22. Byzantine Architecture
Someone was in my head, and it wasn’t Ciarán. Ciarán was there too, of course, lurking in the corners as he always did, but this new presence felt distinctly different.
It was more opaque and amorphous than Ciarán, but it shined through the thick slurry of my mind. I reached out for it, hoping it might drag me out the fog I’d been prisoner to, and it danced out of reach.
“Settle down,” Ciarán’s voice murmured in the dark. “She’s trying to help.”
“Who?” I demanded, suddenly on the defense.
“Just let her work. You’ll be better soon.”
“I don’t want strangers in my head!”
The presence darted closer, and the dark static of my mind swooped and swirled. My stomach lurched, and though I was trapped in my head, the cold sweat that drenched my back was all too tangible.
A sudden fire seared between my temples, burning away the fog and confusion and replacing it with white-hot pain.
I lashed out against the flames, but heavy weight pinned my arms to my side, so I couldn’t escape the fire in my head.
“It’s almost done, Blue. You’re okay.”
My stomach heaved again, and I thought I could see Linsey’s rotsbane forming in the shadows of my mind.
Her bones cracked and snapped as her face split to reveal the monster underneath, and I screamed in fear and pain, and the fire in my head turned hotter and hotter and hotter until—
Something popped, like a lightbulb bursting, and everything fell back into cold dark.
The smell of burning incense stung my nose and pulled me out of sleep. I blinked against the dull, warm light of whatever room I was waking in, and my heart jumped into my throat at the familiar, warm eyes that stared down at me under a furrowed brow.
“Liam?” I croaked, but dark hair fell forward into his face, and I sighed.
It wasn’t Liam, but Ciarán, though his eyes lacked their usual dark sclera and orange glow, leaving him looking more like Liam than usual.
“You’re okay,” Ciarán insisted. “We’re safe.”
Safe.
The word made me giddy and whatever sludge had existed in my head before had been replaced by a strange euphoria.
I reached up and grabbed Ciarán’s face, smooshing his cheeks together between my palms. His eyebrows rose in surprise.
“You don’t have a beard,” I whispered.
“What?”
I patted either side of his face, feeling the smooth skin. “We’re always traveling, but you never even have stubble. How? Why don’t you have facial hair?”
“I burn it off. What are you—?” He pulled away and grabbed my wrists to keep me from reaching for his face again. “Stop that.”
“You burn it off?” I repeated incredulously. “With magick?”
“Yes. Do you feel okay?”
“I feel great!” In fact, I’d never felt this good in my life. I could fight ten rotsbane. I could climb the Second Sentinel. I could—my stomach rumbled. “God, I’m starving. Do we have food?”
I glanced around for something to eat but didn’t recognize where we were. Candles sent shadows dancing up the bare walls of the room, and incense burned somewhere nearby. I tried to sit up to get a better look, and my white linen gown shifted with the movement.
I froze, staring at the fabric. “Where did my clothes go?”
“They smelled like a bog.” Ciarán did his best to come off as nonchalant, but a twinge of embarrassment tugged at our tether. “The healer put you in that, but Orla dropped off some new clothes for you.”
“But my hoodie—”
“It’s fine. Orla’s getting your other clothes cleaned.”
I nodded. “Right. And where are we?”
“At a healer’s in the citadel. She’s a Ceremender, so she specializes in head injuries, but you’d developed a fever too.”
“And how long have I been at this healer’s?” I dared to ask.
“Nearly a day.”
“A day?” I felt myself blanching.
“That’s not bad for the extent of damage the Ceremender had to repair, and your fever broke around midday. You should be fine, but the Ceremender mentioned some temporary side-effects from the treatment.” Ciarán helped me sit, and I rubbed my head.
“Side-effects like what?”
“I think her exact words were a ‘detachment from reality and a mercurial sense of whimsy’.”
“Oh, no. Not whimsy!” I teased, then pulled a bit of lichen from the tangles of my hair. “I’m growing moss.”
“That’s probably been there since the flood.” He grimaced.
“Gross.”
“There’s a bath in the back. Don’t worry. It’s private.”
I swung my legs over the side of the cot. My head felt light and woozy, but it no longer pounded behind my eyes and temples. I could think more clearly than I had been able to in days.
Fresh bandages wrapped around my forearms. I’d completely forgotten about the wounds my bone blades had left there, and until that moment, I’d also forgotten about the wound they had left in Ciarán’s flank.
“You!” I grabbed at the hem of his tunic. “Are you okay?”
