Bloodwitch

by Susan Dennard

  Vivia’s eyes fell shut. Her magic skipped outward, greeting the fish and the salamanders, skating past boulders and roots, through fissures and over grooves. Her senses moved upstream, they moved down, and she felt and reached for anything that might be out of place, for anything that wasn’t right inside the plateau.

  Yet all was well, just as it had been since she and Merik had saved the city two weeks ago, and second by slippery second, Vivia returned to her body. Gone was her panic, replaced by the power of tides and the strength of storms.

  She was Vivia Nihar, Queen-in-Waiting of Nubrevna—chosen and bound to these eternal waters. She could face down entire navies, she could ride a waterfall from mountain peak to valley’s end. She could battle almost any man or woman and be named victor.

  And Stix was right: it was time that Noden and the Hagfishes bent to a woman’s rule.

  So Vivia made her decision. She would travel to Azmir. Today, just as Stix had suggested, and she would negotiate trade with the Empress of Marstok.

  And Vivia would do it for herself, she would do it for Nubrevna.

  NINE

  The fifteenth chimes were singing by the time Iseult, Aeduan, and Owl reached Tirla. City of a Thousand Names, they called it, for every few decades, a new nation or empire laid claim to its sharp roofs and crooked streets. Since Marstok had conquered it, they had named it Tirla, after the long lake beside which it rested.

  A setting sun canted down, turning whitewashed buildings to gold. Iseult would have found it beautiful were she not drowning beneath the children’s shouts, the merchants’ calls, the donkey brays and endless hammer of hooves—not to mention the soldiers’ barks or the blacksmiths’ bellows or the creak-creak-creak of wagon wheels. The din buffeted her from every direction.

  For every noise, there were just as many people. Bodies, bodies, bodies everywhere she turned, and each moving beneath their own distinct Threads, their own erratic, emotional lives. Iseult’s relief at the presence of humanity had quickly been overwhelmed, and now she wished she could just stop. Close her eyes for a single moment and enjoy at least one less sensory onslaught.

  But that was not an option. Not yet.

  For the final mile into the city, she had walked with her arm underneath Aeduan. Owl hadn’t liked that. Aeduan had liked it even less, and Iseult had liked it least of all. It took so much of her focus to keep him upright and to keep Owl from wandering off—not to mention ensuring she and Owl were properly hidden beneath hoods and scarves. She knew the laws in Marstok were more forgiving than others when it came to Nomatsis, but that did not mean she wanted to test them.

  Legal protection could not eliminate centuries of hate.

  As it was, Iseult veered out of the crowds at the first inn she saw. A dangling sign declared The White Alder, and a second sign below claimed Vacancies. Even better, the inn was built mostly of tiny white bricks and terra-cotta tiling. As far as Iseult was concerned, the less wood, the better.

  As Lady Fate would have it, though, once inside the crowded stable yard, she came face-to-face with a long-dead, sun-bleached alder standing majestically at the heart. She eyed it warily as she passed. She also paused at the front door to check that … yes, yes, her hood was firmly pulled down across her face. She turned to Owl. The girl’s lips puckered into a scowl, her glare even fiercer than Blueberry’s had been, but Owl did not resist when Iseult tightened her scarf. Nor did she argue when Iseult murmured, “Stay close to Aeduan, and do not speak.”

  A hum of clay red annoyance twined through the girl’s Threads, and with it came a flash of pale contempt, as if she were thinking I rarely speak, foolish woman.

  Iseult supposed she had a point.

  They ducked beneath a low entrance into a noisy dining space that was, to Iseult’s relief, also white stone. Oak tables with matching chairs filled the space, and though she couldn’t see it, she sensed a small fireplace at the end of the room. It tugged against her, like a lodestar to a magnet. Heat itched up and down her fingers.

  Cool as a Threadwitch, she reminded herself before striding purposefully for the nearest expanse of bar counter. Here a woman with black hair piled high atop her head carefully carved a ham. She did not glance up at Iseult’s approach.

  Nor did she shift her attention when Iseult said, “We need a room for the night.” She merely continued cutting the ham, juices oozing with each slice and her Threads a focused green.

