by Rachel Dunne
Watching now did not bring him any peace. Keiro was not sure he would ever find such a thing again.
One hand rested on the small form lying at his side, feeling the gentle rise and fall of even breaths. Cazi had fled through the tunnels, spurred by fear or anger or pain. Keiro had left more slowly, though no less alone, crawling the tunnels with his thoughts swirling. Cazi had hidden himself away in a little dell between the hills, covered by shrub and scree, but Keiro had found him nonetheless—walked straight to the Starborn, as though his feet had known the way. Cazi hadn’t fought when Keiro had lifted him up, had let Keiro cradle him as he walked through the hills, making a shelter of his arms and his chest. He’d brought them to this place, the gentle hill that stood like a border between the rest of the hills and the endless Plains. It was a good place, a peaceful place. A place for resting.
Cazi nudged his nose against Keiro’s fingers, and Keiro stroked his hand down Cazi’s warm body, careful around the places where Cazi’s wings had been. They didn’t seem to pain the mravigi, but Keiro would rather not put that to the test. “I should have stopped it,” he said, not for the first time. He could tell himself, again and again, that there was nothing he could have done, that his will was as nothing against a god’s . . . but he should have tried. “I’m so sorry, little one.”
Cazi trilled softly, his tongue snaking out to scrape against Keiro’s finger. It only made Keiro feel more guilty, that the Starborn should feel compelled to comfort him.
Guilt is a useless emotion. Sterner words than would usually drift in his mind, but no less true for their harshness. He should put aside guilt, and focus instead on retribution. “But how?” he murmured aloud. It would need to be vengeance against the Parents, of course, but what more could he do? Saval’s attendants would be returning to Raturo, would bring the power of the Fallen to bear, and Keiro was certain they would find some way to free the Twins.
If only they could have waited to remove Cazi’s wings. It would not be so long before the Fallen arrived; once the Twins were free, there would be no reason for the mravigis’ wings to be cut, no reason for Cazi’s freedom to have been torn away. If only the Twins could have been patient . . .
But no. Even as he thought it, Keiro knew he was wrong. The Twins had to protect themselves, and young Cazi likely did not tend toward the circumspect. Should the Parents see him flying, the Twins’ hopes would be destroyed before they could begin to grow. They had done what they had to do, and anger at the Twins would serve Keiro just as well as guilt. He should put both aside, and turn his eyes from the past to the future. There was still much to be done.
And yet. Keiro wondered again what he could possibly do. The Fallen would arrive soon enough, and nothing could be done without their aid. So where did that leave Keiro? Waiting, useless, unnecessary.
Over the waving grass, lengths and lengths away, a gentle wisp of smoke climbed into the sky. The tribehome, and the communal fire there. The whole tribe would be gathering, roasting groundbirds and berries, telling stories . . . no, begging Saval for stories. He’d be sitting there as the plainswalkers fawned over him, soaking in their kindness, his odd mage sitting apart.
A mage would be a useful thing indeed . . .
Keiro’s fingers stilled atop Cazi’s chest. He knew precious little about magic, but perhaps there was some spell that could help the Twins. Not restore them to their power, of course, that was beyond the ability of any mortal, but surely there was something the mage could do. And if Nerrin didn’t know of any spells, the Twins themselves held the world’s oldest knowledge, and magic had been a wild thing in the days they had walked upon the earth; they might know of something . . .
Cazi gave a soft chirrup as Keiro stood. “Rest, little one,” Keiro said, but Cazi rose as well, lithe body stretching. Keiro forced himself to look at the smooth patches of scale where Cazi’s wings had been, made himself watch the play of muscle beneath scale, the easy grace with which Cazi moved. He was not in pain. His eyes were bright and curious. The young were resilient, and Cazi was no exception. There was no reason to feel such guilt, or worry—he had to keep reminding himself of that. He lifted Cazi up to his shoulder, the Starborn’s normal perch. As he began walking, he told himself it was in his imagination still: the way Cazi leaned forward, his muzzle stretched into the air that blew gently by, nostrils flared and eyes slivered. Or the way his claws tightened, his weight shifting, as though he were preparing to launch his body up, up . . .
