She stood, covered in mud. “The Lady won’t let him die.” Her voice was dreamy. “If all the world burns, while that light maintains him, he’ll live. That’s enough.”
Tiana sighed. If mysticism was required, she’d take it, but if Jerya had tried the quiet authority, it would have worked. She hoped the camp would be broken by the time they got back. She should have listened to Kiar, and they should have moved the camp, and it was past the time for recriminations, time for action, even in this downpour. They would look to her for a destination, and for that, she had to work out what to do about Jozua and his sleeping light.
Chapter 24
The Starcatcher Hand
THEY WEREN’T READY to leave until long after full night, but nobody suggested waiting until dawn. In rain and darkness, they led the horses to the old road and mounted. Minex, once again fully awake and unrepentant, scampered in front. Ghostly flames, will o’ the wisps, sprang up around her, and they followed the road as it wound through the forest to its eastern edge.
In darkness, Lisette stared down at the light at the end of her wrist, hidden from others under her cloak. The shape of her fingers remained, but they glowed like incandescent flames through frosted glass. Tiana had inspected it, and tightened her lips, and touched her shoulder. Twist had thanked her somberly for his life. Kiar had given her a pained frown. And the big man who had carried her through the woods, Jozua, gave her a wry smile that made her want to hug him. Only his expression made her feel human.
She looked into the light as she curled her shining fingers. She could touch material things, but barely feel them. Her grip was uncertain, and she was afraid of touching anything alive. She couldn’t stop thinking the gauntlet remained and her hand was gone. When she’d summoned up the lux against the living eidolons, she felt like she was trading her flesh for power, like the gauntlet was devouring her. Like she was doing something wrong.
She shivered, and pulled her cloak closer around her. The rhythmic swaying of her horse soothed her, but she couldn’t take her eyes off her hand. When she tried, all she saw was blackness. The murmur of voices, the creak of leather, the smell of wet horse, but like a metaphor for her life, all she saw was devouring light and a powerful darkness.
She’d always known her life would be dedicated to the Blood. She never imagined it would be quite so literal.
She curled and uncurled her fingers, felt the coolness of the light with her other hand as she clasped them together. That was the strangest part: to the rest of her flesh, the light was hardly anything at all: not a warmth, not a tingle, just a numb pressure, as if her hand had fallen asleep.
The light swallowed her sense of time passing, and shockingly soon, when she lifted her gaze from the lux to compare it to the dark, she found a dirty grey instead. The horses squelched along a muddy track, between barren fields. At some point, the rain had stopped, but heavy, wet clouds covered the sky.
Jozua rode near her, as if by accident. He quirked a grin at her as she regarded him. “Good trick, sleeping while you ride.”
“I wasn’t asleep—” she began, then realized he had to know the truth. She ought to smile back at him, but she couldn’t find the energy.
As the day got brighter, the scouts found an abandoned farmstead, and they settled down to rest for a few hours. Lisette found herself passing her horse to a guard and moving to find Tiana, the habit too strong for even a lux-infused hand to break.
The princess stood in the large kitchen at the heart of the farmhouse, in a cluster with some of the others. Lisette slipped in beside her as Cathay rummaged around in a low drawer. Tiana reached for her hand and then hesitated. A pinprick of grief almost exploded in Lisette’s heart. She squeezed her eyes shut and Tiana hooked their arms together.
When she opened her eyes again, the pain safely tucked away again, Cathay stood, an apple in one hand and a carrot in another. “They’ve left recently.” The apple was freshly picked, still plump and smooth.
“Fleeing from Ohedreton’s forces? The army Jerya mentioned? The road has been so empty, even in the rain,” Tiana sounded bewildered.
“Villages sometimes hide from Blighter armies,” said Slater, reassuringly. “They’ll come back.”
“But they didn’t take the food,” said Cathay. “That’s odd.”
“Maybe they were in a hurry,” Tiana said darkly. “Or maybe something else happened to them. Maybe they were taken. Jerya said there were humans with the Blighter army.”
