Heart (Cruelly Made Book 3)

by K. M. Hade

  The darkness swirls and pushes, the heat suffocating and silky at the same time.

  >>HE IS MINE.<< It is not a voice. It is the shape of emptiness, and the words want to add me to the nothing.

  “No!” I scream. “If he was yours, he’d be down there! He fought you! He is mine! Mine!”

  >> YOU DEFY ME, SMALL CREATURE? <<

  I scream as the millions and millions of tentacle-eyes poke into every part of me, demanding, examining, threatening, showing me what it will do to me for my defiance.

  >> YOU SMALL AND STUPID CREATURE. <<

  I have been called so much worse it means as little as my words in this abyss. I laugh instead as the eye-tentacles push me back the way I’ve come, trying to get me to let go, trying to unknot the net I’ve woven.

  I scream and fight back, burning myself, searing myself, slashing at the nothing with my sword. “ScatheFire! Follow me out! Get over here! Come on!”

  I haul on the net with all my might. My soul incinerates. The darkness howls and—

  I scream. Light erupts around me.

  No, wait, it erupts from me.

  Bits of dirt and rocks fling up into the air. The ground cracks. Shards pull up from the ruined earth as I haul on ScatheFire’s ties as hard as I can. It’s like trying to move a statue.

  The bond is still there, but he’s too heavy to drag out of the grip of the Abyss.

  I collapse over my knees, sobbing, breathing hard, choking. Light rolls off me, so bright and intense it’s like waves. My Aether is molten and incandescent in my skin.

  I won’t give up. I won’t.

  I haul on the line with a sob, then crumble again.

  My light dies. My Aether solidifies.

  “Holy shit,” Blood’s voice says over the strange buzzing, humming din. “Pebbles. What. The. Fuck.”

  Pebbles.

  I become fully real again.

  Rot catches me as I topple over into the dust.

  “How—how long was I gone?” It’s still daylight.

  “About an hour.”

  I look up at him. “It felt like forever.”

  He’s shaking. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t forever.”

  I manage to drag myself back up by bracing myself on his shoulders. Light still rolls off me like fog, even though it’s fading. Lost, I look around.

  “Oh no,” I whisper. ScatheFire is still just sitting there, unmoving and vacant, and all around us is a forest of crystal spears, shining yellow-red in the dust. The memory of the formless Abyss quickly fades and I try to hold on to it, but it’s dissolving like wet sand, and there’s only the memory of ScatheFire and his familiar anchored in my mind.

  I tug the string with raw magic. Still heavy.

  Get back here, you lout! Come on! I know you’re in there! I felt you in there! The Abyss couldn’t take you, so come back already!

  Rot’s face falls.

  Atrament kneels next to me. His hair slides around us. My light is brighter where his shadows touch.

  “Don’t say it,” I whisper.

  “Did you find him?” he asks instead.

  “Yes.” I want to weep. “He’s there. He’s like a coal, but he’s still there. His love for his familiar keeps him warm. I know that doesn’t make sense, but they’re together in the Abyss.”

  “Abyss,” he says. “What is the Abyss?”

  “I can’t describe it, the memory, it’s being taken from me even now. There was a voice… maybe it was the Old One. But it wasn’t a voice, it was the shape of emptiness, and…”

  Atrament nods. “It’s fading because there are no words that can encompass what you saw, and there is no name to give it.”

  “So it wasn’t real?”

  “It was very real. It is something you understand, like you understand the language you first learned as a child. You cannot remember learning it, you cannot explain how you learned it, you simply learned it. There are… places… like that.”

  “I tried to… pull him out. I can’t move him, though. Maybe he’ll wake up and come to us.” I tug on the rope again. My magic sears me with another rumble of light and I cringe.

  Smoke shoves the bag back over ScatheFire’s head.

  Please come back, please come back.

  Blood comes over and pulls me to my feet. My Aether solidifies again, like he’s pulled me all the way out of the Abyss. He holds my hands tight. “We’ll give it a few days. We’ve brought him this far, we’ll bring him a bit farther. But, Pebbles, I think you’ve done all that can be done.”

