The Rot

by Siri Pettersen

  The blindling raised his hand toward the snarling wolf. The animal whimpered and backed away, head lowered, before disappearing between the trees. Graal reached out to Hirka, and she realized that she was still sitting on the ground. She took his hand without thinking. It closed around hers. Cool. Strong. Claws sharp against her wrist.

  She was touching her father. Her father and her enemy. For the first time.

  This wasn’t how she’d imagined it. She ought to have been standing. Back straight. Wide awake. Not sitting, like this. Not with puffy eyes and rotting leaves in her hair.

  He pulled her to her feet. He was nearly as tall as Naiell, but thinner, with an almost boyish appearance. Young and old at the same time. Soft and hard.

  She yanked her hand out of his and took a step back, bracing herself for an attack. A blow. A weapon. Anything. It didn’t come. He crouched down and locked eyes with her. Fire in black glass. Eyes reflecting worlds. Generations.

  “Blood of my blood.”

  His words confirmed everything she’d feared. What he was doing here. Why she was here. The feelings she’d kept at bay came flooding back, crushing her. An unbearable sea of despair.

  Rime was nowhere to be seen. Graal had never intended to make a trade. He wanted everything. She backed away from him. He didn’t have everything yet. She still had power. Hirka pulled the knife out of her boot and held it against her wrist, the steel cold against her skin.

  “Where’s Rime?” She hated that her voice was shaking.

  Graal smiled, but his eyes still looked sad. Or perhaps they just seemed that way because they turned down slightly at the corners. It made him beautiful, and she hated that even more.

  “You’ve definitely inherited my penchant for the dramatic,” he said. “It gives us good and bad days, I’m afraid. I hope for your sake that you have more of the good ones. Now, I could lie to you. It would make everything so much simpler. I could tell you he’s waiting for you. That I’ll take you to him. But I don’t have him. He’s on the run. I have my best people on the case, and I promise you I’ll find him. Before the police do.”

  “Why? What do you want with him? He doesn’t belong here!”

  “I know you think I brought him here, but I didn’t. He had help. From someone I didn’t think would help him.” Graal was still sitting on his heels, eyes lowered and an air of mournful calm about him. She couldn’t help but feel the same. Sad that Rime wasn’t here, that this was the end. She’d thought she’d get to see him again. Here. Tonight.

  “Rime came here entirely of his own free will,” Graal said. “He defied me. Not many people do that. Every day he’s here, I lose influence in Mannfalla, and that’s hard-won.”

  Hirka gritted her teeth. “And the raven beak?”

  “He took that, too. Once again, entirely of his own free will,” Graal replied, showing no sign of surprise that she’d made the connection.

  “Liar! He wouldn’t take it to escape Slokna itself! Why would he?” It felt good to get it off her chest. He didn’t have Rime yet, and that emboldened her. “It’s blindcraft! His throat will rot—I’ve seen it! No one would do something like that of their own free will!”

  “You think there are limits to what people would do of their own free will?”

  “Not this. Not Rime.”

  “So maybe we need to reconsider what free will is. Yes, I had everything to gain from him taking it. He’s the Ravenbearer. Kolkagga. I couldn’t have had a better man on the Council. It’s true. But no one forced him. He had his reasons.”

  Hirka barked out a laugh. She felt like a different person, yet somehow more herself than ever. It scared her. It was like she was watching her own ruin. “Nothing in the world would make him do that.”

  Graal stood up. “He did it for you. Because he knew you were in danger.”

  “You’re lying!” she shouted, pressing the knife more firmly against her wrist. She could feel her pulse against the steel. “Let Rime go! Get that blindcraft out of his throat or I die now. And you’ll never be free. My blood will flow into the ground and feed the worms. Then it’ll never be yours!”

  She knew she wouldn’t be able to follow through on her threat. She could feel the resistance in her entire body. But Graal didn’t know that.

