Heart (Cruelly Made Book 3)

by K. M. Hade

  “You should think about—”

  Telling the others? Not yet. One disaster at a time. There is still time. ScatheFire first, before I lose all hope. I will not fail him. The chance I’m actually pregnant when the hundred-year-old Atrament did not actually finish inside me? Slim. If I managed to get pregnant from that and fail at everything else—

  I scratch my Aether again and growl to myself.

  Getting stitched is excruciating, traumatic, and you are wrecked afterwards, but it’s not your body that’s enduring it. Yes, getting physically pierced with a needle and thread is painful, but the stitching is done to the top layer of skin. It’s as superficial as stitching a minor wound shut. The agony and trauma come from what the thread does: pulls your soul and your magic into alignment so you access the full strength of your magic.

  Most Aether Mages only need (and in fact, can tolerate) a small amount of Aether thread to get the optimal result. Fells need relatively more. Too little thread, you’re hobbled. Too much and the stitches just fall out. Waste of thread.

  Blood rides his horse alongside mine. “Alright, alright, we’re ready to go, impatient princess.”

  Smoke snorts something.

  “I am not a princess.” I swing aboard my horse. I nudge it towards the thing I think I can see in the distance. Maybe it’s some water that doesn’t taste like the crap you clean out of a gelding’s sheath or the sweat between a man’s thighs. Not likely, but a Mage can dream.

  “She’s touchy,” Rot says to the others. “You piss her off again, Atrament?”

  “I did.”

  “You want to tell us what you two are snarking at each other about?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Is it going to get us killed?”

  A long pause, then a very thoughtful, “I don’t believe so. At least not in the short term.”

  “How comforting.” Smoke launches his familiar into the air.

  “Are you lot coming?” I call over my shoulder.

  The glittering in the distance fades. Frustrated, I keep my eye out for the creeping vine mats of a lotus. There’s plenty of patchy thorny scrub brush and a few determined buzzards circling overhead.

  They want ScatheFire. They think he’s dead.

  Eventually we get to a thin trickle of a creek that’s barely more than a dribble. The horses slurp greedily.

  The others talk about stopping for a bit, but I crouch at my horse’s forelegs while it gnaws on some handfuls of the grain we’ve brought and contemplate the thorny bushes. We’ve got to keep moving. We can’t stay out here.

  My familiar dips its tongue in the dribble of water. It doesn’t need to eat or drink or even breathe, but it enjoys doing those things.

  “Do you see that?” I ask it.

  It flicks its tongue. It doesn’t see what I’m talking about.

  I get back on my horse and ride out, resisting the urge to push the horse faster than a brisk walk. The others curse and catch up to me, muttering about we can stop, but I ignore them. We have to keep going.

  Almost there.

  Almost there.

  Almost there.

  Almost there.

  Almost there.

  Almost there.

  Almost there.

  My horse begins to snort and balk. I shift, pressing heels against its side and clucking. He keeps trying to duck out from around my legs and hand, sucking and curling behind my hand, and trying every evasion in the book to avoid whatever’s got him spooked in the distance.

  I can’t blame him for being spooked. I hadn’t noticed it before he started to act up, but something stinks, and it’s not my pits. The stench is awful. Bad enough my eyes water. I swear my nose is going to start bleeding.

  “Probably just a corpse of something,” I tell my horse. His ears rotate back and forth, his neck tight and patched with sweat that isn’t from the sun. I keep my leg on, shifting and nudging around his squirming, and high-headed and high-hoofed as he nervously approaches, snorting with every step.

  There’s a patch of stones, and twisted into the crevices, are thorny brown leaves with massive spikes. On the patch is a single black bud, still closed. It stinks like carrion.

  No, it smells worse than that.

  My horse snorts explosively, quivers, and he rocks his quarters under himself. I nudge again, and he starts to get light in front.

  My Aether pounds and singes in my skin, and my magic roils and rattles. My familiar, in its sword form against my horse’s flank, calls me. I unconsciously reach behind me for its hilt, wrap my fingers around it.

