‘There are too many ghouls in the forest. We need you,’ said Kolya.

The poor kid was exhausted and pale, his usually sharp gaze dulled with tiredness. Silvie gave him a second fruit bun. There was no harm in a little petty crime and the buns weren’t selling anyway. If she was leaving the bakery today, it hardly mattered whether she was giving away free samples.

‘I’m not due back at the barracks for another week,’ she reminded him.

‘Bd hr d–’ Kolya swallowed his mouthful before trying again. ‘But you’re the best, and we need you.’

Silvie shook her head, smiling. ‘I’m not the best, I’m just the closest. The others went further away for better work. Don’t try to butter me up.’

‘I’m not buttering you up! You’re the best,’ Kolya said, absolutely buttering her up. He was good at turning on the charm when he wanted to. ‘And you have to help. Please? It’s going to be dark soon. The ghouls get hungrier then.’

‘No, they don’t. That’s superstition.’ Silvie didn’t bother to correct him on “ghouls”. Sentries weren’t allowed to use “upir”, like the villagers did, and although she used the official “cadaveri” readily enough while working, she baulked at adopting it into her own vocabulary. “Ghouls” was a compromise she was willing to overlook.

She argued with Kolya for another few minutes, but they both knew how the debate would end. After saying good-bye and thank-you to the owner of the bakery where she had worked this leave-break, Silvie went upstairs to collect the sentry cloak she’d stored out of sight weeks earlier.

She held it in her hands for a few moments before putting it on, rubbing one thumb idly against the mustard-yellow fabric. Silvie was used to the weight of the wool on her shoulders. It was one of the most familiar sensations in her life.

When she’d first worn it, the hem had reached her ankles. Now it was high on her calves. As sentries went, Silvie was tall.

Leave was a routine part of a sentry’s life, a chance to recover from the strain of the work they did. Not from all work, of course – while they were away from the barracks, they had to earn their own living. Silvie was used to it; she’d never known anything else.

‘I hate being in the village,’ Kolya complained as they walked through its outskirts towards the barracks. He kicked at a pebble on the path. ‘On my way to see you, some boys threw snowballs soaked in piss at me. Yellow snow for the yellowcloak.’

Silvie spent a few uncharitable seconds imagining how helpless and terrified those boys would be if ghouls overran their safe little world. But she was older than Kolya, so she had to set a good example.

‘We should feel sorry for them,’ she told him. ‘They’ll never be anything other than human.’

‘Well, I don’t,’ he retorted. ‘I hate them.’

‘Don’t let anyone hear you say that. It’ll only make things worse.’

‘I know, I know. I still wish they’d all drop dead.’

Kolya hadn’t been turned over to the sentries until he was seven and, for all its bullying and restrictions, his new life in a yellow cloak was a reprieve from what had come before. He’d learned how to be a child eventually, but he was always brittle and blank in how he dealt with others, as if something fundamental had been stolen from him. Silvie didn’t have a name for it, or even know how to define it beyond its absence.

‘Then we’d all get reassigned to other parts of the kingdom. If they all dropped dead, I mean,’ Silvie pointed out, humouring him. ‘No point in having sentries if there’s nobody left to protect.’

‘Doesn’t sound so bad,’ sniffed Kolya stubbornly, refusing to relent on his daydreams of murder. ‘Maybe we’d be sent to Gemelli, and have cherry cheesecake for every meal.’

‘I don’t think they have it for every meal, even in Gemelli.’ Silvie couldn’t help but give a merry laugh at Kolya’s resulting pout.

 

No matter how much she resented having her leave cut short, Silvie felt a familiar thrill as she settled into her seat in the sentry-house, drawing in a deep breath and sending herself out into the wolf waiting at the forest’s edge.

Once upon a time, the sentry-houses had tried to raise the wolves with the same strictness as they raised the sentries themselves, but it hadn’t worked – only the truly wild, unfettered wolves that lived freely in the forest had minds open enough to link with. Domestic animals were too human.

Silvie had first connected with her current wolf four years ago, when he was scarcely more than a cub and she was younger than Kolya was now. He wasn’t her first wolf, but he was the closest bond she’d felt, her mind slipping in easily to overlap and blend with him as he paced.

Connecting to wolves was a learned ability, and a hard-learned one at that. Silvie was glad of the skill, but looked back on her earliest years with an echo of remembered pain. Sentries did not have childhoods, they had a very specific and very difficult education.

There was no way to know how aware the wolves were of being controlled, but they didn’t seem to mind it. Silvie was glad. She would have felt bereft without the freedom she felt when she was a wolf. It was the one truly bright thing in her life.

She was off! Senses alight with a thousand things at once as she ran, Silvie thrilled at the sheer pleasure of being a creature utterly at home in its environment, powerful and strong and adept. Every petty cruelty of her life as a sentry was worth this.

A scent that came when the snow melted into the dark soil made her wolf-mouth water as much as the quicksilver living aroma of small prey between the trees did. To the wolf’s keen senses, that cold-smell was the language of home, nuanced and subtle as a poem. 

The twigs and bracken were cold and rough under her wolf-paw. Magic crackled wild and weird in the air all around, another symptom of whatever imbalance was stirring up more ghouls than usual.

