Chapter 38
Chapter thirty-eight
Ashara
The Blessing
Blood: my blood, Throllo’s blood, Pietr’s blood, blood of another nameless acolyte who died at my hand. So much blood I was caked in it, the stains bleeding into one another until I was one open wound. They said Thromarra ran red…well, so did I.
Vetrius, Lycandor, set me down by the hearth, both of us now locked behind the iron door to his rooms. He’d left me for a half a turn or so, just so he could retrieve the tome and his armour, both of which were now stashed in his chamber.
But he was back now, and I was still where he’d left me, lost to the flames.
“Cold?” he asked.
I nodded, wiggling my fingers closer to the hearth. Though I felt the fire’s burn, its warmth evaded me, brushing over my skin, but refusing to seep into my bones where I needed it most. Shivering, my teeth clacked together as I huddled closer, chasing the heat.
But before I could consider wandering into its grate, two hands draped a shawl over my shoulders, careful not to disturb the wounds at my front.
“It’s rather different,” I confessed, once the shivering had ebbed. The fire licked at the logs, streaking them orange before singing them black. I pulled the shawl tighter. “What is?” He spoke from behind me, his deep cadence somehow managing to penetrate where the fire’s warmth could not.
Blackened wood crumbled to powder.
“To kill someone close, rather than from afar.” A log snapped, embers coiling upward towards the scorched mantle before fading to ash.
His boots thudded on the rug, and he joined me by the fire.
“In the end, distance does not matter, only the destination. When a heart stops beating, it cares little for the geography of its unmaker.” He prodded at the dwindling hearth with a poker, sparks flitting towards us like fireflies.
“Do you still believe me blessed with mercy?” I asked. “Was it mercy to slit their throats? Mercy to gut his innards like swine? Mercy to unman him?”
Helm fixed on the fire, his silence was telling.
“Acolytes died before, in the Room of Rites,” I continued, watching the flames dance. “Tens and tens of them, when the sky fell on our heads.”
He hummed, his swallow thick even under the barrier of chain. “But I reasoned, even if by some impossible chance my blood was the cause, I had no need to feel guilt, nor remorse. For why should I? It was not my will, nor my plan. A truth?” I abandoned the lure of the flames to gaze into his veil.
“Always.” Finally, he turned towards me. Through the mesh, I hunted for his eyes; two pinpricks of light, like the faintest of stars, glinted behind the metal.
“My will or no, I was glad of it,” I whispered, knowing he would scent my truth. “After everything, as I was forced to look on as laurel after laurel succumbed to bloodstone and then the hammers. It felt like justice.”
It still felt like justice.
“It was,” he affirmed.
That urge to rip away his covering consumed every muscle until I was taut with it, as if his eyes, or nose, or godsdamned mouth, could give me some clue as to what in the pits had made this druid, the Butcher of Dendralis, grateful for the deaths of his brethren.
“But today…” My palm, the one knotted with linen, tingled beneath its bandaging, its sting banished by Lycandor’s blessing. “That feeling bloomed again; the breath after I slit Throllo’s throat. I don’t think I could have done the rest without it.”
I blew out a breath, the burden of another truth leaving me lighter. “What does that say of me? That one throat was one too many? That I may have dropped the shard and let them bleed me dry. Is it cowardice or bravery to simply endure?”
“Neither.” He shifted closer, his elbow grazing my arm. “It is simply who you are.”
“It is not who my blessing wanted me to be. Perhaps it was my blood that trembled the earth and kindled the tree, for I swear I could feel its hum in the ground. In the walls. Like a shoot, ready to burst from the soil.”
His thumb swiped at the curve of my cheek, collecting a tear.
He rubbed it against the base of his forefinger, as if feeling for what it was made of.
Inevitability, I nearly confessed. There’d be no hope to fly with Demetri, or even plummet together.
Not after what I’d done. Not when the High Druid and Falstaff found out.
I turned back to the fire. “Today was different from what happened in the Room of Rites. To slice a man’s throat, even under the hold of my blessing…to feel the tension in my wrist, so similar to canvas, always blunting the shears. The effort, the—”
“The resistance.” His hand cupped mine, the one that cradled Esioul’s eyes, and he nudged at my fingers. I didn’t open them. I couldn’t. Not yet. Then I’d have to look.
“It is as if the flesh and bone fight back,” he added, coaxing my smallest finger to unfurl.
