The silence that followed was worse than the gunfire.

  Gunfire, at least, had direction. It told you where to look, what to do, how to move. The silence told you nothing. It simply sat in the room with the bodies and the smoke and the two girls standing in the middle of it, and waited.

  Florence had not moved.

  The pistol was still in her hands. She was holding it the way she had been holding it when the shot left the barrel. Both hands were clamped around the grip, her arms locked straight, her elbows rigid. The weapon trembled in her grip with a fine, constant vibration, as though the muscles had received the instruction to fire and had not yet received the instruction to stop. The barrel was pointed at the floor. A thin ribbon of smoke curled from the muzzle, rising through the still air in a line so straight and undisturbed it looked drawn.

  Florence's eyes were open. She was not looking at anything in the room.

  Alice reached out.

  Her own hands were shaking. She noted this with a detached, clinical irritation, the way she might note a stain on a glove. But her fingers found the pistol grip and closed over Florence's knuckles and applied a gentle, steady pressure that said let go without requiring the words.

  Florence's fingers opened. The pistol came free. The absence of it in her hands didn't change her posture. She stood there with her arms extended and her palms empty, holding the shape of a thing that was no longer there.

  "Florence." Alice's voice came out wrong. Thin. Papery. She cleared her throat and tried again, and what emerged was closer to functional but still several registers below the voice she normally presented to the world. "We need to move."

  Florence looked at her. The expression on her face was one Alice recognised, not because she had seen it on Florence before, but because she had seen it on other faces, in other rooms, in the particular context of people who had just crossed a line they hadn't known existed and were standing on the far side of it, trying to remember what the world had looked like from the other direction.

  "Alice, I—"

  "Not now." Alice tucked the pistol into the waistband of her skirt and suppressed the flinch as the cold barrel settled against her hip. She couldn't afford to be gentle. Gentle was a luxury, and the currency it required—time, safety, distance—was not in her purse. "The Clients are coming at dawn. If we are still in this cabin when they arrive, everything that just happened will have been for nothing. Do you understand?"

  Florence nodded. A small, mechanical motion.

  Good enough. Move.

  Alice stepped over Miller's body. She did not look at the burns. She crossed to the Leader, crouched beside him, and went through his pockets with a speed and efficiency that would have impressed her father's valet. She found coins first. It was a heavy leather pouch of gold and silver, enough weight to be useful. She pocketed a folding knife. She left the pocket watch. She grabbed a box of ammunition from the table and stuffed it into the satchel she'd retrieved from the pile of rugs.

  She stripped the wool coat from the man at the table. It was too large, it smelled of tobacco and gun oil, and the left sleeve was stiff with something she chose not to identify. She threw it to Florence.

  "Put that on. You look like you've been dragged through a hedgerow by a horse, and I will not walk into Dunwick next to someone dressed like a crime scene."

  Florence caught the coat. She held it against her chest and looked at it, and looked at the man it had come from, and looked at Alice.

  "It's a coat," Alice said. "It doesn't care where it's been. Put it on."

  Florence put it on. The hem fell past her knees. The shoulders hung four inches below her own. She looked, Alice thought, like a child playing dress-up in her father's wardrobe, which was almost funny, and almost unbearable. Alice turned away before either of those things could settle.

  She kicked the door open.

  The night was cold, clear, and aggressively indifferent to them.

  The rain had stopped. The forest dripped in its aftermath, every branch and leaf releasing the water it had stored during the storm in slow, irregular taps that filled the dark with a quiet, arrhythmic percussion. The moon was working its way through the clouds, and where it broke through, the light fell in pale, fractured columns that made the trees look like the pillars of a cathedral that had lost its roof.

  They walked. Alice led, because someone had to, and because the alternative was standing still, and standing still was not something she was willing to do in proximity to five dead men. She kept her pace brisk, her posture straight, her stride projecting a confidence that was approximately eighty percent fabrication. Behind her, Florence followed. The oversized coat swished against the undergrowth with each step, and her breathing was audible. It was not panicked or laboured, just present. It was the breathing of someone who was putting one foot in front of the other because they had been told to and had not yet arrived at a reason to stop.

  Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of wet bark and mud and the slow, physical work of moving through forest at night, and the cabin fell behind them, and the distance helped. Not enough. But some.

  Alice stopped at a fork in the game trail.

