Riss had no sensation of having slept, so it would have been difficult to say she woke. She transitioned, somehow, from the rain and the thunder and the swift dance of battle to a dark and prolonged agony. Disoriented, weakened, and above all freezing, she curled in against herself on the cavern floor, rolling onto her side.

Adal spoke from above her, told her to be careful, not to move too much. When she didn’t reply, he asked her if she was all right.

Something had happened. She had no idea what. The pain had been blinding. There was a gap in her memory. She snarled in frustration, wordless, and shoved herself up with an elbow. Her teeth clacked in uncontrollable chatters, deep cold gripped her bones like the floor of a tomb. Each breath was a mission.

Adal swept a blanket around her shoulders, and on any other day she might have objected to being so babied. This time, however, she wound it around herself and burrowed in. When and how had it grown so cold? The swamp had been many horrible things, but its atmosphere had remained steadily warm and humid. There had been no surprises there.

“May I?”

Adal, with an arm out. Riss appreciated his asking permission. She nodded stiffly, and then he bundled her up and pulled her to his shoulder. He held her tighter than she expected.

It was then that she got an inkling of what might have happened.

“I am very glad to see you up.” His voice was a subdued whisper, the tone of it implying that her waking was an uncertain prospect.

Beneath the blanket, Riss patted herself down. She felt no obvious wounds, but every part of her ached with a general malaise. A sense of being beaten all to shit. The full-body pains that preceded a flu.

What was the last thing she remembered? Rain. Thunder. Hauling Adal from the pool. All of them rounding on the rock creature as a unit, struggling to haul it down. Frustration that she couldn’t see shit. Worry that she’d have to put trust in Calay and Vosk to tackle it. And then…

“It got me, didn’t it.”

Adal, who was yet to let her go, nodded against her hair.

It was an odd prospect to face. Did she even want to know more? Given the lack of damage to her person, she then had to face another odd and discomfiting truth: Calay must have patched her up using whatever dark methods he’d used upon himself. Stiffening, she ran her hands down her front and along her arms. The realization sent a whole new cold coursing through her. The growth that now jutted from Calay’s arm, would that start growing inside her?

Hands spasming in alarm, she threw the blanket off and shoved away from Adal, falling back on her rear and looking herself over. Her armor was spattered with blood, though her skin appeared clean and undamaged. She felt at her ribs, her throat, her face. She paused and considered the beat of her heart, skittish with fear but feeling roughly the same as ever.

“Riss…” Adal started to say something, but she interrupted him, eyes blazing.

“What did he do to me?”

Adal hesitated. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “He saved you. We had no choice.”

Visions of bone-spurred horrors and twisted, grey-barked abominations raced through her mind at runaway speed. She held a hand to her chest. Did everything feel normal? And what of the parts of herself that she couldn’t touch to be sure? She imagined spikes of bone erupting from her back, scythelike shards of it exploding out of her like shrapnel, shredding her from the inside out until her flesh dripped away and she resembled one of the horrors that called this place home.

“Riss, you’re fine.”

But who was he to say that? Who was he to judge? How could Adal know that for sure? Calay hadn’t even been able to properly fix himself.

When she breathed in, was anything gurgling unusually?

“What have you done,” she whispered through her teeth, as much to herself as to him.

“We didn’t have a choice,” Adal repeated. “It was… bad. You had minutes left. It was either let Calay work on you or lose you entirely.”

She gulped in air in an attempt to calm herself, but calm was a faraway place. Calay had touched her with his sorcery now. Even if it didn’t disfigure her for life, what of the consequences? Did he have power over her now? Could he magick her at will? Were there unseen side effects? Had Adal considered any of that?

“I can’t believe you.” She palmed at her face, rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands in the vain hope that she might wake up again, that this was a nightmare interlude that would soon pass. “Didn’t you consider that—”

Adal cut her off, his voice low.

“I considered the only options we had. Hate me if you want. I made the call. I had to.”

“I don’t hate you. I just—”

“You were meat, Riss.”

She closed her eyes again. To steady her clenching fingertips, she threaded them through her hair. Then she combed them over her scalp, driven by terrified compulsion to palpate the contours of her skull. The smooth curvature of the bone did nothing to reassure her. What could be growing inside it? Just below the surface, where she couldn’t see or feel?

You were meat.

But was she still the same meat she used to be?

She heard voices further down the cavern, Calay and Gaz engaged in quiet conversation. But she didn’t hear Torcha. Or Vosk. Smoothing her fingers through her hair, she swallowed. Her mouth felt terribly dry. She didn’t want to ask Adal for water. She didn’t want to ask him for a damn thing. Selfish as it might have been to grind him down in her anger, she needed that anger to spark herself forward. As long as she was pissed off at something, she wouldn’t sink into despair.

“We need to get moving.” Adal rose up from where he’d been sitting, a stiff shove to his feet. “Torcha led the thing off, but there’s no telling whether it will be back.”

The air in Riss’ lungs felt heavy, thick as sludge. “Led it off? Alone?”

“Yes. Alone.”

Hot, aimless fury ricocheted around her insides with nowhere to go. Riss levered herself up, smacked away the hand Adal offered. He stood there in the face of her anger, ready to absorb more if need be. But she found she couldn’t inflict it on him. As much as she wanted to scream in his face. Gods, her legs hurt. She felt sick with frustration. Was she shaking with exhaustion or rage?

“We’ll get her back,” said Adal, and it just wasn’t enough. No words were enough.

Nauseated and dazed, moving through the world like it was all some terrible dream, Riss packed up camp. She directed Gaz to pack what he could, ditching all but the largest tent. She sent Adal to gather Torcha’s things, because she knew he’d treat them with the care and respect they deserved. Hitches of panic squeezed at her insides when she surveyed the camp and found Torcha absent. And when her eyes fell on Calay, she looked away immediately. If he so much as stared her in the eye, she wouldn’t be able to hold it in anymore.

The hostility she felt for Adal, it was really meant for Calay. He was the one who’d befouled her. Whatever he’d done. Adal had thought he was helping. He’d panicked in the heat of the moment. As the tide of her anger ebbed, she was able to acknowledge that. At least internally. It might be some time yet before she could swallow her bile and say it to his face.

And then she found the source of the blood they’d used to fix her: Vosk, still pallid and quivering on the cavern floor. They coaxed him from his fetal position and, after a moment’s deliberation, slung him over the back of the moa. Riss considered leaving him, but the promise she’d made to Tarn wouldn’t let her do that. The man needed to face his punishment. Tarn deserved to hear the truth. So much of this job had spiraled completely beyond her control that she seized on justice with a fanatic’s grip. She’d sooner march herself to death than let Vosk escape.

The rain, at some point, had abated. The dog, at some point, had disappeared again. Riss felt the threads of control slipping through her fingers. She wondered what Gaspard would have done.

Numb with fatigue, they abandoned camp and returned to the trail, cut from seven to five. Riss stared off into the murk of the forest, the trunks of trees wreathed in low fog, and looked for any sign of Torcha. But it was like she’d never passed through at all.

The rain had washed away even her footprints.

How many times had Torcha saved them, Riss wondered. The Fourth had owed their lives to her from the moment they’d crossed paths.

###

The siege at Semmer’s Mill was a memorably shit five days in the midst of several shit months in the middle of a big shit war. Unlike many of the smaller settlements scattered around the textile district, the northlanders had taken Semmer’s Mill early and driven most of the locals out. Riss would have done the same thing, were she in charge of the campaign. Locals couldn’t be trusted to be friendly, unless you had the manpower to ensure their compliance.

She could still feel the warm, dry heat of the high-summer sun, scorching both her skin and the thatch of the roof she lurked upon. Everything was so dry it crackled. Growing up on the steppes as she had, where the winds were cold and vicious, she’d learned to relish sunlight in whatever form she could take it.

Atop the low roof of a stable, though, that was pushing it. There was some definite waft drifting up in the heat. Gaspard, who lay on his belly beside her, the both of them as low to the thatch as possible, seemed unbothered.

How is he so relaxed? Riss felt a stab of envy for her commander. They could find us at any moment.

The Fourth was currently holed up in a farmstead outside of town. Gaspard and Riss had patrolled toward town, then been forced to duck down the streets when they were surprised by a unit of northerners patrolling the other way. As best she could tell, they hadn’t been spotted. Gaspard was as quick on the streets as he was in the bush, and he’d led her to the rooftops in a heartbeat.

“The stables?” She’d been skeptical. “Every single one of their riders will stop here. Every last one.”

Gaspard had merely hefted his shoulders, scratched through his beard, and laid down, like that hadn’t been a consideration in the beginning and it wasn’t about to become one.

The better part of a day had come and gone. Below them, exhausted soldiers wearing the brown and gold of Zeyinade’s army milled around. They pissed in alleyways, ate hardtack, tended to their horses. Riss was never an ideologue of any sort, let alone a nationalist so rabid that she thought her enemies inhuman. Still, it was odd to watch them go through the motions of everyday life. It produced in her a strange tension. She’d have felt more at ease if they were tearing the town apart hunting for her.

Gaspard, by comparison, didn’t give a dry fart. He popped one of those vile salted liquorice candies into his mouth and sucked on it boredly, baking in the sun.

Twilight fell. Riss’ stomach grumbled. Gaspard silently offered her a candy. She refused.

Within the hour, she relented and ate one. Clacking the hardened liquorice against her molars, she noticed that the intense salty flavor did have a stimulating effect. It was so unpalatable that it woke her up. Was that the secret of his attachment to the damn things?

A shot rang out somewhere in the long shadows of the millyard. Riss stilled. Beside her, Gaspard lifted his head, single eye asquint, as if he’d been waiting for such a disturbance all along.

After the shot came a man, wailing piteously as he staggered down the road. He hurried toward the welcoming light of a house where his fellows were bivvied, steps arrhythmic and stumbling. The light was fading, but Riss could see the dark trail he left behind him.

