The Moon That Remembered Blood #2
I had found him once already, kneeling over a fallen man with his hands pressed to the wound, and he had looked up as though he felt me looking and given me the smallest tilt of his mouth.
I had lifted two fingers to my brow in the old soldier's salute we had made into a joke years before, and he had laughed.
I could not hear it, but I saw it, and for the length of that laugh the field did not exist.
Now I turned toward the tilted warmth, and the field fell away on either side of me, because I was no longer interested in it.
I found him under a half-burned cart, an old woman in his arms and a child crouched behind him in the wreck, and a long black-fletched arrow standing out of his side below the ribs. The old woman was alive, and so was the child. He had got them there. Of course he had.
I went to my knees in the mud.
“Cassiel.”
“I am here,” he said. “I am here, my dark one. Don't be so loud.”
“Let me see.”
I drew his hand away from his side. The wound was wrong.
I had seen clean killings and dirty ones, and this was neither.
This one had intent in it. The blood at its edges had already gone black.
I knew the arrow, and I knew the patient black craft that had fletched it and laid this whole field as a snare with Cassiel at its heart, because there was only one of my own kind who hated me enough to study the person I loved.
Marcellus.
“Drink.” I bit through my own wrist and held it to his mouth. “Drink, Cassiel, take from me, take.”
He turned his face aside, gently.
“It won't hold,” he said. “You know it won't hold.”
“You will drink.”
“Drakhar.”
“You will not leave me on this ground.”
“Drakhar. Look at me.”
I looked, and he was already further from me than he had been a breath before. There was a grey that came into a mortal face when the body began its long quiet work of letting go, and it had come into his.
“The promise,” he said.
“No.”
“The promise, my love.”
“No. I withdraw it. I unsay it.”
“You can't.” His hand came up, slow, and found my jaw, his thumb passing once beneath my eye as it had in the dark before the horns. “Don't cage your heart around my ghost, or make a prison of me. You were loved. You are loved. Carry it as love. Promise me again.”
“Cassiel.”
“Promise me.”
I could not. I bent my forehead to his and made a sound I have not made before or since, and he waited, patient as he had always been with me, until at last I gave him the words, because they were the only thing I had ever been unable to refuse him.
“As love,” I said. “Not as ruin.”
“There,” he whispered. “There, my dark one. There.”
His hand slid from my face, and his eyes did not close at once. The warmth at his temple where my mouth was pressed went still, and the child was crying, and the old woman prayed in a tongue I did not know.
I sat with him a long time, though it may have been a moment. Time was not behaving.
Then I rose and went to find Marcellus. He had not run, which was his arrogance, and I would hate him for it across every year that followed, because had he run sooner I might have had him.
I found him at the edge of the field, where the dead thinned and a black horse waited that he had been too certain to need, and he saw what was coming for him, and his face moved in a way I had long wanted to see it move.
I will not set down what I did to reach him.
There were deeds a man might do and afterward speak of, and deeds he might do and afterward only carry, and the road I cut to Marcellus Vane belonged to the second kind.
By the time I reached him the horns had stopped, and the drums with them, and there was no one left to drum for.
He did not draw on me. He stood beside the black horse with his arms loose at his sides.
“Slower than your reputation,” he said. “I had wondered whether the stories were generous. They were.”
“You will not enjoy what comes next.”
“I have already enjoyed it.” He tilted his head, unhurried, savoring me. “You felt him go, didn't you. That little warmth, the drop of your own blood you kept him by, like a leash. I wanted to be near enough to watch your face when it tilted, and it did not disappoint.”
I did not answer, because I could not, and I have never been able to put a word to what was in me then.
“You should thank me, Drakhar.” He spread his hands. “I have freed you of the one weakness your long life had left you. A creature as old as you, undone by a soldier with soft hands. It was unbecoming. I have made you terrible again.”
“You have made yourself a dead man who is still, for the moment, standing.”
“For the moment.” His smile did not move. “But you are bleeding our oldest blood into the mud, and the iron in your arm is mine, and we both know what your reach is worth tonight. Come, then. Reach.”
I got a hand to his throat, and in that same breath the old iron in my own arm answered the sigils his witches had strung through the field, my strength guttering low at the one moment I needed all of it, and I understood that he had built the whole morning around exactly this.
My blade opened his face instead, a single long stroke from temple to jaw, when it should have taken his head.
He went backward over the horse with one hand pressed to the ruin of his cheek and his eyes still on me, and the shadow took him, and the field gave him up where it would not give me Cassiel.
He would carry that line for the rest of his long life, pale and clean against the dark of him, the only mark I ever set on Marcellus Vane, and a fraction of what I owed.
I carried the other half of it ever after myself: that lost half-inch, the width of a weakened arm, the space between the blow I struck and the one I meant to strike.
I went back to him, and I let no other hand touch him. I carried him to where the ground was clean and laid him down and knelt, and the moon, which had no business in the sky at that hour, hung above us pale as a washed bone.
That was when the witch came. She walked through the dead as though they were tall grass, old in a way that did not count itself in years, and she was not afraid of me, which I noticed, because everything living had been afraid of me for a very long time. She looked at Cassiel, then at the moon.
“Blood-born,” she said. Her voice was not unkind, and not kind either, only old. “Stand.”
“Leave.”
“Stand, Drakhar of the First Blood, and hear what the moon has to say of him.”
“The moon has nothing to say to me.”
“Then hear it for him.” She set her hand, light as ash, on Cassiel's brow. “He is not yet finished walking.”
“He is dead.”
“Yes. The flesh is.” She lifted her face to the pale moon.
“What war has taken, time shall return. Not in the same flesh, nor under the same name. He will come through debt, and through blood, and through a door that should not open. And when he comes,” her eyes came down to mine and held no pity, which I respected, “do not make a cage of your grief. He will not be yours to keep, but yours to choose, and to be chosen by, if by then you have learned the difference.”
“You speak cruelty and call it mercy.”
“I speak what is. Call it what you will.”
She bent and kissed his forehead, then stood and walked back through the dead the way she had come, and I did not stop her, because I had nothing left in me to stop anything.
I gathered him up again. The moon was beginning, at last, to give way, and I carried him from the field, making the promise a second time, and a third, into his hair where no one could hear it, not yet understanding what I was promising.
I carried him beneath the moon that remembered blood.