CHAPTER ONE
In the month before the gathering, the wall weeps blood.
We stand in its shadow, Lux and I, as the day turns to windswept dusk. The wall is built of bones and magic, held together by a spell that wanes throughout the year. Moon by moon, it turns more fragile. And these nights, the bloodied nights where the magic of the wall is like an unraveling thread, are when the vespertine come.
It’s early storm season, and the days are still long enough that there’s light to see by as I check Lux’s armor, running my chipped-polish fingers from buckle to buckle. She’s dressed the same as all the wardens. The same as me. A white linen dress with collar and sleeves buttoned close, a leather belt with a strand of bone shards clipped to one side, a sickle-curved knife sheathed on the other.
Out beyond the wall, the moorland is hazed by dimming sunset. The holy wards, stuck in the earth at regular intervals, look like the sharp-pointed wrought iron fence that encircles our chapel yard.
Lux raises her arms obediently as I tighten the straps that hold her armor in place. We’ve worked as a team since she joined the wardens when we were both children. She’s my best friend—my only friend—and the movements between us have been repeated so often that now our preparations feel like a ritual. Lux standing straight-backed, her hazel-gray eyes focused on the slice of moorland visible through the barred gateway. Me, with my head bowed like a penitent as I carefully check each knot and stitch.
This armor is a new creation, one I’ve just finished. Wolfspine bracers, each vertebra sharpened to a brutal point, and a rib cage strengthened at the joints with silver chain. Tonight, if we encounter a vespertine, it will be the first time the armor has been tested. And that makes me nervous.
I fasten and refasten the buckles three times over. Then Lux huffs a sigh between her black-painted lips and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “We’re good, Everline. Stop worrying.”
I scrunch my hands into my pale skirts to still my restlessness. My own armor and weaponry are a modified version of what the other wardens wear—twin knives, no shards, none of the carefully sewn pockets to hold chips of bone or vials of honey required for casting magic. It takes no time at all to check the clasp on my belt and straighten the strands of bone-and-chain lariat that drape from my collar to my waist, clinking against the rib-cage bodice fastened over my linen dress.
Lux gathers up her hair and begins to braid it back, tying the ends with two white ribbons. Both of us share similar coloring—olive skin and treacle-dark hair—but there’s a glow to her I’ve always coveted. Her hair is shot with strands of umber that catch the sunlight, and her cheeks have a petaled flush that intensifies when she’s pleased, or angry.
Finished with her braids, Lux takes another ribbon from her pocket and motions for me to turn. I turn. She combs her fingers through the length of my hair, then starts to weave it into a braid.
Facing away from the moorland, I look toward the enclave. I can see the chapel with its iron fence and real glass windows. The entrance to the catacombs is beside it, framed by the citrus trees that pass for our orchard. A few orange fruits still persist on the highest branches.
“There,” Lux says. “All done.”
She winds the braid up into her hand. Holding it away from my neck, she traces a zigzag pattern over the freckles that mark my nape in a constellated pattern. The last step in our familiar routine.
A sound echoes across the yard, footsteps crushed over the graveled path. Lux lets go of my hair. My stomach sinks at the sight of Briar Linden—my half sister—walking toward us with an unhurried stride.
She’s a year my elder, and we look nothing alike. She’s clear-eyed and fair, the same as our father, their features so similar that no one would ever doubt she belongs to him. She even wears her armor the same way he does, with her white linen sleeves pulled down beneath wristlets of bone and a single, polished clavicle hooked on her shoulder as a pauldron. Neither was made by me.
Even from here, beneath the low susurrus of wind, I can hear the clink-clink-clink of bone on bone as endless shards clatter together in her overfilled pockets and on the strand at her waist. She carries a single knife on her belt with a ribbon tied to the hilt, as though it’s some kind of stickpin you might use to hold a chignon in place. I’ve only ever seen her draw it once.
Briar comes to a lazy stop when she reaches us. Her wheat-gold hair is shaved on one side, the rest pulled over her opposite shoulder in a loose braid. Her lip is pierced at the center with a silver barbell, and she chews at it when she looks at me, her pale brows knotting into a frown.
“Oh, good,” she says, sounding not at all pleased. “You’re still here.”
“Have you come to deliver our farewell? I hope you’ve brought a lace handkerchief to wave.”
She brushes an invisible speck of dust from her sleeve. “I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I wasn’t asking your permission, Everline. While Father is away, I’m in charge.” Raising one finger, she deliberately taps at the insignia pinned to her chest—the branch-and-bone symbol usually worn by our father, Fenn Linden, commander of the Vale wardens.
“Fenn,” I say, “doesn’t attach his insignia with a tailor’s pin.”
Ignoring me, Briar goes on. “I’m in charge. And I’m assigning myself to your patrol.”
“I could always stitch the insignia on for you. I have a needle and thread in my pocket.”
There’s a flicker between us, one of those dizzying moments where I can almost feel the balance tilt in my direction. Then she quirks her mouth into a smile. Her lips are painted black, the same as Lux’s; her smile a sharp line etched across her delicate face. “I suppose you do have more room in your pockets, since you don’t need to carry anything to cast spells.”
