Chapter Thirteen
The dark calls all things back in the end. For to its master – all darkness must return. In those shadows deep beneath, it can be made anew. Awaiting its chance to rise, to reclaim what was taken. To sing the hymns of the Alder Kings. To awaken old gods and allow Verr to reign.
– Hymn to the Alder Kings – Unknown
All the next day thunder rolled in on dark clouds, forcing the fires to be lit early, and the day after, and the day after that. Emrys hadn’t appeared again after my lesson on ghoul capture. My days had fallen into the same routine as before: study, helping William, then pestering Alma to change back, while secretly hoping a mysterious lord made an appearance.
Only, no matter how many times I sat to take my meals in the kitchen, he didn’t appear again.
A crack of thunder broke above, as rain struck the study windows hard. Storms used to give me comfort, bundled up in the cottage with my parents. My mother telling stories and singing the ancient hymns of the fates, as my father refused to sit still, either returning rain soaked from training with his blade or filling the cottage with the warm scent of spices from his baking.
Now, storms only reminded me of being sat on a beach, the smell of smoke still in my nose as rain pounded my skin with icy strikes, waiting for someone to find me. Knowing the Council patrols would sense the magic I’d unleashed, the force of it.
A loneliness had sunk into my very bones with the icy rain that day. Remaining even now.
When you realise how brilliant you are, Croinn, I think we’ll all be in trouble. Emrys’s words tumbled through my thoughts more than I cared to admit. Fingers absently tracing my collarbone, feeling the warmth of my magic rush across my already flushed skin.
How effortlessly praise had fallen from his lips, especially considering how deadly my mistake had been. How it had soothed something inside me.
A different type of wound I hadn’t noticed the Council inflict. Deeper than I’d ever admit.
A flash of lightening bathed the study in harsh white light before plunging me back into the dimness with the dying fire, reminding me of the late hour.
Frustrated, I stood from my desk and moved to stoke the fire with my own magic.
I considered my hands in the warm light, the fading veins of lavender dissipating from my fingertips. Turning my ink-stained hands over to see the small, almost invisible scars, white in the firelight against my knuckles. Such brutality this world offered and yet I couldn’t give up, because I wouldn’t allow it all to be meaningless. I couldn’t.
I was supposed to be here to study, but I couldn’t stop focusing on dark things that weren’t mine to solve: fey murders, the rise in dark summoning’s and fiend attacks. Impossible things that turned me back to my desk only to run into something cold and hard, sending me rocking backwards as I looked up into a familiar annoyed face.
Emrys.
His eyes were as black as midnight. Hair tousled, coat hanging open and shirt partially unbuttoned, revealing the pale webbing of scarring over the toned skin of his chest, as his coat hung open. There was a strong smell of damp earth and night air coming off him.
My magic flared in response to his appearance and the hearth surged, illuminating him more clearly. Then I saw his hands and shirt were smeared with dark red.
‘Is that blood?’ I asked, mildly horrified.
‘I need your help.’
‘Where?’ I asked, instantly.
He took my arm and guided me back through the study, past his desk to the far other corner which was swamped in darkness. ‘Your paper on septime weed poisoning. Remind me of its conclusion.’ There was an urgency in the bluntness of the question and the unforgiving nature of his stride.
‘How do you—’ I began, almost stumbling over my feet. ‘You’ve read it?’
An impatient glance was my answer as we made it past another set of bookcases.
‘The plant grows after the death of most ground goblins or wood sprites. Their bones are toxic to the soil,’ I clarified, shaking off my disbelief. ‘When ingested by animals, they become afflicted, and the poison seeps into their milk or meat.’
‘Resulting in a wasting sickness,’ he simplified, still not looking back at me.
‘Close to a normal fever, but there is a strange spotting formation, especially around the neck and wrists. The victim runs a wet fever, secreting a sweet smell from their skin, and the heart begins an odd rhythm.’
I wondered where he was taking me, knowing the room had to end at some point, only to see the bookshelves were staggered to hide a narrow passage that led into another room. This one was just as messy as the first, only instead of an opulent fire and large desks, an old door was the focal point.
Covered in chipped dark paint and a collection of locking mechanisms, it wouldn’t have seemed inconspicuous to anyone else, but I recognised the incantations carved into the frame around it, the metal woven with spells as it connected to what appeared to be a collection of dials as well as an empty lantern that hung next to the doorknob. No, a crystal chamber, the design old and dangerous in its unpredictability.
‘Is that a Portium door?’ I whispered conspiratorially. Portium doors were forbidden due to their tendency to manifest anywhere, without the other side’s permission. No papers needed. No Council authorization.
‘An ancient model,’ he replied, moving to the dials at the side of the contraption, reaching into a threadbare pouch that hung next to it, pulling out an array of small crystals, coloured differently for different distances.
