by K. M. Hade
ScatheFire blinks.
“We should get moving.” Smoke rolls to his feet. “We can fill him in on the way. We have at least another day of riding.”
“Where are we going?” ScatheFire asks.
“Trying to find a mudwitch.”
“Why?”
“Atrament might have knocked up Pebbles as one of the Warden’s sick experiments.” Blood pulls his familiar off his ear.
“Well, that’s not good.”
“Just wait until you hear what waits for us back in the Empire...”
16
Crystal
The ruins of the road are little more than the occasional cobblestone poking out of the clay. We follow it until it leads us to a small collection of claybrick huts with roofs made of thatched thorny vines and red plaster.
There seems to be something passing for crops off in the distance, and the grimy ribbon of a larger creek to provide water. The people in the small cluster of buildings (is it a town? A village? A hamlet? I’m not sure it’s any of those things) stop what they’re doing and stare at us. They’re not hostile, they’re also not welcoming. Strangers probably don’t ride up out of the dust clouds every day, especially not Imperials.
I hang back with Atrament while Blood dismounts and approaches. He greets the villagers in common, and asks if they speak it—a few muddled nods, so he switches to another dialect that sounds like common, but not really, which gets more of a response. One of the villagers, a tall guy with a big frame but little meat on his bones, seems to be the one who speaks for the group, and he and Blood converse for a few moments. He’s reluctant at first, but Blood quickly convinces him that’s not the right way to go about the remainder of whatever his short life would be.
The guy looks at me, then Atrament, then back at Blood. He shrugs and points in a general direction even further west.
A strange sense of dread curdles under my heart. Rot rides his familiar alongside me. “It’ll be okay.”
“Nothing about this is okay,” I say with weary humor. “We’re in the damn ruined lands trying to find a mudwitch, and we just got told to go further west. How much further west can we go? I’m a bit short of time, unless I’m not, and this is all a chase.”
“But you got me back.” ScatheFire’s got his reins in one hand, and his familiar cupped in the other. It nuzzles under his neck. It’s still happy he’s back.
So am I.
“Yeah, well, we forgot what a pain in the ass you were,” Rot tells ScatheFire.
“You assholes already abandoned me in the Pit, you’d leave me in the Abyss?” ScatheFire gasps in mock affront.
“Worth considering.”
The cat flicks its tail.
“He said we’ll find the local woman up this way,” Blood relays. “An hour’s walk west of here, but he told me we’d be smarter riding back east and trying to find some other village that he’s heard might have someone, but he heard that years ago from someone passing through.”
Rot reins his familiar around. “So why should we avoid this one?”
Blood shrugs. “Let’s find out. If she’s actually scarier than the shit we’ve seen, I’m curious.” He glances at me, then tells Rot, “I’m not an expert on this sort of thing, but I’m pretty sure the sooner we get this done, the better.”
“There will be a time when it cannot be done with medicine,” Smoke says, his voice like hornets.
I gulp as a pulse of anxiety churns through me.
The road leads past a cluster of thorny bushes, across a small bridge, and we come to a pond. If you could call it a pond. More like a muddy depression in the dirt with some thornbushes sticking out of it, and a foul stench rising off it, and a thick pollen-like scum. There’s a large mud-brick house with a thorn-thatched roof smeared with more of the blasted clay and covered with the leathery skins of creatures, and leathery creature skins create the door. Racks made of thorn branches hold the bodies of various small, wretched creatures and drying, wretched herbs, and other things not worth mentioning.
Bones of all sizes and shapes—some clearly human—crunch underfoot and have mixed with the hard-packed sand over time so much that they’ve formed a terrible pavement. A collection of human skulls pecked clean by birds hang from ropes strung between clay poles and create a perimeter around her domain. I rein my horse over to one. The lower jaw has been fused in place and a small bit of some kind of substance—dung or tar, maybe—sits in the bottom and there’s soot all along the inside of the brain case.
I take in the perimeter with its festoons of skulls again. “This place must look really festive after dark.”
