Fortune's Blight

by Evie Manieri

  “You could,” said Ani, “but it would kill you. I’ve poisoned it so no one can take it but me now.”

  Ani held out her hand to Dramash. He came over to her obediently enough, but his head was bowed and he pulled his hand away for a moment before he put it into hers. Isa looked over the room again. She felt like she had put something down and was about to leave without it, but she saw nothing but some old furs and bits of wood and stones, and some beetles buzzing under a glass dome. The humming sound found the little prickings of doubt in her mind and smoothed them over, soothing her back into certainty. She opened the door.

  Dramash spoke at last. “What about Rho?” he asked, stopping just before the threshold. “He probably wants to come with us.”

  “You chose,” Ani told him. “You sent him away. He isn’t coming back.”

  The three of them went into the next room. Ani’s guard was still slumped against the wall. Isa did not try to touch his mind this time; she knew he was dead now. The door to the outside creaked on its iron hinges as Isa opened it wider, and they went out onto the roof. The flakes were falling in heavy sheets now, but the snow beneath the worn soles of her boots felt as soft as sand and she didn’t feel the cold any more than she had the heat of the fire. Far down below, inside the castle and out on the Front, and spreading like a pool of blood into the city beyond, she sensed the deep boom of a terror beyond anything she had ever imagined. But that didn’t worry her.

  Everything was going to be all right.

  Chapter 39

  Lahlil held her ground as Gannon charged, tracking Valor’s Storm as he swept it down with enough force to cut her in half. At the last moment she whirled out of the way and heard Eowara’s sword whisk past just over her head.

  Gannon was already using the momentum of the missed strike to swing back around, but Lahlil had changed to a two-handed grip as she spun and now she hammered down with all of her might, trying to smash Valor’s Storm to the ground. Maybe it was Gannon’s strength, or perhaps some unseen property of the bronze blade, but her strike glanced off and left her off-balance, and she only just managed to turn aside his next thrust by locking their blades. Both of them pushed as hard as they could while Eotan’s headless statue loomed over them, aloof and impartial.

  They both timed their move out of the impasse so perfectly that Lahlil herself didn’t know who had moved first, but she didn’t waste time wondering; she went all-out for Gannon, blade and muscles shifting in perfect harmony.

  She tried to push him back to the balustrade, cutting at him first from the left and then the right, employing the agility that had vanquished a hundred imperial blades; keeping him always on his back foot. She had hoped all those years of wielding an imperial blade would have made Gannon slower and clumsier when he couldn’t control the blade with his mind, but he matched her speed and bettered her strength, leaving her unable to take advantage of any opening even when she managed to find one. She could not even find a way to use the weeping wound on his arm to her advantage.

  She failed to capitalize on a brief moment where he left himself open on his left side, then had to scramble as she misread a feint and found a thrust coming straight at her heart. The bronze blade slid past as she shifted out of the way, coming close enough to rend her coat.

  She came back into position again and started working through all the little tricks and maneuvers the Mongrel had perfected just for the sake of it, but nothing worked. She felt scattered; disjointed. She needed to focus entirely on Gannon, but instead her attention skittered around like a little bird, wanting her to notice the fighting that had broken out among the crowd on the other side of the terrace and the tumult of the troops below her on the Front; wanting to know what had happened to her brother, and where Trey Arregador had been taken. Mostly she wanted to know if Jachad was still alive, and if he hated her for leaving, and what he would say if she ever found her way back to him.

  Finally she forced herself to let everything disappear but her opponent: she was just a blade, a vessel of destruction with no conscience, no sympathy and no objective other than the kill. She waited for the relief that came with giving over to the Mongrel once more.

  But this time it wouldn’t come, and instead was the image of Jachad, pale and dying, turning his face to the wall so he wouldn’t have to look at her.

  Then Gannon let out an agonized cry and fell back against the statue, contorting into one unnatural pose after another, as if someone had got hold of the muscles from the inside and was yanking them this way and that. She should have hit him then, but she was thinking of the convulsions she had watched Eofar endure right before he flew at Gannon in a mad rage.

  And he came for her again, battering her with hatred and fury in every stroke of his sword. She had fought princes and generals maddened by the carnage on the battlefield around them, but this was beyond anything she had known. She fought him until her arms ached, but she could do nothing to stop him.

  Succumbing finally to frustration, Lahlil squared her blade and charged, trying to push him back with nothing more than brute force. The strategy worked—something so stupid had probably caught him off-guard—but then she saw a slackness in his jaw and the way his right shoulder sagged a little with the weight of the sword and realized he was finally vulnerable. Dozens of possible attacks flipped through her mind like the pages of a smeary training manual. She wanted one that was quick and ugly, and she wanted it to hurt.

  But before she could choose, an armored triffon streaked out of the sky and smashed right into the front of the green-glass balcony. A cloud of pulverized ice flew up, hiding bigger and sharper pieces within, and a crack zigzagged back as far as the castle wall. The impact knocked Lahlil off her feet, but she caught a look at the contorted soldier in the saddle before both he and the triffon fell two stories through the breach. The sickness that was killing her brother had claimed another victim.

