“Get her away,” said Morris shortly. “Oi—” He finally took a step sideways as Lady Dufay cooed at him and reached out to touch his shoulder.
“She’s not got all her wits,” panted Alan.
“I can bloody see that.”
Alan got himself in between the two of them. Close quarters. Right. His hand slid clear of his pocket.
Morris reached across him to try to keep the Lady at arm’s length. His sleeve caught on Alan’s cap and pushed it nearly off.
“What the—”
Now. It had to be now.
Alan spun, adjusted his grip on the knife, and flung his free arm around Morris’s side as if embracing him. Holding him steady. Judging, the best he could through all these bloody clothes, where the man’s lowest ribs stopped and unprotected flesh began.
He set the knife’s point to that place and shoved in and upwards with all the strength he had.
Alan had been in his share of ugly fights. The rule was that you ended them fast and in whatever way you could. This wasn’t a scuffle over food or a prime stretch of begging space on the street—Morris wasn’t the sort to take a wound as a warning, and Alan had no faith at all he’d be able to knock the man out cold.
Alan had never killed anyone before.
Morris grunted when the knife sank in. He sounded surprised.
Pressed up close like this, the heat of Morris’s body was tremendous. Alan smelled sweat and copper. He couldn’t feel his fingers around the knife handle. He yanked anyway, praying his muscles would cooperate, and stumbled back a few steps with the knife in his nerveless hand and finally, finally looked Joe Morris in the face.
Morris was staring back at him with the violence of a bottle freshly broken against the edge of a bar. Recognition bled onto the bottle’s edges and, horribly, Morris gave three little coughs of laughter. Each one expanded the hint of darkness that Alan could see seeping out onto the white shirtfront from beneath the black of his waistcoat.
“Nice try, thief,” Morris ground out.
And began, doubled over as he was, to cradle a spell. It took shape with searing quickness, pale blue and glowing. Alan had seen this spell before. He found himself glued mothlike to the sight of it as the cold acid of his own actions drained from his limbs and left him shivering.
Move, you bloody fool, he snarled at himself.
He darted forward with a clumsy swipe of the blade at Morris’s fingers, but Morris was ready and took two steps back out of reach, now pressing the blue spell to the wound Alan had left in his side.
Healing. As he’d healed Alan’s hand once the damage was done.
The spell sank in and was gone. Morris straightened up and stepped toward Alan, already cradling anew. His face was pale and shone with sweat, but he moved as if the knife had never been in him at all.
Lady Dufay moved faster.
The swoop of white fabric was like a swan taking off from the water. Morris growled a curse, and Alan flinched back, and when he recovered Morris was standing trapped with his arms held firmly out on either side, each wrist held in one of the Lady’s hands. No way for him to cradle like that. He was still kicking backwards for all he was worth, trying to throw his captor off balance. If he cursed any louder, then the back row of the rapt ice-platform crowd would hear him.
Lady Dufay stood like an oak tree herself. She gave Alan an impatient look. “Well? Get on with it.”
Alan’s stomach clenched with such abruptness that he nearly retched. There was blood on the knife. There was blood soaking his hand. God, God. To do this twice, and to do it the second time to a man held helpless—even such a man as this, who had in his snarling face Alan’s death and the deaths of his family, and the small scraping sounds of a blade against the bones and tendons of Alan’s hand—
Sin-eater, Alan thought, numb.
This time he drove the knife into Morris’s neck. The gush of blood when he drew it out was like warm water from a tap, purple-black in the darkness. Unreal.
Morris choked. Trying to say something. His eyes rolled, and his arms strained against Dufay’s implacable grip.
It took a few awful bubbling breaths, and then it was over.
Alan wiped his knife shakily on his skirts and returned it to his pocket. He heard the scratchy thud of Morris’s body hitting the ground as Lady Dufay released it, but he was too busy emptying his guts into the reeds to see it happen.
“Oh, settle down,” said the Lady. Alan straightened to glare at her, but she wasn’t looking at him. She knelt with a hand flat on the stones. “There’ll be more of that to come, no doubt.”
Yes. No doubt. Alan cast a frantic look across to the stage. The crowd had the quiet of an attentive audience. George’s voice was still going. How long had all that taken? It didn’t matter.
Alan ran through the pink arch and into the grotto.
As soon as he stepped across the threshold, there was a moment of stunned silence, and then four people began shouting at him at once.
Alan took in the scene—glowing strings, some kind of prison or tether, and none of them were moving. He shoved his fingers in his mouth and gave a single sharp whistle. That shut them all up.
“Tell me how to get you out of this,” he said.
“Edwin,” said Robin at once. “Is he alive? Have they—have they killed him?”
“What—” started Alan.
“I felt someone die,” said Jack.
The land. Lady Dufay, soothing it. Perhaps she was still doing so, because she hadn’t followed Alan in here.
“I don’t think they’ve done anything to him yet. And that—that was Morris.” Alan rubbed his palms on the blasted apron. “Morris is dead.”
Another startled silence. Then—“Bastoke and Walter are going to kill Edwin, and it won’t look like they have, they’ll have an illusion up,” said Robin, tripping over his words. “Forget about us, go and save him.”
“On his own?” Jack said sharply.
“He can disrupt the ritual. Perturb it, somehow.”
“Perturb this bloody Bridle!” said Violet. “If you touch the pillar, Alan, maybe it’ll turn the spell in on itself.”
“And maybe he’ll be trapped too,” said Maud. “Isn’t there another way?”
Oh, fantastic. Another argument about magical theory. And the only clever one wasn’t here.
“Wait—if Morris is dead,” said Robin, “then this can’t be something he was powering directly.”
“If it’s a trap, could he have laid it here this morning?” said Alan. “Left it for later. Like your illusions, Violet.”
“They only work because of the oak-hearts,” said Violet. “As Edwin keeps telling us, wood holds magic because magic clings to life. This is stone. How could it—”
“Mostly stone,” said Maud, and Jack said at the same time, “The shells.”
A single row of pink and white shells circled the pillar like a ring on a finger. Alan walked between his motionless allies and took hold of Jack’s stick, which slipped easily from Jack’s grasp when tugged.
He lifted the silver-topped end, took aim, and smashed it right into the closest seashell, which shattered.
The glowing strings blinked into nothing.