  He looks around at the crystals radiating out from where I had been kneeling, the cracked and torn land.

  I swallow, hard.

  “Now,” he says firmly, “what is this shit about a mudwitch? It’s time for you to tell me why you want to stay in this hellscape one moment longer and go further west. Did I mention it’s a hellscape?”

  “Let her recover,” Rot says mildly.

  “I’m okay,” I say. “I don’t mind. It makes me feel real. I… I don’t know what happened.”

  Atrament shifts. My familiar squeezes and hisses at him to keep his theories to himself.

  “It’s all fading anyway,” I say. “The mudwitch. Yeah. We…”

  I had just been in the Abyss while an unnamed god shouted at me about who owned ScatheFire, and I’m having a hard time explaining why I’d really broken out of the Pit.

  Rot startles. “Oh, no. Oh no. Did I get you pregnant?”

  Blood smacks himself on the face and draws his hand down. “Oh hell.”

  “No, no!” I wave my hands urgently. “No, no, nothing like that!”

  “I may have,” Atrament says.

  “Wha—?” Rot stops dead.

  Everyone stares at Atrament.

  “It is not what you are thinking,” I say quietly. “The Warden…”

  “The Warden wanted her and I to conceive a child,” Atrament says.

  Blood’s entire body jerks. “Why?”

  “An experiment.”

  “In what?” Blood demands.

  “In what happens when a powerful Aether and a powerful Fell conceive a child in the Pit.”

  Smoke jerks like he’s barfed a bit in his mouth and gulps something down.

  Atrament seems unmoved. “We were threatened that if we did not comply, she would be drugged into a stupor and I would be drugged into a sexual frenzy. We orchestrated a farce to suit the Warden to buy time for all of us to escape. She may, however, have my child, conceived in the Pit, within her now. We had to go to extreme lengths to convince the Warden we were fully complying with his demands.”

  “What kind of sick fuck…” Rot intones.

  “How has the Blight not taken this asshole yet?” Blood demands.

  “That’s why I had to get out,” I confess softly. “That’s the real reason I said we had to leave. Because every time Atrament and I went through our little farce, there was a chance and I couldn’t take the chance.”

  Rot puts a hand on mine. “Don’t worry. We would never have let the Warden breed little freaks from you. So we go find this person, and if we can’t, we double-back and go to N’Jod. We’ll find the right person for sure there.”

  Smoke throws up his hands. “Are you insane? Wintering in N’Jod with a price on our heads?”

  “What, you want her to give birth to the kid and we have to smother it?”

  “What I want is for us to stop getting fucked harder and harder.”

  “I think we all want that. You just mad she had a real reason for wanting out of the Pit?”

  Blood shoves his hands onto his hips and kicks at a clod of clay. “Fuck. Fuck. Yeah, I was hoping for some bullshit reason, but fuck. Okay, here’s what I suggest we do. We ride west another two days, following the pillars. If we don’t find this hovel our guide spoke of, we have to turn around. We can either double-back to the western pass, or we can try to ride to the eastern pass. Neither one is a great option.”

  Smoke scowls. “And winter
is coming. We need to plan for what we intend to do about that. Are we going to hole up, or are we going to try to find our way to the southern front like she originally suggested and turn her in?”

  “We are not fucking turning her in,” Rot growls. “The team is everything, the team is sacred.”

  “She isn’t one of the team!”

  “The fuck she isn’t!” Rot shouts. “Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not true!”

  Blood raises a hand. “Stop. Enough. She’s on the team. Atrament is part of the team for now. Things are complicated. We can talk about our next move on the way west.”

  15

  CRYSTAL

  We head out. I drag ScatheFire’s soul with us like I’m leading an unwilling horse.

  I am not giving up on him. The voice I can barely remember from the Abyss hadn’t been able to take ScatheFire’s familiar, and It hadn’t been able to take ScatheFire from me.

  So ScatheFire is still in there, and if I have to drag him all around the world until he gets tired of being a coal-covered donkey, I will do just that.

  “Is everything okay between you and Atrament?” Rot asks under his breath.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like… was he nice to you about it? Or was he… you know. Like your old team.”

