15 Kaia
We followed the commander into a different tent. As we entered, the lantern guttered. My ears popped, and the chained thing under my ribs—my sister, awake now, awake and listening—flattened herself against the floor of me and went silent.
Two of them filled the space. The first I could look at.
A tall man, narrow through the shoulders, his robes hanging off him like they’d been cut for a larger body he’d burned through.
His face was the gray of old candle wax, and from the inner corners of both eyes a thin blue light wept down his cheeks—a slow glowing seep.
It dripped off his jaw and winked out before it hit the dirt.
High Alchemist Joss.
I knew the name the way children know the names of weather. You did not say it loudly. You did not say it after dark.
The second one I could not look at. A shape stood where a man should be.
The eye kept sliding off it and coming back wrong, the way a tongue keeps going to a broken tooth.
Cold poured off it in a steady fall, and under the cold rode a smell I had no name for—deep earth turned over, the underside of a stone you shouldn’t have lifted. The Third Saint.
A living mercy.
That was the word the catechism used. Mercy.
My whole body knew it for a lie. My whole life said otherwise.
I’d stand in both, then.
I’d learned that trick at six years old, kneeling on cold tile while my mother’s voice told me the wild rose had to be trimmed.
You could believe a thing with your mind and disbelieve it with the warm animal underneath, and as long as your face only gave them what they wanted, you survived the morning.
Behind me, Tommy made a sound.
I turned my head a careful half-inch. He’d gone to his knees by the post like I’d told him, head bowed, wrist in the cuff—and a dark line ran from his left nostril down over his lip, fat and quick, dripping off his chin onto his collar. Blood. The Saint’s weight, crushing something in him.
Don’t, I thought at him, useless, the tether between us thinned to a smothered thread between the cuff and the witch’s potions. Don’t you dare.
His hand came up and smeared the blood across the back of his wrist, and he gave a shaky, hiccuping little laugh.
“Man.” He sniffed hard, wincing, playing it broad.
“Is it the altitude? My ears have been doing this thing since we got up here. Nobody tells you about the altitude. The brochure really undersold the altitude.”
The blood kept coming. He wiped it again, and his eyes flicked up for one instant—past me, to the floor, never at the Saint, like a man too dumb and too scared to know where to point his terror—and dropped again.
Beautiful. Reckless and beautiful. My sister stirred, a hot protective surge up my throat, and I sat on her so hard my back teeth ached.
I lowered myself the rest of the way down. Both knees in the dirt. I folded my hands at my breastbone, right over left, thumbs crossed, and I bent my neck the way I’d bent it ten thousand mornings in the assembly hall, and I let everything I was supposed to be flow up into my face and fill it.
“High Alchemist.” My voice came out hushed, warm, threaded through with the proper tremor of a Steward who has never in her small gray life stood this close to the holy machinery of the world.
“Blessed One.” I let my breath catch on the second word, real awe pulled up over the top of real terror, because terror was the safest thing to wear in front of a creature that drank it.
“Forgive me. I—I didn’t dare hope. To be in your presence.
To be of use to you, after everything you’ve given us—”
Joss waved one wax-gray hand. The blue light wept faster from his eyes when he moved, as if the motion cost him.
“Spare me the liturgy.” His voice scraped, dry, a man who hadn’t slept in a week and resented anyone who had.
“You’re the Steward who came out of the burn with something potentially rare.
” His glowing eyes went to Tommy and stayed there, and something hungry pulled at the corners of his mouth.
“Stand up. Tell us what happened while my friend looks at you.”
The cold deepened. The Saint turned its attention—I felt it as a hand laid flat against the front of my skull, fingers spreading, pressing in. Not painful. Worse than painful. An invitation to open, the way you’d open a drawer.
I rose. I kept my hands folded. “The Inner Circle arrived early for an assembly. But I heard a noise in the halls and investigated. I found…. I found Warden Miller already dead. Some kind of monster had slashed open his throat. The door to the lower level was open and I remembered all the patients down there. I heard screaming and I rushed down to find monsters taking them. I followed.”
