Chương 321: placid island; black infinity - 2-1.17

My unexpected ally — or at least the enemy of my enemy, other statuses yet to be determined — finally got a green light on a bare-knuckle punch-up, the premature climax it had been hankering for since my first arrival on this fairytale turf. The pinprick of true darkness in the centre of the pit trembled and pulsed as it throbbed itself larger, until it reached the size of a clenched fist, engorged and bulging like a toxic fruit dangling from an invisible nightmare tree.

It was a sphere of Actual Dark, True Nothing, the Truth behind the veil, like a circle cut out from the underlying fabric of this world, to show the endless black void that lay beneath all the fancy drama and fairy fantasy. Nothing! That's what's behind the facade. Nothing. The Giggling Darkness unfurled itself from nothing, like a long spindly insect or a great meaty cephalopod pushing itself through a narrow gap, unfolding and multiplying and revealing itself on our side of the breach.

Black tongues spilled forth in overlapping layers of fractal meat. Row after row after row of razored coal-dark teeth chomped at the air, meeting in waves of enamel that spawned lips of shivering shadow and jaws of melting obsidian. A whirlpool of chitin-plated limbs and armoured tendrils and clawed appendages reached through the gap and ratcheted outward, clickety-clickety-clack, filling all and any available shadow with a whirling skitter of things half-glimpsed in peripheral dark.

A thousand claws clutched at the stone floor and anchored themselves on this side of reality; a million joints quivered and slithered and uncoiled into branches and root systems and spreading fractal night; a billion tendrils and tentacles gathered themselves in an ever-deepening core with all the logic of a black hole. You'll have to forgive me for sounding so much like my sister (you will), but the newcomer was difficult to explain.

The Giggling Darkness (I'll keep calling it that for now, because anything else is woefully inadequate) had tried it on with me twice before. The first attempt had come when we'd camped at that ruined village; it had tried to lure me out into the dark, then appeared as a startling truth, spoiling for a fight, all thumbs and teeth, thinking I was there for the very same thing.

Casma's attention had made it scarper, but I hadn't understood that at the time, because I didn't understand Casma, or the Dark, or least of all, myself. On the second attempt the Giggling Darkness had gotten dressed up, done its hair, and put on some perfume (the shy little thing it was), and appeared to me as the giant centipede in the castle's ex-garden. An impressive outfit, a set-piece for the two of us, and this time with nobody around to interrupt.

But it had picked the venue poorly (always scout ahead for a date, you know?), because it had not counted on all those creepy pale dolls. So I'd fled back into the light, and not understood what I had turned down. But now I'd invited this skittish admirer of my own accord. So it saw no reason to pretend anymore. Which mostly meant it was very difficult to look at.

Our Lady of the Forded Briar is also difficult to look at, but that's because she likes it that way, so mortals and others are forced to avert their eyes. She's too bright — all white light and burning nuclear fires dredged from the heart of a star, too stark and harsh and high-contrast for human vision. She leaves nothing uncovered, no mysteries, no ambiguity, because the truth is there's so little to her. If you do look, you can see she's not all that.

She'll burn out your retinas and leave you blind, but in the end she's just a woman in a white dress. The Giggling Darkness is hard to look at because it's nothing but mystery and ambiguity. When you do look, suddenly it is everywhere, filling the edges of your vision, crawling through every shadow, unfolding and unfurling into a boiling mass of a million different shapes, all suggestions on the cusp of collapsing into a true form. But then, look away, and it's gone.

Was that really a whirling mass of tongues and limbs and chattering teeth — or was it mere shapes in the shadows? Did you actually feel a feathery tendril drawn across the skin of your exposed calf, or was that just the wind? Did you really hear a giggle at the edge of your hearing, or are you going mad? The Giggling Darkness was living pareidolia. (Which meant we were perfect for each other.) (Mwah!) But. I mustn't get ahead of myself.

The feathery tickle of a hundred tentacles against my clothes and exposed skin was still dangerous. My new 'ally' was already touching me literally everywhere, especially on my face, cupping my cheeks, enclosing my throat, because darkness doesn't discriminate, and this Darkness had been denied twice already. I wasn't the only one it was touching; Muadhnait let out a weird little scream and flailed with her sword, but you can't cut shadows. I flicked at the air with my knife.

