He glanced at the other monks, now fully encircling the grove. A number of them were shape mages, but their power was weak, no more than a flicker. Sharlee must have shared her blood with them, and—
Then he knew.
“Your blood isn’t very powerful, Sharlee,” Danr said in a slow, measured voice. “I can see it. You gave it to these monks, but it hasn’t wakened much magic in them. You’ve made promises to them. Promises of magic, promises of power. Promises you can’t keep. They’re afraid of you because you can change their shapes, but you know eventually they’ll overcome that fear. They’ll overcome you. But now you’re thinking, I have the firsts. I have their blood. You’re dressing it up in a ceremony, but all you’re planning to do is cut a vein and give our blood to them so you can keep your position as abbess.”
He raised his voice. “Those who take the blood of the first sometimes die. Their bodies twist and break. It’s painful and horrible, and it takes a long, long time. That’s the truth.”
Some of the drumming faltered. Sharlee’s smile, wooden and unyielding, returned to her face.
“You know nothing, child,” she said. “It’s not my blood they carry.”
“Then whose—?” Danr began, but then his eye went to the blobby thing in the middle of the grove. His voice went shaky as a feather in a windstorm. “No.”
“After you left me and my home in a wreck, I crept back to it,” Sharlee said. “You’d left Hector’s body to rot like a dead dog in the gutter.”
“A dead dog in the gutter would have been an improvement,” Kalessa put in. “Your husband needed to bathe to qualify as a slob.”
Sharlee ignored this, or seemed to. Danr saw the vein throb at her forehead. “After you left, I went back and found he wasn’t dead. My own magic came to me then. I … changed him. Stabilized him.”
“Using the magic you took from us,” Aisa called.
“And now you still have Hector,” Danr finished. “You keep him here because his blood is actually stronger than yours. His blood gives your people at least a little magic.”
“Yes.” Not seeming to care that the ring of monks was waiting on her word, she stepped over to the blob and stroked it. It shuddered. “My dear Hector.”
Danr forced himself to look at both Hector and Sharlee with his left eye as the moon climbed overhead and the drums droned and eagle-lion stared. He saw the pale image of the man Hector had been, saw him writhing in pain, deaf and blind and dumb within the shape Sharlee had given him. Danr’s heart sickened. Hector had earned no sympathy. He had done terrible things to countless people, had sent countless people to their deaths. Yet Danr couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. And Sharlee. A thick red band tied them together, a love that was as deep and true as his love for Aisa. Deeper, in its way—it’d had years to mellow and thicken, years Danr and Aisa hadn’t had yet.
Danr cringed. A love so thick and so heavy Sharlee couldn’t let Hector go. A love that drove her to transform him into this … wreck. His and Aisa’s love would never turn into something like this. Would it? A sudden fear drove him to stare even harder, look deeper at the bond between Hector and Sharlee while the drums battered the air.
Threads of darkness, stinking black rot that blotted the insides of his nose curled through the bond. Almost against his will, Danr followed them as they spiraled downward like roots, down into the ground, into the dark, sucking depths that hid teeth and claws and rotting corpses. The Garden. Now that Queen Gwylph had tainted the place, it was tainting Sharlee and her magic, had curled its new filth around Hector, had even threaded through the others in the monastery. That was why the shape magic was poison to them. But the bond itself was still strong, could still be a source of strength.
Danr’s right eye popped open and the vision vanished. “Sharlee,” he said hoarsely. “You have to stop this. It isn’t you. It’s the Garden—warped shape magic—that makes you think this way. It’s affected you and the entire monastery. But you can turn it around. You can—”
Lif kicked him, in the ribs this time. The pain wasn’t as bad, but it ended Danr’s plea in a grunt. “We follow the great Lady Kalina,” he growled. “We are one with the moonlight and we share in the stars. Your words mean nothing to us!”
“But your blood,” Sharlee said, “is something else entirely.”
“You intend to keep me around to feed your people,” Aisa said flatly.
“You are the First,” Sharlee agreed, and raised her voice. “All hail the First!”
