by Hannah West
But a secret pity for Devorian bloomed in my heart. I remembered how close I had been to believing I could resurrect Ivria.
I closed my eyes. Rather than thinking of Devorian or the blacksmiths or the plagued citizens of Beyrian, I listened to the leaves rustling and tried not to think at all.
* * *
A low growl yanked me out of sleep. I blinked my eyes open. The ancient forest chirred and whispered around me, as full of darkness as the belly of a beast.
Another vibrating growl rumbled deep in Calanthe’s throat. My eyes adjusted, and I distinguished her silhouette standing at full attention with hackles raised. I reached for my knife and scanned the perimeter. But when my hand jerked in the direction of my weapon, a vicious snarl tore out of Calanthe’s throat. Her shining eyes were locked on mine, not an approaching predator.
I froze. I heard others stirring and saw Glisette stand up, a white light beaming out from her elicrin stone. Her first thought had also been to comb the shadows for an assailant.
“Calanthe?” I whispered. The hound’s muscles locked in an aggressive stance. Though she was bred to take down stags and stood a head taller than me on her hind legs, I had never feared her. She’d never once displayed her teeth or even frightened a stranger with a soft warning growl.
I opened my palm in a gesture of submission, slowly reaching out to pet her snout. But instead of bowing to nuzzle my palm, she lunged and caught my hand and wrist between her teeth.
I screamed as numbing pain shot through me. My attempt to wrench away from her clamped jaws only heightened it. Now I could feel the warmth of blood and the deeper sting of betrayal. With my free hand, I clenched her long snout and tried to yank her teeth from my flesh.
“Nagak!” Glisette cried out, ripping Calanthe away—taking a chunk of my flesh with her—and smashing her into a tree.
“No!” I screamed. I wobbled to my feet only to see milky-white eyes twinkling from under hoods around the perimeter of our campsite. Putrid sores shone in the soft light. This was the ambush we’d been awaiting.
My pulse throbbed in the torn flesh of my hand. Calanthe lay limp on the mossy bedding of the forest floor. Mercer withdrew his sword with the sing of metal. Kadri notched an arrow on her bowstring, her chest heaving.
“Maranil foraen,” hissed one of the six hooded figures, and a piercing sound jabbed like a needle through my head. My unharmed hand shot to cover my ear, but nothing could muffle the excruciating ringing.
Glisette reached out and curled her fingers, evoking a bracing wind that sliced through the trees. The torturous sound tapered off, but as I shivered in the driving wind, it seemed Glisette’s counter was even more unbearable than the attack it curtailed. My breath billowed out in a fog that rushed away. The wind felt like icicles pricking my skin.
The chill finally receded and Glisette was ready with a next spell, one that wrenched a blight’s joints in all directions. Mercer hobbled forward—was he wounded?—and shouted “Matara liss!” Light bloomed from his elicrin stone and bright flames engulfed one of the blights. The creature squealed like a suckling pig and sank to the ground while another jabbed the same spell at Glisette, who countered with “Asas nila!” to block the retaliation. I knew from Professor Strather’s class that blights could exercise only a dim version of elicromancy, but despite this, they were dangerous and tenacious opponents. These ones seemed especially so.
One of the blights singled me out and charged, but a long blade squelched through its sternum, skewering it from behind.
The blade ripped out and the blight fell. Mercer stood in the shadows, his bloody sword ferocious in a stripe of moonlight.
Meanwhile a blight rushed Kadri, wielding a jagged knife. She drew an arrow at the last second and pierced it through the shoulder, which angered more than injured it. I knelt to fumble for my dagger, barely dodging a spell intended for me, and crossed paths with Kadri’s attacker. With the help of the light flashing from Mercer’s elicrin stone, I lodged my knife in the blight’s neck and gave a good yank on the arrow, twisting it through muscle and flesh. Dark blood oozed from the knife wound, which also should have been fatal, but the creature ripped the blade out and bared its jagged teeth, raising the knife to puncture my heart and end me.
