by Rachel Dunne
But Scal had never seen the future in the flames. It was a thing that was beyond him, and so he said nothing.
She spoke little after that, and after a time she rose and said there was much still that they needed to do. Before he stood, Scal looked to the sword that lay stretched along the grass next to him. He had thought, Fire, and the wood had caught. The power of the Parents, answering his will.
He waited until Vatri’s back was to him, before he held a thought in his mind and reached to hold the sword in his right hand, the hand of fire. When he raised it, the blade remained cold steel, showing only the light of the stars, of a piece of the moon. He returned it to the makeshift sheath at his belt so that Vatri would not see. So that she would not ask why he had looked into the dancing flames and held the thought: Darkness.
Chapter Six
They avoided roads when they could, not that it made all that much difference. Rora’d seen few enough people out, even when she’d circled close to the road. Most folks seemed to’ve locked themselves up inside their houses, and she couldn’t say she blamed ’em for that. Every time they passed by a house, its windows glowing like stars in the darkness, it put an ache into her. She’d only lived in a real house twice in her life, both times when she’d barely been old enough to remember things, but maybe that was why home called to her so strong. Both those times, she’d felt more safe and happy than she’d ever felt since.
And it was a small, stupid hope, but Rora thought maybe she was heading toward home now.
She recognized the land they were walking through, all the fields that were shit for hiding in and the big stretches of nothing but grass with maybe a bush to break up the boring. Even in the dark she recognized the area, because the last time she’d been through it, she’d been holding her head proud as she led her new charges, all the knives and fists that answered to her now. She’d spent so much time scouting, because she’d wanted them to see she’d do her fair share, see that she cared about doing a good job of it all.
Funny—in that really-not-funny way that was right on the edge of tears—how quick things could change. She felt more like a beaten dog now, creeping back with head and tail low, hoping for scraps of food, attention, love, anything. Hoping her stupid little hopes.
Hoping that her family—the family she’d chose, not the family her blood had chose for her—would take her back. Hoping they’d somehow be able to make everything right.
“This feels bad,” Aro muttered. He had his back against a low stone wall that some farmer had put up around his field. Seemed a pretty bad fence—it hadn’t stopped Rora stepping over it and helping herself to the farmer’s tasteless corn. That was the good thing about being back in Fiatera proper—there was a lot more food, and it was a lot easier to steal. “It’s all wrong . . .”
Nothing had been right for a while, but Rora kept that thought to herself, hard as it was to do. She’d spent her whole life listening to her brother, answering his questions even when they were stupid, taking care of him. Even if he was broken, even if he’d broken the trust they had, even if he sometimes wasn’t much like the brother she remembered at all . . . he still was. Taking care of him was a hard habit to break.
But Rora’d made a promise to herself not to let him off easy like she had her whole life. He’d taken away her teeth, taken away all her power when he asked her not to kill Joros and Anddyr for what they’d done to him. He’d asked her to go against everything that made up who she was, and forgiving him for that felt like a long, faraway thing. And all the killing-hot anger she still had inside her had to point somewhere, so Rora felt like she spent most of her days wrestling it away from Joros or Anddyr to point at Aro instead. He’d asked her not to kill the others, and she wouldn’t because he was her brother and he’d asked—but that meant she got to be mad at him for a good long while.
And she’d seen the look in his eyes when he was mostly sane, when he realized how mad she was at him. Aro’d always had more pride than he deserved. He hadn’t said he was sorry, and she knew he wouldn’t. He’d just let her be mad until she forgave him, the same way she always had. Rora ground her teeth. Old habits broke hard, but they could break.
“It’s bad,” he whispered, “it’s bad, it’s bad . . .” He trailed off into mumbles, probably the same words over and over just too quiet and tangled up to hear.
Even if Aro was lost in the mess of his mind, he wasn’t wrong. This place felt bad. There were no people around at all, just dark houses you could barely see and an empty road stretching off to nowhere. Even farther south, farther away from real civilization, there’d been some people; here, closer to the capital, they should’ve run into people or seen ’em locked up in their houses like sensible folk.