  “What on earth has he been telling you …”

  It didn’t sound like a question, but she was so angry and so scared that she answered anyway. If this was the end, she’d never have a chance to say another word. “They poisoned your blood, I know that much. So you could never use the raven rings. So you could never leave this place.”

  “That pretty much sums it up,” he replied quietly.

  “But you can swap your blood! They can do it, the humans. I know they can. At the hospitals. But you can’t swap with humans. You need blood from your own kind. You need my blood. So now you get to choose whether you want Rime or your freedom, Graal.”

  He stared at her, eyes full of doubt. Then he closed them and gave a pained grimace.

  Hirka hadn’t expected that. She suddenly felt uncertain. She found herself hoping that Naiell had misunderstood, that Stefan had been lying. Maybe she wasn’t a blood bag. The knife quivered against her wrist. She could no longer hold it steady.

  Then he grabbed her. She didn’t have time to react. He stood before her, her knife in his hand. He threw it to the ground. The blade plunged into the earth.

  “Hirka, we don’t kill each other. Dreyri do not kill Dreyri. He knows that. Yes, I’m trapped here, in the human world. I always will be. He has sealed my fate. An eternity without the Might. I’ve made my peace with that. I don’t need your blood.”

  Her body betrayed her. Tears started to fall. She was so, so tired. She hoped against hope that everything he was saying was true.

  He turned up the collar on his coat and moved closer to her. Strong yet gentle. A movable mountain. “If you don’t believe me, then go. My brother will use you, blood of my blood. For all you’re worth, until there’s nothing left. But I won’t force you to stay with me. Go if you want. You’re free. I don’t need your blood. The only thing that will happen if you die is that I will mourn you until my last breath.”

  Graal cupped her face in his hands. Plucked a leaf from her hair. Wiped her tears away with his thumb. Careful not to touch her with his claws.

  “Hirka, I’m not here to take your life. I’m here to save it.”

  THE SUCCESSOR

  Hirka followed Graal through the trees and out into an open area. There she saw a vessel she’d only seen a few times before. It looked like an enormous insect. Angry and black, and somehow able to fly without proper wings. The fog made it look somber, like a lone funeral carriage. Was this to be her final journey?

  Graal opened the door for her. She couldn’t bring herself to climb in, not until she knew.

  “You can remove it, can’t you? The beak? If you didn’t force him.”

  “No.”

  A small word, yet so painful.

  He walked around the insect carriage and climbed in on the other side. “There is someone who can, but no one you’ll ever meet. Nor me. They belong to our world. The world of Umpiri.”

  She shut her eyes. She couldn’t think about it. Right now she had to keep a cool head and understand her father. Her enemy. Work out whether she could trust anything Graal said. The blindling who had just turned everything she thought she’d known on its head.

  She climbed in and sat down. He handed her a pair of ear cushions, like the ones on Nils’s plane. She put them on straight away, not wanting him to think she’d never flown before.

  Graal pressed a dizzying number of buttons above them, between them, and in front of them. The carriage started to whine, getting louder and louder as the needles on the panel in front of her quivered. The wings on the roof swished around. Faster and faster, until they melted together. Then they rose off the ground. Climbed up and forward, as if borne by the Might. They soared through the night, above a blanket of light
s. Hundreds of thousands of them. The moon appeared above the clouds, and it felt like she was sitting in the hand of Ym. The first, the giant whose body had become the eleven kingdoms. His bones mountains, his blood rivers.

  The lights disappeared behind them. They were headed into nothingness, into darkness.

  Hirka kept glancing over at her deadborn father. She hated how conflicted she felt. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. It was supposed to be simple. Graal was supposed to be like Urd. He was meant to sneer at her. Knock her to the ground. Wrap his hand around her throat and squeeze until she couldn’t breathe. He was meant to coerce her, with force. With cruelty. So she’d be able to drive her knife into him. That was the idea.

