by K. M. Hade
Smoke makes a noise of fury and storms over to his horse.
“Don’t worry about Smoke,” Rot whispers to me. Then he hesitates and says, “Can I kiss your cheek?”
I smile and almost laugh. “Sure.”
He gives me a kiss right on my cheek and I practically purr like a petal dragon. He blushes so red it’s obvious even in the moonlight, Blood groans and facepalms, and Rot curses at him like whattt?!
Smoke makes a noise of disgust.
Atrament just looks confused. “I don’t understand. Why is it inappropriate to ask a woman if you might kiss her?”
“Oh gods we name, now there are two clueless proto-virgins on my team.” Blood buries his face in his hands. He pauses. “Wait. Atrament, are you a virgin? Do you know how babies get made?”
“No and yes.”
My insides coil with anxiety. Oh, he was sort of a virgin. But he wasn’t. Proto-virgin. Yes.
“You okay?” Rot whispers in my ear. “Did that guy do something to you?”
“No. It’s not that. Let’s go.” I feel sick and need some air.
We cross the road and head into the lands on the other side, riding until we spot light in the distance. It’s the light from the lanterns on a barn and small farm house.
“Pebbles, send your familiar to trigger any guard dogs,” Blood orders in a whisper.
I poke my snake. It slithers down my horse’s leg and shoots off into the grasses. A few minutes later, a dog starts barking. Blood focuses on the sound. After a few seconds, the dog goes quiet.
“Let’s go.” Smoke rides to the front. He grabs Blood’s horse and leads it while Blood concentrates on keeping his grip on the dog.
I hope he’s not killing it.
We ride single-file to the barn, careful to pull up our stirrups and anything else that might jangle. A few horses munch hay in paddocks outside the barn, enjoying the cool summer night. There’s also a donkey, a team of draft horses, and in the distance, a cow moos. Blood lets out his breath and relaxes. I extend an arm to catch him before realizing I’m not even close to him.
“Is it dead?” I whisper.
“I’m not going to kill a farmer’s barking dog. I wish that damn cat was around though. We usually just send it to torture the dogs and set them barking, and once the people see it’s just a cat, they ignore the dogs.”
Atrament weaves darkness around us to conceal us in the shadows cast by the single lantern on the outside of the barn. The barn’s closed up, but Rot is able to muscle the big door open so it doesn’t make a sound.
“Smoke and I will take the horses around back and get them hay and water,” Blood whispers. “You three take Rot’s familiar and the sack we’re calling ScatheFire, and see if we can steal a couple hours sleep in here.”
“A little light, please, Lady Crystal,” Atrament whispers as we step into the threshold of the dark barn.
“You can do it, it’ll be fine,” Rot adds.
I hesitantly conjure a little ball of Aether, which crackles and snaps off a piece of wood. A few chickens squawk and flap. A goat bleats. I cringe. “That hasn’t gotten any easier.”
“You did fine,” Rot assures me.
The little ball of Aether light drifts up into the air. Atrament raises a hand, and his shadows crawl up the sides of the barn, encompassing us in darkness as the light illuminates the interior. “They will not see from the outside. It will merely look dark.”
The Aether lantern combined with the shadows washes everything an in eerie glow. Standard barn. Some empty stalls because the horses are outside. There’s a pen with some curious goats that bleat at us, and some aggravated chickens. There are piles of golden hay on the second level. Everything smells fresh and clean and like summer and sunlight. And Blight, but when you’ve been in the Pit, you barely notice that.
“Looks good,” I say. “We can stay here tonight. Sleep up in that hayloft, I think.”
“For a couple of hours,” Rot agrees. “We’ve got to be on our way before the farmer wakes up, and that’ll be before dawn.”
I look at his Imperial uniform. It’s road-dirty, but has seen use from the faded creases in the leather, and some brigandine that’s been replaced, and the boots with well-worn fading at his ankles, but it’s obviously his, and he’s the one who’s been wearing it. “Atrament and I could hide. You and the others could just... commandeer things.”
