Chapter 1 · The Girl Who Always Falls — Mortwing™

Azazel woke up mid-fall.

For one bright, weightless second she didn't know which way was up. Her stomach was somewhere above her. The dark behind her eyelids was full of green light and the after-impression of a ceiling she had never seen. Her hand was already moving, palm flat to her forearm, fingers searching the warmth of her Blood Seal through the sleeve before her brain had finished asking what was wrong.

The Seal didn't pulse. The room was still. No green fissures. No breathing walls. No swarm.

Just dust, old wood, and the distant clatter of someone in the kitchen negotiating with a kettle.

Azazel exhaled slowly into her pillow.

A dream. Of course. A stupid dream. She'd had a version of it before — the falling, the green light, the sense of someone else's heartbeat in her chest — and she always woke up like this, hand on the Seal, breath quick, certain for one second that she'd been somewhere else.

She was not somewhere else.

She was in her bed. In her room. In the Wickerman manor. Nineteen years old. Late for training.

She was already losing an argument with herself.

The argument went: get up, and then: no, and then: Genzō expects you at the training hall by seventh bell, and then, decisively: Genzō expects a lot of things.

She rolled onto her side and pulled the blanket over her head.

The Wickerman manor creaked around her like it was trying to remember how to stand. Wind slipped through the warped shutters and made the old wood sigh — a long, patient sound, the sound of something built two hundred years ago and grimly committed to making it three. Somewhere in the walls, something small and alive moved between beams and gave up halfway. The roof tiles clicked in the wind, arguing among themselves about which one would fall first.

She'd grown up to that sound. She'd grown up to a lot of sounds her cousins in the upper city would have considered structural emergencies.

Azazel counted the stains on her ceiling. There were thirty-eight. She'd counted them every morning for a year. They were always thirty-eight. The stain shaped like a dog was still a dog. The stain shaped like her falling down stairs was still her falling down stairs.

The manor groaned overhead.

She flinched anyway.

Right, she thought. Home.

The word fit worse than it used to.

She lay there for another minute, listening to her mother win the argument with the kettle, and tried not to think about what waited at the bottom of the hill. She tried not to think about the training hall's polished tile floor, which had personally introduced itself to her face nine times in the last month. She tried not to think about Cro's flat you fell, delivered with the affect of someone reading a weather report. She tried not to think about Miyu's small, devastating, let me.

She thought about all of it.

The manor sighed in agreement.

Creasalia, in the year 2053, was a city that had decided not to choose.

You could stand on the lower hill of the Wickerman estate and see four hundred years of architectural indecision laid out in front of you like a deck of cards someone had shuffled badly. Stone keeps from the early Empire. Iron-and-glass towers from the Reform. A monorail track on graven pylons that crossed above the old aqueduct without touching it, as if the engineers had been afraid the older stone would notice and take offense. Gas lanterns on the same posts as electric lamps because the city council had argued for sixteen years and then quietly authorized both. The sword on the Crownguard captain's hip and the rifle slung over his back, neither replacing the other, both expected.

People said the Empire was two thousand years of compromises stacked into a city. Azazel thought that was generous. To her, Creasalia looked like a place that couldn't throw anything away.

She climbed out of bed and the floorboards made the sound floorboards make when they're being asked to hold someone whose family has been losing money for six generations.

Her room was small. The window was warped. The mirror was old enough that her reflection looked slightly to the left of where she actually stood, which had stopped being charming around her tenth birthday.

She stood in front of it anyway and assessed.

Black hair, sleep-mussed, with the single white strand at her temple where the Shiranui in her had refused to be erased. Every Shiranui in the upper city had hair like fresh snow and eyes like cold honey. Her father had been Shiranui through and through — Genzō's only son, born to the colors of the line. The Wickerman in her, all of it from her mother, had taken almost everything anyway. The black hair. The red eyes. The sharp narrow look that made strangers nervous and aunts comment. The bloodline had stamped itself on her like it had a point to prove and left exactly one stripe of her father at her temple, a bright stubborn thing that would not lose its argument with the rest of her. A face that her mother insisted had the look of Azamoth in certain lights and that her grandfather refused to look at directly. Lean build. Sharp shoulders. Something narrow and quick about her, like an animal that had decided to be small and fast on purpose.

