Inkmistress

by Audrey Coulthurst

  A wave of emotion struck as I stepped back. I had tried so fiercely to hold together the pieces of my heart that had broken when Amalska burned, and I’d thought Ina was the only one who might help me stitch them back together. Now she was gone forever, leaving me with even deeper wounds—ones she’d salted well.

  I slumped against a wall and hugged my knees to my chest as my throat tightened and tears spilled over again.

  A baby. How could she not tell me she was going to have a baby? It changed everything. Her lie of omission made me question everything we’d ever had. Had I ever meant anything to her, or was the love we had no more than a fleeting summer romance? When she came to see me at winter’s end, had it truly been for the village and because she missed me, or had she been using me all along? I never should have used my gift to help her. I never would have if I’d known it would turn out like this.

  I sobbed into the folds of my cloak. What would I do now?

  My grief swallowed me so completely that I failed to notice the breezes eddying through the cave with increasing strength until a gust hit me so hard my head smacked against the wall. I coughed and wiped my eyes, looking around in confusion for the source of the wind. When the stars cleared from my vision, a man was shuffling toward me, still partially obscured in the shadows.

  “You trespass,” his voice hissed through the cave. The chill in the words cut through me like jagged edges of broken ice.

  He came into the light at a deliberate pace, his tattered robes rippling in the wind that swirled around him. In my Sight he glowed bright as a demigod, but dark tendrils laced through his aura like some kind of rot. What little hair he had left was white as fresh snow, his face lined with centuries of age. He hissed at me again in an inhuman way that froze me to the core.

  I scrambled toward the path out of the cave. Gusts twisted around me and pressed on my chest, shoving me onto my back. Wisps of wind worked their way beneath my clothing and dug into me like teeth and claws.

  “Get off me!” I screamed.

  “Foolish child. This sacred ground is not for you.” The malice in his baritone voice was as palpable as the force of his magic.

  The pressure on my chest increased, and darkness began to creep in at the edges of my vision. The wind he controlled was stealing my breath. If I didn’t do something, he would asphyxiate me. I might have welcomed death at Ina’s hands; it would have been fair after what we’d put each other through. But being destroyed by the whims of a random monster wasn’t.

  My heart pounded in my chest, quick as the wings of a sparrow. I flailed desperately, only managing to scrape my wrist on a sharp rock. A hot trickle of blood ran down my fingers.

  The man stopped moving toward me, the wind momentarily ebbing. I crawled backward, leaving a thin trail of blood. Some of my panic must have bled out with it, for everywhere my blood touched, it created grooves in the stone. He raised a hand again, his magic shoving me hard against the floor. My own gift pulsed at the edges of my open wound, urging me to write a way out of this situation. I held it back with all my remaining strength, no longer able to flee.

  The man slowly bent down to where my blood had splattered on the floor. He touched the blood with a knobby fingertip, then brought it to his tongue.

  A soft cry escaped his lips. The wind departed as swiftly as it had arrived, leaving dust to swirl through the sunbeams angling into the cave. Now that the man wasn’t attacking me, he looked much weaker. Age had hunched his shoulders, and his hands trembled with some kind of palsy.

  “You taste like him,” he whispered reverently.

  “Like who?” I clutched my injured wrist to my chest, terrified of what he might do next.

  “Veric,” the old man said. “This is his sanctuary in which you trespass.”

  “Who the Hells is Veric? And who are you?” I asked, scrambling to my feet to take advantage of the reprieve from his attack. I was getting very tired of being accused of trespassing when all I wanted was to be left alone to mourn what I’d lost.

  “I am Leozoar, son of the wind and guardian of the Sanctum,” he answered.

  I started. He was one of Hal’s brothers—or at least claiming to be.

  “You don’t look like a demigod.” Nor did he behave like one. Not all of us were especially moral, but we generally didn’t kill the way he’d apparently been doing for generations.