‘I thought they were destroyed?’ I leaned forward to run my fingers over the ancient runes at the frame, unable to restrain my childish wonder. Feeling the strength of the magic bite against my fingertips.
It now made sense why the study moved itself. If it was connected to a Portium, that was best to be kept hidden … such doors brought unwanted guests.
‘Are you going to tell on me, Kat?’ he challenged softly.
I pulled back to consider his expression. The patience in it as shadows cut across his features.
I shook my head. No, I wasn’t.
Satisfied with my answer, Emrys popped a small green crystal into the chamber at the side and turned the dial the rest of the way. The clatter of the incantation wheel was louder than the Institute’s approved model. The outline of the door glowed green as Emrys inserted a key from his pocket and pushed it open, revealing a corridor beyond, the pungent odour of healing herbs greeting us as he stepped through, and I was left to follow.
The floor was tiled and the walls stark white. Various doors lining the hallway, bright light from lanterns hanging above to guide the way.
‘What is this place?’
‘Thornfield House, a healing house in the western fields,’ he explained as we headed down the hallway.
We passed rooms with open doors revealing rows of beds illuminated by muted light. All empty.
The rooms all seemed the same, until we turned a corner, seeing more cluttered workspaces like Emrys’s study, a communal dining hall and spacious sitting room. I tried to make out more details, only to collide with something solid, rocking back to see I’d walked right into Emrys’s back. He’d stopped suddenly outside a worn door that had a notice pasted to the front of it.
Confinement.
He opened the door quickly and guided me inside. The room was small but warm, an overwhelming strange bitter stench filled the air, strong enough to cover the usual scent of beasam bark that followed Emrys.
A desk sat in the far corner, a small fire with a pot of water boiling, a chair draped in clothes and a small healing bed upon which lay a figure.
‘Robert Thrombi, a farmhand from one of the villages surrounding Paxton Fields,’ Emrys began as the door closed behind us.
‘That smell!’ I gasped, and moved to the other side of the bed, considering the man’s faintly flushed face and the unsteady breaths that came panted through his lips.
His chest was bare, lying there in nothing but light cotton trousers. His feet were hooved, legs covered in thick, white hair that blended into flesh. Two tusks came from his dark chin.
He was a miroc, a creature between forms. They were a lesser fey who usually dwelled in the eastlands.
‘That smell isn’t septime weed.’ I’d know it anywhere. I could detect that scent in my worst nightmares. How it had come off Alma’s skin as she clawed at herself, mad with fever in Daunton. Just like all the other children.
‘I dosed him with whelm weed before the fever took hold.’ Emrys reached into his pocket for a small vial of white powder, holding it across the bed in offering. I took it, wondering if William had grown it for him.
Then I understood. Emrys suspected this man was a victim of dark sickness.
‘You’ve seen this before?’ I asked. The number of files he’d given me to study were vast, but I didn’t see any notes on living subjects. Not like this.
‘Three. I didn’t get to them quick enough.’ A coldness came over his expression quickly to hide his emotions. ‘They didn’t break the fever.’
He turned to the large chalkboard, already covered in his scrawl, in the corner of the room for answers.
‘I can’t work out the formulation for the healing draught. Not when the sickness is as combative as this one.’
I was alarmed at the chaos before me. He wasn’t exaggerating when he said healing wasn’t his specialty.
‘Nothing is working,’ he continued with the frustration of a man completely out of his depth, but trying none the less.
My attention returned to Mr Thrombi. The sickness was similar to septime weed poisoning, but something was missing. Something I couldn’t place as I moved about the bed, tucking the vial Emrys offered me inside my apron.
The man was deathly pale, his skin holding a greyish hue as a sheen of sweat covered him. One side of him was a more alarming shade of grey than the other.
I summoned a small burst of my magic, rolling it into an orb of light in my hand, illuminating more details and confirming my suspicion about his right side.
I turned over his arms, revealing the rest of his side, seeing a strange injury just below his ribs. A webbing of purple and black marks, like veins, leading to the side of his thigh, where the darkness was contained. They paled in the light, something dwelling in there, reacting to being so close to fey magic.
I pressed the skin gently to see it fade and move upon contact, trying to get away from that light.
‘I assumed it was bruising from labouring,’ Emrys commented next to me.
Dark things hide right in front of us and use our foolish doubt against us. My father’s words came back to me. How not all monsters take a monstrous form.
‘It’s a bite,’ I whispered, trying to stop fear from tightening my chest at the brutality of the dark magic before me, impossible but real at the same time.
‘What?’ Emrys leant closer to see, but I was already reaching into my bag, rooting through my things anxiously as I kept an eye on the man’s breathing.
