The Demon’s Surrender (34 page)
Read The Demon’s Surrender Online
Authors: Sarah Rees Brennan
“And for those of you who left,” Mae said.
“Or those of you who may change your minds,” Sin chimed in sweetly, and let her eyes fall on every face she had memorized.
“You all carry the magician’s mark Gerald gave you,” Mae said. “The channel between every magician in the Circle. And now the channel between you and the demons. Nick made a bargain with Anzu in the magicians’ circles. You all saw it. When Gerald’s body decays and dies, Nick will give Anzu another magician to possess. And another. Every magician in the Circle who keeps feeding people to demons will be fed to our demon, in time. And every magician who has already left, who will go to another Circle with Gerald’s new mark, will open a new channel for us. Every magician in England who kills will end up possessed.”
A full circle of victimhood, using the mark Gerald had been so proud of inventing against them, bringing on the magicians the same fate they had been willing to let fall on innocent people.
Only it meant that now the Market fed people to demons. No matter how guilty those people were, it was a terrible thing.
Sin did not have more than a moment to think about the guilt she had to bear, because the next moment Anzu moved toward her.
She remembered the promise she had made.
*
Gerald’s body was already changing, Anzu changing a human being to suit his own taste, terrible beauty sweeping his face like a forest fire, hair running with gold.
He stood in front of Sin, silent and patient as demons had to be. It was only when he reached out and touched her arm, jerking his head toward the door, that Sin knew he wanted to go now.
Sin stepped toward him, separating herself completely from the others. If his fury was going to be directed at anyone, she wanted it to be her alone.
“I’m not going with you,” she told him gently. “I was never going to go with you. I was lying when I said I would. Humans do that.”
Sin closed her eyes and bowed her head.
He could kill her now, if he wanted. She refused to show fear and held herself braced. She knew the risks she had taken, making herself a bargaining chip in the demons’ game.
And she’d never meant to go. She wasn’t for sale.
She waited for a long time, and then the touch came. Light, against her stomach.
The pain from her wound dissolved under his fingers.
Sin lifted her head. Anzu’s face was almost completely changed now, golden and still, like a face painted on a glass window.
He didn’t kill her.
He nodded slowly instead and turned away. His hand lingered above hers, not quite touching, in what might have been a demon’s version of a good-bye.
She wondered if he was doing what he’d said he would, doing nice things for her so she would love him, or if he’d listened to anything she had said about love, or if he had learned something from Nick.
He could not speak. She would never know.
He looked at Nick before he went. Nick met his eyes with a level gaze, his friend from another life, his enemy in this one.
The demons would keep their bargain, Sin thought.
Anzu walked out the door. The magicians and the Market people shuddered away from him as he went on his silent way, all humans together caught in a moment of horror.
They had won. They did not need to keep up any pretense of power, when they had used it all.
Nick lay down, in the smoky ruins of the Circle, like an exhausted child. He lay down beside the still body of his brother.
Jamie staggered and Mae dived to catch him, both of them sinking but managing to stay up, Mae’s arm tight around Jamie’s waist. He sagged against her arm as if it was his only support, and spat something out onto the floor.
He lifted his face after doing it, and Sin saw blood dark on his lips and dyeing his teeth. His face was very white. His eyes were Mae’s eyes for the first time, dark brown and human, and Sin found herself distantly shocked by them.
Sin could hear quiet spreading in Anzu’s wake, through the house and then outside it, the battle stilling, over and won. She went to the window and saw it was raining, not a demon’s storm but just the light gray drizzle of London, rain falling in the silent street.
A small sound made Sin turn around.
In the mess of the summoning circle, through the lingering smoke, she saw the new gray shimmer of Alan’s hair.
His shoulders were humped, his back an arch of pain, as he struggled onto his hands and knees. He was making a low, terrible moaning noise. Sin knew that he was moaning and not speaking because Alan the silver-tongued, her smooth, cunning liar, had given up his words to a demon, had not used words in so long that they were lost for now. Animal sounds were passing his lips, nothing human.
“Nick,” Alan choked out at last. His voice was destroyed, as if someone had been slowly strangling him for days.
He dragged himself up into a sitting position, and his outstretched hand almost reached Nick’s body, fingers hovering over his shoulder, as if Alan was too scared to touch him.