“All hail the First!” the monks shouted.
“And you, my friend,” Sharlee said to Danr, “we will keep as our oracle. You speak with the voice of Kalina. You will spend your days telling truth for me while we bleed Aisa for the good of the monastery. Eventually, we will all be shape mages, and we will spread the word of Kalina throughout Balsia. And the world.”
“I’ll tell you nothing!” Danr spat.
“You can’t help it, truth-teller,” she said. “I have complete power over you and your slave bride.”
“You have no power,” said Kalessa next to him. She leaned forward as much as her bonds would allow, and her voice hissed into Sharlee’s ears. “You only have what you steal from others. You are a common thief. A shit-stealing thief who feeds on dung. Even the place between your legs has to steal its pleasure because no one will give it to you. Even your husband and his soft, tiny member knew that, and he got what he deserves.”
That did it. Rage filled Sharlee’s face, and she turned on Kalessa with a roar. “Orcish whore! You’ll become the worm that you are!”
Danr tried to shout as golden light flared from her hands, but at the moment Sharlee flung her magic at Kalessa, another bolt of pure power blasted from Aisa in her cage and struck Kalessa as well. Danr shied away but shut his right eye to understand what was happening. His true eye saw it all, as if time had slowed. Sharlee was sending magic that would twist Kalessa’s shape into a worm, as she had promised. Danr could already see her body shifting and moving.
Aisa’s power, including her growing power as a Gardener, filled Kalessa like the way sunlight filled a prism. The power tore through the orcish woman, exploded Sharlee’s own meager shape magic, and amplified her spell. The magic that struck Kalessa burst into her with a thousand times the intended power. With a shriek, Kalessa burst free of her bonds, and instead of shrinking, she grew. Her body twisted and ballooned, until a great wyrm half again as large as Slynd writhed before Sharlee.
What came next happened so fast Danr could barely follow it. Sharlee stared openmouthed up at Kalessa for a tiny moment. Kalessa struck. Sharlee was gone. Kalessa raised her head up to the sky and jerked her jaws once, twice, three times. Swallowing. A squirming lump wriggled down Kalessa’s long throat and vanished into her body.
Chaos burst through the grove. The drumming abruptly ended. Monks and nuns scattered with shrieks and screams. The eagle-lion lunged at Kalessa, but she swatted it easily aside with her tail. It hit a tree and slid motionless to the ground. Lif and the other monk snatched up crossbows and aimed the weapon at Kalessa. Danr used the moment to gather his own power and flow into his human body. His wrists and hands easily slid out of his bonds, and he lunged at Lif. His human form was light and scrawny and the tackle was clumsy, but it was enough to ruin Lif’s aim. Danr and Lif went down with Danr on top, and Danr rushed back into his true form. Lif gasped under Danr’s full weight. Danr punched him, and he went limp.
“Look out!” Aisa shouted.
Danr tried to twist aside, but not fast enough. Searing pain hit him as the other monk’s crossbow bolt caught him in the spine. Danr lost all sensation in his legs. They buckled beneath him and he landed facedown in the dirt. The world went dark.
Chapter Ten
“Queen Gwylph made you,” Talfi repeated slowly.
The other Talfi let out a long, relieved sigh. “I can’t say it, but you can.”
“That can’t be.” Talfi’s legs wobbled and he sank to the bed. “Th
e elven queen … how could she make you? A whole bunch of you?”
The other Talfi shrugged. “Not allowed to talk about it.”
Ranadar straightened and took the other Talfi’s head by the chin to peer into his face, and the other Talfi sighed. “Even his eyes are the same, Talashka. I don’t know how this was done.”
“Aren’t the dwarfs the only ones who can make golems?” Talfi said.
“Yes. But this—he—is no ordinary golem. I have never heard of a golem made of flesh until this moment, nor have I heard of one that heals itself. It would require powerful magic of the kind the world has not seen since … since …”
“The Sundering,” Talfi finished, more than a little hoarsely. “How does it work?”
“I’m standing right here, you know,” said the other Talfi.
