by K. M. Hade
“Yes. I am told all their names. And while the Deans have not seen my thread, I have certainly discussed theory and research with them. I am a Researcher as much as I am research. Although I fail to see how any of this is important.”
Blood shrugs. “Right now? It’s not.”
That ends the conversation and the Fells settle down into the hay to sleep, with Smoke’s familiar on the rafters, keeping an eye on everything, although I think it wants to eat the chickens. I dismiss the light, and Atrament’s shadows pull back from the walls. Moonlight streams in through the windows. I try to sleep, but when Atrament slips into the shadows and out of the barn through the cracked doors, I follow him.
He’s scaled the external ladder to the hayloft and mantled over the roof to sit on the far side, out of sight from the farmer’s house, and stare at the waning moon. His shadows stream over the roof like underwater plants.
I sit down next to him.
“You should be resting,” he says softly.
I shake my head once. There feels like I have a lot to say, and I can’t find the words, but somehow I think he understands. “Thank you for not bringing up the Luminous Mage thing.”
“I suppose it is not important to the many conversations we are having. But why haven’t you told them about why you had to escape? Shouldn’t they know? They might say they are trying not to blame you, and have faith your reasons are good, but they also do want to blame you for the turn their lives have taken. You don’t need to suffer their sullen anger.”
I trace the veins in my wrist. “Maybe I was rash. I could have gambled the Military would come looking for me sooner or later and demand the Warden produce me.”
“The Warden would have found a way,” Atrament says very softly.
Yes, he probably would have.
“You think you want to… keep it?”
“No.”
He whispers, “Because it is not just the moment of conception that determines the course of a Mage-child. It is the prayers and rituals after, so even if we did conceive a child in the Pit, it would only have been exposed to it for a very short time.”
“What are you saying? This isn’t up for conversation.”
“You and I are the best candidates to produce something like a God-Forged—”
Holy shit, is Blood right about Atrament? What the hell was he saying! “I’m not research!”
I slide off the roof, drop to the ground, and spend the rest of the night currying my confused palfrey.
7
BLOOD
The ruined lands were once part of the Empire and now are nothing but what they sound like: stretches of ruined land ranging from shallow muck-swamps that glow green with Blighted lichen to red-clay deserts that are desolate. While there are ruined lands to the south, the lands to the north are where the First Wars raged.
The ruined lands once were other countries, districts, duchies, cities, towns. The Blight destroyed all of it. The Empire just erased it all from the maps and never gave anything new names.
People who have never been to the ruined lands think they’re empty and just a skeleton. The lands are worse. They’re hellish, full of twisted creatures, thorny plants, brackish water, and people. The kind of people who make a life in a place like this for only one reason: no other option.
The lands are full of burned out, abandoned homes, estates, mines, orchards, rogue livestock turned feral. Treasures that were abandoned and have been scattered. Relics from the First Wars. The pelts of rare, exotic, and warped creatures, and rare and exotic woods and plants. And in the northern ruined lands is a particular flower that only grows in the north: the creeping lotus. Its stalks and thorns make the most pure and powerful Fell thread. Its blossom makes the most deadly poison known to the Empire. Even its scent can undo an Aether Mage.
Atrament claims he can do the spinning and Tailoring.
If the dark Fell is lying…
Why is he so damn attached to Pebbles? He can’t let himself get confused. She’s dangerous. Hell, she’s somehow made herself even more dangerous than the Heart he’d first seen walk into the Arena with her Aether team at graduation that spring. Now she had orchestrated the first escape ever out of the Pit.
And he’d helped.
Because of course he had, because he doesn’t have it in him to tell her no. Another thing to piss him off. Sometimes he can, but damnit, when she wants something and looks at him with those big, beautiful eyes it is like he can feel how badly she wants whatever she wants, and it melts through his resistance like Blight rotting a corrupt politician.
He should be mad at her, furious even, but his anger fizzles like wet kindling.