I heard a whoosh and a felt a sharp pinch along the edge of my ear. One of Kadri’s arrows pierced straight through the blight’s eye. The creature released me, staggering back.
Dark blood spurted across my face. I spat it out, barely ducked beneath the blight’s swiping arm to grab my dagger, and lunged to sink the blade in its gut. Another arrow whistled over my head, catching some of my hair as it struck the blight between the ribs.
“Kadri!” I yelped, tearing my hair as I jerked free.
“Sorry, I thought he was mine!”
I eased off her prey, barely disengaging in time to duck an unfamiliar spell that withered the pad of moss I’d only just occupied.
“Sokek sinna.” Mercer blocked the blight’s next attack with a glowing shield, coming alongside me with his sword raised and one rusty manacle trapped on his wrist. It seemed their orders were to take Mercer alive and kill his companions.
Mercer swung the empty manacle and brought it down on the blight’s face, then stabbed it through the chest with his sword, coaxing spells from his elicrin stone—one of which turned the creature’s jagged knife into nothing but a gray wisp of fog when it struck skin.
Mercer turned and slashed at the blight Glisette had disabled, carving at the grayish flesh until gruesome entrails emerged from what should have been a mortal wound—but the creature was still fighting back.
“Bifreat nargon,” uttered a gravelly voice behind me. I knew what was coming before the spell hit, but knowing did nothing to stop the burning beneath my flesh. My fingernails raked across my skin, unstoppable. I dropped to my knees in agony. Even my wounds itched like mad and I couldn’t bring myself to show them any mercy.
I looked up to find a blight with one white eye. Its body was hollow and thin, but it easily kicked my slick, wet knife out of reach.
Everything went slow as the blight clamped its hands on my temples, poised to break my neck. One side of its face revealed the elicromancer she had once been: a proud, bright-eyed woman, a human. But the other half had decayed to expose a raw cheekbone and rancid molars. A murky, colorless elicrin stone swung at her concave chest. Had the Moth King forced her into servitude? Or had she elected to deal in dark elicromancy knowing full well it would, little by little, turn her into this creature? Could the same happen to Mercer if he was captured?
As if responding to a silent plea, Mercer called my name, a bright light shining from his chest, casting his features into stunning relief. I found his gaze and thought fleetingly of the warmth and safety of my hearth at home in Arna. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Glisette covered in filth and blood, a wicked gash bleeding over one eye. Kadri lay sprawled on the ground, her bow more than an arm’s reach away as one of our enemies raised a spear to pin her body to the soil. Calanthe lay in an unconscious heap by the tree. I couldn’t let them suffer, let them die. The very thought triggered a zealous rage.
The world went oddly quiet as the blight tensed to break me. The peace and the rage that washed over me intertwined, one and the same. A peaceful rage, I thought, though it sounded nonsensical. My spirit was so still, so untroubled, that I even noticed a moth drawn to the embers of our dying campfire.
A moth drawn to flame. I would be the light, the flame, deadlier than I seemed. This Moth King could never guess how I’d burn him.
My bloody hands opened in a gesture that might have looked like a plea for mercy. But I locked eyes with the wasted elicromancer touching my face, curled my fingers, and snapped my wrists away from each other. The creature’s neck broke.
The crack of breaking bones echoed around the campsite. Bodies thudded to the ground, and somehow I knew they were only the right ones.
For a moment, I stared, mesmerized by the
slick blood on my hands, my wrists and fingers contorted. The power still battered inside me, a heartbeat so wild it broke free from any rhythm. I stood and met the wide eyes of my companions.
“Is anyone badly hurt?” I asked, searching their faces in the dark. When no one replied, I stepped over the blight and knelt next to Calanthe, locating a hard knot above her ear. When I trailed my finger over the wound, she stirred and blinked up at me, then tried to tenderly lick the bite she’d inflicted while under some sort of beguilement. I steered her away from the smears of infected blight blood and felt down her ribs, hips, and legs.
“I’m sorry,” Glisette said. “I had to do something.”
“Are you all right?” Mercer asked Glisette, cupping her face to examine the cut above her eye.
