Chapter 20 Lysa #2
Back in the supply room, I braced myself against the soapstone sink, scrubbing at my hands until the skin was raw and red, but the tremors wouldn’t stop. The water in the basin sloshed over the rim, splashing my boots.
“Stop it,” a voice hissed.
The door slammed shut, slicing off the sounds of the weeping baker in the front room. Briony stood there with high color in her cheeks and not much patience.
“I have to get clean,” I said, reaching for the scrubbing brush again. “I have to—“
Briony crossed the small room in two strides. She grabbed my wrists, her grip surprisingly hard, and yanked my hands out of the water.
“Look at them, Lysa!” she said. “Look at what you’re doing!”
I tried to pull away, but my strength had drained out of me with the dog’s life.
I was a husk, trembling in her grip. My hands were a ruin, frostbite burns from the Quieting sat stark white against the scrub-marks.
My fingernails were blue, the beds contrasting sickeningly with the dried blood I hadn’t managed to wash from my cuticles.
“You’re killing yourself, Lysa! Look at you!” Tears spilled onto her cheeks, but she didn’t let go. “Whatever is happening to these animals, whatever this sickness is... it is too much. It is not worth your life. You have to stop.”
“I can’t,” I said, the words brittle. “If I stop, the village—“
“To hell with the village!” Briony shoved my hands back toward my chest. “I don’t care about the infirmary! I care about you! You disappear when you use the gift, Lysa, you turn into a ghost right in front of me.”
The door creaked open again. My father stood on the threshold, his shoulders slumped. He looked between us: Briony fierce and weeping, me shaking and bloodstained.
“She’s right, Lysa,” he said. “We cannot ask this of you anymore. Not at this cost.”
“It’s not about the cost, the river is turning into sludge. The foxes are seizing in the mud. That dog out there died because the magic inside him curdled.”
I leaned back against the sink, gripping the edge to keep upright. “Tell me. Everything you didn’t say when the letter arrived. Why does it matter?”
My father rubbed a hand over his face. “Lysa—“
“Why is the manor so important for Abberwyn?” I demanded. “People say the Stormgardes abandoned us, but the moment that house started dying, the town started rotting. It’s not a coincidence.”
Father sighed. He stepped into the room, closing the door behind him.
“It’s the Hush Magic,” he said. “We think of it as simple—heating rugs, cooling tea, finding books. Domestic comforts. But magic requires a filter. It requires a structure to ground it, or it becomes wild and toxic.”
He gestured vaguely toward the ceiling, toward the mountain peaks hidden by the rain.
“The Stormgarde ley-line isn’t only a source of power, Lysa.
It’s a heart. The manor was built to pump the magic through the valley, to refine it, to strip away the volatility before it reaches the town.
The Stormgardes... they are the keepers of the filter.
Not many people know this though. I, myself just found a few pages in one of your mother’s books. ”
I stared at him, the cold in my bones forgotten for a heartbeat. “So when the manor crumbles...”
“The filter breaks,” Briony said, horror dawning in her green eyes.
“Raw, unrefined magic bleeds into the soil,” Father confirmed. “It twists the creatures first. Then the water. Then us. If Fenrik dies, and that manor falls... Abberwyn won’t just be poor. It will be uninhabitable.”
I looked down at my ruined hands. The poisoning was happening to the entire valley. And Kelda, she wasn’t just killing a man. She was damming the river at its source.
“I need to see that book, Father.”
“I’ll find the text,” Father said, though his gaze drifted toward the front room, where the silence was heavier than the sobbing had been. “But Lysa... knowing the mechanics of the dam doesn’t help when the water is already drowning you.”
The heavy thud of the front door closing echoed through the shop. The baker was gone.
“It might give me a way to plug the leaks,” I said. “If the manor is a filter, then Fenrik is clogged. And Kelda is ensuring nothing flows through him ever again.”
Before Briony could argue, the bell above the shop entrance screamed, a violent jangle of brass that made us all jump.
I really should have taken the thing down some time.
Of course Maren would do that to my door.
She didn’t wave hello. She slammed the door, threw the deadbolt, and then pressed her back against the wood as if holding back a horde of goblins.
“Don’t open that,” she said, chest heaving. “Unless you want to be pelted with rotten cabbages. Or worse, unsolicited advice from Mrs. Gable.”
“Maren?” Briony stepped forward. “What’s happened?”
Maren marched past the display of calming crystals. She dumped a lumpy, moving bundle of wool onto the examination table, right next to where I’d failed to save the hound.
