The mist had turned to rain by the time Hjordis cleared Greenlake's southern gate. Getting past the curfew wasn't an issue. The gates stood wide open and the two guards sat snoring beneath a roofed toll booth, heads resting on each other.

Rain tapped on her mother's cloak, thick hood up, keeping the worst of it off. Hands cold but firm on the reins, the saddle thick and unfamiliar.

She rode through early morning, past small clusters of fir forest and open abandoned farmland where a doe and her kid grazed in the grey light and raised their heads in alarm as she thundered past. Further from Arable with every stride. Follow the wind, the elf had said. She'd done that — stopped, wetted her fingers, felt it at her back the whole time.

So she followed the road.

She stopped midday to water the horse and her own dry mouth at what had once been a road's inn, roof caved in but the water barrels intact. Not fully abandoned though. Hand on the door, she heard a cough inside. Voices. She thought of Tomsun's cautionary tales about footpads, jumped back on the horse and rode on before anyone noticed the red-dressed girl on the Magistracy destrier.

A woman at a crossroads gave her directions. “Two days south and east. Keep the hills on your left. You'll smell it before you see it.”

The sky dried up after that. Water dripped from bare branches, collecting in puddles that reflected nothing but grey.

The sword dragged at her hip. Rumenor. That was its name apparently, and it had warmed at the word when the strange woman said it. 

For Mads.

That was the whole of it, when she stripped everything else back. Not the elf and her cryptic nonsense. Not fate. Just Mads. Nineteen years old, dark hair, beautiful blue eyes, dead and buried with no face. The creature that had done it was in Graywell wearing his skin and the only way she knew to give Mads his rest was to stop his killer from walking around in the sunlight.

For Mads.

The mare was the stubborn sort. Hard to steer, needed to be convinced, whinnied at the smallest correction with heel or rein. Obeyed when Hjordis talked to her instead — clapping the muscular neck, scratching behind the ear.

"Good lass. Just a bit further now." She'd lean forward and whisper to the back-turned ear, the mare's head nodding in approval.

He's waiting for you.

Hjordis grimaced. "Of course ye are."

She clicked her tongue and the mare lengthened her stride through the mud.

She heard the Magistracy wagon before she saw it. The mare's ears went forward — clinking lamps, hooves, creaking wheels on mud.

Hjordis reined the horse off the road into a stand of bare trees and sat still, hand flat on the mare's neck. The horse understood.

The wagon came around the bend with two mounted guards flanking it. Deep blue lacquer, the Magistracy seal gleaming despite the wet. Moving fast for the road conditions, heading toward Greenlake.

She watched through the thin cover of bare branches. The lamp inside lit one window amber. A face turned toward the trees as the wagon rolled past — not searching. Just looking, the idle gaze of someone deep in their own thoughts.

Her pulse kicked hard against her throat.

Dark hair tied back. A black beard. Strong jaw. And those eyes — the lantern caught them as the wagon moved, brightly blue in an olive-skinned face, thick-lashed, and for one wrong second she was looking at Mads. Not the changeling. The real Mads, looking back at her. Her senses told her Mads was dead and in the ground in Arable and she knew that and still she couldn't—

The wagon rounded the bend and was gone.

She sat in the trees listening to the wheels fade.

Not Mads. A man who looked like what Mads might have been in twenty years, if Mads had had twenty years, which he hadn't. Her stomach clenched. She rubbed her face and clicked at the mare.

Graywell smelled exactly as advertised.

Wet rot and old cook-fire smoke and the sharp smell of piss underneath.

She passed under crumbling arches, the carved figures on the pillars worn down to suggestions. Mist rose from cobblestones slick with moss. Rickety wooden buildings with slate roofs leaned in over the narrow streets like greying old men.

A man against a wall tracked her movement while rolling a coin between his fingers, calculated something in his face, and apparently decided against it.

She kept her hand near the sword hilt and her hood up and rode through the centre where a cart lay overturned, its spokes reaching skyward, and past a row of gallows where empty ropes swayed in still air.

The Golden Dragon occupied most of the square, the only building with all its windows intact and light in each of them. The sign above the door — a faded dragon, paint peeling at the scales — was the most colourful thing in Graywell. A gust of wind hit her back, made her cloak and the mare's mane reach for the door.

Hjordis secured the mare to a post worn smooth by decades of hands, clapped her flank and pushed inside.