Ranadar said, “I do not fully understand it. I am a minor magician, a spark to my mother’s inferno.”
“You’re really good at archery,” Talfi said, trying to lighten the mood. “Fing!”
“And you’re good in the bedroom,” the other Talfi added. “And the hammock. Remember that one time when—”
Talfi socked him in the stomach. He hadn’t meant to. His hand balled up on its own, and his fist flew out before he could stop it. The punch came from his sitting position on the bed, so there wasn’t much power behind it, and the other Talfi only gasped a little and stumbled backward a step.
“What was that for?” he asked.
Anger he didn’t know he was carrying suffused Talfi, red and ugly. “You don’t remember anything,” he said.
“I do remember.” The other Talfi backed up to the washstand table and leaned gingerly against it. “I’m you.”
Talfi’s face flushed and his stomach roiled. “You’re not me!”
“But I remember,” he protested.
“Calm, Talashka.” Ranadar put a hand on Talfi’s shoulder. “This is a strange situation for all of us. We will work out what to do.” He turned to the other Talfi. “What do you remember? What is the earliest thing for you that you can tell us?”
The other Talfi thought. “I remember … sitting on a table in a huge room. The room has a ceiling as high as the sky and a fireplace that’s big enough to eat me, but they probably only look that way because I’m small. A lady with a wrinkly face is cutting my hair with a big pair of scissors, and I’m scared because I don’t like the noise the scissors make—snip, snip—in my ear, but I don’t run away because the table is really high up.”
“I don’t remember that,” Talfi said quietly.
“I remember being mad at my sister and holding her doll over the well. It’s soft and made of quilt patches. My sister is yelling at me, and just before I drop her doll, Mother runs out and snatches the doll away. She swats me on the butt and I cry.” The other Talfi blinked at Ranadar and Talfi. “I remember hugging Danr right after he was exiled and watching him disappear into the darkness at the foot of the mountain. I remember helping Ranadar dress in the palace at Alfhame on a warm summer morning and he keeps changing his mind about what to wear, so I call him an uppity elf because I know he won’t punish me. He laughs.”
Talfi was on his feet again, fists clenched and heart pounding and nausea twisting his stomach. “I only remember that I always called him an uppity elf, but not how it started. Why do you remember these things and not me?”
“I’m you,” the other Talfi repeated. “We all are. All the other ones.”
Ranadar was beside him now, his arm around Talfi’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Talashka. We can handle this. Together.”
Talfi looked at this mirror image of himself, the one who knew as much as he did but in different ways. He trembled under a terrible curiosity. He hungered for the memories locked inside the other self’s mind, hundreds or even thousands of fragments that might piece together more of his own past. He wanted to devour the man alive, force him to give the memories over. Give them back. But this demand also made him angry. He shouldn’t want these things. He shouldn’t need to want them. They should be his already. The crying need repulsed him and frightened him at the same time, and with that came anger, and the emotions tangled themselves into a terrible dark ball that swallowed up his insides and made him tremble.
“Talaskha?” said Ranadar. “What is it?”
“How many of you are there?” Talfi demanded, ignoring him. “Why did Gwylph make you? Why are you here?”
The other Talfi shrugged. “I can’t talk about it.”
“We need more information,” Talfi said, and turned to Ranadar. “How can we get it? Can you look into his mind?”
Ranadar shook his head. “I already explained that. But … there may be another way. It is drastic and horrible, but …”
“What is it?” Talfi said. Snapped, really. “Spit it out.”
“It involves doing something awful to a fellow Fae,” Ranadar said softly. “I have never done such a thing, but I know how it works.”
“And your mother has done such nice things to Kin?” Talfi shot back. “To me?”
“I know how Danr feels now,” Ranadar muttered. “Always caught between.”
The other Talfi cleared his throat, and Talfi thought, That’s what it sounds like when I do it. “Listen, Ran,” the other Talfi said, “you betrayed your people and helped save the world. What do you have to lose now?”
“Don’t call him that,” Talfi said through clenched teeth.
“Call him what?” said the other Talfi, looking surprised.
