Valkyrie’s weak knees. Hot blood against cold skin. Abyssinia’s hand on Valkyrie’s head, her mind peering into Valkyrie’s thoughts. Confident. Arrogant.
Vulnerable.
Valkyrie’s hands clutched Abyssinia’s head.
Valkyrie drowned in memories.
They overwhelmed her. She was lost to them, her own identity nothing but a drop in the vast ocean of Abyssinia. Pain and love and conflict, hatred and strength, peace and vengeance. Faces and voices Valkyrie had never known, suddenly as sharp as those of her own parents.
Valkyrie went under. This was a mistake. Doing this was a mistake, but there was no way out now. She was being crushed by a life she’d never lived, where everything was new, where everything was alien.
And yet, in all that newness, something familiar.
She swam towards it.
She was on a hilltop, hunkering in front of a dying man. Blood seeped from a wound in his belly. She prodded him in the chest with her finger. He winced, and opened his eyes.
“Oh, no,” he said when he saw her.
Valkyrie smiled. “Hello,” she said.
No. It was Abyssinia. Not Valkyrie. This was Abyssinia’s memory, and yet it was Valkyrie who spoke.
“They left you behind, did they?” she said. “A terrible thing to leave a comrade behind. You go to the trouble of attacking a village and killing all of these fine, fine people … and, at the first whiff of a stab wound to the gut, they leave you in their wake. You have my sympathies, brave warrior.”
“Please,” said the dying man, “I know who you are. Help me.”
Valkyrie laid a hand on his shoulder, and looked him in the eye. “I will help you. I would be honoured to help you. But first, I am in need of some information about these friends of yours.”
“Ask me anything,” said the dying man, but Valkyrie shook her head.
“You don’t have to speak,” she said. “Conserve your strength. Let me do the work.”
She ignored his look of confusion and sent her thoughts into his, like the tip of a spear sliding into soft flesh. She felt his alarm and she pushed it to one side, focusing instead on his memories. They opened before her, every intimate detail of this dying man’s life. But she cared little for the intimate details. She absorbed the recent memories. The moment the dying man and his eleven companions came across this village of mortals. The death they brought, with steel and magic and cudgel. She watched, through his eyes, as one of the mortals, a desperate woman defending her children, ran him through before she, too, was cut down.
“They abandoned you,” Valkyrie said, leaving his mind. “After all you’ve done for each of them, they left you to die here alone.”
“Please,” the dying man said. “Help me.”
“Of course,” said Valkyrie, and rested her hand across his forehead, drawing out what remained of his life and taking his energy for herself. The empty shell of his body toppled sideways and she straightened.
“Eleven of them,” she said, “going north. Six hours ahead of us.”
Skulduggery stood over another corpse, his hood up, casting his skull in darkness. The wind plucked at the tail of his coat. His sword lay heavy across his back.
Valkyrie walked over. “Did you hear what I said?” she asked.
“Eleven of them,” he repeated to her. “Six-hour head start.”
Valkyrie touched Skulduggery’s arm. “They’re just mortals,” she said gently. “There’s so many of them in the world that I doubt anyone will notice their loss.”
He turned his head to her, ever so slightly. “You think I grieve for them?”
“You don’t?”
“Maybe once I would have. Maybe once such mindless slaughter would have stirred grief within me, or righteous fury …”
Valkyrie bit her lip. “But no longer?”
“Now I feel nothing but contempt,” Skulduggery said. “For their weakness. For their short, vulnerable lives. For the sheer pedantry of their existence.”
A smile broke across Valkyrie’s face. “My love,” she said. “You have finally joined me.”
She pulled away from the memory, heaving herself back into the ocean. She was herself again. Valkyrie Cain. And Valkyrie Cain had parents and a sister and a dog, and she wasn’t Abyssinia and she hadn’t been the one to encourage Skulduggery’s descent.
Because, of course, Skulduggery didn’t need any encouragement.
Valkyrie was in darkness, watching, as Skulduggery donned the black armour. Cold flame flickered off the walls. He worked slowly, methodically, with buckles and straps and belts. Piece by piece the armour went on, each segment sliding into place, covering him, burying him, sealing him away, until at last the helmet went on and Skulduggery Pleasant was gone.
And there was only Lord Vile.
No.
She didn’t want to see this. She didn’t want to see Skulduggery like this. She didn’t want this memory. It wasn’t even hers. It belonged to Abyssinia, and Valkyrie wasn’t Abyssinia: she hadn’t watched her father die and she hadn’t joined Mevolent’s army in order to get close to the man who’d killed him.
She was in the hall, in the great hall in Mevolent’s castle, and she was talking, making a speech while they all looked on.
She was at the top table. Mevolent’s wife may have been seated at his right side, but Valkyrie was seated to his left. She could see the resentment in the eyes of the gathered sorcerers – Serpine in particular. Baron Vengeous was without expression, and beside him China Sorrows smiled, as if she was delighted that Valkyrie had been chosen as Mevolent’s favourite.
All her plans had led her to this point.
As she spoke, Valkyrie glanced behind her, to where Lord Vile stood. Upon hearing certain words, he would strike, plunging his sword through Mevolent’s back. And then, while he killed Serafina before she could even stand, it would be she herself who took Mevolent’s head.
And yet.
Fate had a cruel sense of humour, it seemed. Her plans, as careful as they were, as precise in their execution as their planning, had scattered before her mere hours earlier, when she had learned of the child growing within her.
Suddenly her thoughts of vengeance were nothing but smoke on the wind. Mevolent had robbed her of her family – though he did not know it – and yet she had the potential for a new family. She didn’t need to kill him. She didn’t need to take what was his. She could slip away in the night and seek happiness elsewhere.
Behind her, Vile waited for words that would never come.
Valkyrie paused in her speech, took a drink of wine, and found herself with her hand on her belly. She looked down, and smiled. This would be her final night in the castle.
And it was.
The tip of the sword slid through her chest and Valkyrie frowned. There were cries from the crowd.
She was lifted off her feet as the pain blossomed. Vile. He had betrayed her. She almost laughed.
Her feet kicked feebly as he carried her to the window on the end of his sword. Mevolent and Serafina, she noted, never even looked up from their meal.
Lord Vile threw her into the glass and it shattered around her and she fell into darkness, the wind snatching at her clothes and her hair and she fell and fell and the rocks met her at the bottom and broke her body.
She blinked up at the stars. It was all she could do.
Her strength had saved her from an immediate death, but that strength was leaking from her with every moment. She tried to touch her belly, but could not move her hands. Tears mixed with the blood on her face.
I’m sorry, she thought, for her lips could not form words. I’m sorry, my child.
Sadness overtook the pain and Valkyrie wept, and tore herself from the memory, and gasped, and looked down at herself, and saw the hole in her chest.
She was back in the East Room, back in the Sadists’ Club, back in Roarhaven, and Abyssinia was stumbling away and Valkyrie sank down, her back against the wall, while Skeiri wailed in the corner.