  The left path sloped downhill, vanishing into a thicket of birch. The right curved deeper into the woods, the canopy closing overhead like a fist. Both looked identical in the dark. Both looked like nowhere.

  Alice stared at them. She stared at the sky, where the clouds had sealed the gap the moon had found, restoring the darkness to its full, unhelpful completeness.

  "Damn it," she muttered, and kicked a root, which accomplished nothing beyond confirming that roots were harder than boots.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I have no idea where we are." The admission cost her something. She could hear it in her own voice, the small, involuntary thinning of the vowels that happened when control was slipping. "We need to head northeast to reach the city, but I can't find a star in this soup, and we can't go back to the main road."

  "Why not?"

  "Because the main road has a crater in it the size of a swimming pond, and by now the constabulary will have it roped off and crawling with officers who will want to have a long, detailed conversation about what happened and who was involved. A conversation I would very much prefer to skip."

  Florence was quiet for a moment. She was looking at the two paths, not with the helpless confusion Alice expected, but with a focused, evaluative attention that Alice did not expect.

  "If we're near the Old King's Road," Florence said, "and the ground is sloping downhill to the left..." She pointed to the right fork, into the deeper dark. "That way."

  Alice looked at her. "That way."

  "There's a logging track about two miles in that runs parallel to the river. It feeds into the industrial district on the eastern approach. It bypasses the main gates entirely." Florence paused. "If the map I studied was accurate. It was published four years ago, so there might be new construction, but logging tracks don't tend to move."

  "How do you know this?"

  The ghost of something passed across Florence's face. Not quite a smile. The memory of the conditions under which a smile might form.

  "I studied the maps," she said. "All of them. The county, the city, the university grounds, the tram routes. When I got the acceptance letter, I couldn't sleep for a week. So I memorised the geography instead."

  Alice looked at her—this girl, this baker's daughter, who had just killed a man and was standing in a swamp in a dead man's coat and was navigating by mental cartography she had memorised because she was too excited to sleep.

  A sound escaped Alice. It was not quite a laugh. It was the shape a laugh would take if it were made of exhaustion and disbelief rather than humour.

  "Lead the way," Alice said.

  Florence led.

  She moved through the undergrowth with a sureness that surprised Alice, picking her path around roots and standing water with the instinctive footing of someone who had spent a childhood navigating countryside that didn't believe in paved roads. Alice followed. The reversal of positions sat in her chest with a complicated weight she didn't have the energy to examine. The country girl was leading, and the aristocrat was stumbling behind.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  They walked in silence for a while. The rhythm of it was almost bearable. Almost.

  Alice broke it first, because the alternative was allowing her mind to return to the cabin, and her mind was showing every indication of wanting to go back there, and she needed to give it somewhere else to be.

  "So," she said. "How long have you been practising?"

  Florence glanced over her shoulder. "Practising what?"

  "Don't be coy. I'm not going to report you. But what happened in that cabin was not a girl having a bad day. That was two distinct magical disciplines deployed under combat conditions, and I'd like to know what I'm walking behind."

  Florence stopped. She turned, and the moonlight, which had found another gap in the clouds, caught her face, and the expression on it was not the evasion Alice had been braced for. It was genuine, unguarded bewilderment.

  "Alice, I have no idea what I did."

  "You hardened your skin. Twice. The bullet, then the buckshot. That's physical reinforcement. It's advanced reinforcement, the kind of output you'd expect from a Tier 4 abjurer, not a—" Alice caught herself. "Not a first-timer. And then the Leader's shoulder. You opened that wound from across the room. That's sanguimancy. Blood magic. A discipline so rare that most practitioners are dead or institutionalised or both."

  Florence was staring at her. "I didn't—I wasn't—" She pressed her hands together, the fingers interlocking, as though she could hold the confusion still if she gripped it hard enough. "My body moved on its own. When the gun went off, I just... I was in front of you before I knew I was moving. And the man at the end, the Leader, I just wanted him to stop. I looked at his shoulder and I could feel it. The blood. I could feel it moving under his skin, and I wanted it to come out, and it—"

  She stopped. The sentence collapsed under its own weight.

  "It did," Alice finished.

  "I didn't know I could do that," Florence whispered. "I didn't know I could do any of that. I've never cast a spell in my life. I don't even understand how magic works."

