Nine #4
Blood was splashed across the front of her dress and torso, painted up her chest and neck like some sort of attempt at abstract art.
It was very red, very mammalian, and much of it appeared to have come from her left arm, which was a ruin, gouged down to the bone in places, the flesh hanging red and raw where it remained at all.
She spread both her arms, in case I had somehow managed to miss her injury, and stood to let us both get a clear look at what she was dealing with.
Then she sagged, looking almost like she was about to topple over.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want to worry the children. They don’t do well when reminded of how my husband used to treat me, or reminded that I can be harmed in any way.”
“I understand,” I said, voice low and shocked. “Acacia, your arm…”
“It doesn’t hurt as much as you’d expect,” she said. “I may be a poor excuse for a Firstborn in some ways, but I do have my talents. I’ve shunted the pain into the ground, where it can sit deep in the earth and not trouble me until I’m ready for it.”
“Pain is so you know when you’re impaired, and can give your body the space it needs to heal,” I said.
Tybalt scoffed. I shot him a sharp look. “What?”
“You’re the last person who gets to talk to others about ‘taking it easy,’” he said. “You treat your body as if you have already procured a replacement, and are waiting only to do terminal damage to the original before you exchange yourself between them.”
“I still hurt,” I objected. “Pain is a part of getting injured. I feel everything I put myself through.”
“I am not entirely sure that is an improvement,” he said.
I focused on Acacia. “You’re Firstborn,” I said. “Who did this to you?”
“My injuries were dealt by the men who attacked my daughter,” she said. “Come. We must hurry.”
She started walking faster. Lacking any better ideas, we followed, and she led us across the open ground to the nearest broken building, dripping a blood trail behind her all the way.
The smell was getting overwhelming. I had to admire her illusion work.
It hadn’t been enough to hide the smell completely, but it had done more than it should have been capable of doing, considering the gulf between her magic and my own.
She stepped through a break in the wall we were approaching, slipping into the building. Tybalt and I followed.
We entered into what had apparently been a storage room of some point in the past, barrels and wooden boxes pushed up against the walls, a broken window high in one corner, letting a few shafts of watery starlight inside. I didn’t pay them any mind. My attention was on Luna.
If Acacia looked bad, Luna looked like she was working to redefine the word.
Her skin was slashed and shattered, leaving gaping holes into the rest of her, but there was no blood, no raw redness where the skin had split and the muscle beneath had been torn; instead, there was only shredded green pulp, like someone had been trying to cut rose stems with a pair of safety scissors and merely mashing it instead of cutting cleanly.
Golden sap leaked from those slashes, gumming up her skin and leaving her visibly sticky.
It was hard to look at her. The wrongness of those wounds was enough to make me involuntarily turn my eyes away.
The sap was very clearly the same as I’d smelled before, sweet and sticky and rose-scented despite the utter lack of visible flowers.
It was a different rose than Acacia’s, more hothouse, less wild, although it was no less fragrant; I could absolutely see the second rose as a cultivar of the first, something refined by a skilled gardener to thrive more easily within a walled garden.
And none of that mattered, because Luna looked like she had been mangled by some wild animal, some horrible creature that came out of nowhere and ripped her effortlessly open.
I made a small, horrified sound and rushed to drop to my knees beside her, not caring if I got sap on my dress.
There was already blood. We’d be visiting the nearest Bannick before this was all over.
“Luna!” I half-gasped, half-shouted, trying to find some space on her body where I could put my hands without hurting her even worse. She didn’t react. I wasn’t certain she was breathing. I looked up at Acacia, eyes very wide. “How are you so calm?” I demanded.
“Seven children I had with Michael, seven babes at my breast and cradles by the fire,” she said.
“And one by one they left me, turned away for the sunlit world where they could thrive. My Dryads were more loyal than their rose-colored siblings, but they left me long before Michael wooed and won me.”
I gaped at her, not sure how to respond to such a calm accounting of grievances. Acacia shrugged.
“She’s my daughter, always will be, but it’s been hundreds of years since she was my responsibility,” she said, calmly.
“I am more upset because my grandchild is gone than I am because my daughter has been harmed in my halls—although I’m unhappy about that to be sure. She should have been safe here.”
Yes. We were in a Firstborn’s bespoke skerry, a place where no one was supposed to pass without the explicit permission of the current landholder.
There were exceptions—the Rose Roads always connected here, and the Luidaeg could open passages as she chose—but they were rare, and none of them should have been used to do the skerry or its occupants harm.
So how the hell had someone been able to get in here to attack Luna?
But there was a more-pressing question at hand. I met Acacia’s eyes, forcing my voice to stay level, and asked, “Is she dead?”
“No,” said Acacia. “There’s still sap in her veins and a quickness in her breast. She’ll recover if she’s allowed. She may not be the same blooming rose, but she’ll come into herself again.”
I had no idea what healing looked like for the Blodynbryd.
It can be easy to get caught up in the heat and immediacy of Faerie, to assume that the mammalian way of doing things is all that matters, that we have the right of things and don’t need to worry about our cousins made of stone or foliage or wind.
But Faerie is and has always been more complicated than that.
Looking for easy answers is the human way of things.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Roses can be fertilized with blood as easily as with other things,” said Acacia.
Luna and I hadn’t been friends for a long while; we might never be friends again, depending on how things played out with Raysel.
I still didn’t hesitate before pulling the horn knife from my hip and laying my hand open again, then bringing it to her mouth, allowing the blood to run down my fingers and drip between her lips.
She didn’t react visibly, didn’t swallow or grab hold of my wrist, but as I watched, some of the shallower cuts on her arms and cheeks began to ease themselves away, healing like a piece of film running backward.
Luna’s healing was nowhere near as smooth or fast as my own, but it was better than nothing. I slashed the knife across my hand a second time, keeping the blood flowing, and watched the cuts disappear, leaving smooth skin behind.
“She’ll do better in sight of the trees,” said Acacia, picking Luna up.
Luna didn’t react, and I didn’t object—there’s only so far I’m willing to go when arguing with a supposedly friendly Firstborn.
Acacia carried Luna out of the room and through the building, back to the skerry outside. Tybalt and I followed.
When Acacia set Luna on the ground and retreated I stayed close, watching for the moment when Luna would wake up. I didn’t have to wait for long.
It began with a delicate fluttering of her impossibly pink lashes, then her eyes opening and staring blankly up at me.
She didn’t look like she could actually see me or, if she could, like she actually knew what she was seeing.
That was fine by me. What mattered was that her eyes were open and she was at least somewhat alert; she wasn’t gone.
She blinked, eyes focusing, then blinked again, looking past me to Tybalt and Acacia. Her mouth moved. No sound came out.
I sighed, suddenly unutterably weary. “Let me guess,” I said. “What am I doing here? How did I get here? And then probably something kinda mean.”
“No time for that,” Luna rasped. “October, where is my daughter?”
I looked at her, not flinching, and said the cruelest thing I possibly could:
“I don’t know.”