32. No Future, No Past
DESDEMONA
Every now and again comes a Eunoia whose bare touch can incapacitate a person. This is because they have no control over the emotions they deposit into another. Do not touch this creature under any cost.
– A GUIDE TO SURVIVING IN VIRIDIS
The one who leaves returns alone.
I’ve been trying to decipher the prophecy. I think it means my mom will come back with or without my intervention, but I don’t know. As for time shattering and the universe dividing, I’m entirely stumped.
There’s also love being my demise and all that. I guess that’s about my mom. My love for her will take me to dark ends to get her back. Right?
I knock on Wendy’s door, and when there’s no answer, Calista tells me to check Azaire’s room. While I wonder if this is another trap from Lucian, there’s just no sensical way that it even could be, so I go.
I knock on the door, and a few minutes later Wendy walks out and right past me with messy hair and the top button of her uniform pants undone.
“Follow me.” We walk in silence to a corner of the garden. The mastick starts just behind a tall fountain, meaning we’re within the barrier. I think the fountain is supposed to be Zola. It has a scale in one hand—the sun on one plate and a moon on the other—and the roots of a tree wrapped around the other arm. What more do I need to decipher the goddess of balance and nature?
Wendy unbuttons her gloves. “I felt something when I channeled it. I can share it with you.” Of course she understood. I mean, what else do we have to talk about?
I grab her extended hands immediately.
Then I have to let go. I have to let go, but I can’t. It’s like her hands are glue and I can’t rip mine away. I can feel my brain slowing, my hands going limp.
Then it’s splitting agony, like there’s a zipper down my body and someone’s undone it and is pulling me out. The next part is agonizing loneliness, worse than I feel now. It’s debilitating. It’s everyone I love and could have loved, dead. It’s sitting in a blank, empty room, and the only chair is their bodies stacked one on top of the other.
I pull my hands from hers the second I can. “What the fuck was that?”
“Your prophecy,” she answers. Her eyes drop from mine and to my chest. “What stone do you wear?”
What a time to be asking such a question. Keep it hidden. “It was my mom’s.”
“Why do you wear it under your shirt?”
And why does this feel like an interrogation?
“To keep it safe.” My hand goes instinctively to it. “It’s the last piece I have of her.”
“Is it the Memorium?”
What an absolutely ridiculous question. It couldn’t be. “You do know I’m from the septic, right?” I almost laugh.
“Answer the question.” Her eyes glow green, and she stares into mine.
Like I’m scared of such a docile creature. My power surges through me, heat flooding my bones. I laugh at the mere thought that she thinks she could best me and say, “It’s not the Memorium.” My tone goes so bitter I have to spit the words out, “We don’t get to keep the precious stones, we only mine them.”
“The Memorium is a Soul Stone,” she says like I’m dense.
“All the more reason I can’t get my grubby hands on it.” I can’t stop myself from sneering at her. “Thanks for showing me the rest of the prophecy.” I don’t feel very thankful as I walk away. It just felt like death.
I stop when I hear the whispering. My head whips in the direction of the mastick. Trees rustle, and the whispering wind in my head grows louder.
“Help us.”
“What is it?” Wendy asks.
“You should go,” I say.
“What’s out there?” she demands.
“Nothing.” Certainly something, because a dark-gray cloud of smoke with four arms hovers toward us.
“Help me.”
Is that the corenth? This whispering that has just now become coherent?
I didn’t know corenths had a me. A herd of them share a soul, they’re not individuals.
Its arms—more like tendrils with a dark smoke wisping around them—reach for me while the wind pleads. I reach for it too. I have to hear what it has to say to me. Has this whispering been the corenths this whole time?
I think of the moonaro and the way the whispering grew then too. Is this why Lucian thinks I’m involved?
Branches wrap around the semi-solid creature while roots sprout from the ground and around its hovering form. The creature writhes beneath the restraints of the tree.
Wendy just saw everything. She might have felt it too.
“Thanks,” I say, playing it cool, at the same time that she says, “We need an arphac blade.”