  “Ah, so you have the Sight, do you? How useful.” Leozoar edged closer. “The gods forsook me when I took the first life in protection of this Sanctum. But my vow was to Veric. He was my family, too. My love.” His gaze grew distant, as if looking for a memory too far away to grasp.

  “I see.” Worry needled at me. Did all the death I’d caused in Amalska mean the gods had turned away from me as well? Or perhaps I’d been cursed and abandoned by them since birth. That would certainly explain a lot.

  “Go to the dais and offer your blood.” Leozoar’s words sounded like a command, not a choice.

  “No. I want to leave,” I said, my voice weak. The day had been long enough. I didn’t want anything to do with this wind wraith and his dark magic.

  “But you have everything to lose and just as much to gain,” he said. His dark eyes grew fierce and the wind picked up again. The meaning was clear: if I didn’t obey him, he’d kill me. A tingle of fear zipped down my spine, then faded away. I barely had the energy to be afraid anymore. In a way, it was almost a relief.

  “Tell me why I should,” I said.

  He huffed in frustration, sending another gust through the cave. “Because I am tired of waiting here and you might hold the keys to set me free.”

  I crossed my arms. “What’s in it for me?”

  “Everything. Your past and your future,” he sputtered. “Do you dare dishonor the only other like you? The only one with your gifts?”

  “Which gifts?” I asked, fear finally creeping its way in.

  “Your ability to make the future what you wish, just as Veric could.” His hands trembled more fiercely.

  “Veric was a bloodscribe?” I stared at the man in shock. If that was true, Veric and I had to be related. Finally, I had a lead on my origins.

  “It’s like you haven’t heard a word I’ve said!” Leozoar shuffled up until he was barely a handbreadth from me.

  I backed away along the wall. If Veric had been a bloodscribe, that meant some secrets of my past might be preserved here. I had never expected to find any keys to my past. Then again, I had never known I needed to search for them back when I thought I was the daughter of wind.

  I had to do it.

  “Where’s the dais?” I asked.

  “Follow the stones,” Leozoar said, raising his arm to send another burst of wind through the chambers. Dust blew aside to reveal a mosaic of polished granite winding a glittering path through the stone floor of the cave. Leozoar limped along beside me as I followed the intricate designs. We walked past the pool through an archway into another smaller room that also had windows on the cliff-facing side. The patterns on the floor twined toward the center, and I followed them as if tugged by an invisible wire.

  A circular stone dais lay between two columns at the heart of the cavern. Text spiraled around its surface toward the center.

  I gift you my blood so that I may serve my kingdom.

  I take your blood so that I may know your intentions.

  If my blood is your blood

  And your heart is my heart

  The past and the future will be yours to command

  Until the blood of us both is but memory and dust.

  A shudder passed through me. The similarities to the rite Ina had used to take her manifest stood out to me in sharp relief. Old blood magic had been practiced here. A handprint much larger than mine lay embedded in the center of the stone table. Perhaps it was Veric’s.

  I touched the indentation, the coolness of the stone seeping into my fingertips. Apprehension stirred, sending a shiver through me. I looked back at the old man, and instead of hos
tility in his expression, I saw something else.

  Hope. For what, I didn’t know.

  “Offer your blood,” Leozoar said, his voice fervent. A groove through the center of the handprint seemed made for just that. His dark eyes shone with intensity, freezing me in place.

  Did I dare tempt fate by offering the dais my blood? Did I even have a choice? Ina had left me. Now I had to take care of myself. Perhaps the secrets of my past would help show me the way to a better future. I took a shaky breath, gathering what little strength I had left. I couldn’t turn my back on something that might provide information about the only other demigod like me.

  I squeezed the wound on my wrist to reopen it and let a few drops of blood fall onto the handprint. They dripped into the groove, tracing a red path toward the center. The earth trembled and groaned as the dais turned on an unseen axis until a chamber appeared. Inside lay a leather booklet containing a single sheet of folded vellum.