“You’re fine,” he said aloud, sternly, and then looked at Cazi from the corners of his eyes. Softer, he asked, “Aren’t you?”
Cazi’s response was to bite gently at Keiro’s ear, and that put a faint smile on his lips.
The tribehome was every bit as bustling as Keiro had guessed it would be. He approached it from a different direction than usual, leaving the worn path to walk instead through the grass stalks, through the thousand tiny cuts their waving blades left. He moved slowly, in time with the dancing shadows the fire cast, not wanting to be seen. All the plainswalkers had their eyes fixed on Saval, arms waving and voice booming, and so no one noticed Keiro when he stepped from the grass.
Nerrin sat alone, a distance from the others, rocking slowly and muttering to herself. She startled when Keiro touched her shoulder, but did not make a sound. “Come with me,” Keiro said. Nerrin looked to Saval, and a shudder rolled through her body. “Come with me,” Keiro said again, more firmly. He’d learned from his flock of followers—those who had now abandoned him for the new novelty of a Ventallo—that confidence and surety were powerful things, and so he spoke as though Nerrin following him were a foregone thing. Her eyes flickered to Saval again, but she rose and followed Keiro back into the enveloping grass. Saval’s story followed them through the stalks, and Nerrin flinched near continually at the slow-fading sound of his voice.
Keiro took her far away, far enough that Saval’s voice was swallowed by the grass. That stopped her flinching, but it made her muttering more apparent, a constant stream of barely audible nonsense. Keiro wondered, not for the first time, if she were truly mad—perhaps it was merely some astronomical coincidence that the last two mages he had seen had been mad. Perhaps nothing was being done to mages at all, and he was merely searching for meaning where there was none.
They stopped near where the Plains began to taper into hills, the grass only waist-high and sparser. Keiro stomped flat a portion of the grass and then sat; Nerrin remained standing, her eyes fixed into the distance, arms wrapped tightly around herself. It was warm in the grass-sea, and she must surely be warm wearing the thick black preacher’s robes, but still she shook where she stood. She acted almost like she didn’t know Keiro, like he was a stranger who had spirited her away. “Nerrin, why don’t you sit?” Keiro said, and though he spoke gently, she flinched as though it was a blow. She did sit, though, legs folding beneath her and then drawing up to her chest, making herself as small as possible.
It was need—and a questing for power, there was that, too—that had led Keiro to bring her here. Now, though, those both began to pale by degrees as he watched her. She was so broken; broken, he feared, by his own people. He had known mages in his life, not well but well enough to know that they were no more prone to madness than any other group of people. It seemed too great a coincidence that he had met two mad mages in his life, and both had been in the company of a preacher. There was something deeper here, something sour, and an aching grew in him to set things aright. Perhaps it was worth hurting her, if it let him help her.
“Nerrin,” he said softly, and gently touched the back of her hand. She cringed, but didn’t move away from his touch. “I don’t know what’s been done to you . . . but I am sorry for it. I . . . I would help you, if you’ll let me. Please, Nerrin. Tell me how to help you.”
“I am the cappo’s loyal servant,” she said through chattering teeth.
“You don’t have to be. You are you. Surely there is a better life for you than this.”
“I am the cappo’s loyal servant.”
Cazi slipped down from Keiro’s shoulder, trod slowly across the space between him and Nerrin. She gave a yelp when his small-clawed foot touched her leg, but stayed still as though roots had sunk her into the ground. Cazi climbed her leg, and Keiro saw how he was so careful with his claws, gripping with splayed toes and, when he did need to use his claws to pull himself higher, sinking them only into her breeches rather than the flesh of her legs. The young mravigi perched on her knees, and though his head blocked Keiro’s sight of her face, he saw how Nerrin’s eyes fixed on Cazi. Intense and intent, as though trying to convince herself he was real, even though she had seen Cazi before, had seen other mravigi. She watched him, and didn’t flinch when he stretched out his slim body so he could press his nose to hers.
“Free.”
It took Keiro a long moment to realize that the word, soft and high and sweet, had come from Cazi.