Later, Lisette curled under her blanket as the others slept through the morning, thinking about Tiana’s suggestion. Were those caught in the expanding Blight transformed? Was that what gave the enemy’s eidolons their apparent self-will? She wondered if they’d hidden in their coats, afraid of the reactions of the people left unchanged. The andani did not hesitate; any reservations they had were surely left with their previous shape, if previous shape they had. Their minds belonged to Ohedreton.
But here she was, still Lisette. She wanted to mourn, but she stumbled. If she was still Lisette, all she had to mourn was her hand. And scars gained in battle were nothing to hide, especially for a Regent.
She woke up, staring at the fingers of her unmodified hand. She flexed them. This journey had paralyzed her. It had taken her from the world she understood and changed Tiana and Kiar, and left her all alone.
She remembered reading about this in Rocliff’s analysis of the collected diaries of twelve famous Regents. Most Regents typically experienced stress and even a loss of identity when their charge developed a close relationship with somebody else. It could happen even with a private internal fixation.
It was, Rocliff wrote, a Regent’s coming of age. It was easy to blame the Voice of Atalya and her glowing hand, but when she considered it closely, she’d been increasingly adrift ever since the sword Jinriki had appeared. She still believed Tiana had done the right thing in preserving her connection to the sword, but where did that leave Lisette? The Regency had a phrase about Regents and weddings that seemed apt here, even if it was hardly a romance: ‘No place for a Regent at the wedding table’.
Of course, relationships were rarely so well separated, and the epigram was more about how a Regent felt than any truth of the matter. But it validated her feelings. She felt this way, and it was normal. She read enough to trust that. Yet she also knew she had to stop letting her feelings control her if she was going to be useful to the Blood.
Rocliff himself had lost his leg to gangrene. There was no magic, no suggestion of a powerful gift, just life-changing loss, and moving on.
He didn’t come to terms with losing his leg in two days, either, said a sulky, self-indulgent part of her. But Lisette knew about that, too, knew about shock and survival and visualization. She knew about the need for purpose, and a hundred and one other tricks to keep a wobbly member of the Blood focused and fighting when, potentially, everything else was lost. It was all theory, with so little practice, but she knew how it began.
So she stood. She went to find a place to clean herself up, and she brushed her hair thoroughly, and if part of herself stood aside and watched her attack her hair like her bad thoughts were tangled in it, well, that was what a decade of specialized Regent training did to you.
They spent the afternoon traveling again, this time without rain. The road remained hauntingly empty. They journeyed toward Sunasin, Fai and Cinai’s home, but they were limited to the speed of Fai’s travois. They moved with a careful, aching alertness. The empty landscape put everybody on edge.
Lisette guided her horse up beside Kiar. She pulled her cloak aside and stretched out her light-filled fingers. Kiar only glanced at her, busy brooding At first Lisette wanted to back off, to coddle and pet and encourage Kiar the way she would any member of the Blood. She resisted the impulse. Right now, Kiar was a resource Lisette needed to understand what had happened to her.
“What I did before... wasn’t what Jinriki suggested we do, was it?”
After a hesitation, Kiar
raised her head again. “I don’t think so. What were you trying to do?”
Lisette said, “I wanted to send power to whatever Logos-working Twist was doing when he fell. That didn’t work, but something else did. Everybody seemed... stronger. It wasn’t as... explosive as what happened to Twist, either.” She waggled her fingers and Kiar gave her a pained look.
“Do you think it will explode or destroy anything you touch?”
“How would I know?” She paused, thinking, and added, “No, I don’t, because it doesn’t burn through my cloak when I wrap it, see?”
Tiana’s raised voice came from the head of the column. “—idiotic. You can’t go.” She’d pulled her horse to a halt, cutting off Jozua’s own mount, who blew and pawed the ground.
“I have a job to do, Your Highness. I’ll take the girl to her father, and you can bring along the boy later. Or keep him, I don’t much care.”
“No,” said Tiana stubbornly. “Cinai won’t go. I’ll explain things to her father when we get there.”
