by K. M. Hade
“Hey, you usually wander around people’s houses?” she demands as I gawk at the botanical records on the walls.
“I just—”
“Unless you’re an herbalist, that info ain’t gonna do you any good, so get back over here,” she grouses.
“I’m sure there are people who’d want what you’ve learned,” I say.
“How do you know they haven’t come and taken it?” she grins, showing one missing tooth and bitterness. “Look, what I know ain’t secret to anyone who’s spent time out here. There aren’t any great secrets. The only thing worth anything out here are some other plants and such that make unusual shades of purple and orange dye, and a bright green. But the elite down in the Capital hear about where those dyes get sourced from and they don’t want to wear anything from it.”
“Everything just looks like the same old leathery grass and thorny vines,” I confess.
“Yeah, because you don’t know what you’re looking for.” The mudwitch presses a small pellet into my hand, then closes my other hand over it. “Take it with water, and don’t have eaten anything for a few hours before, and nothing after. You won’t like what happens.”
I nod.
“It’ll hurt like hell, and anything that might be in there will come out,” she says. “You’re gonna bleed either way. So do it somewhere you won’t have to go anywhere for a few days, because you’ll just attract wild dogs with the bleeding. And it ain’t meant for you to wait on it. If you wait too long, it won’t work, and it’ll just make a mess of things, and you’ll need a Verdance to fix you. You don’t want a dead, partially-dislodged baby inside you. It’s a quick way for even an Aether to die.”
I nod again. “How long?”
“Depends. I ain’t a midwife though. I wouldn’t waste time on it. That’s the thing ‘bout babies. They don’t wait for when it’s convenient.”
I nod a third time.
She looks at her skull. “They call you Heart. You really a Heart?”
Am I? Is that my name? “Yes.”
“You don’t sound convinced about it.”
“It’s complicated.” That’s the only answer I have for either of us. “My team is dead.”
She gives me a long look. “You aren’t like the other Aethers I’ve met.”
“Very true.” I laugh humorlessly.
“You’ve got that look in your eye. You’re too damn young for that look.”
“What look?”
“That you’ve seen hell,” she says. “I didn’t give a shit about that Fell threatening me. Nobody wants to chop my head off bad enough they’ll come look for me, and I’m too useful none of the bounty hunters will take a tag on me. I saw the look in your eye. Nobody your age has any right to look like they’ve seen the face of a god with a forgotten name.”
I stare at her, feeling across a vast distance. She’s a bit too accurate for comfort.
“Guess it comes with being a Heart, huh, and having your team ripped from you. Did they die?”
“No,” I say, throat twisting around the Fell thread that stitches my soul closed. “They didn’t.”
She sighs, genuinely, and puts one leathery hand on my shoulder. “Must be hard, being a Heart who had her team disintegrate. It’s the Heart that’s supposed to give out first, ain’t it. Not the other way around.”
I steel myself for judgement.
“I guess that’s why you don’t know your own name anymore.”
Stiffly, I nod, once.
She squeezes my shoulder, her grip like a tight leather thong. She gives me one gentle shake. “What do they call you? The Fells, I mean.”
“Pebbles,” I say around my constricted throat. “They said I’m their pet rock. It’s the most truthful name I’ve ever had.”
She grimaces. “Nobody should act surprised you made some bad, crazy choices and fell in with some Fell Mages. I guess a bunch of Fells are the only ones who can understand what that kind of pain does to someone. I hope you’re not planning on staying in the ruined lands. Because the military is gonna want to know where their Heart Mage went, and once the rumors are she’s running around the ruined lands, they’re gonna turn this place over to find you. The Military’s crazy enough to try to put you into another team, as if you can do anything with a Heart that broken, but I guess you would know better than I would.”
I smile bitterly. “They want the impossible. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe go to the pirate coast and across the Vast Dark. Tell me how selfish and crazy I am.”
The more I think about crossing the Vast Dark, the more tempting it is. I’d never considered crossing it before. Never even curious about it. There’s a reason it’s called the Vast Dark, and it’s not just because it’s an endless ocean. There are ancient maps at the Imperial Palace and in the Imperial libraries showing the coastlines of lands beyond the Vast Dark, but with the war with the Blight being what it is, expeditions aren’t a thing. The Empire has banned wasting ships and resources and bodies with the Blight chewing through us. It’s been that way a long time.
I touch the knot of Fell thread hidden under my shirt. Drowning or getting lost in the Vast Dark would be a stupid and wasteful way to die, but lowering my head for the Empire to bridle me again?
Must be the Fell thread making me think that way. I look at the mudwitch. “Not telling me how crazy I’d be to try to cross the Dark?”
“Not a chance,” she says. “I think Mages get as raw a deal as most of us do. You don’t even get your own names, and most of you don’t even get to keep your souls. I’m not a midwife, but I’ve been around some Mage-babes. Fell and Aether. Made me hate people. Makes me think we should just let the Blight take us all. All you Imperial Mages get to have is your team and a fuck-ye-well, unless you do survive to retire, and how many of that is that, anyway? And how many of you are so broken your retirement is worth anything? Anyway. If you’re going to fuck off and tell the military you’re not having another team, I ain’t gonna tell you otherwise.”