My hand goes to my knife hilt, the motion more instinctive than anything with real heat. Briar tilts her head, eyes on my blade. The air between us carries a haze of barely perceptible tension, as her fingers twitch toward the strand of bone beads at her hip.
Lux steps between us. She lifts her chin in the direction of the gate. “Shall we go before the wards are entirely out of power?”
Briar moves lightly past us and presses her hand against the lock. There’s a click as the magic that holds it closed shifts. The gate swings open. She walks out onto the moor, her index finger pressed to her mouth as she licks away the blood claimed by the unlocking spell.
I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek, trying to ignore the sting of her earlier words. Briar Linden is the best caster at the enclave. Better than anyone—including Fenn, who has commanded the wardens since he was only a little older than I am now. But all wardens have an aptitude for magic. Even those without Briar’s skill can manipulate the blood-and-bone spellwork used to maintain the wall and fight back the vespertine when they try to break through.
All wardens have an aptitude for magic—except me.
Lux turns to the wall, scrapes her thumb through one of the freshly oozing drips of blood. She smears it across the bridge of her nose in a crimson streak. I echo her gesture. Briar does the same, avoiding my gaze as she catches some of the blood on her finger and paints it elegantly onto her face. The magic-infused blood from the wall has an icy tang to it, like something just unfrozen. It crackles on my skin as we walk out onto the moorland.
The ground here is flat, deceptively so. From where we stand, beside the wall with our blushed shadows flung up against the closing gate, the world appears to end abruptly; gorse and heather cut off in a line. Beyond is only darkening sky, colored by slants of early sunset.
It’s a wild place of thorn and weed and jagged stones. All threat and fable, a graveyard and a battlefield. Where the first wardens fought the first vespertine, then dragged their bones to the edge of the moor to build our wall.
We have the battle scene immortalized in our chapel. A single arching stained glass window set high above the altar, filling the entire apse. It shows Saint Lenore with her bone armor and glimmering sword, all lit up as brilliant as a sunrise. Nyx Severin—creator of the vespertine, a monster who was once thought of as a god—is laid out at her feet, his body displayed in shards of violet and obsidian glass that not even the midday light can pass through.
Lux and I fall into step as we cross the open fields between wall and ward line. We’ve worked together like this since we were recruits. Patrolling the moorland and setting wards to reinforce the wall as its magic fades throughout the year. I know her movements like they’re my own. Her quiet progress forward, the way she tilts her head to listen to the night.
By contrast, the sound of Briar’s footsteps behind me is jarring and discordant. Her presence is as prickly as a stuck burr, no matter how hard I try to ignore it.
We reach the apiary, framed by sprawling tangles of wolf roses and lavender blooms. I put my hand against the nearest hive, its whitewashed wood still sun-warm. Bees hum beneath my palm as they work in the nectar-laced depths. No flowers will grow in the enclave, so we tend the bees here.
It was Saint Lenore who first discovered that honey from the bees she kept could sweeten the blood spells cast by Nyx Severin. The spells he used on his worshippers, trying to draw power from their bodies as he sought a way to transcend the Thousandfold, where he was bound.
Lenore changed these spells, used the honey to turn the magic against Nyx and his vespertine when she and the first wardens fought him, putting an end to his monstrous reign.
Now, just as Saint Lenore did, all wardens carry a stoppered fiola alongside their bone shards and silver chains. Made of annealed glass, these vials are our weapons against the vespertine. And a drop of honey is added to each newly made fiola before it’s sealed.
Lux pauses beside me, her eyes narrowed to the distance. A wayward tendril of hair has escaped from one of her braids. It marks a curlicue against her cheek as she examines the moorland ahead. “There,” she says, voice softened. “Can you see them?”
Our holy wards are made from spike-sharp pieces of bone, split to shards and polished smooth. A length of silver chain, held in place by iron stakes, is strung between them, forming a barrier across the moorland. Beneath each ward, where they are pierced into the ground, the earth should glow—but there’s a blotch of darkness where one of the wards has failed.
We slip past the hives. Briar falls in beside me, winding her stranded bone beads around her knuckles. As we make our way to the burned-out ward, the scent of faded, dying flowers in our wake, the end of the world cleaves the horizon. The landscape is a bruise, all spiny gorse leaves and pallid heather, the darker charcoal of lichen stones.
I follow Lux along the barrier to where bones circle the base of each stake. Small shards and chipped vertebrae stained with dried blood. The ground inside each circle flickers with an otherworldly light—the holy fire of consecration, one of the first spells all wardens learn, where they spill their blood on honey-slicked bones and set them into the earth with a whispered incantation.
As we walk, I cast a sidelong glance at Briar. She’s never patrolled with other wardens before, and I can’t help but wonder what compelled her to join us tonight. It sets a queasy foreboding in the pit of my stomach. I’m tensed, anxious, as I turn to look at the darkening moorland beyond the wards. The painted shadows seem empty, but that stillness is deceptive.