I kept my eyes soft and lifted to a point just below Joss’ chin, the deferential middle distance, and I let the pressure in my head find what it would find, because the trick—the only trick—was that I could not stop it from reading me, so I had to be sure that what lived on top was true.
And the genius of it, the awful saving grace of it, was that almost all of it was.
Show it the truth, I told my sister, and felt her understand. Show it the woman who believed.
I had believed. For a lifetime I had believed, with the clean total faith of someone who’d never been allowed near a door marked otherwise. That faith was still in me, and I walked the Saint straight into the front hall and let it admire the furniture.
The pressure built. Images came up out of me, dredged, and I did not fight the dredging.
The basement. The screaming. I let it have the screaming, because I’d heard it—I’d been there, in the smoke and the shouting, in the moment the lower floors broke open, but I nudged it.
I pictured wild ones in the tunnel. The shapes.
I let it see the shapes the way I’d had nightmares about: huge, wrong, lunging out of the dark, all teeth and muscle, dragging the patients off their cots.
Feral shifter monsters. I’d believed exactly that for a lifetime.
The Saint could read the belief because it had been real.
The pressure increased, hunting for the after, for the turn, for the garden and the pond and the word sister—
I gave it the next true thing fast, before it could dig.
Terror for my patients. That was true too, layered right under the rest. They’re taking them.
They’re taking my flock into the dark. The pure animal need to follow, to not let them be taken, to bring them back into the light where they’d be safe—I’d felt every degree of it.
I just let the Saint believe the light I’d been running toward was the Order’s.
I followed, I thought, and let it ride the memory of my own legs carrying me up out of the smoke and into the trees. I followed into the dark to bring them home.
“I searched for them as best I could but the monsters were fast. I saw the green fire and found Tommy at the treeline. He was having some kind of episode. I knew he needed help so I brought him here. To you. Please, help him.”
The cold held me a long moment.
Then the pressure eased, a fraction, the drawer sliding most of the way shut. Behind the place where the Saint’s face should have been, something gave a slow approval, the way a cat resettles when it’s decided you’re furniture and not a threat.
Joss had been watching my face the whole time, reading the Saint reading me, and now he exhaled and the hunger in him relaxed into mere greed.
“Devout little thing,” he said, to no one, to the Saint, to himself. “Good.” His glowing eyes swiveled back to Tommy, who’d hauled himself upright against the post and stood swaying, bloody-lipped, doing an extraordinary impression of a man one bad noise away from fainting. “And this?”
He crossed the tent in three strides that cost him visibly, the light streaming from his eyes, and he took Tommy’s jaw in one hand and wrenched his face toward the lantern. Tommy let his head go where it was pushed, slack, terrified, perfect.
“Hey,” Tommy said weakly. “Buddy. Easy. I bruise. I’m a very easy bruiser—”
“A potential dormant male.” Joss said it the way a starving man says the name of a food.
His thumb pressed into the hinge of Tommy’s jaw, tilting, examining, and the wept light dripped off his own chin onto Tommy’s collar.
“Do you have any idea what you are, you confused little animal? Do you have the first idea what you’re carrying around in there?
” He laughed, a cracked dry sound, and turned his glowing face half toward me without letting go.
“We could open him up right here and the reservoir alone would carry us through winter whether we recovered the other dormants or not—”
Open him up.
My sister came off the floor of me with her hackles up and her whole body one long snarl, and the heat I’d been sitting on for an hour surged up the inside of my skin all at once, fever and fury braided so tight I couldn’t tell them apart, and for one white instant every muscle in me wanted to cross that tent and tear the wax-gray hand off his arm at the wrist.
Open him up.
So it was true. All of it.
Genny’s flat dead voice, the harvest, the elevator, the women who’d gone down and never come up and been logged as returned to normal life in my own careful hand—
I felt the Saint’s attention twitch back toward me, drawn by the spike.
I drowned it.
I drowned all of it under a lifetime of liturgy in the space of one breath, and I let my face fill with the only thing that would save us: a Steward’s gentle, slightly anxious concern.
I clasped my hands tighter. I made myself smaller.
I let my brow crease the way it had creased a thousand times over a clipboard, professional worry, the worry of a woman who only ever wanted to do the work correctly.