"Hey, no," I said, hoping this would work — because if it didn't, this fight was going to be too complicated.

"Her. Her. Understand? I need your help. With her." The Giggling Darkness — now a throbbing mass of fractal shadows like ink dropped into night-time seawater — showed no sign of comprehension. But the feeling of being casually caressed by a million tendrils vanished instantly. Muadhnait staggered and gasped, wiping at her face with one gauntlet. Briar straightened up and faced the Dark.

She replaced her shouting panic with a righteous frown, then flicked her spear as if trying to whip some debris off the broken tip. The smashed remains of the golden maggot I'd ripped from inside my guts suddenly deliquesced and leapt onto the head of the spear, reforming into the shining golden tip that had broken off inside the dream of my entrails. Her inner light deepened, cycling down from white, through orange, to a dark and angry red, like a star approaching the end of its sequence.

She was the only thing in the pit not bathed in shadow, glowing like nuclear fire, but unable to cast any true light.

"You," she hissed at the Giggling Darkness.

"Your presence is unfit for even the least of my discarded first drafts. This place is mine, not yours. You forfeited that when I brought the humans here. I brought them here, I made this place viable. I get to decide on the stories—" A giggle drowned her out. High-pitched and everywhere, scratching at the inside of my skull. Even Briar winced. Briar held her restored spear up high. Suddenly she seemed a hundred feet tall, too large for the pit or the room beyond, stretching reality with an optical illusion.

"You are nothing but mere anarchy!" she said in the voice of a bonfire doused with petrol.

"Motion without meaning! I will bring structure to your nonsense!" The spear descended. The Giggling Darkness didn't need to make itself a hundred feet tall, because it was already everywhere. Briar and the Giggler (yes? no? what do you think? No, of course not. Silly me.) crashed into each other with the kind of sound I imagine an aircraft carrier would make if it was piloted straight into the metal and concrete of an entire port.

It was so loud and chaotic that it obviously wasn't real, just the closest thing our poor little human-or-doll ears could make of the cacophony. Muadhnait staggered back and almost fell to her knees, one arm out to protect me (sweet), while I gazed up at the mess I'd caused. Naughty me. Briar fought like a goddess in a white dress armed with a spear probably should do — all dramatic killing blows, slicing through the shadow-monster at her feet, striking poses with effortless ease, teeth bared, eyes ablaze.

The Giggling Darkness, however, refused to become a single target; it flowed at her from every angle, ripping and tearing at her dress, opening a million wounds on her skin, gouging great chunks of burning, boiling meat from her torso and hips and arms and face. Furnace-light re-filled Briar's wounds the moment they were inflicted. The Giggling Darkness didn't even need to 'heal', because the substance of it simply returned whenever the golden glow of Briar's spear had passed.

You've probably heard enough of my sister's way of explaining things to comprehend that this wasn't what was actually happening. I'm not human, my senses are approximations of memory, but they're also no better than bog-standard homo sapiens at processing things we were never wired-up to witness.

A pair of Outsiders, originally native to a dimension so far removed from our own that in their natural state they appeared as pareidolic faces in shadows and stone, who had then taken on aspects of a group of human beings they'd rescued from fuck-knows what sort of magical misadventure, were now having a fight over who got to determine the tonal and narrative nature of this particular dimension. I saw a shining goddess (bitch) and a crawling dark chaos (friend? more?) having a kaiju battle in a space too small for both of them. And that was enough for my purposes, because after trading a few blows like they were wearing rubber suits and waiting for somebody to shout 'cut', the Giggling Darkness shoved Briar so hard that she stumbled into the wall of the pit. Her hip clipped the lip of stone and sent the whole wall crashing down in a deafening avalanche of black rubble. (Did you shove her on purpose, my would-be something-or-other? Thank you kindly. You're beautiful. Mwah.) Ignoring the danger of running head first into a still-settling landslide of black rubble, I went off like a shot, straight toward the jagged ramp that now led up and out of the pit. Forgive me for failing to grab Muadhnait's arm or shout something suitably dramatic at her, but you have to understand (do you?) that I was still in prison. I was still in prison. I would always be still in prison. And I had to get out. Besides, Muadhnait could handle herself.

