by K. M. Hade
“Can feel you picking through your thoughts, Pebbles,” ScatheFire says. He shifts his shoulders. “That’s gonna take some getting used to.”
I walk over to one of the skulls and turn it around, and examine a couple of the others. All human, all rigged to be lanterns. “Hey, ScatheFire, get over here. I’ve got an idea.”
He comes along with the others and they cluster around me like a human blanket. It’s not unpleasant. It’s nice, actually, feeling all their attention and intrigue moving through me. I close my eyes and sort out each one’s presence: Atrament’s velvety dark, ScatheFire’s laughing embers, Blood’s surly-on-the-outside-gentle-inside uncertainty and the way he shifts uncomfortably once he senses my attention, Rot’s kind bulk, and even Smoke’s reticent pull.
“What’s the idea?” Blood asks.
“Think she’d like some crystal skulls? Infused with scathefire, so they glow? I could probably infuse some with aether-light too. Maybe I could even... make smaller ones? Give her some she could pile as a little cairn outside her house. ScatheFire, do you think we could twist our magics together to make Fell-glowing crystal skulls?”
“Scathefire tends to burn itself out,” he says. “We’re more or less like Infernos.”
“If we infused the scathefire into the crystal. The Heart bond should let us work in concert. That’s why Heart teams are so powerful. It’s not just a perfect partnership and Blight-healing, it’s the ability to blend magics. So an Inferno and a Metal and a Storm can make it rain burning metal.”
ScatheFire shrugs. “Hell, let’s try.”
“We need a distraction,” Smoke murmurs. “If it doesn’t work, you can turn the skulls into crystal at least.”
“Hey, snake,” I tell the sword on my horse.
It drops to the ground and slithers over.
“Atrament, Blood,” I say, “Send your familiars to go dance with the snake and amuse her. Snake, go play.”
“When, exactly, did we turn into a traveling carnival?” Blood inquires as his petal dragon emerges and clings to his thumb, wings clamped down over its little head.
“The instant we rode out of the Pit, obviously.” Atrament’s hummingbird buzzes around Blood’s thumb and squeaks at the petal dragon.
Blood offers his familiar a drop of blood and soft, whispered words. It raises one little wing, then clamps it back down.
“And you call my cat an asshole,” ScatheFire says.
“Give it a moment, it’s scared,” Blood snaps.
The cat stops its bathing and hisses. My familiar, which has scurried over to where the mudwitch is working, raises itself up and bobs back and forth. It is not a good dancer. It’s a fucking terrible dancer, actually.
“Wow,” ScatheFire says as his cat stops bathing long enough to give my snake a long disapproving stare, “your familiar is stupid.”
“It tries, which is more than we can say for your little furry asshole.”
The cat blinks at me sweetly. That must be the feline finger.
“Snake!” the mudwitch exclaims.
“That’s just my familiar,” I say.
“You’ve got a snake familiar?” she exclaims.
“It won’t bite you.”
She glares at me. “What Aether has a snake familiar?”
“This one,” I shoot back. “Take it up with the gods if you want. Oh, wait, that’s right, They don’t pay attention to what happens here.”
The hummingbird whips around my snake’s head, and the two play with each other until the petal dragon flutters over. It lands on my snake’s head and begins—a little reluctantly—to sing its favorite happy song, and wave its wings in a little dance. The hummingbird dances with it and squeaks along to the song, while my snake bobs in time.
“Well, if this whole Mage thing doesn’t work, we will definitely have a career as a traveling animal carnival,” Blood says under his breath.
“We won’t starve,” Atrament says.
Everyone sighs at him. Even me.
“A petal dragon,” the mudwitch says, entranced with the little beast. She holds her hand out for it. It trills nervously, but obediently lets itself be picked up, and continues to dance and sing in her palm.
“It’ll be fine,” I tell Blood.
“It’s very little.” Blood doesn’t look away from his familiar.
“The way you worry about that petal dragon you’re going to be terrible with a baby,” ScatheFire says with a grin.