“Kelda Morvain is what happened,” Maren spat, unwinding her scarf. “She’s been busy while you’ve been up at the cliffs playing nursemaid to the lord. I came from the market. Do you know what they’re saying over the turnips? That poor lord Fenrik was fine, recovering, even, until you arrived.”
My stomach dropped. “That’s absurd. He was dying.”
“Truth doesn’t matter when you wrap a lie in silk and serve it with sympathy,” Maren countered, her dark eyes flashing.
“She’s telling everyone that your gift is the problem.
That you aren’t quieting the magic; you’re strangling it.
She claims your ‘unnatural’ silence is causing a pressure buildup in the ley-line. ”
I leaned against the counter, the room spinning slightly. It was brilliant. Evil, but brilliant. It played into everyone’s fear of what I could do. “So the river rot...”
“Is your fault,” Maren finished grimly. “According to her, you’re not the cure, Lysa. You’re the infection. She says the manor is rejecting you, and the tremors are the earth trying to shake you off like a fever.”
“That explains the look the dockworkers gave me,” I wasn’t just the weird girl who quieted scared pets anymore, I was the reason their livelihoods were dissolving into sludge.
“It gets worse,” Maren said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “She’s organized a petition. A ‘concerned citizens’ appeal to have the Council intervene and remove you from the clinic. For the ‘public safety.’”
Briony made a sound of outrage, but I just stared at the lumpy wool bundle Maren had placed on the table. It squirmed.
“She’s isolating me,” I realized. “If the town turns against me, I can’t stay here. And if I go back to the manor...”
“You’re trapped with her,” Maren confirmed. “But you’re not entirely without friends. I found this little one shivering behind my rain barrel. Seems he didn’t care for the rumors either.”
She peeled back the layers of wet wool.
Kirion blinked up at me. The wyrmling looked wretched, his midnight-blue scales were dull and shivering, and his oversized wings were tucked tight against his small body.
But when he saw me, he let out a pathetic, high-pitched chirp and scrambled across the metal table, his claws clicking frantically until he reached me.
He scrambled right up my front, digging his claws into my apron, and buried his cold snout into the crook of my neck.
“He escaped the manor?” I asked, my hands coming up instinctively to cup his trembling body. He felt fever-hot and ice-cold all at once, the duality of the curse raging inside him.
“Or he was driven out,” Maren said, watching the creature cling to me. “He wouldn’t let anyone else near him. Nearly took a finger off the fishmonger when he tried to shoo him away. But the moment he saw me, or smelled you on me, I can’t say, he practically jumped into my arms.”
I stroked the silver markings along his spine, feeling the jagged rhythm of his heart against my own chest. He wasn’t wild with madness right now, he was just terrified.
“See?” Maren gestured to the wyrmling. “The town might believe Kelda’s lies, but the creatures know the truth. That lizard knows whose magic is keeping the lights on.”
“We need a map,” I said, the thought crystalizing amidst the chaos of exhaustion. Gods I could have slept right there for at least a week. “A real one. An old one.”
Maren blinked, her hand hovering over Kirion’s trembling flank. “A map? Now? Lysa, look at you. You look like you lost a fistfight.”
“If the manor is a filter,” I said, pacing the small length of the room, ignoring how the floor swayed, “then the ley-lines act like veins. I need to see where they flow and how they intersect. The Rainmint Bookshop will have the cadastral surveys from before the Collapse.” I grabbed a clean rag, pressing it firmly to my nose to stem the flow of blood. “We have to go. Now.”
“We aren’t going anywhere,” Maren argued, “until you drink something that isn’t your own blood.”
Before I could retort that I had plenty of blood to spare, a lie, a thunderous pounding rattled the bolted front door. It sounded awfully close to the thump of officialdom.
“Open up!” a muffled voice boomed. “By order of the Town Council!”
Maren rolled her eyes so hard I thought they might get stuck. “Oh, wonderful. The circus has arrived.”
My father moved to answer it, but I clamped a hand on his arm. “No,” I said, feeling a sudden spike of adrenaline that sharpened my vision. “Let them in. I want to hear this.”
Father threw the bolt. The door swung open to reveal Council Member Aldric Pembroke and Beatrice Holt standing on the stoop, flanked by two town guards who looked like they’d rather be wrestling bears.
Pembroke, a man whose mustache possessed more volume than his courage, took one look at me and flinched so violently he nearly knocked Beatrice into the umbrella stand.
“Gods above,” he squeaked, raising a handkerchief to his face.