“Then we definitely are leaving before dark,” Blood says.
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” ScatheFire asks.
Smoke gives him a wretched look. “She just pulled you out of an Old One’s unholy asshole, and you want to spend time with a woman who uses skulls like party favors?”
“You’re right. Seems pretty dull.”
“I do not understand you.”
“You have never understood me. But now with our Heart, perhaps you will.”
Smoke glowers.
We dismount. Blood whacks the side of the clay building with the bone knocker dangling from thongs of leather by the door.
ScatheFire squeezes my hand in his. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m scared,” I whisper back.
“Don’t be.”
“I’m so glad you’re back.” I also feel like my heart has been trampled and rubbed raw. And I don’t think I should have been able to do what I did—I went somewhere forbidden and dangerous. And it breaks my heart that Smoke and Blood don’t want me as a Heart—not that I can blame them—and how Atrament has pulled away, and the entire thing feels like a mess.
I don’t know what I am anymore. And I don’t know what I am, I don’t know who I am. And if I don’t know those things, I might hurt someone else again.
He squeezes my hand again. “Stupid Aether.”
The leather door jerks aside and an old woman stares at us from the other side. She’s old—that’s apparent from the steel-colored hair, the lines on her face, the skin on the back of her hands. But she’s neither diminutive nor fat. She’s dressed in a patchwork blend of leather, furs, and cloth, and she looks like she definitely collected all those human skulls herself.
Not exactly what you picture when you picture mudwitch.
“Imperial Mages,” she says, looking Blood up and down. She gives Atrament a look, then studies me in my vagabond gear. “And what are you?”
“Calvary,” I say.
She gives me a sideways look. Leans to the side, looks back at me. “Maybe in those rags, sure. But not with that hair, and not with that horse. Proper cavalry officer wouldn’t be dead on a nag like that.”
“Never said I was a proper cavalry officer. You didn’t ask for specifics,” I say dryly.
“So what are you Imperial lackeys doing so far from home?” She flicks her finger against the Captain’s badge on Blood’s shoulder. “Riding horses that I know you commandeered from some poor ass farmer.”
Blood smiles at her. It’s his cruel, I don’t fucking care about you smile, the one that betrays he’d kill you and never even think about it. She’s smart enough to pale slightly under her leathery, stoney hide. Blood informs her, “Personal business. You won’t mention we were here, we won’t mention we know where to find a mudwitch that probably knows more than she should.”
She shrugs. “You think anyone’s going to come looking for me out here, Fell? Run along, I don’t do business with Empire types. Nobody out here will.”
Blood rolls his dark eyes. “Everyone out here will do business with us Empire types. Especially when they’re Fells. The only thing that really will make us pause in killing you is if we did it too casually, it’d feed that Blight that makes us what we are. But give us a good reason.”
She pales a bit more, and her sweat in the oppressive heat looks a bit clamm
y. “Imperial Mages don’t deal in murder.”
“So keep giving us shit and it won’t be murder. We have an issue you can help with. An issue the Empire really can’t know about.”
She eyes him. “Yeah? What kind of issue?”
Smoke intones, “The team is everything, the team is sacred. And sometimes, the team has to take care of things privately.”
I realize my hands are shaking. I twist my fingers together to hide it. ScatheFire pushes me forward with his hand on the small of my back.
“Let me guess,” the mudwitch says dryly, “one of these savory examples of masculinity got you pregnant.”
My throat is completely dry. I swallow once, manage to unknot it. “Could be. I’m not sure.”
“So you don’t know. You rode all the way out here because maybe one of them got you pregnant.”
I feel as tiny as Atrament’s hummingbird, and try as I might, I can’t shake it off. “It’s more complicated than that, but basically, yes. That sums it up nicely.”
“Yeah, which one is it, you think?” she asks with a cruel smirk.
Haha, she thinks I’m ashamed? I point to Atrament.
“And here I had this one pegged for it.” She points at ScatheFire.