He reached the doorway, and just as he threw the door open, his temple blew open and he sagged to the ground. A hair later, Riss heard the shot.

Gaspard put a palm between her shoulder blades, shoving her down into the thatch. They hunkered there in silence, barely breathing, as more distant shots rang out. The stables and house below exploded into noise. Riss strained to pick apart details in the commotion but found it difficult.

A woman shouted, her voice an authoritative bark that was cut off mid-syllable.

The retorts were deep, heavy. Some sort of large-caliber rifle. Riss was far from an expert on firearms, reliant on the silence of a bow in her line of work. As far as she knew, there were no other Inland remotely nearby. Was this some sort of internal scuffle? Unruly townsfolk? Firearms were unusual in these parts, far too expensive, but not unheard of.

Her curiosity got the best of her. She had to know. Rolling sideways, she attempted to peek over the crest of the roof, but a hard arm rolled her backward. Gaspard pinned her down with a forearm to the shoulder, shaking his head. He signaled with his palm, tipped two fingers downward. Wait.

Soft, agonized wailing rose up from the road. It didn’t sound like anyone was still moving around down there. Until the sound of heavy, booted footsteps reached Riss’ ears. A lone individual on foot, approaching from the right, from whence the shots had come. Gaspard’s brows drew low. He waited. Riss waited. Interminable waiting. She hated it.

A sudden voice from below.

“I saw you up there! You can come on out!” A young woman’s voice, her accent a relaxed twang. Someone was calling them out, like a parent beckoning her kids back from playing too close to the creek.

“Come on! I even left one alive for you!”

Riss looked to Gaspard for orders. He seemed as baffled as she was. Finally, with a lift of his shoulders, he peeked up over the rooftop. Riss stayed low until he signaled. They both rose to their feet, startled by the sheer scope of the violence that greeted them.

Six men and women lay dead, blown apart to various degrees. One woman in gilt-edged officers’ clothes remained living, buckled on her knees, her hands folded behind her head. She was bleeding, or splashed with blood. It was tough to tell from so high up.

She knelt at the feet of a short, skinny figure in a dingy grey coat. The woman—and it was a woman, Riss was pretty sure from the voice—carried an enormous rifle over her shoulder, and presently she held a smaller pistol to the officer’s eye socket. Lit only by the faint glow of candles and lanterns through windows as she was, Riss couldn’t make out any details.

“You wanna interrogate this gal or should I just crack one through her skull?” the hooded woman asked. “I’m not bothered one way or the other, but her crying is real tiresome.”

Gaspard was never one to turn away a gift. When they clambered down, his first order of business was securing the hostage and ensuring she couldn’t call for help. Which left Riss alone to survey the damage, to stare in stunned bewilderment at the puddles of blood congealing in the pitted cobbles.

She wasn’t new to violence. War was messy. Life was cheap. Every cliché in the books rang true now that she’d lived it. But this had not been a battlefield engagement. This was wholesale slaughter of people—regular people—who’d been grasping at the chance to take a breather.

Which is why, when the perpetrator finally revealed her face, Riss was startled speechless.

Holstering her pistol, the mystery woman flipped her hood back, revealing that she was not a mystery woman at all, but a mystery girl. It wasn’t just her height. Her cheeks were baby-chubby, dotted with freckles. What Riss had mistaken for malnourishment was just the knock-kneed skinniness of a body that hadn’t yet filled out.

She picked a fleck of brain matter out of her brassy red-orange hair, patted herself down, then asked Gaspard to check their prisoner’s pockets for a handkerchief.

###

Torcha had been unpredictable since the beginning. Wild, itinerant, angry. Prone to acting out.

Riss should have seen this coming.

<< Chapter 44 | Chapter 46 >>

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Once Calay had his insurance, he left Adalgis sitting vigil over his fallen friend. A sepulchral atmosphere had settled over the cavern; he felt like he was intruding on something very private. He felt like a man who’d coughed during the moment of silence in a funeral, despite the fact that nobody had died.

His stump itched. He resisted the urge to scratch at the bark, though he did spare a glance down at what was growing from his arm. Sharp-knuckled metacarpals sheathed in bark rather than flesh had begun to take shape roughly where a hand should have been. He preferred not to ponder what eventual shape it might take.

Silent, drained from his exertions patching Riss back together, Calay stalked to his abandoned satchel and dug inside. He’d avoided his cigarettes for the entirety of the trip, cognisant of the risk of smoking in the field. When they were trying to move unseen, it could give away their position to things and people unsavory. He’d assumed Riss would tell him to snuff it, so he hadn’t bothered lighting up. Now, well… Riss wasn’t in the picture at the moment, and also there was no doubt in his mind that every single evil thing in this entire cursed swamp knew just where to find them. They may as well have been straw-stuffed archery targets.

He unfurled his pouch of tobacco, sliproot, papers, and other sundries. The speed with which he moved one-handed annoyed him; he grit his teeth as he worked. He didn’t bother with any clever blends. He’d had that nice high going back in Adelheim, but dulling his senses at the moment seemed like a poor idea. He went for straight tobacco, laying the desiccated leaves out along the parchment. Then he braced the edge of his bone-shard limb against the paper and attempted to crimp and roll it with his remaining fingers.

Gaz found him that way minutes later, staring down at a crinkled mess of paper and tobacco, his shoulders held so stiff they trembled.

Letting a few sacks of silks and pearls hit the cavern floor, Gaz made an inquiring sound, peering down at where Calay sat.

Calay was, for once in his life, caught speechless. The frustration that welled up in him was unlike anything he ever felt. It wasn’t that insane, white-hot anger that had moved him to cut a bloody trail through the Vasa Nobles’ Quarter. It was more like the bitter anger-sorrow cocktail that came from losing a childhood pet to old age or disease.

Everything felt unjust. Every gods-damned thing in the entire world.

But what came out instead, the words twangy and unsteady with emotion, was: “My hands. They always go after my fucking hands.”

Gaz sank down beside him in a heartbeat, reaching for all the paraphernalia.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I got it.”

I know, Calay wanted to say. You’ve always got it. If there is anything I for some reason do not have, you always have it. But a man should be able to roll his own fucking smokes, and instead of rolling a smoke to get through this, I’ve got a thing growing out of my arm and I have to deal with that instead.

Instead, he shut his trap and rubbed at his face. When his thumb skimmed close to an eye, he found the corner of it wet. Curse the swamp and everything in it.

He watched as Gaz folded the paper anew, then tapped in the ground tobacco and smoothed it with his finger. His hands–massive, scarred, thickly callused–had a gentler touch than their appearance suggested, and he pinched and rolled the small joint with dexterous ease. Then he licked the gum, sealed it shut, and presented it to Calay, although only for a moment. He seemed to think better of something, seeking out Calay’s matchbook and lighting the cigarette first. He gave it a single puff, enough to get it really burning, and then passed it over.

Calay took the smoke in his fingers, tucked it into his mouth, and mumbled a thank-you.

“I was gonna roll one for you and Adal, too,” he said, and Gaz made a thoughtful noise. His hands kept working. Paper, herb, crease, tap, roll, pinch, twist. It was strangely calming, the everyday mundaneness of such a process. The smell of the tobacco as much as the experience of smoking it sharpened his brain, that fake-but-workable faux alertness he’d leaned on during many a dreary morning preceded by a sleepless night. Thoughts occurred to him all at once in a great flood, as if they’d been held back until chemically permitted.

He thought of Adal and his silent vigil over Riss.

He thought of Sylvene back home in Blackbricks, how deep his old betrayal must have cut her.

And, perhaps most surprisingly, he even briefly thought of Kella. He hoped she’d found success. He imagined she never thought of him at all.

He spared a moment for Torcha, who seemed to hate him now about as much as Syl. Torcha off in the rain. Perhaps dead, perhaps alive.

He watched Gaz’s hands again, noted the flecks of blood that darkened the undersides of his fingernails. Whose blood even was it at this point? This misguided endeavor had bled them all dry.

“Gaz,” he said, abrupt. “Have I taken you for granted?”

Gaz’s fingers didn’t even slow on the smoke he rolled. “Weird question.”

Calay was articulating himself poorly. The tobacco helped, but he still felt unsteady, head crowded with too much emotion: pain, frustration, the loss of his arm, a dread for the future that he rarely ever felt. The future had always been his for the taking. When things were good, he shot for the stars. When he was down in the shit, the future meant redemption and new opportunities. Now, though, this thing growing out of him… he feared it. He wasn’t ashamed to admit he feared it, the concept was just so foreign to him that he had no idea what to say.

“Let me start over.” He stole a look out the cavern’s mouth, where the rain was tapering off into grey daylight. “We haven’t really had a moment since all… that shit… happened. I wanted to thank you. For that and… all the other times.”

Gaz had a hard face, but it had never hidden a hard heart. He smiled immediately, a crookedly amused lift of his mouth.

“I get it,” he said. “But no, I don’t feel like you take me for granted.” His lips pursed to one side in hesitation, but no further words came.

“Sounds like there was going to be more.” Calay prompted him. “Don’t get cold feet on me now.”

Gaz gathered up the finished smokes and tucked them with care into the pouch. He kept one for himself, sliding it behind an ear.

“It was a little unkind,” he said.

Calay glowered at him. “I can handle unkind. I’m a grown man.”

Gaz spread his fingers, a shrug with only his hand. “Fine. I don’t feel like you take me for granted, or anyone anymore, because you learned a lot since Syl.”

Calay grimaced like he tasted something foul. He puffed smoke and inhaled again, hard.

“Hmph.” He said. “Well.”

Damn, that was a little more honest than Gaz had strictly needed to be there. And yet… Calay supposed he wasn’t wrong.

He spared a moment’s mourning for the trio that once was. Now a partnership. And that was nobody’s fault but his.

