Chapter 19 I’ll Live
I’LL LIVE
KINGFISHER
VORATH SHAH’S SHOP was a disaster. Or . .
. there was a strong chance that maybe I was hallucinating.
Had it been like this before? I couldn’t remember.
Either way, glass bulbs and shattered wooden crates cluttered the floor.
The shelves were hanging off the walls, lopsided, the contents spilled onto the ground.
A strange, musky scent filled the shop, too, pungent and sour.
Carrion and I had both wrinkled our noses when we’d entered, and we were now breathing through our noses as we combed through the debris, searching for an alembic still that hadn’t been smashed to pieces.
“I swear I know that smell.” Carrion swayed, pressing his hand against the wall for support.
“It’s so familiar.” He wasn’t far from passing out.
It was a miracle, really, that he hadn’t toppled like a fallen tree with all the demon venom chugging through his veins.
He’d thrown up multiple times on our way back through the tunnels across the Third, but then again so had I.
Now, we were both running on empty, and much as I didn’t want to admit it, it wouldn’t be long before consciousness slipped away from both of us.
“Worry less about the smell and more about that still,” I told him.
My arms were tired. My thigh was screaming with pain. The puncture wound from Joshin’s stinger was deep and burned like someone had poured acid into it. Putting weight on the leg was excruciating, but I could baby the wound later. For now, the anti-venom was . . . was our only priority.
“Don’t we need . . . Oh, gods . . .” Carrion stiffened, his face turning gray.
He closed his eyes, and I knew what he was experiencing: the rolling nausea, the spinning vision.
I regretted thinking about it immediately as the same sensations passed over me.
“Don’t we need a healer to make this for us? ” he gritted out. “This anti-venom?”
I kicked a plank of rotting wood out of my way, scattering shards of glass and a pile of fine blueish powder, frustration building as my eyes didn’t alight upon a still.
“No. All warriors know how to make anti-venom. We learn basic healing skills before we even learn how to wield a sword. There are plenty of things that want to poison a person in your kingdom, Your Highness. A warrior needs to know how to reverse a toxin when they find themselves in the frozen woods of Yvelia. They won’t get very far if they don’t. ”
“I don’t like that,” the smuggler groused.
“Really? I’d say it’s really fucking handy that I’m trained in plant medicines.”
“No, not . . . that.” He had to take a breath between words. “Your Highness. I don’t like it when you call me . . . Your Highness.”
I snorted. “You are the true heir to the Winter Throne, are you not?”
“All right. I’ll start calling you Lord Cahlish, then, shall I?”
“Not if you want to keep your fucking tongue,” I growled.
Carrion straightened, looking up at the ceiling as he thought about this. “Umm. Yeah, I kinda need my tongue.” He took a deep breath and then sighed it back out. “People do seem to like it.”
I almost laughed. Almost. Gods, I was losing my mind. The male was ridiculous. “Just keep searching for the still, Swift.”
For the first time since we’d arrived in Zilvaren, luck decided to favor us.
We didn’t find a still, but we did find a shallow crucible in the back of Shah’s store that would suffice.
The black-market trader had a full distiller constructed back there, out of sight from prying eyes, where he had clearly been up to no good.
I broke down most of his setup, lit a taper beneath the burner, and got to work.
“You’re too late. Why even bother?” My mother was back.
She sat on the end of Vorath Shah’s bench, swinging her legs beneath her long skirts, eating an apple.
Her long black hair swirled around her head like she was underwater.
“You’re just like your father, aren’t you, darling.
Always too late.” She took a huge bite of the apple, offering it out to me.
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t want it.”
“Is a dead person talking to you right now?” Carrion asked. He was bent over by the door with his hands on his knees again; it was probably the only position that helped with his nausea.
“Yes,” I told him.
“Oh, good,” he said in a high-pitched voice. “I thought that was just me.”
Whatever phantoms were haunting Carrion, he chose not to share, and I chose not to pry. A male’s ghosts were his own business, and I was having enough problems with my own.
“Well, look at you. Putting people in the line of danger. Again.”
I cut the palm of my broken hand—two inches long, at least half an inch deep—and clenched my hand into a fist as best I could, grunting through the pain. Blood welled in the crucible’s bowl, gathering quickly.
