by K. M. Hade
I wait for him to finish his sentence. He’s half-holding me up. I manage a wan smile. “But I’m clean. Sort of.”
I’m not sure I’d call it clean, but the top layer of blood and grime is dissolved. Along with my skin, apparently.
“You stupid, stupid, Aether. You came for me in that abyss. You should have left me there.”
“Not a chance, you stupid Fell.”
Blood snerks.
“You just enjoy being flogged,” ScatheFire growls.
Rot, shyly, hands me my rags. Blood is suddenly there as well, gently separating ScatheFire’s fingers from my arms. “Sit down, Pebbles, and we’ll help you get dressed. Don’t need you falling and cracking your skull. Or starting bleeding again.”
“I’m not sure there’s any blood left in me.” I don’t resist as he lowers me gently to the floor. I wince. My body hurts.
“Oh, there is,” he says. “And your insides are scabbed over, and let’s not tear the scabs loose.”
“Scabbed?” I echo faintly. That doesn’t sound good. What had the mudwitch given me?
Blood’s expression is haunted. Instead, he pulls my shirt over my head. “I’m not a Verdance. Don’t listen to anything I say except you need to take it easy. We do not need you to rip something loose. We’ll spoil you like the princess you are while you recover.”
“I’m not a princess,” I tell him with a sigh.
“Not now you aren’t,” he says with a wink. Rot carefully hefts me like I’m an oversized doll, and Blood pulls my pants up over my ass. Then Blood ducks behind me to finger-comb and re-braid my hair.
“So are we heading east next?” I ask.
“Supposedly,” Smoke says from the corner.
“Not west,” I say.
“West is nowhere to winter. Not for us,” Rot says. “We need to find somewhere to hole up for the winter and figure out our next move.”
“We didn’t really plan on getting this far,” Blood says.
“Yeah,” I say softly, “I suppose that’s fair.”
We ride out the next day. I’m still sore and exhausted, but it’s not like I haven’t ridden sore and exhausted a thousand times before. Blood frets that my insides are a giant scab and if it breaks loose, I’ll bleed everywhere again.
“I think you’re being paranoid.” I sigh as his petal dragon curls around my ear. My familiar hisses at it, oozing jealousy and insult. The petal dragon squeaks.
Blood gives me a severe look. “It will let me know if you need to stop and rest.”
“It’s a petal dragon, what the fuck does it know about nursemaiding?”
The petal dragon squeaks indignantly.
“It’s my familiar, it knows a lot.” Blood huffs and goes to his horse.
My snake whirls the top of its tail. It’s seriously jealous and aggravated about the petal dragon nursemaid. The petal dragon starts to sing. Right in my ear.
“Knock it off. Please,” I tell it.
Atrament lurks more than usual. Did I say or do something while I was in a state I don’t remember? I barely remember much of anything through the pain. Just snippets of Blood making me drink and Rot trying to comfort me, and waves and waves of pain and the horrible feeling of slippery things sliding out of my body.
My familiar, draped around my neck, tries to impress upon me I didn’t do anything it found untoward.
“Hopefully,” Blood says as the horses walk out, “the horses hold up and the weather holds out. We’ll also pray for Pebbles and your clothing.”
“A plan would be good too,” ScatheFire comments.
“The eastern passage,” Blood says. “How’s that for a plan?”
“Lousy.”
“What is our plan after the eastern passage?” Smoke asks. “Because these horses might not make it that far, and our supplies definitely won’t.”
“If anyone else has suggestions, speak up. Look, we’ve got a century-old Fell with Aether thread, an Aether with Fell thread, a bunch of information that could get us killed, prices on our heads, no friends, no family connections, and no money.” Blood counts on his fingers. “I think Pebbles’—”
“Heart,” Atrament mutters.
“Pebbles’ plan for us to sneak onto the southern front, impress some people, and make ourselves at least enough of a curiosity that they pause before hacking off our heads isn’t the worst plan. We are not handing her over. We are not handing Atrament over.”
