by Jen Williams
When life energy was taken, winnowfire must be released.
The young girl on her knees in the grass raised her arms compulsively and became the centre of a mountain of fire. A mile across in all directions, the dome of green and white rose up and up, too bright to look at, too loud to hear. The settlement was instantly engulfed as the very air turned to flame; people, animals, tents, plants, all structures, became fiery beacons, burning impossibly hot. Hair and fur crisped off in an instant, flesh melted, bones turned black and brittle. Connected to them all as she was, Noon felt the terrible flash of agony that moved through her people, felt it as though her own body were cooked, and in her last moment of awareness before she blacked out completely, she felt her mother clearly – dying, her last thought was that it had been Noon, that it had been her little frog, and that she was sad, and sorry.
Sorry.
Back in She Who Laughs’ fake tent, Noon howled with anguish and curled up on her side, shivering violently. The smell of burning flesh was everywhere, in her nostrils, her hair, her skin. For the first time in her life she longed for the cold damp walls of her Winnowry cell, to be hidden and alone and forgotten again. It’s where I belong, it’s where I belong, blood and fire, they should have killed me. Why didn’t they?
‘Noon. You did it. You remembered. My clever girl.’ She Who Laughs reached over to push her hair back from her sweaty forehead.
‘Don’t touch me!’ Noon scrambled away, and abruptly bile was surging up her throat. She vomited noisily into the corner, her whole body clenching with the effort of it. When it was done she wiped her lips with the back of her hand. ‘Why did you make me remember that? Why –’ she stopped, crying too hard to speak – ‘why, when you already know?’
‘What good does it do me to know? I could never have explained it to you. Do you know, Noon, that you’re the only fell-witch to have glimpsed what this power really is? The only one, in so many centuries.’ She Who Laughs shook her head ruefully. ‘Do you have any idea how frustrating that has been for me?’
Noon opened her mouth to reply, but there were no words. She still felt incredibly weak, barely able to lift her head.
‘I felt it, when you figured it out,’ the woman continued. She had sat back on the far side of the blankets, her thin face serene. ‘All the way out here, I felt it. Like years of watching a barren patch of earth, waiting for something to grow, and suddenly there you were. A little green shoot, there and gone again. And when I felt the old ship awaken, I knew that had to be you, too. Isn’t it amazing?’
‘Leave me – leave me alone.’ Noon lifted her head with some difficulty and met the dancing green eyes of She Who Laughs. ‘Get out now, or I swear I will kill you, or myself. Myself is probably easier, so if I am of any value to you –’
The woman stood up easily, her hands held out in front of her. ‘Don’t fret, Noon, I’ll go. You need to rest. It’s a lot to take in, my child, I understand that.’
The woman stepped out of the tent and was gone. Noon watched the space where she had been for some moments, her face blank, and then she lay back down in the blankets and prayed for the darkness to take her.
Chapter Twenty-three
When finally they landed, the towers of Tygrish were not as far behind them as Vintage would have liked, but Helcate’s suffering could not be ignored much longer. With a tear in his wing and twice as much weight as he was used to, the flight had been fraught and uncomfortable for everyone. The war-beast put them down below a small rocky outcrop, hiding them from the skies at least for a little while. Vintage climbed down, a little shakily, and went to stroke his long snout.
‘Darling, what a fine job you did. You saved us both, do you know that?’
Behind her, Agent Chenlo stumbled to the ground and bent over for a moment with her hands on her knees. Her skin was glistening with sweat, and belatedly Vintage noticed that her left sleeve was soaked with blood.
‘Goodness! What happened to you?’
‘Nicked by an arrow.’ Chenlo straightened up. ‘Just as we got up in the air. I barely noticed myself at the time due to the – the –’ She gestured vaguely, and shook her head. ‘I cannot describe it. The potion you made me drink made everything unpleasant.’
‘How bad is it?’ Vintage went to the woman and made to take hold of her arm, but Chenlo stepped back. ‘Oh give over. Are you a child? Let me look at it.’
Chenlo opened her mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it. With obvious reluctance she held out her arm to Vintage, who peeled the sodden material back with her fingers. The cloth had stuck to the wound, which was shallow but long. It had started to scab up already in the heat, but it looked less than clean.