“Go to Leiholan,” I tell her. At least one of us knows what it is we’re fighting. The creature breaks free from the tree and hovers toward Wendy—not me. “Go!” I say again.
She looks at me like I have two heads, but in the end, she nods and runs for the school, and I grab hold of the creature that slithers—in the air—toward her. It’s… scaly. “Help you what?” I whisper, and the blank slate of a creature turns to me. It looks like it blinks, but I don’t see any eyes.
“Causer of our pain, you are,”it hisses in my mind. “Never could we act for us.” Its words are muffled by a wind that I haven’t been able to explain until now. A wind that was always loudest beyond the barrier…
“How did you pass the barrier?”
“No more.”
“The barrier is broken?” I ask, trying to get a clear answer and straying further from it.
“For you, pain awaits. Free us and accept. Your fire draws you closer to the home.”
“That’s it?” I say a little louder than necessary. “That’s what you’ve been trying to say to me? That makes no sense.”
“Not me.”
“Is this a prophecy or something?” I can’t do another one of those.
“Not future, now.”
A tree pulls itself from the ground and its branches grow to the floor, like legs, pulling itself closer to us. It’s branches wrap around the semi-solid creature, and my hand draws away from its scaly skin.
Okay, so maybe I can’t take Wendy. I had no idea the Eunoia could do this. I thought they just healed people.
I retreat, backing right into Leiholan. He all but pushes me away, then unsheathes a sword I’ve never seen before. The blade isn’t silver—and not by design—it’s rusted away, unsharpened and forgotten.
Wendy has one hand pulled back to her shoulder, her fingers contorted and bony, while the fingers of her other hand wiggle. She’s controlling the tree.
“How do we kill it?” I ask.
“Drain its blood with the arphac blade,” Leiholan says and raises his sword, walking to the subdued corenth. A snake shoots past the arms—branches—of the tree. The snake swings around, hitting the trunk of the tree with so much force I hear multiple cracks before the thing finally breaks a hole in the trunk. Two of the corenth’s four arms slither out from the gap, coming right for me.
Everything becomes a blur. Leiholan steps in front of me, then the arm wraps around his calf so tightly that he screams.
I look to Wendy, waiting for her to do something, to save him. But her hands drop to her stomach and she falls to the floor, gasping like there’s no air in her lungs.
The tree snaps in half with a crack that sounds so… alive.
Leiholan is being pulled across the ground and Wendy is still on the floor, and I have nothing but my throwing knives and a box of matches.
Unsheathing quickly, I hold one of my knives by the tip of its blade, closing one eye and trying my best to estimate how far off I have to throw to account for the movement. It’s just an austec, I tell myself, one that Damien didn’t electrocute nearly enough and happens to be moving faster than I can.
Somehow, I cut off the arm that drags Leiholan, but the snake—its tongue, I realize—takes the position I’d just relieved the arm of. It bites so deep into Leiholan’s leg that I’m not sure he’s going to get to keep it, if he gets to keep his life at all. The corenth roars, but it doesn’t turn to me. It pulls Leiholan in entirely, wrapping its three remaining arms around his torso.
With the sword we need to kill it.
I run for the creature, slicing at its tail that hovers just above the ground. I throw the knife at one of the arms that holds Leiholan and another at what I think is the thing’s neck. Not that it seems to care.
The snake, covered in Leiholan’s blood, comes right for me. I throw another knife in its eye that’s even bigger than the bullseye of my targets. Another tongue shoots from the snake’s mouth and wraps around my neck. I writhe and claw at the dry, sandy thing, but it’s no use.
And suddenly, I don’t seem to care at all! This is funny, I’m being choked to death, I know that, and I am entirely calm. At peace with it. The stillness in my lungs is oddly comfortable. Death is the only promise, and I’m just happy that something is being promised at all.
Stars fill my vision before the word goes black, and there’s nothing I can do, and I feel good about it.
