Chapter 21 Lysa
twenty-one
Lysa
Isat in the back corner of The Drifting Teapot, staring into the dark dregs of an infusion I hadn’t touched in twenty minutes. The porcelain was cold against my fingertips, a stark contrast to the heat I used to feel near Fenrik, whenever I reached for magic.
“You’re going to burn a hole in that cup, Lysa,” Maren said, sliding into the chair opposite me. She placed a fresh scone on the table, and the smell of butter and currants made my stomach roll. “Eat.”
“I can’t. It’s been three days, Maren. Three days since Kirion vanished from the infirmary.”
“He went back to his person,” Maren said, her voice gentle but firm. “It’s what familiars do.”
“He went back to die,” the conviction sat heavy in my lungs. I had convinced myself that leaving the manor was an act of mercy, that my presence was the catalyst for Fenrik’s destruction. But the silence from his and Kirion’s bond... it didn’t feel like healing. It felt like a grave.
Whatever Maren was going to say next was severed by a scream that tore through the cozy hum of the shop.
My chair scraped against the floorboards as I bolted upright. I was out the door before the bell above it could finish its chime, skidding onto the rain-slicked cobblestones.
A crowd had formed near the bridge, a wall of retreating backs and fearful murmurs.
“Keep back!” a man shouted, brandishing a shovel. “It’s maddened! Look at the rot on it!”
I shoved past Mrs. Gable and the baker, ignoring their protests. “Move,” I said. The circle parted, and the air left my chest in a rush.
Kirion.
Fenrik’s wyrmling was staggering across the stones, but he was a ruin of the creature I had come to love.
His midnight-blue scales were dull and cracking, peeling away like dead bark to reveal grey flesh beneath.
But it was the blood that made me gag, thick, silver fluid that usurped the natural red, dripping from his snout and his torn wing.
Where the silver droplets hit the wet pavement, they hissed, burning small divots into the stone.
“Monster,” someone whispered behind me.
“Kirion,” I choked out.
The wyrmling’s head snapped toward my voice.
His movements were jerky and one amber eye was swollen shut; the other was bloodshot, swimming with a milky haze, but when it landed on me, clarity sharpened the pain.
He let out a sound that broke my heart: a high, trilling cry that broke into a wheeze.
He took one step toward me, his legs trembling, and then his strength evaporated.
I hit my knees in the mud beside him an instant later. “No, no, I’ve got you,” I said, my hands hovering over his flank, terrified to touch him where the silver blood seeped. His breathing rattled in his chest.
“Miss Emberlin, get away from it!” the baker warned. “It’s cursed!”
“He’s hurting!” A small voice piped up.
I looked up, blinking against the rain. Two children, the miller’s identical daughters, had slipped through the line of fearful adults.
The braver of the two dropped to her knees beside me, her small hand reaching out to stroke the only patch of intact scales on Kirion’s neck.
Tears made tracks through the dirt on her round cheeks.
“It’s okay,” she sniffled, patting him. “Lysa is here.”
Kirion leaned into the child’s touch, a low hum vibrating in his throat.
“He came all this way,” I whispered to the girl, though I was speaking to myself. My hands settled on his neck, ignoring the sting of the corrupted magic radiating from him.
A familiar was a reflection of his bonded one. If the familiar was this broken, this consumed by the silver rot...
“He’s dying,” the little girl said, looking up at me with wide eyes.
“No,” I said, the word trembling with anger. Not at the creature, but at the lie I had swallowed. Kelda had said I was the problem. Kelda had said my absence would save them.
Kirion let out a long exhale, and a cloud of silver mist drifted from his nostrils. He nudged my hand with his snout.
“Lysa. The inquisitive eyes,” Maren hissed, her grip on my shoulder firm enough to bruise. “If Holt or Pembroke receive word you’re practising Arcane Medicine on the street after their warning, they’ll shackle you.”
Rain plastered my hair to my skull, but the cold barely registered against the heat of the wyrmling’s fevered hide. Maren was right. The baker looked ready to fetch the constables, and the crowd’s murmurs were sharpening from fear into accusation.
“Help me,” I rasped, sliding my arms under Kirion’s trembling belly.
Maren threw her heavier wool cloak over the wyrmling, shielding the glow of his silver blood from prying eyes.
Together, we hefted him. He was light, but his heat seared through my wet clothes.
We stumbled through the side door of the tea shop, bypassing the main floor where crockery clinked and patrons whispered, and hauled him up the narrow staircase to Maren’s private quarters.
