by Anna Holmes
The earring’s whine is still reverberating in my skull. Under my breath, I tell him, “You weren’t sure about that answer you gave her.”
He nods, taps the earring. “Starting to wish I’d thought of a gift that gets me into less trouble.”
“Alain.”
“I have to try,” he says, setting his hands to my shoulders and his forehead to mine. “Tell me you don’t understand.”
“I do.” If I could risk my own life to take away the certainty that my friend’s will end, I would. And yet, and yet, and yet.
Alain settles in front of Tressa again once the cloth is on her forehead and Kai’s unfurled a sheet over her lower body. Tressa keeps quiet, though the way her eyes pinch shut with each labored breath says more than enough. Riley is unusually pallid, traveling back and forth between Tressa’s side and mine. At last, I catch him by the shoulder and pin him in one spot for a moment. “What is taking so long?” he mutters under his breath.
“Easy,” I whisper back.
“Easy—every moment we stall is another moment she has to endure.”
“I know. Nobody’s stalling.” Alain is, however, spending a worrying amount of time with his eyes closed. His extended, trembling, scaled-over hand is clearly straining for something, though the target is not visible. Once again, I'm brought to the brink of interrupting him, and yet again, I pull back for fear of breaking his spell irretrievably. What part of the story are you telling, my love? I want to ask.
But I don’t. I wait and try to hold myself and my heartbrother together while staying as unobtrusive as possible. Alain might not keep the religion, but living through this sort of moment—suspended helplessly in time with nothing to do but wait—is precisely why so many do. I hope he’ll forgive me, but in case it does any good at all, I send my thoughts out to the unknown. Let whatever this is work. Keep Tressa with us. Keep Alain healthy through it, too.
I would hope that a situation with so many unknowns should please our mysterious divine and bend their ears to me, but I have been in enough situations like this one that I know it's not quite that simple. Just in case, though, I squeeze my eyes closed and repeat silently to the darkness. Let whatever this is work. Keep Tressa with us. Keep Alain healthy through it, too.
I open them again only when I hear Alain's voice call out a command. “Think, Tressa,” he barks. “I need you here for this.”
She nods, a fine sheen of sweat breaking out over the light brown hide that covers her skin. And then that hide starts to retreat. I blink, sure that the tears I’ve been fighting are messing with me. That must be it.
And then I catch sight of her nose. It’s lengthening into a point, the nostrils narrowing. Kai, too, seems to jump. “How—?” Alain just holds up a finger in the doctor’s general direction. His eyes stay closed, his chest pushing up and down at uneven intervals. Kai murmurs, “Not possible.”
Alain has been known for an impossible thing or two. As it’s wont to do, my shoulder stings just for a moment while I’m thinking of it. As though I could possibly massage it through the breastplate, my hand travels to the site. But that knocked him out when he was at his best. My hand closes around the lip of the gorget and tugs subconsciously like the armor is closing around my throat. I might need to pray harder.
A burst of force and heat pushes outward from Alain the way it had in the war room, accompanied by a brilliant flash of blue light. I have to throw up an arm to keep the brightest of it from searing my eyes. When I can finally pull it away, he’s still upright—exhausted, yes, but awake and alive. Under the sheet, a pair of smallish feet protrude, and Tressa struggles to sit up. Kai rushes forward to fold the sheet down to her waist and the bottom of it up to expose her uninjured, unscarred human knees. He sits back on his heels and buries his face in his hands, either weeping or laughing uncontrollably. Riley rushes forward to pick her head up from the ground. “Did it work?” she asks, dazed.
Riley seems to fumble about for words, dark eyes saucers. “Well, assuming the it is that the prince turned you human, then—yeah.”
“Human,” she repeats. “I’m—human?”
“Temporarily,” Alain gasps, clutching his arm to his waist. “But long enough.”
