The Talon & the Blade

by Jasmine Silvera

  The sound tearing from Gregor’s chest was a beast of its own—grief. It shredded him from the inside out, leaving him a husk. “You’ll let her die here.”

  “I would have let her die five minutes ago,” Raymond said. “As a mercy.”

  “There is no mercy in this,” Gregor screamed. “What life did she have before you sent her to die for you?”

  Raymond’s eyes narrowed, and Gregor prepared himself to die with Ana. The calm settled over him. So be it. He held the necromancer’s gaze. But dying wouldn’t save her. He lowered his eyes. “Please.”

  Raymond’s gaze held the weight of consideration. With the pad of one thumb he traced a geas on her skin, leaving a fading trail of ochre sheen as he went. He ended with a single stroke between her eyebrows, leaning over her again to exhale a single breath into her nostrils.

  Ana inhaled. The bleeding stopped.

  “She needs more than I can give.” Raymond sank back on his heels, his elbow braced on his knee. “She has a few hours. Maybe less. Maybe enough to make the journey.” He reached forward and Gregor tensed. The necromancer’s smile held no humor. “Come now. It’s too late to fear me, you crazy son of a bitch.”

  Raymond’s thumb sketched a figure over his brow and cheeks, then dusted his eyelids. The power itched. Not a binding. Something else. “There is one thing that may stop this. The gift your master sent. I must stay and finish this. But the geas will allow you to enter my aedis unmolested and find the ambrosia. Touch nothing else or the consequences will be dire. One drop. Better less than more. There is no telling what too much will do to her in this state. When this geas wears off, if you are still inside, you will die.”

  New plan.

  Boat. Car. Aedis.

  Raymond’s gaze returned to the lifeless form of the unnatural thing he’d created out of love and the destruction it had wrought. In one hand he held the rusted manacle inscribed with symbols that had bound her. Without looking back at them, he gave a final command. “Go.”

  Gregor slid his arms behind Ana’s knees and under her shoulders. He scooped up her swords in one hand, and the blades sliced into his palms and rivulets of blood ran down, mixing with hers on the shale and wet sand. He felt nothing but the ticking of a clock inside him, marking her last breaths. Her head lolled at an unnatural angle.

  Boat. Car. Aedis. It was all he had left.

  “Stay with me, Ana. I need you.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Gregor gave more weight to speed over caution, hoping Raymond’s charm would be enough to hold her together as they bounced over the waves. He wrapped her in an old blanket reeking of oil and the ocean for the trip to the car and carried her up the silent dock. The small community he’d procured the boat from was quiet, but he could feel the eyes following them from the windows of the buildings nearby. A curtain stirred, faces appearing silhouetted by light, then drawing away. What did they feel—fear, hatred?

  The camaraderie of Azrael’s Aegis was its strength. They moved as a single mind, recognized all over the territory as the hand of the necromancer, and he stood at their head. The stirrings of human dissatisfaction cropping up in Prague had seemed like fleas on a giant’s back. What must it have been like for Ana, alone with a necromancer she could barely trust and a cohort nipping at her heels?

  A ragged sound escaped her as he settled her in the passenger seat. He pushed the car to speed, grateful for the clear road in the predawn hours. Sluggish but steady, her pulse beat under his fingertips. Impossible considering how much blood she must have lost.

  “You almost had me convinced,” she said between gasping breaths. “After the trick with the harpoon. To renegotiate my contract.”

  “That was pretty clever, wasn’t it?”

  She sucked her teeth. “But if this is what it feels like to draw your sword, you can keep your soul steel.”

  He laughed in spite of himself. Her eyes slid shut. He counted every hitching breath. Immortality did funny things to the ability to reckon time with any reliability. Once, in London, Azrael had gone into a library for “a moment” and disappeared for a week. Lysippe had laughed at Gregor’s concern, taken rooms at a local luxury spa, and proceeded to sample the menu of treatments. “You’ll learn to enjoy it. A few days for yourself here and there is a good trade-off for letting him drag you around the world for the rest of time.”