  “Stop!” Blood shouts, and suddenly he’s at my heel, holding my horse. Rot is on the other side, also holding the horse, while I realize my heels are in my poor horse’s side, and my sword is in my hand.

  My Aether shines, and light rises up off my skin like fog drifting off water.

  “Come down, Pebbles,” Blood tells me, his voice slipping through my ears like dark, rumbling honey, playing along my Aether, appealing to me, pulling, pulling, pulling.

  Smoke is there too, and he also croons, “Come down. Dismount.”

  Why do they want me off my horse? “I’m fine. Let me go.”

  “Come here,” Blood’s voice says as Rot’s big hand presses into my ankle, twisting my foot off my horse’s side. “Pebbles, come to me. Come down.”

  Well, if they really want me to come down so badly. I re-harness my sword with a swift gesture. It hisses in protest, but Smoke murmurs my name again and I am dismounting, his hands steadying my hips and pulling down.

  Smoke pulls me back against his body, his face in my hair, and whispering words I can’t understand. Blood moves in front of me and draws me close against his chest. The suffocating, carrion-stench heat bakes all of us. Blood strokes my hair with one hand. Their four hands restrain and grip me against the yearning.

  “We’re almost there,” I say.

  “Hold on to me,” Blood whispers.

  “Why?” I ask, confused.

  “Because he wants you to,” Smoke whispers in my other ear. “Hold us.”

  I obey and push my hands up Blood’s chest for some reason, then over his shoulders, down his back until I weave my fingers together at the back of his neck.

  “Hold tight,” Smoke whispers. “Hold very, very tight.”

  I obey, confused why I need to. Smoke slowly backs away, but I’m still holding Blood. Rot is close by, holding my poor, upset horse, while Atrament watches.

  “Don’t let go,” Blood tells me.

  I focus on him. It’s hard. “Did I hit my head? Am I having sunstroke?”

  “No. They sing.”

  “What sings?” This is not making sense. Not even a little sense.

  “The creeping lotus. You’ve been hearing it for the past ten miles. It sings to Aether like Aether summons Blight.” He gently pushes some of my scraggly hair away from my face. “You don’t even realize it sings, do you?”

  “I—I don’t know. I don’t hear anything. How did you know I was hearing it?”

  Now he frowns and pulls his hand back. Gruffly, he informs me, “Because Aethers can hear a creeping lotus’ song.”

  “I’ve never heard that creeping lotus has a song.”

  “Of course you have,” he says.

  “No, I’m sure I haven’t.” Why is he getting upset? So what if I haven’t heard that the flowers sing? But he’s rattled like a wet cat trying to get out of a bath, and so are Smoke and Rot. Atrament, of course, watches.

  Smoke pushes away from me, and so does Blood. I’m suddenly cold despite the stifling heat.

  “Let’s just get the vines and go.” Rot yanks his knife out of his boot.

  “Do you know how, Rot?” Atrament inquires.

  “Done it before,” Rot grumbles.

  I still don’t hear any song from the lotus, but I creep towards my horse. My sword needs to be in my palm. That pulling sensation in my chest increases, but it’s not my Aether.

  “Watch her,
Fells.” There’s a knowing in Atrament’s tone. “The flower’s song is filling her.”

  Is that what’s happening? I don’t feel full. I feel drawn, like I’m pulling against ropes. I feel like I’m cheese and wire is pulling through me.

  “We know,” Blood says coldly.

  “And you’re ignoring it? You are a stupid lot of Fells.”

  “We are not stupid,” Blood snaps furiously.

  “You are afraid, then,” Atrament says. “Afraid you care, when it is too late. You already do.”

  “What are you talking about?” Smoke asks, tone very harsh.

  “You know exactly what I am talking about. If you are going to be stupid, get out of my way.”

  My hand is around my sword. How did I get here? I grip the hilt and unhook it again. Rot is sawing into the vines. I pull towards the vines. My Aether shines, the bright light-smoke rises off my skin.

  Atrament hooks an arm around me from behind. His other hand draws the back of his fingers along my cheek. I gasp. All the strands inside me shudder, and his Fell thread flutters like a flock of hummingbirds inside me.

