Chapter 9 Kielyne
NINE
KIELYNE
Blight.
I recognize it the moment I see the black veins crawling beneath his skin.
Every battlefield medic knows about blight.
A magical poison that rots living flesh from the inside out, spreading through the body until it reaches the heart.
Shadow-magic weaponized, distilled into something that kills slowly enough to be agonizing and fast enough to be unstoppable.
The texts all say the same thing: blight is incurable. Once it takes hold, nothing stops it. No herb, no poultice, no amount of surgical skill. The victim dies in agony within hours while their body consumes itself from the inside out.
I’ve seen soldiers choose a quick blade to the throat rather than suffer through a blight death. I’ve held hands while men begged me to end it faster. I’ve watched strong warriors reduced to screaming, weeping wrecks as the curse ate them alive.
Now Blorjorn lies crumpled on the bone-studded earth, the curse spreading toward his heart, and every piece of medical knowledge I possess is utterly useless.
“Move him into the shade.” My voice comes out steady. Commanding. The voice I use when everything inside me is screaming. “Get me water, bandages, any herbs we have. Now.”
The war band scrambles to obey. Grothak barks orders, positioning fighters in a defensive perimeter around us.
They’re expecting an attack—the blight trap was old, buried in these bones for years, but its magical discharge would have been visible for miles.
Anyone watching would know exactly where we are.
I don’t have time to worry about attacks. I barely have time to think.
The black veins have already spread from his chest to his shoulders.
The flesh around them cracks and weeps something dark, darkening to the color of rotted meat.
His breathing comes in ragged gasps, each one shallower than the last. His skin burns fever-hot where the rot hasn’t reached, ice-cold where it has.
The oath-mark on my arm burns. A warning, sharp and insistent. He’s dying.
I know. Gods help me, I know.
I do what I can with what I have.
My hands strip away his ruined armor, exposing the wound beneath. The blight originated from a sigil carved into ancient bone, buried just beneath the earth’s surface.
It worked exactly as intended.
I pack yarrow paste along the edges of the blackened flesh, hoping to slow the spread. The herbs hiss and smoke where they touch the curse, and Blorjorn’s body convulses. A sound escapes him—not quite a scream, but close. Raw and animal and wrong coming from someone who’s always seemed invincible.
“Hold him down,” I snap. “He can’t thrash while I work.”
Grothak and Vekra pin his shoulders. Fenrik takes his legs. Even half-dead, his strength is terrifying—muscles cord beneath his fever-hot skin as he fights their grip. But they hold him, and I keep working.
The yarrow buys time. Minutes, maybe. The blight adapts, works around my barriers, keeps spreading.
I try cutting away infected tissue—a desperate measure that I know won’t work even as I’m doing it.
My blade removes blackened flesh in strips, blood welling dark and thick, and Blorjorn’s screams echo off the bones around us.
It’s not enough. The curse is too deep. It’s already in the muscle, threading through tissue I can’t cut without killing him.
“It’s not working.” The words taste like ash in my mouth. “The blight’s in too deep. I can’t—my medicine isn’t—”
“Move aside, child.”
The voice is ancient, cracked with age like old leather left too long in the sun.
I look up to find an orc woman pushing through the gathered warriors.
She’s old beyond measure, her skin the gray-green of weathered stone, her back bent nearly double with the weight of years.
White hair hangs in thin braids around a face that’s more wrinkle than flesh.
I’ve seen her at the edges of the war band, tending small fires and muttering to herself in the old tongue. I assumed she was someone’s grandmother, too old to be left behind but too frail to be of use.
Now she moves with purpose, her rheumy eyes fixed on Blorjorn’s ruined chest with an intensity that makes me shiver.
“Who—”
“Morra.” Grothak’s voice is rough with something that might be hope. “She’s a bone-singer. Knows the old ways—the magic from before the Veil Breaking.”
The old woman—Morra—kneels beside me with a creak of ancient joints. Her gnarled fingers hover over the spreading black veins, not quite touching. Her lips move silently, and I catch fragments of old orcish—words that feel heavy in the air, weighted with power.
“Blight is shadow-magic,” she says finally.
“Made from the same darkness that cursed our bloodlines during the Veil Breaking. Your human medicines can slow it—you’ve done well to buy this much time—but they cannot stop it.