  But Graal coerced her with words, manipulating her with lies she couldn’t even begin to understand. He tormented her with insufferable civility. This blindling was to blame for all the misery she’d experienced since birth. She wanted to hate him. She didn’t want to go to her death with this suffocating feeling of being drawn to him. But that was what was happening.

  He hadn’t asked about the book yet, and now it was too late. She’d left it buried with the wolves. A small comfort. Even though she was gone, Stefan and Naiell would find it when they woke up. But sooner or later Graal would realize he’d been deceived. That she didn’t have the book he needed. What would he do to her?

  I’m not afraid.

  She’d imagined all the terrible things that might happen. Over and over again. Now that she was with him, it was nothing like she’d imagined. And that scared her more than anything.

  She had no idea how long they’d been flying when the sounds around her changed. The carriage hovered in the air. Then it descended toward an illuminated red circle. They touched down. The sounds faded. The insect died. Graal undid her seat belt and helped her out. They were in the mountains, on the edge of a cliff overlooking snow-covered peaks. There were no lights or signs of life. Just her and Graal. And a cold wind that tugged at her hair.

  Part of what she’d thought was mountain was actually a building fused with the black stone. Impossible angles slanting over the abyss.

  Graal opened a door and they went inside. Stepped straight into the mountain, with floors and walls of black stone. Unseen light sources in the corridors. Glass and wood. Familiar materials that made her feel at home, even though she’d never seen a home with such distinctive features. She didn’t dare think how much a place like this would cost.

  They entered a room with windows that angled over the edge of the cliff. A black piano stood in the corner. On the wall behind it hung a picture of a similar instrument, smashed to smithereens. There was a dark sofa that looked hard as stone. A large painting hung on the wall, depicting storm clouds, fire, and a raging mountain.

  “The Great Day of His Wrath.”

  She gave a start at the sound of his voice, right behind her. “It’s an original. A gift from John Martin. Do you like it?”

  She didn’t reply. It was nice, in a way, but destruction nonetheless. Graal looked at the picture like he was seeing it for the first time. She got the feeling he did that a lot. He came closer. “And I saw when the lamb broke the sixth seal,” he said, as if reading a poem. “And lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood, and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs when she is shaken of a mighty wind.”

  Hirka didn’t understand the words, but they sounded horrific. She turned away from him and put her bag down on the sofa. On a glass table in front of her stood the cadaver of a raven. She went to touch it but stopped herself.

  “They killed it,” Graal said.

  “Who?”

  “My brother’s slaves. Before they sent me here. They didn’t call themselves a council back then, but you know who I mean. Everything you believe is based on the story of the twelve warriors.”

  Hirka remembered. “The twelve who rode into Blindból to stop the bli—to stop you. The first Council.” More details came back to her. How it had all ended. How the Seer had saved them all by turning on the blind. His own. She’d never considered that there had been two sides to the war. No one talked about the blind as people. The blind were just the blind. Deadborn. And now one of them was standing here, right behind her.

  “No wonder he’s scared of you,” she whispered.

  Graal came to stand next to her. He had an intense presence. “Scared? Blood of my blood, no creature has ever been more driven by fear than my brother is now. And rightly so. He’s no longer a god. Powerless without the Might. And he knows he’s trapped here. He’s not going anywhere without me.”

  “Then why did he come here?”

  “That depends on whether you think him brave or a coward.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he’s brave, he came of his own free will. The people he betrayed are returning to Ym. We have allies in every region. Even in Mannfalla. If he’s brave, he came here to stop me.”

  “And if he’s a coward?”

  “Then he spent too much time as a raven. Got lost in his bird brain, with little more than a vague notion of who he was. If he’s a coward, it was the raven that brought him here.”

  Hirka thought about Kuro. The way the raven had been in Ym. Before she’d come here. Before he became Naiell. The raven and the Seer were like night and day.

  “He’s a coward,” she said.

