I am only an old woodsman, whispering a sob,
As I steal like a spring-shadow down the Winding River.
Since the palaces ashore are sealed by a thousand gates -
Fine willows, new rushes, for whom are you so green?
Du Fu

The king appeared on the balcony for only the briefest second to wave to the crowd: there and then gone again. He was not an old man: with pale blonde hair and a long, leonine face, it was easy to see why he was still deemed handsome by the general populace.

There were whispers that he was immortal - that he kept a girl with rose petals for hair in a glass coffin in the palace and once a year she erased all the age from his face, from his body, from his mind, wiped him clean and left him hale and hearty once more.

These were, of course, merely whispers. Rumours. Nothing more.

Rumours rarely were

His son was at his shoulder. His Selection had just been announced. He looked like his father - golden hair and darker eyes, a face that could have been carved from stone. An unkindness to his eyes. You would have to be unkind, to preside over something as bloody as the Selection.

The queen was, as usual, absent.

The crown prince raised a hand to wave, and fireworks shattered the night sky into a thousand glittering fragments. The king disappeared back into the palace.

He was right to be afraid. From the depths of the crowd below, a dark-haired man closed his hand over his cane and considered just how easy it would have been to kill the king.

Too easy.

He wouldn't have to wait long.

He found her in the usual manner one finds the devil's daughter: playing liar's dice in a circle with leathery-faced women and men broad in both shoulder and belly, cheering on a small crimson cube as it bounced about in the dirt. He didn't have to ask which one she was. She had the look of a girl who drowned her mornings in medovukha and her evenings in tarasun, a girl who smiled with sharp yellow teeth that had she had taken from the carcasses of wolves. A true revolutionary.

Yegor wasn't accustomed to jobs like these. Before the last purge, they had people to do this for him, people to relay messages and find things and speak to strangers, to pass secrets along the coast until they reached him once more. One of the paramount rules of rebellion: the less you know, the less you can give up. He had only ever met a handful of other insurgents. It was an uncomfortable, bare feeling to stand in the sunlight and address one of his own comrades face to face.

He said, "Kasha?"

"Piss off," the girl said. She was chewing on a hangnail watching the die bounce in the dust. Her bare brown arms, folded on her knees, were braceleted with jagged, deep scars papered at the edges with rusty infection. Chittagong tattoos, they called them.

"I was told to find you." He adjusted his collar, nonchalant. The shipbreakers all wore dirty, torn clothes, tank tops that left bruised arms bare, brown felt jackets from which butane torches hung, bandanas to hold back hair and plastic guards to save their forearms from the worst of the damage that came from tearing oil tankers apart with their bare hands. Yegor wore a brown coat and the kind of waistcoat you could hide a gun in.

She squinted at him. He had to stop himself from recoiling. She had one dark eye; the other was filmed with white, staring into space, a long black mark extending across her face in either direction. She was one of the Fabulists – the pretty girls who took kitchen knives and hot pokers to their own faces rather than be taken into the Selection.

"Were you," she said, and accepted the bundle of notes that the nearest cutter handed to her, tucking them into her pocket, before she rose from her crouch and stepped forward to take his arm. "Now, who told you that?" Her hand cupped his elbow as she steered him towards the sun – she had long, thin fingers like the limbs of a spider. The pads of her fingertips were as rough as sandpaper.

"It's December," he said, and Kasha's dark eye seemed to glitter. "It's time to wake Levi up."

"At last," she said. She had a voice like she had inhaled smoke as a child and had spent her entire life trying to cough it out again – low and husky. "And you are – "

She paused, and arched a thick dark eyebrow. "Unnecessary," she answered herself.

"This mission will take everyone," he said, and she looked sceptical. "Me included. Wake him up."

His sergeant had neglected to explain to him precisely why this Kasha was the only person Levi Fallon entrusted with the secret of his hiding place, but that was the circumstances. She didn't seem inclined to play nice.

"Storm's brewing," Kasha said. The sky behind her was clear and blue as mertensia. "It'll be tomorrow before…"

"Do it. I don't care how."

She tapped a fingernail on his lower lip. "Careful," she said, and he remembered what she had done to her own face to save her life and did not doubt she was capable of inflicting far more on him if she deigned to turn her hand towards that task. She smiled.

"My name is Yegor Corbeau," he said, and her smile faded as quickly as it had appeared and her hand dropped as quick as she had raised it.

Nice to know the name still meant something.

Kasha was looked at him with thinly veiled apprehension now, like she was expecting him to move suddenly. "I'll wake him up," she said. "And tell him to meet you..."

"In Honduragua."

She paused. "So this is a recruitment drive. You're going to do it."

He nodded.

"Choose your pieces wisely," she said softly. "And long live the king."