Bloodleaf

by Crystal Smith

  I felt a hand on my elbow and turned to find Kate, her heart-shaped face colored with concern beneath her dripping hood. “Emilie,” she said gravely. “Don’t go over there. I promise you, you don’t want to see.”

  My lungs began to expand and collapse in rapid pace. I shook her off and pushed myself through the gathering crowd.

  I knew that something terrible had happened—​knew it in my bones—​but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of it. Before I could stop myself, I let out a keening wail.

  Nailed to the lintel above the portcullis was the head of a once-white horse. Her muzzle was curled back from her teeth, frozen forever in a contorted scream, while her beautiful mane was matted with blood into snake-like ropes. Her blood was splattered and smeared all across the marble, black burns streaking out from the stains like the feathery marks of a lightning strike. Blood and rain dripped from her lips, forming rivulets of red that outlined each cobblestone below. The spirits of the gate wandered listlessly beneath the grotesque spectacle, unmoved by death or downpour.

  I hardly noticed Zan and Nathaniel making a beeline over to me, or Zan’s attempts to quiet the awful sounds that were coming from my mouth. I couldn’t look away. Falada was dead. Dead.

  “Emilie, stop. Please. You’re making a scene.”

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Emilie, just stop—​”

  “Don’t touch me!”

  Nathaniel scooped me up as easily as if I were a child throwing a tantrum. I fought against him, but the man must have been made of granite; he didn’t seem to notice my struggle at all. When he set me down again, we were out from under watchful eyes. Kate and Zan were following close behind.

  “How dare you,” I said, quivering with rage.

  Zan’s face was a mask of calm, which infuriated me even more. “This is what we were trying to prevent, Emilie . . . Bleeding stars. They must have realized, after they killed the one horse, what we’d done. And even though she was disguised, they could have cast a spell to see through it.” He cursed again. “I’m sorry about your horse, but you have to understand we have much bigger problems now . . .”

  “You’re sorry?” Rain and tears were stinging my eyes.

  “I’m upset too. We should have done it ourselves. At least then she could have gone humanely, but we failed—​”

  I lunged at him; I wasn’t sure what I meant to do, but I didn’t get close enough to find out before Nathaniel stepped in front of him. Impeded by the human barrier, I was forced to retreat, and I began stalking up and down on my side of the divide.

  “You failed!” I futilely wiped my eyes on my soaked sleeve, chin quivering. “I almost killed myself working your spell because you said you’d protect her, and you didn’t. I don’t even know why I believed you; you can’t even protect yourself. That’s what Nathaniel is for, right? To make sure you never have to ruffle a hair on your head, never have to get your hands dirty.”

  Zan said in a quiet, dangerous voice, “Maybe you should go. Calm down, and we can talk again when you’re back to your senses.”

  “Oh, I’ll go,” I said. “But this? This is over. I’m done with you.”

  “Emilie,” Kate said, “wait!”

  “If she wants to go,” Zan said, “don’t stop her.”

  * * *

  Back at the hut, emotions roiling, I slammed the door shut with a deafening crack and then collapsed against it as the expenditure of fury left emptiness and exhaustion in its place. My clothes were wet and cold, hanging heavy on my frame. I unlaced the ties of my bodice and dress and stripped it off, abandoning it where I stood, and moved toward the fire, wearing nothing but my white shift. I crouched, shivering, by the fire, and pushed the sodden lumps of hair from my eyes.

  I was surrounded by the papers that had fallen from Zan’s lap that morning. I gathered them together just to get them out of the way at first but found myself unable to set them aside unviewed. The first two were charcoal sketches of a twinkling city, as seen from our high vantage on the wall last night, captured effortlessly in Zan’s bold, dramatic style. The third was of hands—​my hands. In one there was a luneocite knife. In the other, nothing but black blood seeping between long, white fingers.

  Letting go of the papers, I stared at them. Last night’s cut had already knitted itself into a thin red weal. I closed my fingers into fists to hide the mark and the old, familiar shame. In my head I heard the distant echo of the Tribunal mob’s fevered chants: Witch! Witch! Witch!