“Free,” Cazi said again, and a wet, tearing sob burst from Nerrin’s mouth. She rolled onto her side, curled around Cazi’s small body, and wept like the world was shattering around her.
Keiro sat where he was, throat heavy, torn between giving her the privacy of her grief and wanting to comfort her. Her tears ran themselves out before he managed to make up his mind, and she pushed herself up to sitting, one hand cradling Cazi, the other reaching inside her robe. She set a jar on the ground between her and Keiro, the same jar he had seen before, the one full of the foul black stuff. Her hand shook, and stayed around the jar for a long while before she released it.
“There,” she said, voice rough, and her eyes wouldn’t look at Keiro or the jar.
“What is it?”
“It makes me his.”
Those simple words made Keiro’s guts clench with anger. He knew he had been right in hating Saval . . . “How can I help?”
“I don’t know.”
“How does it work?” Keiro leaned forward to pick up the jar, turning it in his hands, lifting the lid to watch the way the sludge moved when he tilted the jar. When he glanced up at Nerrin, the hunger he saw in her eyes was a frightening thing.
“Blood.” The word fell heavy from her lips, and drew behind it a silence like death.
When the world was young, before the One God of the Highlands had woken and granted power to his followers, when gods had walked the earth beside men, there had been magic. Not the shaping power of the gods, nor the gentler powers now commanded by mages—it had been magic born of blood, and those who could wield it had been the closest mankind had ever come to godhood. All preachers knew of blood magic, for its traces were woven through Mount Raturo, through the seekstones each preacher carried, through the Sentinels that guarded the mountain paths, through the secret things said to be kept away in the bowels of the mountain. Blood magic, though, was no more than a piece of a long history, no more real now than any of the old stories the preachers told.
The stories of the Twins, whom Keiro had seen and spoken to.
Keiro knew nothing of the power of blood, had no idea how any of the Fallen had unlocked its secrets, or how to undo its effects. But the Twins might know . . . after all, Fratarro’s blood had healed Cazi’s wounds in an instant . . .
“Cazi,” Keiro called softly as an idea struck him, and the young mravigi wriggled obediently out of Nerrin’s arms. She whimpered as he left, and Keiro felt a pang of guilt—Put aside guilt. She could stand a moment of sadness. “How does he do it?” he asked Nerrin as he ran a careful hand along the curve of Cazi’s back.
“Three drops of his blood,” she said, “mixed with each jar of skura. I . . . none of us have been able to figure how it works.”
He was happy to hear the enslaved mages seemed to have formed some sort of confederation, even if it had proved fruitless for them—it told him there was hope yet, for the mages. Using the nail of his thumb, Keiro scraped at Cazi’s scales, chipping away the blood that had dried there and sending the flakes of it into the jar. Most of the blood was Cazi’s, but Keiro remembered well how Sororra had smeared her brother’s blood over the mravigi’s wounds. Perhaps there was enough of it remaining to do something, and gods’ blood was certainly more powerful than a man’s . . .
When Keiro had chipped away as much as he could, he stirred the black paste with his finger. He could feel Nerrin’s intense regard, her eyes unwavering. When he lifted his finger, sticky with the muck, her mouth fell open, her tongue thrusting out. It turned Keiro’s stomach, but it seemed a small thing to quail at, and so he pressed his finger against her tongue. She licked away the black paste, and then fell away as convulsions tore through her. Keiro sat, frozen again by indecision, watching as she shook and clawed at her stomach. A scream tore out of her, loud enough to echo through the wide plains, and then she went abruptly still.
Keiro’s heart was pounding with something that felt close to panic, and he hurried to kneel at her side. She still breathed, raggedly, but that at least meant she wasn’t dead. Why in all the hells had he thought that was a good idea? So foolish, and his own stupidity might have come close to killing her . . . He touched Nerrin’s shoulder, and her eyes opened slowly. “Are you all right?” Keiro asked breathlessly.
Her gaze was distant, unfocused. “Bring him . . .” she murmured. She didn’t even seem to realize Keiro was there.
“Nerrin?”
