Chapter 20 #2
Slowly, I released my hold, and Na? jumped down, retreating and shaking herself, wiping her paws over her face like a cat trying to clean the scent of dog from its fur.
Pito sank to her knees, and Topi crawled forward, grabbing at Pito’s neck, yanking what was left of the creature out.
The burn of ice pinkened Pito’s skin, but the wound looked clean, the creature dead.
Na?’s opal eyes met mine. “Well, I see you have taken to your lessons.”
“Airón,” Tallu said, and he came forward immediately, checking where the creature had bitten me, where I had been injured in my fights. I hissed when he tried to move my limp arm.
But even as I could see the worry on his face, I knew something true, something that no one else could possibly understand. Tallu would not die.
Pito and Topi were talking on top of each other, speaking in shorthand and whispers, trying to catch up on weeks apart when too much had happened to both of them.
Irad?o stood back, watching everything with her blue-green eyes, her expression curious.
When she saw me looking, she shook her head as one might to a child who’d done something dangerous and survived.
Tallu’s eyes were dark with fury when he ran fingers along my shoulder, finding the crushed bone.
His lips were flat, and Vostop’s men were lucky they were already dead, because the expression on Tallu’s face promised a painful murder. He exhaled, nostrils flaring. Before he could say anything, Koque came to the entrance of the cave.
She was pale and looked first for Vostop. He stood, moving to her without needing to be asked. Tallu and I followed, Irad?o behind us with her hand on her sword. The twins stayed curled around each other, two halves of a broken heart, weeping against each other’s shoulders.
Inside the cavern, small pools of pale green water were lit from beneath. Water cascaded from one pool to another, starting with a small waterfall at the top of the cavern.
“The healing pools,” Vostop said in explanation.
Only one of them was occupied. A small boy drifted beneath the surface of a pool in the center of the room. His skin matched Tallu’s, although he had the delicate bone structure of his mother. He didn’t have the dwarves’ pointed ears, which meant Tallu was right: he was Millu’s son.
The blood mages surrounded the other side of the pool, Lerolian looking saddened as he stared at the boy under the water. Bubbles rose from the bottom of the pool, and Hallu breathed slowly but didn’t open his eyes.
Koque paced the side opposite from the blood mages, her hands clasped together tightly, skin white with the pressure. “Is it safe to remove him?”
She looked at Vostop, who shook his head.
“I do not know, my love. He should not even be in the water without a healer nearby.” He took a step forward, as though he was about to enter the pool himself, then hesitated.
“He’s been in there for days,” Pito Bemishu said from the doorway. She was leaning heavily on her sister and dropped her eyes when Koque turned to look at her. “The healers don’t know what’s wrong with him. They said the water is the only thing keeping him alive.”
I looked up sharply, frowning at Lerolian.
“I do not know if it is the curse,” Lerolian admitted. “He suffered the same fate as his brother.” He nodded gracefully at Tallu. “We can sense the threads that connect him to that fate, but there is something darker there, too. I do not believe it is the curse that is causing this.”
Irad?o stepped forward, cocking her head. She turned to me. “Can’t you hear it?”
I closed my eyes, listening beyond the gush of the waterfall, Koque’s unsteady breaths, and the whispers of the twins as they made their way across the path. Then I heard it, the murmur of Centipede’s poisonous voice under the water.
Blinking open my eyes, I tried to make sure I understood it. Centipede had tried to take over the boy, tried to make him a puppet for the animalia creature. The Shadow King would have allowed it, because he assumed that Centipede taking over Hallu would benefit King Inor instead of Centipede.
Only Centipede’s control had been at odds with the curse the boy already suffered. The blood monks had trapped him in threads of fate, and even Centipede could not break those. Only Spider could do that, weaving the web that trapped us all.
“It is the creature that controlled Pito and the badgers outside,” I said. “We need to remove it.”
Pito raised a hand to her throat, shaking her head. “He’s a child. I’m not sure he can live. I only lived because I…” She glanced at Topi. “Because I couldn’t leave you alone, sister.”
“No,” Koque breathed the word, leaving it with almost no voice. “I cannot lose him.”