  My focus caught on the corner of a new drawing that had shaken loose from the others when I dropped them. I plucked it from the pile and rose to my feet, feeling sick, wanting to strike the image from my mind forever and yet unable to look away.

  The girl in the picture had wild hair flying around her face in a twisted halo, her eyes wide and staring, her mouth parted in what looked like a scream—​of pain or ecstasy, I could not tell. The touches of beauty and elegance found in the detailed hand study were gone; in this rendering, the girl’s fingers had become stiff and curled, like claws. Her cheeks and eye sockets were marked by cavernous shadows, hollowed by the tongues of flame from the blood and hair burning in the bowl.

  No wonder, I thought. No wonder they hate us. No wonder they burn us. No wonder the Empyrea wants to rid the earth of us. This . . . this person . . . she was power and danger and death.

  She was what Zan saw when he looked at me.

  I cast the picture into the fire. While it smoked, I scrabbled on my knees for the other drawings, and then I burned them, too.

  The fire roared in the grate, and my body flushed in the stifling heat, as if I and my effigy were inextricably bound and I, too, was being consumed by the flames. Desperate for air, I fled back out into the rain and then did not stop at the doorstep. Past the trees, the pond, down into the culvert and the passage beyond.

  When I climbed up the rocks and out onto the field of bloodleaf, the Harbinger was already waiting for me. She knew I would come, the same way she seemed to know everything but what paths might actually help me.

  “All these years I’ve let you guide me. I’ve put myself in danger to do as you bid me, and look where I am now. Just look at what’s become of me. Is this what you wanted?”

  She waited, wordless as ever.

  “I’m sick of it. All of it. Of you, of magic, of death.” I took out Achlev’s luneocite knife and made a quick nick on my index finger. “I don’t want you to visit me anymore,” I said. “I don’t want to see you following me. I’m done. We’re done.” I gathered every ounce of feeling I had left inside of me and let it loose at her. “Just . . . be gone!” I cried, and felt a strange, unsettling snap.

  She stumbled backwards, as if I’d cast not words at her but weighty stones. She fell into the web of bloodleaf that encased the tower, and the vine reacted to her touch, snaking around her limbs and torso, up around her throat, and entwining itself in her hair. It enveloped her, it became her, until I could see nothing but her black-orb eyes, glowing darkly inside the tangle of red-shot vine.

  And then she let out a silent scream as she and the bloodleaf turned to glittering orange ember and drifting ash, leaving a cavernous space in the hedge and revealing an ancient door beneath it.

  I raised shaking fingers to the rusted iron inlay. It was a mess of swoops and swirls. There was a corroded lock set in the aged wood, but I didn’t need a key; a soft push made the door give way. I took my first nervous step inside.

  Rain was leaking through old cracks in the walls and spilling from thin lancet windows onto a mosaic of the triquetra knot.

  At the foot of the stairs I saw her again, the ghost woman whose body was too broken to identify. She glanced at me over her shoulder and then moved up the stairs, revealing a painting behind her on the wall. Though age had worn much of it away, I could make out three figures: a woman between two men—​one with dark hair standing in the light and one with light hair standing in the dark.

  The painting
s continued panel by panel, telling Aren’s story alongside my ascent up the stairs. Black shadows slipped out from a tear in the barrier between the material and spectral planes, each one more grotesque and frightening than the last.

  Aren and her brothers followed the ley lines to the spot, which sat in an ancient basin, next to a fjord, in the midst of a thatch of wild red roses. There they had joined hands to cast the spell that would seal up the hole forever.

  As I neared the top of the tower, more and more of the panels were faded to obscurity. I could make nothing out until the second-to-last panel, which showed Cael with a knife in his hands and Aren dying in Achlev’s arms. At first it looked as if Achlev was wrapping the rose vines around her, but a second glance showed me the truth—​the vines were becoming part of her. As they overtook her, the red roses became pure white.

  Instead of dying, she had been transformed into bloodleaf.