Finally her eyes fixed on him, and she let Keiro help her up to sitting. Cazi, with a concerned chirrup, fitted himself under one of her hands. The other hand she pressed to her forehead, as though she’d been hit, or was trying to press back a headache. “We’ll have to get Saval,” she said, voice faint. Not the muttering tone that was so common to her, for these words were clear and intentional, but it seemed almost as though she didn’t realize she’d spoken them aloud.
“Why?” Keiro asked. “I . . . I don’t think he’ll approve of . . . what we’ve done.”
Her eyes fixed on him again, sharp and sane, and then they slid away. “He is needed.”
All the hard certainty had drained out of Keiro, replaced by a cold, creeping horror. What have I done . . . ? “Nerrin, you should rest. It’s peaceful here by the hills. We can sleep and see what the morning brings. Sleep can give you a wondrous new—”
“There’s no time.” Her voice was sharp, her eyes hard, and he saw her fingers curl into fists. Cazi scampered away from her, disappeared through the grass. A shudder rolled through Nerrin’s body, her jaw clenching so tight that Keiro could see the tendons stand out stark beneath her skin. Then her limbs relaxed once more, her face smoothing. She didn’t look at Keiro as she stood. “If you will not help,” she said, “we don’t need you.”
“‘We’?” Keiro repeated, hurrying after her as she started through the grass, aimed toward the tribehome. He caught her up, pulled on her arm. “Nerrin, stop—listen to me! I don’t know what that foul stuff did to you, but—” She ignored his grip on her arm, walking forward even as it twisted her arm behind her, Keiro’s continued grip stretching her arm out until he swore he heard faint tearing, popping. He let her go and she carried on forward, unperturbed. “Twins’ bones,” Keiro breathed, “what have I done?”
He followed after her, dogging her steps and, like a dog, yapping at her the whole way, trying to get her to stop or talk or pause or anything besides her rigid path and dead-eyed stare and pressed lips. He stood directly in her path, pressing his hands against her shoulders, using all his wiry strength to push against her, and both their feet put furrows into the ground as they pressed equally forward. Keiro was the one to break first, stumbling back and sideways as she moved inexorably forward.
Keiro raced ahead to block her path once more, and this time, when she reached him, he took a deep breath and brought his fist up from his hip. He had never hit another person, and the scrape of his knuckles against her face was a horrible feeling. Worse, was the way the soft part of her cheek, below the cheekbone, gave beneath his fingers. He hated himself for it, h
eld his fist against his chest as though it were a live and rabid thing, but if it could break her from this strange trance . . . Her feet did halt, and her face lifted slowly from where his strike had cast it sideways. She blinked rapidly, confusion plain in her eyes, and relief flooded through Keiro so strongly that a half sob of joy burst out of him.
And then her eyes flickered, the fire rising in them once more, and the voice that came from her mouth hardly sounded like her own: “Oppose us again, Keiro Godson, and you will take Saval’s place.”
Keiro stood shaken, feet like leaden lumps as Nerrin stepped around him, her shoulder bulling against his as she passed. He did not try to stop her. He almost didn’t follow her, wanting no more part in whatever strangeness, whatever wrongness, had taken her . . . but he had done this to her. It was his doing. Keiro was not a brave man, but he was no coward. He would face what he had done, and he would try, to his dying breath, to fix it.
And so Keiro followed meekly in her path, watching and—he told himself—waiting for his moment. Watching, and wondering, and lamenting.
She walked confidently into the tribehome—swaggered, practically—and strolled right up to Saval, though he was in the midst of a story. She pressed her hand to his arm, and though her voice was not loud, she didn’t bother to whisper when she said, “You must come.”
The silence that fell was a heavy thing, made up of the broken spell woven by a story well told, and made up, too, by the mixture of curiosity and uncertainty of the tribe. They had likely not remembered that Nerrin existed, much less expected her to interrupt her master. They all watched with mouths agape, waiting to see what would happen.
Saval glared at his mage, clearly annoyed. “We’ll speak later,” he said, brushing her hand from his arm. He turned back to the plainswalkers, drew a breath to continue his story.
