Chapter 13
Nik didn’t realize he’d backed away as the woman called Elianne stepped forward until he caught the scent of snow and felt cool fingers brush against his. The stranger stared at him as if he were a campfire in the middle of a blizzard, her hands lifted toward him, hunger in her eyes.
He gripped the cool fingers harder than he should have. Heat flashed up his spine, burned at his eyes—that was surely all this was. A fever. Delirium. He shook his head, willing the delusion to vanish, but the woman only eased a step closer.
He edged back, Kyrja moving with him and shifting nearer, so that her whole arm touched his, sending blessed coolness through him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, praying he sounded more certain than he felt.
“But you must be mistaken. My mother’s name was Liv.
She died when I was a baby, in childbirth. My little sister with her.”
“Little sister? My babe was a girl?” The redhead blinked rapidly and splayed a hand over her leather-clad chest. “I was Livia Ivandottir. You were twenty-two months old when the pains started with my second babe, too early. I left you with Tristan in his workshop, certain my healer would be able to stop the contractions. I told your father they were nothing, the false ones like I had with you for the last two months. So he let me go alone.”
Livia Ivandottir. He gripped Kyrja’s hand more securely. His mother’s name, yes. But…why was this stranger lying? Making up such a story? What did she have to gain from it?
Another shake of his head, firmer. “No. My mother died. She bled out in childbirth, and my father never got over it. All my life, he told me how if the Fjorders gave us the same medical care they gave themselves, she’d still be alive.”
Elianne’s nostrils flared. “He wasn’t wrong, even if he was mistaken.
I could see my healer’s panic, even as the pains ripped me in two.
I knew the babe was dying, heard her saying there was too much blood.
There were doctors in the dome for inoculations, and I remember her yelling to get me to them, but then…
I don’t know. I woke up in their makeshift hospital.
I had no idea what had happened, if my babe lived or had died, only that my womb was now empty.
They were taking my blood—so that they could give me more, they said.
I’d lost too much. They had to run tests first though. ”
Kyrja sucked in a breath beside him. “It’s routine.
To know what type of blood you could receive, that your body wouldn’t reject.
My best friend, Dania, is a doctor. She does such things all the time.
” The fingers of her other hand brushed his inner elbow.
“But that wasn’t the only test they ran, was it? Not if you’re here.”
Nik’s stomach ached.
Elianne shook her head, tears spilling from her eyes only to sizzle off on her cheeks.
“I didn’t dare object when I realized they’d run the Test. I knew my healer had told them I was a widow—even then, Tristan was involved in the Red Hands.
His uncle, Bjorn, was the leader. The doctors wouldn’t have treated me if they knew I was his wife.
But after that, they kept me sedated so long, I lost all track of time.
The king cut me with a flint blade at one point, Awakened my Curse.
” She showed her palm, bearing the same strange mark that Nik’s now did.
The one that matched the flame circles each of the others revealed with a flash of their palms.
Frost and snow. This was real. Somehow, this was real. And she…
She met his gaze again. “Time doesn’t exist in the mountain like it does Above.
When he sent me here—to train, he said—I had no way of tracking the years, to know how old you’d be now.
If your father would still be alive. What had become of you.
But you—you are the very image of Tristan.
And you are here—like me. So I knew it was no mistake, no trick of my eyes. ”
“Flames.” The leader, Daemon, spat the word like a curse and passed a hand over the long strip of blond hair down the center of his head, tied in a tail at his nape.
He had the broad shoulders of a thane, the bulk of a miner who spent his days hefting stones, but the eyes of a rebel.
He spun toward where Perla sat on the ground as if at a tea party, planting his hands on his hips as if this were all her fault, somehow.
“You. You seem to think you understand this Curse. How is it passed from parent to child like this? The Blessing comes only when a Fjorder and a thane join in union.”
Perla blinked in exaggerated innocence and fluttered a hand at her chest. “Me? Am I allowed to speak again, King of the Daemons?”
“Don’t call him that.” Elianne—Liv? Modur?—whirled toward the princess. “He is no more daemon than you.”