Alan’s hand finally fell on Nick’s shoulder, very lightly, very gently, the same way Sin pulled the blankets over Toby when he was asleep and she did not want to wake him.
Nick lurched upward, shuddering, black eyes staring and terrible, like a dead thing come to unnatural life.
Alan did not flinch.
“Don’t you ever,” Nick snarled. “Don’t you
ever
do anything like this to me again.”
“Okay, Nick,” Alan soothed him. “I won’t. I promise.” “You’re just lying,” Nick said. “You said you’d never leave. You always lie.”
“I know,” Alan murmured. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“I
missed
you,” Nick raged, his voice cracking, and he put his head down, forehead pressed against Alan’s knee.
Alan laughed a little, trembling and amazed, and Sin felt a rush of triumph, like the victorious adrenaline that always ran through her exhausted body after a successful performance, but multiplied by a thousand.
Mae laughed, her laugh a victory song even as she held her brother up, and Sin looked at her, knowing that their smiles mirrored each other, joyful and fierce.
Then Sin looked at Alan, and he looked back at her. He looked so much older, or as if he had been through an illness everyone had thought would prove fatal. There were crow’s-feet scored deep in the corners of his eyes, and his hair was thick with silver. His eyes had not changed at all, still dark steadfast blue and dear.
“Alan,” she whispered.
He whispered back, “Cynthia, I’m here.”
She had him back. The Market was safe. They had lied and murdered and now they had trapped the magicians, become almost as bad as the magicians, ready to see people as food for demons.
There was already one man possessed, walking through London in the rain. There would be more. The Market had to accept that. Sin had to accept that, what they had become in order to win.
It had been worth the cost. But it was such a cost.
Alan stroked Nick’s hair with hands that could not stop shaking.
“Shh, it’s all right,” he said, lying again already, making the lie a lullaby. “Everything’s all right now.”
Sin turned back to the window, watching through the glass as that dark shape walked away through the rain, the human lost, the demon alone.
She had been in enough battles before to know victory was always bitter, and the bigger the fight, the worse the cost. But she hoped she would never again taste victory as bitter as this.
22
The Leader of the Goblin Market
T
HE LIGHTS OF THE
G
OBLIN
M
ARKET WERE SHINING ON THE
arching branches of the trees around Kensington Gardens. They were floating on the silvery surface of the lake, like lilypads with light instead of a lily.
Sin was dancing.
She was covered in tiny beacon lights like the one she had used in Black Arthur’s house, shining like pearls with tiny candles set inside, and strung together across her skin with gossamer-thin threads of silver. It was a costume to brighten the old audience’s eyes and dazzle all those for whom this was their very first Market.
The Goblin Market was spread around the lake on all sides, larger than it had ever been before, like a tiny city.
Sin knew there was nothing more important than opening a show with a bang.
She was dancing in silence by the lake, an illuminated apparition, her reflection a white shadow on the waters, her feet moving through the dark grass. People had started to gather, murmuring to one another, a hushed spoken start to applause.
Two tall torches were burning on either side of the lake.
The torches carved a warm orange cave in the evening. There was a cold wind blowing, making the flames of the torches form strange shapes, as if they were dancers themselves.
The music started, lifting the scene to a whole new level. The drums of the Market started first, setting everyone’s hearts to a new rhythm, and then Matthias led the twisting, turning, and enchanting music of the pipes. Sin spun with them, brightness flowing around her as if the music had become a shimmering ghost and was turning her in its arms.
Low and sweet and simple came the sound of Alan singing, his voice changed but still beautiful, a song about love and trust in darkness.
Sin twisted her body as if moving like this was easy, as if she was made of water and light. Her hair lifted in the wind, streaming curls with more light trapped in them, and she moved as if caught by the current of the night wind, arms swaying above her head and then moving gently down, palms resting against her body.
She danced from the lake surrounded by trees gone sunset orange in autumn and night, through the Market, cutting a path to where the pagoda stood.
She held her face just so, looking at nobody directly and so looking at everyone, welcoming her audience.
Then she pulled the long knife from her bodice and threw it straight and true, and at the cue Chiara flung up the curtain hanging in front of the pagoda. The knife thudded into a wooden pillar, and the curtain was caught.
