Chapter 7
SEVEN
Heat roars. Wood cracks and embers fly.
“Run.” Blood drips from his mother’s mouth as she speaks.
It splatters his face.
With arms stained to red, she pushes herself up. She wants him to crawl out from beneath her. She wants him to escape. “Run, my child, run.”
He does not run. He does not move. He waits, as he always does, for the flames to overtake him and the world to burn alive.
The wounds on his chest scream.
Aeduan thrashed awake. Thirty paces away, the Earth Well burbled, steam rising off its moving waters.
Tendrils that lifted into the night, circling past beech trees with summer plumage despite the winter nearby.
No snow touched here; grass grew; and the air was warmer than it had any right to be.
Which had made it a logical place for camping.
Overhead, the bright column of stars that Cartorrans called the Sleeping Giant sparkled down, almost bright enough to outshine the moon. It felt bigger this high in the mountains, and there was a sharpness to it from the cold, as if the moon’s yellow edges were chipped out of stone.
Aeduan’s horse nickered. Then pawed at the first stones edging around the Well. Surefoot was a squat gray beast with a constellation of white spots across her rump and a comfort with mountains unmatched by any man.
Aeduan trusted her with his life. She’d carried him without wavering for almost a month now, one mission after another, always in the name of the Cahr Awen.
“I hear you, girl,” he murmured as he hauled himself to his feet. “You’re hungry again. You need to pace yourself, though. These fresh offerings from the Hasstrels won’t last forever.”
As despairing as the main estate had been, the stables had been clean, warm, and fully stocked. The fon Grieg brothers cared about their horses—a reminder that even the worst humans usually had a good side. (And the best humans almost always had a bad.)
After offering Surefoot fresh apples to go with the grass she’d already cleared, Aeduan turned his attention to the Well.
He had never been here before, although he knew of it.
Iseult had come here; she had healed these waters with Safiya; and what had once been dormant for centuries now thrived again—all because they really were the Cahr Awen.
Without thinking, Aeduan reached out with his Bloodwitchery. It was a habit. An instinct. A need. Think of Iseult. Reach for the silver taler. But she wasn’t within the range of his magic, and Aeduan already knew that. She was a hundred leagues away, at a hunting lodge near the Solfatarra.
Aeduan ran his tongue over his teeth. One heartbeat passed. Two. Then he strode all the way to the Well’s edge and stared into the waters. Despite never having been here, never having seen this Well or watched its waters roil, there was a familiarity that seeped through the night.
And the waters, he was quite certain, stared back at him. Because long ago these waters had been alive.
A thousand years ago, they had been Exalted Ones—not that Aeduan had known that when suddenly one of their souls had been shoved inside of him. All he’d known was that one moment, he was himself. The next, he was drowning and a Paladin named Nadje had controlled his body.
Once, as a young boy living near Saldonica, Aeduan had seen a bear forced to dance by a Herdwitch. All life had been sapped from the poor beast’s eyes. There had been nothing left but broken resignation.
That was how Aeduan had felt when the Paladin had been trapped inside him.
Nadje had been a Paladin of Aether before death had claimed him a thousand years ago.
Now, fragments of Nadje still lingered inside Aeduan—not the man’s consciousness so much as memories, hazy and illogical.
Like a song from childhood in which the words are gone, but the tune still remains.
And that tune from Nadje had been one of pain. One of hatred and anger and, inexplicably, relief when the end had finally come for him. What end that was, though, Aeduan couldn’t remember.
Nor did he want to remember. He wanted that cruel Paladin out of his mind, his bones, his blood.
He wanted no memories or songs or fury to ever linger there.
Iseult had told Aeduan that over time, these remnants of Nadje would likely fade.
That these Threads, now unbound to him, would eventually drift away into the embrace of the Moon Mother.
But it hadn’t happened yet, and it wasn’t happening fast enough.
Aeduan sank to one knee at the Well’s edge. Nearby, Surefoot stopped her chewing and snuffed. Aeduan ignored her, dipping his hand down. Gently, warily.
The water lapped on a sudden wave. It splashed against his fingertips, warm and welcoming. No sentience or hunger or hints of a soul from a thousand years ago.
Now Aeduan was the one to snuff, in a harsh, almost hateful laugh. Because he was being a coward. Of course this Well could not possess him. Assuming any ghost still endured as Nadje’s had within the Aether Well, there was no Leopold the Fourth here to force such a being into Aeduan’s body.
He is Trickster, Iseult had explained weeks ago, from our legends. He can return souls to bodies just like the tale of the girl and her hedgehog.
Aeduan had been too embarrassed to admit he scarcely remembered the Nomatsi gods, much less the fables and stories his father had once told him.