Casting a look over his shoulder, he watched Adalgis sit there, hand on the forearm of his sleeping friend. He was far enough away that Calay couldn’t make out the words of his indistinct murmured comfort, but he heard the tone of it: warm, encouraging, a little scared.

An odd, bitter envy bit into him then. He wished he had that empathy and ease of expression that Adalgis possessed. He supposed it was easier to grow up learning those traits and valuing them when you weren’t hurting for basic necessities. Shoulder to shoulder with sixty other brats just as shitty as him in the same crowded orphanage, Calay hadn’t had the time or inclination to practice warmth and appreciation for his fellows. He’d focused on survival. He’d had to.

Gaz had done for him what Adal had done for Riss. At tremendous risk to his own person. The mercenaries would have been well within their right to execute the both of them. To never let him practice magick again.

He finished his cigarette and ashed it on the ground.

“I’d be completely fucked without you, you know.” He said the words to Gaz as he rose, an abrupt cough of speech. He dusted off his trousers, like such an admission was just another aspect of his dawn routine.

Gaz tilted his head. Calay caught a glimpse of his look of surprise, but he didn’t hang around to hear any reply. He couldn’t sit still after all that. All those phantoms crowding in his head, they were getting him twitchy. He had to keep moving.

Pacing out into the humid grey morning, he surveyed the perimeter of their camp. It looked like a small-scale military skirmish had taken place, there were so many crazy tracks through the mud. He found Adal’s rifle caked in the muck and dug it free with his fingers for lack of anything else productive to do. He propped it where Adal would see it, near the mouth of the cavern, then decided to test his luck with a little climb.

The missing hand made it tougher than he anticipated, but he levered himself up atop one of the larger boulders, then leapt up onto the outcrop, where the stone was still slick with leftover rain. Sat on a rocky precipice hemmed in by tufts of yellow, fluffy-topped grass, he stared down into the pool. Its surface reflected the grey clouds above, rendering it silvery and molten.

That itch came over his palms again. It occurred to him consciously for the very first time: I used to scratch at my scars when I was thinking. And now I can’t. No wonder it’s bugging the shit out of me.  

Faded with both time and care, the faint silvery lines upon his palm looked older than they were. Alfend Linten had showed him a recipe once, when he was a child. A cream made from beeswax and fruit pits that lessened the appearance of scars if applied while things were healing. Just gift that Mr. Linten had given him before he’d abruptly vanished, leaving the clinic in Calay’s care.

Very few people had ever been dear to him. And for such a small number, they all had one trait in common: they seemed to vanish from his life at an alarming, unstoppable rate.

Gaz found him that way: sitting atop the camp, tapping the bladed edge of his mangled hand against his remaining palm, tangled up in the past.

“Heck of a thing to say to someone and just stalk off,” he said. He had a canteen in hand, and when he twisted the stopper free, steam coiled from its spout. He offered it down to Calay, who took it without even asking what was inside. When he stuck it under his nose, it smelled of grassy, minty tea.

“Well.” Calay’s shoulders stiffened again. He felt tense and defensive for reasons he couldn’t pinpoint. He pissily sipped his tea.

“Nah. I get it.” Gaz kicked a pebble over the precipice and watched it tumble down, into the mud. A chorus of frogs had started up in the distance, all croaking at a slightly different pitch.

“You do?” It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Gaz. More like he wanted to hear it articulated. Maybe hearing someone else talk through their thoughts would settle his own.

“Sure.” Gaz grabbed the canteen off him and took a sip of his own. “It’s just… grief, isn’t it?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Seeing him with her, it dredged up a lot of stuff from back home.” Gaz cleared his throat. “What you said, about how we never got a minute to talk about what happened. I know you meant when you got shot, but it goes back further than that. We haven’t had a minute for a long time.”

Calay ran his tongue over his teeth, tasting the cool mint of the tea. Gaz was, as usual, correct. They’d fled the city immediately after the pandemonium of his would-be hanging. They hadn’t stopped running since. He got shot. He lost his arm. Gaz sacrificed his own blood and safety to ensure he lived. Still they hadn’t stopped.

“It catches up to a person,” Gaz said, like he was speaking from experience.

Calay had lost a lot more than a hand, hadn’t he. And apart from one glorious, sun-soaked swim along the Janel coast after they’d escaped to freedom, he’d scarcely had a moment to breathe since seeing his whole empire torn down. He couldn’t escape the sensation, the cold pit-in-your-stomach truth that the law was yapping at their heels. Or maybe Syl. Or any number of the Landed Families.

“Not us.” He clenched his remaining hand into a tight fist. “They won’t catch up to us.”

Gaz rolled his jaw for a moment, regarding Calay in lengthy silence.

“Not a them, boss. An it. The grief.” He settled a big, heavy hand on Calay’s shoulder and squeezed.

“Well what do you do about it?” Calay rankled at the thought that there was some great, unwieldy gunk of emotion clogging up the filters in his brain, making him stupid.

“Beats me. Try to live a better life. Do stuff that makes you happy. That sort of shit.”

Who had time for that? For what had to be the thousandth time since they had met, Calay wondered how he and Gaz could suffer through such similar upbringings and emerge such completely different people. The same forge that had hardened all his edges had softened all his friend’s in a way that somehow made him no less effective, no less keen.

It wasn’t just Adalgis he envied.

“C’mon.” Gaz pressed the canteen back into his hand. “Tea’s getting cold.”

Maybe this was their moment. Maybe it was the only moment they were going to get. They traded sips until they’d finished it, keeping watch over the camp, listening to the frogs.

<< Chapter 43 | Chapter 45 >>

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Rain pelted Adal’s face, sharp stinging needles of it. He wasn’t aware Calay and Gaz were trying to get his attention until someone grabbed him. He spun reflexively, machete up, but it was only Gaz, who withdrew his glove as soon as he made eye contact.

“Get over here,” he said. “She’s still breathing.” Then he hollered at Vosk to get the moa settled down. Necessity bred strange bedfellows, didn’t it.

They hurried under the overhang, where Calay had dragged Riss out of the mud.

It was just as bad as Adal feared, save for the fact that she still clung to life. Calay crawled to Riss’ side, holding a lantern aloft to survey the damage. In the moment, he seemed to have cast aside any questions of loyalty or intent, tending to her with the same care and alacrity that Adal had seen from any medic worth his salt. He withdrew a sweater from his own pack, rolling it and shifting it gently beneath Riss’ neck, trying to ease her breathing.

But how long could she keep breathing? Her ribcage was splintered. From the neck down, she was a crushed mess of bone and blood. The sight of it sent cold dread flooding through him, as dark and mortal a fear as he’d felt when he’d sustained such injuries himself.

He forced himself to put up that wall again, to focus on the immediate.

“So what can you do for her?” he asked, watching Calay work.

Riss sputtered, forcefully expelling blood. Calay held her by the cheek, turned her head.

“I can make her comfortable,” he said.

Adal listened to the rain, tried to focus on that instead of the hideous, sucking gurgle that rose each time Riss attempted to breathe.

“No.” He snapped his eyes to Calay’s. “I mean what can you do.”

Calay’s hands stilled. He regarded Adal with newfound wariness, then looked immediately to Gaz.

Gaz, similarly wary, looked Adal up and down. He rolled the knuckles of one hand, the way a man does in a bar the instant before a fight breaks out.

For all Calay liked to talk like he was the one in charge, it was clear that he was asking permission. And with a nod, Gaz granted it.

“This is going to take a lot of blood, you realize.” Calay shrugged his coat off, rolling up his sleeves. It was laborious work with his sole remaining hand, and it revealed the gnarled, bark-and-bone deformity that now grew from his elbow. “And I can’t make any promises. This is… it’s beyond medicine. And some things are beyond magick, too.”

“Do your best,” Adal said. “I’ll get you blood.”

“And as much as it pains me to be so mercenary about this…” Calay trailed off. Adal instantly caught the meaning behind that statement. “This goes a bit beyond the scope of my initial contract.”

Adal grit his teeth so hard he thought his molars might snap.

“Name your price,” he said, and he meant it.

Calay merely nodded, his gaze dropping back to his patient. He flexed the fingers of his remaining hand, looming over Riss like a gargoyle.

“The blood, then,” he said, intoning it like an order.

Adal shoved up to his feet, scouring the campsite. Just beyond the cavern, Vosk had done as told and gotten the moa under control. He flinched when Adal caught his eyes.

That’s right, Adal thought. You’d better. But he disciplined himself into calm. He disengaged.

“Vosk. You’ve got a chance to bargain yourself off the gallows. Know that if you don’t come willingly, I’ll blow out your knees and leave you here in the mud.”

###

Vosk was not the only man who had to make a bargain.

Calay waited like a statue until they had their blood donor all trussed up, his shoulders held by Gaz and a tourniquet binding his arm. He regarded Vosk with clinical dispassion, then set his eyes on Adal.

“We should talk terms before I start this,” he said. Adal could have slapped him. There wasn’t time to barter. Each time Riss inhaled, each time he heard that thick, wet gurgle from her throat, he wondered if she had it in her to draw another.

“I don’t care about terms,” he said. “I meant it when I said name your price.” He doubted the sorcerer would demand money. If riches mattered to him, it seemed well within his power to acquire them. Adal didn’t give a damn about hammering out the details until Riss was stable. Despite the small, quiet fear lodged in him like an old splinter, he knew there was no price Calay could command that would deter him.

He’d never noticed it until now, but in the ember-glow, Calay’s eyes shone like a beast’s.

“Insurance,” he said, those strange shining eyes fixed on Adal’s with all the sympathy of a reptile. “Vosk’s blood to fix her, your blood to secure our passage out of here.”

The small, quiet fear bloomed into something chilling and terrible. Had he felt this cold a moment ago? His clothes were still sodden. That had to be it.