  “He was very kind.”

  “You just didn’t tell us for this long. Like even if he was nice about it… I mean, I don’t really trust you to know what nice is. Like, him not hitting you isn’t being nice.”

  I smile wanly. “We didn’t have sex. He… he jerked off into a bowl, then painted it on me so the Warden would think we’d done it. He got… inspected… as closely as I did.”

  Rot recoils, and Smoke, nearby, gags once. Rot says, “That’s terrible. So he put it inside you?”

  “Yes. Because the Warden examined every detail. We had to do it a few times.” I close my eyes for a moment. “I knew I had to get out. Because we weren’t going to fool the Warden for long. And I know I’m being really paranoid that I got pregnant, and I probably didn’t, and I’m so sorry for—”

  “Hey.” Rot reaches across horses and puts a big hand on my arm. “Hey, it’s okay. You want to make sure, so we want to make sure.”

  I give him a watery smile.

  “Even I will agree to that,” Smoke murmurs.

  “Ignore him,” Rot says under his breath. “If he could be a solo Mage, he would be.”

  Smoke ignores Rot back.

  “I’ll call you Heart, if you want,” Rot says, a bit shyly.

  I manage another watery smile, but I can’t find my voice to answer. I don’t feel like a Heart. I feel like a hot mess. Pebbles suits for now. It also won’t cause any arguments.

  That evening, ScatheFire sits like he always does, staring at nothing. I tug on the net but it just doesn’t move. Atrament curries horses and plays with his familiar, who enjoys playing “pounce” from behind a horse’s ears.

  Weird hummingbird. Very weird.

  It’s Smoke’s turn to feed ScatheFire. He offers the Mage a chewed-up bit of some leathery rabbit-rat creature Blood had strangled that afternoon.

  I make myself watch.

  ScatheFire’s eyes move towards the food.

  I jolt upright. Smoke saw it too. He gestures for all of us to stay very still. None of us move. Not even the hummingbird.

  Smoke offers ScatheFire the food, waits until it is swallowed, then holds up another bit of food, and slowly moves it back and forth. ScatheFire, slowly, stiffly, turns his head a few degrees to track the food.

  “By all the Named Gods,” I hear Blood whisper.

  I pull on the tethers I braided. Get out here, you stubborn Mage! Come on!

  I haul hard.

  Atrament materializes to stop Rot from moving towards ScatheFire. “Wait,” he says softly, “let him wake slowly.”

  “You said you don’t know shit about this,” Rot hisses.

  “I have been punished as he was punished.” Atrament’s voice is haunted. “Not as severely, not until I was a husk, but enough. I have seen a glimpse of where he is. It is best to return… slowly. For reasons I lack the words to adequately name.”

  “How much of him will come back?” Blood asks.

  “I cannot say. Perhaps all of him. Perhaps… not much. Steel yourself.”

  Rot sits down next to ScatheFire. I move to sit in front of my friend, resisting the urge to touch him, and instead I focus on pulling.

  Follow me out. Come back to me. Follow me out.

  My Aether is the only light, glowing a soft blue-yellow hue in the dusty air. I pull more magic through it to provide more light. I try not to think about how easy it is to summon light. I’ve always been able to do that. The only difference is now it’s easy.

  ScatheFire’s eyes close and his shoulders dip.

  “Get back here, you asshole,” Blood mutters under his breath as all of us shift.

  I reach out and touch his cheek. Light plays off my fingers. My voice shakes. Did I bring him back just for him to die? “ScatheFire.”

  Slowly, like he’s half-asleep, ScatheFire lifts his hand and puts it over my wrist.

  My soul trembles and every wire inside me pulls and yanks taunt.

  “You… stubborn pet rock.”

  Smoke rocks back on his ass and braces himself on both hands.

  “Fuck you,” I manage to choke out around my thick throat.

  Rot squishes him in a huge hug, then yanks back and gives him a shake. “Holy shit. Holy—”

  “Give him a few moments,” Atrament says.

  “Nothing holy about what happened to him,” Blood says.