Behind the curtain, in the center of the pagoda, stood Merris Cromwell and Mae. Over their heads, among distant trees, a golden spire shone like a crown, the memorial of a queen’s beloved.
Merris was all in black, her hair streaming black too. It was dark enough that nobody could see the traces of red.
Mae was wearing tiny beacon lamps as well. Sin had designed both their costumes, as Mae did not really have the eye for showmanship yet; she tended to go overboard. Mae’s dress was longer and lower, though, a softly glowing evening gown that cooled the brightness of her hair. Her eyes were shining.
“Mae of the Market,” Merris said, her voice echoing in the night. “Will you take my people as your own, guard them and care for them, protect them with all your mind and all your body and all your strength?”
“I will,” said Mae. “If they will have me. And if I do badly, they will be able to make a change. In seven years, I will call a meeting like this one, and I will call on Cynthia Davies. I will listen to the Goblin Market if they wish to take her as leader or keep me: I will lead the best way I know how, and in seven years if the Market wishes, I will follow her with all my heart.”
Merris turned her black eyes to the Market. She had not wanted to come back, but Sin had contacted her through the necromancer now running Mezentius House. She had not pleaded or begged, but she had argued that it was the only way to transfer the Market, safe and entire. She had been sure that some part of Merris would still care.
And here she was.
“What do you say, Market people?” Merris asked. “Will you have her?”
Sin stepped forward before anyone else could, and said into the anticipatory hush, “We will!”
They got applause for the moment, applause for the dance and the whole show, applause that went ringing on and on as Merris put her hands to Mae’s throat and fastened Celeste Drake’s pearl there for all to see.
“I’ve done my part, I think,” said Merris, standing in the shadows with Sin and watching her with Liannan’s eyes.
Nick was hovering at Sin’s back. Sin was not entirely sure if he was there as a silent threat, if he thought she needed protection from Liannan, or if he simply wanted to say good-bye.
“Yes,” Sin said. “Thank you.” She thought of Liannan and of Anzu, who had said he was betrayed. “And I’m sorry if you feel we took anything from you.”
“Anything from me?” Liannan asked, a subtle change in intonation the only way to differentiate between Merris and the demon now. Her eyes slid to Nick. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my dear. He’s just strayed a little. You humans don’t live very long at all. A human lifetime to us, it’s only the duration of a game. You forget every game, after a while.”
“Not this one,” Nick said.
Liannan smiled at him, sweet and cruel. “All right, my darling,” she told him indulgently. “We’ll see. I’m off to play my own game now.”
She went over to Nick, her feet hardly seeming to touch the ground, and leaned up to kiss him. Nick jerked slightly away, and she only caught the corner of his mouth.
Liannan laughed as if she found him infinitely amusing. “See you later,” she murmured, and moved away, easy and boneless in the night, swimming through shadows.
“Merris,” called Sin.
She turned, the haughty face Sin knew so well smooth and young, but still the face she knew, half the woman she had cared for and half a demon.
But Sin was getting used to that.
“I loved you very much,” she called out. “I wanted you to know.”
“Yes, child,” said Merris, in her old impatient way. “I knew.”
Then she was gone. Nick and Sin exchanged glances, understanding each other well enough, and turned back to search through the lights of the Market for Alan.
Liannan’s open disbelief that Nick had changed, that the long, painful process of transformation could ever work at all, made Sin take especial note of all the magicians moving, some more obviously uneasy than others, through the Goblin Market.
She saw the fearless leader of the Aventurine Circle walking through the Market, using his usual method of diplomacy, which was talking at people blithely and persistently and moving on, leaving them stunned in his wake.
“He says after learning to talk to me, everyone else was easy,” Nick said behind her. “Which is funny, as I never recall him having trouble talking to anyone at all.”
Jamie’s voice, addressing Seb and Mae and floating over to them, bore him out. Seb was walking beside Jamie as usual, but something about the way they were walking caught Sin’s attention: Jamie’s body angled back to mirror Seb’s, perhaps. She thought this might be a date.
“I was thinking that what I need is a nickname,” said Jamie. “A fearsome nickname. Like James Hook.”
“I think that one’s already taken,” Seb told him, sounding utterly bemused but affectionate, and almost not embarrassed about it.
“Oh,” Jamie said, downcast. “Really?”