“Wren—!” His face flushed as I pulled his shirt up and pressed a hand against the fresh bandages there. Whoever had treated the injury had also tended to what remained of his wounds from the rotsbane in the Second Sentinel, though scars peeked out from under gauze and wrappings.
“Does it feel okay?” I prodded hard at the bandages.
He took my wrist into his hand again and let his tunic drop.
“I’m fine, now that you’re awake. Come, Blue. You smell simply offensive.” He helped me to the stone bath in the back room and pointed to where a clean set of clothes waited in the corner. “Those are the clothes Orla bought you. You can change into them once you’re ready.”
“Bought? We have money?”
“We do after selling a bottle of Skal. It’s highly valued everywhere in Skalterra, but we’re in the Barony now, and Tamora keeps tight control over who gets Skal and when.”
“Eck. Tamora. We’ll just have to drop a lake on her next,” I giggled, then froze at the sound of my trilling laughter. I’d never made a sound like that before. I laughed harder.
“Yes, very funny and a great plan, but again, even here on the outskirts of the Barony, we are in her house. Be careful talking about drowning her.”
I shooed him away from the bath and let myself be greedy with the amount of time I spent in the hot water.
I unraveled the bandages on my arms, revealing pink lines of scar where my blade had cut through muscle.
The healer may have specialized in brains, but she’d done an excellent job magicking the skin back into place.
My hair, meanwhile, was worse off than I’d realized. It took a while, but after I’d worked out all of the tangles and bits of lichen, I finally dried off and wiggled into the clothes Orla had brought.
While the tunic had a long-sleeved under layer that hid my arm scars, the top layer was that awkward length where I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a dress or a shirt.
That was alright, though, because the thick leggings toed the line between pants and tights.
I missed my hoodie, and felt naked without the armor I’d grown accustomed to the last week.
“Be honest,” I asked as I stumbled out into the front room. “This is an okay outfit for Skalterra, right?”
“She may have lived most of her life hiding inside a mountain, but Orla does have decent taste,” Ciarán said, then added in my head, “though you need to be careful with what you say out loud. It’s best we not announce you are from a different reality.”
“Oh.” I noticed the woman shifting through a shelf in a storage closet and wondered if she’d been the Ceremender in my head.
The thought of facing the healer that had been poking around the ridges of my brain was too embarrassing to handle, and I hooked my arm around Ciarán’s elbow to drag him through the door.
I faltered on the front step of the building, gawking at the lamp-lit street.
Bright tapestries decorated stone walls and draped across walkways.
Street vendors called for customers, reeling passerbyers in with food, drinks, and trinkets.
The buildings here only rose a few stories, but taller structures were visible closer to the center of the citadel.
There, rising above the buildings, a tree stood at the highest point of the citadel, impossibly large with massive boughs that occluded the night sky and stretched as far as the wall that surrounded the city. But its trunk—
“Is that Skal?” I asked, incredulous, and pointed at the tree. Patterns like lightning snaked up its trunk, glowing blue against the bark. “I’ve never seen a tree glow like that.”
“It’s not a tree,” Ciarán said. “Not anymore, anyway. It turned to stone when the Four Magicians were creating Skalterra. The leaves are vines that have crept up the rock, and the glowing veins are exposed opal that formed in Skal.”
I gave him a sloppy grin as we walked. “Opal does that. Forms in water. Or Skal, apparently.”
“You really do love your rocks.”
“Yeah, okay. Care to tell me about the buildings, Mr. Architecture?” I froze and smacked his arm. “That would be the perfect secret last name for you. Architecture.”
“Maybe it is my last name,” he teased.
“Is it?”
“If I told you, I’d have to marry you, which I don’t think either of us want.” He led me forward, looking up at the buildings as we passed. “These buildings are of Byzantine influence, which comes from your world, though I imagine your style has diverged a bit from how it’s developed here.”
“Liam liked architecture too,” I said.
“You’ve mentioned.” He pulled his elbow out from mine, and I stopped walking, suddenly remembering.
“The forest we passed through,” I said, looking back at the giant, stone willow at the city’s center. “Those trees were petrified too, weren’t they?”
Ciarán dug a hand into the pocket of his trousers to procure a bit of rock. “I know you like rocks, so—” He cleared his throat and passed me the stone.
I ran my finger over the textured surface, marveling at the preservation of the wood-grain pattern.
“Petrified wood.” I grinned.
“Flip it over.”
I gasped when doing so revealed opalescent blues and oranges flashing in the light of the street lamps and giving off their own subtle glow.
“You weren’t really conscious, so I grabbed a bit. For you.”
I wrapped my fingers around the stone and grinned at him.