Fiddles and shouting and the close warm reek of too many bodies and not enough air. Low beams thick with old smoke. A central fire doing its best, a carved golden dragon above it with most of the gold paint peeled off. She kept her hood low and pressed forward through work-worn bodies two heads taller than her.

The woman behind the bar was built like an ox, worn like she'd probably done this job before Hjordis was born. Strong forearms, a jaw that had set at some point and decided to stay that way. Her gaze snagged on the embroidery of Hjordis's dress — the red fabric, the flowers and vines along the hem — and she leered, displaying at least three dark gaps where teeth should be.

"That's proper village work." She set down the mug she was drying. "All those little flowers. Your folk still dressing like it's two centuries past?" The amusement was tired rather than cruel. "What'll ye have, love?"

Hjordis put one copper on the bar. The woman palmed it, turned and poured a rummer to the brim from a tap at the wall with no ceremony. Slammed it down, foam sloshing over the rim onto the hand-worn wood.

Hjordis stood on her toes, pulled herself up over the bar, lowered her voice. "I'm lookin' for someone. Young lad. Blue eyes. Might've come through in the last day." Conversations began to fade, rough worn heads turned.

The barmaid's expression shifted to a smug grin, like she'd seen this kind of errand before. Her eyes moved upward. "Pretty lad? Friendly sort? Bit odd in his manner?"

"That'd be him."

"Upstairs with Nellie. Third door." The amusement returned, different now. "Though I'll say — not sure what he's doing in there. Been awfully quiet for a working room."

A tall man reeking of tobacco and sweat turned with a long pipe in hand. His bloodshot bulging eyes narrowed with sudden interest. "Arable, by the look of ye. That's where all the pretty lasses learn to pray and plow, ain't it?"

A ripple of crude laughter swept through the nearest tables. Hjordis's cheeks flushed red despite herself.

"Heard tell that whole village's naught but a Magistracy breeding ground," added a gap-toothed woman with ale foam in her greying sparse beard. "Old patriarch taking his pick of the daughters while calling it holy work. That how it really works, lass? Does the geezer do his own get?"

The patrons let out a ring of laughter. In a corner table, a group of men all in black leather cheered and raised their cups at her. "Good luck in there, lady red!"

Hjordis left the beer untouched, hands clenched on the handle, jaw set, and took the stairs. They let her pass with no preamble, forming a path. She kept the sword hidden beneath the cloak.

Her ears had begun to ring.

The stairs creaked under her feet, hardly discreet, but the noise from below thinned as she climbed, the fiddles going muffled, the laughter dropping to a low roar like water heard through stone.

The corridor at the top was narrow and dark, a single tallow stub burning low in a wall sconce at the far end. Through the second door, a man's rhythmic breaths, a woman's bored response. Through the fourth, nothing. Through the first, snoring.

She stopped in front of the third door on the right. The ringing in her ears changed quality — lower now, more even, like when you run a wet finger around the rim of a glass. She looked down at the sword in her grip. The hilt began to pulse, a hint of warmth like when the elf had stood too close.

She breathed. Put her hand on the latch, pushed slowly, inching it open.

The small space was dark, smelling of lamp oil and a herbal oil that reeked of something green and sharp.

A single candle burnt shyly on the table by the wall. And on the bed: a woman lying face-down across the rumpled sheets, her tall curved body entirely bare, gorgeous flame-red hair pooled loose across the pillow. She was as relaxed as a sleeping cat, one arm hanging over the side of the mattress, breathing long and slow.

Mads's shape sat astride her waist, his broad back turned to Hjordis hiding behind the door.

Also naked. Hjordis's nostrils flared with fury, clammy hand slipping on the dragon hilt. The sword grew even warmer.

His hands worked either side of the woman's spine with slow deliberate pressure, thumbs moving in small firm circles along the muscles running beside the backbone. He was talking — not in Mads's deep northern register, but in a lighter voice, educated Coraneese with that foreign lilt underneath.

"The latissimus here — Nellie, do you feel that? That's not tension, that's damage. How long have you been sleeping on this mattress, dear?"

Nellie made a drowsy sound.

"I jest, obviously. But structural compensation is a serious matter, and what you have here is—" his thumbs pressed deeper and she made a sharper sound, half-discomfort, half-relief, "—there it is. How long have you worked this particular establishment?"

"Few years," Nellie said into the pillow.

"Few years." He moved further down, hands unhurried. "And before that?"