  The binding was stiff and aged, but clean—safe from the grime that had overtaken the rest of the cave. On the outside of the vellum, a single line was written in an ornate and slanting hand. The ink was a deep scarlet that could only be achieved by mixing blood with midnight thistles. Even though the folio had to be centuries old, even now, the handwritten letters burned with magic in my Sight. My throat tightened as I read them.

  The next bloodscribe born will find this before their eighteenth winter.

  “You see?” Leozoar said. “Veric wrote that you would come here. His words shaped your destiny, just as you will shape others’.”

  My hands began to shake. My fate had never been entirely mine. Emotions assaulted me from every side. Anger that my future had been tampered with. Relief, because someone else might be partly responsible for the events that led me here. Guilt, for even momentarily trying to blame someone else for my failings.

  “My time as guardian of this place is over. You’ll send me to meet the shadow god—to be with Veric again.” He grasped my arm so tightly it hurt, and a rapturous expression came over his face.

  “What are you talking about?” I broke free of his grip and shied away.

  “I want you to free me,” he said, gripping my arm again. “This must be why you’ve come down from your mountain. To bring me peace. Do it. Do it now!” His hysteria intensified.

  “How do you know where I’m from?” I accused him, gripping the strap of my satchel until my knuckles went white.

  “I tasted it in your blood,” he said, his voice taking on the hissing tone it’d had upon our first confrontation. “All you have to do is take my power. Make it yours. Do what you want with it—I don’t care. Please.”

  Cold dread coursed through me. “You want me to kill you?”

  He touched my wrist with trembling fingers, and memories broke over me like waves.

  The first time I wrote with my blood.

  The way Ina had looked at me those hot summer nights last year.

  The smell of burning as Amalska was reduced to ash.

  The expression on Hal’s face when he’d woken up this morning and I was still there.

  “Veric promised me you would,” Leozar insisted. “His legacy awaits you. I’m no longer needed. Please have mercy on an old man. I’m ready to see Veric again. You know I’ve killed many—you could stop that right now.” His tone grew wheedling as he tried to take advantage of my guilt.

  I wasn’t that easy.

  “A death for a death does not bring absolution for either one,” I said bitterly. Neither did the death of bandits make up for the loss of a village. Nor would the death of the king.

  “Then help me because I am in pain. Everything hurts. I’ve already lived more than half a dozen mortal lifetimes. The wind is the only strength left in me.”

  I dropped into my Sight and studied the patterns of darkness curling through his aura. He was already a broken thing, slowly fading away. One day he might be little more than wind, slowly returned to the earth like all demigods. But what would it do for the poison in him to pass on that way? He might remain as a killing gust at the top of the cliff forever. He might continue to take lives long after his corporeal form disappeared.

  “If I do this, it will be a true death, and you’ll never hurt anyone again?” I asked.

  “Never,” he said fervently. His icy hands gripped mine.

  I’d only used my power to kill when it was necessary to end the suffering of trees or animals too diseased or broken to survive. I tried to convince myself this would be no different.

  Tentatively, I looked for the place inside me with its own darkness so unlike his. A false sense of peace washed through me when I found that nightlike river of magic. I loosed my hand from his and took his forearm to let the blood on my wrist smear on his skin, giving my magic a connection to grasp his. My heart beat in my ears like a drum.

  An expression of peace and bliss came over Leozoar’s face. My Sight made it easy to see the magic that comprised him, the strengths and the weaknesses, the threads I could pull to unravel it. He was held together so tenuously, and the darkness beckoned to him.

  Carefully, I pulled on his power, drawing into myself the magic that wove together his very being. Absorbing his power felt like submerging myself in an icy lake. Remnants of his anger snatched at my conscience and tried to convince me his feelings were mine. The part of me ruled by him wanted to do terrible things. His magic surged wildly inside me. It took everything I had not to use his power to pull out my knife and make the future into a twisted nightmare as dark as the broken pieces of his soul.