“Look, I didn’t get my tab, and there were some... incidents, and I want to make sure,” I tell her, finally finding my voice. “It’s complicated and fucked up, so we’re here.”
“You came all the way to the ruined lands to get your womb scrubbed?” she asks slyly. “If you’re a proper officer, you could have just reported to your medics and had them deal with it.”
Damnit. So much for hoping she’d just give me what I’d come for.
“We both know I’m not a proper officer.” I twist a strand of my pink-stained hair around my finger, then pull at the collar of my shirt to reveal a portion of my Aether.
She chortles and her eyes narrow with sly amusement. She knows exactly what she’s looking at. “And you thought you’d pass yourself off as a cavalry officer? I’m not dumb, Aether. By the way, nice Aethers like you don’t belong here.”
“They also don’t belong riding Fell cock.”
“Your team know where you got off to? And why didn’t you just tell your team one of them knocked you up so your Verdance could solve that problem? Wouldn’t that be your Verdance’s fault, anyway?” Her eyes got cunning. “Unless your entire team is ladies.”
Smoke leans down and whispers in my ear, “Do not tell her you are on our team.”
No shit. I’m not dumb. “My Aether team is dead, and if I wanted to be interrogated about it, again, I’d have gone to the medics and lied about getting fucked by a train of stablehands.”
She doesn’t believe a word I’m saying, but it’s hard to say how many shits she gives either. “Bullshit. What are you running from, Aether? Aether and Fell don’t mix.”
Haha. Well, there’s a surprise for her on my chest I hadn’t shown her. “I don’t have to explain that to you. You’re running from something too, unless you just happen to enjoy living in a godforsaken wasteland. Who were you? Alchemist? Midwife? Tailor? Did you drop the wrong baby on its head, or just screw up one too many times, or did you collect too many skulls?”
She scowls at me. “You come here asking for my help and you insult me? You grovel to me, Aether. Not the other way around. Now fuck off.”
Blood leans back against the wall of her clay house and eyes her. “She’s got the accent of an east-empire mid-tier noble. She’s trying to hide it, but you can hear the inflection when she says here, but my retirement stipend says she was an apothecary. Maybe an apprentice alchemist. So’d you get caught and branded before you escaped, or did you escape?”
She flips her finger at Blood. “Maybe I just decided not to put up with anyone’s shit and make my own rules.”
Blood smirks at her. “I think you like skulls. I think you like them, and bones, and the gods know what else, that maybe you had a collection you weren’t supposed to have. This is an awful lot of intact human skulls for a desolate part of the ruined lands. So people bring you offerings, or do they just not ask questions when someone goes missing?”
She glares at him. “I think they’re skulls, and the birds picked ‘em clean a long time ago.”
“You give us what we came for, and we forget we ever saw you. None of us give a shit what you do out here, or who you do it to. Heart, do you care about any of this?”
The mudwitch’s eyes widen and take on a glassy shock as she looks at me. Her accent slips through as she stammers, “A Heart without a team?”
“See? Even she doesn’t care about your morbid little collection.” Blood grabs her chin and twists her head around to look at him. “But I’m very certain that if we have to go back empty-handed, we won’t have a hard time finding someone who is looking for an aged woman of some education and breeding, and a knowledge of certain things, and a penchant for skull-lanterns and bones.”
“Fuck you,” the woman spits.
“Liar, liar. I can sense how your blood just pushed through your neck. How your heart swelled. How the pressure in your veins tightened and the flush of blood to your organs as your body prepares to fight,” Blood informs her sweetly.
She jerks away from him and smacks his hand away.
“She’s a Heart that was ripped from her team,” Blood says. “She’s a little unstable. And she’s got so much Aether in her it’s not stableboys that ran a train on her. Aethers aren’t crazy enough to keep up with her depraved, anguished tastes.”
The mudwitch crosses her arms and glares at Blood. “Nothing’s free in the ruined lands. You don’t want to stir up that Blight that makes you, then you deal with me proper.”