But there wasn’t any kind of life around, and the closer they got to the old crumble-down estate where they’d left Whitedog Pack, the more worried Rora got.
Anddyr tugged at one of the cornstalks, his eyes going bigger as it swayed toward him. The witch’d been clear-thinking for a while, which probably meant he was due for a crazy spell anytime now. It was always great, when him and Aro got crazy at the same time. “We’re close,” Anddyr whispered. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what’s waiting . . .”
Joros snorted. “Then we’d best not waste any more time in finding out.” He stood up from the rock he’d been sitting on and gave Rora a half glare, probably waiting to see if she’d argue with him.
She almost wanted to—because even as bad as she wanted to get to her pack, she was more’n a little scared what she’d find. Waiting wouldn’t make the finding out any better, though, so she didn’t argue. “Get up,” she said to Anddyr, and he lurched to his feet like a baby horse who hadn’t quite learned how to stand yet. She went over and nudged her brother—she couldn’t order him around, especially not when he was in one of his bad patches. She had once, back in that heavy forest that’d swallowed them for a few days: she’d got so frustrated with the way he couldn’t take more’n five steps without falling down and crying about giants or birds—he was blubbering so much she never could hear it clear—that she’d shouted at him, “Gods damn it, Aro, stop crying and just walk.” And his face’d gone totally slack, his tears drying up as his eyes changed into a stranger’s eyes. There hadn’t been anything left of her brother in them, not for the handful of heartbeats it’d taken him to stand up and take a few shaky steps. She’d stood there frozen, horrified, but the strangeness had faded from his eyes once he got walking. Still, those few seconds he hadn’t been Aro, those few seconds he hadn’t been anybody . . . that’d stuck with her.
So she shook Aro’s shoulder, grabbed his arm to help him to his feet. He was still her brother. He followed behind her—he was usually pretty good about that—and she led the way through the fields, picking their roundabout way toward the old estate. Mumbling was the only sound, Aro and Anddyr and occasionally Joros—she didn’t hear what he said or who he said it to, and that put a twitch under her eye. The witches kept up their mumbling over the next few hours, even when Rora made everyone stop and hunker down behind some wild shrubs, staring across the empty road.
The estate sat as dark as all the houses they’d passed by lately, dark and dead. The gate hung half off its hinges, just like it’d been the day Joros’d shown ’em the place and said it belonged to Whitedog Pack now. If the pack’d made any changes since, it didn’t show. If there was anyone alive inside the walls, it didn’t show.
“Wrong,” Aro whispered, “wrong, wrong, wrong . . .”
Rora hushed him gently even though he was right. She could taste her heartbeat, sour with nerves and fear.
“They can’t be dead,” Joros said, soft and shocked, but sounding like he was right on the edge of tipping into a good shout.
“We have to go in,” she said. “See . . .” She didn’t know how to finish that, didn’t know if it’d be worse to see them all dead or to see that they’d left, that she’d never know where they went, that she’d never get their
forgiveness or have a family or have a home . . . “We have to go see.”
She stood up, and led the way across the road.
As they passed through the gate, moonlight flickered dull off the spots that weren’t covered in rust. The moon wasn’t more’n halfway up the sky, so it threw long shadows across half the courtyard, the old walls stretching across the ground. Rora searched all the windows of the dark house, looking for any movement, any light, anything . . .
Anddyr screamed.
It made Rora near jump out of her skin, whirling around to face the witch, and he was scrabbling at his chest . . . scrabbling at something in his chest. A plain hilt, the rest of the dagger buried in his flesh. His fingers were already starting to turn black where he pawed at the hilt, darkness taking all the color out of the blood. Rora spun back around in just enough time to duck under the arm that would’ve slammed into her throat, but she didn’t avoid the jab to her kidney that sent her down to her knees. Fingers grabbed enough of her hair to hold on to—she had the crazy, stupid thought that she should’ve taken the time to cut it back to short enough it couldn’t be grabbed—and yanked her head back. She wasn’t even surprised when she felt the dagger against her throat.
