Chapter 17
By the time the four hours had passed to Amelia’s scheduled dinner time, Nyx was on edge because she hadn’t heard from Tristen or Maruca.
She walked into the dining room with Evra, her unease amplifying when she saw that everyone was there except them.
Her gaze swept over Kaden and Morgen, who stood with Amelia at a sidebar with drinks, quietly talking.
“I’m sure they’ll be here any moment, dear,” Amelia said, picking up on her worry.
Nyx was not so reassured. She dutifully took her own fruity, thankfully non-alcoholic, beverage and tried to sip it and make polite conversation while wondering what the hell Maruca had done with her Shaman.
Her tension eased fifteen minutes later when Maruca dragged Tristen in, until she realized Maruca was literally dragging him, because he wasn’t coherent.
All of his earlier manic energy was gone, replaced by an empty expression.
Maruca zeroed in on Nyx. “How long has it been since you let him heal anyone? He did too much.”
Somehow, it didn’t surprise Nyx that everything was her fault again.
“I don’t ‘let him’ do anything, and a day,” she answered straightforwardly.
Tristen had held a last-minute healing session the day before leaving Dead Earth, because Valerie had already made promises to someone with permanent internal damage as the result of an assault.
Maruca blinked. “One day?”
“One. How many people did you ‘let him’ heal? He looks catatonic.” Maruca’s hand curved around Tristen’s wrist seemed to be the only thing keeping him from wandering off in a random direction.
Her face took on a pained expression. “He wouldn’t stop. He cleared the burn ward in an hour, then started tearing through the elder ward.”
Nyx tried not to panic. Maybe they were small wards. Only a few people, not a mass of them about to be released home to spread the news of their miracle cure.
“The second one was more difficult,” Maruca continued.
“The last person he worked on has been like this”—she indicated his blank expression—“for two years. Now they’re talking and demanding to go home, and Tristen’s not.
I’ve been sitting in the garden with him for the last hour, hoping he’ll wake up. ”
Irritation and worry flared in Nyx’s chest. Maybe someone should have listened to her when she’d said this was a bad idea. “Did you try to snap him out of it?”
“No,” Maruca said icily. “I did absolutely nothing, blithely certain that everything would be fine.”
“What did you try?”
“Talking to him. Yelling at him. Shaking him. Slapping him. None of it made any difference. Perhaps another Shaman—”
“No,” Nyx, Evra, and Morgen all said together.
“Why not?” Maruca demanded.
“It’s not your concern,” Nyx said. Tristen had said the Congregation kept them from getting mixed up with the people they healed. That he’d had a hard time remembering who he was when he’d first started healing on his own.
“It is my concern when this happened on my watch,” Maruca objected.
Nyx ignored her. She needed something Tristen would react to that would cut through whatever secondary identity he was currently lost in. What was he most reactive to? The answer came to her with sudden clarity. “Let him go, I need a minute with him.”
Maruca’s hand tightened on his wrist. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing bad.” She was just going to threaten to. In a manner she would rather Maruca and Amelia didn’t know existed.
“It’s fine, Ruca,” Morgen said.
Maruca hesitated.
Nyx’s temper broke. “For fuck’s sake. If I wanted to hurt him, I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of dragging him to this planet to do it. I am not this awful person you seem convinced I am.”
Maruca looked like she was about to snap back at her, but then she took a deep breath. Blew it out slowly like she was mentally reciting calming instructions in her head. “Okay,” she said at the end of the breath. Coming from Maruca, it was practically an apology.
“Then can I have him?”
Reluctantly, Maruca let Tristen go. Nyx had thought the woman’s arguing with her had been because she didn’t like Nyx, but the expression on her face said she actually did feel responsible for Tristen’s current condition.
“He’ll be fine,” Nyx promised. She took his hand and led him out of the dining room.
He followed her wordlessly. Since the house wasn’t overly large, Nyx took him back to the room she and Evra were staying in, mostly because it was at least far enough away that if he panicked, Maruca shouldn’t hear it and feel the need to come running.
Alone, Nyx could admit she wasn’t sure if this was going to work. “Tristen?” she asked softly.
He didn’t give any indication he’d heard her.