“What in the pits is it? This thing inside me?” I demanded, tugging my arm until he let go.
“The warmth?” His hands fell to his sides, his forefinger and thumb dancing together in a small circle.
“It spread…from here.” I pressed my other hand to my chest. “It spread and spread and spread until I was filled with it…this stranger’s joy. When I slit Throllo’s throat, then the other’s, then Pietr’s…”
His arm twitched, fingers stretching to skim the edge of my shawl.
“I still don’t have it, Lycandor.” His name slipped from my tongue before I had the good sense to pull it back, the syllables tumbling from me as if I had spoken them a hundred times before.
“The guilt, the shame, the remorse. Why am I empty of all the things I’m meant to feel, and full of the things I am not? ”
“Remorse? Overwrought and useless. You have no need of it.” He waved a dismissive hand as I bristled at the words, familiar somehow. “What do you feel at this moment?”
I returned my gaze to the flames. “Cold. Just cold.”
Some indistinguishable sound leaked from behind his mesh. Readying to turn, perhaps to prowl back to the dresser he ransacked upon entry, he paused before the first step of his boot.
Two arms encircled my shoulders, wrapping themselves across the expanse of my back.
I sucked in a breath, the cold somehow banished.
His touch was firm, but gentle, angling his body away from my cuts. Yet, even with the small distance between our middles, I was lost to him, to his embrace—cloaked in his smell, in his heat.
The telling weight of metal lowered to my crown, the hem of his veil ghosting the back of my neck and shoulders. For a moment he hovered, like a dragonfly unsure where to land. Then, his chin came to rest atop my hair.
My parting scratched beneath the friction of a beard, the one I had glimpsed in the Unmantle. I braced for the weight of his helm, but it never came, its burden kept from me.
I smiled into his shoulder. The heat radiating from him was delicious, better than the fire. I exhaled, closing the distance between our chests and letting his warmth banish the ice. Pressing my face to his heart, it hammered beneath my ear, each thump urging my grin higher and higher.
“Which is it, Lycandor, excited or scared?”
My head dipped alongside his chest with the huff of a laugh. “Both.”
Nestled into the strange comfort of the faceless druid I’d come to know, I thawed.
He was sturdy, unbreakable, unyielding, and I pushed into him, determined to borrow some of his strength.
I’d need it, surely, once the numbness abated and Falstaff came knocking.
I wrapped my hands around his waist, my closed fists skimming over the vast expanse of his back.
His breath jumped, holding me tighter and softening, his shoulders relaxing.
A sticky warmth thrummed over our middles, washing me in another wave of heat. He stilled. Damn me to the pits if I didn’t cling on, hoping for just one moment longer as he tried to pull away.
“Your wounds, Ashara.”
My name on his lips sobered me, and I released him, reeling from how intimate it felt—more so than his embrace. I glanced down at my exposed breasts, one leaking, the rust of dried blood lining its edges. Lower, at my hip, the padding gleamed tacky and damp.
As if noticing them awakened me to the pain, the sting of the incisions rekindled, stealing my breath.
“Oh…I—” The telltale heat of a blush crawled up my neck. Foolish to feel shame at this moment. Lycandor hadn’t shown a single inkling he was fixated on my nakedness, and even without reading his eyes, some part of me knew they hadn’t leered with lust, only concern.
“We need to patch you up; you’re dripping all over my carpet.”
Dottings of red embellished the patterning.
“I’m sorry, I’ll—” I tugged at my bodice, wincing.
“Stop.” His hand closed around mine again, igniting it.
“And do not apologise.” I could somehow feel his eyes on mine, like a prism of sunlight through a windowpane.
“None of this is your fault.” He lifted my hand and for a moment, I thought he might kiss it, like the knights in my mother’s stories.
Instead, he used it to guide me towards his bed.
“You are not to blame, for anything,” he said over his shoulder.
“It was your blessing, and even if it wasn’t, do we blame the fox who turns on the hound?
No, it is the way of things, it’s survival. And it was I who—”
“I wanted to hurt them,” I hissed, forcing my feet to a stop.
“I wanted them to bleed, and to feel afraid, and to suffer the same indignations as I had. Even through the haze of my blessing, if that’s what it was, I wanted it.
” I still wanted it, all of it. I wanted the entire templum reduced to rubble.
“I am grateful for the joy, even if it wasn’t my own; there was freedom in the absence of fear. ”