  “It sings,” he whispers, his voice resonating against those threads, echoing those wings, “it sings, and sings, sings in a sweet-Blight-tongue, and now you know how your Aether sings to us. The longing, the thirst, the need to slake some need that has no name and no shape.”

  Rot saws off a hunk of the vine and tosses it at our feet. Then another length. The vines are dark brown, covered in thorns like crusted scabs with wicked points. Atrament carefully releases me and inspects the lengths.

  “How much do you want?” Rot wipes sweat from his brow.

  “Two more lengths.”

  Smoke captures me and pulls the sword out of my grip before I can wander over to the vines.

  “What am I doing?” My body isn’t my own.

  “Behaving like the stubborn Aether you are.”

  Our brigand-guide, who apparently had been hanging back, is looking at me slack-jawed and making squeaking noises.

  Atrament hooks his arm around mine. “So much Aether and magic inside you, you’re helpless before a creeping lotus without training.”

  “Why wasn’t I warned about that?” I struggle to focus on him.

  “Another thing they don’t teach you in the Academy,” Smoke says.

  But the creeping lotus’ song isn’t like Blight. I can sense Blight. This is something else, and I can’t even hear it.

  “No, no,” Smoke says, “hold on to him.”

  My arm has somehow moved off Blood’s shoulder. Atrament has a grip on my other arm.

  Rot tosses two more lengths at Atrament’s feet. He picks them up carefully, wraps them in one of our empty food sacks, and ties them to the back of his saddle.

  “Mount up, Pebbles.” Smoke pushes me towards my horse. I obey, still focused on the creeping lotus.

  Blood is suddenly there on his horse, and he leans over and takes my horse’s reins. “How about we just not trust you to ride in the right direction.”

  “You don’t have to be mean to her about it,” Rot says. “She can’t help it.”

  “Neither can we,” Atrament mutters as he rides past us.

  “What did you say?” Blood demands.

  “Nothing.” Atrament’s tone is sweet and exasperated at the same time. “Nothing at all.”

  12

  CRYSTAL

  We set up camp miles from the creeping lotus, next to a small pond. It was past sunset (not that you could see the sun through the ever-present haze in the sky) and cooling quickly once we made camp by a small pool of brackish water. Blood has trussed up the mutant rabbits he picked up during the day.

  “You could help with this, you know,” Blood tells the catatonic ScatheFire as Smoke strikes the fire with a particularly hard rock they’d found and my sword. “Lazy bastard. Getting ripped up by an Old One is no excuse.”

  “He has spent the last few years underground, being fed and watered and sheltered without so much as having to raise a finger,” Smoke murmurs.

  “Fucker,” Blood says.

  And that is how I know they want him back. They might say they don’t want Atrament to stitch me, and maybe they don’t, but they want ScatheFire back. When it comes down to it, they’ll let Atrament stitch me for the exact same reason ScatheFire went to the Pit: it’s necessary.

  Because the team is everything. The team is sacred.

  Our guide rocks back and forth. “An Aether. She’s an Aether. An Aether!”

  “He’s a bright light,” Blood tells Rot.

  “You said she was a Bone!”

  “We lied. Shocking, I know.”

  “But you can keep calling her Lady Bone.” Rot smirks. Then he snickers. “Lady-bone.”

  Atrament shoves his hand into the small pond.

  “Something might bite you,” Smoke grumbles.

  “A risk I’m willing to take. This seems sufficiently deep. How are you feeling, Lady Crystal?”

  I look at him over the withers of the horse I’m currying. “Fine.”

  He comes to get the bundle of vine we harvested. “How much do you remember?”

  “I’m not sure. Most of it, I think. Maybe not.” It still doesn’t feel real. I remember being in a great hurry, but not hurrying. I remember the Fells restraining me, but no idea what I was going to do or what they were preventing me from doing. They were speaking, and I was responding, but I couldn’t hear the words. Everything had been turned around and spun around and disoriented and strange.