Here I’m braced for yet another you’re a piece of shit failure and I get the exact opposite. Sending the world to shit isn’t high on my priority list, but it’s nice to hear it. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe go across the Vast Dark. Think pirates will give me passage for some green skulls?”
She chortles as she presses another handful of pellets into my hand. “An Aether as a Pirate Queen! Here, then, you’ll need these.”
“I will? Will they turn me into a pirate?”
She taps me on the head. “Stupid girl. You’re gonna need those until you find someone else to make ‘em for you. They’re tabs. Just as good as what the military would hand you. You might be dumb enough to think you aren’t going to fuck any of those Mages out there again, but I’m not, and let me do you a favor. I don’t think the world’s done you many.”
I close my hand over the precious pills. “You don’t know who I am, and what I’ve done, and the blood and worse I’ve got on my hands. The world doesn’t owe me any favors.”
“Bullshit, you’re a kid. If you were a roast and I pulled you off the spit, you’d still be cold and bloody inside.”
I carefully fold the pills into the small pouch on my hip. There are eight. Eight months. “Thank you.”
She waves me away. “Don’t want thanks. Just don’t come back here, and you forget we ever met. I’m gonna take all the credit for that skull.”
I laugh. “Sure, go ahead. I’ll forget all about you the instant we ride out of here.”
“Faster than that, if you don’t mind.” She does an unsteady mock curtsy.
The sunlight is about as bright as it’s going to get through the low-hanging clouds, and on the horizon, where the ruined lands supposedly meet the western ocean, the sky seems especially angry. “You think it’s going to actually rain?”
“Let’s hope not,” Blood says, holding the reins to my long-suffering palfrey that is still wondering what the hell happened to his coddled life of cart
ing someone back and forth across a nice even bridge.
The mudwitch ducks out of her shelter and cackles. “Oh yeah, that looks like it’s blowing in. Hours out yet, though. About damn time. I got some more bones to bleach.”
I vault onto my horse and take the reins up from Blood. Rain that can bleach bones? Doesn’t sound like any kind of rain I want to be caught in.
“Start digging some holes.” The mudwitch cackles. “Get lost. Unless you’re going to make me some more skulls, I ain’t got room for you lot. Go away.”
“Shit,” ScatheFire says. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve got to find somewhere to burrow.”
“Literally burrow?” I ask.
“Hmm,” ScatheFire says.
The small cluster of buildings that gave us directions to the mudwitch barely pay attention as we pass. They’re too busy mixing up wet clay and plastering their thatch roofs. Rot offers to beat up one of them for information, but Blood nixes the idea. “Blight management.”
“We’ve got a Heart now,” Rot says.
Smoke mutters something.
“No,” Blood snaps so sharply I flinch, but it’s impossible to tell who he’s snapping at: Smoke or Rot. Not even the jolt stabbing through my magic like splinters tells me which way his anger was directed.
Smoke launches the bird into the air.
“We got a plan beyond ride?” Rot asks Blood.
“I’m sorry, do you happen to have a detailed map of the ruined lands?”
“I can draw one by shaking info out of people.” Rot points back the way we’ve come.
“Blight management, big guy. Blight management.”
My snake twists itself around my wrist like a bracelet, and happily flops to the horse’s stride, and deep in the back of my mind, I hear the hum of its happiness at going for a ride.
“Right,” I tell it. “I get the weird familiar that likes pony rides and dancing.”
It lifts its head and flicks its tongue. A strange impression of various emotions and sensations presses into my awareness. A jumble of I was not-here a long time and I like being a stabby-stabby sword and an assortment of others where it seemed to enjoy the whole being alive thing, along with a prey drive.
“Wait until we feed you a proper mouse,” I tell it. “You’ll be in heaven. Or you get to see your first line of dancing girls.”
It bobs its upper body in that cheesy dance it does.
“We’ll find you a little hat and you can dance with them,” I tell it. “Center stage.”
It flaps its tail against the saddle at the promise of a little hat.
“Would you like a little hat with flowers, or a little velvet hat?” I ask it. “I think you would look dashing in a hat adorned with a little rose petal.”
The tail practically whirls about. It twists up my arm and tickles my ear with a gentle forked-tongue kiss. I laugh and duck away. “That tickles!”
“That’s our job, snake,” ScatheFire tells it, wagging his finger. “Tickles and spankings are for us.”
“I hate being tickled,” I tell him fiercely.
“Bet you would have told me you’d hated getting spanked too.”
My pussy dampens instantly at the memory seared into my mind, and it flashes across the bond between us. I scowl at him, and his smirk deepens. Very deliberately, he shifts in his saddle, reaches down, and adjusts himself.
Rot laughs.
“Shut up, both of you,” I demand. We’re in the middle of the ruined lands, some unholy rain is coming our way, we’re out in the open, we haven’t bathed in ages, we’re all a shade of clay-red, and my pussy is panting at the idea of some more spankings, and it’s practically thrumming with what ScatheFire’s hand delivering swats directly to my ass felt like.
“I didn’t hear them say anything, Pebbles,” Blood calls innocently over his shoulder.