She ducked back to grab her pack and supplies, and then a few moments later she was by my side, scrambling up the loose scree that led toward freedom. Behind us, Briar and the Giggling Darkness fought on, casting jagged and impossible shadows across the uneven bricks as we climbed. I don't really remember the climb, and not because I've used the memory as fuel (and I wouldn't even if I could).

I recall the shattered bricks and rubble shifting beneath me, threatening to trap a leg (which happened) or swallow me up (which didn't, obviously). The dim feeling of pain in my hands, of almost snapping my knife blade between the shards of masonry — that's a bad one. I do remember Muadhnait grabbing me by the scruff of my neck and throwing me the final few feet up and over the ruins of the pit-ledge (wheeeeee!) Memory comes back at the point I scrambled upright, up and out of the darkness of the pit.

The room didn't matter; it was big and made of stone and looked like a stereotypical dungeon. It was lit but a trickle of very thin grey light coming from a high, narrow window, so all was empty haze. Muadhnait was next to me, raising her sword, turning to look at the titans swinging at each other behind us. Steel was nowhere to be seen; perhaps she'd lost interest now that I'd lost my unwanted internal passenger. And I … … Alright, no point in beating about this particular bush.

My sister has done it plenty of times, and she's perfect beyond what you can imagine, so there's no shame in this. I fell over. One moment my feet were beneath me and I was gripping my knife, turning to see the fight, thinking that maybe everything would change if the Giggling Darkness won this scrap. The next moment the world wobbled and went sideways and I was on a trip to the ground, non-stopping service, express route, no changes, direct line. Choo choo. This wasn't meant to happen. I had excellent balance.

I didn't even need balance, because I had no inner ear. But there I was, the Good Ship Maisie Morell, going down. Hard wooden arms caught me before my head could go crack on the stone floor. The Pale Doll scooped me up and hoisted me in a princess carry. I had a glimpse of a thousand eyes framed by the grey haze. Then Muadhnait shouted, "Okay, fine, just run!" I did manage to steal one final glimpse of the fight as I was carried out of the dungeon, as the Pale Doll turned to slip sideways through an arch.

Briar and the Giggling Dark were tearing at each other. Briar's spear was coated in thick tarry night, loops of empty murk pulling it down, trying to rip it from her grasp. Her white dress was stained with growing patches of black blood. The Giggling Darkness was growing ever more complex and layered, a fractal nightmare glimpsed in the corner of your eye on a moonless night. The Audience, the pattern-faces, had their attention glued to the fight, but not in the way they'd observed everything else until now.

They were raving as if watching a cock-fight, roaring for their particular side, and I couldn't tell where the majority fell. A few of them shot their alien glances at us as we left, but they'd lost interest in me. Down at the foot of the fight, in the last split-second before I lost my view, a tiny figure scurried down the avalanche of black bricks, whirring on too many legs. She reappeared clutching a big leatherbound book to her chest. Briar must have dropped it.

Mave, my little vulture, made off like the thief she was. And then we ran. Or Muadhnait and the Pale Doll ran, while I lay limp and floated down a river of pain. For the first time since before I could remember (quite literally, in my case,) I finally understood why my sister had so often referred to unconsciousness as 'merciful'.

The reason I'd fallen over, and the reason I lay limp in the arms of the Pale Doll, as she and Muadhnait hurried away from the titanic fight, through corridors of dark stone and grey haze and fingers of cold, clinging, clammy mist, was simply that I was starting to feel all my wounds as more than just scratches on the surface of a doll. And I was really fucked up. Have you been keeping track? I hadn't, because none of it mattered, none of it was mine.

But then I'd opened myself up and removed something that was very definitely not me, and now all those bumps and bruises and cuts and scrapes and lacerations, they belonged to somebody, didn't they? They belonged to me.

So there I was: small puncture wound on my chest, self-inflicted; bruises on skull and shoulders, acquired when falling; both feet badly cut, tightly bandaged, but still bleeding; left leg lacerated and grazed on bits of loose stone; right hand minced and punctured and torn up, so badly that I couldn't be bothered to count all the individual holes; stomach cut open and broken apart and held back on with a tea towel and some bandages. That's me right there. A litany of wounds.