” Those ancient eyes turn to me, sharp and knowing. “Nothing of this world can.”
“So he just dies?” I don’t bother hiding my desperation. “There has to be something. Some ritual, some—”
Morra’s gaze drops to my arm. To the oath-mark, visible beneath my pushed-up sleeve, still pink and raised against my skin.
“You carry his blood now. And he carries yours.” Her voice drops lower, taking on the cadence of ritual. “The oath mingles what was separate. Makes two bloodlines one, at least in the eyes of the old magic.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Clean blood, freely given, can purify what shadow has poisoned.” Morra’s hand closes around my wrist, her grip surprisingly strong for someone who looks like a stiff wind might shatter her.
“But it must come from one whose blood is already sworn to his. One who shares his oath-mark. One who gives willingly, knowing the cost.”
Understanding hits me like a fist to the chest.
“You want me to give him my blood.”
“Not want. Need.” Morra’s expression doesn’t change, but something flickers in those ancient eyes. Sympathy, maybe. Or warning. “The curse has spread deep. To purify it will require more than a few drops. More than is safe for a body to lose.”
“How much?”
“Enough to weaken you severely. Perhaps enough to kill you, if your body is not strong enough to recover.” The old woman’s eyes bore into mine. “The choice is yours, oath-bearer. No one can force you to bleed for him. But if you refuse, he will be dead before the sun touches the horizon.”
I look at Blorjorn. At his gray-tinged face, slick with fever-sweat. At his labored breathing, each gasp shallower than the last. At the black veins inching closer to his heart with every passing moment.
He saved my life. Bound himself to me when he could have let me die. There’s no choice. Not really. Not for me.
“Tell me what to do.”
Morra works quickly but carefully.
She has me lie beside Blorjorn, our bodies parallel, our marked arms pressed together.
The oath-marks align—his burned black into dark-green skin, mine pink and raised against golden-brown.
Where they touch, I feel warmth. Recognition.
The magic acknowledging that we belong to each other, at least in this one way.
Around us, the war band watches in tense silence. Grothak’s face is carved from stone, betraying nothing. Vekra’s expression is unreadable, but she hasn’t moved from Blorjorn’s side. Fenrik looks terrified—young and scared in a way that reminds me painfully of my brother.
“The cut must be deep.” Morra produces a blade—bone-handled, ancient, the edge dark with age but still sharp.
Symbols carved into the handle, worn smooth by countless hands.
“The blood must flow freely from your veins to his wounds. I will guide it with the old words, but you must not pull away. No matter how much it hurts. No matter how weak you become. If the flow breaks before the curse is purged, all of this will be for nothing.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” Those ancient eyes search my face, seeing more than I want her to. “This is not medicine, child. This is sacrifice. Your life poured out to save his. If your body fails before the curse is gone, if your heart gives out from the strain...”
“Then we both die.” I hold her gaze. “I understand. Do it.”
Morra nods once, slowly. If she’s surprised by my conviction, she doesn’t show it. Maybe she’s seen this before—oath-bearers bleeding for each other, sacrifice in the name of bonds they never asked for but can’t escape.
The blade bites into my arm.
Pain flares, sharp and immediate, but I’ve felt worse. The cut is deep—not a scratch but a true wound, opening the vein beneath my skin. Blood wells dark and rich, flowing faster than I expected, and Morra presses my bleeding arm against Blorjorn’s chest. Against the heart of the spreading blight.
She begins to chant.
The words are old orcish—the same guttural, rolling sounds Blorjorn used during the oath ritual. They settle into my bones, vibrate in my teeth, make the air itself feel thick and charged. The oath-mark on my arm flares hot, then hotter, responding to magic it recognizes.
My blood flows.
I feel it leaving me—hot and fast, too fast, draining from my arm into his poisoned flesh. The sensation is strange, intimate in a way I didn’t expect. My blood, my life, pouring into him. Becoming part of him.
Where it touches the blight, something happens.
The black veins recoil. Shrink back from my blood like a living thing flinching from flame. The curse fights, tries to corrupt what I’m giving him, but it can’t. My blood burns through the poison the way fire burns through dry grass, leaving clean flesh in its wake.
But the blight is deep. So deep. And there’s so much of it.
Morra’s chanting grows louder. My blood keeps flowing. The world begins to tilt at the edges.
Time loses meaning.