He’d never been a soft mark for anyone. He’d had plenty of women try to bat their lashes at him and play games. Some men too. He’d always been the thin, starving brat that the bigger brats had thumped on or ignored or kicked around. When he’d gotten picked up by the Academy recruiters to be groomed for Academy entrance, suddenly everyone had wanted to be his companion. When he’d gotten to the Academy, and proven he was intelligent, articulate, and cruel, he’d had pussy flung at him by curious students and the curious ladies of the imperial court.
They’d tried to play games with him, manipulate him into thinking he was a stupid Fell, beguile him.
But this broken, defective, Mage-killing Crystal beguiled him without trying. She doesn’t even know how to try to seduce or beguile him. She can barely flirt. She is so blessedly, painfully naïve, and broken.
They’re four days out of the Pit. It’s murderously hot. They managed to steal two more nags and some supplies. ScatheFire’s content to ride behind Rot with that stupid wet bag over his head, and Rot’s familiar doesn’t complain about the extra weight.
Pebbles apparently had some tiff with Atrament and has been giving the ghoul the cold shoulder. She hasn’t been too obvious about it. Pebbles is a professional. But when you’re being professional with your own team, that’s a bad sign. Atrament doesn’t know that—he knows enough to make himself unobtrusive—but the Fells sure know.
Whatever it is, Pebbles isn’t sharing. But she’s still determined to get Tailored with Fell thread.
Blood reins his horse along the barely visible trail in the dirt. It’s been a few years since he’d come this way, but once they’d passed the farm, he’d remembered where they were going. They’d just come at it from a different direction the last time the powers that be had sent them on a forsaken mission out this way.
The rocks get closer; the path narrows to not even two horses wide. Overhead, Smoke’s familiar soars, keeping an eye out for anything that might ambush them.
The rocks abruptly stop and they emerge onto a narrow ridge.
“Fuck,” Blood mutters under his breath. No matter how many times he sees this, it’s like seeing it for the first time.
Smoke’s familiar lands on Smoke’s upraised arm and screeches unhappily.
“I agree, featherhead,” Rot grunts. “Shit. I hate this place.”
Pebbles rides her horse between Blood and Smoke. The breeze tugs at her hair. She’s just got the opalescent strands in a loose, ratty braid that’s frayed during the day, and numerous tendrils drift around her face. In the miserable landscape, her hair and shining skin and just… something… about her makes her seem brighter. Wondrous.
You’re thinking with your balls, Blood.
His balls definitely remember her playing with them. In fact, they were remembering right now, at the worst possible moment.
She glances at him, brow furrowing. “What?”
“First time in the ruined lands?” he asks to hide the jolt of discomfort. Had she somehow heard that? Or had he been gawking at her? Because sex is the farthest thing from his mind, but then again, his balls don’t always agree with his brain.
It’s hard to not stare at her: she’s beautiful, even thin and filthy. They’re all a bit thin and filthy. The Aether must be doing it—there must be something about bringing that m
uch Aether into the ruined lands that its presence just pervades everything like holy grace.
“Of course. Wait, have you been here before?”
“We’ve come this way a few times. Like I said, you want something in the ruined lands, you send a Fell. Take it in, Pebbles. We’ve all had the same reaction.”
She looks back out over the desolate landscape. “Holy gods.”
“Nothing holy about this place, that’s kind of the reason it exists.” His horse snorts and rests one hoof, unimpressed with the scene.
Far below them is the plain of a vast valley. The other side is obscured through the perpetual haze that clings to the sky. Everything is reddish sand and clay. Anything that isn’t that reddish shade is red-black like a thick scab. Everything seems to have a fine dust all over it, and the breeze instantly deposits a coating all over them and their horses. Blood dusts some off his familiar’s brooch and sighs.
Pebbles turns around in her saddle and looks back the way they came: green and brown. Blue skies, dotted with clouds. Everything like what you’d expect an arid summer to look like.