  Graal smiled. He walked over to the window and looked out at the dark mountains. “What you need to ask yourself, Hirka, is why my brother would choose to stop a war he helped wage. I know you’ve heard the story, but I suspect you’re too clever to swallow the lies they’ve force-fed you for centuries. What did he find in the ymling world that made him willing to risk death in order to win? What did Ym have that was worth sacrificing his own people for? That was so powerful that he destroyed the raven rings so he could keep it for himself? So he could live as a god?”

  His words pushed their way into her head with explosive force. Twisting everything she knew. It was as if he’d opened a third eye inside her. Made her see anew. And there was no doubt as to what the answer was.

  “The Might …”

  Graal turned to her and held his arms out demonstratively. “And He saw the beauty of Ym,” he quoted from the Book of the Seer, his lip curling into sneer. “Such was the goodness of He who looked upon them that they were all saved by His grace. Such was His sorrow for the fallen that His tears washed away their transgressions. Innocent, they looked upon their seer, and He said unto them: ‘All power from the earth has been given unto me.’”

  He sat down on the piano stool. “I won’t bore you with the details of what they did to me. But you should know that his tree was forged from the blood of the thousands of men and women who fell on the battlefields. From parched earth. From the Might. He drew it through stone. Through worlds. Used ymlings and humans to feed his own might. The flow of the Might diminished. Dried up. And the raven rings died. Not a bad day’s work, wouldn’t you say?”

  Graal leaned forward, rested a finger on one of the keys, and held it there, waiting for a sound that wouldn’t come.

  Hirka moved closer. “He says it’s you. He says you’re poisoning the world. That it’s dying because of you. But it’s because of the Might, isn’t it? The world is dying because the Might doesn’t exist here. And it doesn’t exist here because he destroyed it! Because he stopped the flow of the Might? He said it was you, but that’s not true.”

  Graal pressed the key down. A low note slipped out and died quietly between them.

  “I so wish I could tell you you’re right, Hirka. Win your trust by giving him the dubious honor of being a destroyer of worlds. Yes, I believe he doomed everyone but himself to death when he stole the Might. But the truth is I don’t know. Maybe things would be different if the Might was still here. Maybe they would have had a chance. But I’ve lived among humans for a thousand years and gotten to know
them all too well. They need no help from my brother to reap their own ruin.”

  “No one can kill an entire world.” She spoke the words even though she had a gnawing suspicion that it wasn’t true.

  He shrugged. “They say you’re a healer, so I understand that it pains you. But you can’t heal this world. It’s going to die. And I’m going to die with it.”

  He started to play. Soft. Mournful. Intricate.

  “So that’s why you hate the humans? So much so that you let them rot?” She wanted to be angry, but the words came out flat. Graal had drained her. Cracked her open. She was leaky as a sieve. Her feelings went straight through her.

  “Let them rot? The way I let Rime take the beak? Or let him come here? Not only do they do it of their own free will, they’re willing to step over corpses for it. The few people who know my secret promise me everything they have, and these are people who have everything you could dream of. The only thing they lack is more years to live. Yes, I give it to some of them. Am I to choose loneliness, when they would sacrifice everything to live by my side? You must have seen what they’re willing to do.”

  He stopped playing. Got up. “Hirka, I’m far from innocent. I’ve done things you would deem horrific. And I’ll do more. That’s a given. But I don’t consider the rot to be one of those things.”

  She tried to summon the rage she knew she had in her, but it had deserted her. All she had were empty accusations. “But it’s not right. It’s not natural!”

  “It’s not sorcery, Hirka. We’re more than Umpiri. We’re Dreyri, the only surviving descendants of the first. Our blood dominates the human body. Suppresses what’s there and takes control. It’s not contagious, but it can descend through the ranks. Some of them start to share blood among themselves. They thirst for it the way we thirst for the Might. Some take it by force. Kill each other for it, even though it is diluted with each new generation. Yes, it’s poison to them, but not one that kills. It’s poison that lets them live. It’s the power in our blood. And you’re one of us. You are Dreyri. You are blood of my blood.”