Tressa gives a startled little ha, her hands feeling for her waist, her legs, her ears, her face. All of a sudden, she freezes, her eyes traveling the air as if she’s tracing something writ in it. She looks up slowly to face Riley. He looks down at her in bafflement. Then she seizes his shirtfront and jams her face into his in a kiss.
At first as it does with any unexpected contact, his back goes utterly rigid, his eyes widening in shock. In a moment or two, however, he wraps his other arm around her, and now I'm uncomfortable. I turn to Alain for something else to occupy myself and whisper, “I was not expecting that. Do you need a hand up?”
“Just—need a minute,” he answers.
I run my hand through his hair. “Well done, dearest.”
Riley and Tressa finally part, and she says, “Sorry—I've been waiting a while and I only have till the prince goes to sleep again.”
“What do you mean?” he asks, frowning in confusion and smiling uncontrollably at the same time.
“I mean, it’s his spell, so—” She looks over. “Alain?”
I look down again and find him teetering ever so slightly. I stoop, hold out my hands to steady him. “I think we need to get you sitting down.”
“I’m fine,” he answers, wobbling forward toward my outstretched arms. “Just—fine.”
He misses my arms altogether and falls forward. I lunge to catch him, wait a second for him to pick himself up as he usually does. Instead, he goes totally slack, like a sail with no breeze draped over the mast of my forearms. I sink all the way to the ground and turn him over only to find his eyes shut and his breaths very shallow. I touch his face and the heat nearly burns my skin. I shake him gently. “Come on, don’t do this,” I whisper. “We’re so close. Just hang on.”
No answer. I sag a little, crestfallen. I should not have expected one, but hope dies hard.
Things move fast after that. Riley puts Tressa safely in the office portion of the warden's building, and after that everyone seems to be rushing around the hidden chamber. Everyone except Alain and me. Me, because I wouldn’t know what to do if I had written instructions and a map and it’s best that I stay out of the way, and him….
He’s not unconscious, exactly. Nuthatch seems to think that in the moments before he collapsed, Alain must have cast something to render himself inert, to protect himself from total depletion. Maybe even involuntarily. It’s a nice theory, but that’s all it is, and it doesn’t make this any easier. He lies unmoving, shirtless, shoeless, the scars of his time here exposed on the same cold examination table the Legion forced on him. After all the work he’d done to escape this place, to try to escape what it did to him, their cruelty continues.
I lean forward on my chair, change out the cloth on his forehead for the sixth time. His body has cooled a little since the moment of his collapse, but still, every time I take the formerly soaked cloth from his head, it’s bone dry. I lay a fresh one on top of his forehead and wipe a streak of dirt from his face before it can reach the wide quill-like protrusions lining his cheekbones. “Ah, dear,” I say softly, tracing the edge of the cryst where it meets his skin. “You’ve done it this time.” I know why, but the knowledge doesn’t make any of this easier than the theory.
Slowly, I lower my head to his chest. His heart beats neither slow nor fast, but steadily. I close my eyes and listen to the even drumming, laying my hands next to my head, letting his pulse resonate in the places he’s left hollow.
In the days of the war, the Resurgence had a drummer—not an official post, but a woman who’d played for my father in the old days, who’d learned the rhythm of war even in times of peace. I’d listened to her insistent strikes, the resonant space between, watched my fighters, bedraggled as they were, called back to the spirit of the fight,
felt myself rise too, buoyed by the beats against the hide. The same magic to the frenzy of percussion is here in his heartbeat, and as tired as I am, as lonely and lost and frightened as I am, I feel the fight coming back. It hasn’t left him, and now he’s lending it to me. Unbidden, a smile breaks across my face, and I turn to push aside the scarf and press my lips to the flat of his chest. “You keep doing that,” I whisper to that pugnacious drumbeat. “You keep beating, you understand me?”
I laugh a little, wiping my eye on my rough broadcloth sleeve. After everything I’ve seen, everything just today, hope still dies hard.
“So you do love him,” a voice comments from the foot of the stairs.