Anddyr was still screaming, but it was more muffled; Rora could move her eyes enough to see he was facedown on the ground with a whole pile of people on top of him, grabbing at his arms. They were smart enough to know he couldn’t cast any spells without his hands.
She couldn’t find Aro with her eyes, couldn’t turn her head enough to see him, and she couldn’t hear his voice at all. What in all the hells was he waiting for? Anddyr’d trained him enough he could save them, stop this, at the very least put a shield up around her and the others.
She felt the crackle in the air, and if Anddyr was too tied up to do anything, it meant her brother’d finally shaken the cotton out of his head enough to do something useful. The world got sharp and heavy and full of iron, something big building, something horrible, but at least it had to be better’n dying at the hands of whoever’d killed her pack or driven them out. She couldn’t avenge them if she was dead, so whatever awful thing Aro was building, she knew it’d keep them alive, him and her at the very least, and—
Two people stepped out the front door of the old house, and the sour fear in Rora’s mouth turned to full panic.
“Aro!” she screamed, ignoring the pain as the dagger scraped against her throat. Bloody gods, would he be able to hear her over Anddyr’s screaming? “Aro, don’t do anything.”
Somehow, she heard the little whimper. She’d know her brother’s voice from anything, and all the sharpness fell out of the air, sudden as letting out a held breath. Rora sagged a little, even though it tugged at her hair, even though it pressed the dagger harder against her throat.
Of the two people that’d walked out of the house, the slower one stopped, looking around the half-dark courtyard. The other one kept going, heading straight for Rora, hands curled into fists. “Listen,” Rora said quickly, the knife scraping on her throat, “it’s not how it—”
It was a good punch, Rora’d give her that. Tore out some of her hair as the person holding on to her kept holding on. There was the taste of blood, the burn of split skin across her cheek, but she’d been half expecting the punch. She’d earned it, kind of. Maybe she’d even earned the second punch, the one that slammed right into the same spot on her cheek, and this time the hand let go of her hair. She fell hard against the ground.
Rora’s head was spinning, but she could’ve got up. She had daggers all over the place, and she could’ve pulled out any of them, used her knives and her own fists to fight back. That wouldn’t’ve done her any good, though, and maybe it’d even make things worse. So she just lay there, letting her head spin, blinking away the red fog. She got a good look at Tare, the older woman’s face written clear with pure murder, and then she got a much closer look at Tare as she landed on top of Rora. Fingers wrapped around Rora’s throat, digging in where the dagger had nicked her, and Tare’s other hand went back to slamming into Rora’s face.
Far away, Rora could hear shouting, but it was just like Aro and Anddyr’s mumbling, soft and unclear. All she could really hear was Tare, snarling in time with her punches: “I knew. I couldn’t. Trust. You. Traitor. I’ll. Kill you.”
The punches stopped, and Rora blinked back blood, saw others had finally managed to grab Tare’s punching arm and were yanking it back. That only slowed her down for a second, though—she unwrapped her fingers from around Rora’s neck and curled them into a fist instead, worked on pulping the other side of Rora’s face. She’d been the one to train Rora to use her off hand just as good as the other one, so the punches didn’t feel too much different. The others eventually got control of that arm, too, hauling Tare up, but she got in a few good kicks to Rora’s middle before they lifted her up completely.
And then it was just Rora staring up at the stars, wheezing and gurgling and trying to figure out if she really was still alive. Even lying still hurt, and she knew how priests always said all your hurts went away when you died, so that meant Tare hadn’t killed her. Yet.
After a while, before the buzzing cleared out of her ears, it felt like something was crawling along her skin. No, more like there were a hundred hands, all pressing down on her, like they wanted to push her through the spaces between the cobblestones, but they were light as butterflies. She didn’t even know what it was until her ears opened up and she heard someone screaming her name, over and over and over. She’d know her brother’s voice from anything.