Distantly, she was aware of her arms prickling to gooseflesh, but Silvie dismissed the irrelevant sensations of her human body and concentrated on the world around her wolf-self. There was a dank, dense feeling in the air, the ominous atmosphere that often came when the ghouls were out in numbers.

Silvie could tell that one was nearby already, the scent of it like a falling ribbon in the dark, bright and twisting in the air. The whole forest pulsed with life, making the un-life she was tracking stand out even more. She could taste her victory already, the rend of her claws and the snarl of her mouth as she rendered dead flesh inert and eliminated the threat.

But she didn’t hear the one on her left. It didn’t have the pungent reek of the one she tracked, it was too old – more desiccated bone and sinew than corpse. After the skull-crushing snap forward of its upper jaw, there was no time for comprehension or pain to dawn. It was as instant and simple as the breaking of a twig: one moment she lived and the next…

 

A window was wide open, letting in the din of heavy rain and of bells. Stirred by the deluge, the air carried with it the stench of decay, a dank rot thicker than the prey-scent Silvie had chased as she rode the wolf’s mind.

She’d died as she’d always expected to. Most sentries didn’t live long enough for their yellow cloaks to become as short on them as hers had. She should consider herself lucky. She’d grown old enough to become tall: a small victory.

So what now? Was she a ghost? If so, why was she haunting this unfamiliar place? What connection did she have to this room, and why was that link strong enough for her last seconds to fling her consciousness here, so much further than the distance to a wolf?

Two girls were huddled together beneath the open window, oblivious to the rain. One comforted the other, rubbing her back and whispering inaudible sympathies into her ear. Other people were in this strange, sumptuous room as well, but they were a blur to Silvie.

She moved closer. That was the only way she could think of it, even as she understood that direction and dimension didn’t mean much to her anymore. Her wolf was gone, like a thousand wolves before it, and like a thousand other sentries, Silvie was gone as well, like a sailor caught in the rigging of a sinking ship, drowning as it descended. This strange scene was some final flare of magic before she vanished, her story over.

The older girl, about seventeen, Silvie’s age, raised her head. Unlike the younger one in her arms, she wasn’t crying. She had an unnervingly beautiful face: wide, seafoam-green eyes, lashes as black and bold as stitches. Heavy dark curls framed her grief-drained face.

‘What’s going to happen to Lena?’ the beautiful girl asked, arms curling closer around the other figure. This girl was probably no older than Kolya’s fourteen years, her face buried in her hands and her form swallowed by the heavy pink velvet of her skirt puddled around her. What little of her skin was visible in that position was the porcelain tone some women attained by magic, but this girl was far too young for that.

‘What’s going to happen to her?’ the beautiful girl asked again, her voice sharper and more demanding.

Silvie shifted focus, turning the world to see who the girl was speaking to.

A handsome man in his prime lay in the middle of a huge bed, his patrician form still and diminished in the particular way that told Silvie he was dead. Distantly, she realised that her own body must look that way now, as well. Empty.

Another man, this one younger and very much alive, stood by the body. He cast a brief, numb glance in the direction of the demand. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘I have no intention of taking a queen. The tower is hers.’

One of the other figures came into focus as they approached the man. ‘Your Majesty, you must see to the christallo immediately; the cadaveri are rampant throughout the city.’

The living man turned away from the dead one and from the girls, setting his shoulders with a deep inhale. Most of the other people followed him as he strode from the room. 

The beautiful girl’s shoulders dropped with relief, her face softening from fear to calm. Silvie felt a small sting of regret that she’d never know anything more about her.

As if on cue, the world gave a sickening lurch and Silvie thought I wish and everything went black.

 

The first sensation of her new life was vertigo, her whole self reeling and spinning, a sense of falling that didn’t stop despite the bed beneath her.

The second was the sound of bells, ringing and ringing, barely quieter than they’d been in that other place she’d gone to. Her head, already aching, could hardly bear the sound.

Even more unbearable than the clang of bells were the voices, a dozen of them all layered on top of one another like a deck of shuffled cards, no single thread of conversation distinct from any other. Silvie’s senses all felt dull and clumsy, like when she was a child and first learning how to ride a wolf’s mind. Nothing was as vivid as it should be. Everything was a little too slow. It was as if she was trying to ride her own mind but didn’t know the trick of it.

‘Silvie! Silvie, can you hear me?’

‘Kolya?’ she managed to reply, opening her eyes and then slamming them shut again an instant later. Everything was too bright, like the world was made from sunlight on water. Her head throbbed, spinning and spinning. ‘How am I alive?’

‘We saved you. We…’ He trailed off. Silvie thought he might be crying. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it worked.’

He was deflecting, and clumsily at that. She thought she’d taught him to speak with more cunning.

But maybe the scolding could wait for a little while. Until the spinning stopped. 

Silvie drew in a slow, steadying breath, trying to quell her nausea. It didn’t work. 

Another peal of bells made her wince. Everything was so loud, like the whole world was happening right beside her pillow.

‘Why are the church bells ringing?’

‘We know why there were so many extra ghouls, now.’ Kolya squeezed her hand again, as if to reassure himself that she was warm and present. ‘The beacons caught fire an hour ago.’

‘The beacons?’ Muddled, she tried to make sense of his words.

‘The signal beacons, from Arteria,’ he told her. ‘The King is dead.’