And despite my weakness, as he tears the strength from my bones, I see my path. I hear the City whisper to me with silken words. I know what I will do.

With the last blow, my thoughts uncoil into endless shapes before me. I see Azelma sleeping. I see Ettie reaching out for me. My pulse hammers, drowning my ears with its beat.

My sisters.

I couldn’t save the one who protected me. I couldn’t save the one I was supposed to protect. I can’t save the hundreds who sleep in the grasp of his claws. No one escapes him. And so there is only one thing left.

I make this oath in iron; I make it in bone.

I will destroy him, and then they will all be free.

PART FOUR

The Black Cat’s Hunting

1832

Thou hast all the long night for the hunting.

—The Jungle Book

HOW THE TIGER GOT HIS STRIPES

FROM STORIES OF THE MIRACLE COURT, BY THE DEAD LORD

Il était une fois … there was a man among the Wretched of the Miracle Court who lived in a time of famine. He saw Death the Endless take half the city. Then hunger took his wife and daughters, leaving him with only one young son.

The man asked himself: Shall I sit here and wait for death to take us both?

For as all men, he was afraid and did not want to die. Thus, fear made him do that which the Wretched are bound by Law never to do.

He sold his son to the slavers of the sea. The Guild Lords heard of it, and on the day that the slavers sailed up the Great Serpent, they went to stop it. For it is forbidden to sell a brother into slavery. But when they saw a hundred slave ships on the banks of the Seine, they too were afraid. For how could a weakened, starving Court do battle with such an army? And for the life of one boy?

They watched his father take twelve gold coins in exchange for the life of his son. They watched him trade the coins for slaver’s bread so that he might live. They saw the boy dragged away; they heard his cries as the slavers striped his back and face with their cat-o’-nine-tails, and they did nothing. They comforted themselves by saying he would probably not survive a day at sea, and they agreed to forget.

But things that are forgotten don’t always themselves forget. One day, many years later, a slaver came from the sea: the boy, now a terrible man with stripes on his back and his face like a tiger. He wielded the cat-o’-nine-tails now.

He cleaved flesh from bone from the back and face of his father and sold him to his brethren, but that was not enough to satisfy him. He went to the table of the Lords of the Miracle Court and demanded a place.

Lady Kamelia Yelles of the Guild of Sisters spoke for all the Lords. She said that there was no place at the high table for one who trades in flesh, and there never would be.