Adal worked his jaw in silence. Riss gurgled and choked. He forced himself to look at the mangled wreckage of her ribs to hasten his courage.

“Fine,” he spat. “So be it. Now or after?” He unbuttoned his cuff, then rolled his sleeve to show he meant business.

“Oh, later is fine.” Calay ticked a little nod aside to his partner. “There are more pressing matters.”

How had they ever mistaken him for a man like them?

At that gesture, Gaz grabbed Vosk up tightly, an elbow pressed between his shoulder blades. The skinnier man winced, caught in the arm-lock, and Calay slipped a thin, tapered blade from his belt. With no ceremony or even a cursory warning, he slit a line of red along the interior of Vosk’s elbow, then wrenched his arm over one of their stew bowls.

“Flex your fist,” he ordered, voice quiet and curt.

It was clear Calay still struggled with his newfound disability. He moved slow, a study in caution, and little twitches of his deformed limb hinted at muscle memory that hadn’t yet atrophied. He ran a studious look up and down the length of Riss’ torso as if unsure where to even begin. Vosk meanwhile did as told and pumped blood into the bowl. Over the sick, wet rasp of Riss’ breath, Adal heard blood dribbling on stone.

Vosk turned his cheek, unwilling to look. Disgust or nerves, who knew. He did an admirable job of looking neutral, but when Calay dipped two fingers into the blood, a nervous twitch shook him.

What they’d done to Calay had hurt Gaz a great deal. Would it kill Vosk to patch Riss back together? Adal considered that a fair trade. Perhaps even karmic.

Features tight with concentration, Calay hovered his blood-wet fingers over Riss. Anxiety ticked through Adal’s fingers, his heart a nervous rabbit. Why wasn’t he starting yet? Why was he wasting time?

“Why aren’t you—”

Calay shushed him. “I’m thinking.”

What was there to think about? Adal tilted his head.

“It’s her cuirass.” His mouth pulled to one side, a frustrated scowl. “These glyphs work best on bare skin. But her armor is the only thing holding everything together.”

Unbearable nausea flooded through Adal’s guts at those words. He swallowed.

“Just fix her,” he said. He refused to believe this sorcerer could outwit the Vasa Leycenate and slither so far south without enough canny to solve such a basic fucking problem.

Calay snapped his eyes up to Adal’s.

“I don’t actually want her to die, you know. I am trying.”

Meanwhile, a nervous tremor had possessed Vosk’s entire body. Still he bled into the bowl, which had over half filled.

Calay reached down with the mangled mass of bark and bone that had once been his right hand, then he yanked it back.

“Gaz,” he said. “Tilt her chin up a little.”

Gaz did as asked, cupping Riss’ chin in his massive palm and carefully angling her head up. He handled her gently. Adal was grateful for that.

“Vosk,” he was just spitting orders now. “Slosh some blood down her neck.”

Vosk tipped the bowl, the three of them working for now in concert.

Riss’ sandy golden-brown skin was shades paler than it should have been, and the splash of blood stood out too bright. Calay bent down and dipped his bloodstained fingers into the wash of red. He pressed his fingers into the armor that bound Riss’ chest, then began to sketch jagged, incomprehensible characters across the leather.

“I’ll try to get her stable enough. Be ready to cut it off, Gaz.”

“I don’t understand.” Adal warily averted his eyes, remembering the flash that had stung him. “It’s magick. Why will it only maybe work?”

“This weave works best against bare skin. The closer to the heart the better. I’m not conjuring whole new things into her body. I’m fortifying what she already has.”

Clean, cool-toned light sizzled through the cavern, chasing away the orange cast of the firelight.

Riss screamed and bucked against Gaz’s grip. Vosk screamed along with her, biting into his sleeve. Adal scrambled to make himself useful, working the laces up Riss’ side. He knew how hard she’d worked for those leathers. She’d be devastated if Gaz cut them off. As he yanked the armor down, just enough to expose her undershirt, something bony in her body shifted and popped against his arm. He recoiled. Calay shoved cloth aside and kept on scribbling, streaking red over now-bare skin. Adal buried his face in his shoulder, unable to watch.

In the moments his eyes were closed, he lacked other distractions. Without them, he couldn’t quite keep the panic at bay.

It wasn’t that he thought Riss immortal. It wasn’t that he felt he couldn’t go on without her. Nothing quite so melodramatic. Since Gaspard, they’d all learned in a hurry that nobody was immune. Even living legends were a single misstep away from the same death as anyone else.

No. Adal knew Riss would die someday, just like he would. But until it became a tangible possibility, he hadn’t realized how scared it would make him.

Losing Berin had been terribly sad. The loss of a sibling couldn’t come without grief, even if the siblings in question hadn’t been particularly close. Because the death of family rippled outward—you had to watch the people you earnestly loved suffer. And you lost the chance to ever care to the same depth they did. When Berin died, Adal had lost a potential future in which they might have one day been friends and his mother might have one day held them in the same regard.

And as for Gaspard, the sadness he’d felt had been mostly on Riss’ behalf. He’d admired Gaspard, considered him as much a friend as a subordinate can consider a commander. But he hadn’t needed Gaspard like she had.

Berin had been his brother, Gaspard a respected elder. But Riss was the most cherished friend he had ever had. A friend that came around once in a century. When he imagined a future where that friendship was commuted to merely memory, bleak terror seized him and made his insides tremble.

More light. More screaming. Riss fell slack. Vosk wept, bent-backed, drool hanging from his mouth. He shivered and collapsed.

It all happened so fast that Adal felt physical whiplash, yet it had also been the longest few seconds of his life.

###

He didn’t know how much time Torcha had bought them, but he was hesitant to move until at least one of Riss or Vosk was mobile. He’d neglected to pay much attention to Vosk’s suffering when the spell was cast. Bigger issues at hand and all. But now he took a moment to examine the man, who had curled into a fetal position on the rain-damp cavern floor. He shook periodically, his features gone grey-yellow. Adal couldn’t rouse any sympathy.

In the aftermath of her thrashing, Riss remained unconscious. Calay had explained this was normal—the spells he’d used, how he’d referred to it as ‘fortifying’ what the body already had—used the body’s own energy to repair itself. It was an exhausting process, he’d said. And Adal had seen that firsthand when both he and Gaz had emerged in a half-sick stupor from repairing Calay’s arm.

For the moment, Adal sat by Riss’ side while Calay observed both her and Vosk. Gaz drifted behind them, packing up camp. Urgent impatience scratched at Adal’s back. He wanted to get moving as soon as they could, didn’t want to waste Torcha’s sacrifice. For the time being, he’d cobbled together a loose best case scenario of get Riss out of the swamp, then double back for Torcha with whoever’s willing and able.

“Hey.” Calay gently cleared his throat, drawing Adal out of his thoughts.

“Mm?”

“I’m confident she’ll recover fully.” He sniffed, rubbed at the dark circles that sagged beneath his eyes. “We had to improvise with the first weave, but the second couldn’t have gone better.”

Adal only nodded, unsure what was even worth saying. It was easier now, sitting and speaking to Calay, even aware of what he was. Over such a short time, he was growing desensitized, at least as long as Calay kept his arm covered.

A nonstop onslaught of horror would do that to a person, he supposed.

To his surprise, Calay kept talking.

“None of this was supposed to work out this way.” He glanced over his shoulder, watching Gaz for a moment. “I’m sorry, for what it’s worth. For any part I played in turning your mission into a fiasco.”

Adal, raised in the ranks of Altave Shipping and Mercantile, knew a sales pitch when he heard one. This was Calay ensuring his own survival by way of remorse. Or softening the blow before he asked for his pint of blood.

“I don’t think any of us could have known.” He wondered though, about Tarn. Riss had implied at the inn that Tarn suspected ulterior movies in Lukra’s disappearance. Had he suspected Vosk? Had he let them go in blind?

Tarn was a problem for the future, though. Adal studied Calay’s face, found it inscrutable. He looked tired. That was all.

“I suppose you’ll want your payment.” He saw no point forestalling the inevitable.

Calay cleared his throat. “I wasn’t going to bring it up until she was up on her feet.”

Adal lifted a shrug. His shoulders felt leaden.

Calay explained his price. It was simple enough: a flagon of Adal’s blood as insurance.

He claimed he’d destroy it after a month if nobody came for him via Adelheim. Adal wasn’t sure he believed that. It didn’t matter at all one way or the other. Whether he trusted Calay or not, he was on the hook.

In the mad rush from the moment Riss had fallen to the time she drew her first unimpeded breath, Adal hadn’t spared much thought for what he’d agreed to. He hadn’t had the luxury of time to weigh the pros and cons. But all the deliberation in the world would not have affected the outcome.

He’d have done far worse.

<< Chapter 42 | Chapter 44 >>

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Adal went down hard. The impact drove the air from his lungs, and then he was tumbling into the water, unable to regain his breath. Crashing down below the surface of the pool, he twisted and thrashed and kicked, trying to discern which way was up. The creature had splashed in with him, but as he swept his limbs all around, he didn’t feel it. Or anything solid.

Righting himself, head still underwater, he opened his eyes long enough to watch bubbles. He coughed out a small amount of air, watched them travel upward, then oriented himself that way and kicked. When he broke the surface, it wasn’t much drier, rain pouring down as it was. He managed to gulp in a breath, choked on rainwater, then swam the short distance toward the shore.

The dark was near-impenetrable. He had no idea where his rifle had fallen.

Before he could climb up out of the pool, something heavy sloshed within it, sending a gentle, tell-tale current pulling at his legs.

He had a half-second to suck in air before the creature pulled him under. The water slowed the velocity of its weighty arms, so the blow didn’t hurt, but it swept him down and then pinned him below the surface, grinding against his back and pressing his chest against the sharp rocks that littered the ground. They dug into his armor, which held, fortunately, but he would be out of air soon.