The only one he recalled with any clarity was the monster and the honey—and he hated that story.
Collect the six pots of honey, little monster, and you can become a man.
In the end, the monster didn’t become a man; because in the end, the Moon Mother broke her promise to him.
Aeduan swallowed. Wet his lips. Then, with an almost frantic speed, he stripped out of his clothes. Cloak, baldric, breeches, shirt, undergarments. Night air—winter laced with enticing heat—stroked his skin and raised chill bumps across him.
He dove into the Well. Water lashed into him, subsuming him with its wild churn. And with a sparkle that he had felt before, inside the Aether Well. One not of ghosts but of a healing embrace.
Within moments, Aeduan surfaced and let his legs float. He drifted on his back, the waters bubbling beneath him, sending him on a lazy course across the Well as he stared at the sky. At the Sleeping Giant, always pointed north.
A sky singing with snow, his magic murmured inside his chest. Meadows drenched in moonlight. Sun and sand and auburn leaves falling. It was not a scent Aeduan recognized, nor one he remembered ever having smelled before.
And it also was not a scent that was here. Instead, this was a memory plucked into being from the Old One, Nadje.
Inexplicably, the scent made Aeduan’s chest hurt. His heart hollowed out in one sharp twist as if he’d lost a piece of himself—the only piece of himself that really mattered.
Monster. Demon. I can smell it on you: you’re bound to the Void.
Run, my child, run.
Aeduan flipped onto his side. In four swift kicks, he reached the Well’s lip. He pulled himself free, water sluicing off him. Then he sat on the stony edge, legs still in the water, and crooked over to study his chest.
The six old wounds had reopened. For years, they had bled and haunted. Then they had seemed to heal—or at least stop their recurrent bleeding after Iseult had saved Aeduan’s life in the Aether Well.
But a week ago, the nightmares had returned and the wounds had begun their weeping again.
They hurt too, as if the arrows from Aeduan’s childhood once more flamed through his mother’s body and into his own.
He’d spent most of his life with that pain, just as he’d spent most of his nights with the nightmare of her corpse burning atop him.
Somehow, though, the intensity and cruelty of it all seemed far worse after two months of freedom.
Fresh waves lapped against Aeduan’s calves, at odds with the cooling water that dripped over his chest and mixed with fresh blood. Dark rivulets gathered in the grooves of his abdomen and poured down onto his thighs. Onto the stones.
Aeduan waited. And he waited. The wounds did not close up, but the echoes of his mother’s voice did fade, bit by bit. And the bleeding did slow. Then stanch entirely, while the pain eased into a softer heat.
Good. That was good.
After a quick scrub to clean away the blood, Aeduan stood. Winter air kissed and nipped against him as he strode to his discarded clothes. As he dressed, piece by piece, with Surefoot chewing audibly and watching him with drowsiness in her eyes.
“You can sleep, girl. I promise we’re safe here, and we won’t leave until first light—” Aeduan broke off. His bare toes had snagged on something unexpected. Something cold and slinking when there should be only stone.
A Hell-Bard’s noose, he realized as he hastily scooped a golden chain off the ground—and not one noose, but two. Both were split apart, no longer necklaces but simply strands of gold to glint across his hands.
Aeduan frowned, lifting the nooses and expecting his witchery to latch on to the fon Grieg brothers’ foul bloods.
But no. These were different smells entirely, one of coastal storms and freshly turned soil.
One of smokeless heat and a father weeping.
Yet both scents also carried hints of the noose and cold iron.
Which matched the bloods of the two missing Hell-Bards: Zander and Lev.
For weeks, Safiya and Caden fitz Grieg—a bastard brother to Shitpants and Red—had been searching for these Hell-Bards.
Aeduan himself had entered the Solfatarra three times to search for their bodies, since everyone had assumed they must be dead.
They’d fallen from a flying machine; they could not have survived the acid lake waiting below.
But there had never been any corpses in the Solfatarra for Aeduan to find, and the mystery of Zander’s and Lev’s disappearance had stopped being his problem. He’d been sent away on errands. New coins, new causes, new Griegs with things the Empress needed.
Aeduan thrust both chains into a pocket on his breeches, and with hasty efficiency, he finished dressing. Already, his magic was peaking, searching, tracking. The Earth Well had left its mark inside his witchery; he would have no trouble tracing which way these bloods had gone.
After checking Surefoot possessed what she needed—a warm spot to sleep and a bucket of water—he gave her a scratch at the ears.
Pressed his forehead to hers. “I’ll be back soon,” he promised.
Then Aeduan set off, tracking the smells like the Bloodwitch he was, no matter what element he might be bound to.