed to find a foothold and pull myself back up. And at last I reached a ledge wide enough to stand on, a thin outcropping of guano-flecked stone running along a row of windows flanked by praying angels.

I had been expecting, I think, something more like a luxurious prison, but what I saw when I peered through through the nearest window was nothing like a prison at all. There were no guards and no bars, only a boy sleeping uneasily in a tangled nest of blankets, and the room they’d given him was not just comfortable but full of things that might be used as lockpicks or weapons. They weren’t expecting anybody to steal the urchins back, and from what I’d heard, they weren’t expecting anyone to want to leave.

You’re surprised by that? You shouldn’t be. What the Songbirds offered... it’s a tempting proposition: food, warmth, education, and more than that – more than anything else they could offer – a family who would care about you and keep you safe. We didn’t have any of those things, unless we found or took them for ourselves, and I couldn’t blame the others for seeing the promise and not the trap. I hadn’t seen it either.

I made my way south along the ledge, counting windows and statues until I reached the one I was looking for. My brother’s room. I tapped on the window glass once, twice, and then again, louder each time, until the he woke with a start and a shout; when he saw me crouching on the ledge outside, his face went bloodless.

He ran to pry open the window and help me in, and steady as I had been outside, I practically tumbled through, dizzy now with relief. I believed – or I wanted to believe – that the difficult part was over, and we’d be home, as doomed soldiers are like to say, by teatime.

“You can’t be here,” he whispered, and I never heard him sound so scared in my life, not even when I nearly saw the Boatman fighting that fungus thing out by the Marshes. “If they catch you – “

There’s two possibilities for what they would’ve done if they’d caught me, and ending up in the Face’s private pantry would’ve been the better one. But I wasn’t letting myself think about that just then, because if I wanted to convince my brother to leave with me, I couldn’t look scared and I needed to be strong.

“I’ve come to get you out,” I told him.

“I don’t want to leave,” he said.

“Even though they’re....” I couldn’t make myself say it. I think I knew it would hurt him, is the thing, and I didn’t want to do that. Still, the word was right there, fluttering around inside my head like some kind of trapped bird.

“Sis,” he said, “when we fought monsters, and chased spirifers out of Flowerdene and all that... it was a game. It was a good game, and we helped people, but it didn’t – it didn’t stop Flowerdene from being Flowerdene, or stop anybody from wanting to sell their soul so they don’t have to starve. With the things I’m learning here, I think I might be able to make things better, in a way that lasts. And they’re good to us, and – and anyway, it isn’t safe.”

I didn’t know how to answer that. Even if he was wrong about it being a game, he wasn’t wrong about the rookeries, and I could tell he wasn’t lying, either, about wanting to stay. But beneath the conviction, it seemed to me that he looked the way I had felt earlier, hiding in Wilmot’s End: cautious, watchful, ready to bolt if he had to or fight if he couldn’t flee.

“It’s safer than this place,” I said. “Come on! I know the way back, and once we’re on the ground, we’ll be home free. They won’t ever find us.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You can’t. You’re not one of us.” I couldn’t even tell if it was pride or shame I was hearing, or the kind of pride that comes from shame, but there was something in his eyes that hurt to look at. “It’s better if you don’t know.”

“I do know,” I told him. I could feel myself panicking, talking too fast without knowing what I meant to say, and maybe that’s where I went wrong. “But it isn’t your fault, you know, and I don’t blame you none. You can come back from it. You can come back from anything. There’s people come back from Seeki – “

“Stop it,” he said, his voice gone very quiet. “I mean it. Stop. If you say one more word, I’ll sound the alarm.”

Maybe I should’ve called his stupid bluff. Maybe I should’ve wrestled him out through the damn window. Might be that was what a Valkyrie would have done, a real one. Me? I didn’t do either of those things. I backed away to the window, keeping my eyes on him all the while. Not another word, but I did hold out a hand to him, feeling more like a beggar than I ever had when I used to ask for alms. He wouldn’t look at me.

I hesitated, said his name – the one our parents had given him – hoping that would be enough.

“Get out,” he said in a small voice. “Please.”

Tears stung my eyes, and I blinked them back, swallowing around the lump in my throat. If he had been angry, I could have argued. Scared of the Songbirds, and I could have saved him. But he looked scared of me, or of what I knew, and all I managed to do was run.

I regret that. I’ve spent years regretting it. But sometimes I do wonder whether, if we’d escaped together that night, things would truly be any better than they are now.

It’s useless to speculate. All I can tell is what I did, then and after.

The trip back through Wilmot’s End passed in a daze, and I ended it on a rooftop outside of Heorot, watching the early laborers on their way to work and the morning lamplighters making their rounds. From my height, with my vision blurred from tears and lack of sleep, the lights along the street looked like a row of candles lining a dark river, and I pulled my jacket a little tighter, shivering in the chill that always settles over high places. I would slip back inside soon to face the Ringbreakers with my failure, but I couldn’t return to the warmth and safety of the hall just yet.

I didn’t have to. The sound of metal jostling against metal brought me back to full alertness, and I looked up to see the Unbending Bodyguard clamber out the window, steadying himself against the gable with one hand and carrying two steaming mugs in the other. His tin-pot armor caught the light from inside the hall and gleamed, but his eyes were shadowed from sleeplessness – he‘d been standing watch again, it seemed, or just waiting up. He smiled to see me back, though his face fell when he realized I’d come alone.

“He wouldn’t come back with me,” I said, hearing the weight in my own voice. “He wanted to stay.”

I didn’t tell him the rest of it, and I never told any of the others, either. What good would it have done, besides giving them all the kind of nightmares better unshared, and spreading around secrets that weren’t mine to tell? Let the Shieldmaiden tell them, or not, if he ever chose to return to us; I wouldn’t do the thing he feared.

I leaned back against the roof, achingly tired, and found a cup of watery tea pressed into my hands. I didn’t drink it, but I held it close until it cooled, watching the steam rise and curl like fog off the river. The Bodyguard sat beside me in a clatter of pans, and I smiled despite myself at the noise and the company; the time for keeping watch was past, and night’s silence had been traded for the cries of costermongers and the rattle of produce carts from the streets below.

“Might be the Shieldmaiden’s happier where he is,” the Bodyguard said, sounding hesitant. I couldn’t tell if that was because he didn’t want to upset me or he didn’t believe it himself.

“He says it’s where he belongs,” I said. “He believes he can do good there.”

And maybe he was right about that. The Foreign Office could certainly buy him more influence at Court, and perhaps even with the Masters, than any amount of rooftop heroics. But the cost...

I had been so certain once that some deeds, knowingly committed, would make a monster out of you, and that the only way to deal with some monsters was a merciful ending. Sitting there that night, I didn’t know what to think. My mind shied away from it. All I knew was that he was my brother, that he wanted to help people, and I didn’t want to see him harmed. And he hadn’t been told – not at first, when it still mattered. He hadn’t chosen. It was a different monster that had done this, and with that thought came a tumult of new questions: if you kill the beast, does it break the curse? And if you break the curse, does it wash away any of the bad that’s happened?

And out of all the remembered stories and doubts running around my head right then, on that border between night and morning, one thing loomed more pressing than the rest. I needed to know what it was, that thing they had sung to, and I needed to know what it would take to bring it down.

Chapter 2 here.
Index page here.