As the Doll cradled me, and Muadhnait clanked along beside us, ducking in and out of doors, winding our way deeper into the tangle of the castle, I raised that torn right hand to peer at the dozens of tiny injuries inflicted by the process of extracting the golden maggot. My palm was pierced and punctured, my fingers were ripped up badly, and my wrist was covered in dozens of long scratches and welts, like I'd been fisting a thicket of thorns.

The wounds wouldn't close, no matter how long I stared, even though this was all just pneuma-somatic trickery. They stared back at me, stubborn little rips and tears in my hands. My hands. Mine. All mine. Muadhnait and the Pale Doll carried me through the corridors of the castle for an eternity. Anybody else carrying me like that would have earned some twisted monument of resentment; I didn't feel like being reduced to a passive thing again, not after Briar. But with the Pale Doll it was okay. I had freed the Doll.

It was, in a roundabout way which I refuse to justify, my adopted child. The pain rolled on and on and on; pain gets monotonous after long enough, forever stretched out ahead and behind, the same the same the same. Where were we going? Nowhere. Where had we been? A fight, but it was ancient history for me by then, buried underneath miles of stone. The pain in my right hand was like the sea being torn apart on the rocks, but the pain of my violated belly was like a jagged stone in my guts.

I wrapped both arms around my abdomen and made such noises that I will not repeat here. Worse than the pain was the knowledge that Heather wasn't coming. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. Intellectually I knew the real reason; I wasn't an idiot (ha!) and I had been listening. Steel had spelled it out for me.

This dimension worked on narrative expectations, enforced by the ever-present Audience, and Heather couldn't get in here because her arrival would end the story. You heard it as well as I did. Steel made perfect sense. Not a shred of ambiguity. But I couldn't help thinking, and thinking too much, churned up and tainted and head-fucked by pain. Now that Heather had endured a couple of days apart from me, was she beginning to suspect the truth? Had she realised that I wasn't the person she had set out to save?

Did she know I wasn't the Maisie Morell she remembered from her childhood? Our childhood, technically, but I didn't remember anything of it except smears of her. I bobbed and swayed in the Pale Doll's arms, and started laughing.

"Look, look," I slurred, "I've all gone to pieces. Pieces. Ha. Haha." Freed from my own lack, but freedom was terrifying. Freedom meant I wasn't Maisie Morell.

"Maisie Morell is dead," I said. Or thought I said, because there was no response but the throb of my own flesh.

"Long live Maisie Morell." I was dead and filthy and not what my sister had wanted. I was burning with hunger and thirst because I had not eaten or drunk anything in days. I was lost beyond the walls of reality and coming apart at my hidden seams. I wasn't like my sister; I didn't have multiple voices inside me to correct my path. I barely had one. And you've already learned how difficult I can be.

Half-conscious, babbling, laughing, sobbing, I was doing all of those and more when Muadhnait and the Doll finally drew to a halt amid a whirling vortex of pale stone walls, lit by moonlight and glow-light and the flicker of shadows. A purring trill soothed my words down to nothing. Somebody touched my forehead with a cool, pale, little hand. Somebody else was very worried, and I almost laughed again at that. Worry about the doll, please do. It's nicer than you know. Dead and alive, I wanted to say.

I'm dead, but I'm also alive! … … Waking up sucked a whole cesspit full of shit, and the shit was pain, and the pain was beyond my ability to describe, and this metaphor sucks more than the shit did. Actually no, it doesn't. Few things can. Pain. It was sharper and fuller and more all-encompassing than it should have been. What had pain been like as a child, before Wonderland, before the Eye? Not as if I could remember, but surely it hadn't been like this, had it? Was this what I'd been missing all this time?

My right hand and forearm throbbed in a steady, constant pulse, like a standing wave. My head was ringing like I'd bounced it off a stone floor. My gut was a simmering fire banked with hot ashes. Both my feet stung. Oddly enough it was the feet that truly woke me; they were too far away from the rest of me, too vulnerable, out in the open. Sitting up hurt a lot, so much that I stopped being conscious again for a moment, but I didn't lie back down.