The sky in the valley is sullen. The clouds are translucent and hazy. A greenish lightening periodically flickers. Not a lightening that a Storm could command. Something else. Something other.
“It’s a rain that never comes,” Smoke says, voice odd, like a reverent Priest.
“Except when it does.” Hopefully Pebbles won’t find out about the rain. It’s another thing a Storm couldn’t command.
Atrament’s hair drifts around him like dark clouds, and Smoke seems obscured. She looks at her Crystal-dusted skin. It shines faintly, like gemstones under dirt.
Blood leans forward on his saddle horn. “Have you ever been here, Atrament?”
“No.”
Blood grimaces and looks to the north. “Well, if you ride that way, all the way to the edge, you get to a crack in the world. The ocean pours into it. No bottom.”
Smoke and Rot collectively shudder, and the rattle goes through Blood too. Their first mission together, they’d been sent there, with their original Shard. The Shard hadn’t lived long. His soul shudders around the deep fear again, but only for a second before it passes.
Pebbles is looking at him. Her skin seems to shine a bit more, and those big, strange eyes of hers are staring at him like she sees something, or knows something.
He coughs some dust out of his throat, then reaches behind himself for his waterskin, mouth suddenly dry. “Our first time we got sent here, it was to see if it was still there. If it’d changed at all. Like something like that can change. Our first Shard didn’t survive. Reason I mention it,” he took a second swig, trying to get past the wad of guilt and fear and the memory of their first Shard, “is because the whole ravine is covered in creeping lotus vines.”
Pebbles asks, “So the ravine’s real. It’s not just a story?”
“It’s real.” Rot’s voice sounds a bit strangled.
Their first Shard had been an actual Shard. Back when they’d believed in the value of a Shard. They hadn’t been close. The Shard hadn’t been wedged in deep. Blood forces himself to put his waterskin back on its hooks and not guzzle all of it, trying to choke down the strange lump wedged in his gullet.
“Is that where we’re going?” Pebbles inquires.
Damn, this woman is insane. Just jaunt off to the ravine at the end of the world? Was she clueless, courageous, or so fucking broken she had no sense of self-preservation?
Rot’s gruff when he tells her, “No. We’re not kitted for it. It’s a six week hard ride with triple remounts and full gear.”
“Right then.” She shifts slightly in her stolen saddle and her horse steps out, carefully picking its way down the narrow trail. She holds the reins in one hand with an almost careless ease. “First creeping lotus we see we grab and get out of here.”
Something heavy pulls inside his chest. He looks at Rot in shock, and even Smoke seems bewildered behind his regular unmoving expression. This woman is insane. They hadn’t appreciated how crazy she was until they’d travelled with her a week.
She trembled and quivered like a beaten kitten if they touched her. Or she froze like a terrified mouse. But a giant crack in the world that drives people insane is that way, and her first reaction is let’s go. A treacherous, rock-laced ride down a narrow bandit path on a gentle palfrey instead of a rugged remount without a breastplate or crupper or her in proper riding clothes? Come on, then.
Her horse’s hoof slides a bit on the pebble-strewn ground, but she barely reacts, just shifting slightly in the saddle to keep her weight where it needs to be, her hands both steadying and keeping out of the horse’s way, somehow encouraging it to extend its neck and keep its head down to study the path better.
He’d never learned to ride (really ride, not just stick to a stolen cart horse) until he’d gotten to the Academy. All the Aether brats had grown up on horseback. Most of the Fells didn’t know how to ride, some (like him) hadn’t even known which end of the horse to feed. It’d put him at an instant disadvantage, because in high society, how well you ride is a mark of refinement.
But it’s not in the Academy’s interest to send Mages to the front who can’t ride very well—because you never know what emergency remount you’re getting assigned—and care for horses. He hadn’t been the only Fell student in need of serious teaching, and there’d even been some Aether students who had needed some remedial lessons.
Easy to see why Pebbles had been sent off to the cavalry: she was fearless, could ride anything over any terrain, and make it look like it was nothing.
