Chapter Seven Simran #2
But the knight had helped her. The knight had reached out, gentle and open-hearted to the deer. The knight would show her true colors soon enough, but right now, Simran couldn’t see the villain under that noble surface. Damn it all.
The darkness grew thicker. One of the deer—the one who had touched her nose to the knight’s hand—lowered her head. The deer’s light was blotted out entirely—and then with an exhale like a sigh, a last breath, the darkness vanished. And the woods with it.
There was a moment of trembling air, as if the entire Isle was shuddering around the wound of the lost woods.
Then the seam closed. The landscape that had once surrounded the woods fused together, fields joining, the horizon meeting in one endless line of blue marked by the distant smoke of factories.
It was like the woods had never existed at all.
Simran realized they were both trembling. She felt exhausted.
She saw the knight huff out a breath and brush her sweat-damp hair back from her face.
Unwanted, a pang of sympathy rang through her.
And godsblood, she had no time for sympathy.
She had time for none of this. Not grief, not horror, not sympathy for a knight meant to take her life.
She had to go to her parents’ home—to Hari.
She rose to her feet, turned on her heel, and began to walk.
“Wait,” the knight called out, after a beat. “Wait!”
Hurried footsteps behind her. The knight’s voice was close to her left.
“The witch hunters will be close,” the knight warned. And damn her, why was she pretending Simran’s freedom mattered to her?
“I don’t care,” said Simran. Her voice shook.
The anger and panic in her were wild as briars and thorns, growing as she thought of Hari and her parents and the stranger, and his cold, malevolent eyes.
“What does it matter if they see me? What we are—what I am—I can’t let that hurt my family.
I should never have come back.” Her voice snapped, broke like kindling wood.
“Simran,” the knight said gently. The pity in her voice was unbearable.
Simran couldn’t look at the knight. Her heart was a drumbeat in her chest, thudding in her ears.
“If you try and stop me I swear I’ll hurt you as badly as our tale allows,” Simran vowed, voice low. Then she took a deep, ragged breath and started to run.
The ground turned from untended grass to muddy tracks to paved stone under her feet.
They were on the cobbled road outside her parents’ home when she saw a crowd ahead of her, local folk gathered together in a thick huddle of long coats and caps and muttering voices.
Broken glass littered the ground in front of the shattered window of her parents’ store.
Among the gentle peace of those colorful shop awnings and redbrick buildings, the damage was as livid as a scar.
She paused, her stomach sinking. She was too late.
Her thoughts kept racing, parsing what must have happened as she elbowed through the crowd.
Instead of shoving her way to the shop, she headed for the wide-open side door that led to the flat above the store.
She paid no attention to the creak of the wood under her feet, or the voices behind her.
She had no time to prepare herself—nothing but her hammering heart and her ragged breath as armor, as she came face-to-face with her parents for the first time in years.
And there they were: her mother, tired lines bracketing her mouth, her hair pinned in a bun. Her father, a slight man, throat scarred. The furniture was broken around them, the window to the right smashed. Hari was not there. But her parents, at least, were safe.
“Mama,” she choked out. “Papa.”
She didn’t want to see the love in their eyes. Don’t look at me like that, don’t love me, you don’t see the knife at my throat—
“Simran,” her mother said, trembling. “Darling.”
They reached for her, and she didn’t step away. The warmth of her father’s arm around her. Her mother’s perfume.
She gripped her mother by the sleeve. Forced herself to breathe.
“Where is Hari?” Simran asked.
“Gone,” said her mother. Her voice was sharp, brittle. Her eyes red. But she hadn’t wept. Simran had never seen her parents cry. “A devil—a man—came and told Hari if he left with him he would not hurt us.”
“Are you hurt?” Simran asked tightly.
“No,” said her father. His voice was as warm and weighty as his hand, a balm. “We are safe.”
“Hari said you had not come with him,” said her mother.
“He said it to us. He said it to the devil. But the devil said Hari lied, and then he took him. They vanished like mist.” She waved a hand, as if to say it was like this.
