2. Chapter 2
Lunette
I’d seen this often enough that it should’ve meant nothing, but my stomach still climbed into my throat.
I stopped in the center of the tiny village square to breathe through my body’s revolt.
The silence was worse than screams. Those sounds of agony might’ve meant I could do something to preserve life amidst the carnage.
I stepped carefully around the splatters of darkening crimson marring the fallen leaves blanketing everything that hadn’t burned or wasn’t covered in the remnants of destruction.
Without rain to wash the blood away, it had dried in patches everywhere, black where it had clotted.
Apparently, even the weather had decided it had done enough.
The gods, too, if the silence was anything to go by. They’d been remarkably consistent in their absence—the only thing they offered us anymore.
A vein-streaked hand stuck out of a golden pile beside the community well, its rigid fingers stretching out as if reaching for water even after death.
Another body lay two paces away—an old woman, sprawled half-buried, eyes and mouth choked with the ashes of her neighbors’ houses.
The wind caught a lock of her gray hair, making it dance grotesquely in the breeze.
Men from my village sifted through the wreckage, stooping to remove belts, pry off rings, and pull boots from the legs of the dead.
Elbort, average in every way except for the deep scar across his temple and his commitment to making everything around him worse, wrestled a cloak free of a corpse, cursing when the blood-stiff fabric resisted him.
He laughed as the seam tore, making the body hit the ground with a soft thud.
Of course he’d laughed. Elbort laughed at funerals, at injuries, at anything difficult to think through. I hated him for the sound and hated myself more for still flinching at it. Worst of all, I knew he’d find a way to make an ugly joke about the dead again before the sun set.
Today the men had turned grief into a contest of who could laugh first. It was worse when their simmering fear curdled into cruelty. I’d seen the pattern often enough to recognize the symptoms for both. And this man in particular was stupid enough to mistake cruelty for strength.
“We’d already be back in Selmont if you weren’t spending so much time laughing,” I said. Normally, I was adept at biting my tongue, but the sight and smell of so much blood had loosened the hold I had on my temper.
A sneer flashed across Elbort’s face before he thought better of it and resumed his work.
My morality, it turned out, was flexible, but not infinitely stretchable. I still had standards. I was complicit in robbing the dead, but I would never stoop to degrading them.
Cold bastards.
Our village had thrived while others faltered, in part because we scavenged the remnants left behind by raiders.
We’d learned to profit from their destruction, bartering a raider’s axe for grain in market towns, a scorched cloak cut into squares for a quilt and sold for a touch of secondhand warmth.
It was ugly commerce, but it would keep the children fed this winter.
Though naming it survival didn’t make it feel any better.
To the east, rugged mountains clawed at the sky, casting deep shadows over the winding track that led home.
If these raids ever stopped, I might be able to leave Selmont behind with a clear conscience, hide my ears with creative hairstyles, and go somewhere my life wasn’t carved out of other people’s ruin.
Somewhere that didn’t carry my history with these people.
Where people didn’t look at my ears and see a pariah.
Somewhere I could be foolish enough to trust and maybe one day fall in love.
The faintest moan pulled me toward a small hut.Lichen clung to the wood-shingled roof and weathered logs that formed the walls. It was likely a replica of the house that had been its neighbor, but that one had perished in the fires that had consumed most of the wooden buildings in the settlement.
My magic stirred unprompted as I crossed the square, a tiny, restless flicker that felt like the brush of a stranger’s hand against my arm.
Strange, but I told myself it was from nothing more than anticipation at what I would find.
Even as I stepped around the old woman’s body near the well, my heart beat harder, and hope bloomed where only despair had been.
Grasping the crude handle, I wrenched the door open.
A gray-haired man lay sprawled in his bed, pained gasps rattling his torso. A worn knife lay on the floor beside him.
He tried to fight.
The walls of his tiny home were adorned with knickknacks that could only have been crafted by a child’s hands—lopsided clay figurines and scraps of wood decorated with charcoal faces. Someone had loved him. Probably many someones.
Tears pressed at the corners of my eyes as my imagination painted the scene of sacrifice in the name of love. Now blood stained the front of this man’s shirt, and one side of his chest didn’t rise at all.