Perla’s face cleared, the sarcasm gentling into sympathy. She rose to her feet with more grace than anyone should have by rights and dipped her head in apology. “It was a jest—but perhaps in poor taste. I apologize, Elianne. Or would you prefer I call you Liv?”
She couldn’t be his mother. She looked no older than him—younger, if anything.
There was nothing soft and maternal about her, not so much as a spare ounce of flesh on her bones, the muscles of her arms were too defined, too hard-looking.
She looked more like a stylized poster for Raf’s wall than like the soft-smiling, plump-and-pleasant mamma in the image of the three of them Pab kept on his chest of drawers.
But the hair color was the same. That was the only detail he even remembered from the picture he hadn’t looked at in years.
And she knew his mother’s story—more of it than he’d ever known.
The way Pab told it, she’d died at the healer’s along with the babe, and the visiting doctors had stolen her corpse for their studies.
He’d never had a reason to question it. Not given how many other bodies they routinely confiscated for study before the families could burn them.
Whenever Reykstoll’s doctors were in the domes, the dead went missing.
In response to Perla’s question, she darted a look at Daemon. Then one at Nik. “Elianne is the name I chose. That will suffice.”
The princess nodded. Her eyes remained clear of teasing as she looked to Daemon again.
“My father has had his scientists studying the Awakened for centuries. Before my brother and I were born, his researchers had isolated a nanite that appears in the blood of every Awakened—ancient technology. In the years since, their study has shown that all humanity has pieces of this ancient technology inside them. But the sort varies based on people group. Think of it as the code for blue eyes or red hair—it has to be passed down within a family, but in order for it to show up, it has to receive data from both parents. Make sense so far?”
Daemon shrugged. “We aren’t taught much about biology under the domes. But it seems logical enough. Though I fail to see how…tiny machines? How they could give one control over the environment.”
Perla smiled. “That is where the Triada comes in. Or the Giver, as you call him. The One, as our mer friends do. But anyway.” She waved away her own distraction.
“According to our tradition, it was a gift from the Triada that first combined with this technology to change something inside certain people and give them power over water. That was the first gift, which helped both the mer and the people trapped on an arid, nearly-destroyed land to survive after the Great Cataclysm. But he chose to use bits of these nanites from different people groups, and they had to combine to be triggered. Magic only came in the meeting of worlds.”
Even the thanes had been taught that much, so Nik nodded along with the others. It was why the Fjorders still needed them. Well, aside from free labor. Without the blood of thanes, there would be no Blessed.
Perla cupped a hand, and water condensed in it.
“This magic has been around for millennia at this point. Our scientists suspect that every human alive today has nanite halves in their blood. If all one kind, it does nothing. Remains inert. But if a person has two or more kinds…” The water rose, danced, and then burst into the air and hung suspended in drops the size of rain, but perfect spheres.
“The potential is there for magic. But even so, these are tiny little machines, and they need something to turn them on.”
“Hence the ceremony,” Kyrja said. “The Blade and the blood.”
The princess nodded and set the droplets to spinning.
“For whatever reason, the Blade seems to send a message to the nanites. We’ve yet to be able to see what is happening, but our current head scientist likens it to a chemical reaction between the material of the Blade and the nanites that opens a door on them.
Then when the blood of another Awakened encounters those nanites, now yawning open, and enters them… ”
The drops whizzed around them all before combining back into one globe that hovered over Perla’s hand.
“Magic.” Kyrja curled a finger toward the sphere, and it puffed into snow that drifted down.
“But my mother’s wind magic proved to be different.
” Perla sent a gust into the snow, somehow making each flake spin in place instead of fly away.
“Her mother is a seraph, so the magic in her blood is something new. Clearly still related to the nanites, because she, too, had to be Awakened—but the metal blades that work on water magic were not what primed hers, though it was enough to reveal it. It took a slice from the claw of my grandmother’s hawk-form.
And my father’s blood still sufficed to finish the process.
” She looked from Nik to the other Cursed. “For you all it took…?”
The others all deferred to Daemon, who still stood with his arms crossed over his chest. “Flint.”