When consciousness overcame pain, I blinked my eyes to clear the tears, and found I was in a dimly lit room, choked with shadows and struggling light. It was some kind of domestic suite — a once-grand bedroom, rambling and rotten. A massive four-poster bed dominated one end of the space, all fallen to ruin, draped with moth-eaten grey sheets. Dressers, a vanity mirror, a table and chairs, all had gone the same way, melted down to stubs of wood as if left in salt air for decades.

Fresh chairs had been dragged in from somewhere, made from newer wood, but even they looked creaky and unstable. The carpet was a touch more intact, but not by much; some kind soul had unrolled a blanket for me to lie on, instead of just dumping my carcass directly on the threadbare floor. A pair of big windows were open to the night, nothing beyond but star-less grey gone black for lack of light. My body — I? — was bandaged, also a lot.

My right hand was swaddled, each finger separately wrapped like in a cartoon; the flesh beneath felt wet and sticky, probably covered with some kind of sealant salve, because there was almost no blood seeping through. The tea towel with the maids had been removed from around my gut and replaced with a thick layer of bandages; plenty of blood had already soaked through in a three-sided rectangular pattern, like I was an unfinished Teletubby.

The dressings on my feet had been changed, and my left leg was covered in a similar wrapping of clean white fabric. My hair was caked with blood, stuck to my scalp, but at least it wasn't glued to my face. I still had all my clothes on, even the shawl, but somebody had put their hands all over me to achieve this, hadn't they? I tried to grab at myself, at my gut. I wasn't clean yet, I had to get scrubbed out, disinfected, properly emptied. There was still a risk, still a chance of—"Maisie. Maisie. Maisieeeeee."

Somebody was calling my name, gently touching my hands and stopping me from peeling the bandages off my belly. I looked up and met a pair of very familiar bright pink eyes, almost glowing in the dimly lit room.

"You have to leave the bandages alone, May-may," said Casma.

"You did a lot of bleeding, and while you could do more, I don't think you want to. Okay?" I met her eyes for a long moment. No looking away. Until I actually needed to. Apparently I wasn't the only one who'd been sleeping, though nobody was left asleep now; I'd been making some very weird noises while trying to paw at my gut, and that had alerted the whole motley crew to my new and present status. Muadhnait was sat against one wall, armoured legs stretched out before her, dark bags under her eyes.

The Pale Doll was squatting in a nearby corner, hugely simian and faintly luminous, like a mystical ape in the thin illumination from Muadhnait's light kernel, which was lit and sitting in the centre of the room. Casma was right next to me, looking none the worse for wear in her sweater and skirt and white tights. Tenny was there too, up on her feet; I don't think she'd leapt up at the sound of me awakening, I think she'd been prowling back and forth.

Her face was alive with a big smile, as human as she could make it. In her tentacles she was clutching an eclectic array of utensils — a fire-poker, a little spade, a pair of tongs, and some kind of crowbar, as if ready to fight four duels at once. She let out a long trill of greeting as soon as our eyes met.

"Maisie! May-may!"

"Tenny," I said. Or I tried to. (Tenny was allowed to call me that. Casma was allowed to as well, but I wasn't going to tell her.) Kimberly wasn't on her feet, she was sitting in a chair, and I didn't blame her, because she looked how I felt. Auburn hair swept back with sweat and grease, great big bags under eyes on the verge of going glassy, a bone-deep tiredness in her frame. Her t-shirt was off, leaving her in pajama bottoms and her bra. At any other time that would have been the most notable thing about her.

I didn't stare. (I didn't!) Kimberly's torso and arms were covered in magical symbols — loops and whorls, angles and juts, spiralling down her forearms to terminate at her fingertips, all drawn in a dizzying mixture of reds and yellows and greens and blues, against the backdrop of her decidedly indoorsy complexion. For a confused moment I thought she'd scratched it into herself, but then I realised it was just paint and ink. Or at least a substance that looked like paint and ink.

"Kim?" I slurred. She shrugged.

"Magic," she muttered. That explained nothing, but magic never did.

"Glad you're … here, Maisie." Our little group was not alone. We had two visitors. Calderon the fairy-man was sat on another semi-intact chair, his shaggy legs spilling over the sides, his bushy orange beard twitching with embarrassment or discomfort. His sword was firmly back in his cane. His top hat was off, held delicately in his lap. He looked as if he'd been deep in whispered conversation with Kimberly. He cleared his throat at the sight of my eyes and bowed his head to me.

