Cleaning myself was made all the more difficult by the fact that my hands, despite the steaming heat of the spring, were trembling violently. I felt frayed, untethered – directionless and frenzied like an animal in a trap.
And I couldn’t get the fucking blood out of my hair.
“Silas?”
No matter how hard I scrubbed, there was a tangle of blood and some vile strip of flesh that was caught in my hair, and it wouldn’t come out.
“Silas – Silas, I know you’re still scared—”
It’s hard for me to explain it effectively – after what had happened, I felt a deep, compulsive need to be clean. I had to be clean. If I could get the blood and organs off of me, I could relax – or maybe that’s just what I told myself, I don’t know. The only thing I could focus on was the frantic desire to just get it off, get it off, why wouldn’t it come off?
“You have to calm down enough to tell me what happened – Silas—”
Off, off, off, off, I chanted to myself. I didn’t want this, I didn’t want it. It was all over me and under my skin. I couldn’t get it out. It wouldn’t come out no matter how hard I scrubbed—
“Silas, stop.”
I felt hands grab my wrists. Shoulder-deep in water, I had to lift my chin far to stare up at Perenor, who was crouched by the side of the spring.
“Stop,” he said again, eyes sad and anxious.
“W-w-w-w-w-want it off,” I choked. My throat was constricted.
“I know,” he said. “I know, Silas. Let it soak.”
Despite the heat of the water, I shuddered, and my chin fell to my chest. Perenor hesitated, then scooped up a handful of water to drizzle over the stubborn mat of blood. In another situation, I would have been surprised by such a tender gesture, but frayed and frantic as I was, all I did was let my eyes fall shut and try to get my breathing under control.
“You’re safe now,” he said. “You’re all right.”
But I didn’t feel safe. In my mind, I was replaying every visceral detail of their deaths, and it was not the sort of thing that would calm me down. I began to wheeze, and I gripped the hard, rocky edge of the spring to keep myself from falling apart.
“Ssh. Silas, do you remember when we were children? When we still shared a bedroom?”
The question was strange enough to, if not soothe me, then at least distract me for a moment. I did remember, of course. Siblings always shared a room in the formative years of childhood; theirs was allegedly a sacred bond, one that was to be reinforced whenever possible. It had never really worked with Perenor and me.
“Do you remember the song?”
It took me a moment, but I did. It came back to me as incomplete melodies and disjointed lyrics.
“I remember when we came up with it,” Perenor continued as he rubbed at the mat of blood in my hair with his fingers. “Grandmother was hosting a party downstairs, and you couldn’t sleep because of how frightened you were by all the people, even though they couldn’t see us.”
The memory became clearer. I was amazed that Perenor remembered it at all. We couldn’t have been more than thirty seasons old.
“I didn’t want you to feel scared, so I just made up a song, and it worked. Do you remember?”
Under the milky surface of the water, I rubbed my hands into my knees. “I’ll go with you, over the ocean,” I sang, though that may not have been how it started. Out of the corner of my vision, Perenor grinned.
“I’ll take you with me, into the sky.”
“Th-then it w-w-w-was something about a b-b-boat.”
“A flying boat,” Perenor corrected. “As I recall, it took you away from all the scary things in the world.”
Despite myself, I smiled. I didn’t have that many good memories from my childhood, but that was one of them. “W-w-w-we were s-s-so close b-back then,” I said, before I could stop myself.
Perenor, by his expression, was thinking the same thing. “Yeah,” he answered, massaging the mat of hair between his palms. “You used to sing that song whenever you got scared. Until one day you just stopped.”
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t remember why I’d stopped. It hadn’t been long before Perenor and I grew apart, but it happened so early that I couldn’t remember what had done it.
“You s-s-stopped singing it to m-m-me, t-too,” I said.
“Yeah,” Perenor answered slowly. “I did.”
He worked the bloody tangle from my hair and smoothed it out. Then he withdrew his hands from the water and leaned back on his palms.
“Better?”