Jozua’s horse danced and Jozua let it. He shook his head. “Even a Blood Princess like you should understand how I ought to report in. The Blight is coming here and the defense of the Counties and that girl’s marriage are links in the same chain.”
“That’s idiotic, too,” said Tiana. “Why would armies depend on one girl’s wedding? Nobody’s going to withhold troops because somebody hasn’t gotten married. This is just... nonsense.”
Jozua shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Can’t say I disagree. It’s all nonsense but it’s nonsense old men with armies care a lot about. How about this: you keep Cinai and I’ll go ahead to warn the Count you’re coming, get some armies mobilized, even start baking the wedding cake.”
He attempted to move his horse past hers. Tiana leaned over to grab its bridle, staring at him.
Like it was printed in stage directions, Lisette could see that he was considering making—and breaking—a promise to wait there for whatever Tiana needed him for; she could see that Tiana was wondering if she could trust him, and as he shifted his weight and his horse snorted, he was further considering trying to intimidate Tiana into letting his horse go.
That was never a good idea, and she wondered why he was so eager to get away. She’d miss him; in the short time since he rescued her, she’d appreciated his relaxed, easy strength. He exuded confidence in a way none of the guards did, as if nothing could ever really touch him. Cathay was like that sometimes, but she’d never seen it in anybody else.
She indicated to Kiar that she’d be right back to continue their conversation, and started to move up the stalled column.
Tiana said, “Will you swear on my blade that you’ll return as soon as you convey the message?” and Lisette pulled her horse back, surprised. What a cunning, awful idea. Where had she found it?
**She came up with it herself,** said Jinriki in her head, sounding crotchety.
Jozua raised his eyebrows. “I’ve heard bad things about that sword.”
“If you’re trustworthy, so is he.” Tiana drew Jinriki from the scabbard slung over her saddle and rotated the blade so the handle extended toward Jozua.
He reached out and then pulled his hand back. “I don’t think I’ll make that oath after all.”
“Then you can’t go. Not that I understand why the red light would be in an oath breaker anyhow.”
“I cannot break an oath I haven’t sworn,” Jozua snapped, his patience visibly frayed. “But perhaps if I do, your red light will let me go. Shall we try it?”
“Please!” said Lisette loudly. She softened her voice as she moved closer to the arguing pair. “Please, don’t be rash, either of you. Sir, would it be so bad to travel with us for a time? We’re all going to the same place, to the home of Fai and Cinai. And you’ve seen that it’s dangerous. You must look after your charge. Does it inconvenience you somehow?”
Tiana stuck her jaw out, nodding agreement, and Jozua stared at Lisette a little too long. Then he said, “There is the army coming.”
“You don’t care about the army coming,” Tiana pointed out. “That’s an excuse. Even a Blood Princess like me can see that.”
“It’s still true.” He sighed. “I’m inconvenienced in... small ways. But I’ll stay for now.”
Lisette finally found a smile. “I’m glad. Perhaps we can talk more later.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “If I’m lucky.” A little thrill of pleasure curled in Lisette’s stomach at the genuine interest in the intensity of his gaze.
Tiana said, “And work on getting over whatever issues you have with Rann, please,” and Jozua broke his gaze away from Lisette’s. Without responding to Tiana, he turned his horse and rode back along the column to where Fai and Cinai travelled. Tiana blew out her breath and kicked her horse into a trot, ranging ahead with Slater at her heels.
Kiar caught up with Lisette. “That could have been worse.”
Lisette shrugged and immediately returned to her previous conversation. “Will you experiment with me to discover what we can do together?”
Kiar gave her a flat, unfriendly look. “Why would you want to use that thing? I don’t like what it’s doing to you. What could possibly be worth it?” Her response reminded Lisette of her own reaction when Tiana decided—the first time—to keep Jinriki. She shivered.
Kiar saw and instantly apologized. “I don’t want anything bad—worse—to happen to you, Lisette.”