And finally, sheltering behind his chair like a naughty teenager, shuffling from foot to foot to foot to foot, was Mave. The Mimic. (My Mimic?) She still had too many legs and too many arms, more like a misshapen tree than any approximation of a human being. The hard edges of her face and her deep green eyes flittered away from me as I stared at her. She clutched a leatherbound book tightly to her chest, the same one that Briar had held back in the pit. My sister's tale.

Nobody said anything for a very long moment, but luckily for me I am immune to that kind of embarrassment, and not because I'm a doll made of carbon fibre. (And yes, the pain helped.)"Who …" I croaked, cleared my throat, tried again.

"Who bandaged me?"

"Muadhnait did!" Casma chirped.

"With a little helper-help from yours truly, and also Tenny. You're all dressed now, Maisie. Dressed up and dressed down, though I don't think you need the latter. Latterly you got it from …" I looked at her. Casma closed her lips and used them to smile. Kimberly let out a huge sigh.

"You're conscious and alive, that's what matters. Maisie. Maisie, what the hell happened to you? Muadhnait has told me, but … but it doesn't …

""I got pregnant," I croaked.

"I'm not pregnant anymore. Then I called a stalker to help me. But the stalker was okay." Kimberly slowly put her face in one hand. Tenny trilled and waggled her tentacles. Casma made a fascinated little o-shape with her mouth and muttered something about how she needed all the details.

"I'm also dead," I said.

"But that's a much longer story, and it hasn't ended yet. Unlike the pregnancy."

"Fine," said Kim.

"Fine. Fine!"

"Kimberly," I said.

"Why are you … a canvas?" Kimberly looked so utterly defeated, not really the right aura for a mage covered in magical workings. She shrugged and shook her head.

"I didn't … didn't have a choice. Panicked. Had to … I …" Casma said, "Kim's been protecting us!"

"Yaaah!" Tenny trilled. Calderon cleared his throat with a blustery bleat, stroking his beard with one leathery hand.

"Protecting and saving us all, perhaps?" Kimberly spread her hands in a helpless shrug.

"I can't do this!" she said to Calderon, in a tone that told me she'd said it at least a dozen times already.

"I can't! It doesn't matter how desperate you are. I'm barely even a mage. I'm … I'm a nobody, a-a- what do they call it these days? A 'girlfailure'?" She laughed, but it was halfway to a sob.

"I can't duel a century old mage, not alone, not by myself! I can't do this, I'm sorry. I can't save you. I can barely even protect these kids." She waved a helpless arm at Tenny and Casma.

"I'm coming apart inside already, and I've barely started." My mind was rapidly catching up, filling in the details. I'm sure yours is too. But you and I both had the same question. I shifted around on my makeshift sickbed, dragging a blanket beneath my backside. Casma tried to stop me turning, and she was probably in the right, because twisting from my hips made my stomach feel like it was going to tear open and spill the entrails I didn't have all over the ground.

I made a very bad sound and said a couple of words that were hopefully new to Tenny. Then I tried again, turning my whole body instead, pawing at the ground with my bandaged right hand, which also hurt at the slightest touch. The others waited while I did this, like I was the chief invalid and they all had to defer to my whims. I turned until I was facing Calderon and Mave. I didn't even have to say anything.

Calderon dipped his head again and awkwardly took his top hat off his lap, then didn't seem to know what to do with it. He passed it back to Mave, as if that made any sense at all.

"Maisie Morell," he began, in his deep bleat of a voice.

"I can only beg your forgiveness. Not for myself, but for poor Mave here. In bringing you to us, she was merely taking the only opportunity she had. She had to use you as cover, as a sort of normality. She had to perform the usual actions expected of us, so that she might smuggle in the instrument of our freedom, the one thing Margaret doesn't want here." He opened his other hand toward Kimberly.

"Another mage." Kim didn't seem flattered by this sudden messianic designation. She pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a sound of pure frustration.

"I can't do this. I can't do this! Why won't you understand? I can't. This Margaret woman, she's decades old. I'm nothing!"

"Not truuuuue!" Tenny trilled.

"Kimmy is Kimmy." Kimberly averted her eyes, biting her lower lip. Behind Calderon's chair, Mave was looking everywhere but at me.