"Merwick. Smaller place."

"Were you on your feet more or less?"

"More."

"That explains it."

Tryggve laughed in Mads's voice — the same tone she'd heard him use on the children in Arable, genuinely excited, slightly unhinged. But Hjordis saw from her spot in the open doorway what he was doing. Saw the calculation in that horrible stiff grin, Mads's stolen hands kneading flesh, preparing it like some farmer did to certain favoured pork before the year-end slaughter.

Hjordis drew the Demon Slayer — slowly, silently — from the belt. The blade caught the candle and threw its light across the ceiling and she crossed the room in three quick steps.

He spun, maybe catching the shift of air — but his movement was sluggish, and the ceiling was low, hitting his head as he was about to stand, and she was already raising the sword and she drove it through his back with everything she had.

Steel punched through flesh and grated against bone. His spine arched, the body convulsing, a wet choking sound tearing through his throat. Nellie screamed and scrambled and Hjordis pulled the blade free, feet to the bed's edge for support and yanked it finally loose with a force that sent her stumbling back.

"For Mads," she said. She meant it to come out differently. He slid from the bed and took the sheet with him and hit the floor with a heavy thud and the blood came fast and dark across the boards.

Nellie pressed herself into the far corner, both arms wrapped around herself, screaming in a continuous high note that she seemed unable to stop.

Then the Demon Slayer blazed.

White, total — the hilt going from warm to searing in under a second. She let go, fingers forced wide, the blade clattering to the boards. The light died. The steel lay still and ordinary.

On the floor, Mads's features had begun to change.

The dark hair grew like weed, lightening as it lengthened, the bronze skin turning to freckled alabaster, the broad shoulders narrowing, the whole frame rearranging itself before her eyes.

Tryggve Beardaughter lay before her feet in his true shape. Green eyes fixed open and unseeing beneath loose golden hair. Delicate lips parted, the flush leaving his narrow cheeks as blood steadily pooled beneath a body that was neither fully one thing nor another.

"Please, miss!" The woman's terrified voice cut through her thoughts. "By the nine, spare my life! I've nothing to do with this Zyrellian sorcerer!"

"I—" Hjordis began, looked down at her blistered hand.

Then the cold came.

It rose up from her chest and into her throat and her hand moved to the dagger at her belt before she'd decided anything. She watched her own fingers close around the hilt.

No. She wasn't reaching. Something else was.

Suddenly her lips pulled tight against her teeth. The skin of her face seemed to shrink, flatten. Her nostrils sealed. She tried to draw breath and found her mouth closed too, air trapped in her lungs, and her face began to burn — not pain but something worse.

The sensation of her own features moving without her, smoothing, collapsing inward like clay pushed back by invisible hands, erasing nose and mouth until only blank flesh remained.

She was still there. Present. Watching from the inside of herself while something ancient and hungry took inventory of the body it had claimed. Another wave of panic flooding through her — someone else's. An instinct that understood that death would soon claim her and that it needed a face, any face, now.

Her legs moved. She had not told them to. She saw nothing. Could hear everything. Nellie's pleas. Her scream split the air and then stopped.

She came back all at once, like from deep water — the skin moulded into a human shape, eyes pressed open, light returned and she drew a shaky long breath from a mouth that wasn't a mouth, only a hole, and she dropped the dagger now slick with blood, hands shaking violently to feel the features slowly returning. The iron smell of the room crashing over her once her nose wasn't just two holes.

The fiddles kept playing below as though nothing in the world had changed.

She let out a whimper, lowered her hands and made herself look at the corner.

The woman lay across the boards with one hand reaching for the bed, flame-red hair fanned around a face that was no longer a face. Smooth. Blank. Features erased as cleanly as chalk wiped from a slate.

Hjordis looked down, found the dagger. Her hands picked it up and slid it back into her belt with steady fingers. She let them.

On the other side of the bed came movement. On the floor the body of Tryggve Beardaughter was stirring, a heavy wheezing that rustled and croaked until it became an inquisitive "Hmm?"

He sat up quickly, sheets falling off his shoulder, to reveal a still bleeding wound at his heart. Locks that defied gravity bounced as he turned his head confused and found her. Those expressive green eyes frowned then perked up with understanding — entirely present, entirely alive and awake. He grinned, happily, rubbing blood from his lips.

"Oh Poopsie, you should see your face!"

She had come to Graywell to kill a monster, and she understood finally now that she had become one.