Chapter 10 #2
Whether that’s kindness or self-preservation, it feels like mercy. A low pop from the fire in the hearth breaks the silence—sap spitting as the log settles. Flora’s enormous deerhound raises his head and growls.
“Raise your hips,” Flora says, her voice husky.
She’s blushing still, and I try to think of something to defuse the moment, to make her feel safer with me. I’m half afraid anything I say will only make the situation more embarrassing for her, and I stare at the beams on the ceiling instead to calm my body’s traitorous response.
Her hands brush my hips again and then my thighs as she pulls the breeches off. I pretend not to notice, but telling myself not to react only makes me unable to think of anything other than the touch of her fingers on my skin.
Clearly, there’s something to be said for forbidden fruit.
I’m a Rider—there’s been no shortage of women happy to undress me and share my bed.
Even here in Alba Scoria, more than a few mortal women have offered.
I’ve had little interest, but that’s not the same as denying myself.
The more I try to ignore Flora, the more I feel each little touch, every scrape of her skin on mine.
She finishes removing my clothes and slices through the bandage around my chest. The linen sticks to the wound, but she pries the fabric off with cautious fingers.
“There, now you can lie down for the rest of it,” she says.
Holding the plaid in place across my hips, she helps me shift back around so she can reach the full length of the wound. I lie back as she picks out the moss and melted fir pitch she used earlier to draw out the poison and stem the bleeding. Fresh blood trickles down my chest.
Her hands are gentle, and I’m careful to show no sign of pain.
“You’re good at this,” I say, partly to break the silence, and partly because it’s true.
“Between here and the two Dunhaelic villages farther along the road, there’s rarely a week when someone isn’t sick or injured.”
I raise my head to study her, unable to tell what I’m hearing in her voice. She’s hard to read, though I can’t decide whether that’s because she’s human and the small clues that reveal emotion are less familiar to me or because she is trying not to react to what she’s seeing.
“How bad does it look?” I ask. “Be honest.”
She darts a glance at me, then quickly looks away. “The blackening—the dead flesh—is too extensive to remove it all. Without knowing what kind of poison this is, cleaning and stopping the bleeding can only do so much.”
Light and shadow from the lamp play across her skin.
In the hearth, the low flames hiss softly.
Catching an odd flicker of movement, I glance over and see the long, lithe form of a Twilight Weaver pull itself from a dark corner.
The creature studies me, then turns away and sets a fresh log on the fire before fading into the shadows again in the magical way of Shadelings.
They like to make themselves useful, but they’re wary of humans and terrified of Siorai.
After what Vheara’s done to them, I can’t blame them.
Flora hasn’t paid the Weaver any attention, and I’m starting to wonder if she can see the Shadelings at all. They’ve spent so long in the shadows that humans can only see them if they wish to reveal themselves.
“Did you understand what I said?” Flora asks. Her face is pale, and a drop of pinkish water falls from the cloth she’s holding.
“Did I understand that I’m going to die?” I respond more sharply than I intended. “Yes. You were clear. What makes you think it’s poison and not an infection?”
“I can’t be sure—I don’t know how different your bodies are from ours—but areas that were healthy tissue this morning have already turned black and died. And the odour…Your blood doesn’t smell of iron, but there’s a metallic stench to the wounds I can’t account for.”
“Thank you for being honest with me,” I say.
She opens her mouth as if she’s going to protest, then closes it. Her lips are tight as she pries away another clump of sap. The piece is large enough that I notice the gold-black sheen of something embedded in the amber resin as it catches the light.
If I hadn’t been thinking of poison and iron, I doubt I would have noticed the resemblance. But I’ve spent centuries watching the sun play on the gold-black whorls of celestial iron that are forged into my sword.
“Can I see what you just took out?”
“Why?” She picks up the clump from the table and hands it to me.
I bring it to my nose. The odour is faint but unmistakable, a smell like metal burned out of the stars.
Since the moment Tuirse stopped breathing, I’ve known I was going to die. But until this conversation, until this moment, I’d clung to a gleam of hope. Having that snatched away again is painful.
My death will not come on a battlefield with honour, nor as part of a hunt with the other Riders, nor even as an oathbreaker for resisting the promises I know I will eventually have to break.
I will die with my duty undone and my tasks unfinished.
Well, I suppose that’s better than being banished to the Pit.
“Is the pain worse?” Flora asks, searching my expression.
I toss the lump of fir sap back to the table and wipe my hands. “The powder trapped on the surface of the resin looks and smells like pure celestial iron. The swords that gave us these wounds must have been coated in it.”
Flora rinses the cloth again. “What’s the point of that in the middle of a battle?”
“This didn’t happen on the battlefield. Ordinary men with ordinary swords set an ambush for us the next day. At the time, the attack seemed pointless. But the wounds refused to heal.”
“So someone made certain you would die, even if they couldn’t kill you outright? In a cruel way, that makes sense. It’s surprisingly daunting to know you have to cut off a head or stab someone through the heart to kill them.”
“Cruel is Vheara’s stock in trade. But I doubt that’s the only reason for the tactic. She’d never trust an ordinary human with a weapon made of celestial steel—not when it could be turned against her or her Greys.”
“Can you be sure the queen was behind the ambush?”
“Without a doubt. Anything involving celestial iron points straight to her.” I almost smile at the grim irony of it. “It’s hard to fathom. More than 1,600 years of banishment in the Pit—the Gloaming—and she goes straight back to mining ore the moment that she escapes.”
“Sixteen hundred years?” Flora’s hand goes still. “Are you saying the Raven Queen is the same Vheara whose abuses led to the Human Uprisings and the Compact? And why? What does she want with it?”