  So Iseult coughed. Then tried again, more loudly. “We need a room for the ni—”

  “I heard you.” No pause in the woman’s cautious shave. No shift in her Threads. “We’re full.”

  “Your sign says otherwise.”

  “Well, the sign is wrong.”

  Iseult’s nose twitched. She’d so rarely had to do this without Safi at her side, and she doubted her usual threat of chopping off the woman’s ears and feeding them to the rats was going to work in this situation.

  Then again, Iseult’s mentor Mathew always said, Money is a language all men speak.

  “I can pay,” she began.

  “Not enough.” The woman’s carving did not miss a beat. Her Threads, however, fluttered with irritated red. “We’re an expensive establishment.”

  “How expensive?”

  “Fifty cleques a night.”

  Iseult didn’t need Safi’s magic to know that was a lie. The woman was marking up the price; her Threads made it clear she wanted Iseult to leave. But Iseult had something to prove now, and Moon Mother save her, she was about to waste a lot of coin just to make a point. Just to defend her own people.

  Safi would be proud.

  From the folds of her coat, she eased out a silver taler and slid it onto the counter. Then she offered her best attempt at a smile. “How about twice that?”

  Instantly, the woman’s Threads erupted with suspicion. She straightened, knife rising—not quite a threat, but not not a threat either. “Did you steal that?”

  “No.” Iseult’s voice was perfectly still, her expression perfectly blank. She was Threadwitch calm through and through. “It was payment for … sewing.”

  “Oh?” The suspicion in the woman’s Threads spread wider. “I thought sewing was a man’s work for the ’Matsis.”

  Ah. Well, that was unexpected. Of all the innkeepers for Iseult to encounter, she had to find the one who actually knew something about Nomatsi culture.

  “It is,” she said as evenly as she could. Give her what she expects to see. Give her what she expects to see. “I … learned the skill from my father. But my father was killed by raiders, and now my family and I”—she motioned to Aeduan and Owl—“are just looking for a place to stay a few nights. We’ll leave soon, I promise.”

  A thoughtful grunt, and slowly the woman’s Threads melted. First into the bright cyan of understanding, but tinged with midnight blue grief. Then at last, a wave of pink acceptance.

  Iseult’s good fortune scarcely lasted a heartbeat, though, before Aeduan started coughing. A great explosion of air and sound that sent nearby patrons spinning toward him, a blanket of horrified Threads.

  The same horror rushed over the innkeeper’s Threads, and her face sank into a scowl. The knife tilted back to its threatening slant. “No plague.”

  “It’s not the plague.” Iseult pitched those words loud enough for the innkeeper and the nearest patrons to hear. She even rolled her eyes in the most Safi-like way she could manage. “If he were sick, then my sister and I would be sick too. That’s how disease works, you know.”

  The woman did not like Iseult’s tone, but she also didn’t argue.

  “He was injured in the raider attack,” Iseult went on, “and the wound hasn’t healed well. In fact, if you could point me to a healing clinic, I would be grateful.”

  After a moment of consideration, the woman’s Threads blurred back to acceptance. A curt nod, and she finally set down the knife in exchange for the silver taler still gleaming on the dark counter.

  “There’s a clinic a few bl
ocks east of here,” she said, crooking down to grab a key. “But it’s unlikely you’ll find anyone to help. Almost all our healers have been pressed into service and sent to the border.” When she stood again, the dark sorrow was back in her Threads. “I know what it’s like to lose someone to raider violence. Here.” She offered Iseult the key, and also a pile of bronze coins. “Room thirteen. Third floor, third door on the left.”

  “Thank you.” The word fluttered out, softer than Iseult intended. No act, no Threadwitch control. The woman had charged her far less than fifty cleques, and for that she was grateful.

  “A word of advice.” The woman’s chin tipped up. “Keep you and your family hidden. People are saying the Nomatsis have moved to the Raider King’s banner. They aren’t welcome in Tirla because of it.”

  Iseult blinked, stunned. “But that’s not true. He has been killing us.”

  The woman did not look impressed. “It doesn’t have to be true for people to believe it, so stay out of sight and don’t make trouble.” A bounce of the woman’s eyebrows, and before Iseult could even nod, the innkeeper was back to carving her ham.