  Atrament picks up one of the clumps of vine. “You’re drawn to the lotus like Fells are drawn to Aether. I’m certain if we were in the Aether-caverns where the thread is made, we would have the same experience.”

  “Once Atrament realized you were hearing the song, we just followed you,” Blood comments.

  I curry in deep, firm circles. Blood’s horse wriggles her lower lip and leans into me.

  “Do you remember anything else?” Atrament asks.

  “Like what?”

  “Anything.” His unspoken words pull inside me, quivering inside his Fell thread. He uses a sharp, small knife to cut off the thorns. The lack of light doesn’t seem to deter him.

  I keep currying. “It’s like the memory of a bad, confusing dream. But if you have a specific question…”

  “No. Just curious.”

  I resist the urge to snap at him (again) that I am not research.

  “Dinner!” Blood shouts

  I push past Atrament and head towards our little fire.

  The mutant rabbits taste terrible and you have to pick little bits of them out of your teeth. Tonight it’s Smoke who dutifully chews up bites of it, then feeds them to ScatheFire. ScatheFire will chew, yes, but he won’t gnaw.

  My heart breaks with each beat. Every night I hope there will be something. Like his eyes might track food. He might reach for a waterskin. Maybe in the morning he’ll at least shift his hips like he’s going to throw a leg over Rot’s familiar, or bend his head for the bag, or just any damn inclination at all that he is thinking. Or fighting. Or trying to come back.

  But there’s no change. There’s been no change. No spark.

  He is exactly the same every hour of every day.

  “You,” Blood points a bone at the guide, “tell us how to get to this place that might know about the herb-masher. And I will know if you are lying. We’re tired of feeding you.”

  More like we don’t want him around for the next part of this.

  The bandit-guide stammers out that if we head back to the end of the big road, and follow the pillars five or six days (give or take) more west than north, we should find our way to a small little hamlet, and they’d know, because there are rumors there’s exactly what I’m looking for further west of there.

  Then he’s told to get lost, and he leaves.

  Blood twists the bone from a rabbit in his fingers. Something dark in his expression, but thoughtful too. It chills me deep inside
, like the brush of cold air on wet skin. I hope he’s not about to ask me why I want to go see this person. “Whatever you’re thinking, Blood, it’s bad.”

  “Always thinking, princess,” he replies, focused more on ScatheFire. “Let me borrow your sword.”

  Well… that’s unexpected. I nod towards my sword. My snake has felt like being in utility form that day. Playing Big Bad Snake has gotten old.

  Smoke moves out of the way as Blood shifts his grip on the sword and approaches ScatheFire. “Stand.”

  ScatheFire obediently stands.

  “Take this.” Blood offers ScatheFire my sword on the flat of both palms.

  ScatheFire takes the sword by the hilt.

  “Attack me,” Blood orders.

  I inhale.

  ScatheFire twitches but does nothing.

  “Well, I supposed that’s good news,” Blood says. “I had a concern they were making a brain-wiped army.”

  “Husks were never tested for any servile purpose,” Atrament says, tone somewhat brittle.

  “That you know of.” Blood points at him.

  Smoke stands and dusts off his pants. “Pebbles, go stand over there. Just out of sight.”

  Blood folds his arms and glances at Smoke, but doesn’t protest. Rot gets to his feet as well. I do as they ask, although I hate walking into the darkness. It makes my brain shudder like it can’t keep the door to the room shut.

  Smoke leads ScatheFire’s husk and points at me. “Run.”

  Still holding my sword, ScatheFire instantly runs towards me.

  He’s still pretty quick.

  Oh hell, he’s not going to swerve!

  I brace myself.

  He smashes right into me.

  My familiar twists into snake form.

  I go flying back into the sand.

  He falls on top of me.

  He doesn’t try to get up.

  His strange eyes have no shine to them.

  I yank my head to the side and push at him, trying not to scream. I half-push him, but he’s just a living sack of organs. I gulp a sob and shove.

  Rot yanks him off me. I gasp and roll onto my side.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you move?” Blood demands.

  “Asshole, you want him to just run?!” I swing my arm at the darkness. “I move and he just runs into the night like a hound after a fox!”