  The floor shuddered beneath her and she crawled back away from the rupture while the terrified triffon shoved through the columns below, trying to find its way back out into the open. Each impact from its iron-plated forehead shook the whole terrace until finally one pillar cracked and went down, and then another. The terrace split in two along the fault line, each side swaying on its remaining supports.

  She and Gannon were cut off from the castle, as was Eofar, if he was still alive. The crowd on the other side of the terrace bolted for the throne room, but there were too many of them to get through the doors all at once.

  Lahlil sprang back up to her feet. she demanded.

  Gannon backed away from her, holding Valor’s Storm in front of him like a talisman. The fur on his blue ursa coat shook with his trembling, and she could tell by the way he dragged his feet that his legs had gone numb. A silvery pus had started to ooze from the innocuous cut Eofar had scored during their duel and the emperor’s eyes were wide with primal terror.

  For by these marks on their flesh—

  <“For by these marks on their flesh,”> she recited for the man to whom all of Norland owed allegiance, <“their twisted limbs, the corruption in their blood, our brother Valrig has claimed them.”>

  She had witnessed every type of terror, but this … The tiny black dot of Gannon’s realization condensed all the fear of an entire lifetime into that one moment. She wanted to savor it, to roll it around her mouth and suck the marrow out of it, let its warm juices run down her throat. Instead her teeth clamped down and her lips sealed tight, shutting it out. Somewhere along the way, she had lost the taste for other people’s horror.

  the emperor screamed at her, dropping Valor’s Storm and clutching at his head with both hands.

  Lahlil looked down over the Front and instead of colored tabards in strict formation, she saw a riot of dots and streaks of color like the work of some demented artist. Armored triffons flew erratically through the towers or out over the city, while others tried to force the
m down or engage with them. Jittery archers fired down from the walls and up at the sky at anything that might be a target. Frantic servants and commoners, armed with whatever they could find, flooded from the castle gates and tried to find a way past the soldiers, desperately trying to escape. Wherever Lahlil saw empty space, she found someone indiscriminately attacking those nearest them, spitting silver foam from their mouths or writhing and screaming in pain. All this horror, because something was turning people into the one thing every Norlander had been taught to fear from their first sip of milk.

  Let all so afflicted be numbered among the damned.

  A heavy, sucking energy behind her made her turn back around to see Captain Vrinna come out onto the abandoned terrace, leaking silvered blood down over her Eotan tabard. The passion of her purpose kept her upright as she flung herself over the teetering ice toward the breach separating her from her emperor. She fixed her dripping eyes on Gannon as if he were a god demanding her sacrifice, then ran straight to the edge of the gap between the two sections of the terrace and jumped.

  She didn’t make it.

  The gap was only a few feet across, but Vrinna’s legs collapsed under her just as she leaped. She managed to grab the jagged edge of the green-glass with one hand, and now pulled the other one up beside it. Her legs swung below the thick ice, but she had nothing to brace herself on to pull herself up the rest of the way.

  Lahlil watched her trying to hold on and felt like she was watching herself clinging there by her fingertips, as she had been ever since that morning out in the desert when she had watched her mother fall from her triffon. Every day of her life she had felt that ice slipping away from her, knowing the darkness at the bottom of that drop would be the end. Only one person had been there to give her the strength to hang on: Jachad. He had kept her from falling all these years, even when she had resisted; even when she didn’t deserve it. He had never stopped trying to pull her back up, even when he was dying himself.

  Lahlil ran to the broken edge of the terrace and rammed the point of her sword down into the green-glass to give herself a little bit of leverage on the tilting ice. She held on to the hilt with one hand and seized Vrinna’s wrist with the other. The captain let go of the ledge and grabbed Lahlil’s arm and with one good heave, scrambled over the edge and slid across the listing ice.

  As Lahlil pulled out her sword, she noticed that the crack had grown wider and the two ends of the terrace were leaning further from each other. The brittleness of the green-glass columns below them would not hold out against the stress forever. She looked across the gap toward the doors, trying to guess how long she could wait before she had to get back across, when she noticed a woman sitting just across the threshold, cradling the body of a man in her arms.

  Lahlil’s mind splintered into jagged black shards as she recognized the dead man. She felt as if the gods had stuffed the whole night sky in there and then shattered it with hammers of lightning. The explosion hollowed her out, making room for the dread to sink deep down into her. Trey was dead. She had forfeited the bargain she had made for Jachad’s life. She had broken her promise, and left him alone for nothing. She had ripped Cyrrin away from her people, and then failed to save the one person the healer had ever allowed herself to love, even if he had never loved her in return.

  Eofar warned her—still alive—and she turned to see Vrinna with her sword in hand, but not coming for her. The captain was dragging herself along the ice toward the emperor.

  Gannon cried out to her, still caught in his terror as he backed away from her into the broken statue.