Her gaze flicked downward briefly.

Flat as the morning her mother had given up and bought her practical undershirts.

Don't, she told herself.

She thought it anyway: Miyu probably hasn't worn a practical undershirt in her life.

She thought it again, with feeling: Miyu probably doesn't know what a practical undershirt is.

She thought it a third time, just to be cruel: Miyu probably gets her undershirts custom-stitched in the upper district and they probably have her family crest on them and they probably fit.

The mirror, having had years of practice, said nothing.

Azazel pulled on her undershirt — practical, no crest, six years old, a little too short in the sleeves — and her uniform over it, and her father's long black coat over that, and the coat refused to sit straight, again, because the buckles had been made for someone shaped differently and her mother kept saying she'd take it to the tailor and then the upper city had raised the manor land-tax again, or Ela's scar had ached too badly through a storm and the healer had cost more than expected, or some other small reason had stepped neatly into the place a tailor's bill might otherwise have gone.

That was the way the Wickerman finances worked. They owned the manor. They had owned the manor for two hundred years. Every other thing in their lives lined up behind the manor and waited its turn, and the line never got any shorter.

Azazel tugged the left strap. Loose. Tugged the right. Tighter. Both wrong.

She looked at herself in the slightly-off mirror, in her father's coat — the one he had stopped being a Shiranui in, the one he had become a Wickerman in, the one no Wickerman daughter could have inherited because Wickerman daughters were the only Wickermans there were — and tried to find the part of her that looked like she belonged in any of it.

She gave up around the second button.

"Tch," she said to her reflection. "Whatever."

Her reflection, slightly to the left, agreed.

The kitchen smelled of old kettle and the rosemary her mother grew on the sill because the upper-city rosemary was expensive and the lower-city rosemary was vaguely sad.

Ela Wickerman stood at the counter with her back to the door, sleeves rolled, hair tied up in the practiced low knot of a woman who had been done with vanity for fourteen years. She was sharpening a knife. She was always sharpening a knife. Azazel had a theory that her mother sharpened the knife when she was thinking, the way other people paced. The Wickerman knives were the sharpest objects in the lower city.

"Morning," Azazel said.

"Morning, weasel."

"I'm not a weasel."

"You sleep curled up. Weasel."

"I sleep curled up because the bed is small."

"Mm-hm." Ela turned, knife in one hand, and looked her over the way she'd been looking her over since Azazel was four. Quick. Diagnostic. Cataloging what was wrong without comment. "Coat's sitting funny again."

"Coat is always sitting funny."

"I'll take it down to —"

"You said that last month."

Ela's jaw worked once. She set the knife down.

"I'll take it down to Hennir," she said. "This week."

"This week meaning this week, or this week meaning the next time the city council releases a budget surplus?"

"This week meaning eat your bread before you say something I'll have to remember."

Azazel ate her bread. It was yesterday's, slightly stiff at the crust, warm in the middle from the oven Ela had relit specifically for her. There was honey on the table. There hadn't been honey on the table the day before. Ela hadn't said anything about honey on the table. Honey was expensive.

Azazel chewed slowly and pretended not to notice.

"Genzō's expecting you at seventh," Ela said, without turning around.

"I know."

"He's not going to —"

"I know, Mom."

"— wait the way he waits for —"

"I know, Mom."

The kitchen was quiet for a second.

Ela picked up the knife again. The whetstone made the long, slow sound that whetstones made.

"You'll do fine," she said, not looking at her.

"Right."

"You always do fine."

"Right."

"Azazel."

She looked up.

Her mother's hand was on the counter, resting near the knife, and she wasn't moving. The morning light through the warped window made her look thinner than she was. Older than she was. It caught the long, faint scar that ran down the inside of her left forearm — the place where Ela's own Blood Seal had been, before Azazel was born, before Ela had given it up. The scar was old now. It only ached, Ela had once admitted, when storms came in or when the earth shifted in its sleep.

It was aching today.