She chuckled gallantly. “It’s just deep enough to hurt my ego.”
He turned to Kadri. “Did they make enough contact to infect you?”
“I don’t think so.” She scanned her shaking limbs. “But my blood is rushing so hard I don’t think I’d feel it. I’ll go to the creek and wash off.”
“Valory?” Mercer asked.
All three of them turned my way. I didn’t miss the awe illuminated in their eyes, and for the first time I saw it: the understanding that we weren’t just undertaking some foolhardy, hopeless adventure for the sake of it. We were here fighting, bleeding, suffering, because I was meant to touch the untouchable, destroy the indestructible. My power had a purpose.
“That’s going to need sewing shut,” Mercer murmured.
I cast my eyes down to my trembling hand, almost surprised to find I was still vulnerable to bodily wounds. A hunk of flesh was missing and blood dripped to the soft forest floor. “Have you given stitches before?”
“Not while wearing an iron manacle.” Mercer staggered over to gently encircle my wrist—it looked like a twig in his large grasp—and inspect the wound. “It’s not going to be pretty.”
“What happened to your leg?” I knew how to slather a wound with herbs and apply simple dressings, but my prowess didn’t cover broken bones.
“Hard whap from a bludgeon. I can walk it off.”
We started down the rocky trail to the creek we’d passed earlier. Downstream, Kadri scrubbed furiously at her skin. The cold water washing over my wounds made the pain almost too much to bear while conscious, but I filled a bowl of water for Calanthe and cleaned the contusion on her skull before I let Mercer bribe me with wine in exchange for treating my wound.
“This is what I bought it for,” he said. I bit my cheek as he tugged the needle through my flesh. He nudged the wineskin back to my lips. “Just keep drinking.”
When he finished, he started a fire to burn the bodies. I drank until the pain detached, until the strange, buried notions lurking in cages at the edges of my mind broke free to roam as they pleased:
I was dangerous, destructive, deadly.
And instead of leaning away from that truth, I threw it on me like a glorious mantle.
HE next morning brought a spring rain. We crossed paths with the blights’ horses and Kadri managed to catch one by the reins, but it was wild-eyed and manic, marked with lashes. My heart ached for the innocent creature swept up in the enemy’s cruelty. However, we couldn’t afford an overexcited packhorse. Kadri slipped off its gear and released it to the woods.
Mercer’s leg bruised up riotously and the jagged stitches on my left hand looked and felt no better than advertised. Glisette agonized over the cut trailing from her brow to the apple of her cheek. Calanthe seemed a bit dazed and slow. I wished I had left her with Ander, regardless of our discord. She might even have been better off in the kennels as Melkior’s prized bitch.
But then again, Arna might be in a worse state than Beyrian. The thought made an acrid taste rise in my throat.
Something had changed since the encounter with the blights last night, besides our mismatched troupe being worse for wear. The others used any excuse to cast a sidelong glance my way. There was hardly a rearranging of a heavy bag on a shoulder that did not lead to a stare in my direction. They began to defer to me on matters that had naught to do with my handy recollections from geography lessons.
When we stopped to lunch on yellow-tinged mushrooms, roasting them on sticks, I sat on a log perch and stared fixedly at the campfire until my mushrooms browned around the edges.
“How did they find us?” Kadri asked. “Weren’t the spells covering our tracks?”
Glisette gave a one-shouldered shrug. “There are ways to negate them. But that’s harder than casting them. No blight should be powerful enough to do it.”
“They were stronger than any blights I’ve met,” Mercer said, “almost as if they still had elicrin gifts….”
He trailed off as something sparked in his eyes, embers of hope. “Elicrin gifts,” he repeated in a whisper. “Do you think it’s possible someone else could have been trapped with the Moth King all this time?” he asked me.
“I suppose, but the sea witch didn’t mention it. Do you think…?” I let the question hang.
