20. Flood Risk Management
The dark and the silence it carried with it were a welcome respite. I was weightless and timeless and thoughtless, and I wouldn’t have minded if I could have remained in that space a little longer.
But a familiar buzzing crept into the back of my head, bringing with it a pain that pulsed against the confines of my skull. A familiar buzzing accompanied the pain. Ciarán’s thoughts, only half-contained, were back.
Dull blue light filtered through my eyelids, and air heavy with humidity weighed on my skin.
I opened my eyes to Una’s fox-like face inches from mine. Her ribs, which I seemed to be using as a pillow, expanded beneath my head, and then deflated as her warm breath washed over me in a huff.
I turned away, seeking refuge in her green fur.
“Do you think it worked?” I murmured. I didn’t have to look around the room to know Ciarán would be nearby. It was the same room we’d slept in the night before, our packs still leaning next to the door where we’d left them. “Do you think Ferrin’s coming?”
“I told you I wasn’t strong enough to fight him like that.” Ciarán’s angry croak came from somewhere to my left, and I rolled against Una to find him sitting against the far wall, glowering at me as he pet Jonquil where she curled next to him.
“You were strong enough to knock me out.” I tried to make it sound like a joke, but my words slurred.
Right. I probably had a concussion.
But I wasn’t a rotsbane, and I couldn’t hear Ferrin anymore, both things I would happily suffer a concussion for.
“That’s not funny.”
I tried to think of a smart remark, but my brain felt like slurry and my arms were on fire.
“I’m laughing,” I insisted.
“No, you’re slurring your words and drooling on yourself.”
“Am not!” I hurried to wipe away any drool clinging to my chin but froze when I saw the bloodied bandages wrapped around my arm. “My arm. Why—”
“Is that Wren?” Orla’s voice sounded on the other side of the closed door. “Wren, are you okay? What’s going on?”
The door shook in its frame as Orla battled with the handle, but a heavy deadbolt held it shut.
“What’s Orla doing?” I hissed.
Ciarán grimaced and shrugged. “She saw me carrying you back to the keep.”
“What did you tell her happened?”
“Don’t worry.” Ciarán murmured directly into my head, presumably so Orla wouldn’t hear him. “I didn’t tell her anything. I brought you here and locked the door. She doesn’t know the plan.”
“Wren?” Orla called again from the hall.
I pressed my hands over my eyes, searching my muddied thoughts for an excuse.
“It’s okay, Orla!” I called back. “I just hurt myself while practicing my magick.”
“Your arms were sliced open!” Orla squawked. “And you were unconscious!”
“You mean to tell me you’ve never knocked yourself out while training before?”
There was a momentary silence. And then—
“Only once, but I definitely didn’t almost cut my arms off at the same time.”
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “Please. Go rest. I’ll be okay.”
“Promise?”
I locked eyes with Ciarán. He glowered back.
“Yeah. Promise,” I said.
Her sigh sounded through the door, and her receding footsteps told me I’d soothed her worries for now.
“You need to be nicer to Orla,” I said.
“You know we can’t trust her when it comes to her uncle.”
“That doesn’t mean ignore her as you carry my bleeding body away to lock in a room!”
“Pardon my lapse in judgement,” he seethed. “I was a bit stressed. I told you Ferrin was too strong.”
“But not strong enough. I’m not a rotsbane. You’re back in my head, and he’s not. He’ll be here soon, and we’ll kill him.” I held my bandaged arms ahead of me. “Now what happened to my arms?”
Ciarán pulled a jagged blade from within the folds of his cloak, and he tossed it my way. It clattered against the stone floor, coming to rest at my feet. Dried blood dirtied its serrated edge, and my stomach flipped as I realized it was a bone. My bone.
“That’s my bone blade,” I said. I’d made them countless times as a Nightmare, but it shouldn’t have been possible in my real body. “I made that?”
“You made several,” Ciarán growled. “The others retracted after I knocked you out. That one I had to snap off.”
He lifted an arm, and the folds of his cloak fell away to reveal bloodied bandages wrapped around his side.
“I hurt you?” Panic, or maybe guilt, coursed through me, turning my fluttering stomach to lead. I tried to sit up, but pain pulsed against my temples, and I fell back against Una’s flank.
“It’s nothing.” He let the cloak fall back over his bandages.
“But how did I make my blades?” I demanded. “I can only change my body when I’m a Nightmare.”
“Ferrin was forcing enough Skal into you to transform you into a rotsbane, so you definitely had enough Skal to alter your anatomy.” He glared at the bone where it rested on the floor.
“Still, it’s impressive magick. It’s real bone as far as I can tell.