‘Get some air to it, that’s it. We need to give it a wash, but given how abruptly we left, we find ourselves in the middle of nowhere with no supplies, no water, and no bloody crossbow.’
‘The beast? Will he fly again soon?’
Vintage looked at Helcate, who had sat himself down in a patch of dusty earth. Tentatively, she reached out to him.
Darling, how are you? Tell me honestly now.
His reply came not in words, but a series of impressions: His time spent flying the perimeter of Tygrish, frightened and uncertain. He had found no food, little water, and had been too worried about Vintage to venture far. Her summons, when it came, had been like a bell, clear and welcome. Now he was sore, exhausted, needed rest. But there was a river, very close – he had seen it as they had come down.
‘Helcate,’ said Helcate.
‘He needs rest for now, as you do too. There is, however, a river not far from here. We’ll have to get there on foot, that’s all.’
In the end, the river was an hour’s walk away – Vintage made a mental note to have a word with Helcate about the tricks of perspective possible when one was sighting something from the air – and they got there as the day was reaching its hottest point. It appeared to be a tributary of the Ember, a slow and shallow section of water, glittering with orange and yellow stones beneath. All three of them drank from it gladly, and while Helcate bathed downriver, Vintage made Chenlo sit on the bank with her arm held up for examination.
‘This isn’t as clean as I would like, of course, but it will have to do.’ She had torn a section from her shirt and folded the material over to form a rough sort of pad. She soaked it in the clear river water and held it up. ‘Give me your arm then.’
Again Chenlo hesitated. She had gained some of her colour back during their walk to the river, and now her cheeks grew pinker.
‘When you met the Lady Noon, did she ever describe to you the restrictions of life at the Winnowry?’
Vintage put the pad in the water again to stop it from drying out. ‘Some of it, yes. And I’d heard plenty myself, over the years. Bloody awful place.’
‘It’s very solitary,’ Chenlo said, looking away over the river. ‘There can be solace in that. Grace. If you accept it. We were kept apart, and we kept ourselves apart.’ She sighed suddenly. ‘My point, Lady Vintage, is that I spent many years not being touched. I am not used to it. It worries me a little. People do not generally trust skin-to-skin contact with a fell-witch.’
Vintage frowned slightly. She held out the pad to Chenlo. ‘My apologies. Please, I did not intend to make you uncomfortable. You can of course attend to your wound yourself.’
For a long moment, Chenlo didn’t say anything. Downstream from them, Helcate splashed his wings in the water, washing the dust from them.
‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘I appreciate your help, and I would be glad for you to do it. Thank you.’
Vintage dipped the pad again, and then carefully wiped away the sticky blood on Chenlo’s arm, taking special care around the wound itself. To her relief, once the blood and dirt was washed away, the injury did not look too serious, and she used another section of her shirt to bandage it. Chenlo nodded her thanks. They sat for a while looking out across the river and the grasslands; Vintage found her e
yes drawn to the sky again and again. Tyranny hadn’t sent her fell-witches to pursue them, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t change her mind.
‘So,’ she said eventually, ‘how would you say that went?’
Chenlo raised her eyebrows. ‘Forgive me, Lady Vintage, but in Yuron-Kai we would have called that “a corpse too fly-blown for leather”.’
‘How colourful,’ said Vintage dryly. ‘And please do call me Vintage, dear. All this ladying reminds me too much of home.’ She threw a stone into the water. ‘We failed to get any sense out of Tyranny, but I don’t think either of us were surprised by that. I was a little surprised that it escalated so quickly, and almost getting eaten by Wild-touched cats is not a success by anyone’s measure.’
‘Your friend Harlo did get eaten by the cats,’ pointed out Chenlo, and Vintage winced.
