House of Blood

I hit the sand at a dead run, and then I stopped running, because there was no point in running anymore. The beach was already moving.

It rippled outward from Wren’s feet in long, slow rings, like a pond after a stone. She stood in the middle of it, very small against the wreck of a dragon, with her four black wings half-spread and her mouth open. She’d understood, at last. I saw it hit her. I saw her go white as a sheet.

”Wren!” I screamed. ”*Don’t move!*”

Her head snapped round.

”*Valerian?*”

The first arm came up out of the sand.

It was white and boneless and soft as dough, and it rose behind her without a sound, swaying like a cobra, the thumbprint at its tip opening and closing. She whirled. She’d moved before she’d thought, because Wren always moves first, and her feathers came up in a spray of black knives. They hit the arm and sheared a chunk out of it, and it didn’t even flinch.

A second arm looped round her waist.

”*Wren!*”

I was already moving. I had no staff. I had no coat. I had a guard on my forearm that was dead as a stone until dawn, because I’d burned every second of it on a ridge three hours ago, and Aurelix pressed her small hot body against my neck and said in a quiet, awful voice, *There’s nothing. There’s no notch. Valerian, I’m so sorry. There’s nothing left.*

”I know.”

*Then what are you doing?*

”I don’t know,” I said, and ran straight at the thing anyway.

---

Kaelen was shouting something behind me. I didn’t hear it. The sand heaved and bucked under my boots, and a third arm lashed up and caught me across the back, and I felt my shirt tear open and a line of fire carve across my shoulder blades. I went down on one knee. I got up again.

*Down!* Aurelix hissed. *The rule, Valerian. It hunts what* stands.

I threw myself flat.

The arm that had been about to take my head went over me with a *whump.* I lay with my cheek against the cold grey sand, panting, bleeding into my collar. All around me the beach was alive. I could see them now, dozens of them, pale and patient and uncoiling out of the dunes in the starlight like worms out of wet earth. And every one of them was swaying toward the only thing still on its feet.

Wren.

She hung in the air, now, a good six feet off the ground. An arm was wrapped around her waist, and it was lifting her slowly, tenderly, toward the great round hole in the middle of that mountain of white flesh. Her wings beat uselessly. Her feathers cut at the arm in black flurries, and each wound closed up as soon as she made it.

”*Valerian!*” she shrieked. ”I can’t *cut* it! It won’t *stop!*”

”Stop fighting!”

”*What?*”

”The beach hunts what stands, but it’s holding you! It’s got you! You’re *already standing!* It can’t unstand you!” I was crawling toward her on my elbows, sand in my teeth, and I knew I wasn’t going to get there in time. ”Lie *down!* Make yourself *heavy!* Go limp!”

”I can’t *lie down* in the *air!*”

”Then make it *think* you’re asleep!”

It was the stupidest thing I’d ever said. I knew it as I said it. But I’d learned something about this island in the past three days, and the thing I’d learned was that every rule had a way to cheat it, if you were brave enough to be stupid.

Wren looked at me, up there in the starlight, with blood on her face and tears in her eyes.

She went limp.

---

It worked, for about four seconds.

The arm around her waist hesitated. Its grip loosened, slowly, uncertainly, the way a hand loosens on a toy that’s gone quiet. Wren hung there, perfectly still, wings folded, head lolling.

Then the thing in the middle of the beach *looked.*

I felt it. It wasn’t an eye. It was the huge round thumbprint at the center of that white mountain, tilting slowly toward the sky, a vast, silent, patient *attention,* and it swung away from Wren like a lantern turned toward something brighter, and settled on the dune behind me.

On the girl.

She’d come down the slope behind me, on her own, barefoot, in her thin white shift. She was walking across the sand in the starlight with her hands at her sides and her silver eyes wide and her pale hair floating around her face like smoke. She wasn’t running. She wasn’t afraid. The thing in her chest was *beating,* slow and enormous, so loudly that I could feel it in my own ribs.

”*Don’t,*” I rasped. ”*Little one,* don’t—”

”It’s all right, Father,” she said.

She stood up straight in the middle of the beach, in the middle of a thousand hungry arms, and *stood.*

The arms rose all around her like grass in a wind.

And she began to sing.