Only the Four Magicians have ever used Skal to create living tissue. ”
Ciarán must’ve been forgetting about the time I’d created antibiotic mold to save his life, but I thought better than to remind him.
“He tried to turn me into a rotsbane,” I said blankly.
“I know.” Ciarán’s breathy laugh betrayed his relief.
“How? I’m not a Nightmare.”
“It takes more magick to turn a real person into a rotsbane than a Nightmare,” Ciarán explained, “but remember that’s the reason Magicians had to come to Skalterra in the first place. There was too much Skal in your world. We kept transforming.”
A new concern emerged from my mess of muddled thoughts.
“And what if we make it all the way back to Keldori just to turn into rotsbane as soon as we get there?”
“We’ll control ourselves,” Ciarán said evenly. “It’ll be easier without a madman forcing magick into your system.”
I nodded, but the movement made my head spin.
“Right. Then we should probably warn Iseult and Tiernan that Ferrin’s probably on his way.” I tried to push off of Una, but Ciarán stood first and held his hand up to stop me.
“You sleep. I’ll let them know.”
“I have a concussion. I don’t think I’m supposed to sleep.”
“You’ll be fine for now. You need a proper Ceremender, but I poked around and fixed what I could. I’m no healer, but it’ll hold you over until we get to the citadel.”
“Why do I need a salamander?”
“Ceremender,” he repeated, unlatching the deadbolt on the door. “They’re brain healers. But like I said, once I could get back inside your head, I was able to fix the worst of the damage. So rest. We’ll be on the road soon.”
The heavy door creaked on its rusty hinges as he dragged it open, but Ciarán hesitated before exiting.
“What?” I asked.
He strode back to where he’d been lurking against the wall, shooed Jonquil away and picked up whatever she’d been curled up on. Ciarán threw it at me without looking as he crossed back to the door.
“I did my best. It’s not great, so let’s hope I did a better job fixing your brain than I did your clothes.”
He fled into the hallway, still with his back resolutely to me. I looked down at the blue fabric in my lap only after the door slammed back into place.
The folds of Liam’s Von Leer hoodie unfurled as I lifted it above me.
New, jagged rips ran down the length of both sleeves thanks to my bone spikes, but the tears had been repaired with careful—though crooked—lines of thread.
Meanwhile, the gaping hole in the center of the chest was finally mended as well, and the circle of fabric that had been roughly sewn into the Von Leer coat of arms looked suspiciously the same color and material as Ciarán’s cloak.
It was Jonquil that sensed something was wrong first.
I awoke to the sound of her angry hiss and opened one eye to see her fur standing on end and her back arched. I frowned, trying to figure out what had her agitated, and then Una gave a low bark from the back of her throat.
“What—” I started, but then Una stood, and I slipped off her flank and onto the stone floor.
My head felt like it might explode from the pressure in my skull when I tried to stand, but I forced myself to my feet and staggered into the hall.
Una charged ahead and came to a stop at an open walkway that looked down into the canyon from the face of the keep. I followed her, trying not to trip over Jonquil as she wove between my ankles, and then paused between two columns to look down at the moonlit moss where I’d fought Iseult.
Our skirmish had left burns and gouges in the loam, and while the head injury made remembering the details of our fight foggy, I could track bits and pieces of the duel through the dark spots left on the canyon floor.
Una’s low growl brought my attention back to her. Her green, tufted ears pinned back against her head and her lips drew back to reveal serrated teeth.
I looked between her and the moss-covered rock walls several times before things started to click into place. Maybe I would’ve been quicker to realize if it weren’t for the concussion. This was the plan after all.
“Ferrin!” I shouted stupidly, pushing past Una to flee towards the dark steps to the lower floors of the keep. “Ferrin’s coming!”
I stumbled into Ciarán on the bottom step, and he pressed a hand over my mouth. I hadn’t realized I’d continued to yell Ferrin’s name until Ciarán had forced me silent.
“If he really is outside, are you trying to alert him that we know he’s here?” he hissed. I shook my head against his palm, and he let me go. He looked over his shoulder at the open doors of the keep. “It’s quiet out there. You were probably dreaming.”
Una replied for me with another low growl. She crept through dust-laden moonbeams that shifted across her jade pelt like falling water, and her growl grew louder the closer she got to the entrance.
Ciarán’s shoulders stiffened, and he pushed me back towards the stairs.
“What’s happening?” Orla appeared in the doorway of the main hall, the glow of the skalsprings throwing her outline into sharp relief.
“We need to go.” Ciarán pressed me towards the stairs. “Where are the others? Are they ready?”
“Ready for what?” Orla demanded.