I start. The hidden chamber is maybe three times the size of the building atop it, long and wide enough that I only sometimes catch the sounds of the feverish preparations being made at the other end behind the maze of partitions. Long and wide enough that I missed Jori’s entrance. I sit upright slowly, level my gaze at her. “I would hope,” I say firmly, “that under the circumstances we can skip the needless competitive provocation. Yes, I love him. You do too, or whatever your version of love looks like. Let’s just focus on getting him right.”
She steps fully into the room, turning her head to somberly take in the state of him. I want to yell at her that she did this, that every slash across his body was hers even if she didn’t hold the whip, but I don’t. I settle for balling my damp fists on my knees and staying wrathfully silent. We need her cooperation, like it or not.
“You damned fool,” she says quietly, reaching out as though to touch his hand. At the last moment, just as I start to open my mouth to object, she pulls back. Her emerald eyes stay locked on his face. “Why would you do that?” she asks him.
“He saved his friend.”
She laughs, still subdued. “Yeah, he would, wouldn’t he.”
“Caring isn’t a weakness.”
“No?” She gestures to the table with her still bound hands. “Then why did it get him damned closed to dead?”
“Magic did that. It has a cost.”
“Tell you that, did he?” She starts to round the table, passing his feet. “He’s wrong. It’s choosing that carries a price. I should know.”
“Yeah, your choices have all been very smart.”
She arches her eyebrows. “They were. That’s what cost me. That’s why I lost him.”
It’s getting hard to stay contained. My face heats up, and I’m shedding an embarrassing amount of light. “No, you made inhuman choices, and that’s why you lost him. You put him in here and grief for you led him out, and now he’s stuck here again. Because of your choices. And now instead of trying to help fix what you can, you’re here degrading yourself by arguing over a boy who does not want you and might not even live through the night. Because of your choices.”
“And you’re so sad about that, aren’t you,” she hisses. “You were there to pick up the pieces, to kiss it all better. A magnanimous monarch, you are, taking your little wounded bird and letting him debase himself singing for you time and again. When he’s done being your charity case, remembers himself, what he could be out of your shadow, free of your weak little reign and out in the world where he belongs, yes. I will be there.” She spreads her hands to the limit the chain will allow, her mouth smiling, her eyes staring murder straight into my skull. “There’s no fight, valsht. All I have to do is wait.”
“You might be waiting a while,” I mutter. If I ever let him get to making that proposal, a very, very long while.
“Well,” she says, cocking her head to the side. “If I get bored, there are ways to speed things along. Almost had you the last time.”
“You know, that hurt him, too. Maybe more than it did me.”
“And next time I’ll be there with a handkerchief and a dustpan to sweep up all his little pieces. I told you. Once he’s cried all he can cry, the night he stops murmuring your name in his sleep, the moment he starts to forget your face, I will be there. Just like you were.”
Kai rounds the corner of the last partition, frowning deeply at Jori. “Can I assume you can comport yourself long enough to take care of my patient?”
She scowls. “Like you have a choice.”
“I have a choice. The Queen could have any number of casters here in a moment. She was allowing you to be here out of kindness and convenience and a chance to redeem yourself.”
The earring shrills loud and long, but I keep my face neutral. It’s extremely hard not to stare at him and ask what the hells he’s doing, but whatever the case, it seems to be having some sort of an effect on Jori, whose lips pinch together so hard they turn white. “I was this close to leaving you on that lakeshore and she was the one who suggested you come along. So I suggest you show some godsdamned gratitude. Failing that, go get Bannon to remove those shackles, and I swear to gods, if you bungle or distract from this procedure in any way, you will regret it.”
He produces a small mirror from his belt, and a look I’ve never seen on her crosses Jori’s face. Abject terror. I’d be more concerned, except the earring went off when he said that, too. Without another word, she hurries from the examination area. I watch and let some time and silence elapse before asking, “Why’d you lie?”
He sighs, looks down at Alain. “He risked his life to save my sister, which is more than I did. If he trusts you enough, then so do I. If I can do nothing else for him, helping his…queen be rid of that pestilence is a start.”