I released a long breath. There was still a tight knot of dread in me, but it was no longer turning me into a shaking mess. I nodded weakly.
“Did he possess you again?” Perenor asked, gently. “Like at the confirmation?”
Carefully, haltingly, I explained. I told him about the ambush, the woman’s threats, their words, the Night Father’s possession of me. I stopped short before I got to the part where they were ripped into ribbons. I trusted Perenor could glean enough from context.
“Silas,” he said when I trailed off. “I… shit. He just swooped in and killed them? Just like that? I suppose you are his Godspeaker, so he has a duty to protect you, but…”
I fought away the images of as best I could. “P-P-P-Perenor,” I said, “I th-think you n-n-need to t-teach me d-d-defensive Craft.”
I’d startled him, clearly. “What? Craft?”
“It’s either C-C-Craft or physical c-c-combat,” I said, “and m-most days, a s-s-stiff wind could overpower me.”
I lifted my arms out of the water demonstrably. Unlike Perenor’s well-constructed musculature, I was assembled almost entirely from paper-thin skin and birdlike bones.
“Silas, I’ll protect you,” he said.
“And as w-w-we’ve d-discovered,” I answered, “there w-w-will be circum-m-mstances in wh-which you won’t b-b-be there to d-do so.”
I dropped my hands back into the water. Perenor frowned down at me.
“It’s not…” He sighed, pushed a hand through his hair. “It’s not as simple as that. You can’t just learn combat Craft.”
“I’m a q-q-quick study,” I said.
“Silas, people spend years—”
“Then j-j-just teach m-me the b-basics!” I said, grabbing the edge of the spring with both hands. “T-t-teach me enough to incapacitate so I c-c-can run.”
“That’s…”
He sighed a second time.
“We’ve g-g-got th-thirty more days on the L-L-Long Road,” I said. “T-teach me at the end of each d-d-day.”
Perenor’s mouth twisted. Just as I thought he was about to cave—
“He’s calm now?”
We both turned. Soya had arrived from the nearby copse of trees. She had a freshly-killed rabbit over her shoulder.
“Yeah,” Perenor said. “Well, I mean, he’s traumatized, but he’s stopped shaking.”
She nodded, opened the pack to find a sheet of waxed leather to wrap the rabbit in. “So it was Umbrion?”
“Yeah,” Perenor said.
“You’re sure?”
“Who else would it be?”
Soya eyed me a moment as she packed the rabbit in the waxed leather, face traced with the ghost of suspicion. She looked like she had a question hanging off the edge of her tongue, held in place by the same tension that holds dew to grass. I frowned when she didn’t answer Perenor’s question. Did she think it was me?
“So we’re dealing with a god who has a vengeful streak,” she said. “Is that his goal? To just kill everyone?”
“He seems pretty good at it so far,” Perenor answered.
“It seems too straightforward,” Soya said. “The gods are unknowable. Why would his only goal to kill us? There’s something more to the story that we don’t know.”
“Well, I’m sure if Silas just asks him, he’ll make everything perfectly clear,” Perenor said sarcastically.
Soya stilled. “Will he d
o that?” she asked.
“I wasn’t being serious,” Perenor said.
“I know you weren’t, I wasn’t asking you. Silas, if you ask him – pray to him – will he answer your question?”
I stared at her in silence. I had no idea. “M-m-maybe?” I answered “I m-mean, theoretically.”
She finished wrapping the rabbit and stood over me, limbs akimbo. “Well, he clearly won’t hurt you, so maybe try it.”
“That’s a stupid and terrible plan,” Perenor said at once.
“Why?” Soya challenged.
“Because it could implicate Silas and anyone around him,” Perenor answered. “Like you said, he’s a vengeful god – what if he got word that Silas got information out of him only to betray him with it?”
“If we’re not willing to talk to Umbrion, then what exactly is the point of having him?” Soya shouted.
Perenor stood up. “I’m not in love with your tone, Rhodan.”