“Captain Hook in
Peter Pan
,” Mae informed him readily. “His first name was James.”
Jamie frowned in thought. “Captain Hook was cool. I could go with that. What would you say to James Hook the Second? I don’t really think I look like a captain.”
“I think you’re an idiot,” said Nick. “Not that that’s relevant. Except that it is always relevant.”
“Oh, hush up or I’ll be Evil Jamie again, and pull your hair,” Jamie said lightly, while Seb and Mae both glared at Nick. Sin stepped forward to intercept the glares.
“Thanks so much for all your help with the lights, Seb,” she told him. “You really have an eye for this.”
Now Seb did look completely embarrassed. Apparently he could accept being gay, but coming out as artistic was a step too far.
Jamie looked impressed, though. “Oh, hey,” he said. “They’re great.”
“Right,” Seb said. “They’re not that good. But. Um. I’m glad that you—that you like them.”
Jamie looked confused, then surprised and dawningly pleased. He still did not seem terribly used to being liked.
He smiled, crooked and a little shy. “Yeah, they have a certain appeal I’m starting to appreciate,” he said, and when Seb stayed there looking helplessly down at him, Jamie was obviously seized by an impulse, pulled him down, and gave him a light kiss.
So definitely a date, then.
“Not a word, Nicholas,” Mae said, with terrible warning in her voice. “I think it’s nice.”
“You’re both deranged, and you always were,” Nick drawled. “I’m never going to be done getting you tiny lunatics out of trouble.”
He did not sound deeply upset about it. Mae dimpled up at him. “We get you out of trouble right back.”
She had changed out of her beautiful dress, which meant that Sin had been able to force her into it for all of twenty minutes. She was wearing a black business skirt and heels, which was not exactly Mae’s style but which suited her somehow, and a pink T-shirt that read
AND THEN THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER (BARRING DEATH, DIVORCE, ARREST FOR TAX FRAUD, THAT INCIDENT WITH THE POOL BOY…)
The letters on her shirt got too small to read at that point.
Against her pink shirt was the dull gleam of the black pearl, the talisman safeguarding her from demons, the jewel that canceled out a demon’s mark. For at least seven years, and then they would see.
Nick looked away from Mae and at a random patch of grass.
“We could…,” he said, and hesitated. “We could grab a cup of coffee. Sometime. You and me.”
“Are you asking me out?” Mae inquired.
She waited for Nick’s tiny nod, and then she was beaming, even brighter than before. Sin would not have thought that was possible.
“I don’t know about coffee. I might hold out for dinner.”
“We can do whatever boring thing you want,” Nick told her.
Mae laughed. Sin thought she was trying for mocking and sophisticated, but Mae just sounded happy. “Ah,
l’amour
.”
“I’ll entertain myself looking at your face,” Nick said. “You know I like that.”
“Yeah,” Mae said, beaming and beaming. “Sounds like a plan.”
They couldn’t stand around here talking all night. They had to be seen around the Market, shaking hands and walking through the stalls, and it was almost time to dance.
When Sin set off, Mae followed her at once. She caught on fast, that girl.
They had never dared hold the Market in such a public place, but now with the magicians’ spells for privacy here they were, in a park surrounded by the purr of cars, a palace not so far away. The stall of lights was located on a statue of Queen Victoria, beacon lights dripping around her neck, a single love light hanging from her stone scepter.
Helen the magician was standing at Carl’s weapons stall, having an animated conversation about morning stars.
Phyllis’s stand of chimes was gone and would never be set up again, but Ivy had put up chimes around the scrolls and tablets and old books in her stall. The chimes sang out softly as she moved around them, their song calling passersby to her stall.
Sin stopped and spoke to Matthias, who was walking along with two older women behind him, making complicated hand gestures as they went. Neither of them, unlike Matthias, was Asian.
“These are my parents,” Matthias said, and gestured to the women, his thin piper’s hands moving with easy, fluid grace. He had his pipe tucked away.
“A pleasure,” said Sin, and shook both their hands.
One of the women gestured at Sin after she was done shaking hands.
“She says she’s heard a lot about you,” said Matthias. “She’s probably thinking about someone else. If you’ll excuse me, there are a lot of gullible tourists to rook once I’m done showing my parents around.…”