I’m oddly touched. “You can do more for him than that, though, yeah?”
Kai looks seasick. “I truly, truly hope so. And I think so. If our calculations are correct, and the small girl with the nose for formulaic errors seems to think they are….”
“That’s good enough for me.” I nod toward the mirror. “What’s that?”
“Oh, this,” he says, fidgeting with it. “It’s a mirror.”
“Then why the hells did it scare her off like that?”
“Because it used to be more than a mirror. Nasty little artifact that can suck out a caster’s soul and imprison it as a focus. Or could, before I destroyed the enchantment.” My eyes go wide. “Yeah,” he says, looking at the burnished brass cover and the symbols ringing it. “Not every mage is as principled as yours here. That’s why I was using my time as Arrow to hunt down these artifacts. Figured I’d done enough harm in the world. High time I helped. In the meantime—” he flips the mirror shut and leaves it on the metal tray next to Alain's table “—it’s been a useful enough deterrent.”
I nod slowly, still a little dumbstruck. “Well, thanks. For all of it. You know—the country is in need of a court physician with scruples. I think you qualify.”
He laughs nervously, rubs at the back of his neck. “Ah. Tempting. But you may want to wait until I’m successful in treating the prince before making any sort of offer.”
I clasp his shoulder. “I have complete confidence.”
The earring lets out a little ringing noise, and I turn away and pull it from my ear. I don’t need that right now.
Kai clears his throat, kindly refraining from mentioning that he knows what the earring does. “Gavroth,” he yells. A splintering of wood answers as a huge fist crashes through the nearest partition. I jump. Nuthatch slaps a hand to his face. “I didn’t mean like that.”
Gavroth’s great ginger grin appears in the gap. “Why waste time and tools when a punch will do? The princess knows what I’m on about.”
I tilt my head. “You’re sure you’re going to be all right to do this?”
He frowns. “Sure I am. Why, what did I…? You’re the queen. Not a princess. Right. I can still read a formula. Little Miss Alchemist can help.” He glances over at Alain. “You’re going to need all the help you can get.”
Kai nods and starts rolling up his sleeves. He’s covered his bloodstained clothes with a meticulously clean white smock and settles a pair of glasses on his nose. “Go get the others,” he tells Gavroth.
�
�Right,” he says, disappearing from the hole he’s made.
Footsteps echo down the rest of the dark room. Left visible by the hole is a strange object— a large yellowish gemstone, cut, polished, mounted on an iron tripod, a pair of handles in its setting. “Is that…?” I start.
“The focus,” he answers. “I want to be able to keep an eye on its user this time.”
Gavroth comes back around the corner, Elle astride his shoulders and a huge bag at his side. His eyes travel up to her. “What I still don’t understand is how you’re planning to deal with the erosion of the base elements in the mixture.”
She folds her arms atop his head and leans over slightly. “Easy. Ever cured a hangover?”
He chuckles appreciatively. “Shevat, kid, this might just work. How many hangovers have you cured, exactly?”
“I told you. Sailors.” She catches my eye and tosses me a metal clamp as Gavroth. “Plug his nose.”
Once I’ve situated the clamp on his nose and tilted his head back as instructed, I’ve about exhausted my usefulness. I still can’t bring myself to leave the room. I retreat to the back corner and pick up the mirror. The metal feels warm, as though someone’s been holding it between their hands. I know very little about magic, but I do know that it has the same feel as my earring. Maybe it no longer eats souls, but there is some enchantment here. Maybe to keep casters from realizing its old purpose is dead. Or maybe Kai likes to look extra pretty when he looks in it. I don’t know. Either way, I catch his eye in the midst of his preparations. “Can I hold onto this?”
“Good idea,” he answers, gesturing with his chin down the hall. The clinking of chains is growing louder.
From the bottom of the table, he draws up thick leather straps and starts wrapping them tight around Alain's shoulders, chest, waist. I frown. “What are those for?”