I scrub a hand over the stubble on my chin. The skin feels hot and damp. My brain is spinning, and it’s hard to pull out any single thought, to know where or how to explain ambition as warped as Vheara’s.
“That’s hard to explain without starting with what it means to be immortal.
In some ways, 1,600 years is nothing for us.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t take a toll.
Life needs death to give it depth and meaning, the same way that light needs shadow for contrast. That’s why we also call the Father of Light, who gave us immortality, the Father of Curses.
But when he realised what he had done to us, he created the Anvar’thaine and cast a piece of his own celestial throne from the heavens to give the Riders power over life and death—the power of peace and justice. ”
I study Flora, though I’m not sure what reaction I’m looking for. Horror? Fear? She turns to the basin and rinses out the bloody cloth.
“Do you know about the Anvar’thaine? What we are?” I ask.
“The Great Hunt.” There’s nothing in her voice. No condemnation.
Not yet.
“We’re the guardians. Enforcers of oaths and laws, and the gatekeepers to the Gloaming—the world between the worlds. The king’s fists, errand boys, and glorified messengers, yes—but originally, we were meant to be something more.”
A pain worse than the wound in my chest flashes through my veins as the oathbands flare. The individual runes glow and shift on my arm, and my back arches as the muscles contract.
“Lie back,” Flora says, dropping the cloth back into the basin as she turns back to me. “Breathe through it.”
“I’m fine.”
“Of course, you are.” She pushes gently against the top of my chest until the pain passes, and I ease back against the bed.
There’s a moment of silence between us, and with my head flat, I can’t fully see her or what she’s doing.
There’s only the sound of our breathing, the rasp of linen against flesh, and the swish and drip of the water in the basin as she rinses the cloth over and over.
Occasionally, I catch glimpses of her pale face or that hair that’s like living flame at the limits of my vision, but even without seeing those deep grey eyes, I can almost feel her thinking.
I study the way her shadow shifts along the wall, looking for a hint of what she feels.
She has every right to hate us. Treachery can’t be forgotten, and all Siorai, everything that is Tirnaeve, must be tainted by what Fionn did to her family when he seized power and made himself the Sun King. What he did to stay in power.
I feel the shame of it on his behalf.
“You still haven’t said why Vheara wants the celestial iron,” Flora says. “What makes it worth all this destruction and death?”
“I was getting to that. All the celestial iron the Father gave us was forged into the celestial steel swords for the Anvar’thaine and the ceremonial daggers our priests use in the Temple.
There’s nothing left of it. But there are Siorai who would give everything they own to be allowed to die, and others who would pay anything, betray anyone, to escape the justice of the Anvar’thaine.
Some—a more cunning few like Vheara—simply want the power a weapon capable of killing Siorai will give them.
The power to offer a merciful death or to threaten someone who doesn’t want to die. ”
Flora’s face turns ashen. “The Raven Queen sells death for money?”
“For power. For favours or influence. When she discovered there were deposits of celestial iron in Alba Scoria, she enslaved humans to mine it for her. But that’s only the means to an end. She’s here to build an army, and ultimately, she’ll march into Tirnaeve to capture the throne that she wants.”
The cloth stills against my chest, water trickling down the wound in a rivulet as Flora’s hand squeezes into a fist.
“Then the war—all this misery and death—none of it’s about Alba Scoria at all?” Her voice is soft, every word enunciated carefully.
Water splashes in the basin, and the chair scrapes against the oak planking of the floor. I raise myself to one elbow, and her right hand grips the back of the chair so tight that pale moons surround her knuckles.
She has every right to fury.
“The war is about survival. Yours and ours,” I say.
“Make no mistake, Vheara’s end goal doesn’t mean she won’t destroy this realm, and every other mortal realm, before she ever sets foot in Tirnaeve again.
She’ll feed on the destruction, grow fat and bloated with it. That’s what she does. Who she is.”
Flora’s expression is haunted, and the colour has bled from her cheeks. “Then that’s why the Anvar’thaine and the rebel king have come. You’re fighting here so the war doesn’t come to Tirnaeve.”
“Evil grows the longer it’s left to fester.
” I catch her eyes, and I hope she can see the truth in mine.
I need her to believe me. “We have to stop her. If there’s celestial iron in the wound, it’s likely I’m dead already, even if my body hasn’t caught up yet.
A clean slice with a celestial blade can take weeks of recuperation, even in Tirnaeve with magic all around us for our bodies to draw from.
I can’t afford to stay this weak, much less to get any weaker.
What I need is time. You said you can’t cut all the poison out.
But will you try? Cut out every bit that’s been infected. ”
Her left hand hangs near the edge of the bed, a few scant inches from mine. I reach for it, needing to make her understand the urgency.
“Can you do that?” I ask her. “Is it possible?”
Her hand lies stiff within my palm. Then slowly, she turns it, flattening her palm against mine, threading our fingers together, as if she realises how much I need the connection to another person. She probably does understand it. Mortals die.
“How fast can your body heal?” she asks. “If you were human, you wouldn’t survive if I removed half the flesh that’s gone black.”
“Try. Give me a chance.”
Her hand feels cool and soft and alive against mine.
“The blood loss might kill you. Or shock. Fever,” she says.
“It might not. Either way, it wouldn’t be your fault.”
I don’t know her at all, but I can see that my death would weigh on her if she does what I ask. I’m asking her to do something that might kill me, and that’s an unfair burden. She has every right to reject it. Every right to hate me for what I am, and what we’ve done. For what I’m asking.
“I won’t promise anything,” she says, “but I will do what I can.”