Rot shakes his head once. “Nah. Commandeering from folks who got nothing? I mean, we’re gonna steal his stuff, and that’s just as bad, but when you commandeer, they get pissed at the Empire. At least they can be mad at those fucking thieves that took their shit, you know? Trust me. When I was a kid and the Imperials would come through and be like, give us your shit, it’s the law, people got so much madder. They’d get pissed as fuck when they thought a thief stole their shit, but you can maybe catch a thief and give him what-for. The Empire just shoves its dick up your ass and doesn’t ask nice about it before they do.”
“The farmer might also report to any bounty hunters that he saw us,” Atrament says. “But if we simply steal his horses, it could be anyone.”
I don’t like it, but it’ll have to be this way.
Rot smiles at me, shyly. “You’re still so sweet.”
“Sweet?”
“Your hair looks like candy in the light,” he says. “All pinks and greens and blues. Like spun sugar clouds.”
Atrament suppresses a sigh. I don’t know how I know that, because he doesn’t change at all, but I can feel him sigh like even I am not this cheesy. My heart melts like the aforementioned spun sugar clouds for Rot. He blushes and looks away. “I just think you’re so sweet after all this shit.”
My familiar slithers up my arm and wraps around my neck, clasping its tail in its mouth like a necklace. I pet its head gently between the eyes before touching Rot’s cheek. “You’re sweet, Rot. You just have such a big heart. Big enough that the Blight that makes you Rot just rattles around in there. Like a mouse in a big house.”
He leans into my hand, eyes wide. “You think? Because it—you know.”
I smile a bit more. “You can hear it chewing on a nail at night? It’s just a little mouse, Rot.”
“I try not to listen too much to it,” he confesses. “But sometimes it’s all you hear. Drives you crazy.”
I lick my lips as needles dig into my heart. I rubbed my thumb along his cheek, feeling the texture of his skin. “You don’t have to be worried about what happened between us. I know it still worries you.”
He puts a big hand over mine.
His doubt tugs at me. I push close and stretch on my toes to whisper, “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had an orgasm I didn’t give myself?”
For fuck’s sake. What am I doing?
I pull away before things get weirder. “Come on. Let’s go check the hayloft.”
6
CRYSTAL
ScatheFire (lucky for us) understands “climb the ladder” although once he gets to the top, he just stands in the loft like a doll.
I don’t know how long I can watch my friend like this.
“Go sit down.” Rot gently propels him to sit in some hay.
The hayloft is even better than expected: a mix of bales and loose hay. We have to dislodge a couple of sleeping barn cats, but a warm, dry bed that smells like sunshine? I roll around in it. “Ug, heavenly. Heavenly.”
“And we’ve got the food,” Blood’s voice says as he and Smoke crawl up the ladder. He tosses the remaining sack of day-old meatpies over the edge of the loft.
We divvy up the food, and Rot takes over patiently feeding ScatheFire pieces of a meatpie.
“So, what happened to him?” Blood asks, watching the sad scene.
“He was taken into the presence of the Old One,” Atrament says. “Not directly, no one can get down there, but he went... far enough. And was forced to remain.”
“That’s just fucking disturbing. An Old One? Why the fuck.”
&
nbsp; “He did survive the Blightling. I have no idea how, as I was not there, nor did the Warden share his thinking with me. I did not participate in his imprisonment, I only know what I was told.”
Blood sighs. “Fuck, Pebbles, I know you want him back, but I don’t think he’s coming back. He might not even have a soul anymore.”
“I’m not giving up on him. I know he’s there. I can feel his soul,” I snap. Maybe it’s my Aether lying to me, but I have to try.
“Lady Crystal believes he is still in there. It is possible he is,” Atrament says.
“You’re not an Imperial Mage, so why do you have an Imperial name? Who trained you? They send tutors from the Academy?”