Blood goes ashen under his pallor, and a feeling like a gutpunch shudders through our bond. Maybe it’s just the cold realization a baby is pretty terrifying.
“I was thinking of a nanny,” Blood says.
“And you never plan on holding your kids?” Rot asks.
“What the hell do any of us know about being good parents? Hire a professional, I say. You hire a professional to train a horse or a dog, don’t you? Obviously you’d hire a professional to raise a child.”
Gross. “That’s not how that works.”
“You had a nanny, didn’t you?”
My brothers and I had had a few different governesses and nannies and tutors, but my parents had never been far away. They’d been busy with social obligations young children couldn’t attend, of course, but it wasn’t like we’d just been handed off to caregivers. “The nobility don’t hand their children off to nannies.”
Blood frowns. “I thought the nobility passed their kids off to someone else to raise.”
“Oh, no,” I counter. “No, no, you don’t want to risk your heir or your Mage-child on being raised by someone you hired. One of the things noble children get taught is you can pay someone to wash your sheets, but you can’t pay them to care. Noble parents are expected to train up their own stock, as it were. Doing otherwise is politically embarrassing. There’s gossip your fortunes are too fragile to allow you to tend to your family’s future, or that the children aren’t worth your time.”
Smoke’s tethers twist and shift, an inky unease sliding around in the pool between us.
Rot seizes Blood around the shoulders with one meaty arm and gives him a good jostle. “You’ll have to figure that out too, Captain.”
He punches Blood on the arm. Armor jangles. Leather creaks.
I fold my arms under my breasts, tapping my foot and canting my shoulders like my mother, and I added a bit to my high-bred accent. “My spouse and I would not think of a hired servant raising our children.”
Atrament speaks over my shoulder, “We have a task to accomplish, Lady Heart.”
I half turn towards him. Why does he seem to vibrate like a hummingbird?
Smoke cuts through all of us. “Yes, we do.”
“Yeah, yeah, let’s take a look at what we’ve got.” ScatheFire works some pickpocket street kid magic with his fingers to remove one of the skulls from its rope while the mudwitch watches the familiars dance. The petal dragon is really getting into it now and the other familiars weave like a silly dance troupe.
ScatheFire passes me a skull. It’s a skull. Seen lots of skulls. This one just happens to be intact. The ones I see are usually caved in or half-disintegrated, and covered in pulp and goop. ScatheFire and I sit down to contemplate the skull, while Smoke and Blood step off a bit to continue a fake conversation about what the mudwitch would want, while Atrament hovers like an awkward kid at a court dance.
“Think you can transmute it to crystal?” ScatheFire asks.
“Pretty sure, but I’m afraid I’ll crack it,” I confess.
“How about just encasing it in crystal? Like coating it with ice.”
“Huh, maybe.” I’ve never tried to do that before, but it should work, since it’d just be a variation on the living shield that I can cast on my teammates.
Rot picks up some small bones and pebbles. “Practice on these.”
Everything is so much easier now, and a lot more difficult at the same time. There’s still so much power. I’m so used to pushing and shoving and tugging. Conjuring crystal but
keeping it half-formed is a delicate balancing act, and as I close my eyes and try to picture it sliding instead of pushing, I latch onto Blood and Atrament’s velvety shadows to help guide the shape of my own magic.
I gasp and open my eyes, releasing the connection. “I—I—sorry about that.”
Atrament’s looking at me with huge, dark eyes. The mudwitch is still entertained by the dancing familiars and hasn’t noticed.
“I do not mind,” Atrament says steadily.
Blood’s expression and his soul... churn. He contemplates and discards emotions like he’s searching for what frock to wear. I wait for him to say something, anything, but he’s too busy sorting out the complex web of reactions, but through it all I hear I do not want a Heart. I do not want this. This cannot be true.
I try to pull back out of it, I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to know this. I know it, but I don’t want to know.
Atrament looks at Blood, calm and cool. “Come here. You are needed.”