I pulled out the hilt of my father’s blade, letting it fit against my palm as it manipulated itself into a small knife.
‘It’s an anthrux bite,’ I answered.
Anthrux were small spider-like creatures formed of dark magic. Only certain spells could result in their creation, and casting any of them was punishable by death – if you survived speaking the incantation. Dark magic like that hadn’t been successfully wielded in centuries.
‘He must have been working infected land, such a bite grows more deadly the longer the creature exists.’ I hoped whatever ancestors I had watching me were paying attention now. ‘Let’s hope this one was in its infancy.’
With every drop of fey blood the creature consumed, it would only grow stronger until it was impossible to kill.
‘Pass me those towels,’ I instructed. Emrys turned without hesitation to gather them out of the small basket.
I pressed my blade carefully to the man’s flesh. Sour-smelling black slime oozed from the wound instead of blood. Mr Thrombi still didn’t move, no matter how large I made the wound or even when his blood finally ran red again over the towels Emrys pressed in place like any other healer’s assistant would.
Mr Thrombi’s reaction to pain shouldn’t be this subdued, especially not with so much of the poison drawn from his blood. Even if he was dosed on whelm weed.
I turned to Emrys with that worry, realising just how closely we stood, the strange potency of his magic running over my skin, eyes dark and waiting.
‘My mother swore by a mixture of black bark and a purification charm in the brewing to ease the symptoms.’ I looked across the room to see a workbench in the corner.
He frowned. ‘Black bark is poisonous.’
‘More poisonous to dark beings than to fey,’ I replied. We were of the same coin, after all – black bark would make us sick, but it wouldn’t kill us outright.
‘Is that your equipment?’ I indicated to the desk in the same horrid disarray as the rest of Emrys’s workspaces in the house.
I didn’t wait for confirmation, making certain he had pressure on the wound before I crossed to the washing bowl. I put the knife down, the blade turning to nothing but a hilt the minute my palm left it. I sank my hands into the hot water and used the healers’ soap to try and get the offending black gunk off my skin. I dried them on my apron, opening my bag to rummage for my vial case and the black bark I had. Hoping it hadn’t dried out from disuse.
‘Do you always walk around with poisons in your possession?’ Emrys asked, considering me from across the room with both curiosity and caution.
‘Croinn,’ I replied by way of explanation, using his own ridiculousness against him.
From the work bench, I grabbed a jug of steaming water and a spare bowl that had been left discarded. I saw the container of marrow salt, which had been poorly labelled in Emrys’s illegible hand, tipping it all into the bowl and adding the water. I grabbed a handful of bandages, turned, and offered them all to Emrys.
‘You need to clean out the wound. The salt will stop it resealing for now.’ Perhaps I shouldn’t be giving a Lord such orders, but if he was offended, he didn’t show it. He took the supplies from me and returned his attention to Mr Thrombi.
I pulled the pestle and mortar closer, tipping a few flakes of the bark into it, rummaging through my healing case for arcaz powder to stabilise the bark and fight the fever as well as draw the poison out. I added some herb water, mashing it into a slimy, lumpy paste that reeked of rotten fruit, muttering a purification charm. Then I carefully summoned my Kysillian flame so it engulfed my hand, heating the crucible until the stone glowed orange, the mixture shifting in the presence of my magic. Smooth and gleaming.
I dumped the mixture into another bowl to cool, grabbing more clean bandages before moving back to Emrys as he washed the wound. The area of infected skin was looking better already, but I could see the flesh trying to knit itself back together, trying to hide whatever poison was still left in there.
I pushed myself tightly into the space next to Emrys, oursides flush as I dunked the bandage in the mixture, coating my hands. Without instruction, Emrys made space as I packed the slimy fabric into the wound, pushing it in as far as it would go. Somehow reading my mind, he reached for the clean bandages and began the arduous task of wrapping them around the man’s waist, timing it perfectly to seal it just as I moved my hands away.
I located my healing case for one of my tonic concoctions that should keep the other symptoms at bay.
Moving to the head of the bed, I used my forefinger and thumb to pinch Mr Thrombi’s chin and open his mouth, placing three drops of the tonic onto his tongue as I tipped his head back, waiting with bated breath until he finally swallowed.
When he did, I sagged with relief, put the tonic aside and helped Emrys finish wrapping the wound. We worked as if drafted onto a battlefield, quick and efficient, unbothered by our tangling fingers until the bandage was neatly knotted and tucked.
‘He’s cooling down already,’ Emrys commented, pulling the covers over him from the bottom of the bed as we finished.
‘He needs another dose in three hours, and then half a dose six after that.’ I pushed the loose strands of hair from my damp brow with the back of my hand.