Sudden, swift as a breeze. “I understand Hari lying to him—but to us? Why, Simran?”
He’d lied for her. She met her mother’s piercing eyes for one heartbeat, then two, and said nothing. She saw understanding dawn in her mother’s eyes—and worse, resignation.
“I see,” her mother said.
A clatter at the door. The knight stepped in through the entrance, alone. She ducked her head apologetically.
Simran’s parents stiffened at the sight of the knight. In their usually cozy kitchen, with its net curtains, its faded but carefully tended-to rugs, the knight was an unnatural sight, a warning of violence, an interloper. Even without her armor, she reeked of what she was.
The knight paused, head still tilted. Her long fingers moved to her waist and swiftly removed her sword, then the bow at her back. She laid them on the ground. Her shoulders rounded; her posture changed. When she stood, Simran would have sworn the knight had somehow grown smaller.
“I’m sorry,” the knight said, in that low, rich voice of hers. “I’m here to help, if I can.”
“Wait outside,” said Simran. Godsblood, she didn’t want the knight here.
“Our friends are coming,” said the knight. She moved to lean against the door—barring the way out, but also the way in. “Please allow me to help. At least I can keep watch.”
Simran’s parents were looking at her. Swallowing her instinctual bile, Simran said, “Fine. Stay if you want to.” To her parents, she said, “She won’t cause any harm.”
“Who is she?” Simran’s father asked. “What is happening, Simran?” His grip had tightened, his eyes dark. “Beti, if you’re in danger…”
“I’m fine,” she said shortly. Then, forcing herself to speak gently, respectfully, she said, “I’m really fine, Papa. Don’t worry about me. Let me find Hari. Sir Lavinia will help me.”
She tugged herself from his grip. He let her go.
The knight said something to her parents, but Simran couldn’t hear it over the panicked buzzing in her own skull. Being here made her feel raw.
Simran walked over to the biggest mess: the broken kitchen table.
Her parents’ favorite teapot, flowered and ceramic, was broken into shards.
It lay in a pool of spilled tea, a scattering of glittering white sugar.
Simran kneeled down, examining it all. She mouthed a spell under her breath as her fingertips traced the remains.
The knight, as if drawn by gravity, came to loom over her.
“Will this help you find him? Your friend?” Her voice was a respectful whisper, but Simran took a moment to glare at her all the same. The knight didn’t have the good sense to recoil.
As if it were that easy, Simran thought bitterly, despairingly. People without any touch of magic had a tendency to think it could do anything. But magic obeyed the rules of tales as much as anything did, and Simran couldn’t find Hari from spilled tea and will alone.
The knight’s voice lowered further.
“If your magic isn’t back…”
“My magic was never the problem,” hissed Simran. “I was wrong. It’s still here.”
She touched her fingers to the pottery. Her eyes snagged on something she hadn’t seen before: a shard stained in bright blood.
She touched it. Rubbed the blood between her fingers. At the back of her throat, she didn’t feel the telltale scent of a story marking the presence of an incarnate, the pale-eyed stranger with the circle on his brow. Instead, the blood buzzed at her touch, singing a familiar note.
“Hari’s blood,” she breathed. “That brilliant man.”
The knight shifted next to her, forehead creased.
“He’s hurt?”
“I think it was intentional.” I hope. “Hari knows I can use blood,” Simran said hoarsely. “He’s never been a fighter. He knows he should leave the fighting to me. He did this for me.” She raised her head. “I need a cloth. Something clean and dry.”
Without hesitating, the knight ripped her sleeve and offered the cloth to her, eyes steady. Simran gave her an incredulous look.
“You call this clean? It’s been against your skin. It’s covered in—in dirt!”
“It’s all I have,” said the knight, mouth twisting into a lopsided, self-effacing smile.
“It won’t do.” She tucked it away anyway. If she ever needed some way to trap the knight, it would help.
“Here,” her father said. He gave her a soft tea towel, clean. “This is… magic?”
She froze, the cloth tight in her fist. Then forced herself to move and breathe.