  I feel something like hands pulling on the ropes I’d woven. ScatheFire pulls himself up within me. His hands move like he’s been in bed too long. Blood moves, pulls his dagger from his boot, and presses it into ScatheFire’s palm.

  It transforms into the cat familiar, who rolls to the side like it’s been trampled by a horse. Then it flips over, shakes itself, and scrambles up his arm to head-butt his chin. ScatheFire clutches it and snuggles it.

  I sob and bow my head.

  The cat purrs and mews.

  ScatheFire hugs it for a long, long time.

  We all wait.

  Finally, as the horizon starts to brighten, ScatheFire opens his eyes again. They’re green-cracked-fire, and this time, he is inside them. “Where the fuck are we?”

  “Ruined lands,” Blood says.

  He looks at me. Then, “So… I was a prisoner in the Pit. That wasn’t a bad dream.”

  “Nope.”

  “Did we earn our pardon and you’ve just been dragging me around?”

  “We are the Empire’s most wanted right now,” Rot says cheerfully.

  Blood says, “Pebbles wanted to escape. High-bred bitch gets what she wants. Including beguiling Pit-bred Atraments and stealing you back from an Old One’s playpen.”

  I laugh through my tears.

  “Shit got wild,” Rot says. “We’ll catch you up. Shit got real wild.”

  I put my arms around ScatheFire and hug him, pressing my cheek into his beard and ignoring the cat’s squirming protests. I hold tight, shuddering on silent sobs. After a minute, he puts his other hand around me (even if I’ve got to share him with the cat), and he tentatively holds me in return. “You came for me.”

  “Damn right I did.”

  “Why?” His eyes search mine, and he feels along the connection between us.

  “I know,” I tell the strange tangle of emotions that has no name and offer him my own. Because he is my first friend, my only friend, the first person to defend me, to stand up for me, to try to help me, to look under the Aether, to make me feel like I mattered. He’d kept me alive when I didn’t want to be alive. He’d protected me, even from his own team.

  I had had no one and nothing, not even a familiar, but I’d had him.

  ScatheFire squeezes, then looks at Blood. “Didn’t leave me for dead this time
, Captain?”

  Blood’s familiar, which has been stubbornly in brooch form this entire time, shifts and flutters to clutch the hair of his master’s temple. It’s claws kneed, and it sings a soothing song. Blood says, calmly, “Thought about it.”

  “Do you remember anything?” Rot asks.

  ScatheFire hesitates. Something dark pulls hard on my Aether. Then he says, “I remember the Blightling, getting dragged by it, then… something… something ripping me apart. I just… went somewhere else in my head. Locked myself in there. Like when I was a kid. It didn’t get me in there, but I couldn’t unlock it. Didn’t want to, I think.”

  “Yeah,” Rot agrees soberly. “Yeah. We get that.”

  I pull back and settle onto my heels.

  “What… how did that happen?” He frees his hands and looks at them, turning them over like he expects the Fell thread to not be there.

  Atrament drifts into his line of sight. ScatheFire startles. “The hell are—”

  “Atrament is part of the team,” Rot tells ScatheFire.

  “Sort of,” Smoke mutters.

  “Not sort of,” Rot growls.

  ScatheFire asks, “Since when?”

  Blood sighs. “She likes to collect strays.”

  “I thought that was Rot.”

  “She’s prettier than Rot, so she gets more exotic strays.”

  Atrament kneels down behind Rot. “You were taken into the presence of the Old One that lays at the bottom of the Pit. It dragged you into a place Heart has named as the Abyss, but it failed to consume you. Lady Heart held fast to you, and you held fast to your familiar.”

  “Heart?” ScatheFire echos, not understanding.

  “The woman you call Pebbles,” he says it with great distaste, “is Heart once again.”

  “We’re Fells. Blood? What the—”

  “I don’t know.” Blood puts his head in his hands. “I don’t know. We aren’t arguing about it right now.”

  “He didn’t want it to be true, but you just proved it’s true.” Rot grins at ScatheFire. “She’s not our Shard. She’s our Heart. An Aether Heart for a Fell team.”

  “She’s been your Heart,” Atrament agrees. “Since you were taken before she even began to realize what she was.”