Bullets whizzed through the water, leaving odd little trails above him. The foot upon his back wavered. Adal kicked, trying to wrench himself free, but couldn’t quite get enough leverage.

He’d been swimming for all his life. He’d grown up along the river, the source of all prosperity in the Dominion from their crops to their shipping lanes. The river gave and the river took–which is why his family placed such importance on paying their tolls to Loth.

Adal never expected he would drown.

Above the pool, he heard and felt the shudder of a great impact. Light flared across the rippled surface, illuminating the outline of the hulking monster that pinned him. Again, Adal kicked as hard as he could. This time he managed to free himself from the press of weight atop him, and he kicked like mad for the surface, his chest burning for want of breath.

He broke through. He breathed. He gulped and yelled, but the voice that came out was a shallow imitation of his own. Or perhaps his ears were still damaged. Bloody Torcha, firing that rifle in a cave–

Gunfire cracked over his head. He hiked in air and dove down, swimming to the side of the pool. Something swiped at his leg. He kicked at it blindly; it hooked him fast. Then that same sharp something bit into his thigh, sudden and tender, the shock of it enough to make him yelp in pain. Bad move. Water flooded his mouth. He coughed and choked and struggled up just enough to heave a breath that was half air, half water.

The rank, gungy water tasted of algae. It snapped Adal back to a far-off place in time, a whiplash back to his childhood.

Age fourteen, knees on the riverbank, a hand planted in the mud. His face was hot with embarrassment; his eyes burned with tears.

They’d scattered Berin’s ashes that morning, over the river he skippered so long.

Adal had known he was gone. He’d rushed down to the pier as soon as he’d heard the Sondrio had gone down. They’d brought survivors in on ferries and rafts and every dinghy the town could muster, yet he’d known somehow that Berin wouldn’t be among them. That his brother would be coming home under a tarp.

The ashes, though. This made it final. This made it real. Berin had been returned to the waters.

He’d made the mistake of approaching his parents’ chambers after. He wished to relay his sympathies to his mother. He knew he couldn’t go to her with his own sorrows, at least not expecting anything in return. But he felt compelled to reach out to her, to acknowledge her own suffering. He had lost a brother, but she had lost a boy.

And he’d hesitated outside the door when he’d heard her weeping.

Out of all of them, why him? Why not Adal? Why not Rode?

Adal had swallowed his grief and walked to the riverside, sitting beneath the willows, unsure where to even begin to unravel his despair. Berin had always been the favorite, that he’d known, but to hear his mother speak it aloud, to hear her blatantly confess that she’d have traded them…

He plunged his face beneath the water and screamed. He screamed his throat raw, crushing mud between his fingers, venting out all the anger and poison in him in a place only Loth could hear.

And when the water rushed back in, he held his head under just a few seconds longer, marveling at the sensation. He didn’t want to die, no. But he wanted to know how it felt. He coughed and sputtered and wiped at his face, wondering if it had tasted the same when it flooded Berin’s mouth–

One last heavy impact threw shockwaves across the pool. Adal kicked against whatever held him, managed to twist his leg free. He crawled up into the shallows, heaving himself up, unwilling to look behind him. Riss and Calay appeared at his side, each of them grabbing one of his shoulders. They all ran together, the pair half-dragging him. The ground trembled as the rock creature lurched up out of the water, crashing to ground and clawing at their heels.

They ran for the rocks that sheltered the cavern, aiming for the narrow crevice between.

Light exploded across the campsite. In the flash, he saw Torcha silhouetted atop one house-sized boulder. She sparked a fuse and hurtled another bomb behind them. When it exploded, Adal felt heat lick at his back.

But it wasn’t enough. Perhaps, made of stone as it was, heat and fire didn’t deter the creature like they would have any normal, mortal being. Shrieking, it blitzed them, swiping Adal ass-over-end in the mud. He rolled, smashed into a fallen tree, choked on mud.

He lifted his head just in time to see the thing bear down on Riss, who’d fallen on her front. Calay, who’d fallen beside her, spun and lifted his pistol. He squeezed the trigger again and again, but it didn’t fire.

Somewhere, the dog was barking furiously.

Adal watched, helplessly far away, as the creature heaved its massive forelimbs up and brought them down on Riss’ back with a nauseating crunch. She never even tried to get up.

He had no time for his horror. He shoved up and back into the fight, losing battle though it may have been. Finally, he spied his rifle in the mud, though it was so choked with dirt and moisture it was rendered useless when he lifted it. He growled and ran for where Riss had fallen, reaching her at the same time as Gaz.

“This fucking rain,” he heard Calay shouting. “My gun’s fucked.”

He grabbed Riss’ machete from the muck without thinking, charging toward the creature’s towering outline.

“Get her to shelter!” he bellowed at anyone who would listen. He had no time to see whether Gaz and Calay obeyed.

Fresh gunfire from the mouth of the cavern. Adal glanced aside long enough to see Vosk, hands now freed, manning one of the extra rifles. He had yet to hit the thing.

And then the monster was upon him. Stumbling, his sore leg far more sore than he anticipated, Adal barely managed to weave aside from its first swipe. He danced around behind it, sliding in the mud, tried to find the same openings Riss had hacked at. But it was a damn sight harder in the nighttime. He couldn’t see shit.

He slashed, cursed when the machete pinged off stone. He tried again. Still nothing.

Wind whipped past his face as a heavy blow missed him by a hair. His mind had switched off; he was all instinct and intuition now, body moving faster than his tactical brain ever could.

It gave his mind a brief, quiet interval for thought. We’re going to die out here. Riss already has.

Fierce, white-hot light erupted from nearby. Adal squinted. That could only mean Calay was magicking again. Nausea flooded through him when he wondered if the bastard was using Riss’ blood.

But then the source of the light moved closer: a short figure swaddled in a brilliantly-dyed scarf, red hair plastered to her face with rainwater.

Torcha dashed between the creature and Adal, whistling hard.

“Hey!” She hollered above the crash of thunder. “Hey, over here! That’s right, motherfucker, this way!”

She carried her lantern overhead, and Adal could see that she’d stuffed one of her explosives inside it. A flare of some kind. She waved it over her head a couple times, trying to catch the creature’s attention. It didn’t seem to have eyes or a face of any kind, but it spun toward her, drawn to the distraction.

Torcha’s eyes fell on his. He could see then how much she’d grown. Not that she’d ever been a child, even back when they’d first met. She never got a chance to be.

“Get her out of here,” she called. “Get them all out of here. Adal, go!”

She started to back away, slowly at first, then she turned when it became apparent the monster followed. Turning and hauling tail toward the trail they’d come down, Torcha reached the cover of the trees before the creature did. It rushed after her, hot on her tails, its stride listing and limping but barely slowed.

Splashing through after both of them, the dog barked crazily, giving chase.

Adal, struck wordless, watched Torcha’s lantern bob and flicker in the darkness. Then she moved beyond where his eyesight could reach. Or something had doused the flame. He had no way of knowing.

Riss and Torcha, both gone. Just like that.

Adal lowered his hand. The tip of the machete rested in the mud. His clothes were soaked through. They felt so heavy. Everything felt so heavy. He tried to force himself to turn around, to heed Torcha’s wish and take command, but he was terrified of what awaited him.

<< Chapter 41 | Chapter 43 >>

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The dog appeared to be taking a liking to Torcha. When Riss led her off to Vosk’s secret stash, the canine picked a path over the roots and boulders behind them. It kept polite distance from Riss, but it circled back around to Torcha periodically for a head scratch or to sniff at her heels.

“Do you really need me to inventory the silks?” Torcha asked, sounding highly skeptical. “Or are you here to tell me off for what I said to Adal?”

Riss snorted. “Adal’s an adult. He’ll cope. I really do want you to take a look at this stuff. Less to inventory it and more because I thought you’d appreciate it.”

Much of the cloth—especially the spider silks, the ones in blue and navy—appeared to be native to Torcha’s home district, or at least close to it. Riss didn’t have much of an eye for textiles, but she’d found similar stashes secreted away in deserted homes and basements in Semmer’s Mill. The weavers had tried to conceal their prized cloth from the northlanders with varying degrees of success. And who could blame them? The occupiers all but ground artisanship in the area to a halt, diverting resources to more “necessary” industries.

Riss considered all this in silence while Torcha pawed through a bag, having fallen quiet as well.

Finally, she spoke up. “A lot of this is…”

“From home?”

She blinked. “Yeah.”

“Hence why I thought you’d like to have a look.”

Riss dropped to a crouch beside the shorter woman, peering over her shoulder. Torcha drew out a striped length of silk, dyed in bold primary colors. She fingered the weave of it, then flipped it around her neck like a scarf.

“Still smells fresh,” she said. “They must be dyeing again, back at the bug farms.”

Unlike most of Gaspard’s mercenaries, Torcha hadn’t gone home after the war. She said she saw no need to. She’d stuck with Riss, following her through Medao, seeing her through those hard, lean weeks after Gaspard’s death. She’d followed Riss back to the grounds of House Altave to retrieve Adal. And she’d followed Riss to Adelheim.

There was a certain irony to that. All throughout the war, Riss had assumed Renato was the loyal one, that the traumas and hardships that made Torcha so callous had also made her aloof.

“I want to make something clear to you,” she said. “You know Adal and I have a great deal of trust in you, right?”

Torcha’s shoulders tensed a little. Her thumb stopped stroking the fabric.

“I know,” she said. “But Adal just… it rubs against my grain to hear him do that thing he does. Trying to please everybody. Talking to Calay like he’s just another person. Like he wasn’t lying to us.”

“Adal can’t help it. That’s his family’s whole thing.”

“Yeah. I know. I didn’t say I won’t tolerate it. Just that it’s slimy.”