  He found it even less amusing now. A few hours could be two or ten at a necromancer’s pace.

  A little moan escaped her. When he peered into her eyes, it was clear Raymond’s magic kept her alive but did nothing to dull the pain.

  “You were right,” he said, hoping to distract her. “I misjudged. Raymond, the territory. I was arrogant and made assumptions I should not have. I only saw you. And I wanted…”

  “To rub in how good a deal you have with Azrael.”

  You to be safe. Aloud, he muttered, “I am good with negotiations.”

  She snorted. “You accepted Raymond’s oath, no questions asked.”

  “I knew what I was getting into when Azrael sent me.” He bit his tongue on the rest. I knew I would walk through hell with you the moment you told me to mind my business in the hall.

  Her eyes found his in the dark. “Why are you doing this?”

  Because waking up in a world without you, you and your terrible food and your inability to plan and your wonder—at whales and trees and people who love you—is no longer an option. The words stuck in his throat. “It seemed to irritate Raymond.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s yelled at him like that in a few hundred years.” Amusement quaked in her voice. “I was pretty sure he was going to end you.”

  After a moment he laughed too. It felt good, this aching deep in his chest. “So was I.”

  “Death comes to us all at some time or another,” she said. “You owe me nothing.”

  I owe you everything.

  On the night he’d taken his vow, when the words had been exchanged but the gift not yet given, he’d stopped Azrael. “One more thing. I want—I need to keep this.”

  His hand settled over the scar on his chest. Curiosity quirked Azrael’s lips in an amused smile. They’d been in close enough quarters that Gregor had seen Azrael’s scars a time or two. He wondered that the necromancer who could have made himself unblemished had kept them and knew they must convey some meaning.

  “A memento?”

  Gregor did not answer.

  Azrael’s eyes darkened, but he nodded. After the exchange, Gregor drew the sword for the first time. When Gregor regained consciousness, the necromancer’s power racing through his body, he studied himself in the warped mirror. Subtle changes marked his physique—increased strength, the sloughing of damage from sun and wind, the disappearance of signs of age. The scar remained, unchanged. A reminder of what a foolish master emotion is.

  In the car he touched his chest where the uneven jagged line ran, surprised to find the well of memories clambering to the surface. He’d spent hundreds of years building a barrier so they could not remind him of what it was to be human: to hope, to fear, to love. He’d thought himself better without them. Cold calculation, willing to make sacrifices.

  “The only things worth fighting for are the things you believe in. The things you love,” Lark had chided him. He’d buried that truth away with the rest of the memories.

  This was what Azrael had seen when he’d chosen Isela. What she’d embraced when she knit herself to the necromancer. Fighting together made them stronger; fighting for one another made it matter. There was no serving one without the other.

  Ana had given this truth back to him. Truths hurt. Maybe a story was good for relieving that pain too.

  Gregor cleared his throat. “How about a story?”

  Ana’s smile filled him with relief. “Going to tell me about your not-a-demon?”

  “We have some time to kill.”

  She grunted, and her gaze skated over the dashboard screen before her eyes closed. The memories cr
owded his chest and his throat until if he inhaled deep enough, he could smell the pine and bayberry.

  “My commanding officer sent me on a reconnaissance mission with two in my unit who had no love for me. I was not supposed to return. I managed to get the best of them, but not before one left me bleeding out from this.” He touched the line on his chest. “I should have died.”

  He spoke of Haven, and Heinrich and Iain and Talking House. And Lark, putting him back together with herbs and her voice. Of the years he’d become something more than a foolish, brokenhearted boy to earn the heart of a woman who shouldered the burdens of the world.

  “Lark would do anything to protect her folk. And they followed her without question. She also could outshoot me with my own rifle. I was determined to be worthy of her. I failed, often and spectacularly for years before I figured out how. Still, she chose me anyway.” He paused with wonder in that. Her patience. Her forgiveness. Her strength. “We were married by an old Quaker. A common law marriage. For outlaws. Still, I used to dream of a gravestone in my family’s crypt with her name on it beside mine. Ridiculous, no? To have been willing to give up all this for love?”

