The coach swung around another bend. Someone screamed. A horse reared, struggling against its handler; a basket of cabbages spilled across the road. They had left the empty byways behind. As they careened down the street, dodging carts and wagons, Elisabeth had brief impressions of shocked faces flashing past in the gaslight. Pedestrians scrambled for the curb, fleeing from their path.
The first fiend rounded the corner behind them. It didn’t bother weaving through the traffic, but instead took a direct route, bounding over the displaced carts as if they were stones laid across a river. Coal and apples and kitchen utensils went flying. Bystanders fell back, shielding their heads with their arms, as the street disintegrated into chaos.
“Stop,” she cried. “People are going to get hurt!”
“What do you propose I do? Raise a white flag? Ask the fiends nicely not to eat us?” A muscle worked in Nathaniel’s jaw, betraying his own frustration.
“Use your magic!” she exclaimed, astonished that she had to be the one to suggest it.
For a wild moment he looked as though he might laugh. “Sorcery requires focus,” he shot back instead. “Concentration. There are limits. I can’t fling spells around while I—”
He swerved the carriage, narrowly avoiding a cart that hadn’t moved out of their way quickly enough. The pony hitched to the cart shied from the hooves of Nathaniel’s horses and crashed into a booth stacked with baskets of herring. The cobblestones vanished beneath a silvery flood of scales. Elisabeth ducked as the coach’s wheels sent a stray fish spinning over their heads.
“I’ve seen you bring an entire courtyard of statues to life,” she said. “You’re a magister. These people are counting on you. Make a stand.”
He conveyed to her with a single look that he found her difficult, irritating, and probably mad, but as they barreled toward a square, he pulled up on the reins and swung the coach around. She braced herself as the wheels jumped the curb. They dragged to a shuddering halt on the paving stones, drawn up beside the grand brick buildings that lined the square, a fountain interposed between themselves and the street.
As soon as the coach stopped moving, Elisabeth clambered from the driver’s bench onto the flat wooden roof. From here she could see the entire path they had taken after turning onto the main street. She took in the confusion of toppled wagons, balking horses, scattered produce. Shouts carried on the night breeze, mingled with the shrill whinnies of the horses. Closer by, the handful of vendors near the fountain were hastening their efforts to pack up their carts. The pedestrians had seen the coach coming, and had already emptied the square. A few stragglers hurried up the steps of the nearby buildings, where they were swiftly pulled inside. Doors slammed. Faces pressed to windows. The air smelled of roasted chestnuts, and despite everything, Elisabeth’s stomach growled.
Her eyes roved across the scene of chaos. At first she saw no hint of the fiends. Then a hunched, scaled back slinked between two abandoned wagons; a plume of steam rose from behind an overturned cart. She fixed her gaze on the spot until a fiend prowled into view, and her heart skipped at the sight of it. The left side of its head was burnt, its left eye a weeping ruin. It was the fiend she had struck from the coach.
“How hard are they to kill?” she asked, as Nathaniel climbed over the rail and joined her.
“That depends on your definition of killing.” The wind ruffled his hair and teased his cloak. “Anything that comes from the Otherworld can’t be slain in the mortal realm, just banished back home. Their spirits live on after their bodies are destroyed.”
It felt dangerous to speak in the tense, expectant hush that had fallen over the square. Elisabeth noticed that someone had lost their hat, and it had blown into the water of the fountain. A lady’s glove lay in the gutter. The fiends prowled nearer, winding sinuously between the carts. They had separated, advancing from six different directions.
She amended, “How many times do I have to hit them before they won’t get back up again?”
Nathaniel’s mouth twitched. “I think you’ll get the hang of it, Scrivener. You aren’t lacking in enthusiasm. Now—give me a moment. I need—fifteen seconds. Perhaps twenty.”
He closed his eyes.
She had imagined sorcery to be immediate, like drawing a sword. Now, seeing the stillness of concentration that settled over Nathaniel’s face, she wondered, for the first time,