“But—” I try to say.
“That’s a shit plan and we all know it, because the Military might decide they want to study us more than put us back in the field,” Rot grouses. “What do you think they’re gonna do with Atrament and Pebbles? Risk them in the field when they can study them? The Academy is gonna want in on that so bad. Just like they keep that Snow there to study her. I was in all those theory classes. They’re gonna say there’s no record of Atrament and they can’t possibly be risked in the field. Maybe if you and Smoke get the sticks out of your butts and agree she’s Heart, they’ll keep us all around to study but we all know there’s a lot of people that want us dead.”
Blood’s lips draw into a thin line. Smoke pulls against the bonds, and everyone can feel it at this point, which only pisses him off more, and makes everyone else a little squeamish. There’s a little less privacy on a Heart team.
Blood gestures as if to say that’s the best I’ve got.
“We could consider turning her in, per her original plan,” Smoke ventures.
“Fuck you, asshole, the team is everything, the team is sacred, and she is on the team,” Rot snaps. “We told her that was the deal a while back, and it’s still true. She’s on the team. You don’t have to accept she’s our Heart or our Shard or whatever, but she is on the team. Atrament too.”
ScatheFire, holding his cat like a baby, nods.
“You trust Atrament?” Smoke inquires, tone steady.
“Not a bit, but not because I think he’s got snakes in his head,” ScatheFire says. “I don’t trust him because he doesn’t know a goddamn thing. I trust him the same as I’d trust a baby holding a sharp knife. You don’t hand a baby a knife, and you make sure to keep an eye on the baby so it doesn’t get its grubby sticky hands on a fucking knife.”
“I can’t believe we’re even fucking arguing this after everything. Get your heads out of your fucking asses. You just hurt her feelings and make the team all fucked up. We are not a fucked up team. We are the best Fell team there is, and we aren’t going to impress anyone like this,” Rot grumbles, seething with aggravation.
I don’t move, and I barely breathe, because I don’t know how to feel. Atrament is similarly blank, but for a different reason.
Blood rubs his head. His petal dragon, clinging to my ear, starts to trill anxiously for its master. “I agree. This isn’t… what I had in mind, but the gods give no shits about plans. Pebbles, you’re on the team, although the fuck I know what your name should be. Atrament, you’re on the team. The team is everything, the team is sacred. Can you wrap your hair around that?”
There’s a long pause before he says, “Yes. Does that mean…”
“The team’s all you’ve got. The team is all the Empire lets you have,” Rot says.
Atrament strokes his chin with his long fingers, hair slipping over his horse in its usual silky, disobedient waves. “That is more than the Wardens ever let me have.”
I’m feeling so many emotions—my own and theirs—that I can’t name any of them. I can just feel them in all their sharp-edged hot-burning glory. It’s all I can do to keep breathing.
Rot’s right, though: we need an explanation for the Empire. One that removes the blame from my shoulders and gives it to someone else. But pointing fingers at the wrong people won’t extend our lifespans.
ScatheFire shifts his cat to his other shoulder. It grinds its forehead into his cheek and kneads his shoulder, purring happily. The petal dragon on my ear makes a trill sort of like a growl, as if to say kiss-ass. My familiar tries
to wriggle its tail around towards my ear so it can smack the petal dragon.
“Maybe across the Vast Dark it is,” ScatheFire says.
“Or we drape skulls around our saddles and haunt the woods.” Blood studies his grimy hand. “How would I look, you think, as a haunting fire-draped specter?”
“Pretty good, actually. I think it’s your calling. Perhaps we could terrorize some small towns and then ‘save’ them. Build up a good name for ourselves. Draw the military out. Say we still want to serve the Empire, even if we have to do it vigilante style.”
Blood points at him. “An idea with merit.”