My mouth is dry. Blood, clotted and coagulating, walks to us and crouches down, unwillingly. Oozing, almost. They’re terrible sensations. I don’t like it. I don’t want it. I try to pull up out of it, but it’s a spiderweb and I can’t get free.
“She’s not Shard,” ScatheFire tells Blood.
“You’re hurting her,” Rot says.
The internal tug-of-war between souls continues. One of us is the spiderweb, the other one is the trapped moth, and I’m not sure which one is which. There’s gibbering and babbling echoing in his memories, like he’s standing in the doorway of a house, and someone’s having a breakdown in one of the rooms, and I’m hearing it over his shoulders.
And he’s staring at me, and he hears, maybe he feels, my dark memories of my Aether team.
I turn my attention back to the skull. Blood slowly crouches down. This time, he doesn’t hold his magic out of reach. Keeping crystal as liquid and unformed burns through my Aether and the Fell thread bindings. I have to summon so much magic but keep it squished and spin it while ScatheFire burns it with his own magic, and Blood’s magic shows me how to keep it thick, and not let it clot.
I pull back, like closing off a keg, and breathe hard.
ScatheFire holds up the stone. It’s encased in a thin sheen of crystal that glows in shades of scathefire green and purple, like the flames lick through the crystal.
“Whoa.” Rot takes it in his hand and studies it. “That is impressive.”
I rub my eyes. They feel like they’re full of sand. I rub across my chest. My Aether hurts too.
Blood takes the stone next, then tosses it to Smoke.
“That was a lot harder than I thought it’d be,” I confess. “Maybe just one skull.”
“I think one skull will be impressive enough,” ScatheFire says.
“I know how we’re going to make our fortune across the Vast Dark if it comes to that.” Blood smirks. “We’re going to make glow-in-the-dark trinkets.”
“Who said we were going across the Vast Dark?” Smoke asks.
“I don’t recall ruling it out as a possibility.”
Smoke glowers. “Some things don’t need to be said.”
Rot passes me the skull. I take a deep breath and get to work on it. It’s not any easier this time, but I manage to wrangle the crystal goop over the skull while ScatheFire burns it. The end result is a skull that looks like it’s both frozen in ice and made of liquid fire at the same time.
The familiars have stopped their dance party, and the mudwitch has gone back to whatever she was doing, but the three familiars sit and watch, with the petal dragon still singing the occasional song, and my snake having crawled up the side of the clay house and baking itself on the roof.
I wipe my brow.
Blood holds up the skull. It throws strange green/purple light across his face and hair. The eerie glow makes me shiver.
“We could sell those for a fortune where I’m from,” Rot says.
“Could you see a pirate ship decked out in these for travel through the fog?” Blood agrees with a sly grin. “We definitely should consider an alternative career path of pirating.”
“A ship could probably find its way across the Vast Dark with that,” ScatheFire agrees.
“Let’s see if it will please a mudwitch.” Blood gets to his feet. His familiar zooms over and curls around his ear, purring something about did I do right? I want a treat, I want a treat. “Yes, yes, little love. In a moment.”
Atrament’s hummingbird returns to his hand, but my snake just looks at me from the rooftop and resumes its sunning. Salty fucker.
Blood clears his throat, holding the creepy skull behind his back, so it stared at all of us.
“That really is spectacular,” ScatheFire tells me. “What do you think, Smoke?”
Smoke gives us the side-eye, hazing into view long enough to give us all a clear look at how few fucks he gives. Then he fades into the background again.
“Ass,” ScatheFire mutters.
The mudwitch finishes twisting the head off of some small burrowing thing, flings it aside, and looks at Blood. “Yeah?”
Blood presents her with the skull.
She instantly gasps and grabs it. “What is it?”
“One of your skulls,” Blood points to the empty spot on the line, “made... fancy.”
“But... how?” She turns it over in her hand as all the greens and purples flow and shine through the surface.
Blood pulls his petal dragon down off his ear and puts it in one palm, then offers it a drop of blood. It happily licks up the droplet, making loud purring noises as it clings to his finger with little claws. “So. Our deal?”