  Ana’s eyes stayed on him. “Not at all.”

  After the war, as colonies became states and new laws were drafted, they fought attempts to overrun the settlement by militia and scavengers alike. He grew weary of fighting as Lark grew more patriotic, more determined to carve a life out of the land of her birth.

  It was one of many little ways they began to fracture. Moments of silence between them became vast crevices.

  Gregor broached the subject on the next hunting trip with Titus. The former slave served in the Continental Army during the war, where his ability to read and write and knowledge of military strategy gleaned from listening in on conversations had made him a favorite of his commanding officer. When the war ended, his owner reneged on the agreement to free him, so Titus ran. Lark’s brother had helped to hide him until they could bring him to the relative safety of Haven.

  “Should go before we can’t.” Titus stared into the fire. “Declaration of Independence wasn’t for us. They say that new gin will increase production of cotton and the need for bodies to grow and harvest it. If that time comes, papers won’t matter when they come with the chains.”

  Gregor wrote his father, and on the next supply run received a letter welcoming him back with open arms. His commander had entered him as missing and presumed dead in official documents. Apparently reporting desertions was bad for the man’s own record. After years of mourning him, his family was ecstatic.

  “There’s a ship leaving, from Philadelphia,” Gregor told Lark over dinner. “Perhaps it’s time we took a honeymoon.”

  She saw right through him. As always. “You mean not to come back.”

  He showed her the letters, waiting impatiently as she read each word. When she finally looked up again, he was on his feet, pacing the cabin. “They’ve settled a sum on us. A belated wedding present.”

  “A sum.” She echoed the words.

  He tried to lighten the moment with humor. “Princeling, remember.”

  Silence greeted him.

  “Little bird. Say something.”

  “Your little adventure in the wilderness is done. Time to run home. Did you enjoy playing frontier man?”

  “I’ve never—”

  “How can you think of leaving now? These people need us.” Haven didn’t need Lark anymore. But he did. Now he just had to make her see it.

  “Look around, Lark. Haven is finished. Most of the cabins are empty. Talking House says they will join up with the Catawba or Cherokee. Titus is taking a group up to Ohio when the weather turns. I spoke with your brother—he won’t feel safe until they make Toronto. We need to go.” Titus’s words haunted him. “Now, before we can’t.”

  “We,” she echoed.

  The calm steadiness in her voice confused him. Where was his fiery wife, the one who shouted down men who towered over her, including him? “You are my wife.”

  “Your property? You decide to turn tail and run, and I am just baggage to be loaded on your wagon.”

  “You’re being absurd.”

  “Am I?” She rocked back in her chair, contemplating him.

  “I vowed to protect you—and I am afraid I won’t be able to do that here.” He took a deep breath to steady himself. “And there is so much more out there to see Lark, so much more than just—”

  “This backwater?” Her voice lowered, the silky purr lulling him into thinking she was beginning to come around. “This falling-down cabin in a gully so high in the mountains even the bears won’t come here?”

  He nodded.

  “More than this rabble of runaway slaves and Indians without a place to go? A castle to escape to?”

  He froze. She’d trapped him again, led him into a briar of words in which every turn cut like thorns. She rose from their dinner table, collected the plates and slapped them into the slop bucket.

  “Someone has to fight for the future of this country and all the people in it.” She refused to look at him. “There’s talk of a route to get slaves to freedom. I want to help.”

  “You’ll get yourself killed. Or worse.”

  Lark’s eyes fixed on him, solemn and unflinching. “The only things worth fighting for are the things you believe in. The things you love.”

  They argued bitterly. He booked them passage on a ship bound for the continent. She refused to discuss the trip. The last morning in the mountains she rose early, her belongings packed by the time he woke. He pressed the jäger rifle into her grip. She kissed him goodbye. “Go home, soldier.”