Vast Dark, southern front, scamming small towns, or assault on the Capital, we’re going to need remounts and gear. “I know were we can go to regroup. We can even lay low for autumn and winter if we decide to. But we have to go east. Our choice is if we do it on this side of the hills or the other.”
“Where are we going?” Blood asks.
“TasselWood.” The name’s hard to say.
“Never heard of it.”
“No surprise.”
“Anyone going to be looking for us there?”
“If they thought to, they’d have already done it by the time we get there.”
“You don’t want to go there, though,” Rot says.
“It’s complicated.” I shrug.
Blood gives me a long look before he says, “TasselWood it is, then. How far away from the two passages is it?”
“Closer to the eastern one by a fair amount.”
The Imperial Fells exchange looks. They don’t need me for that silent communication—that’s from years of being together as a team. But I can feel the buzz and silent exchange along all the ties that bind us now. I wish I could be happier about it, but fixing this mess is going to be almost impossible.
I touch the knot of Fell thread in my chest: but that is supposed to be impossible too.
22
CRYSTAL
There’s a tavern in the ruined lands.
After a lot of careful deliberation, we decided to go east via the ruined lands. The general thinking being that the ruined lands has some fairly basic and well-known dangers: starvation, dehydration, rain, bandits, beasties. The southern route might involve less chance of starvation or dehydration, but a lot more risk of being spotted or bumping into bounty hunters. And we’d have to pillage and scavenge either way, which would be a crime in the Empire, but is business as usual out here.
Lucky for us, as we’d pressed farther south and east, we’d encountered more people (or their caches) to scavenge from. Passed little houses and terrible farms and little hamlets. More pillars. More chunks of roads and deep wagon tracks ground into the dust. But even in the “populated” southern reaches, the ruined lands is still desolate beyond belief, even though there is constant evidence that there are people carving out an existence here.
It would be nice if my insides would stop hurting too. When I move wrong, it feels like something catches and a sharp pain goes through my lower body, and after a day of riding, it feels like I’ve got hot rocks inside me and I ache. I try to ignore it and not show it. Blood says the scabs on my insides are gone, but there still seems to be some kind of lingering damage.
And now there’s a tavern. And it’s in something resembling a… town.
“The hell?” Here I thought I’d been in the heat too long, but no, the “road” made of crusty wagon tracks that the Fells swore was, in fact, a road and not some derelict scar left over from centuries past, actually led to a little town. The tavern’s just the only structure with any identifiable purpose: the walls are made of clay, there are no windows, and carved into the broadside of the building is a very large design of a tankard and next to it, a symbol I don’t recognize.
Blood clucks his tongue and wags a finger at me. “We told you we knew where we were going. We’re very close to the passage now. This is where the fun is!”
“Fun,” Rot says. “Fun is not the word I think of when I think of the eastern ruined lands.”
“Treasure! Adventure! Dust!” Blood gestures grandly to the small… town… before us.
“So… this is adventure?” Atrament inquires. “Then what have we been having until now?”
ScatheFire sighs at him.
A sad collection of lumpy, misshapen buildings made of clay and thorny vines squat under the sky. Battered wagons rest in the dirt around the buildings. Some long-suffering mules and horses and snarly dogs are tied to more clay posts. And there is a ton of trash ringing the town like an upside-down moat. Hooded figures pick through the moat.
“Never been to a proper rough tavern before, princess?” ScatheFire rides his horse alongside me.
I’m busy marveling that I spent a lot of my childhood within striking distance of this place. “No, can’t say I’ve ever actually been to a proper derelict booze hall before. Unless you call drinking cuddled up next to those big kegs the army wheels in when we’re at the front so we can forget where we are for a while.”
“You mean the ones where the ground around them is sucking muck and liquid you can’t be sure isn’t piss but may be beer?”
“And people are scooping it up in their tankards anyway because the kegs are empty and the fact the liquid is pale and yellow and awful is close enough to beer?”
“I see we’ve served in the same army.”
I bump him on the shoulder with my fist and jerk my head towards the others. “They still do.”