  I was at the top of the tower now, looking up at an overhead door. Not unlike the entrance, it was aged and ineffectual. I pushed it open, emerging onto a platform in the rainy gray daylight.

  I turned to find a huge sculpture of a woman, rimmed by a dim halo, looking down at me. A luneocite knife, not unlike the one I had in my pocket, was locked in her stony hands. I knew her face well now. My ancestress. The Harbinger. Aren.

  I felt cold pricking along my arms in the dreary drizzle, and turned. The ghost woman was standing at the brink of the tower platform, beside the crumbling parapet. She reached out her hand; she wanted to show me how she’d died. Too tired be scared, I reached back.

  More shocking than the cold was the jarring transition from day to night, from my perspective to hers in the last moments of her life. In this echo of the past, I had no eyes or ears of my own. I saw what she saw, I heard what she heard.

  She was speaking to another woman in the same spot where we were now standing. “I can’t watch him suffer anymore,” she was saying. “Every day he gets worse. I can feel him slipping away, Sahlma. And I can’t let him go . . . I won’t . . .”

  Sahlma? I recognized her now, the healer from town. Younger, but with the same pernicious scowl. “Best to let nature take its course,” Sahlma said. “Bloodleaf is both foul and fickle; even if I do manage to collect one of those petals—​almost impossible to do; they disintegrate the moment you touch them—​what if it doesn’t work? Then you’ll have died for nothing.”

  The woman was looking down now, and I could see a ring on each of her slender hands. One was a spread-winged raven, the Silvis signet. The other was a clear white stone, cut into a thousand triangular facets. “If I don’t do it, then Zan will die.” She looked up at Sahlma. “A mother should never have to be without her child.” Then she slipped each of the rings off her fingers and placed them in the center of Sahlma’s palm. Trembling, she said, “After you give him the petal and he’s better, will you make sure he gets these? Will you tell him that I love him? Promise me.”

  “Don’t do it, my lady. Don’t.”

  She climbed onto the edge of the parapet and looked out across the expanse one last time. The city—​the entire city—​was built in the shape of the triquetra knot, I saw through her eyes. Each gate was a point. The lines of the city streets and the trees and the shape of the fjord all made up the curved swoops of the knot, contained within the circle of the great wall. We stood high above it all in the exact center, protected by the castle on one side and the fjord on the other.

  Then she looked down at the carpet of bloodleaf far, far below. Taking a deep breath, she gave Sahlma one last look from over her shoulder and said, “Better hurry.”

  Then we turned and leaped over the side, she and I together.

  But before I fell, two arms went around me, throwing me out of the vision and away from the ledge. I pitched backwards, screaming as I hurtled through the disintegrating door and down the stairs behind it, entangled with another body. I felt my ribs and head and arms and legs crack on the unforgiving stone until we crashed together onto a wide stair and slammed to a stop against the wall. I rolled over, dizzy with pain, and saw Zan.

  His eyes were glassy, his face covered with a thin layer of sweat. He looked wild.

  “Zan? What’s going on? What—​”

  He was clutching his chest, each gasp a knife scraping against stone, sharp and metallic and desperate. “Don’t. Jump. Please.”

  “What?” I looked from his shaking body to the square of light of the tower overlook, and knew. He’d saved me. And at great cost to himself.

  “Zan? Zan!” Nathaniel was scrambling up the stairs behind Zan, frantic and stricken. “Is he all right? He saw you going up, and he ran. I tried to stop him, but he pushed me.” Zan, trying to stand, had collapsed and was lying on his side, his breathing a piercing staccato. Nathaniel said, “It’s his heart. I don’t know what possessed him to—​he knows his limits. He knew he couldn’t make it all the way up here, or he’d be in trouble. He did it anyway.”

  Nathaniel put his arm under Zan’s shoulder and lifted him. I was about to grab the other dangling arm when he seized my wrist and locked his terror-filled eyes on me.