  Vrinna told him. Love bled from her, twisted and possessive, as sticky and foul as the silvery stuff killing them both, and everyone around them.

  Gannon screamed, but she sank the blade straight through the hands he had thrown up in front of his chest to protect himself. The emperor’s head fell back to face the falling snow and his mouth dropped open with a gurgling cough. His loyal captain clasped her arms around him and threw herself over the balustrade, taking him with her. If they made a sound when they hit the ground, Lahlil could not hear it over the wall of noise rising up from the still-raging battle below. She followed the trail of Vrinna’s silvery poisoned blood and looked down to see both of their bodies lying broken over one of the fallen pillars.

  The familiar words came back, repeating themselves over and over again, trying to tell her something.

  Let all so afflicted be numbered among the damned. Let them not remain among you, for they will be your destruction; let them be stripped of their garments and set out in the wilderness, for by these marks on their flesh, their twisted limbs, the corruption issuing from them, our brother Valrig has claimed them and will have dominion over them. He will bring them to his hall of Valrigdal in the deep forbidden places, and they shall be his Army of the Cursed. Then be ready against the day they will rise up and strike at the Righteous. On that day let a Hero be prepared with the sword we have given you, to subdue them, lest they corrupt all that is pure in this land. Yet as Lord Onfar is merciful, and as Lady Onraka is just, if the afflicted be found worthy, so their wounds shall be healed and their steps guided back to the fires of their clan. For by this sign, they are to be embraced without prejudice.

  Lahlil looked down at Eowara’s sword lying on the ground. Do not go down into the deep places. She threw her worthless unnamed sword into the gap and picked up Valor’s Storm.

  she called, crossing to the back of the swaying terrace where her brother slumped against the wall. The increased pitch of the other side of the terrace did not escape her notice, nor did the snapping noise that sounded like ice breaking up in a spring thaw.

  A pair of shining silver tears rolled down Eofar’s cheeks, but Norlanders didn’t cry. More fluid gathered behind his parted lips. He jerked his head away when Lahlil reached out to touch him.

  said Eofar.

  Lahlil took a closer look at his wound. The edges had already started to knit together, even without sealing it, but that ubiquitous silver pus bubbled out from the cut. She could feel his strength draining away, like snow melting through her fingers.

  Her next breath snagged in her throat. She had been looking at a picture her whole life without being able to make any sense of it, and now someone had come along and turned it the right way up.

  Let them be stripped of their garments and set out in the wilderness.

  Eofar told her.

  Lahlil started on it before she had even finished saying it and he couldn’t fight her; he was too weak even to wipe the snow from his face. She pulled him out of the fur coat like she was extracting a snail from its shell, and then used her knife to widen the rip in his shirt and tear it off him until he was lying half-naked on the frozen green-glass. She weighed her knife in her hand, only pretending to herself that she was making up her mind.

  she warned him, and before he knew what was about to happen, she pinned him down and slashed the wound in his shoulder open again. His scream contributed nothing to her task, so she ignored it while she gathered up handfuls of snow and packed it into the wound. Cold shuddered through him until his teeth rattled, but she kept him down.

  he asked, as she rubbed more snow into his wound, and then onto his chest and neck.

  said Lahlil.

  her brother asked. His presence in her mind already felt stronger.

  ple out: so they wouldn’t hurt anyone else when they turned violent. They figured out that was how the sickness spread, through wounds and into the blood. If the cold cured them, they could come back.>

 

  she told her brother, looking down at her dirty, callused hands as she brushed the snow from her fingers.

  Eofar curled his fingers into her coat for a moment and held on.

  she commanded after she swallowed past the lump in her throat. The scabbard for Valor’s Storm was still on Gannon’s broken back, so she rested the naked blade against her shoulder as she stood up.

 

  Lahlil said,

  said Eofar, dropping his head back and letting the snow fall on his naked skin.

  Chapter 40

  Rho had thought losing Trey for the first time was the worst grief he could ever feel, but he knew now that guilt and self-pity were not the same as grief. He could still feel Trey’s weight in his arms; it was a burden he would never put down. Nor would he hand it over to someone else. He clutched it to his heart, as he now embraced his mission to take Dramash away from that woman. He would allow nothing to stop him this time, not even Dramash.

  The stink of chaos hit Rho when he came out of the throne room and onto the gallery looking down over the entrance hall. The castle gates had been breached somehow—probably from the inside, by people trying to get out—and now as many people were running inside looking for sanctuary as were frantically trying to escape. A few of the boldest ones hurried through with armfuls of looted treasure, dropping jeweled cups and gold dishes behind them like a trail of shiny crumbs. A soldier with dripping silver eyes took a sword to the neck at the top of the stairs just as Rho leaned over the railing; she went barrelling down, knocking over anyone who didn’t get out of the way fast enough. If the sickness spread from blood to blood, then every knife and sword was now a wand of pestilence and every cut a conscription into Valrig’s army.