“Damn clean-living Empire assholes.” ScatheFire pretends to spit at them.
Blood picks a beetle out of his beard and flicks it away in disgust.
“He never drank the beer.” ScatheFire tells me. Then, to Blood, “Even Princess here drank the beer.”
I raise a brow at him. “You say that like you think I’m proud and have standards.”
Smoke rides his horse past us and tells ScatheFire and Blood, “That was an insult.”
“More like a playful, vengeful jab,” I tell Smoke as I nudge my horse after him. “After… wait, how many days have we been out here?”
“I have no idea, I lost count.”
“Do you believe Aethers will be waiting for us?” Atrament inquires. “We are very close to the border.”
Blood waves off the concern. “No.”
“How can you tell?”
“The garbage-feeders are out.” Blood points at the crouched, hooded figures picking over the heaps of random garbage.
There doesn’t seem to be anything of value or use in the garbage, and the people picking over it don’t seem to be actually collecting anything. They’re all dressed in rags, hooded entirely so their form and face are fully obscured, and they don’t have baskets or sacks for whatever treasure they find. Filthy hands slowly pick up a piece of garbage, turn it over, replace it carefully where it was, then move on to the next piece of interest.
There are two things in what passes as the center of town: a well and a sign board. Both are made of crudely moulded clay. A clay bucket attached to a chain is used to pull up water from the well. The sign board is two clay posts about horse-height high, and the board itself is clay-smeared, reinforced with brambles. It’s had hundreds of paper notices smeared to it over the years that have become part of the clay itself. New notices flutter in the breeze, stabbed into the years-deep pulp layer with thorns and nails.
The tavern has no windows, but the other crude structures do, and the denizens of the town watch us from the shadows of walls or open windows.
Blood dismounts so he can get a good look at the board.
I lean over my horse’s neck. The notices are written in an unfamiliar language. “What does it say? I can’t read it. What language is that?”
Blood yanks down one of the notices and grins. “Of course a nice girl like you wouldn’t speak bandit or thief cant.”
“Cant?” Now I’m clearly dumber than usual. Or going deaf. Or both.
“Secret language. Code. You think bandits or smugg
lers or poachers just advertise out in the open, even here? Tsk, tsk.”
I might not be able to read bandit cant, but I can count. There are five fluttering leaflets, all new, all in heavy waxed paper with broad strokes of indigo ink. They haven’t been here long enough to get more than a bit battered by the wind. Bounty posters, and it’s not a huge mental effort to deduce who they’re for.
Blood unfurls the one he’s ripped down. “Fugitive bills. Guess who is a wanted criminal.”
“If it’s taken you that long to realize it…” Smoke grumbles.
“I am concerned they did come this far to post them,” ScatheFire comments.
Rot leans over his familiar’s neck. “They know about Atrament? There one for him?”
Blood rips down the others. “No. The Warden must be keeping that a secret. Good to know. So let’s see here… By order of the Empress and Emperor, etc, etc, etc, yadda yadda, blah blah, blah, murderous rogue Aether. Ah, the good part. They want Pebbles alive, and her Aether intact and undamaged or no bounty is to be paid. She needs to be returned to either a military outpost or the Pit itself. A tiny finder’s fee will be paid for information leading to her arrest. Pebbles, the Empire has decided you are extremely dangerous and have continued on your Aether killing spree.”
“That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” ScatheFire says.
I grimace.
“Let’s see what they say about me.” Blood shuffles the papers and grins. “Oh, look. I am extremely dangerous too, a Blood Fell can kill within line of sight—it’s true—and I abetted your escape from the Pit. They omit I was being held in the Pit. I am also wanted alive. I’m worth a pretty penny. I’m flattered. I think I’m going to keep this.”
He folds it and tucks it inside his surcoat.
“It’s not funny, Blood,” I say.
“Dear, dear, Aether.” Blood reaches up to touch my face gently. “That’s what makes it funny.”