“Don’t encourage them!”
“You’re doing that all on your own.” He turns around and winks at me. “You’re doing that all on your own, you saucy dust-covered minx.”
“Can we focus on the unholy shower that’s coming our way?” Smoke points at the stormfront. “Because we won’t just be clean if we’re outside when that hits. We’ll be bare bones.”
19
Crystal
Somewhere, there is a god with a forgotten name and a strange sense of humor and timing.
The storm’s wind pushes at our back, increasingly cold in the burning heat of the daylight. It carries a foul, terrible smell—like charred flesh and lightening. The horses don’t have to be encouraged to walk fast.
Smoke’s familiar alights on his upraised wrist. A gust of wind almost knocks it back into the air. It mantles its wings and preens for a moment. We wait while Smoke and the familiar confer, and then Smoke, with shock at our good luck, says, “There’s a structure about two miles from here. It is abandoned and has something resembling walls.”
Smoke takes the point, following as his familiar guides us two miles further north. It’s an abandoned structure made of old wood and brick. It has walls… sort of. And the remains of a roof. Most importantly, there’s something that was once a shedrow for the animals. They’d have to cram in, but it would give them some shelter.
“That’s as good as we’re going to find.” Blood dismounts. He looks towards the west. The storm seems a bit closer, but it isn’t bearing down on us like a regular thunderstorm. “That’s a few hours out yet.”
The structure is very old: there are still some original wood beams that seem to have hardened to stone, but most of the remains of the wall and floor are various iterations of clay brick and thatch. What remains looks like it had been a modest two-story house once, but the second floor has caved in years ago. A two-story house in the ruined lands? The original structure must have dated back to the First Wars.
The crumbled remains of the floor and a few stubby petrified pillars indicate the original size of the house, but now all that remains appears to have been a large central room that’s been repaired and reinforced many times. The roof itself is sort of intact, but has holes. The walls are in a similar state. There’s nothing in it except dust and some charred spots on the half-clay, half-dust floor where previous residents built fires. But anything that isn’t dust has value in this place, so every bone or splinter has been scavenged long ago. It’s distressingly clean and wind-swept.
Atrament takes it all in. “I am not sure this is what I would call shelter.”
Blood gives him a look. “This is most definitely shelter. You’ve been living in a cave too long.”
“Perhaps,” Atrament says thoughtfully.
Smoke, hands on his hips, stands in the center of the single room and turns around, studying the holes. Rot’s familiar is back in utility form, and our five other horses cluster in the mostly-clay-and-thatch shedrow that shares the eastern wall with the larger structure. There’s no hay or even mangers, and the roof is low enough if any of them throw their heads they’re going to whack themselves, but it seems like the shedrow is in a good state.
Atrament, his dark hair dancing in the breeze, says, “The storms come from the west. That must be why this structure is here and is in good repair. The western walls take the brunt of the storms.”
“Do you know about the rain?” I start to pull the saddle off Blood’s horse.
“The rain is acid, and scalds what it touches,” he says, his shadows sliding over the horses and ground, “and the lightening is like scathefire from the sky. The storms last for days when they come. I’ve never seen them, but that’s what I learned in the Pit.”
Nothing like eating into our food reserves. Perhaps Rot’s plan to double-back is a better idea. I pull the saddle off Smoke’s horse and move it outside the shedrow. Atrament watches, reserved and remote. I pause and approach. He withdraws like a horse leaning away, but not moving its feet. I tell him quietly, “I won’t stop you if you want to return to the Pit.”
His dark eyes fly to mine. “I don’t wish to
return to the Pit. I am just..not very good at being outside of it. I have only ever been on short hunting excursions, and of course my trip to the Capitol to be Tailored. This is all very new.”
I move closer. Tendrils of his hair slip over me and between us. No matter how carefully he braids his hair, it still manages to escape. I raise a hand to touch him, then stop. “You’re doing fine. You don’t complain. That’s automatically a huge contribution.”
He seems pained and looks to the side.
“Do you regret leaving?” I ask again.
“No. I do not want to be a burden on anyone.”
“You did this.” I touch my chest. “You fixed me, Atrament. You aren’t a burden, and you aren’t useless. Don’t let Blood get to you. It has nothing to do with you, he’s just salty. This is hard for him and Smoke.”
He shifts, still not looking at me.
Okay. This isn’t a conversation he wants to have. I bite my lip and withdraw. I can’t reassure him with anything. It’s not the ruined lands that scare either of us. Dying here would be the easy way out of all our messes. Now that we’d solved the two straightforward problems, we had the bigger, grander, shittier problem of how we managed to stop being hunted criminals.
“Help me with the horses,” I say instead. I always felt better when I had something to do that I knew I could do well.
Eyes still averted, he nods.
We get the horses untacked, curried, fed, and watered—then I tie each of them up because horses are sort of dumb about the elements and might be like sure, let’s go stand in the pouring skin-dissolving rain. I hope their hooves hold up to whatever this rain is.
Water might be another problem. There is a little scummy pond a bit of a hike from the structure, but no buckets or mangers, so the horses have to be watered by hand, and after the rain comes, none of us will be drinking that water.