When I can see again, the branch of a tree is hugged tightly around me and the world is moving toward me. Then away from me. Everything turns, and I see another two of the corenth’s four arms on the ground, next to Wendy, whose hands are glowing green. Two trees are growing from nothing, and then they tug on the corenth’s last arm. Leiholan falls out of its grasp, unconscious, the bottom half of his leg held on by a limb beneath his knee while he bleeds out at too rapid of a pace.
He’s going to die, and I don’t want him to. I was going to die, and I was okay with it. Arphac blade, snake, calming its prey, of course. This is one of Serpencia’s greater corenths.
Both Wendy’s hands twist in an unnatural way, and the corenth is being restrained by three trees—one of them the one that holds me, I think. Wendy takes the sword, holding it in both hands over her head, and plunges it into the creature.
In one jerking movement, she pulls the sword down the creature’s body. Blood sprays out from the sudden cut, and Wendy twists the sword even further and gives it one last push. The tip of the blade comes out from the other end.
The corenth falls to the floor, its black-and-blue intestines spilling out of its stomach, and Wendy falls to her knees, clutching her stomach again.
I run to Leiholan, unconscious and bleeding out, cursing under my breath. “You have to heal him!” I downright cry, turning to Wendy. She’s taking shallow breaths, and suddenly I’m not sure she can do anything.
“Leiholan?” I slap his cheeks. “Open your eyes!” Slap, slap, slap. “Now!”
He can’t leave me now. Not yet.
Slapping and shouting does no good. Even if his eyes would just open and even if I could bear his weight, we’d never be able to make it to the school. Blood moves from his leg like a waterfall, filling the ground beneath me like a river. “Just. Wake. Up.” I turn to Wendy without leaving Leiholan and hold out my hand. “Channel me.”
Her eyes meet mine—the green less vibrant than they were a moment ago. In fact, the green of the entire corner of our garden looks less vibrant. But she nods, putting her palms on the floor and pushing herself to her feet, walking and sitting next to me. With sluggish movements, she pulls one glove off and grabs my hand.
Burnout overpowers me, and a pit the size of Wendy grows in my stomach, pushing me to puke. When I do almost puke, she lets go of my hand, and every feeling of burnout dissipates. I put together that this is Wendy’s feeling, not mine.
She grabs one of his arms and pulls him halfway upright, gesturing to me to grab his other side. We pull him upright entirely, walking his limp body to the school, his semi-attached leg dragging behind us. Sometimes I step in the puddles of blood that follow Leiholan and it splashes up my ankles.
We take him to a room I’ve never seen before, full of plants and jars of herbs and the walls are all made of wood: the infirmary. Three Eunoia rush around us, pulling him into a room and onto a bed, but no more of them come.
He’s going to need more of them.
Wendy nods to me once, her face still covered in spurts of blood, and she leaves. I follow into the room where Leiholan lies and one of the Eunoia says to me, “We can’t mend his leg.”
She moves across the room, grabbing a jar, and I recognize her. The woman who told me Lilac was attacked by a corenth from Soma.
The bed where Leiholan lays shines a bright green from the Eunoia’s magic. “But he’ll live?” I ask.
The woman rushes back to Leiholan and sprinkles something over his leg. I don’t know how that could help.
“Possibly.” Her hands light green again and the bleeding on Leiholan’s stump of a leg starts to lessen.
The three of them stop working, making their way to the door. The bleeding hasn’t even stopped. “You’re done?” I ask.
“The next group will come in soon,” the woman says to me.
“But he’s still bleeding.”
“We can’t risk burnout.”
“What about his life?” my voice strains.
“It’s up to Zola now,” she says to me like I’m a child. “He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Then give him more blood!” I hold out my fist to her, my wrist facing the ceiling. “Give him my blood.”
“The Folk can’t give to Nepenthe.” She looks stunned by my offer.
“Please,” I say, “just keep him breathing.”
She frowns, then she locks the door. “Look, there are rules around what we are allowed to do to heal the Nepenthe.”
“Okay,” I say, but she locked the door, so I know there has to be more.
She exhales a shaking breath and waits a little longer. “You’re a Fire Folk, aren’t you?” she whispers, and I nod. “If you cauterize his wound, that’s his best chance of survival.”