“There’s a reason for that.” Riss saw no point in concealing it. “We’re fairly certain Calay and his man have a price on their head from up north. If we let him think he’s in the clear, he won’t expect it when we come to collect.”

Torcha blinked, swiveled her muddy green eyes from the fabric to Riss.

“Bold,” she said.

“Mhm.”

“You think he can even die?”

Riss lifted a shoulder. “He seemed to come awful close before. I figure he would have if we hadn’t intervened.”

The wiry-haired hound passed between them, sniffing along the cavern floor in its explorations. Riss watched it for a while.

“Well, tell you what.” Torcha adjusted the scarf around her neck, having confiscated it for good. “You say the word, I’ll drop whatever I’m doing and put him down.”

“What word, you think?”

Torcha pursed her mouth in thought. “Tadivach. Just say it like a curse.”

Riss was somewhat familiar with the term. Tadivach was a deity local to the textile districts, the god of the loom. She wasn’t sure how devout Torcha’s family had been, but when the unit had first taken the girl into their care, she’d explained that the tapestries mounted over doors and walls and weaving rooms weren’t just decoration, they were offerings.

It was as good a code word as any. “Got it,” said Riss. “I hope it won’t come to that, but if an opportunity arises, we’d be foolish not to take it.”

The conversation came to a natural end; they started back toward camp.

“Thanks,” said Torcha. “For explaining all that. I just hope Adal’s on the same page.”

“Don’t you worry about Adal. He and I had a chat similar to this already. I’d have conferred with you both, but it’s damn hard, things being how they are.”

“No privacy in a bivvy,” Torcha agreed.

Sometimes she sounded wiser than her nineteen years, when she wasn’t being a complete brat.

###

Riss slept through her whole shift. No chaos or bullshit or dramatic interruptions this time. It was glorious. She’d feared that dreams of Gaspard’s death might continue to haunt her, but those fears seemed unfounded. Either the dream was a one-off or she was just too damn tired to dream at all.

Torcha and Gaz relinquished their watch to Riss and Vosk. Ever since she’d declined his proposition, Vosk hadn’t been chatty. That suited Riss just fine.

They took a short patrol of the camp’s perimeter, noting nothing of interest. Adal had buried the chum from the fish, just in case. Riss wasn’t sure such precautions would help much out here. They’d learned to conceal traces of their movements in the bush from all sorts of human adversaries, but Riss doubted any care on their parts could hide them from the many eyes and noses of nature.

“I always feel like this swamp is watching me,” Riss said, walking past the pool and back toward the caverns. “I have to say, Harlan, going in here time after time to cut down trees… it takes a pair.”

Vosk gazed off toward the treeline. “Yeah, well, we never stayed out here this long.”

In the steppes and mountains where she’d grown up and first learned her trade, Riss felt at home on the forest floor. Sure, there were all sorts of things that could kill you. Snakes, bandits, lania. The boars they hunted, even. But there were patterns to the movements of both animal and human life. If you learned them, you could generally pass unseen through both their worlds. And even if you couldn’t, it rarely took more than one or two timely shots from a good rifle.

Riss crept around the sleeping bodies and the dog nestled at Torcha’s feet, settling atop a boulder that gave her a good view past the cavern’s mouth. Clouds choked away any moonlight that might have made it through to where they camped, but the pool reflected the fire, which lent enough illumination to see by.

Ripples ghosted over the surface of the pool. Raindrops. Soon, rain pattered down onto the stones, running in little rivulets down the hillock and over the rocky ground.

Relaxing her eyes, Riss stared off into the curtains of rain. She scanned the wilderness slowly. The little jerks and tumbles of raindrops called out to her brain: motion, motion! But she ignored them.

Until she spotted it. An irregularity in the sheets of rainfall. A patch of dark blended in with what little she could see of the stony backdrop. It was less that her eyes saw something and more that they spotted an absence of something: a tall, wide swathe of air where rain should have been falling but wasn’t.

Riss averted her eyes from the light, looked askance toward the dark patch. She tried to keep it in her peripheral vision, another of Gaspard’s old tricks for moving under cover of night.

She tilted her head.

The dark patch tilted, too, as if mirroring her movements.

Her entire body goosefleshed.

Still sat on her rock, she slowly uncurled her legs. She moved at a glacial pace, no sudden movements, and edged her boot toward the closest sleeping body it could find: Calay’s. She nudged him, very slight, and thankfully the motion was enough to jog him awake.

Rolling onto his back, Calay blinked up at her. Riss watched him sidelong, hoped her wide eyes and grave stare toward the rain would say enough. Come on, Calay. You’re a smart fellow. Be smart here.

He inhaled a sharply-hissed breath. He’d seen it too.

A chain of crawlingly-slow, silent communication passed through the camp: Calay roused Gaz. Gaz’s broken snore roused the dog, who shifted and roused Torcha. Adal and Vosk slept too far away to be reached.

And all the while, Riss stared at the void in the rain.

“Orders?” Calay whispered. Riss had no clue how best to deploy him. She knew Torcha slept with her rifle at the ready, heard the telltale shuffle-click of her readying it. Gaz would do what Gaz did best.

Thunder grumbled in the distance, a low roll over the marshlands.

Riss counted the seconds ‘til the lightning, out of childhood habit.

When light streaked across the sky, it illuminated their patch of shadow: a sloping, asymmetrical body of stone and moss, notably missing a chunk of hind leg.

Riss crept a hand toward her belt.

Through the rain, the creature surged toward them.

As soon as it roared into the fireglow, Torcha let loose. She fired directly into its chest, and sharp slivers of stone flew in all directions. Riss hissed as some bit into her skin. The shot echoed off the enclosed space of the cavern walls, rocketing Adal and Vosk awake and rendering everyone temporarily deaf-struck. Rubbing at her head, Riss leapt from where she sat and sought cover as the creature rounded on Torcha.

Calay darted past on her other side. The moa shrieked.

Riss attempted to flank the creature as she had before, but it caught her creeping this time. It swung one of its blocky limbs toward her, the whole thing the size of a wagon wheel, and she slid out into the rain to escape the blow. It glanced her back, knocking her to the ground, and she rolled away from the swiping arm.

Torcha–or maybe Adal, she couldn’t see–fired again, the shot sending more showers of stone erupting from the creature’s body. They drove it back from the mouth of the cavern, and Riss took a swipe at the vines that held its joints in place.

The creature spun, its lurching footsteps shuddering the ground beneath her. It moved unlike anything Riss had ever seen: graceful, sweeping arcs of its forelimbs and juddering, jittery footsteps that made its movements difficult to predict. Likewise, the way it spun and opened up its back to the gunners surprised her.

Riss flailed back as a fist came down. Her boots slid on the slick, wet stone. Adal, Torcha, and Calay pummeled it with gunfire, then Gaz flew into it from the side, bashing its weak leg with his axe enough to send it toppling off-balance. Riss hollered at him to flank it on the opposite side, but she couldn’t hear her own cries over the ringing in her ears. Shit.

The creature ducked low and lurched toward the cavern mouth, squeezing over the top of the boulders that protected it. It swiped down with an arm. Adal and Torcha fled, Torcha ducking between the boulders and Adal slipping out toward the pool. She couldn’t see Vosk.

Gaz leapt atop it, but it rolled and threw him off. Sliding down the rain-slippery rock, it grappled at Torcha but couldn’t reach her. Spinning, lurching, it set its sights on Adal just as he finished reloading.

Picking up speed, the creature rushed him. Adal stood his ground. Lightning lanced across the sky, illuminating the scene just long enough for Riss to watch in slack-jawed horror as the golem crashed into Adal just as he fired. He blew it off-balance, and in return it snared a stony arm around him, tackling both of them into the dark, burbling pool.

<< Chapter 40 | Chapter 42 >>

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Food had a way of soothing the psyche as it soothed the body. The rudimentary stew they’d fashioned resembled the cuisine of Adal’s childhood only in staple ingredients, yet it was enough to transport him to a much healthier, less precarious mental place.

He recalled a favored dish of his childhood: whole silvergill stuffed with water chestnuts in a sticky, spicy sauce that the family cook never did elaborate on. It was, as his mother would have said, a meal for entertaining. Something they only had when occasions necessitated use of the great House Altave dining hall. Adal always looked forward to those dinners as a child.

Riss took Vosk off in search of his ill-gotten loot, so Adal checked in with the others.

“Torcha,” he asked. “You all right for next watch?”

“Of course.” She picked her teeth with a fishbone. “I’m feeling pretty rested.”

Adal nodded. “You and Gaz, then, once Riss is back.”

Around the fishbone, Torcha’s mouth formed a small, cross line.

“With him?” She shifted a look toward Gaz and eyed him with open disdain.

“Calay was with me on mine,” he explained. “We’ve got to keep cycling watches so everyone gets enough rest. It isn’t ideal, but this is not an ideal situation.”

She made that deep, dubious grunt that said she thought something was bullshit but wasn’t going to voice that opinion. Adal had been on the receiving end of that little vocalization a few times in his life.

Torcha had a tendency to view things with a paucity of nuance. She’d been that way since they’d found her—or rather since she’d found them—back in the thick of the war. It felt unfair to ascribe it all to her uncultured upbringing, but the truth was that many in the Lower Deel and the outer textile regions lived fairly blunt, black and white lives.

In wartime, that thinking had been an asset. It had seen Torcha through unknown horrors, the specifics of which she’d never discussed with the Fourth.

But the situation with Calay and Gaz required a soft, careful touch. At least for the time being. With every night’s rest, those two would be recovering. Adal estimated Calay would be sturdy on his feet come morning, and then they’d have to take precious care to ensure that neither of the northerners deduced that Riss intended to sell them out.

Across the fire, Calay inhaled his stew voraciously, as if thoughts of double-crossing and wary intrigue couldn’t have been further from his mind.