“What do you want?” Rot asks impatiently. “You could have just told us the price from the beginning.”
“I don’t want to deal with Imperials,” she spits at us.
“What’s the price?” Smoke ignores her anger and paces up to her.
“You think we can trust her?” Rot whispers to ScatheFire over the top of my head. “Maybe she’ll try to poison her.”
“That’s kind of the idea, Rot,” I whisper.
The mudwitch shoves her hands onto her hips and has to lean back a bit to look up at Blood. “And I can’t promise it’ll even work. She’s an Aether. Aethers resist poison. Fells do too, but Aethers fight it. This kinda thing gets done by a Verdance Aether, although I guess a Blood Fell could do it too. Or a Rot Fell.”
Rot stiffens in horror at the suggestion. “I rot it out of her?”
“Yeah, on second thought, bad idea. You might rot her whole damn womb and insides out. But a Blood Fell? I imagine you could figure out how to do it once the baby was big enough. Just follow the cord heartbeat and strangle it. It’ll die and good chance her body will spit it out.”
Blood recoils and goes as gray as Smoke’s hair. “I am a Fell, not a monster.”
“You sure about that? Anyway, it doesn’t matter to me. Just don’t come back here if it doesn’t work.”
This is like a nightmare I can’t wake up from. ScatheFire tugs me close and presses his face to my hair. I try to pull away. “Don’t, I’m all gross.”
“We’re all gross,” he says, “and I love how you feel against me.”
“Pervert.”
“Well, that too.” He presses his bulge against my thigh and grinds his hips slowly.
Atrament ignores us. “That’s fair. What is the price?”
She looks around, running the tip of her tongue over her cracked lips, and grins. “I’d say I get my pick of you lot.”
“But?” Smoke asks while Blood gives her his most of course, that IS what you’d say look, and Rot and Atrament become supremely uncomfortable, and ScatheFire delivers a swat to my ass.
“Buuuttt I guess that’s just a memory and not really useful,” she says. “So you lot get to do something useful that’ll last longer than your cum will drip out of me.”
“Well, she’s ch
arming,” ScatheFire whispers in my ear.
“If you want to volunteer, then step up,” I whisper back. I swat his ass. Hard. “Go on. Don’t be shy.”
“What do you want?” Blood asks.
“I don’t know, surprise me.”
“We do not have time for games,” Smoke says.
“That’s not my problem.”
17
Crystal
And that’s how negotiations just nose-dive into the ground. What the hell could she want? We’re short on skulls, coin, wine, booze of any variety, cloth, boots, and any of the other usual stuff that was good for wagers in the cavalry. We’re not exactly kitted with anything, and I could conjure a bunch of Aether crystals, but they’d just be lame trinkets.
“Hmmm.” ScatheFire reaches down with his other hand and pulls his dagger out of his boot. His familiar twists into animal form and begins to daintily bathe its face. “What do you give the witch who has everything?”
“More mud?” Smoke scuffs his heel into the parched ground. The only water is the fetid, shallow pond of sludge that is clearly not drinkable. At least not by our very low standards.
“A Bone Fell would be useful right about now,” Blood says. “Or a Venom.”
“You really don’t want anything?” I ask her.
“I want you lot to surprise me. Aren’t Mages supposed to be quite clever?” She smirks and heads over to one of the racks where various things are drying.
“I could desiccate all those bones for her,” Rot whispers.
“I think she likes doing it herself,” I whisper back.
A hot, fetid breeze blows from the west, and the ever-present clouds dance with green bursts of lightening. Rot goes to give the horses handfuls of grain while we ponder what exactly would appease the mudwitch. The skulls dance on their lines. She doesn’t quite have a complete perimeter of them, and they’re all about neck-height, so if you ran into the strings at full speed, you’d probably gore yourself, except they’re not a trap: they’re purely decorative, because they’ve all got that substance that burns inside them. So come nighttime, this place must be lit up like a carnival.