“Well, I’m not in love with the three piles of blood and viscera they’re scraping off the dirt right now in Annolum!” Soya answered in kind. “I’m not in love with the city that broke in half and fell into the hot springs, nor all the people that followed it!”
“That wasn’t my brother’s fault, Rhodan, you said so yourself!”
“I know!” she bellowed, a bit too loud. I drew back away from her; a split second later, she seemed to check herself. “I know. I know, I’m just – I’m sorry, Silas.”
I swallowed a knot of anxiety in my throat. “It’s f-f-fine.”
“I just don’t want to arrive in Avenos without some kind of intel,” she said.
“Well,” Perenor said slowly, “if it’s intel you want, then apparently there’s someone after Silas. She sent those three after him, to kidnap him. Who’d be dumb enough to do that?”
“Plenty of people,” she answered, setting a change of clothes for me at the side of the hot spring. I slowly climbed out and took a drying cloth. “Anyone who survived the breaking of Ellorian, and some besides.”
“They’ll certainly try again,” Perenor said.
“I should think so.”
Perenor sighed. I dried my hair first, then my limbs and torso, then set to dressing. “This is still the best course for now,” he said. “He’s still safest in Avenos. We’ll reach out to this group that wants him from its safety, see what they have to say. After all, wanting to kidnap Silas is not necessarily a sign of bad intention. They must be against Umbrion in some capacity.”
I supposed that was true, although I was hardly eager to meet them.
“Maybe they can help us,” Perenor said. “Maybe they have a plan.”
“Yeah,” Soya answered. “I mean, hopefully.”
“We should avoid staying at the inn,” Perenor said. “Once they find those bodies…”
Soya nodded reluctantly. It hardly mattered to me. On a feather bed or rocky ground, I knew I wouldn’t sleep tonight.
Not only did I not sleep that night, I seemed to stop sleeping entirely.
I suppose it was bound to happen eventually. Apparently the number of people I could watch be ripped to shreds before I started losing sleep was somewhere between two and four.
Everything we didn’t say about what happened could have filled up the palace library a thousand times over. I could see the conflict on their faces. Soya wanted to interrogate me, Perenor wanted to leave it alone.
“I thought of something,” he said one morning, as we were setting up camp after a long day’s trek. The dryness of the ground was slowly turning to forest-dappled plains by then, and Soya’s trips to find firewood were getting longer, dryer brush getting harder to find.
I looked sideways at him. I was exhausted, and felt like I could barely see him.
“You said you wanted me to teach you defensive Craft,” Perenor said. “Assuming you’re as quick a study as you say you are, I think I might be able to.”
He sat down next to me and started to rummage through his pack.
“Normally, using Craft is borderline impossible without a channeler,” he said, “but then I remembered that I—”
“W-w-wait, stop.” Craft parlance was always lost on me. “Channeler?”
“Like my staff,” Perenor said. “Something, usually a weapon, carved with runes so Craft can be channeled through it more easily.”
“Oh.” I supposed there was quite a lot of theory that I was missing.
Perenor kept rummaging through his pack. “Anyway, a real runed weapon would take months to make and would cost more gold to buy than we have on hand at present. And besides, if I gave you a real runed weapon, you’d probably blow yourself up.”
“Thanks,” I said flatly.
“But then I remembered that – ah!”
He found what he was looking for at the very bottom of his bag. When he pulled it out, I didn’t know what it was at first – some sort of piece of leather. When he stretched it out, I recognized it as—
“A g-g-glove?”
“A runed glove,” he corrected. “It’s my old training glove. Much safer than a weapon, still lets you channel Craft.
He offered it to me. It was long and thick black leather, meant to reach the elbow. Runes were stitched into the underside with silver thread, along where the palm and wrist were and extending down the arm.
“Wh-wh-what makes this s-s-safer?”
“Well, for one, it’s not a weapon,” he answered. I experimentally tugged the glove on. The fingers were a bit short, and the fit a bit loose, but the leather was well worn and comfortable and it flexed easily. “And the runes are fewer, meaning that the scope and power of the Craft it can channel is reduced.”