“I’m okay,” she tried to say, but she could hear how her own voice was just bubbles of blood. But he had to know she was fine, or he’d do the bad thing, she could feel it in the air again. “Aro, I’m okay.” How could they not feel it? If she could, Rora would’ve curled into a ball and cried—but if she could move that much, then she would’ve raced across the courtyard, tackled Aro to make him stop, stop, stop . . .
The screaming rose up louder, and the stones shook under Rora, and then Tare’s weight hit her chest again, hands pounding her face, Tare holding nothing back—
The air snapped. The pressure against Rora’s skin burst like a hundred fires, and Tare’s weight that’d landed on top of her was suddenly gone. The screaming died for three heartbeats, long enough for Rora to painfully twist her head to the side. Tare was sprawled next to her, mouth gaping open, eyes staring. Rora couldn’t tell if she was moving, couldn’t see clear enough if there was any life left in her eyes, oh gods, Aro, Aro, what’d you do?
Bodies blocked her sight of Tare, others crowding around, shouting. “Is she alive?” they kept asking, but no one ever answered the question, just kept asking it, and over their gabble she could hear her brother’s high wordless wail. She knew the meaning behind it anyway, he’d said the words so many times he didn’t need to anymore, I’m sorry. I had to. I’m sorry.
Rora squeezed her eyes shut, closing out the hovering bodies, closing out the winking stars. She shouldn’t’ve come here, she’d just been selfish, selfish and stupid to think she could ever have a home here, to think she could ever belong with her pack again. She only ever made their lives worse. She only ever got them killed.
The shouting changed—but it was still shouting, so she almost didn’t hear the difference. When she peeled open her eyes, sticky with tears and blood, all the hovering bodies were standing now, starting to move. Through a split between the press of bodies, she saw a body hanging from two shoulders. Tare, her head lolling, but her eyes blinked dizzily, and her feet stumbled against the cobbles as they pulled her along. Not dead.
Not dead.
A gurgling sound of relief was the best Rora could manage, but even that took a lot out of her.
Sharra Dogshead, leader of Whitedog Pack, she had a trick of making her voice heard no matter what. Even though her people were still shouting, even though Aro’s wailing still carried over everything, even though Rora was right on the edge of l
eaving consciousness behind, still Sharra’s voice cut through: “It seems we have a lot to talk about, doesn’t it?”
Rora closed her eyes, and fell away.
Chapter Seven
Joros had no fond memories of the cellar; one of his sisters had locked him inside it once, and her laughter on the other side of the door had been louder than his pounding fists or his screams. When he’d grown older, he’d spent a night alone in the cellar, just to prove to himself he could. The cellar didn’t scare him anymore, but that didn’t mean he liked it.
Still, he couldn’t deny that it was probably the most secure place in the estate, large enough to hold Sharra and her second, Tare, and the dozen fists and knives they brought for protection—large enough to hold all of them, but not large enough to make Joros, dropped against the far wall with his hands tied, feel small and powerless. He wasn’t quite charitable enough to think that was intentional, but even a blind pig would find a mushroom now and again.
Anddyr and Aro had both been pushed into one of the nearby corners, their fingers elaborately tied—that, at least, Joros was impressed with. For people who still called them “witches,” the pack at least knew how to efficiently disable a mage. Rora was sprawled near them, unmoving, the only sign of continuing life the loud wheeze of her breath through a nose that was likely broken. At least they’d laid her on her side so he didn’t have to worry about her choking on her own blood.
They’d tried talking to Aro—after they’d made sure his fingers were securely tied, because they weren’t about to take their chances with even a suspected witch. Sharra Dogshead in particular had tried coaxing and cajoling the boy, grabbing his arms and shaking him and demanding to know what had happened even as tears stood in her eyes. Aro had just blinked at her owlishly and stayed silent. The traces of skura still running through his veins compelled it—earlier, Joros had gripped the boy’s shoulder and murmured, “Don’t talk about what happened. If they ask, tell them it’s too painful.” Aro wouldn’t tell them anything.
