Chapter 34
Cold found him first.
It had been working on him for a while, judging by the deep, marrow-level ache of it—up through his spine, locked between his shoulders, settled hard in the back of his neck—burrowing into places he hadn’t thought to worry about yet.
Ivan dragged in a breath, and pain hooked into his side so fast it stole the rest of the inhale from him.
His jaw locked. The muscles in his stomach went hard as stone.
For a second, all he could do was lie there and take it, eyes shuttered against the harsh white burst of it.
When it eased enough for thought to return, he tried again—carefully this time, pulling in only a thin ribbon of air.
It barely filled his lungs, but the pain did not bite as deeply.
Fuck.
He couldn’t find his hands. He knew they were there—he had a vague, peripheral sense of them, like a frostbitten man scenting woodsmoke on the wind and knowing warmth existed somewhere he would never reach—but knowing a thing existed and being able to reach it were separate matters.
He frowned, or thought he did. His face felt slow to obey him.
Sound came in pieces. Wind, high and thin, moving through something that broke it—trees, or rock, or both.
Beneath that, voices. Northern vowels. He caught “Leave him,” and then the meaning slid away before it could settle, and there was only the wind again, and the cold, and the dark sitting on his chest like it owned the place.
Beneath it all, somewhere at the far back of him, lingered the trace of another place—sun on his skin, wind in the reeds, a door painted green. He reached for it, and it slipped away.
A place I have wanted to be.
He could not, just then, remember why.
Ivan opened his eyes, and there was only shadow and light trembling above him.
“—said leave him. That was before we knew what—”
“—doesn’t matter what he is. It matters what he knows—”
“—bleeding through the second dressing, Yoni, I don’t care what you said—”
Bryn.
Her voice had an edge that could strip bark. He almost smiled before he drifted again.
The next time Ivan forced his eyes open, he found stone above him. He stared at it long enough to be sure it was not rubble—that it was a ceiling, built to hold, and that nothing was about to come down on top of him—before he let out a breath.
Vredian work, obviously. The seams were packed too neatly for anything thrown together by hand in haste.
He turned his head slowly, because his skull objected to every degree of movement, and found a wall of the same rough-dressed rock.
Beyond it lay the outline of a low doorway, and beyond that, a gale moving through what he identified, after a moment, as pine.
High elevation.
They were still in the ridge.
“Good.”
He turned toward the voice.
Bryn was watching him with her elbows braced on her knees, copper hair loose and snarled around her shoulders.
Dried blood darkened one thumbnail. She looked like someone who had fully expected her patient to die and was only mildly inconvenienced to find him awake instead.
Her satchel lay open at her feet. She set aside the small clay pot she had been turning in her hands the moment she saw his eyes sharpen.
“You’re back,” she said. “Don’t thank me yet.”
Ivan’s mouth moved. Nothing worth hearing came of it.
His body began to return to him in pieces. Pain first, of course. Pain was always punctual. His limbs no longer felt like dead weight, only battered. His ribs were broken—three, perhaps four, all on the right. His shoulder was either wrenched half out of its socket or worse.
And beneath all of that, the other thing.
The shadow.
He had partly expected it to be gone after what he’d spent in that room. Toward the end, he had sensed it draining out of him—drawn the way a man pulls from a flask he knows is nearly empty, tipping it further and further back. But somehow, it remained, though muted.
Bryn pressed a clay cup into his hand—his grip was embarrassingly weak—and waited while he brought it to his lips. Water. Cold enough to ache. He drank until she took it away.
“Slowly. Or you’ll bring it back up.”
“I’m fine,” he said, or tried to. It came out as two rough syllables that gestured in that direction.
“You are categorically not fine.” She settled back on the crate and studied him without sentiment. “You were touch-and-go for the better part of two days. There were several hours I was not confident you’d see the other side of.”
He said nothing to that. Two days. He ran a rough internal accounting and found it plausible, which was unpleasant.
“You’re lucky Dominic considers your continued survival useful in some way. I defer to him in matters where my own judgment runs toward the expedient.”
“And how is His Highness faring?”
Bryn huffed through her nose. “More or less fine. If you ignore the part where he nearly gutted his reserves saving your hide. Again.”