  Alice studied her. It was a habit of reading faces, looking for the tell, the microexpression, the involuntary flicker that separated truth from performance. She had grown up at dinner tables where half the conversation was conducted in subtext and the other half was outright deception, and she could spot a lie the way a jeweller could spot paste.

  Florence was not lying. Florence, as far as Alice could determine, was constitutionally incapable of lying. The girl radiated sincerity the way a stove radiated heat. She did it passively, constantly, and in a manner that made sustained proximity slightly uncomfortable for people who were not accustomed to it.

  "You awakened today," Alice said. It was not a question.

  "I suppose I must have."

  Alice let out a breath.

  Awakening was supposed to be small. A candle flame that flickered the wrong way. A cup of water that rippled without being touched. A draught that came from no window. The gentle, preliminary tremor that told you the engine was there, somewhere, waiting to be found and trained and coaxed into reliability over years of patient study.

  Florence had not flickered. Florence had detonated. Two disciplines, combat-grade output, zero training. On the first day. It was like watching someone sit down at a piano for the first time and play a concerto, except the piano was on fire and the concerto had killed five men.

  "That is," Alice said, choosing her words with the care of someone handling something breakable, "genuinely terrifying."

  She watched Florence's shoulders fall. The oversized coat seemed to swallow another inch of her, the collar rising around her ears, the girl inside it shrinking.

  Alice winced internally. Well done. Ever the gentle touch.

  "Terrifying for them," she amended, stepping closer and nudging Florence's arm with her elbow. "Not for us. Look, you wanted to be a doctor, yes?"

  Florence nodded, wary.

  "Sanguimancy and medicine are practically the same discipline with different paperwork. Think about it. What do surgeons spend half their time doing? Panicking about haemorrhages. The patient's open on the table, an artery tears, and suddenly everyone in the room is shouting and reaching for clamps and praying they packed enough gauze. You could stop an arterial bleed with a thought. You won't need a tourniquet. You won't need sutures. You'll be able to feel the blood moving inside a patient the way a—" She searched for a comparison that wouldn't terrify a girl who had just discovered she could rupture a man's circulatory system from across a room. "The way a baker feels the dough. Whether the consistency is right. Whether something needs more pressure or less."

  Florence blinked. The wariness shifted, just slightly, toward something else. "I hadn't thought of it like that."

  "No. You were too busy being terrified, which is understandable but not productive." Alice pushed a low branch aside and held it for Florence to pass. "There's a catch, though. The city is crawling with Inspectors from the Department of Arcane Affairs. Government mages with badges and an institutional fondness for paperwork. If they catch you casting without a permit, your medical career ends before it starts."

  "A permit?"

  "Registration. It's mandatory for every practitioner in the Empire. You go to the Registry, they test your affinity, you get a card, and the card means you exist in their system as an authorised mage. Without it, you're an unlicensed caster, and the D.A.A. treats unlicensed casters the way the constabulary treats unlicensed firearms."

  Florence absorbed this. She had the look of someone adding new rooms to a mental house that had already been built.

  "When we get to the city," Alice said, and her voice dropped. Not to a whisper, but to the low, direct register she used when she needed someone to remember every word. "You go to the Registry and you tell them nothing about tonight. You don't mention the bandits. You don't mention the cabin. You don't mention the men. None of it."

  "What do I say?"

  "You tell them you woke up with a fever a few days ago. You tell them you cut your finger and the blood did something odd. It hung in the air or moved against gravity, something small and harmless and domestic. A spontaneous awakening. It happens. It's rare in commoners from the countryside, but not unheard of, and the Registry clerks live for that sort of thing. Diamond in the rough. They'll stamp your card and send you on your way, and the worst you'll endure is a lecture about responsible practice."

  Florence was quiet, turning this over. When she spoke, the question was not the one Alice expected.

  "You know a great deal about this," Florence said. "The laws. The Registry. The Department. How mages are classified." She tilted her head in a small motion, curious rather than accusatory. "So are you one of those rare country commoners, too?"

  Alice's stride faltered.

  It was a tiny thing, a half-step that landed wrong, a fractional break in the rhythm of her walk. She corrected it immediately, but the correction was worse than the stumble, because the correction was visible, and visible corrections were the hallmark of someone who had something to correct.