Talfi couldn’t stop himself from snarling, “I call him Ran and uppity elf. Not you.”
“But I—” the other Talfi began.
“You what?”
Other Talfi looked away. His voice dropped. “Nothing.”
“All right, all right.” Ranadar kept his hand on Talfi’s shoulder. “I will try this thing. This new thing. But you will have to fetch a few things for me, because I cannot get them myself.”
“Like what?” Talfi said warily.
“All the knives and spoons from Mrs. Farley’s kitchen,” Ranadar instructed. “And we will visit the market, and find another place to work. We should not do this in Mrs. Farley’s house.”
“I know a spot we could use,” Talfi said. “Down in the Rookery.”
“What are we doing?” the other Talfi said.
Ranadar said, “We will summon a sprite.”
*
Assembling everything Ranadar needed actually took a few days and several trips to the market, where Ranadar visited merchants who revealed unexpected back rooms in their stalls or hidden drawers in their chests. Scandalous amounts of money changed hands. Talfi didn’t ask how Ranadar knew about these people, and Ranadar didn’t comment. During that time, Talfi refused to let Other Talfi stay with them in Mrs. Farley’s boardinghouse, even in a different room. Talfi neither knew nor cared where he slept and how—or if—he ate, but he seemed content to follow Talfi and Ranadar around most days. Or maybe he was just following Ranadar around.
His face continued to heal as well. After a few days, his skin had lost its stretched look entirely, and the muscle filled out. Only a little pebbling remained, and then only if you looked closely. His left hand got better more slowly. His forearm muscle smoothed, and his thumb and first two fingers lost their clawlike appearance, but his last two fingers remained shiny and twisted, and the other Talfi developed the habit of keeping his left hand closed in a fist to hide them while he, Talfi, and Ranadar moved about the city.
More than once, they also caught sight of the other man from the alley, though he kept his distance, and now that he was alert for it, Talfi saw other versions of himself here and there, always just a glimpse, and always too far away to do anything about it, even if he wanted to. Many of them were malformed in some way, and people treated them like beggars, barely giving them a first glance, let alone a second. Talfi wondered if they were healing, too, but he couldn’t get close enough to tell. Did they also have pieces of memory th
at were lost to Talfi himself? Talfi wanted to know, but also didn’t want to know.
If they had his memories, what good would it do him? He had no way to put them into his own head, and hearing about them from Other Talfi only made him unhappy and upset, like watching someone else wear his own clothes or eat his own food.
And what did they remember about Ranadar? The question always made him cold.
Why were there so many of him? What was their purpose? It seemed that if enough of them—of him—were scattered across the city, someone would eventually notice. Or would they? How often did you notice individual people on a crowded street or the malformed beggar on the corner?
One day, he saw another Talfi limping through an intersection when a carriage bolted past. It rammed into the other Talfi, who went flying. Talfi reflexively reached out a hand to help, though he and Ranadar were many yards away. Several onlookers gasped. They gasped even more when the other Talfi got up and limped quickly away as if nothing had happened. Talfi remembered how Kalessa had stabbed the other Talfi in the market to little effect. Was it related to the way Talfi himself didn’t die? There seemed to be no way to know without asking Other Talfi, and Talfi couldn’t bring himself to form the question, so he remained silent.
Eventually, Ranadar announced he had everything he needed from the market and was ready to summon the sprite. They headed out, with Other Talfi in tow, mostly because he wouldn’t leave them alone.
Talfi led them through the Rookery, the windward side of Bosha’s Bay. The Tenner River meandered through the city here, but unlike the deep, fast River Bal, which ran through the city from the north, the Tenner was slow and shallow, and as it coasted west to empty into the bay, it split into an even slower, shallower river everyone called the Niner. The area south of the Tenner was prone to tidal flooding, especially during storm season, which meant the only people who lived there were the ones who were forced to. For reasons lost to time, the area was known as the Rookery. For reasons that were more obvious, the area between the Niner and the Tenner was simply called the Sludge, and Talfi doubted even Danr would walk there after dark.
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