Vespertine live for the night. They’re wolflike, eldritch creatures; silent and swift, quick to strike, quicker to vanish. And even though Saint Lenore gave her life to destroy Nyx—their leader, their creator—the vespertine continue to deliver determined assaults against the wall. Like a tide, crashing against the shore until it crumbles away.
But the wardens hold them back. We gather each year to reinforce the power of the wall. Between times, as the magic weakens, we set our wards. And when the shadows lengthen and night falls, we come here to the barrier and fight whatever gets spat out of the darkness beyond.
Only once have the vespertine breached the wall. It happened just before I was born, but Fenn has told me countless times how the creatures spilled through the shattered bones. They fought past the enclave and slaughtered their way into the Hallowed Lands, where both the citizens and the wardens who fell were dragged back to the vespertine stronghold beyond the moorland.
He’s told the story so often that it’s turned vivid, as though I were there. I am out in the night amid the chaos and the terror. I am watching the monsters swarm and watching them devour. The air is sharp with screams, with howls. The earth turns dark with blood.
It’s marked on me, this not-quite-memory spun from Fenn’s words, a warning as indelible as a scar.
Because in the heart of that battle, my mother deserted the wardens.
As we reach the burned-out ward, I draw my blade. Keep my eyes fixed on the shadowy distance while Lux kneels down to tend the barrier. Briar paces back and forth behind me. Her bead-wrapped hand is at the hilt of her blade, which she draws just far enough to bare a slash of polished steel.
Lux pulls the bones from the ground, dismantling the expired ward. She slips the old shards into one pocket—ready to be cleaned and used again—and takes new ones from the other, setting them carefully into the earth. She uncaps a vial of honey and lets it drip over the bones, then, using another shard, she pierces her finger and daubs a thumbprint of blood in the center of the ward. Her magic ignites. The consecration gleams up, shimmering silver.
I hold out a hand, help Lux back to her feet. Her palm is gritty with dirt, blood and honey smear her cut fingertip. We stand together at the mended barricade. It stretches away from us in both directions, an unbroken line of wards flickering like stars against the dusk.
Then one of the lights goes out. Fast. Much faster than a burned-down bone ward.
Lux tightens her grasp on my hand, pulls me close to her side. A tremor passes through the air, like something alive that’s twitching its skin, irritated by an unwelcome touch. As the temperature begins to change, a rapid drop to frostbitten cold, a shiver tracks down my spine. I want to flinch, but I force myself to be still.
“It’s all right,” I tell Lux, sliding my hand free from hers. “You can let me go.”
She nods, lip pinned between her teeth. She lost a sibling to the vespertine when they attacked the Hallowed Lands. A sister, one year her elder, the same as the distance in age between us. Lux is ever-cautious, always protective of me. But as we draw our weapons, I’m not afraid.
I am bone and blade and armor. I am vital, alive. Soft flesh guarded by spear-sharp spines. When I blink, I see red-petaled flowers behind my closed lids.
In the enclave, I am Everline Blackthorn—a warden without magic, there only by the grace of my father, the commander. But out here, with Lux, it doesn’t matter that I’ll never cast a spell, that Fenn treats me more like a recruit than a daughter, that the fiola I wear around my neck is empty glass.
Even the treachery of my mother—and my questions about her that Fenn will never answer—feels softer, a faded hurt rather than a persistent ache.
The vespertine emerges from the pooled shadows beyond the line of wards, an indeterminate shape cloaked in darkness. I drop to a crouch, my blade already at my palm. The point cuts my skin. My blood lacks the power of warden magic, but it’s a bad omen to fight monsters with an unmarked weapon.
Briar flexes her snared fist, her knuckles crackling beneath the strands of silver and bone. Lux twists a shard between her fingers. The sharpened end is already bloodied, consecration glimmering around her hands. She murmurs a spell and the light grows brighter, washing over the ground.
When it hits the vespertine, we fall into sudden silence.
The monsters we fight are familiar horrors with pelted fur the color of midnights and mist; onyx eyes and spike-sharp teeth. They hunch over the ground, four-legged; their shoulders mantled with bone.
I know vespertine, more than any warden. I’m the one who strips them apart once they’re dead, taking the fur and teeth and bones that I’ll forge into armor. It’s the only magic I have, one I taught myself when I realized I could never work the holy power of other wardens.
And this creature has the same feel as the others we’ve fought. The same ice-laced change to the air as it approaches. The same sharp, coppery stench of tarnished magic and old blood.
But this vespertine is like a girl, moving upright as she picks a delicate path toward us through the tangled gorse. She raises one pale, clawed hand and flicks back a sheaf of long, inky hair from her face, revealing narrow, fine-boned features that are decorated by paint. Swaths of grayish-white paste mark her cheeks, and grim skeleton-toothed stripes of black cover her mouth. Her dress is pale, ragged lace, smeared with mud like she’s crawled out of a ruin. When she sights us, her lips draw back, baring a row of crowded fangs. Her narrowed eyes shimmer like oil over water.
Copyright © 2023 by Lyndall Clipstone