“Tilmorn once took a gift from an elicromancer who used it for ill and placed it in an abandoned elicrin stone,” Mercer said, his hands trembling where they rested on his knees. “He wanted Lundy be immortal. She was afraid to even touch it, but theoretically, if Tilmorn awoke when the Moth King did, he could have reanimated the blights’ stones. It would explain why they were so hard to defeat, why we couldn’t shake them off our trail. Tilmorn could have made one a Tracker to counter our protections, and given small gifts to the others. Normally killing a blight is like killing a walking corpse.”
“Who’s Tilmorn?” Kadri asked.
Mercer’s eyes were wide and intense as they met hers. “My older brother.”
A lump formed in my throat. If Tilmorn could give even the wasted blights power to hunt us down, what more could he do to us?
I didn’t want Mercer to suffer the same loss again, but I hoped his brother was long dead.
“I think we’re nearing my family’s summer cottage,” Glisette said. The cut across her eye might have added a dangerous edge to her beauty if she hadn’t been constantly smearing it with globs of salve. “If we’re up against another powerful foe, then at the very least, we need supplies and horses to finish the journey. It wouldn’t be far out of the way, and very few people know of it.”
Mercer winced at her use of foe but said nothing, staring into the fire.
“You need a ‘summer cottage’ when there are two palaces in Pontaval?” Kadri chortled.
“My father liked hunting in the woods,” Glisette replied matter-of-factly. “And you know the old palace in Pontaval is cursed.”
“You Nisserans and your curses, blights, and undead tyrants,” Kadri grumbled. She squeezed her mushrooms to test their tenderness and stuck them back in the heat. Her normally vibrant skin had lost some of its color and her lips were dry and cracked. I wondered how this journey had taken its toll on me, other than the obvious wound and layer of grime. “I’m beginning to wonder why I didn’t get on that ship.”
“There’s a mirror there that Ambrosine enchanted to look in on Pontaval,” Glisette pressed. “We could ask Perennia if there’s any news. We’re so isolated, we wouldn’t even know if the Moth King was dead as a doornail by now.”
I unfolded the map. Glisette circled the fire to point out the location of the hidden summer cottage. She had waited until the last possible moment to mention the detour, until we were practically on top of her family’s woodland property, at least as far as ink and parchment were concerned.
Since our visit to the market had resulted in disaster, I hadn’t considered reentering civilization, not as long as we had plenty of dried meat and shriveled fruit. But the idea of baths, a Healer, and horses to finish out the journey made the brief detour difficult to refuse.
I looked to Mercer to help me make the decision. He had been less imperious since we’d found the bodies of the blacksmiths and the
guards. I wondered if he felt paralyzed knowing innocent people might meet cruel fates whatever direction we turned. If we couldn’t so much as sneak through an alley without dooming those we passed, the burden of making decisions hung heavy, and now it hung on my shoulders. I wanted to tell him I didn’t mind his imperiousness sometimes and to stop treating me like a commander, but he was too consumed in thought.
“I’m not sure it’s worth the risk,” I said, feeding Calanthe my last toasted mushroom.
“We would put everyone we meet in danger,” Mercer added. “Including your sisters, Glisette.”
“We could use a concealing spell,” she said, growing desperate. “There might be news from Arna or Darmeska….”
The last argument was a low-hanging fruit. Confirming Mother’s or Grandmum’s welfare would ease the tension that had taken up permanent residence between my shoulder blades. I missed home and the comfort of family. Perhaps I would wake up from a lingering dream and Ellen would toss open my curtains at dawn’s first light. I would eat a hearty breakfast with Ivria before going to lectures…
“How easy is it to reach the mirror?” Mercer asked, his face coming into focus again.
“Easy enough,” Glisette said. “There’s one in my father’s old trophy room. And we could find a garden tool to get your manacle off.”
Mercer stretched out his hurt leg and frowned at the rusty hunk of metal hanging from his wrist. Earlier, when I’d watched him and Glisette put their heads together to try to magically break the manacle without snapping his arm in two—and her subsequent salving of the raw skin when they came up short on ideas—I’d felt an irksome ache and imagined myself in her place, exploring more than just his wrist with my touch.
I knew that ache. It had tried to emerge before, when young men like Knox had scattered hints about their interest, but I’d stifled it.