Azazel could tell by the way her mother held her arm.

"Eat your bread," Ela said quietly. "And don't fall down so much."

"I don't fall down on purpose."

"I know."

Azazel ate her bread.

She did not say thank you for the honey.

Ela did not say you're welcome.

The knife went back to the whetstone, and the morning went on.

The path from the Wickerman estate down to the Crownguard training hall took twenty-two minutes if you walked, fourteen if you ran, and forever if you were thinking too hard.

Azazel was thinking too hard.

It was the kind of thinking that started with don't fall today and then escalated, with no visible effort, into don't fall today because Miyu won't be there to catch you and Cro will say something flat and your grandfather will hear about it from someone before sundown and his face will do that thing where it doesn't move but somehow gets thinner anyway. Then it usually ramped into a fantasy where she somehow performed brilliantly at training, won some unspecified competition, and was awarded — by some unspecified authority — a moment of grandfather acknowledgment that she could replay forever in her head whenever the Seal felt heavy. Then she would catch herself fantasizing and feel ashamed, because fantasizing about acknowledgment was probably what people did when they knew, deep down, that they weren't going to earn it. Then she would tell herself to stop being dramatic. Then the cycle would start again.

It was a twenty-two-minute walk.

She had it down to a science.

The lower city smelled of bread and rust and the faint metallic tang of magna-discharge from the early shift at the foundries, which used live magna conduits because they were cheaper than coal. A clatter of monorail above her, the new line, painted dark green for House Shiranui because House Shiranui owned a controlling interest in the rail consortium and didn't bother pretending otherwise. The trolley rolled past full of upper-city office workers in soft, well-cut coats. None of them looked down.

A boy sold news-sheets at the corner of Iron Way and Vagrant's Cross, shouting something about a relic exhibition opening at the Imperial Museum. The Uroboros Helmet returns to public display after eighty years. Azazel's eyes flicked across the headline without stopping. The Uroboros Helmet. She'd read about it in her secondary-form theology lessons. Some kind of ancient relic, supposed to grant infinite magna to whoever solved it. No one ever had.

She filed it away under things that don't apply to me and kept walking.

A Crownguard patrol passed her on the Iron Way, two officers in long coats, a sword on each hip and a sidearm on each thigh. The older one nodded to her — to the Wickerman colors, more accurately. The younger one didn't. The younger one stared at the white strand at her temple a beat too long and then looked away.

She was used to this. She let her face do the thing it did — the quick, crooked grin that people read as confidence and that she used like armor — and walked past.

Don't fall today.

The training hall came up on her left, a square stone building with a glass-paneled atrium grafted onto its front in the last reform, ugly in exactly the way that government buildings managed to be ugly across every era simultaneously. The Crownguard banner hung over the door, green and grey, the old crest stitched in silver.

Azazel paused at the threshold. Took a breath.

The Seal under her sleeve gave one slow, patient pulse.

She didn't know why. It had been doing that more often, lately. Not reacting. Just — beating, on its own schedule, separate from her heart. She'd asked her mother about it once and Ela's face had done a complicated thing and Ela had said yes, that happens, it'll settle and Azazel had not believed her.

It hadn't settled.

She pushed the door open and went inside.

The training hall floor was polished tile, dark green, the Crownguard crest inlaid in silver at the center. It had been polished that morning. Azazel could smell the wax. The wax was important because the wax made the floor slightly more slippery than it had any right to be, and her boots were old, and her balance was a personal embarrassment, and the universe had a sense of humor.

Cro was already there.

He was always already there.

He stood at the far edge of the floor with his arms crossed, and his coat hung off him like the coat had agreed in advance to behave, which Azazel found offensive at a personal level. He was six-foot-three. He was architectural. Standing next to him, she felt like a piece of furniture someone had set out by mistake.

She hated that.

She hated more that she hated it.

Miyu was beside him.

Miyu was always beside him on training mornings, because Miyu was punctual the way other people were tall, by birth, without effort. The mint-green of the Shiranui jacket flowed around her like the fabric had been told who its owner was and had made peace with it. Miyu's hair caught the morning light through the atrium glass. Miyu's posture was the posture of someone who had never, in eighteen years of being alive, needed to wonder if a coat fit.

