The two guards on the prison gate heard footsteps come out of the courtyard dark.

Bare feet on stone. Unhurried.

The older one raised his spear. "Who goes there?"

No answer. The footsteps kept coming.

"I said who—"

She stepped into the torchlight, and the challenge died in his mouth.

She was tall, and she was mostly bare. Black-red symbols curled over her pale skin, up from her hips, across her stomach and chest to her throat — script in no language either man knew, written on flesh like scripture. Dark silk and thin gold chains covered what they covered and moved when she moved. Behind her, folded like a cloak, were wings the colour of blood drying on glass. Two small black horns curved out of her hair. Her eyes were red, with a ring of gold around each pupil.

From a distance, her smile looked gentle.

The younger guard’s spear dipped without him noticing. "Bloody hell," he said. Then he grinned. "Are you lost, love? Because if you’re lost, I’ll walk you anywhere you like."

"Quiet," the older one said. His own eyes had not left her either. He had to push the words out. "This is the king’s prison. You can’t be here. State your business."

"Open the gate," she said.

The older guard’s hand tightened on the spear. "We can’t do—"

Her eyes brightened.

The younger guard’s grin died where it stood. The older one’s mouth kept moving for a second with nothing coming out of it. Then his spear lowered itself, and he stepped aside, and the younger one turned to the wall, lifted the keys off the hook, and fit them into the lock of the king’s prison with steady hands.

The gate swung open.

She walked through it, past both of them, and neither man turned his head to watch her go. They stood where she had left them, facing the empty courtyard, and did not move again.

At the bottom of the stair, the night warden looked up from his stool. He got as far as standing. Then her eyes found his, and he sat back down and stared at the wall, and she walked past him into the cells.

Her name was Alice. Fallen Angel of Lust, one of the Seven Sins. No one in that castle knew it yet.

Camillia heard the footsteps stop outside her cell.

"Come to look?" she said into the dark. Her voice came out cracked. "Look, then. Get it done and get out."

"Camillia."

The air in the cell had gone warm and heavy.

She lifted her head. The torchlight from the corridor reached the bars, and she saw the wings first, then the script on the skin, then the eyes, and whatever she had been about to say died in her mouth.

"What are you," she said.

"Someone with an offer."

"I’ve had men’s offers."

"I’m not a man," Alice said. "And I haven’t made it yet."

She came closer to the bars.

"The prince is dead. You did that well — under the breastplate, in front of his whole city." A pause. "Your sister still hasn’t spoken. Your carpenter is in the ground. And the king told you that grief makes liars of honest people, and then he went to his lunch." She tilted her head slightly. "Did I miss anything?"

Camillia’s chains scraped as her hands closed into fists. "Get out."

"The king is still alive," Alice said. "The court that called you a liar is dining over your head right now. In three days they hang you in the square as a lesson, the city watches, and in a year you’re the madwoman who stabbed a prince. That is the whole of what’s left." She let it sit. "Or."

"Or what."

"Or I give you what you need to finish it. The court kneels. The castle burns. Every man who laughed at your grief regrets owning a tongue. As far as you want to take it, and no further."

Camillia stared at her through the bars.

"Nothing’s free," she said. "What’s the price."

"You aid me when I call. That’s all."

"That’s all."

"That’s all," Alice said, and smiled when she said it.

Camillia thought of Tomas under the tablecloth. Eva’s corner. The smile beside the throne. Go home.

"Yes," she said.

The power did not come gently.

The chains heated, glowed, and snapped off her wrists. The dark of the cell turned red. Her wounds did not close — they changed, the pain in them turning over into something that held her up instead of bleeding her out. Black metal rose over her skin piece by piece. Forearms. Shoulders. Chest. Like something that had been inside her all along had finally been given its shape.

When she stood up, she stood up armoured.

She turned to say something to the angel, and the corridor was empty. Alice had given the power and gone. Everything that happened next, Camillia chose herself.

The two gate guards were still standing where Alice had left them, facing the dark. The first one’s head left his shoulders before his face came back to life. The second got his mouth open. Nothing more.

Then she went up into the castle.

The alarm caught up with her at the barracks. The last of the prince’s six came out of it half-armoured, sword in one hand, boots unlaced, and he recognized the face inside the black helm a second before her blade went through his chestplate and into the wall behind him. The men behind him broke and ran. It did not help them.

The royal guard made their stand on the great stair. Twenty men, shields locked across the landing, a captain shouting hold. She walked up into the line, and the line held for three steps. Spears snapped on the black metal. The captain’s sword turned on her shoulder, and she took him by the throat and put him through the bannister, and after that the line stopped being a line.

She found the chamberlain in a corridor on the third floor, running with his robes lifted in both fists.

"I serve the crown," he said, backing into the wall. "I only spoke as the court requires — I never touched — please. Please. I have a wife—"

You will mind what you say of His Highness.

She did not say anything back.

The corridor went quiet behind her.

She found the nobles who had whispered behind their hands barricaded in the chapel, and the chapel doors were old and thick, and held for as long as old wood holds.

Then the throne room.

Its doors were barred from the inside. She came through them anyway, and the last four of the royal guard stood in front of the dais with their shields locked. The first spear broke on her chest. The second man went through the shields and into a pillar. The third ran. The fourth held his ground, and died holding it.

Then it was the long cold hall, and the two of them.

"Whatever it promised you," the king said. His voice was even. "Whatever the thing in my courtyard offered, I can match it. Lands. Pardon. Name it."

She kept walking.

"I am your king." Louder now. He had backed up against his own throne. "Say something. Damn you, say—"

She stopped in front of him. From behind the black helm, her voice came out quiet.

"Grief makes liars of honest people."

She swung once.

The east gate broke the same night. By morning the capital was burning from both ends — the war coming in through one gate, the woman walking out through the other — and there was no kingdom left to say which of them had killed it.

By the time the last tower fell, the woman who had stood at the foot of a throne asking for the truth to weigh something did not exist anymore.

What walked out of the fire wore black metal and answered to one being in all the world.

The Dark Knight of the Succubus Cross.

♢♢♢♢

Centuries later, under a red sky, on a floor of a Tower in a world she was never born into, the Dark Knight knelt in the mud with her armour cracked open.

Black blood ran through the broken seams. The cross her Mother’s power had been poured into hung split and dead on its ruined shrine. The fire on her sword guttered.

"Mother," she whispered.

No one answered.

Team Zero knew none of it. Not her name. Not the kingdom, the parade, the cell, or the deal made through iron bars. They saw a wounded boss still holding a burning sword.

James kept the python coiled and ready at his side. Ronan raised the broken frame of his shield. Finn lifted his axe with blood running down his arm. Cillian gathered lightning into a shaking hand. Maeve pushed one last pale-gold flicker out into her field.

The Dark Knight planted her sword in the mud, and pushed herself up off her knee.

The final exchange was coming.