“S-s-so you can t-train me with this,” I said, looking up at him.
“Well, not properly,” Perenor answered. “Not comprehensively. But I think I might be able to teach you the absolute basics.”
“I sh-sh-shouldn’t think I’d n-n-need to b-be a scholar in it,” I said. I extended my newly gloved hand out toward the half-assembled fire. “H-how does it—?”
I felt a sudden recoil. I wasn’t entirely sure what happened, apart from the fact that I abruptly went tumbling backwards to the sound of a loud crack.
“Okay, glove comes off for now,” Perenor said, tugging it off my hand as I scrambled back upright. The fire was now burning enthusiastically with what little kindling was available to it.
“H-h-h-how—?”
“A complicated combination of intention and energy,” Perenor answered. “Look, we’ll start actual practice tomorrow. There’s a whole thing with safety you should know before you put the glove on again.”
“You two all right?”
It was Soya, coming back with an armful of kindling.
“Who started the fire?” she asked when she saw it.
“Silas did,” Perenor said. “Quite without meaning to.”
Soya eyed me. “Huh.” She added some kindling to the fire; it slowly began to burn up with more strength.
“Don’t worry, I took the glove away.”
“For the best, probably,” Soya answered. “Did you check the trap? I think I heard it go off.”
“I’ll go look,” Perenor said. He gave me a pointed look. “No more glove.”
I held up both hands in surrender and he headed off into the small forest at the edge of which we had set up camp. I rubbed the palm of my hand. I was usually competent enough at things when I set my mind to them. Hopefully I’d progress quickly out of the accidentally setting things on fire stage of understanding Craft.
“Burn yourself?” Soya asked.
“N-n-no.” I was as surprised as she was. Soya added a few more sticks to the fire.
“I think the whole process is a little redundant,” Soya said. “I mean, what’s the point of self-defense when you have a god in your corner?”
The corner of my mouth twitched downward. “If I h-h-have a s-say in it,” I answered, slowly, trying my best not to take offense, “I’
d r-r-rather have th-those who’d d-d-do me harm unc-c-conscious, and n-not ripped apart.”
Soya hesitated, then slowed to a stop shoveling in kindling. “Right,” she said, belatedly. “You had no control.”
It was almost a question, and I hated that she wasn’t sure. I reached into the pack near my hip and produced a bag of dates. Soya sat down beside me, and the silence was tense but blessedly short.
“Didn’t you say to me – after you talked to the Vizier, didn’t you tell me about how you tapped into Umbrion’s power yourself?”
I frowned at her. “That w-w-w-wasn’t in my c-control, either,” I said. “And I’d r-r-rather not have it b-be my only r-recourse.”
“Right,” she said again.
More silence. I plucked a dried date from the bag; Soya watched the fire crackle.
“I guess your stomach is too weak to kill anyone anyway,” she continued. “Remember that time you cut your finger while cooking and passed out?”
I almost wanted to go back to the suspicion.
“You were barely even bleeding,” she said, grinning, “but you just went out like a candle. Smacked your head on the counter on the way down.”
“C-c-can we p-please talk about s-something else?”
“Oh! Or the time we went to the butcher’s—”
“S-S-Soya.”
“—and you threw up because she had blood on her hands?”
“It was g-g-gross!”
“Animals bleed, Silas,” Soya laughed. “Did you expect them not to?”
“Are we making fun of Silas’s weak stomach?” It’s Perenor, coming back out of the woods with a rabbit over his shoulder. “I want to join in. Did I ever tell you about the time he cried at dinner because he could still see the pig’s face?”
“I w-w-was forty s-seasons old!”
“That’s hilarious,” Soya said.
“Wh-why are we m-making fun of m-m-me? P-Perenor’s s-stupid, l-let’s laugh at him f-for that.”
“I’m not stupid,” Perenor snipped.
“You’re kind of stupid,” Soya answered, laughing.
It felt nice to laugh, even if it was only at ourselves, and even if it was only for a little while. Mostly, it felt good to think about something else – anything at all.
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