I shake my head and look at my hands like they are… what they are.
The enemy and now the savior.
“I—” my voice cracks. “I can’t…”
“It will take at least three rounds for us to stop the bleeding, and I don’t believe he has the time.”
My exhale comes fast and my inhale comes slow. “He’ll die if I don’t?” I ask, even though I understand her.
“Possibly.”
“Can you turn away?” I ask and she does, after nodding sympathetically. I unsheathe one of my throwing knives and take another uneven breath. All the ways this could go wrong flash through me. I could end up killing him, like everyone else.
I should just leave this to the healers. They know what they’re doing. I sheathe my knife again, and I’m about to tell the woman I can’t do it when I watch Leiholan’s shallow breathing. I can’t help but think of my actions the last time I saw him—I was about to fight him. And over what? I can barely recall.
What I can recall is the headmistress handing me another, bigger, metal dagger. “Without wounding yourself this time.” I grabbed it by the blade. “Magic is a tool. You don’t learn to build a kingdom before you can quarry your marble.” Her eyes met mine while my hand bled on her carpet. “You can withstand the blood, but can you control the heat?” she whispered. “Focus on the metal in your hands. Your energy will go where your attention flows.”
All I thought about was the metal… and the blood.
I unsheathe my knife again and cut open both my palms, so deep that I have to bite my tongue because of the sting. There has to be a better way of doing this, I think when I place my bleeding hands on his vacant leg and try my hardest to focus on the heat that fills my hand and not the goop that is his mangled leg.
I force the heat to fill my entire body until my eyes are just prickly balls of ember and sweat drips down my forehead like I’m nothing but a bundle of fire.
My hands are so hot I can’t tell if it hurts or if it’s just invigorating.
The burning becomes so strong I’m worried I’m going to burn him to death instead of saving his life like I’m supposed to. And when I’m sure that I’m going to hurt him, I pull my hands away.
The stump of his leg is blistered, bloodied, orange, and puffy. It’s absolutely disgusting, but a better sight than the gore before. “I’m done.” The woman turns around and examines my work. “What’s your name?” I ask.
“Elva.” Her face is so close to the stump. “You did well.”
Another pair of three comes in a few minutes after she leaves. They look confused, then they look at me and go back to healing him.
I hope they take his pain.
Elva comes back with a knife and a pair of scissors. I look away while she cuts the rest of his leg off.
“We got more healers after your friend of a friend.” I see her words for what they are: a distraction. I guess it’s supposed to be a kind one.
“I heard there’ve been a few attacks lately.”
“There have been. My sister works on the counsel in Viridis. They’re trying to figure out why the corenths are attacking again.”
“It’s been months, they still don’t know?” I ask.
“Nature is slow.”
Great answer, thanks.
It’s the middle of the night by the time Leiholan wakes. There’s been an announcement declaring that the entire academy is in lockdown and we have to stay in our rooms, but nothing was said about the corenth.
“Oh gods,” he groans, twisting his neck back and forth. “Where’s my vesi?” Then he looks down and his eyes go wide. He sounds less groggy when he says, “Where’s my leg?”
“Maybe in a cooler somewhere,” I say.
His eyes narrow on me, and he frowns. “Desdemona,” disappointment laces his voice like venom.
I try not to frown, but it’s even harder to keep the sorrow from my tone. “Yep. Desdemona.”
“Thought you were someone else,” he mutters and closes his eyes again.
“Well, I’m not.” My throat burns. “But I did just save your life, so maybe I could get something more than that?”
He lifts his chin high, frowning, but not unhappily. “Bullshit.”
“Yeah,” I say hastily. “I did.” I don’t like him one bit. But I care about him more than I disdain him. “Doesn’t mean I like you.”
“I find you uniquely unpleasant too, sweetheart.” He raises a soft finger with his words. “Where’s my vesi?”
“Are you not concerned by your missing leg?”
“Alcohol first, missing limb second,” he yawns his words, and his finger falls to the bed.
A few seconds later, he snores.