I didn’t look at the other, sandy-haired female who had joined us and was leaning against the bench next to me.
I couldn’t bear to see her face. Not now.
Not here. Not after so many years of mourning her.
I hadn’t heard her voice in centuries. The sound of it now, familiar, knocked the wind out of me.
It hurt more than everything else I’d endured today combined.
“It’s not that you’re evil. You’re not unkind, either.
You’re just careless,” she said. “You promise to look out for people, and they put their trust in you. And then you let them down, don’t you?
Too concerned about covering yourself in glory to pay attention to what’s happening to those around you. ”
I took a pinch of salt from an open bowl on Shah’s bench and dropped it into the crucible. My chest felt like it was being cleaved wide open.
“See. You’re so worried about saving the day right now that you can’t even be bothered to look at me, can you?”
On the other side of the room, Carrion yelped and jumped away from the wall, batting away an invisible assailant.
I took out the little wooden box and set it down on the bench. My good hand shook as I tried to slide back the lid.
“Always the same. Always a coward. Always too afraid to acknowledge the consequences of his actions,” the female snapped.
The little scorpion inside the box was furious.
It was the last remnant of Joshin’s form.
The demon had been right—it would take lifetimes to replicate itself and return to full size.
It stabbed at me, trying to sting my fingers, but I was done being stung by this motherfucker.
I grabbed it by the tail and took it out of the box.
“Look at me, Fisher,” the female said.
I held the scorpion up, trying and failing to focus on it. “Hold up your end of the deal, Joshin. If you don’t, I’ll smear you across the fucking wall.”
“Fisher, look at me.”
The scorpion squirmed, trying to escape, but I wasn’t letting it out of my sight. It was growing harder to open my eyes every time I blinked. I held the scorpion against the side of the crucible, pressing its stinger against the lip of the metal. At first nothing happened.
Understandably, the demon was livid. We’d burned it to a crisp back in the bell tower. Its true form had died screaming, and this little piece of the demon had felt it all. It didn’t want to oblige me by producing some of its venom . . . but it would die for good if it didn’t.
Petulantly, the scorpion struck the side of the crucible at last, and a thin stream of clear liquid beaded and rolled down into the blood and salt.
As soon as the task was done, I shoved the scorpion back into the box, careful not to let it escape. Back into my pocket it went.
“Kingfisher, look at what you did to me!”
I spun without thinking. Renfis’s sister stood there, the ends of her lovely long hair frazzled and black.
Her once beautiful face was blistered and raw, skin slick like melted candle wax.
Her left eye was missing. Her lips were fused together on the left side of her face.
She was mostly naked, but there were scraps of scorched leather stuck to the exposed bones of her rib cage.
Tears ran from her right eye, coursing down her ruined cheek.
“The wages of your pride, Fisher,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “What do you think? Am I still beautiful?”
“Always,” I whispered.
“Do you know what it feels like to be burned alive?” she seethed.
Sadly, I nodded. “I do, Merelle. And I’m sorry.”
I knew Merelle didn’t blame me for her death.
She would have had every right to, but she hadn’t.
She had chosen to bind her soul with my blade, to remain a part of the Lupo Proelia and stay close to those she loved.
It hadn’t been my choice. I would have preferred her to move on to the shores of the afterlife, to find her peace, but Merelle had always been a strong-willed female, even in death.
This horror show was a manifestation of my own guilt and nothing more .
. . but it shattered my heart into pieces.
I stepped around the charred corpse of my friend and placed my hands over the crucible, closing my eyes.
Venom laced with magic required an anti-venom laced with the same. Like for like. An exchange of power greater than the original to cancel it out. I threaded my shadows into the metal cup, sending them into the blood, salt, and venom, infusing the concoction with my power.
I felt it take hold.
“It’s pointless, trying to wring a drop of remorse out of him, child,” my mother said, looking back over her shoulder at Merelle. “He’s incapable of real emotion. Aren’t you?”
This wasn’t going to be pleasant, but it would work. I collected the crucible and tipped its contents into two dusty cups.
“That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it?” my mother spat. “That you’ll have to truly feel the weight of everything you’ve done if you really want to love her. The hate. The shame. The horror.”