  “You’re . . . bleeding,” he said, wheezing. I looked at my hand, which sure enough was covered in blood seeping from a cut in my arm. And then, unthinking, I pressed my bloody palm to his cheek and told his pain, Not there. I addressed it the way I’d addressed the fire. All the books said that blood magic didn’t lend itself to healing. But pain . . . it was universally agreed that blood magic could be fueled and funneled with pain. So even if I couldn’t fix it, I could use it, couldn’t I? I could maybe even move it.

  I directed the pain inside myself. Here, I told it.

  And suddenly I was seized by an agony the depths of which I could barely fathom, a weight in my chest, a vise on my ribs, fire in my brain. I was drowning. No air. No air. No way to scream my terror. No air.

  I don’t know how long we sat there: Zan writhing on the tower stairs and me bent over him in my sopping chemise, gripping his arms while I breathed in time with him. I felt the misery of his every attempted lungful, the tight shooting pain in every beat of his heart, and then . . . I took it from him. I took it into myself.

  When finally, exhausted, he closed his eyes and his head lolled, I was released, gasping, still clutching his limp arm. I ducked beneath it; it was heavy on my shoulders.

  “I think I’ve taken off some of the edge,” I said, wheezing. “But we need to get him someplace warm and dry, give him something to help him breathe. Is there a healer in the castle?”

  “We can’t take him into the castle,” Nathaniel said. “Being seen like this, in court, by the king—​he would never allow it. He’d be furious.”

  “Not even to save his own stars-forsaken life?”

  “Not even then.”

  I swore. Even unconscious, Zan was a pain in the ass. “I can do what needs to be done, I think, if we can get him to my hut.”

  We dragged his limp body between us, his feet thudding on every stair, and lurched from the door into the rain while I went back and forth between cursing his idiocy and praying for his full recovery. But then the thought of his coming out of this mess unscathed made me angry again, and the whole process would start over.

  We slogged through the abandoned canals as the water rose to my waist, pushing on, paying close attention to the time between each of Zan’s agonizing breaths.

  At the hut we threw open the door and dumped Zan onto the cot. He moaned, on the edge of consciousness.

  Nathaniel started toward him, but I held out a hand. “It’s all right. Let him rest.”

  As I began to gather the things I needed for the potion, Nathaniel settled back against the door frame. “He hired me—​at Kate’s behest—​to train him to fight. To help him get stronger, healthier. I taught him all I could, and he’s come a long way. But some things can’t be fixed, only adapted to.” Gently, he added, “It’s a hard thing for him, letting me handle what he physically canno
t.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. Those times I’d thought him nonchalant, slow . . . That’s what Nathaniel is for, right? To make sure you never have to ruffle a hair on your head. I remembered my words this morning with growing regret.

  “He didn’t want you to know.” Nathaniel sighed. “I feel useless, just standing here. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  I rose to my feet, unsteady. I said tiredly, “Do you know what camphor is?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Kate distilled a batch not that long ago.”

  “Does she keep it in here?”

  “No . . . it’s stored in a closet in our kitchen.”

  “Can you retrieve some of it for me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”

  I had everything else I needed. I remembered the pages from Onal’s herbals well. To ease breathing. I wheezed as I collected all the required items; Zan’s infirmity lingered in my lungs, too.

  I put a kettle of water on the fire and started adding the ingredients from Kate’s stores. Mint, tea leaves, turmeric, ginger. I breathed in deeply as I stirred. The relief, though small, was immediate.

  As the mixture reached a boil, Zan began to waken “What is that smell?”

  “It’s medicine. It isn’t quite perfect yet. Nathaniel went to go fetch another ingredient for me. But here.” I ladled some of the mixture into a mug. “This will at least help, for now. And don’t drink it. Breathe it.”

  He held the mug and let the steam rise into his face. “Are we going to talk about how you nearly jumped from the tower?”

  “Are we going to talk about how you almost killed yourself trying to stop me?”

  He scowled and looked back into his cup.

  “I wasn’t going to jump,” I said.

  “No? Then what were you doing?”

  I hesitated. This was the same dilemma I faced over and over with Kellan: Do I tell him, and have him doubt me? Or do I keep it to myself, another secret to guard, another brick in the divide between me and the people I care about?