  "I mean," Florence continued, and her voice carried the mild, polite curiosity of a girl making conversation and absolutely nothing else, "you mentioned a small town. Stifling air. And you have magic. So it must have been the same for you. A natural awakening. One day you were going about your life and—"

  "Yes," Alice said. "Exactly that. Spontaneous. Completely spontaneous. One day I was—" The sentence needed a destination, and Alice's mouth arrived at the junction before her brain had consulted the map. "Farming. Turnips. And then, fire. Out of nowhere. Very standard. Textbook, really. Happens all the time. In the countryside. Where I am from. Which is the countryside."

  The silence that followed was long enough to have weather.

  Florence looked at her.

  She looked at the way Alice was holding herself. Spine straight, chin level, shoulders squared, it was the posture of a girl who had been told to stand up straight so many times that it had become architecture rather than habit. She thought about the voice. The crisp consonants, the clipped cadence, and the vocabulary drew from a well considerably deeper than the average turnip farmer's. She thought about the way Alice had navigated the conversation about the Registry with the fluency of someone who had not learned this information from a pamphlet. She thought about the fact that Alice had just said the word turnips as though it were a foreign term she was encountering for the first time and attempting to pronounce from context.

  Florence did not call her out.

  What she did was worse.

  "Of course," Florence said. Her voice was light, airy, and scrupulously polite. "Turnip farming is very dangerous work. I've heard the friction alone can be devastating."

  Alice stopped walking.

  "During the harvest especially," Florence added, nodding with an earnestness so exaggerated it had come all the way around from mockery to art. "All that contact with the soil. The sparks practically generate themselves."

  Alice turned. Florence was standing in the moonlight in a dead man's coat three sizes too large, her hair matted, her face smudged, and she was looking at Alice with an expression of such guileless, wide-eyed agreement that it could only have been produced by someone who was enjoying herself enormously.

  The naive girl from the village was making fun of her.

  Alice felt the heat rise up her neck. Not pyromancy. Something considerably more difficult to control.

  "It is complicated," Alice said, enunciating each word with the clipped precision of a woman filing a formal complaint. "I will explain it to you. Later. When we are not standing in a swamp, in the dark, wearing dead men's clothing. This is not the venue."

  Florence dropped into a curtsy. It was dreadful. The mud squelched under her boots, the oversized coat billowed around her like a collapsed tent, and the bow she attempted was approximately forty degrees too deep, transforming what was already a parody into something closer to slapstick. She held it for two full seconds.

  "Understood, my lady."

  "Don't call me that."

  "As you wish, Your Highness."

  "I am going to leave you here." Alice started walking again. The smirk was fighting its way onto her face, and she was losing the battle, and she resented this. "I mean it. You and the wolves can sort out the directions."

  "You wouldn't dare," Florence said, falling into step beside her. The coat flapped at her shins. "You'd be walking in circles within the hour."

  "I would find my own way."

  "Into a bog."

  "A scenic bog."

  "The wolves would eat you."

  "I would burn the wolves."

  "You'd burn one wolf. Then you'd be tired and lost and the other wolves would eat you while you napped."

  "I do not nap—"

  "And then I'd have to come and find you and carry you out over my shoulder, and you'd complain about the indignity the entire way, and I'd be late on the first day."

  Alice opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. The rebuttal she was constructing required a foundation that the current conversation had not provided, and she found herself, for the first time in recent memory, outmanoeuvred in an exchange she had not anticipated having with a person she had underestimated.

  "You are—" Alice started.

  "Navigating," Florence supplied, pointing to a gap in the tree line where the ground levelled out and the first suggestion of a track appeared in the mud. "That's the logging road. We follow it east for about a mile and it meets the river."

  Alice looked at the track. She looked at Florence. She looked at the track again.

  "Fine," she said.

  They walked. The trees began to thin, and through the gaps, the first grey light of the approaching city smudged the horizon—a low, ambient glow that sat above the rooftops like a false dawn, the collective exhalation of ten thousand chimneys and a hundred thousand gas lamps pushing back against the dark.

  Behind them, the forest closed over the path they had taken. The cabin sat somewhere in the dark, surrounded by its veil of illusionary thorns, holding its dead. Ahead, the road wound east, and the air began to change. The clean, wet green of the forest gave way, degree by degree, to something thicker and grittier, carrying the first faint traces of coal smoke and river mud and the vast, indifferent machinery of a city that did not yet know they were coming.

  Alice walked beside Florence, and the distance between the cabin and the city grew, and the night loosened its grip by fractions, and neither of them said anything for a while, which was its own kind of conversation.