‘Yes, poor Harlo. However, despite all that, we learned quite a lot, I believe. We’ve seen our newest war-beast and she has a power none of us could have expected. She also appears to be somewhat unfriendly, and not especially interested in her home or her siblings. Tyranny seems to be taking this queen business reasonably seriously, and she is not without public support.’ She paused to throw another stone. As quiet as the river was, it was running too fast to provide the satisfying little plop noise she was looking for. ‘More interestingly, perhaps, she is no longer in league with her old partner, Okaar, and if anything they now seem to have opposing aims. Jhef I’m not sure of – I would have thought she would stay loyal to her brother, but she is young, and has probably had a somewhat lively childhood. Perhaps the stability and opulence of a royal palace appeals to her.’
‘That potion he gave you.’ Chenlo leaned forward, her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped loosely together. Her bare arm was smooth, the skin marked by a tiny fingernail-shaped scar at her elbow. ‘It was like throwing oil on the winnowfire. How is that possible?’
‘I really don’t know, but it’s certainly interesting, isn’t it?’ Vintage slipped the rolled-up piece of material out of her jacket, and held the vials up to the light. The orange fluid within rolled thickly up and down the tubes. ‘We do know that Tyranny once dealt a lot of akaris in and out of Mushenska when she was still the leader of the Salts. Perhaps she was involved in other drugs.’
‘A drug that makes winnowfire more powerful?’ Chenlo shook her head. ‘She must have kept it very quiet. The Winnowry would have killed for it.’
Helcate came splashing back up the river towards them. He had a golden fish in his mouth, held delicately at the tail – it wasn’t very big, no longer than a human hand, but Vintage smiled at the sight of it.
‘That’s it, darling, good work! Can you get us a few more? Chenlo, let’s get a fire going, and we’ll have fish for tea.’
They decided to wait where they were and rest for the night, and later, as the last light of dusk seeped out of the sky, Vintage found herself sitting by the riverbed, the only one left awake. Helcate slept curled up by the fire, his leathery wings folded close along his back and his nose tucked neatly away. The Winnowry agent had made herself as comfortable as she could, and lay with her injured arm held stiffly at her side. Judging from her faint sighs, she had managed to sleep anyway.
The plains were a peaceful place at night, if somewhat eerie. Winds moved softly through the grasses, and a variety of insects set up a chorus of chirps and hums. It was, Vintage thought, tempting to sit and attempt to forget all the horrors of Sarn – the Wild and the Jure’lia, the wars and the blood-soaked land – but it was never quite possible. Sarn still wore its scars openly, and many of them were fresh wounds. As the sun had gone down, distant parts of the plain had shimmered an ominous deep green as the dying light reflected off great stretches of varnish.
‘A little more poisoned, a little more ruined, with every Rain.’ Vintage ran a hand across her face. Despite her well-practised optimism, it was hard to avoid the fact that the Jure’lia would inevitably win, if they couldn’t find some way to rip them out at the roots. She sighed heavily and stood up, intending to move closer to the fire, when she spotted something moving in the distance. It was too far to see clearly, but the last light of dusk glinted against large pieces of an oily-looking metal.
‘Sarn’s bloody bones.’
It was much too small to be an actual Behemoth, and Vintage could not recall any instances of the worm people’s ships moving across the ground in such a manner, but there was no doubt that it was moon-metal she was looking at. There was no mistaking that unsettling, bruise-coloured sheen.
She watched it for a long time, but whatever it was moved out of sight, and when she returned to the fire, Helcate raised his head, big blue eyes blinking curiously. She felt him offer to keep watch so she could rest, and despite herself she smiled, scratching him behind the ears.
Thank you, darling. Stay alert – there are monsters out there in the dark.
‘Are you ready to talk about it? What this power means?’
Noon did not turn her head to look at She Who Laughs. She had left the fake tent and wandered out into the castle some hours ago, letting her feet take her where they would. Eventually, she had come to an upper chamber with several long narrow windows in the glass walls, and she had sat down next to one and looked out across the desert, watching as the sky changed colour and the winds moved the sand in little flurries. It was possible to see a clump of the white fleshy plants from where she sat, and she wondered if it was one of those she had run to when she’d tried to escape.
‘Are you ready to talk about it?’ Noon said eventually.
‘Of course.’ She Who Laughs came to stand next to her. ‘I want to know what it is like, to feel that, as a human. As a person from this world. How it feels to understand it as I do. You alone of my children have started to understand what it means, this gift.’
