The smoke was red against a white sky. Clouds and snow merged on the horizon so that if one flipped the world upside down it would've looked no different.

But the world was upside down and it did feel different.

Allodie shivered in her room. It was gilt and brocade, tile and scrollwork, ivory and stone. It was a prison. Now that the Red Magician was free, everywhere was. Wards like her would be reverted all across the land, forced to live as objects, as things, as wells to be drawn from, cups to be drank. No matter what the Invisible and the Faceless had promised her, she was alone.

She was still watching the red smoke stretch its bloody fingers when the knock at the door came. Precise and sharp, like an impatient shoe tap. Allodie sighed, putting her arms on the open window sill, feeling her tower tremble with the cold, with the rolling of far off machines that would soon be spilling their rivers of black oil across the snow.

"I can feel you shaking the earth from the basement." The door opened anyway, though Allodie didn't bother turning around. The Invisible Magician wasn't named so for nothing. "Stop having a fit like it's the end of the world, girl. Red is blustering. He'll have the whole March against him."

"I'm not a girl," Allodie said morosely. The tower quaked again. She couldn't help it if she was afraid. And why shouldn't she be? She was just magic, and magicians like the Red didn't bond, they used. Used and used up. She'd be dried out just like Mardas had been, the lovely cistern Ward who'd been with the Faceless for ages. He'd had a lovely pattern of moss and even grown a covering of lily pads. She missed his laugh when it rained.

Anway, if she had been just a girl, as the Invisible accused, then she could've done something. She could've run away. Or maybe even run toward. Right toward the Red Magician with a knife in her angry fist.

"Vis," said a new voice from the door. Male again, but softer, cushioned by the fabric of the hat he always kept in front of his features. Or where his features would've been if he'd had any. "Let her be. You can't blame her. Nobody would want to go back to that monster."

"The Invisible is a bit of a monster himself. You know he doesn't understand when you try to be reasonable." This third voice came from Allodie's right. In fact, it came from the mirror on the wall. A long-gloved hand reached out, filled with the too-pink rose petals that Allodie loved. The hand was soon followed by an elbow, and then a shoulder and neck, and then a tremendous amount of hair the color of rainwater. Silver and blue in coexistence.

The Mirror Magician emerged with a smile, her dress as pink as the petals now scattered on the floor, her smile as pleasant as the Invisible's harrumph was not. Allodie smiled back. They tried, they all did, though she wasn't their Ward at all. It was kind. Allodie would miss that kindness.

She turned around then, finally, to look at the three magicians there. Or, at least the two she could see. The glamorous Mirror with her reflective, lamplike eyes points in the dim room, the Faceless with his gray suit and bowler hat covering what couldn't be seen, and the air of resentment and slight disgust to his left where the Invisible lurked.

"Thank you," Allodie said. Because they were all missing a very important truth. Out there in the cold, the Red possessed a bloodwork army made of all the fallen magicians of history. The March wasn't strong enough to face the dead. Not their dead. The dead of once loved and once known. Allodie wasn't either. She feared looking too far out into the shadows out there, in case Mardas might appear, his green-flecked gray hair and earth-brown skin, his golden laugh turned dark and hollow.

But she was strong enough to face the Red. She was strong enough to take him down. Because long ago when he'd been young, he had bonded to a Ward just the once, and it had been her. Allodie was his strength, and she wouldn't lend it to him anymore.