Blood nudges his own horse after hers. “I’ll lead the way down. I know this path.”
Smoke falls in behind Pebbles, and Rot brings up the rear on his big familiar, with their two spare horses following along on a long pony rein attached to his saddle.
“You should learn to hesitate, Pebbles.” He’s only been down this path twice, but that’s enough to remember every twist and rocky turn. There are no recent hoofprints or bootprints. No one has come this way for at least a few days.
“Only one way to go,” she says, laughter in her voice. “Why hesitate when the choice is stay or go?”
He sighs again, something heavy in his heart. He tries not to look towards the north. The path down isn’t especially dangerous, just scattered with small rocks and dust that’s unforgiving to hooves.
“So your first time here,” she says softly, riding her horse a bit closer so that her horse’s neck is even with his horse’s flank.
He tightens, then consciously relaxes so his horse doesn’t have to deal with him getting tense. “What about it?”
“What happened to your first Shard?”
A wire-like yank pulls on his Fell thread and a cocktail of dangerous emotions begins. He forces his hands to unclench, but Pebbles feels so damn close, like she’s right against his back, breathing gently on him. He looks to make sure she’s not physically touching him.
She’s a solid half-horse away from him. But brief eye contact strikes his Fell thread like a crystal hammer on wire. Her gaze is open, without guile, but expectant. She wants an answer. She expects an answer.
“Why?” he asks more roughly than he means to.
“If I’m supposed to be your Shard, shouldn’t I know? Unless you want to go with my plan of just turning me in. Say the Warden modified me in the Pit.”
“We screwed that pooch when we busted out of the Pit.” He instantly regrets his harsh tone. There’s a flicker of injury in her gaze, which means it’s struck deep and painful. Minor pain doesn’t make her flinch. If he’s seeing a reaction, it hit her hard.
Fuck. What’s wrong with me?
Her idea to go to the front and get mixed up in the fray down there and hope to find someone who will listen to them for five minutes before hacking off their heads is a pretty decent plan. The rest of her plan is ass, but the general idea is solid. The Empire hates wasting anything, especially if that somethi
ng is Mages, Aether, and knowledge of the Blight.
If they manage to survive, it will be better if Pebbles can somehow manage to be their Shard, even if a little bit, instead of a complete charade. Lies can unravel quickly, and as obnoxious and bullshit-filled as the military is, they generally aren’t stupid for years on end.
Smoke denies he’d ever felt her magic, but Rot clearly had, and Blood has to admit he and ScatheFire had felt it too. Just like the brush of wings. Like being attacked by a hungry pigeon. If the Fell thread gave her just enough control to make her just barely a Shard, they should give her the chance to avoid the lie.
But if the Empire executes her—or that Storm team gets within a mile of her—can his mind really withstand the loss of another Shard?
He suppresses a shudder.
The Aether-filled silence is her only comment.
His heartbeat throbs in his Fell stitching.
“So if you don’t want to talk about it, then tell me what a Shard is like. You’ve also been avoiding telling me how a Shard shards.”
He does not want to discuss Shards, but the harder he fights, the more she’s going to sniff around it. And he can’t bear to snap at her to stop with the questions and leave him alone. He’s already bruised her once during this conversation. “Well, the other Fell-Shard team explained it to me that a Shard is like a spade bit.”
A spade on the wrong horse, or in the hands of the wrong rider, is an instrument of torture. No way a common palfrey would wear a spade, and no way a rider like him would dare ride in one, or even throw his leg over a spade horse. The only reason a rider like him should be anywhere near a spade horse or a spade bit is watching a rider like Pebbles on said spade horse.
“Interesting,” she says thoughtfully. “That makes a lot of sense.”
“Can you handle a spade horse?” Perhaps he can change the subject.
“One of my chargers was a spade horse. She was my favorite. So your first Shard was a spade in cruel hands in an uneducated mouth.”