"You weren't play acting," I rasped.

"Mave. You. You weren't. Playing acting. You weren't. That was all real. When you brought me here. When I freaked you out. That was real."" She finally looked at me, skittish eyes narrowed like a cat backed into a corner. When she spoke, her voice was a skittering of thick branches and dry bark.

"I didn't expect you to be so scary!" she hissed.

"I was just trying to get at the mage! Any mage! I didn't expect you to be so … you!"

"Any mage?" I croaked.

"Any mage would have done?" Mave glanced down at the tome clutched in several of her arms.

"Well. Yes? Evelyn Saye or … or maybe Felicity would have been better. But this is fine. She's fine." Mave gestured at Kimberly. Kimberly did not look fine. I pawed at my own waistband. Several members of the absurd little gathering seemed to realise what I was doing, and tensed up in preparation to watch me cut Mave's head off. But I came up empty handed.

"Who's got it?" I rasped, glancing around.

"Who's got my … knife …" Muadhnait did. She raised it in one gauntlet.

"Please," she said, and she sounded so tired that I wanted to respect her plea.

"Please don't." I had expected Casma, Kimberly, the Pale Doll, or maybe even Mave herself. But Muadhnait having my knife was … fine. It felt fine. I stared at her for long enough to make her uncomfortable. (No more helmet!) And then I relented.

"Give me some water instead, then," I said.

"Water me well." Muadhnait dug her waterskin out of her pack. Casma fetched it for me and pressed the distended bag into my left hand. I tilted the nozzle to my lips and felt like I was sucking down the nectar of the gods. I hadn't drunk anything in ages and ages. Maybe in forever. It felt like the first mouthful of water I'd tasted since before Wonderland, since before the Eye, like I hadn't really consumed anything in over a decade. I drank and drank and drank, glug glug glug.

Casma asked Muadhnait if it was okay for me to drink the whole bag; Muadhnait said it was, she had plenty, go ahead, let her drink. Calderon and Kimberly resumed talking, while I was filling my belly with water.

"Miss Kemp. Mistress Kemp. Uh, no no," said Calderon.

"That won't do, we need something more grandiose for the tone. Lady Kemp of Far Sharrowford. Am I saying that right? Mave's book doesn't come with a pronunciation guide, I'm afraid. I first thought it was called 'Shadow-ford'! Haha! Ahaha … ha … ahem." The way he cleared his throat made it sound like he was saying 'ahem' out loud.

"Just Kim, that's fine," said Kimberly.

"Well then, Just Kim," Calderon said.

"I know you are beset with doubt, but I beseech you, please, you must at least try. You are the first mage we have managed to bring here in four decades. We are all so tired, so worn out, so without … anything … anything left to give. Even now my words fail me. My own drafts grow thin. We are all fading away to nothing. You must kill Margaret for us. You are powerful, you are young, you are unconstrained by the narrative, you are the perfect instrument of our salvation, our—""Stop," Kimberly whined.

"Please. Please. I can't." Muadhnait's waterskin finally ran dry. I lowered it from my lips and felt like I was sloshing inside. This really wasn't my story anymore, not even vestigially. It wasn't Muadhnait's either. We were both just tiny cogs in a much larger machine. Even Kimberly was a larger cog than I — painted with magic, petitioned by Outsiders, set up for a climatic duel with another mage. This was not my story. Mave the Mimic had not even cared about me in the first place.

She had only needed Heather's twin sister, Maisie Morell, as a sort of catalyst for this harebrained prison break. Oddly enough I rather liked that. I took a moment to examine myself and my thoughts. Not physically, but emotionally. Besides the pain, I felt remarkably clear-headed and rational. Hooray for me. How much had that golden maggot down in my guts been directing me? How much were my decisions my own? Now, one hundred percent.

"Calderon," I said. My throat felt smoother.

"Margaret. She's the mage. The mage I met. Right? Well met?" Calderon turned his wet and watery eyes on me.

"The very same," he said.

"I have recounted her history in detail to Lady Kemp here, but doubtless you will want—""Don't care," I said.

"She has you trapped in these roles, right? Rightly? Wrongly? Writing stories for her, that she just plucks apart and destroys?" Calderon nodded.