She wiped sweating palms on her jeans, grasped both of Tristen’s hands in hers, and spiraled down into A-Queltr.
He trembled a little as she made the descent.
When she leapt onto death’s ledge, he jerked so badly he would have fallen over if she hadn’t been holding him upright.
She said his name again, hoping that now, it would be enough.
He blinked. His eyes focused on her for a second, then slid away.
It wasn’t enough.
She needed to do more, but she couldn’t actually attack him with death magic.
Or rather, she could, but she wasn’t willing to risk it.
If he didn’t react in time, she could actually kill him.
She just needed to make her own magic feel potent enough that the Tristen who was buried in there somewhere couldn’t fail to recognize it and respond.
She was best at coaxing the magic of A-Queltr out of her center when she was angry or frightened.
In those times, it flooded her with enhanced strength in an instant, without any need for her to consciously guide it.
But she wasn’t scared or angry now, so she had to coax it out, which took time and concentration.
As death magic slowly crept through her body, she kept both of Tristen’s hands tight in hers. He tried to jerk away, but he was no match for death-fueled strength. He also still wasn’t himself. His movements had the jerky panic of a wild animal caught in a trap.
If he didn’t wake up, he was going to hurt himself.
Desperate, she thought of the phantom snakes made of death magic that Jevryn had once summoned when he’d been impersonating Kiev.
Nyx had done something similar—on instinct again—when she’d confronted her mother on Endalna.
Concentrating, she thought of the magic as a whip she could pluck from the unending pool inside herself.
She grasped a tendril of pure death magic and it spiraled out from her. Confident she could recall it in an instant, she sent it at Tristen with all the killing intent she could muster.
Magic detonated from him, a potent jolt pouring straight from him into her. A-Queltr absorbed the deadly influx, and she let the whip of death magic fade.
“Tristen?”
He blinked. His magic still surged against A-Queltr, but this time when he finally focused on her, she saw recognition in his eyes. He looked down at their hands, at the black veining her skin. At the place where his magic was flowing out of him and into her.
His magic slowed.
“Keep going,” she said. “If you need to.”
Understanding and relief lit his eyes. The flow of his magic, which had eased to a trickle, came roaring back like a fire hydrant opened wide. It poured harmlessly into the wide chasm of A-Queltr, and not for the first time, she wondered what this place inside her truly was.
It was all good and well to say a pathway to death lay inside her, but what did that truly mean? Some cosmic link to a physical land of death that was common to all beings? Or some facet of Lethe-Alihana evolved into their children, a magic that linked Salyrians and nothing more?
Even if she had a free hand to reach for Alihana, they wouldn’t tell her the answer.
She’d asked before and they’d ignored her, and she still didn’t know if it was only because they’d wanted to annoy her, or because they truly didn’t wish her to know the answer.
So she stood in the wake of magic that should have killed her and wondered if she should worry about how calming the experience was. How centering.
For all her father’s lectures on the nature of death, and how death was peace, she’d always thought he’d referred only to reaching the ledge of A-Queltr.
She hadn’t considered that standing in an onslaught that should have killed her, but instead merely flowed through her, could be peaceful as well.
There was a feeling of invulnerability in it, as if nothing in the world could ever touch her, and if this was a feeling her father had lived with for nine centuries, it was no great mystery as to how he’d become as arrogant as he was.
Tristen’s magic finally tapered off, drawing her back from internal thoughts to the present.
She dropped his hands, but she remained in A-Queltr.
It was comfortable there, and she didn’t want to leave it quite yet.
But she pulled death’s power back to her center, the black limning her veins fading into nothing.
The onslaught of magic coming from Tristen finally relented in intensity, then slowed, then finally died. He shuddered, looking both like he wanted to hug her and also be as far away from her as possible.
He compromised by staying where he was but dropping her hands. “Thank you.”
That made her feel worse. “Don’t thank me. I should have thought of this sooner.” All of that excess magic could have gone straight into A-Queltr. There wouldn’t have been any risk of discovery, and he wouldn’t have nearly lost himself.
Tristen shook his head. “It wouldn’t have worked. It won’t work, if it gets that bad again. It isn’t just the excess magic buildup. It’s the compulsion to use it for what it was intended for. I could go on a mass killing spree and that compulsion to fix things would still be there.”