Chapter 19Henry woke screaming. More precisely, he did not wake: he knew where he was, and he knew he was dreaming.
He knew the room where he lay. He knew the floor intimately, the knots of the boards so close to his eyes when he opened them, the mocking familiarity—
He knew the pain. The burning. The s***h and the hole and the draining in his gut, in his soul and magic and self, everything gushing out, red and sticky over his hand, both a metaphor and not because he was bleeding out—
Because he’d come to meet a man, and smiled, and flirted, with the prospect of the movements of the French sorcerers’ battalion on the horizon. And that man had seen him and smiled back and gone with him up to this room, and had stepped in close—and murmured words that Henry didn’t know, ugly and slitherin