  But I could also feel what he had once been—a demigod with the same whimsical spirit as Hal. A person who had loved someone so completely he’d given centuries of life to protect his legacy. Someone who had loved Veric as I had loved Ina: without reservation or compromise.

  I bent the magic to my will until it coursed through me quick as the wind, vibrant and powerful as the hum of life itself. Instead of holding on to it, I channeled as much as I could directly into the land, into the place that had belonged to him and Veric. The sunlight pouring through the windows intensified, and a final gust of wind swept through the cave, carrying centuries of dust and grime with it. The land itself seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, and the oppressive sadness of the cave relented.

  My hands were empty and Leozoar was gone.

  Without him, the Sanctum took on the peace of any other abandoned space. Channeling his magic left me refreshed and humming with energy, as if some of his power still lingered in me. I unfolded the folio from the dais and read the words within.

  If you retrieved this letter, your blood is my blood. You found this place because fate led you here—fate written in my hand to lead you to the gift that will make it possible for your life to end in a better way than mine. Humans endlessly twisted and shaped my blood and magic to create enchantments for their own ends. They begged me to change their fates until I had nothing left to give, so I used the last of my blood to create the Fatestone.

  Worn by a mortal, the Fatestone would be simply an amulet of eternal life, but it was not created for that purpose. A demigod with my powers is the only one who must use it—the heir whose blood is able to dispel the protections on these pages, the one who will lift the Fatestone from its place of safekeeping in Atheon.

  The Fatestone protects against the cost our gift demands. It gives a bloodscribe the power to make right what has been wrong—to correct the path of darkness, to bring light to the world and life, all without the suffering of aging before one’s time.

  May it serve you well.

  —Veric Pirov

  I nearly dropped the booklet in shock. My throat went dry. I shouldn’t have released Leozoar before I could ask more questions. The enchantments Veric spoke of—those had to be the same ones Miriel had taught me. How to use my blood to augment potions. How to paint a bit of it on her skin to give her some of my passive gifts. But the Fatestone? That I’d never heard of until Hal mentioned it as the am
ulet his sister was looking for. I pawed through the chamber in the dais, but it was empty. I reread Veric’s letter. Where was Atheon? I’d never heard the word before, and although I’d never left home, I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with Zumordan geography. Even with so many questions remaining unanswered, all my paths of thought led to the same conclusion.

  The Fatestone had been made for me. Veric was indeed my half brother, born and dead centuries before me. This letter and the Fatestone were the only true legacy I had.

  But more important than that, if I found Veric’s Fatestone, not only could I shape the future without succumbing to the ravages of age—I would be able to change the past without sacrificing my life.

  I could make it so that bandits had never destroyed Amalska.

  I could return Ina’s innocence.

  I could undo the mistake I’d written in my blood.

  My anger and grief took a more powerful form: determination.

  I had to find the Fatestone and start our story over.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE SUN SAT LOW OVER THE TREES BY THE TIME I exited the Sanctum. Instead of the sweeping gales that had greeted me when I first arrived, only gentle breezes teased at the grass on the escarpment now that Leozoar was gone. I worked my way back down through the cave with Veric’s letter snugly tied in my belt sash. The booklet held my only shard of hope, and the last of the answers lay just beyond my fingertips. I only needed to figure out where Atheon was. And if I could get this far from my hometown and keep myself in one piece, conquer a corrupted demigod, and talk my way out of trouble with the Tamers—I could do it.

  Hal must have heard me coming, for he stood outside the cave as I emerged, just out of reach of the waterfall’s mist. The Tamers were nowhere in sight. The sun slowly impaled itself on the sharp tops of the trees, giving Hal’s dark-brown skin a warm glow. Gratitude swelled in my breast. After what had happened with Ina, I suppose I had half expected him to leave me, too. He owed me nothing.