She turned, saw Azazel, and her face did the small bright thing it did.

"Morning, weasel."

"Why does everyone call me that."

"Because you sleep curl —"

"I know why. I want to know why my own house has betrayed me."

Miyu smiled. It was a soft, blinding thing, and Azazel hated that it worked on her.

"You're early," Miyu said.

"I'm exactly on time."

"You're early by Azazel standards," Miyu said. "Which means on time. Which is early."

"I'm going to throw you."

"You can try."

Cro, without looking up: "She fell on the way in."

"I did not."

"You almost did. The boots."

"The boots are fine."

"The boots are six years old," Cro said, "and the wax is fresh."

Azazel opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"I hate," she said, "that you're right."

Cro inclined his head a fraction. Acknowledgment. From Cro, that was a parade.

She walked across the floor toward them, very carefully, because she was nineteen years old and a Crownguard cadet and a Wickerman of the direct line, and she was absolutely not going to slip on the wax in front of these two specific people on this specific morning.

She slipped on the wax.

She did not, technically, fall. She caught herself on one knee with a small graceless lurch and bounced back up before either of them could comment. It was the kind of recovery a less gracious person would have called a fall anyway. Azazel decided, internally, that it had not happened.

Cro: "You fell."

"I caught myself."

"You fell with extra steps."

Miyu: "It was very athletic, Azazel."

"You don't have to —"

"It was."

"Stop."

"It was a recovery."

"Stop."

Azazel reached them and dropped into a crouch with what she hoped was casual disdain. Her knee hurt. She did not say her knee hurt. The wax under her boot was still doing its quiet political work.

"Where's the captain?" she said.

"Upstairs," Cro said. "Petition came in late. He's reviewing."

"What kind?"

"Hunt. Lower wards. Probably nothing."

"Probably nothing meaning nothing, or probably nothing meaning we'll be eating standing up for three days?"

"Yes."

"Cro."

"Yes."

She glared at him. He looked at her with the placid neutrality of a man who had decided, sometime before she met him, to be unbothered as a personality.

Miyu, gently: "We start without him. Drills."

"What drills?"

"Footwork."

Azazel made a wounded sound.

"It's footwork," Miyu said. "Three sets. Then position transitions."

"I hate footwork."

"I know."

"I don't see why we keep doing footwork when I'm a summoner."

"Because last week you fell down summoning."

"That was —"

"You fell down summoning, Azazel."

"It was an uneven floor."

"Mm."

"This is a conspiracy."

"It is footwork."

Azazel groaned, the long, tragic groan she had been perfecting since she was twelve, and stood up. Miyu was already moving into the first set, fluid, weightless, the kind of movement that ended up on recruiting posters. Cro, at the edge of the floor, watched with the same expression he watched most things — unreadable, slightly tired, occasionally interrupted by a flicker of what Azazel had decided was probably amusement, although she had no proof.

She set her feet. She set her shoulders. She breathed.

She thought, without meaning to: don't fall.

The Seal under her sleeve gave one slow, separate pulse.

She fell.

Not on the first set. She got through the first set. She was almost proud of getting through the first set. Then on the second set, somewhere around the fourth transition, her left boot did something her left boot had been threatening to do for six years, which was twist sideways at the heel, and the wax did the rest.

The fall was short, catastrophic, and dignified in the way only a fall in front of the two people you most wanted to look competent in front of could possibly be. She landed flat on her back. The wind went out of her in one clean punch. The ceiling, vaulted and beautiful and flying its painted Crownguard banners, looked down at her with the bored serenity of architecture that had been there for two hundred years and would be there for two hundred more.

For a moment she didn't move.

For a moment she thought, with crystalline clarity: I have been in this exact position before.

Not the training hall. Not the fall. The moment. The lying-on-her-back-staring-up feeling. The sense of having been here. Of having lain like this, breath knocked out, ceiling above her, knowing she would have to get up.

She had not, to her knowledge, ever lain like this before.

Her Seal pulsed. Slow. Patient. Not entirely her own.