I shook my head, remembering what it had been like removing the creature from Asahi, tearing it from his neck, and how it had struggled inside Pito, freezing to death and still refusing to yield.
The creature had only been two weeks inside Asahi, and much longer inside Pito. How could we remove it from a child who had borne it even longer, with fewer natural defenses?
“We must try to save him. And we must do it soon,” Na? said as she walked through the room, stepping on the pools of water. Each time she set her paw down, ice spread from her footprint, allowing her to walk on top of the water.
She stepped past the twins and Koque, the women gaping at her. Na? shook her head, enjoying the attention.
She sat back on her haunches, considering the pool of water and the child trapped inside it. Then she looked up at me, and even though her face was inhuman, I could feel her sharp attention as she silently asked me whether I had the strength to save him.
Taking a long breath, I knelt, using my one good hand to pull off my boots.
“What are you doing?” Empress Koque demanded.
“Saving your son,” I said, hoping it was true. Then I put my feet into the pool, dropping inside. Before I could go under, Tallu caught my hand, his fingers lighting every nerve in my palm.
His expression was fierce, brows pulled together, everything about him was sharp, everything brittle. Twisting my mouth into a smile, I tilted my head, trying to say everything that needed to be said. He finally nodded, releasing my hand and letting me sink under the surface.
I had learned to swim in frozen waters and pools heated by underground vents. I knew how to cope with extreme environments.
But plunging into this water was something else entirely. I couldn’t bring myself to the surface. Instead, I floated in some middle space, not needing to move my arms or legs to keep me suspended. My hair swirled around me, my braids drifting in and out of my line of sight.
There was a splash, and Na? floated in the water across from me, Prince Hallu between the pair of us. My eyes didn’t burn from the water, and when I took a breath, I felt it like a cool, fresh wave of air.
I could feel the water already working on me, my shoulder warm as though I had taken a blanket from near a fire and wrapped it around the injury. I could feel the bone regrowing, the tendons knitting themselves back together.
If the water could do this, how bad were Prince Hallu’s injuries that it couldn’t heal him? Or could the water heal only the body and not the mind?
“We will do it again, the same way,” Na? said.
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, even with the strange air flowing into my lungs through water.
Na? started, just as last time, the ice freezing the water around us, her desire clear. Her magic whispered around me, shivering up my skin. Kill this monster, kill this thing. Free this child.
There was more empathy in her voice this time, less rage, less hatred at the creature that could do such a thing.
Let him live, I begged. I needed him to live.
Only this time, the magic felt different.
The last time, Na? and I had been attacking a fully grown creature, a monster that had already taken over Pito.
When we had done it, I had sensed Pito underneath it, the woman I had known, fighting and screaming as she felt herself being dragged deeper and deeper.
But Prince Hallu was a child. The creature had developed inside him as he had grown. It was impossible to tell what he had been before the monster. He had been soft clay, stamped with a curse from his father, and Centipede had shaped him, baking him in terror and pain.
Let him live, I repeated. Let him have time to discover who he is.
I could feel a glow underneath the creature’s evil as the water froze around us, trapping us in it. Hallu was there, but what was left of him? What had the creature not eaten?
In the forming ice, I could see the threads that wrapped around Hallu, the curse given to him by angry, dying blood mages. Was that all that was left? When we freed Hallu, would he be an empty shell, held together only by the blood mages’ curse?
But Hallu’s heart beat with love. As Centipede began to lose its control, I felt it in him: love. Love for his mother, love for his brother, who was no more than a ghost in his memory. Hallu curled in on himself as Na? and I flooded the entire pool with cold, wrapping everything in frost and ice.
Hallu gasped, his eyes opening, and he looked between us, arms desperately moving, trying to swim upward, but the water wouldn’t let him. I reached out and felt the centipede along his spine. With a single touch, I released all of my hope and all of Na?’s fury.
Hallu’s back arched and he opened his mouth in a scream as frostbite shot down his spine, marking where the creature was.
It spread from the top of his skull, all the way to his tailbone.
Then he went still, limp. I pressed forward, feeling the creature crunch to death under my fingers, dying in a long whimper.
Na? trembled, the ice vibrating back into water.