---

It was the same song. The cradle song. Low and simple and wavering, a tune with no words, a tune that had been sung over a cradle in a hall that burned down a long, long time ago. It rolled out across the beach in her thin high voice, and every single arm froze in mid-air.

Slowly, slowly, they began to *bow.*

I don’t know how else to say it. They bent toward her like trees in a storm, tip by tip, a long white wave rolling out across the sand, until every thumbprint pressed itself flat to the ground. The arm that held Wren lowered her to the beach, very gently, as if she were made of glass. It uncoiled. It slid back into the sand.

The thumbprint at the center of the mountain turned fully toward the girl, and opened.

For a long moment, nothing happened. The singing went on. The beach held its breath.

”*Mmmm,*” said the god.

It wasn’t a word. It was a sound, a deep, huge, shuddering *hum,* a note so low that my teeth ached. And in it, if I listened, I could hear something that might have been *recognition.* A long, slow, aching *ah,* the way you’d greet somebody you’d been looking for for ten thousand years.

”*Come home,*” it said, in a thousand voices, ”*Linnet.*”

---

I didn’t have time to ask.

Wren hit me at a full run.

She’d crossed thirty feet of sand in a heartbeat, and she slammed into my chest so hard we both went down, and then she was on top of me, pummeling my shoulders with both fists and sobbing with her whole body. ”*Idiot,*” she shrieked. ”You *idiot!* You stupid, stupid, stupid—you let them *take* you! You let them put you on a *boat!* I *felt* you stop! I thought you were *dead!*”

”Wren—”

”I flew through a *sea of arms!*”

”I know. I saw.”

”Nox lost a *wing!*”

”I know.”

”You’re *bleeding!*” She grabbed my shirt in both fists and put her forehead down hard on my chest. Her wings had folded around us both. She smelled like smoke and sea salt and dragon. ”You’re *bleeding,* you moron, and you’ve got a black *hand,* and you’ve gotten a *girl* somewhere, and I—”

She broke off. She lifted her head.

Over my shoulder, the girl was still singing. She hadn’t stopped. Her face was wet with tears, and the thing in her chest was blazing like a small, bright star, and the whole hungry beach lay quiet around her like a field of bowed wheat.

”Who,” said Wren, very slowly, ”is *that?*”

”It’s a long story.”

”*Valerian.*”

”It’s a long, *long* story.”

*Hello, dear,* said Aurelix, peeking out of my collar. *We’ve missed you terribly. Do mind the dragon.*

Wren stared at her. Her face crumpled, and she started to laugh and sob all at once.

---

We got Nox off the beach before dawn.

It took Kaelen, Dunstan, Emmet and me, and a very strange, shuddering, miraculous trick of Nox’s own. He’d shrunk himself. I hadn’t known he could. He’d folded in on himself with a groan like a ship settling, scale by scale, until he lay in the sand no bigger than a black snake, red embers curling off his hide, one wing a tiny crumpled thing.

*Do not,* he said, with enormous dignity, *remark upon it.*

Wren tucked him inside her coat.

We crept up the slope on our bellies, in the dark, the girl walking in front, still humming, a thin white light in the night. The beach stayed bowed behind us. I didn’t breathe until we’d reached the black stone and slid over the lip into the shadow of the ridge.

Tamsin lay on a blanket near the cave mouth, grey-faced, watching us come. She took in Wren, and the wings, and the tiny snake in her coat, and the girl, and the long, bloody line down my back.

”Ten,” she said weakly. ”I counted. Ten of us, now. That’s the first time the number’s gone *up.*”

”Don’t,” Dunstan said, rubbing his face. ”Don’t jinx it.”

The girl sat down beside me on the rock. She’d stopped singing. She looked very small, and very tired, and she was staring out at the beach, where a vast white shape had slid back beneath the sand, and the dunes lay flat and silent under the stars.

”Father?” she said quietly.

”Yeah?”

”It said a name.”

”I heard.”

”It said it like it knew me.” She wrapped her thin arms around her knees. ”I’ve never had one. But when it said it, I *remembered.* It was like a door opening in my chest.”

I put a hand on her head.

”Linnet,” she whispered, trying it out. And then, in a smaller voice, ”Do you think it’s mine?”