“I have to say…” He smacked his lips. “When you told me you were a spearfisher, I thought you were joking. Or perhaps coming on to me.”

Adal exhaled through his nose, not quite a laugh. Before he could reply, Torcha stepped in to defend his honor.

“Yeah, well, looks like everybody on this expedition is more than what they seemed.” She coupled the words with a hard, bitter stare across the fire, eyes on Calay.

Calay opened his mouth, but for once, nothing came out. He shut it with a click of teeth. He looked, to Adal’s surprise, genuinely chagrined.

“Uh, either way… I think he was trying to say thanks for the fish.” Gaz set his bowl in the stack, then rubbed the bandages wound around his upper arm. As soon as Adal noticed, he couldn’t help but glance toward Calay’s right arm, or at least the lump beneath his duster where he kept it hidden away.

“He’s not your fucking friend, Narlie,” Torcha snapped.

“Torcha.” Adal put up a palm. “I can defend myself, thanks.”

Her eyes narrowed, this time on Adal. “Then why aren’t you? Why are you just letting them talk to you like we’re pals? Like they’re still on the right side of all this?”

With a gust of a sigh, Adal sat up. He’d take her for a private walk ‘round the pool, discuss things with her as he had with Riss. That would settle her. Except…

Damn. He couldn’t leave Calay and Gaz alone. Frustrated, he ground his molars for a moment.

Loth, in a lot of ways it really was just like being back on the front. The complete lack of privacy, at least.

He took a moment to swallow his frustration. Torcha’s anger was not her fault. It might have been inconvenient to the diplomatic approach he was trying to take, but the blame was solely Calay’s. He couldn’t hold her natural, understandable reactions against her.

Besides, this was the Torcha who had mellowed substantially compared to the girl they’d taken under wing after liberating Semmer’s Mill. She’d been younger then, with a temper the gods themselves would be right to fear. Her fury had seemed uncontrollable at first, but they’d discovered one presence in all the world that soothed her. Someone she looked up to enough that she’d shut up and listen even when in the depths of her rage.

And that person was presently occupied elsewhere.

“I get it. I really do. I’m not downplaying anything. I’m just…” There really wasn’t any better excuse than the truth. “I’m exhausted, Torcha. I am too tired to spare any energy on anger.”

Which was true. But as soon as he said it, he knew it also wasn’t the entire truth. He had felt flickers of familiarity, of relaxation if not quite kinship, during their meal. Everyone had shut their mouths and enjoyed their food, even if it was just a big stupid game of play pretend–much like the collective delusions that House Altave contained a cheery family within its dining hall.

Adal was used to wringing humanity out of less-than-ideal circumstances. It didn’t mean his heart was softening. Or that he’d forgotten the betrayal. But Torcha didn’t see it that way.

“You don’t have to be spittin’ mad.” She shifted the fishbone to the other side of her mouth, unimpressed in her regard of him. “But you’re treating them like people.”

Adal’s thoughts came to rest at an ideological blockade he didn’t know he had.

He disagreed with her there. He’d never realized it until that moment, but when she phrased it that way, his mind was quick to counter: They are people, Torcha. A sorcerer was not a thing that masqueraded as a person. A sorcerer was a person who learned to do a thing that let them masquerade as something else.

Despite what Gaz and Calay had done to them, Adal still saw them as fundamentally human. Torcha apparently did not. This was dicier than he thought it was.

The thump-crunch of boots on stone announced Riss’ return not a moment too soon. She arrived tossing a small suede pouch back and forth between her hands. Vosk limped stiffly before her, his expression a tired grimace.

“Well that was illuminating.” Riss retook her seat near the fire, tossing the pouch toward Torcha. “Have a look at these.”

Torcha blinked, her ire forgotten for now. She caught the bag and peered inside.

“Huh.”

From inside the pouch, she fished out a single pinky nail-sized pearl, its shade a creamy rose gold. She held it up for a moment, admiring the shine of firelight on its surface.

“Lotta beads like that,” said Riss. “Gemstones, too. Some fancy glass. Nice silks. I didn’t go through it all, but it’s likely more than we can even carry. So lay off Adal and let him go to sleep with visions of moneybags dancing in his head, hm?”

Adal blinked. “You heard all that?”

“I heard enough.” Riss beckoned Torcha up with a crook of her finger. “C’mere, resident textile expert. I need someone to tell me what’s worth carting out of here.”

Torcha rolled to her feet, limber and young and eager to please the boss. They strolled back into the rear of the cave. Vosk watched them go.

The sun had yet to set, but Adal wasn’t going to waste any opportunity for sleep between watches. He tethered Vosk’s hands again, and when the man complained, Adal decided he was about due for a pat-down as well. But he hadn’t acquired any weapons or stowed any contraband on his person, at least not yet.

“Gonna do us next?” Calay asked, baring his teeth in the first smile Adal had seen on him since he’d been shot.

Adal stared him down. “Do I have to?”

Calay and Gaz shared a look between the two of them.

“Reckon not,” said Gaz.

“Shame,” said Calay. “It’s been so long since I felt the tender touch of a man.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Vosk growled.

For all the hearty meal had rejuvenated him, Adal had just about had it with all the bickering. He knocked the toe of a boot warningly against the back of Vosk’s shoulder.

“Enough out of you,” he said. “Regardless of anything else that’s happened on this expedition, the fact remains that only one among us tried to murder someone.”

Maybe Torcha’s solution was right after all. Diplomacy was growing awful tiring. As he turned away from Vosk, Adal’s spine tingled most unpleasantly. He felt eyes on his back. When he returned to the fire, he saw Calay observing him in silence, firelight accentuating the deep shadows of his face. Convalescent though he might have been, his attention hadn’t wavered at all throughout Adal’s entire conversation with Torcha. He’d heard every word.

Alone at the fire with only Calay, Gaz, and Vosk for company, Adal felt as though his allies were very far away. Nonetheless, he schooled his mouth into a calm smile, never one to let a little malice ruin a good meal.

<< Chapter 39 | Chapter 41 >>

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First you pay your dues, then you get to weave.

Murfrey Lupart’s voice echoed in his daughter’s ear: fatigued, parental, disappointed at having to explain the same old thing for the twentieth time.

Torcha tied her smock on and wondered–also for the twentieth time–if it was worth it.

She knew she’d been given a rare opportunity. She knew that apprenticeships at Madem Yelisey’s were highly sought-after. Doing this bitchwork–and that’s what it was, bitchwork–would open up worlds to Torcha that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Smock and boots in place, she opened the door to the bug room.

The sawdust-musty smell and constant chitter-clitter-clack of thousands of caged beetles all hit her at once. Whenever Madem Yelisey started paying her, the first thing she was going to purchase was something to plug her ears. For now she used torn-off bits of cotton from the spinning room, and those barely blocked any of it out.

Despite everything that everybody said, despite the blatant envy in the eyes of the village girls when Torcha told them where she worked, she wondered if she’d been sent to this place as punishment.

Whether it was punishment or not, she still had to do the work. Holding her breath, Torcha pulled on her gloves and flipped open the lid on the first tank. The bubbly, poor-quality glass was so opaque that she could barely see the glittering emerald-green beetles within, but as soon as she dumped in the first few handfuls of mealworms, the beetles swarmed across the tank’s floor and she could see them through the opening. Shiny, thumbnail-big, teeming by the dozen.

She fed them all, tank by tank. Some ate mealworms. Some ate the last few scraps off deer legs and the cracked-open marrow inside. Some ate clippings from Madem’s garden. Torcha shoveled the feed in with casual indifference. Feeding them was the easy part.

“Madem Yelisey?” she called through the bug room door, once all the beetles were eating. “What are we making today?”

A rough, feminine grunt from down the hall. Then Madem Yelisey’s voice, like a bleating goat:

“Red dye today, Torcha.”

She looked aside to a row of tanks where crimson beetles nibbled on sweet potato stalks.

“Sorry, bugs,” she said, and went to fetch the boiling nets.

Scooping up a net of writhing beetles, Torcha marched over to the vats. Madem Yelisey had the chemicals all ready to go–a secret mix the apprentices weren’t allowed to know. The fires beneath the big copper-bottomed drums burned hot, and Torcha gave the bellows a squeeze. Already, the liquid within was boiling.

She dunked the bug-net below the bubbling surface of the liquid and left it there.

Within seconds, the screaming started.

Don’t you worry, Torcha remembered her father telling her. I know it sounds terrible, but the whistling noise is just steam bubbling through their shells. They aren’t actually screaming. They’re just insects.

She gave the handle of the net a stir, then dragged it upward, chemical-stinky water streaming down off half-cooked carcasses. The beetles weren’t squirming anymore, though a few had legs that still twitched a little, feebly. She turned the net inside out and plunged them into the bath.

Shaking dry the net, she grabbed the long-handled masher off its spot on the tool rack.

With a soft grunt of effort, Torcha leaned over the vat as close as she could, its astringent vapors biting at her eyes. She flipped the switch on the side, counted to five as Madem Yelisey instructed, and drained some of the liquid. Then she heaved the switch back up the other way.

Then she started mashing.

The bugs only had to boil for half a minute or so to get nice and soft. Like a butter churn, Torcha worked the handle in her hands, the liquid in the vat blooming from light rose pink to a deep, dark, bloody red. She huffed and panted with the effort, breaking out into a sweat. If she kept at this for as many years as the Madem, soon her hands would have those same calluses along the innermost knuckles, even through the gloves. Her hands might resemble the spiders and insects they boiled and crushed.

It doesn’t matter, daddy, she’d said.

What doesn’t matter?

If the bugs are screaming for real or not.

She twisted as she mashed down, grinding the insects in the vat into a fine paste. Sometimes stuff just had to die for people to make a living. She was only ten and she understood that. She couldn’t figure out what her father’s hang-up was.

###

Daddy, you’re making a mistake.

