Deals
He smelled the smoke first—a strange, almost pleasant tang of overheated iron and burning wood, layered over the stink of roasting meat and spilled offal.
He opened his eyes to what should have been blue sky.
Instead, the firmament churned with greasy clouds—billowing gray and black smoke from the burning train and, somewhere nearby, an enormous bonfire.
He watched the scene unfold, feeling hollow. Their rescuers—if they could be called that—weren’t Avansi. They wore bright, embossed leathers, and their small, powerful horses bore even more colorful saddles, glittering with tiny mirrors and crystal. Most carried wickedly curved bows.
The Souna, his brain finally supplied. They’d been taken by the Souna, who famously hated their Avansi conquerors—and were just as famous for not taking prisoners.
The Souna were burning the bodies from the train.
He hurt. Tri-Mother help him, he hurt. The ache had grown so deep it blurred into numbness, as though his body had given up trying to warn him. Either he’d gotten the message, or he never would.
He heard a faint, pained sound nearby. Kai stood close, one hand pressed to her stomach, her expression strained. She was speaking to one of the Souna—a woman.
“Did I not tell you they would live?” Kai said.
“Pity. I was hoping to make a necklace from their teeth.”
Math’s eyes widened. He tried to sit—only to abandon the effort as dizzying pain swept over him. He bit back a sob, echoed a moment later by Kai.
“Please stop moving.” Kai’s voice was weak and thready.
Math obeyed.
She turned back to the woman. “Math is not one of them.”
“We remember the stories of the tree people. We saw the plants. They’re cursed.”
“If that were true, would they have fought? The tree people stabbed them. They are not the tree people’s ally.”
“They’re Avansi,” the woman said, though without conviction.
“But not soldiers. We stole the uniforms.” Kai’s voice had slipped into pleading.
He shouldn’t be able to understand them. He didn’t speak whatever language the Souna used, and he doubted they would bother ever learning Ginren or Irrahan.
“That is also a pity,” the woman said. “If they were a soldier and lived, we could ransom them. But you say they aren’t. And I say they’ll not live—not with an injury like that.”
“We just have to wait,” Kai insisted. “When the smoke clears, when the sun returns, they will heal. I know they can. They healed me once, from a wound just like this. They will live.”
“They’d better,” the woman growled, “or Souna or not, I’ll leave you burning on their pyre.”
She turned and stalked away, heading back toward the cluster of horses.
“She seems nice,” Math whispered. “It’s good that you are making friends.”
Kai rushed over, kneeled on the gravel beside him. She was very pale, a little gray, and sweat beaded on her brow. Tear tracks had cleared two paler lines down her face. She was in a great deal of pain—all of it his.
Kaiataris gave the smoke-filled sky a sullen, resentful glare, then picked up his hand and held it in both of hers. “I need you to hold on.”
He almost asked if she still thought he was one of the enemy, but thought better of it. She had come to a better decision about him at some point that morning, probably after the crash and during the fight. He would rather she not have any reason to second-guess that choice.
“I am not going anywhere.” For many reasons, not least of which being he doubted he could walk. Not just due to his injuries, but because he suspected his plants had rooted themselves, drawing energy from the ground instead of the sun. He could think of no other reason he was awake at all.
“Can you heal yourself?”
Such a good question.
Math felt unreal and disconnected, simultaneously aware of all the tiny aches and pains of his body and yet numb to all of them.
Time stretched out, soft and slack as pulled dough, each moment an excruciating draw of air through searing lungs.
It hurt to breathe; he wondered if Huraiik had nicked a lung, then remembered the ash and smoke in the air.
He had healed himself just earlier that day. He knew he could do it. Of course, that had been when the sun was full and bright, with sunlight pouring down …
Except why did he even need sunlight?
He wasn’t a plant. He wasn’t a tree. He didn’t need light to survive. The blood spilled down his chest—now a sticky, awful mess along his back and legs—had started out as red as any other man’s.
The plants were symbols, the same way ice was a symbol for Nuhzar. A way to wrap his mind around the power at his command. Wild magic might be limitless, but the human mind was not. Chaos could not be embraced without structure.
The paradox of chaos was that it needed rules, just as the paradox of order was that using it to enact change was, by definition, an act of chaos.
So be it. He was lying on the ground, surrounded by wildness, with nothing but plants growing nearby for hundreds of miles.
He could do this.
Sometime later, Math opened his eyes, which he had not realized he’d closed. Time had passed—how much, he could not say. All he knew was that he saw nothing but leaves and flowers overhead, blocking out the sky. The plants had surrounded him like a cocoon. A womb.
He pulled air into his lungs.
It didn’t hurt.
“All right,” the woman said from somewhere beyond the plants. “You might be onto something. Let’s get your friend out of this mess—then we’ll talk about what comes next.”