Atrament pulls a strand of his disobedient hair around his finger, then releases the coil of silk. “I distantly remember a name from my before, but I have been Atrament from the moment I was taken to the Pit. I never received formal training. I believe this is because I am an experiment, and the Wardens wanted to see what would happen if a Fell child was grown in their… native environment, shall we say.”
“Gross,” Rot says.
“The First Mages were not so much given training as they were given innate knowledge.” Atrament chooses his words with a care I can feel. “The God-Forged were created. While the gods left us the ability to make more Mages, we were the ones who had to divine how to accomplish that, and then how to train them. The learning is still ongoing. The Clergy is constantly trying to figure out how to breed stronger Mages and how to breed certain varieties more reliably. The discovery of Snow Mages is very recent.”
“And they’re fucking useless,” Smoke mutters.
I purse my lips and give Atrament the side-eye. He’s getting dangerously close to that Luminous theory of his. But he’s got a point: the gods did not simply tell us how to invoke Their powers to recreate mortal-born Mages. The Gods We Did Not Name, by method of the Blight, offered Their powers freely to anyone who cared to dance under Their eye. The Gods We Cared To Name permitted us to invoke Their powers if we proved ourselves worthy.
The gods created the God-Forged and the First Wars had been won. The Blight festered, however, and humanity had been tasked with mopping up that manageable mess. Except we hadn’t, and the Blight had crawled over and through the land again, and the Gods We Named refused to send more God-Forged. They had told us to make our own Mages. They had supplied us with Aether and instructed us how to harvest it and how to stitch it into Mage-children, but that was it. Everything else They left for us to figure out over the centuries.
The first Mage to be consecrated was a Verdance, then a Stone, and slowly other types had been discovered. It had been a long time between discoveries, but about fifty years ago, the first Snow had been born, which was a Storm breeding by-product. The story went the Clergy had been trying to breed a more powerful Storm by emphasizing the Frost reagents and prayers in the conception rituals (hoping to create an Ice, which everyone theorized existed but had never appeared), and instead of a Storm, there was a new type that was clearly neither Frost, Storm, nor Crystal.
Everyone had rejoiced at what they thought was the long-awaited Ice, and that surely a Water or Wind would not be far behind. And a lot of pregnancies went forward over the next twenty or so years to duplicate it. The first-born one hadn’t gotten into Academy, and it took a few more over the next twenty-five years for everyone to figure out that these babies weren’t Ice or Blizzard. They were Snow. And while avalanches, snowdrifts, and hard-packed snowballs are dangerous, Snows have proven tricky to make useful, especially when the weather isn’t cold. Only eight have ever made it to the Academy, so the variety isn’t well understood yet, but it doesn’t appear they have a ton of practical use on the battlefield.
There’s actually a Snow who was a few years ahead of me at the Academy. She didn’t get on a team, but got a special graduation because she had been a gifted student and nobody had figured out how to make a Snow useful. So she is still at the Academy, where she is a sparring partner and does administrative work and I guess tries to figure out how to make a Snow useful.
I’d always thought that if there was a Mage who could understand how I felt, it would have been her. I’d gone as far as figuring out where her quarters were, but I’d always been too ashamed and shy to introduce myself.
Maybe she’d be someone we could reach out to? She might know someone who might know someone. But she’s technically an Imperial Mage (hence her name), and can’t receive personal correspondence. So maybe sneak into the Capital and send Atrament’s familiar with a little note?
Blood interrupts my thoughts. “So is that how you learned? You just learned magic like a baby learns to talk?”
I startle, but the question is for Atrament.
Atrament doesn’t move, but I sense him shift. The question unnerves him. “I have never thought of it that way, but perhaps. But also, the Aether Mage guards that came through the Pit took pity on me. Some, at least. They wanted the Wardens to send back good reports, so being cruel to the Warden’s son wouldn’t be wise.”