  * * *

  Sharing a room, Aeduan discovered, was vastly different than sharing a forest.

  Through the torture that pulsed within his skull, he could not sort out why the walls made a difference—he was technically no closer to the Threadwitch or Owl here than he had been in their little cave the night before. Yet, somehow this space felt a hundred times smaller. A hundred times more crowded.

  A low bed sagged beneath a single window, its green coverlet finely made, if well worn. A chipped washbasin with cobalt leaves around the edge rested atop a table near the door, and there was even a warped mirror hanging above it.

  Owl was immediately fascinated by the mirror, and Aeduan was grateful to have her distracted. Pain thumped in every organ, every limb, and it banged harder with each passing minute. He could barely keep the coughing at bay. Then there was the blood, an endless seep from not only his old scars, but now the twenty-one new ones. The shirt Iseult had gone to the trouble of cleaning was now stiff and red once more.

  At least, he thought as Iseult helped him sit, I did not get any of my blood on her. “Thank you,” he tried to say as he sank onto the bed, but all that came out was a harsh sigh.

  The wood groaned beneath him. The dark-paneled room listed sharply. Then the Threadwitch moved in front of him, a hazy vision of pursed lips and green-golden eyes. Her hands moved to his throat, gentle as always, and it took him a moment to realize she was removing his cloak.

  He stiffened. She hesitated. A faint lift of color reached her cheeks. “May I? We need to tend your wounds.”

  There was that we again.

  He nodded, and as she eased off the cloak, he realized the problem was not that the room felt too small. No, the problem was that Iseult felt too big. She filled every space in his vision. Every touch, every word, every breath. There was no escaping her.

  She folded Aeduan’s cloak, acting as if it were not filthy and pocked with holes, before carefully placing it on the floor. Brows drawn in concentration, she twisted back to him. Her fingers reached for the edge of his shirt, as if she intended to tug it from his pants. As if she intended to peel it up over his bare, bleeding chest.

  It was too much.

  His hands shot to hers. He stilled her fingers where they rested at his hips. “No” was all he said. A mere exhale of a word, but enough. The color on her cheeks fanned brighter. She snatched back her hands. Then pulled her whole body away, angling toward Owl. A split second later, and Iseult was scrabbling away from Aeduan entirely.

  “Leave it!” she cried. “That mirror is not for you to pull apart—Owl, leave it!”

  And Aeduan found a frayed exhale scraping from his lungs. He was more relieved than he cared to admit that Owl was making trouble. The sentiment was short-lived, though, for the actual act of removing his own shirt turned out to be an impossibility—and if he was honest, no longer a priority.

  Every muscle in his body screamed. Shadows fringed his sight, and he simply had nothing left to fight them with anymore.

  A man is not his mind, he tried to tell himself. The first lesson every monk learned. A man is not his body. They are merely tools so that a man may fight onward.

  Aeduan’s attempts didn’t work—and he could no longer deny that Iseult was probably right: the arrows that had struck him had been cursed.

  This, he supposed, must be what dying felt like.

  “Apparently she can control glass too,” Iseult muttered in Dalmotti, twisting back to Aeduan. “Because this child wasn’t tiresome enough already … Aeduan?” Her face dipped in close. “Aeduan, stay awake—just a little longer. Can you do that?”

  “Hmm,” he agreed, and though it took monumental effort, he forced his eyelids to stretch high. Forced his spine to straighten.

  Iseult’s and Owl’s wide eyes met his.

  “I’ll go find a healer now,” Iseult went on. “And buy supplies for the road.”

  “No…” He swallowed. “There is an outpost for the Monastery in Tirla. I can … get supplies … there.”

  Disbelief widened her eyes. “I thought you were a monk no longer.”

  He had told her that, hadn’t he? And he had meant it too, even if the why of it from two weeks ago now seemed muddled in his mind.

  “You can barely speak,” Iseult went on, “much less walk.”

  “I … must, though,” he argued, wondering why she insisted. Why she cared. “The dead monk … he requires closure.”

  “Then I will go report the man’s death for you.”