Gods above and below.
The raiders had aimed for his heart and missed.
The man’s pleading gaze followed me as I approached. I knelt beside his simple bed, brushing soot from his weathered face—ash that had slipped through the cracked door and windows.
“I’m a healer, but I can’t heal this,” I whispered, though my magic begged me to try anyway, foolish thing that it was. If wanting were enough, I’d have saved half the borderlands by now.
The truth stung, but the pain wasn’t as sharp as it used to be. Part of me had become numb to death, even as every fiber of my being sought to delay that inevitability when I could.
Something in his eyes told me he understood. Still, he wanted something from me.
I picked up his cold, trembling hand. His grip was featherlight, breaths shallow as he stood at death’s doorway. Then his attention shifted, focusing on the points of my ears. As shock washed over his face, his fingers went limp.
I wasn’t supposed to exist.
“You don’t have to fight anymore,” I told him, trying to ignore the fear in his cloudy gaze. This moment wasn’t about me or my feelings; it was about making certain he wasn’t alone. “Your family is already at peace. If you want, I’ll stay with you until you’re ready to meet them again.”
Where our hands clasped, I allowed a thread of my magic to flow into him. I hoped the warmth would distract from his pain and quiet some of the panic I saw in his eyes. “I’m Lunette.”
I’d expected his eyes to shutter in relief, but they narrowed then fixed on mine, that same pleading from earlier now turned cold as a grave.
A whisper, barely a breath, slipped from his lips. “End it, please,” I might’ve missed it had my hearing not been so keen.
The words hit me harder than seeing him drowning in his own blood had. This wasn’t the first or the fifth time that question had been posed to me. I’d stopped counting.
I nodded. To prolong life or end it as a mercy were two sides of the same coin. Today, Fate had chosen an end for this man, just as she’d sent me to grant it for him.
After all, what was yet another crack in my shell when I was already a broken woman?
Warmth pooled in my palm where my hand clasped his.
I guided threads of comfort woven together with my unique magic, slipping both up his arm and through his chest, leaving a trail of gentle heat behind.
My unique specialty was called life-weaving because I had the ability to bind flesh, unlike other mage healers.
Yet it came with a dark side only a few knew about.
Healing came at the cost of my sweat and stamina, but the darker side of my gift, the power to rend flesh, required no such effort. Where healing was a labor, rending was a reflex—a horrible destructive thing that cost me half the energy and a single thought to unleash.
I bowed my head and whispered, “Be at peace then, grandfather.”
That seemed to be the right thing to call him. A faint uplift graced the corners of his mouth.
Then, with a sharp tug, I yanked the threads of the magic I’d woven into his flesh, ripping a jagged hole in his fading heart.
The man’s last sigh misted into the morning air.
And then… And then there was only the sounds of my own hitched breathing, my pounding heart breaking, and the chill air filling my heaving lungs.
Not as unaffected as I thought.
A phantom ache pulsed like the ghost of a heartbeat in my palm where the threads of magic I’d held slowly dissipated.
That was normal after rending flesh. What was not was the way every fine hair on my body stood on end at once, nor the faint, insistent pull in my chest like an unseen hand tugging at the core of my magic from far beyond my reach.
I struggled to make sense of it. But quickly realized that the sensation was nothing more than my emotions affecting me physically. I was exhausted and grieving.
But then a strange comfort washed over me, like someone draping a blanket across my shoulders on a cold night. I fought a full-bodied shudder. It had been an eternity since I’d felt that kind of contentment, since I’d felt anything so close to human warmth.
I exhaled a shaky breath through a tight throat, trying to force the sensation away.
It had been nothing more than my mind’s attempt to shield me from the guilt of having taken yet another life.
Because the alternative—that something or someone had reached out for me in this broken moment—was far too dangerous to believe.
Sometimes, though, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to meet someone whose first instinct wasn’t hatred or fear.
Someone who saw more in me than the legacy of my blood or the danger my magic presented.
Despite fading, the feeling of comfort had left a faint but indelible impression.
A reminder of something I couldn’t have.