Blood scratches his chin, but it’s Rot who waves a hand and says, “Wait a second. If all the Aether Mage guards met you—”
“I was not seen by the Mage guards once I began to resemble an adult. At least, I met some, but not all. I was always advised to remain out of sight, and never show my thread to anyone,” Atrament corrects. “I have always been aware of what I am and the need for discretion.”
“Okay, fine, but those guards change every three months. Word of you would have had to leak by now. How is the Warden keeping everyone hushed up?” Rot ponders.
That’s a good question. Atrament seems to be an open secret, which is fine, because the Pit only attracts visitors of a certain sort, and the Mage Guards don’t want to run their mouths and make more enemies.
“I’m not saying you’re lying,” Rot tells Atrament. “I’m just saying you maybe don’t know what you don’t know.”
“I do only know what I have observed and what the Wardens told me, yes.”
Blood cocks a brow at Rot as if to say where’s this train of thought going? And Smoke watches from the shadows. Rot ponders a bit more. “So… this is gonna sound crazy… but how many Wardens have you known?”
Atrament thinks.
When he starts counting on his fingers, my heart drops.
“Nine,” Atrament says firmly. “Nine Wardens.”
“You’re sure,” Blood says.
“I’m sure. Nine.”
“Um… anyone know how many Wardens there’s been in the past thirty years?” Rot asks no one in particular.
“I think three,” Blood says.
“Ah, Atrament,” I ask gently, “How old are you?”
Because I’ve been assuming he’s somewhere around thirty, give or take a few years. It’s hard to tell. The age of a Mage isn’t always obvious. The magic can preserve us or consume us or neither of those things. But if there have been nine Wardens.
“I am… not entirely sure, now that I think about it. The Pit does not mark days or festivals, and I would spend long stretches of time below. But I am certain it is nine Wardens. Why is this important?”
“Oh… my…” I breathe. Holy shit.
“So is that nine Wardens since the one who created you, or nine total Wardens? Just so I’m clear.” Blood gestures like he’s pointing to two different items at a market stall.
“Nine total. This Warden is the ninth.”
“Fuck, he’s like a goddamn pet turtle that just keeps getting inherited like a living family heirloom,” Blood says.
“I think he’s older than that,” Smoke says from his corner. “I think that’s going to put him over a hundred.”
“Do you know the year you were born?” Blood asks.
He tells us the year of his birth. The actual date is unknown.
He’s a hundred-and-six years old.
“Well, fuck.” Blood throws up his hands. “This is fucking terrible.”
“Oh, it’s terrible. All those Aethers that met kid-Atrament? Dead. The Tailors that stitched him? Dead. Academy Deans who knew about him? Dead. Now everyone who meets him just assumes he’s supposed to be where he is and everyone who knows where he came from’s been dead for a century. He’s probably been erased from all the Academy records, if he was ever on them. So how is the Academy know about what it doesn’t know? There goes my plan.”
“His thread is a Tailor job, and he has Aether,” I say, stricken at what Blood’s getting at.
“I have met the most recent High Dean,” Atrament says. “And I have met nobles, of course.”
“Have any of them seen your Aether?” Blood asks. “Because that’s the only thing that’s going to make anyone pause before they swing the axe.”
“I have never shown my Aether to a Dean, why would I remove my shirt?”
“So… no.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t lie and insist the Academy knows,” Rot says. “I mean, the evidence is right there.”
“But I have entertained several individuals who were… either in the Academy or associated with it.”
“Entertained.” Blood echoes.
“Sex. Shirt off.”
“Didn’t the Wardens tell you to keep yourself covered?”
“Who is going to brag that they fucked a Pit-Fell Atrament?”
Rock cracks a grin. “He’s got a point, Blood. The Academy knew, the Clergy knew, the Tailors know. Maybe it didn’t get written down, but it got passed down, because it’s the damn Empire and the Empire never chucks anything useful.”
“I wonder if he’s been used in blackmail schemes,” Smoke murmurs.
“Interesting. You get the names of anyone you… serviced for the current Warden?” Blood asks.