Then the moment passed, the way the moments always passed, and a shadow fell over her — long, rectangular, unmoving — and Cro said:

"You fell."

"I am aware."

He extended a hand.

She slapped it away and scrambled to her feet on her own — immediately wobbling as her boot caught the hem of her coat, which had come undone somewhere in the fall and was now hanging off her shoulder at an angle that suggested it, too, had given up on her.

Miyu, who had been watching from the side with a polite hand over her mouth, failed to suppress a snort.

"You really do have a talent for dramatic landings, Azazel."

Azazel pointed a trembling, accusing finger.

"Traitor."

"I didn't push you."

"You didn't stop me!"

Cro crossed his arms. "Try again."

"I will die."

"You won't."

"I will. I will die, and you will both have to attend my funeral, and you will have to look at my mother, and you will have to explain to her that I died because of footwork."

"Try again."

She groaned — the long, perfected, performative groan — and dusted herself off. Her father's coat was twisted sideways. She tugged one strap. Tugged the other. Buckles refusing to sit. It always felt like she was wearing someone else's clothes. Armor for a hero. Worn by a gremlin.

Miyu stepped forward, the mint-green fabric of her Shiranui jacket flowing.

"Let me."

Azazel froze.

Miyu's nimble fingers found the lapels, straightened them, tightened the shoulder buckle with practiced ease. Miyu stood at five-seven — elegant, composed, smelling faintly of ozone and the expensive tea her family had imported for three generations.

This close, the difference between them was its own small humiliation.

Azazel stared straight ahead at Miyu's collarbone and thought, without dignity: Of course she's perfectly proportioned. Of course. That's how she is. That's how she's allowed to be. I am the one in this family who got the wrong hair and the bad coat and the chest of a particularly austere monk.

She muttered into her collar: "I could've done it."

Miyu smiled.

It was the soft, blinding thing again.

"I know," Miyu said.

She did the last buckle. Stepped back. The coat sat the way it had not sat all morning — straight, even, the Wickerman crest at the shoulder finally visible the way the crest was meant to be visible.

Azazel felt the shape of the coat settle on her.

It felt, briefly, like it fit.

She hated how much that mattered.

She hated more that Miyu had known it would.

"Thanks," she muttered at the floorboards.

"Mm," Miyu said.

Cro, somewhere behind them: "Again."

They drilled for another hour.

She fell twice more.

She didn't die.

When the captain finally came down from the upper office, the morning sun was full on the atrium glass and the wax had dried unevenly and Azazel's left knee had a bruise the size of a coin and Cro had said you fell exactly seven times and Miyu had said let me exactly three.

The captain — a thick man in a Crownguard coat, gray at the temples, a sidearm whose grip had been worn smooth by thirty years on his hip — looked at the three of them with the weary resignation of a person whose job was, fundamentally, supervising disasters.

"Wickerman," he said.

"Captain."

"You fell."

"I caught myself."

"Mm."

He raised a tablet. The screen flickered with the soft green of Crownguard data-glyphs. He read for a moment. The room waited.

"Petition just came down," he said. "Lower wards. Disturbance at the old aqueduct. Likely nothing — likely a bad summoning gone loose, the kind students try and run from. Cell Four pulls this one. You three plus Mirella, when she gets here."

Cro: "Mirella's coming?"

"Mirella's coming."

Miyu: "She'll be late."

"She's always late."

Azazel, despite herself, despite the bruise on her knee and the wax on her boots and the morning, felt the small lift of something happening that she had not yet learned to mistrust.

The Seal at her sleeve pulsed once.

Slow.

Patient.

Not entirely her own.

She didn't notice, this time.

The captain handed Cro the tablet. Cro read. The morning kept moving.

And outside the training hall, far above the city, a monorail ran east on the green-painted line through the long shadow of the Wickerman manor, and the manor creaked in the wind, and somewhere deep beneath the capital — beneath the foundries, beneath the aqueduct, beneath two hundred years of layered stone and the older stone beneath that and the older patience beneath that — something old and patient kept its own slow, steady time.

It had been keeping that time since before the Empire had a name.

It was very good at waiting.