The mudwitch tears her gaze away from the skull.
Atrament paces to the front, his shadows drifting about him. “It was made with great difficulty by the finest Mages in the Empire, and it is the only one of its kind. We created it for you.”
She pulls it to her breasts. “There aren’t any others?”
“No,” ScatheFire says. “Just that one.”
The mudwitch turns her back to us for a moment, holding the skull in both hands and staring down at it, before she turns back around and says, “Done. I’ll make up what she needs. Go kill some time doing something.”
She carries the skull into her house.
“That was easier than expected,” Blood says.
I rub my head again. A splitting headache has started right at my temples and my insides ache from the magical over-exertion. That was a lot more intense than I’d expected it to be. I wander off to the side where our horses are picketed and sit down in the dirt.
Atrament crouches beside me. “Are you well?”
“I’m fine. Just tired,” I say.
“You should be impressed with what you accomplished.”
I give him a watery smile. “You should be too. You fixed me, Atrament. I’d never been able to do that before you stitched me.”
He shifts and looks away. “I’m pleased I was able to help you.”
I hesitate before I put my hand on his wrist. “No, I don’t think I thanked you.”
He still does not look at me. “I do not require thanks.”
“You did a good job selling the skull to the witch.” I tried again.
“I am skilled in courtly flattery.”
Rot drops down across from us. “So I guess we’re going east next.”
Smoke materializes nearby. “We will be spotted and hunted down. We need to decide on a destination next.”
“Clearing our names is the next thing to do,” Rot says.
“Yes, and we should figure out how to do that.”
“Winter is coming too. If it takes us three weeks to get out of here, it’s going to be autumn. The season’s getting late.”
Smoke’s expression flickers with a grimace. He gives one curt nod to acknowledge this fact.
The war is always worse in winter. War in the heat of summer is rank, but the short days, grinding cold, weather
, and fear of hunger in the winter feeds the Blight. It slithers out of those long-lasting shadows and dark nights. Its minions and accomplices and allies are empowered. The battles are miserable and grinding, there’s a lot of sickness that increases misery. People fear winter is where the war will be lost.
Winter is the season the Blight’s minions go looking for weakness and easy prey, even if they have to go far afield to do it. Late autumn and winter nights can be terrifying. The lanterns and candles and lights only illuminate the dark shapes that lurk. And the front itself? Nightmarish. Utterly nightmarish.
There are few things more terrifying than a midnight charge on a moonless winter night as it snows, and whatever light you have is splintered among the flakes, and the wind swirls everything and it’s delirious madness.
Much of the Empire’s population prefers to cluster in the south, even though that’s closer to the front than the north, simply to avoid the northern winters. There are festivals and parties and gifts and such to bring joy and ward off the Blight. Even in the army there’s an effort to keep spirits high.
It was one thing sleeping rough in summer. In winter, it’d be a good way to die. Or worse.
18
Crystal
The mudwitch appears at her leather door. “Come inside. Just the Aether. This is woman-talk.”
“I’m sure men are concerned with the matters of procreation as well,” Atrament says.
“Yeah, you’re concerned for all of two seconds,” she flings back. “It’s on us to make sure we don’t pop out your spawn. I can tell you all about it ‘till the gods all have names again, and you’ll forget it all the instant your cock’s in a pussy.”
She grabs my wrist and yanks me inside.
The skull sits in a place of honor on a set of shelves carved into the clay walls, it’s eerie green light bathing everything in a glow. More skull lanterns, each sitting in a corner, provide the rest of the light for the simple, one-room structure. A low bed, also of a hardened clay frame with a mattress on a vine mesh, is along the far side. Her work table is covered with little clay pots. The floor underneath our feet is more of the tough vines and grasses pounded until pliable and woven into crude geometric patterns. The walls are painted with dozens of images of various plants. The paint isn’t artist-calibre, it’s dyed washes she’s made from what she’s gathered, but the paintings are accurate, and she’s given each plant a name.