“Yes, Papa,” she said thinly. Another thing, among so many, that she’d never shared with him in her brief letters.
There was no surprise in his face. The same resignation, the same familiar grief she’d seen in her mother’s face, flitted across his own. He stepped back.
No guilt, she told herself firmly. It’s better this way.
She dabbed up the spill of blood, whispering a thread of a spell as she did so, to preserve the blood and Hari’s presence in it.
“Quickly,” the knight said suddenly. She’d tilted her head, eyes as alert as a wary doe’s. “I can hear someone coming.” She moved to the entrance.
Now that Simran was also listening, she could hear footsteps like those at the roadside inn, heavy and brutish.
Simran looked up at her parents, panic welling up in her. Knowing about her magic was bad enough. She didn’t want them to know what she truly was.
She straightened up fast. “I’ll go down and meet them,” she said tightly.
“You don’t have to,” the knight began, cautious. But Simran couldn’t listen to this. She pushed past the knight and headed down the stairs.
Her vision tunneled as she walked down, brushing by locals milling in the street.
On the road stood three witch hunters, black and ominous as ravens in their high hats.
Between them stood the archivist, looking supremely irritated.
One of the witch hunters was haranguing the baker, hissing something about stray incarnates and hiding from the law.
The baker’s face was splotchy red with anger.
Simran took a step forward. And a figure swept past her, blocking her path.
“You’re looking for an incarnate, then?” The knight sounded bored, drawling. She straightened, rolling back her shoulders, holding her arms out expansively. “Well, you’ve found me.”
A rustle of alarmed—and interested—noise ran through the crowd.
What was the knight doing? Simran couldn’t see around the barrier of her body. Did she think she could protect Simran? And why for the Isle’s sake would she want to?
“You’re being noble,” she said, acid in her tone. “But there’s no need. I’m who you’re here for.”
The knight turned her head and gave Simran a sharp look. Simran ignored it.
The archivist stepped forward. In the clear light of day, without a wall and rain and panic and mud to separate them, Simran could see that she was older than Simran by perhaps a decade, and just as brown-skinned, with the look of Elsewhere all over her.
The same Elsewhere as Simran, perhaps, though it was hard to know, when arriving at the Isle tended to blur the edges of memories of before and give the ones that remained a strange, tarnished patina.
“Stay still, miss,” the archivist said. “Let’s be done with this.”
The monocular prism set over the archivist’s eye shifted like clockwork, semitranslucent dials under the faceted surface shifting.
“This is the one.” She sounded satisfied. “It is good to meet you, witch. We need to take you back to London. You deserve a formal introduction at court.”
“Take me, then,” Simran said. “Do I get handcuffs or a leash? Or, oh—chains, perhaps? How novel.”
“You’re not a prisoner. You’re going to be celebrated.”
“I don’t want to be celebrated,” Simran said. “So am I free to go?”
The archivist’s mouth twisted. “We’ll talk more, miss. For now—come.”
Simran took a step forward. She looked back behind her.
Her blood ran cold.
Her mother was watching from the door, her mouth thin, her eyes unreadable.
She’d heard, but Simran had to believe she hadn’t. She’d heard, but Simran couldn’t allow herself to know it. A hand closed on her forearm.
“C’mon,” a witch hunter said gruffly.
“She can walk on her own,” the knight said mildly, from somewhere ahead of Simran. She was being led away, to wherever Simran was about to be led. Nobody was holding her. She looked calm.
“I’ll write,” Simran called out to her mother. Even though her mother knew well enough that Simran wrote only rarely, and then only the briefest, most meaningless letters. I’m well. Here is some money. Love to you and Papa. “I’ll—I’ll tell you when I’ve found Hari.”
The witch hunter tugged her arm again, and if her mother said something in return, then Simran didn’t hear it.
They dragged her into a sprung, horse-drawn carriage, waiting at the end of the road. The curtains were shut, and the interior dark. The knight was sitting across from Simran, silent and watching her.
The carriage jolted abruptly. And in a breath, they were moving. Heading back to London.