“How devoted of him.”
Bryn gave him a flat look. “Don’t romanticize stupidity. It’s a terrible use of resources.”
Ivan huffed—half a laugh—and his ribs reminded him immediately and without sympathy what they thought of that.
He pressed a hand to his side and swore, but Bryn was already reaching into her satchel.
She produced another small clay pot, lid bound shut with twine, and worked it open.
The smell that rose from it was aggressively medicinal.
“Ground from what I could find on the ridge,” she said, tipping a measured portion onto a folded cloth and pressing it into his palm. “And before you ask—yes, it’s revolting.”
Ivan looked down at the dark, gritty heap in his palm and, for a terrible moment, considered whether dying slowly of whatever internal damage he’d acquired might, in fact, be preferable. His expression must have done something unfortunate, because she sighed.
“Don’t be a child.”
He got it down in two swallows. She was not wrong. Revolting did not begin to cover it. Something acrid bloomed at the back of his throat, bitter enough to make his eyes water. His teeth pressed together. Every instinct rose in immediate revolt.
He swallowed again on sheer spite.
“There,” she said, voice flat as slate. “You survived.”
Ivan turned his head and fixed her with a look.
One corner of her mouth twitched.
The fire popped and sent a bar of light across the stone floor. Outside, the wind moved through the pines in long, slow waves, and he let the sound of it settle over him—his pulse steadier than it had been, the herbs taking hold, pulling the pain under.
“You were talking in your sleep.”
Ivan turned toward her then, properly, and raised a brow.
“Most of it was nothing,” she went on. Her eyes stayed fixed on her hands as she turned a strip of wrapped linen between her fingers. “Some of it wasn’t.”
“What did I say?”
“A name,” she said, worrying her lip. “More than once. And something I couldn’t follow—about a flood, and holding it. And then once, near the end—” She stopped.
“What?”
“Something in a language I didn’t recognize.” She set the linen down on her knee. “Old. The cadence of it—it wasn’t any Latherian dialect, or Tírrísh for that matter.” She finally looked at him. “Strange, is all.”
The cold in the room seemed to find him all over again.
Think of me.
The memory rose clean and sudden. Elara’s hand pressed over the bloodstone at her chest. Her gray eyes lifting to his. Think of me. Hold to the bond. Perhaps one of us catches the other.
Ivan almost smiled.
She had been there. Not a fever. Not some kindness his dying mind had thrown up against the dark. There—three paces from him in a field that smelled of crushed grass and lake water, the wind moving slowly through her hair. He had reached for her, and she had been there to be reached for.
Ivan pressed his palm to his side, where the bandaging sat warm and damp, and let the small, dull pain of it root him.
The oath was there still. He could feel it, faint but unmistakable, a line drawn taut between this stone room and somewhere he could not see.
The darkness beneath his skin was muted, but it had not gone.
The oath she carried had not gone. She had not gone.
And now he knew how to reach her.
Ivan turned her words over with care. Try the current, if you are traveling. If we’re in the Void at the same time, perhaps it will pull at us both.
The thought sat in him with a strangeness he did not at once know what to do with.
He had spent ten years training himself out of the habit of hope.
Hope was a poor thing to carry into the work he had done; it slowed a man’s hand, and there was no slower hand than a dead one.
He had set it down, year by year, until the setting-down had become so familiar he had ceased to notice he was doing it.
And here it was again, small and sharp and badly timed, sitting in his chest like a coal he had no idea how to hold.
Stay alive, she had said.
He had given her the line, and she had taken it and turned it back on him, and called the debt. Ivan set his jaw against the small, useless heat behind his eyes, breathed once through his nose, and let the moment pass.
“I don’t remember,” he said.
Bryn held his gaze, her brown eyes doing the thing they did where they looked carefully at something and gave nothing back about what they found. Then she nodded and began repacking her satchel.
Ivan slept again, briefly, and woke to find the fire had been fed and the light had shifted.
Late afternoon, maybe. The cold had not improved.
He pushed himself upright, one hand braced against the stone floor, and waited for his skull to finish registering its complaints.
When the worst of it passed, he looked around clearly for the first time.