Noon nodded absently. ‘Don’t you want to know what it was like afterwards, though? The things that I saw. Because I remember that too, now.’
‘What?’
‘And the things I smelled. When I woke up. I don’t know how long I was asleep, but things were still burning when I woke up. There was smoke everywhere, and, you know, I almost didn’t know where I was, because nothing looked the same. There was no grass, no tents, no people. There was smoke, great clouds of it, more smoke than I’d ever seen, and ash everywhere underfoot. White ash, that was still hot to touch.’
She Who Laughs grimaced. ‘I have seen burned things before.’
Noon turned her head sharply. ‘Have you, though? I wonder. There were twisted things all about, still glowing in places. Those were the metal things we had, although I couldn’t have told you what any of them were. The sky was gone too, did I say that? Hidden in the smoke. I got up eventually, because I was frightened and I wanted my mum. I wandered for a bit, feeling the heat of the ash through my boots, retching at the smell. I found twisted shapes on the ground, things that had been people I knew once. That much heat all at once melts the flesh straight off your bones, and turns your bones to charcoal, but you can still make out, you know, skulls and things. Teeth and eye sockets. What about those things? Did you want to know about those?’
‘Noon –’
‘Because you forced me to remember, and I think you should know about this, too. Because you ripped away all the careful little scabs I had built up over this memory.’ She held up her hands; they were shaking. ‘I was there for a few days. I didn’t know what I was doing, but eventually someone alerted the Winnowry and they came and got me. I haven’t thought of it since then, but . . .’
‘I understand that this is difficult for you, but the power—’
‘Mother Fast used to tell these stories, about dark spirits that would come and steal the souls of naughty children. She had puppets of them, little things with white faces and bodies made of black rags. When I saw the bats in the sky, I thought that’s what they were. The sky wights, come to take my soul up to the storm clouds. I was relieved when I saw them.
Which is funny, in a horrible way.’ Noon paused, thinking. ‘Mother Fast survived. Did you know that? I think she must have been on the very edge of it, caught by the outer ring of the blast, because otherwise I don’t see how. Everyone else died. Everyone else died screaming.’
She Who Laughs said nothing. The blonde woman she was inhabiting looked much older than she had; used up, thinner.
‘Did you make me do it?’ Noon asked eventually. ‘Did you show me how it worked somehow? Whisper it in a dream?’
‘No.’ She Who Laughs smiled warmly. ‘You figured it out. Like I said before, you’re good at figuring things out.’
‘Oh.’ Noon looked back out the window. She wanted a strong drink, or akaris. Akaris would be good. ‘Hooray for me. Can you get me something?’
‘What do you need?’
‘There’s a drug, called akaris. The Winnowry makes it. It makes you sleep, without dreams. Bring me as much of it as you can find. And wine, lots of that. I know you can get it.’
She Who Laughs narrowed her eyes, banking their emerald fury into a pair of glowing green slits.
‘I do not want you to harm yourself, child.’
Noon flew at her, knocking her bodily into the far wall.
‘You don’t want me harmed?! What do you think you’ve done to me?’ She raised her fist to strike the woman, but She Who Laughs took hold of her wrist in a vice-like grip and the life energy was torn out of her in one ragged pulse. Noon made a strangled noise and dropped to her knees, yet she lifted her head even as her vision turned grey at the edges. ‘I had the beginnings of something like a life in Ebora, you monster, and you fucking took it from me. You’ve destroyed me all over again.’ With the last bit of energy she had left, she pressed her free hand to the woman’s bare arm. ‘Go on, take the rest of it. Do me a favour and finish the job.’
She Who Laughs shook her off and stepped away. She stood for a moment, her face taut with a very human expression of anger and disgust, and then she left the chamber. Noon watched her go, and then crawled back to sit against the wall, her knees drawn up to her chest. She calls it power, but it is a curse, just like they always said. The memory of her mother’s life energy, the exact moment she slipped away, seemed to hang over her like a physical weight. She hadn’t burned them all to death accidentally, as she had always assumed – such things were not unheard of with fell-witches – she had ripped their lives from them just to feed a terrible emptiness inside her. And there was no forgetting that now. Not ever.