  For several long moments, Aeduan stared at her, considering. Always, she perplexed him. He had no idea what she might say next. What she might do next. At times, it angered him—she had no right to care. But at other times …

  Well, he did not know precisely. He just knew that he was glad he’d not yet abandoned this course and returned to his father. Glad he had not gone to Lejna or hunted the ghost that smelled of clear lake waters.

  “Only monks may enter,” he said at last, voice hoarse. Body shamefully frail.

  Iseult’s nose wiggled. “Fine,” she said. “You can visit the outpost later, once you’ve healed. Rest for now, though. And Owl”—she fixed a stern eye on the girl—“lock the door behind me, and no tampering with the mirror while I’m gone.”

  Several pained breaths later, Iseult left the room. As promised, Owl locked the door with a pointed glance from across the room. The tumbler clicked into place, and Owl crawled onto the bed. She settled cross-legged beside Aeduan, expression expectant. “Story,” she said.

  It took Aeduan a moment to even comprehend that word: story. It was not as if people went around saying it to him often. Or ever, really. And it was not as if he knew many to tell six-year-old Earthwitches.

  “Monster and the honey,” she specified, more insistent now, and this time, she poked him in the biceps.

  It hurt. The blackness advanced. He would pass out if he did not do something, and as useless as he was, he did not want to leave the girl all alone in a strange inn where mirrors were begging to be melted apart and remade.

  But the monster and the honey … It was a tale his father had woven a hundred times when Aeduan was a child—and it was a tale Aeduan refused to ever tell. After all, stories like it were dangerous. They made the hopeless hope and the forgotten dream of being remembered. But the truth was that monsters could never be changed into men, no matter how much honey they might gather.

  So Aeduan swallowed, throat aflame, and began a different story. A harmless story. One his mother had told him many times, all those years ago, about a dirty cat trapped in a thunderstorm and the little girl who saved him.

  TEN

  It was a song that saved Merik from the shadows. A voice so perfect, he thought surely he must be dead. That this must be the hall of Noden; this must be the chant of His most hallowed lost.

  But there was war
mth on Merik’s face, and when his eyes briefly cracked wide, sunlight pierced in. He instantly screwed them shut again.

  Still the voice sang on. Tripping, trilling, soprano words to fill his ears with a language he did not recognize, yet loved all the same. He was the cat in a perfect beam of sunlight. He was warm, he was loved, and he never wanted this music to end. If he was a dead man, then this was the song that would save him.

  Shadows skated across the sun, flickering the light behind Merik’s eyelids, and a gentle scritch-scritch-scritch nudged beneath the music. A familiar sound that brought to mind a similar sunshine, a similar morning breeze kissing his face. And a similar steady beat of footsteps as Aunt Evrane paced her workshop in Nihar, grinding away at a mortar and pestle.

  He could almost hear her old rebuke, bouncing on this new singer’s song:

  The Fury never forgets

  Whatever you have done

  Will come back to you tenfold,

  And it will haunt you

  Until you make amends.

  Dark words, he thought, forcing his eyes open once more. Dark words for such a lovely tune and this lovely warmth surrounding him.

  It was not warmth that met his opened eyes, though, nor sunshine, but a tiny, glassless window set high atop a dark, damp stone wall. The sun was still there, but with clouds knotted before it, there was no glare to hide the uneven gray bricks framing the window. No glare to hide the moss fuzzing along the rim, or the bits of braided, beaded yarn—green, yellow, pink, and blue—dangling from above.

  Ivy crept along the ceiling, while painted red poppies curled and crawled along the crumbling walls. Ancient things made new again, he thought, and with it came the first bolt of panic amidst the song.

  Cam. Ryber. The Fury.

  Where the hell-waters was he?

  Merik tried to jolt up. It hurt—a flashing, skittering pain in his ribs, his stomach, his spine. He instantly gave up and sank back down, but when his neck hit the rough floor, something heavy and hard clacked against it. He jerked upright again, despite the pain, despite the dizziness, and found that a smooth wooden collar encircled his neck. Hanging from an iron latch was an iron lock, and from that lock was a loose-woven iron chain that spooled to the ground before snaking to a hook on the wall.