Lisette curved her lips into a reassuring smile and searched for something light to say. She found nothing, and so she tossed her hair away from her face and looked down at her hand. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to me either. But it’s too late. I’m not what I was. I want to understand what I am. And maybe, with practice, I can control... this.” She tried to wiggle her fingers and the glow wavered.
Kiar squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, she looked haunted. “Fine.” She held up her own hand and an eidolon gauntlet shimmered into existence over her skin.
“What are you doing? That’s not the Logos.”
“I’m still curious.” Kiar proffered her gauntleted hand. Lisette squeezed her own hand, with its glove of light, tightly shut.
“Maybe we should wait until we’re not on horses. If you get thrown like Twist—.”
“I can make my shields very quickly, and I’m prepared to do so. But if you’re really concerned...”
The two young women stared at each other, caught in a morass of uncertainty. Then Lisette gritted her teeth and grabbed Kiar’s gauntleted hand with her own glowing one.
Or at least tried to. The light slid off the eidolon, or the eidolon slid away from the light. She pushed and her hand seemed to pass through Kiar’s, without any physical sensation.
Blinking rapidly, she pulled her hand away. “Is that—?”
Kiar turned her hand over and a perfect sphere, rippling with faint colors like a soap bubble, rose from her palm. “Try to catch that.”
Lisette poked a finger on her left hand at the orb, touching the warm, smooth surface and making the colors swirl. Then she swiped at it with the hand leaking light. Once again, her hand passed through it—but she could see both at the same time, at the same moment. The sphere seemed as unreal as a shadow.
Yes. That was exactly what it was like, like looking at somebody standing within a shadow.
“Ouch,” said Kiar, and the sphere vanished. She tapped her fingers together and then shook them. “I’ll have to think about that.”
“Did you sense something? Were you hurt?”
“Not exactly. There was a pressure.” She shook her head. “I’ll have to think about it,” she repeated.
Lisette drew in a deep breath. “All right. Can we try something with the Logos now?”
Kiar said, “I still don’t think that’s a good idea. Jinriki used the lux to create a monster with Tiana. We don’t need to do that.”
Lisette pulled her horse up, and looked back along the column. At th
e very end, Jozua rode beside the mule that pulled the Fai’s travois. “What about healing him? If Fai was healthy, Cinai would give Tiana the green light.”
Kiar’s breath hissed through her teeth. “Oh no. No, no. Don’t you dare mention that idea to Tiana unless we’re sure it will work.”
Patiently, Lisette said, “I just want you to try it. See what you can do.” She reached out and closed her fingers, like she had before when she summoned the motes of light. Sparkles appeared around her fingertips.
Kiar stared at her, narrowing her eyes. Then she began to mutter to the Logos. After a moment, she extended a single fingertip and touched just one spark, exactly as Twist had done.
There was a crackle, but Kiar stayed on her horse. Instead the spark exploded into a shower of light, and Lisette felt as if somebody pulled on her hand. Kiar stumbled in her speech, her words slowing down until Lisette thought she would stop entirely. That would be bad, she knew.
Something snapped from the vicinity of their hands and the shower of light. The motes compressed into a shape and absorbed color. Lisette felt, distantly, a tiny, rapid thumping. As Kiar stopped speaking, even that faded.
A hummingbird woke up and fluffed its wings in the palm of Kiar’s hand. Lisette stared at it, and then turned her eyes on her own hand. The light now stretched halfway to her elbow.
“I think,” said Lisette, “I’m getting better at it.” She said it to reassure Kiar, she said the words, but she was lying.
Chapter 25
A Beautiful Dream
IRISS TWIRLED IN her new dress, showing it to Jerya. The long skirt flared out, the layers fluttering in the breeze. Her legs flashed through some of the gaps in the layers. The gaps, and the carefully torn holes.
“It’s so pretty,” said Iriss. “Thank you. I feel more like myself again.”
Jerya smiled. “Pretty and useful. You’ll tell me if you think it needs more holes, yes?”
Green Wild (Thrones of the Firstborn Book 2) Page 27