The Intunar
The walk back to Darkway Palace was quiet.
Water moved somewhere below the path. I pulled my cloak tighter and kept moving, though I no longer felt like I had to.
Before the Arrolyn every step had cost something. My body reminded me with each breath that something was wrong with it. Now the poison was still there. I knew it was still there. But it was a presence I could barely feel.
I did not need anyone to find me an antidote.
My power was stronger than the poison.
I felt something strange call to me then. I pressed my palm flat against my chest. The feeling answered.
I frowned at it because I had almost forgotten it existed, or how to use it.
My intunar had returned. And it sensed something. A presence of some kind.
"What are you?" I said into the dark. My voice was calm.
Nothing answered. Just water dripping somewhere below.
Then a scrape.
I stopped.
Another. Above me.
Three Slykars dropped from the ceiling and landed without sound a few paces ahead. Green-grey, their hands slick, their fingers bending at angles that made no anatomical sense. They smelled me. Their heads tilted. They recoiled from the leather and then hunger won and they came anyway.
I couldn't help but roll my eyes.
The first one rushed me.
I stepped aside and drove my shoulder into its ribs. It hit the wall. Hissed.
The second grabbed for my forearm. Its fingers hit leather and it shrieked and jerked back.
The third went for my throat.
I caught its wrist.
The creature struggled. I threw it. It hit the wall hard and did not get up.
I stared at my own hand. I had never been that strong.
The first two came back. Together this time.
I lifted my hand. The light came before I asked for it. It came the way water came when you opened a tap. Easy. Fast.
I gasped.
The Slykars screamed, their voices carried an undertone I did not expect: fear.
They did not get thrown backward. They unraveled. Their bodies broke apart into ash and the ash drifted and then was gone.
Silence came back into the corridor all at once.
I stood with the light still around my fingers. It was not fighting me. It was waiting. Patient as anything. As though asking if I was done.
I lowered my hand. It went.
I looked at my palm. Flexed my fingers. Looked at the empty tunnel where two creatures had been.
I wondered what Aunt Petunis would say about this power. If she would tell me how to use it. Then I realized I did not care.
There was nothing she could teach me about this. This was not a skill. It was mine. Using it felt like remembering something I had never been allowed to know I had.
I continued toward the Darkway.
For the first time since waking in Morrath I found myself wondering what else had been taken from me when I was born.
Fiersa was in my chambers when I returned.
She looked up from the basin where she had been arranging something and stopped when she saw the blood and scrapes on me. She did not gasp. She did not step back.
"Sit," she said. "You look like you had a rough journey back from the tunnels.”
I obeyed but did not answer.
She did not probe. She brought water and set it on the table in front of me and then stood with her hands folded and waited for me to drink it, which I did, and then waited for me to say whatever I had come back here to say.
I looked at her across the room.
I thought about the first day she had walked into my room and gotten rid of Teorin with a nonexistent tailor.
About how she had just accompanied me, without question, for an impromptu wedding to a man she already knew me to be married to.
She had not asked where we were going or why the place was hidden behind a ward or what it was called.
She had simply trusted me. I thought about every morning she had been here when I woke up, every night she had been here when I came back, every question she had not asked when she could have.
She had stayed. She had not been asked to stay and she had stayed anyway.
"Fiersa," I said.
"My lady."
"When I leave here," I said, "I need you to go to Veynar."
She looked at me calmly. "When do you leave here?”
"Soon.”
"And you cannot tell me more than that?”
"No. Not yet."
She was quiet. She looked at the window and then back at me and I watched her work through whatever she was working through.
"My brother lives there,” she said finally.
"I know."
She nodded once. “He is supposed to come tonight. I will return to Veynar with him and wait for you there,” she said.
I gave a small nod then stood and put my hand briefly on her arm, then I left her there and walked down the corridor toward Teorin's chambers.
It was time for breakfast.
Teorin was already at the table when I arrived.
He looked better than he had in weeks. Color in his face. His eyes clear. He had tied his hair back and buttoned his shirt all the way up and there was something different about him that I could not immediately name.
I sat across from him and the creature brought food and I ate and he ate and for a while neither of us said anything.
“You are late,” he said simply.
I felt it then. The same call, the same pull I had felt when Nox had said the words be careful and attempted to pull something from me.
An attempt at control, clearly. I wondered what the mechanics were. I briefly wondered if Teorin was aware of it at all. He had no reason to attempt it right now. I pushed the thought away.
But something nagged at me. Back when he was Arven and I was hungry and alone, he had always told me I was late for our trainings, even when I wasn’t. When he tried to kiss me here in Morrath and my brain had felt foggy, he had used those same words.
Perhaps I was wrong.
I would keep watching, I decided.
"No human company this morning?" I said.
"No," he said. "I found it lacking."
I looked up. "Oh?"
"Yes." He held my eyes. "I am changing perhaps. Or perhaps my needs have been otherwise satisfied."
I looked at him and tried to work out what he meant by that.
Perhaps our previous conversations had truly been that pleasing to him.
Or perhaps the blood and the feeding and the recovery had been enough.
I turned the words over and dismissed the other possibility that flickered briefly at the edge of the thought. That made no sense. I pushed it away.
We ate the rest of the meal in quiet.
When I set down my fork I said, "We should leave soon."
"Yes," he said. "I need to visit the archivist. A few other things." He paused. "I will meet you there."
I nodded.
He looked at me. "When do you leave?"
I stood. I pulled my leather cloak around my shoulders and fastened it and looked at him across the table. Then I reached out and took his hand.
I did not answer. I was learning that everyone else used information to gain the upper hand. Perhaps I should too.
"Do not disappoint me, Teorin," I said.
He stared at me. “Your eyes,” he said quietly.
“Yes, I have those,” I said lightly.
He did not laugh. Instead he nodded, as though confirming something that only he understood.
I turned and walked out of the dining hall and down the corridor and through the parts of the Darkway I had learned by walking them in the dark, past Fiersa's door and past the room where I had slept and past the place where the tunnels began, all the way to the mouth of Morrath.
I stepped through.
I had expected sunlight.
It was dark. The dark of a sky with no moon yet, heavy and close, the air carrying salt and cold and something alive in it that had nothing to do with anything inside.
I stood and let my eyes adjust.
Then I looked toward the docks and began walking.