"That is … it is more … considerably more complex than that, but that is functionally correct. You are a most bright young lady, you—""And what about the faces? The faces in the patterns?" Everyone else in the room looked bewildered, everyone aside from Calderon and Mave, who shared a wide-eyed look with each other. Mave put a hand on Calderon's shoulder and Calderon reached back to squeeze it"You can see them?" he asked, half-incredulous.

"You can truly see them?" Mave said, "Maybe because she got that goddess' spawn in her?"

"Maybe." I shrugged.

"But yes. I can see them. See them I can. What are they?" Calderon sighed. All the air seemed to go out of him at once, reducing his chunky, fattened frame for a moment.

"If only we knew," he said.

"Though I suspect it wouldn't help. They came from elsewhere, a very long time ago, alongside the humans and their goddess." He tried to smile.

"Some of us didn't look like we do now, not so human back then. Neither I nor Mave were ever quite so … this." He gestured down at himself.

"Though I find it hard to remember the times I wasn't. Margaret, she came later. She is the doting favourite of the faces who watch us. She has pressed us into service one after the other, when before the faces were merely … like weather." He paused and cleared his throat.

"Aspen, she was human. And the latest, her name escapes me—""Neassa," said Muadhnait.

"My sister."

"Ah, yes. My condolences." He cleared his throat again.

"The long and short of all this, Maisie Morell, is that we must kill Margaret. We, we pitiful fae, we are not capable of such feats. Only human beings. Or others from elsewhere, from Outside. A mage, a real mage, is better than we could have hoped for. But you … perhaps you could try to—""Went up against her before," I said.

"Didn't work. Didn't you notice?" Calderon swallowed.

"Quite. But … but perhaps if you could get the drop on her, somehow, perhaps—""What about the other fairies?" I asked, looking from Calderon to Mave.

"What do they think of this? If they think at all. Do you think?" Mave made herself smaller, which was quite a feat for somebody of her size and body-plan. Calderon drew himself up, puffing with pride.

"They are not aware. My dear Aspen would never countenance this meeting. A clandestine conversation, you understand? We are plotting a murder, while we remain on the page, while we still can." Kimberly put her face in one hand again.

"We need to get out of here."

"You cannot!" Calderon said.

"Please, Lady Kemp of—""Heather knows we're here," I said. Kimberly liked that. I explained what had transpired between myself and Steel; apparently Muadhnait had tried, but hadn't managed to make herself fully understood, as she didn't have half the context she needed. As I explained, a look of relief came over Kimberly's face, though it quickly faded back into slow panic as I explained why Heather couldn't get in here, and what I'd done by calling up the Giggling Darkness, and what I'd dug out of my guts.

Casma listened carefully, without asking questions (for once), while Tenny's tentacles bobbed and weaved in deep thought. Calderon and Mave didn't have the other half of the context, but I didn't care. Muadhnait looked defeated. The Pale Doll didn't react. When I was finished, Kimberly stared for a long moment, eyes almost bulging from her face.

"Maisie, are you …

""I am not okay," I answered before she asked.

"But I will be. I owe the Dark a debt now. I'm surprised it's not here. Here it is. Maybe it is already?" Kimberly glanced at the open windows, but there was no true night out there in the shadows.

"Then … then we still have the same problem," she said slowly.

"We need to get Heather in here, but we can't. We're still stuck. We're right back where we were." Calderon nodded.

"The only solution is Margaret's death. I tell you, the only—""Not quite," I said, and stood up. That turned out to be harder than I'd expected. My belly hurt when I straightened up, like I was pulling at wounds (which I was). Spikes of pain ran up from my feet as if they had been sliced open (which they were). My vision stuttered and swirled as if I was concussed (which I was not.) I had to cling to Casma's arm as she helped me up, else I would have fallen over. I swallowed my pride.

(Yes, it was pride)"Heather couldn't get in," I said, when I was upright, "because if she turned up, the narrative would end, the story would end, and the faces, the Audience, they don't like that. But I don't think that's the case anymore." I took a deep breath. Everything hurt, but not as much as saying this.

"The story wouldn't end if she turned up now," I said, screwing my eyes shut.

"Because she and I need to talk. Do you hear me, Heather? Sister? Sister, we need to talk. We need to talk about how I'm not me."