  She joined Iain and Talking House outside, hunting packs loaded and a single mule. Gregor watched, mute with anger. He wanted to turn away first. At the tree line, Lark waved the others on and the forest swallowed the two men and the mule. She cast a single glance over her shoulder, full of acceptance. Then she too, vanished.

  He needed one last glimpse of dark braids, riotous curls at her temples springing free.

  Still he remained. Dawn came through the turning branches.

  “Soldier.” Lark’s voice rang through the trees. “Husband.”

  He squinted at the sight of her on the ridge, the jäger strapped to her back. It comforted him, knowing she would carry some part of him with her even as she left him behind.

  “I will love you every day of my life.” Her voice broke. Something in her was dying, same as him.

  He did smile then, though it cracked his resolve. “We’re outlaws. Don’t you know better than to go whooping and hollering?”

  She laughed, the whiskey-rasp sound echoing.

  “I love you,” he managed before his throat closed.

  He stayed at the cabin. She was being stubborn. She would change her mind. A week passed. Two. He walked out of the wilderness alone. Days later in a hotel room in Charleston preparing to scrub off years of mountain living and return to civilization he’d once abhorred, he discovered the last bar of her soap in his bag and wept over the scent of her—pine and bayberry.

  In modern days, couples used the term “breaking up” for the dissolution of a relationship. Like a ship crashing on rocks, its many pieces once operating in concert now cast into an immovable, unfeeling obstacle and dashed to bits. Occasionally a salvager could come up with some useful piece, but the whole was never the same again.

  By the time he finally returned home, he’d served Azrael for twenty years. Tucked into the pages of his father’s old journals, letters in a familiar scrawling script caught his eye. The first had been addressed to him.

  Lark read enough to manage wanted posters and news dispatches, and wrote infrequent, often illegible notes scratched out on scraps of paper to her brother with shipments of pelts. He saw the labor she had put into this letter. Each word carefully formed, each sentence full of emotion. Her joy, her fear, her worry, her hope. She wished only for a chance to share this news with him, with no expectation. Th
e letter was kept with the one Gregor had written a year before, announcing their intention to return before his ship was lost to pirates and he was counted dead again. His father recorded his reply in his journal—news of Gregor’s death and her lack of claim to the title or privileges. But her letter must have moved him, because there was also a sum recorded.

  Gregor sighed and pushed the car out of a curve, gaining speed. “I was always close to my father, and he was generous with his grandchildren.”

  “Your child,” Ana breathed.

  “They corresponded for years,” he said. “He liked her candor, as I knew he would. Lark’s brother convinced her to settle in Toronto, and Rose—our daughter—was raised among her cousins. My father became a silent benefactor of sorts. Rose was educated in the best schools, had a family of her own. Lark married again, and well. They had no other children.

  “I was bound to Azrael by then, and perhaps he would have released me, but I told myself I didn’t want to upset the peace they’d found by showing up like an old ghost.” His voice strained under the weight of the truth. “I was a coward for leaving her to fight alone, and I was afraid. I couldn’t see how she would ever forgive me for not moving heaven and earth to get back to them.”

  He reached up at the sight of wetness at the corners of Ana’s lashes, thumbed away a tear. “It’s been centuries since I boarded that ship, and every step since then has brought me to you. I walked away once. I won’t do it again. So that is the tragic story of Gregor Alexander Leopold Von Schwarzberg.”

  He’d done away with much of it over time. He liked the way Gregor Schwarz sounded. Like the honed edge of the blade he had become. He didn’t judge Ana for giving herself the name that fit best. Hadn’t they all remade themselves with the help of necromancers?

  Ana closed her eyes. Panic gripped him. She’d seemed alert while he spoke. In the silence her breath seemed more labored. He checked her pulse.

  “I’m not finished,” he said, loud enough to startle her eyes open. “This is the most important part of the story. The part… the part that you need to know.”