‘Are you certain you aren’t a witch, Kat?’ he asked, a softness to his features with his gentle teasing, appearing far younger than he usually did, unburdened for once.
‘I’ve come to understand that a witch is simply a being beyond a man’s control.’ A being beyond their limits. Power was theirs, made of nothing but fury and chaos, woven into perfect balance. ‘So perhaps I am.’
He nodded absently, the hint of a smile graced his lips as he moved to wash his hands before turning back to me.
‘Let’s leave him to rest,’ he said, and ran a hand through his dark hair, before holding out his arm to guide me out of the room.
‘We should tidy up,’ I protested.
‘I’ll come back in a moment to finish my notes, but the portal is running unsupervised.’
I allowed him to guide me from the room, unknotting my apron, folding it and returning it to my bag as he guided us back through the mysterious hallways.
‘An anthrux shouldn’t be that powerful.’ I frowned, looking down at the stains the slime had left on my fingers. ‘I don’t think there has been a recorded bite for over a century. They were impossibly rare even before the wars.’ It was old magic, filled with hate from beneath the earth. One that surely couldn’t have festered for this long.
Worryingly, Emrys had returned to his stoic ways.
‘Where did you find him?’ I pressed, suspicious I wasn’t in possession of all the facts, as well as fearful he wouldn’t answer. But as we came to a stop at the portal, a heavy sigh left his lips.
‘He was coming to find me,’ he answered reluctantly.
‘You know him?’ I frowned.
He shook his head, tipping it to see me. His eyes had returned to a stormy unsure grey. ‘I found him outside Paxton Fields. The villagers trying to help said he’d asked for me before he went unconscious.’
He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, thin and crinkled. A torn page that had seen better days. ‘He had this with him.’
I took it gently, feeling the paper was still slightly damp, a horrid musty smell coming off it.
It was a page from a saints, holy book, one a worshipper might use for their prayers. A strange object for a fey to be in possession of, I thought, until I saw the scrawled words around the margin of the page, rushed and barely eligible.
It was in Rivian, a shorthand fey used from when they were in servitude, one my mother had taught me.
‘Do you speak Rivian?’ I asked, curious as to why Mr Thrombi would write a message in Rivian if he was coming to see Emrys.
‘No.’ He frowned, watching me closely. ‘What does it say?’
‘How do you know I can read it?’ Nobody knew that. Not even Alma. I only used it when I was writing notes I didn’t want the Council to read, usually in the margins of my papers. Faint and small.
‘I’m certain there’s little you can’t do, Croinn.’ He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes, and I wondered if he could have noticed such a small thing about me.
I moved closer to the pulsating bright light of the portal, feeling the warmth of it brush over my skin, tipping the page to see the words more clearly. One word. Over and over again until he could write it no more. Tangled with those horrid saints, prayers.
‘ Reimor .’ I turned the page over but no matter how many angles I looked at it from, the message remained the same.
‘Is that a place?’ Emrys asked, his hand braced on the wall next to me, leaning forward to see, so close I could feel the reassuring chill of his magic. The cool pressure of it rushed over my skin like a strong winter’s draught sending a pleasant shiver down my spine.
‘No, it’s the death of Kings. The Kysillian Kings of old.’ I shook my head to focus on the paper again.
Reimor. A command that had sealed the darkness beneath the earth. Such a word made no sense now. A myth. Nothing but a child’s bedtime tale.
‘That was centuries ago, and there are hardly any records it even happened.’ I wondered if I could have read it wrong, but Emrys’s gaze had turned distant as he considered the expanse of dark hallway behind us.
‘Maybe the bite drove him mad.’ He sighed with little conviction, pushing back from the wall and holding out his hand for the page.
‘Maybe,’ I admitted, annoyed I didn’t have any more information to give. ‘Do you have a copy of the saints’ teachings? Or a holy book?’
A dry humourless laugh slipped from his lips, startling me. ‘Unfortunately, I gave up on prayer saving my soul long ago, Kat.’
The effortlessness of my name from his lips sent a strange flutter through my chest.
He pocketed the note and turned his attention back to the portal.
‘That endless rot wasn’t part of your archive, was it?’ I tried to keep my voice steady, remembering how the darkness had curled within the glass.
‘It appears things might be worse than I first thought.’ He shook his head as if dismissing darker thoughts. ‘You were brought here to finish your paper in peace, not hunt dark magic. I shouldn’t have disturbed you.’ He gave a short, formal bow. ‘Goodnight, Miss Woodrow.’
A clear dismissal. Placing a strange distance between us with the formality of my name.
‘Kat,’ I corrected, not allowing him to play that game.
He paused in his retreat as his lips moved to say something else before he thought better of it, then headed back through the portal, leaving me to wonder how I’d explain the blood on my sleeves to Alma.