“Easy, love, easy,” Maren soothed, though she was breathless by the time we kicked open the door to her flat.
The air of Maren’s home was a comforting blend of dried lavender, steep-smoke, and old wool.
Vibrant tapestries from the southern coasts draped over mismatched armchairs, and the ceiling was a constellation of hanging drying racks where bunches of chamomile and star-anise spun in the draft.
It was a nest of colour and life, so unsuited for death.
We laid Kirion on the rug before the hearth. The silver blood immediately began to hiss against the woven fabric, eating into the dyes.
“I’ll fetch the heavy salves,” Maren said. “And fresh linens. Don’t let him burn a hole in the floorboards.”
I sank to my knees, my hands hovering over the wyrmling’s chest. “Kirion?”
He didn’t open his eyes. I pressed my fingers to the hollow of his throat, seeking a pulse. Thump... thump-thump... silence.
“Don’t you dare.” I moved my hands down, checking his limbs for circulation.
His right foreleg was tucked tight against his chest, the talons clenched into a fist so rigid the knuckles were white under the scales.
He was holding something. Holding on as if it were the only thing tethering him to the earth.
“Let me see,” I said, prying at the claws.
They wouldn’t budge. He whined, and tightened his grip even as his strength failed elsewhere.
“I need to see, Kirion. It’s alright.” I pushed a pulse of my Quieting magic into the joint, just a thread.
The tension in the claw slackened and I peeled the talons back one by one. A crumpled ball of parchment fell into my palm, damp with rain and slick with that luminous, toxic silver blood.
The paper was clearly expensive Stormgarde stationary. But the writing... I pressed a hand to my mouth to stifle a sob. It was a battlefield of ink. Fenrik’s elegant, aristocratic script was there, but it was jagged, fighting itself across the page, the letters tearing through the paper in places.
Lysa—stay away—no, please, come—she’s—I can’t— Heavy, frantic strike-throughs obliterated half the words.
Something shifted inside the parchment. I tilted my hand, and a pressed moonflower slid out onto my palm, like the one I’d seen in his sketchbook and like the one he’d sent me tucked in his first letter. Truth in darkness.
He had sent Kirion to find me.
“Oh, gods, he’s still in there.”
I didn’t have any more time to verify if Maren was ready with the salves; I pushed.
I reached for the chord of his frantic heart, the thread of my Quieting gift unspooling from my core to wrap around his chaotic magic, my magic was coming out gold and silver this time.
I couldn’t understand whether it was hot or cold.
Even though my magic was confused, there was no resistance, the wyrmling’s barriers were gone, shredded by the curse.
Then the room vanished. I wasn’t standing in Maren’s flat, I was crouched low to the ground, seeing the world through eyes that perceived heat as color and magic as vibration. I was Kirion.
Fenrik sat slumped at his desk in the manor study, his head heavy. The room swam in a haze of unnatural grey static. He gripped a quill so hard the wood splintered against his thumb, ink pooling on the parchment.
“I have to warn her,” Fenrik said, the words slurring as if his tongue were numb. His hand jerked, fighting an invisible weight to scratch out Lysa. “I have to—what was I saying?”
A hand, pale and elegant, settled on his shoulder. I felt the wyrmling’s hiss vibrate in my own throat, felt the scales along my spine flaring with heat.
“You were saying goodbye, my love,” Kelda’s voice drifted down. She didn’t appear to use force; she used a gentle pressure instead. “Don’t fight it. The gaps are getting worse. Just write it down. Tell her you never wanted her.”
The air around Kelda shimmered, that looked like Veil magic. Through Kirion’s eyes it looked like a net of silver filaments drilled into Fenrik’s temple. He groaned, and the pen moved against his will, slashing through his own desperate warning.
The scene broke and reassembled into a different one. I was in a bedroom. Shadows stretched long across the floor, bleeding from Fenrik himself. He lay on the massive four-poster bed, his wrists bound by the same shadows.
Kelda was there. She straddled his hips, her green robe gone.
My breath hitched—my breath, Lysa’s breath, somewhere far away, as I realized what I was seeing.
The wyrmling had been hiding under the vanity, watching.
Kelda was rising and sinking onto him. Fenrik’s head was thrown back, the cords of his neck straining, his face a mask of agony rather than pleasure.
His shirt was torn open, revealing the curse-marks glowing like molten silver brands across his chest.
I saw the wet sheen of their joined bodies, the way her nails dug into his shoulders, drawing blood. She was grinding down hard, taking him with ferocity.