How could her father keep doing this, with as bad as things were getting? Weavers were disappearing from the village left and right. Half the Madem’s apprentices didn’t come to work anymore, too scared to travel the roads or their entire families long since fled.

Still, Murfrey dropped his daughter at the Madem’s every morning. He told her these skills were too vital not to learn. She could mix dye now, and spin yarn, and dye cloth. The Madem was letting her weave two years early, for lack of able hands to do the work. Her education was too important.

Important enough to risk getting fucking shot? Because when the Narlies arrived, that’s what they were going to do.

Every day, the same argument: Torcha told her father she had to go. She had to go to the mustering. The girls at the Madem’s, they said their fathers and aunties and siblings were going. Some big-dick soldier from the Inland Empire was taking recruits. They called him the Shrike. Torcha was certain he’d take her once he saw what she could do with a rifle.

You’re fourteen, girl. That’s insanity.

But it wasn’t. Someday soon, this town would need her.

So she packed her rifle with her every morning. Her father couldn’t stop that. And after her lessons and her weaving, she marched to the edge of the woods, beneath the grasping legs of all the dangling spiders, and practiced.

###

When they finally came for Semmer’s Mill, it was just Torcha and the Madem left.

And still, that very last morning, Murfrey held her to their routine. She’d wonder about that for the rest of her years. Was he just too scared to act? Did he hope that if he somehow acted like nothing had changed, nothing would?

Their officers were polite. They called everyone to the town square, announced their intentions. They’d only bivouac for a matter of days. They would requisition supplies and move on. That those supplies would come from the locals’ cupboards as an unspoken understanding.

Torcha went to the Madem’s, as ordered. She ground the bugs and grit her teeth and trembled with the magnitude of her own anger.

The Shrike’s men pinched in from the northwest.

Days turned into weeks.

They left Torcha’s parents alone, but everyone knew not to let their children out after dark.

Then one day, the Madem wasn’t at the shop.

It was time to step up where her father would not.

They were the beetles now. She would not be boiled.

<< Chapter 38 | Chapter 40 >>

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Riss sank down onto her bedroll, cross-legged on the mossy cave floor. By the time ass met ground, she was fading. Sleepless days and nights on the march were nothing new to anyone who’d been with her in the Fourth, but circumstances being what they were, there was more weighing on her frayed nerves than merely sleep deprivation. Little flickers of motion played at the corners of her vision, merely tricks of tired eyes, but out here that couldn’t be dismissed with a shake of the head. Out here the phantoms stood too good a chance of being real.

Stretching out on the thin mat, Riss assessed the camp one last time. The early afternoon sun shined warmly into the cavern, bright enough that it chased a lot of her wariness away. She knew it was bullshit false comfort, but human minds were like that, weren’t they. Gaz was, like her, borderline too tired to walk. He’d conked out a few minutes earlier, already dozing with his back to her. Torcha slept on Riss’ other side, snoring into the crook of an arm. Vosk sat further back in the cave’s shallow recess, still bound. And their first watch of Adal and Calay sat at the cavern’s mouth, silhouetted by sunlight.

Riss didn’t quite miss Geetsha. Wasn’t exactly grieving her. But as her eyes strayed toward Vosk one last time, a fleeting regret passed through her. Tarn and Geetsha had some sort of agreement. Would her people retaliate once they learned she’d been killed? Were her people even people? Was there something worse to fear out in the swamp than mimics and monsters?

Fortunately, fear was rather like grief. Riss simply didn’t have time for it. And in the rare moments she had time, she was too tired to dwell on it for long.

###

Waking to commotion was starting to become a habit. Riss blinked awake to the sound of a scuffle, bodies rising up off the ground. Yet as her senses asserted themselves and she surveyed the camp, the scuffle seemed to be more one of curiosity than an immediate response to danger.

“Something’s splashing around outside,” said Calay, eyes trained off toward the boulders that largely blocked the clearing from view.

“It doesn’t sound like a large something, for a change,” added Adal. And my, didn’t the pair of them seem chummy. Adal even gestured to Calay to follow him as he rose up from his seat, readying his pistol. Gaz, who had also awoken, lifted a questioning look to Calay, who gave him a tiny headshake.

“We’re only poking our noses out,” he said.

They crept off to investigate. Riss held her breath, opening her mouth slightly to train an ear toward the wilderness, an old recon trick. She heard two pairs of human footsteps, one much lighter than the other. And a few little splashes that sounded as though they were coming from the pool at the forest’s edge.

A moment later, she heard a most peculiar sound: surprised and jubilant laughter. Adal had a warm, deep laugh that she’d have known anywhere. The muted chuckle that followed must have been Calay.

Despite the fact that Torcha was still asleep, she couldn’t resist calling out.

“Everything all right out there?”

“Better than all right!” Adal answered. “We’ll be right over!”

Turning a look toward Gaz, Riss gave her head a skeptical tilt. Gaz, similarly befuddled, gave his bullish shoulders a roll.

“Calay seem all right when we went to sleep?” she asked him. “Neither of them seemed…” She wasn’t even sure what the word was. Delirious? Was there a chance either of them had actually cracked? Paranoia prickled up the back of her neck. Had Calay done something somehow? Some trick he could play without blood?

“They just sound happy,” said Gaz, in the tone of voice of a person who understood just how fucked up that was given the status of things.

They sat there dumbfounded until Adal and Calay slipped back between the boulders. They carried something strange and shiny in their arms. Something so incongruous that Riss needed a minute before her brain clicked on what the objects actually were: thick-bodied, silvery-scaled fish.

“They were leaping for the midges,” said Adal.

“How did you catch ‘em?” Gaz rubbed a hand over his scalp.

Adal clucked his tongue. “I’m a Deel boy,” he said. “If you can’t learn to spearfish they pack you to a raft and send you downriver to the potato farmers.”

Riss exhaled a faint gust of laughter. “It’s true,” she said. “You should see him with a polearm.”

She trailed off and turned a look from face to face. Any further laughter died in her throat. Don’t get too familiar, she warned herself. Calay and Gaz weren’t crew anymore. If she forgot that, if she let her caution lapse, she knew without a doubt that Calay would take advantage. He and Gaz were in it for themselves, their own survival. Riss wouldn’t be their stepping-stone to escape.

Adal cleared his throat, the sound spiking through the tension.

“At any rate,” he said. “They appear to be regular silvergills. Nothing mutated or horrific about them. I say we fillet them up and see how they taste.”

“Vosk and Calay can test ‘em out.” Torcha piped up from her bedroll, where she rested with her arms behind her head.

That wasn’t a half-bad idea.

Adal got the fish gutted and cleaned. He’d claimed with much swagger that his touch with a filleting knife was legendary, back the first time he and Riss had been in the field. His work lived up to the hype. Soon the fish sizzled with promise in the cookpan over the fire, everyone crowding around.

Riss and Torcha sorted through their provisions, putting together a rudimentary broth of sweet potatoes, salt, and the last of their mushrooms. Fine cuisine it was not, but it smelled more hearty than anything they’d nibbled on in the last two days.

“I can’t believe you two can still eat sweet potatoes,” said Adal, watching them while occasionally minding the fish.

“Pardon you.” Torcha ticked her nose in the air. “I could eat sweet potatoes every day ‘til the day I died.”

“Lucky for us that might end up being roundabout, say, tomorrow.”

Riss cocked her brow at Adal. “Dark,” she said.

Gaz, who had sequestered himself away somewhat with Calay at his side, regarded them curiously from his side of the fire.

“What’s wrong with sweet potatoes?”

Torcha finished chopping a fungus and dumped it in the pan, then leveled the blade of her small knife Gaz’s way.

“Absolutely nothing, that’s what.”

“When we were in the field, we ate a lot of them,” Riss explained. “The area near Torcha’s hometown is full of sweet potato plantations. It was easier to dig ‘em up most nights than to carry our own provisions.”

“Easier plus we were thieving from the Narlies.” Torcha sparked a grin, then tidied her things, folding up into a slouch against the cavern wall. “We didn’t all get the luxury of going home halfway through the war to our estate full of chefs.”

Adal pursed a small frown. “I had a collapsed lung,” he said.

“A collapsed lung and endless excuses.”

“Nasty business,” said Vosk from Riss’ opposite side. “I popped a lung once. Took a while to recover.”

Adal merely grunted. Things had shaken out in a way that Riss found mildly surprising: Vosk seemed on thinner ice than Calay where the company’s temper was concerned. But then again, she supposed she could see a certain logic in it. Calay had, thus far, merely hidden something terrible. Vosk had sabotaged their mission from the get-go, and whatever the story had been with Geetsha, he’d still killed her.

His hands were bound. Calay’s, for the time being, were not.

In these quiet moments, when things felt close to normal, that was when Riss found herself missing Gaspard the most. During their long days and cool, damp nights spent on the march, the Fourth’s forward scouts grew close. Gaspard had a way about him, a talent for setting restless soldiers at ease. He always had a story, a way to pass the time. If Riss closed her eyes and focused, she could still hear the muted twang of his gut-string guitar, often strummed quietly beside the fire while they made camp.

Adal took over cooking duty, dumping the deboned fish in with everything else. He seasoned it with a little pinch of something from his belt, then left it to simmer. Riss saw him slip a sliver of the white meat into his own mouth to test it first.

The aroma drew a straggler out from the treeline: the shaggy-furred hound that had trailed them on and off. The dog sniffed around the entrance to the cavern, wary of stepping inside until Torcha invited it with a soft, beckoning whistle. It crept closer, caution evident in its lowered ears and raised tail, until she coaxed it close enough to stroke its muzzle.

Notably, the dog didn’t approach Vosk at all. Riss sighed, rubbing at her face.

They ate in weary silence, portioning out a bit of fish and potatoes for the dog. The stew had a fortifying, steadying effect. As long as they had it in themselves to create a proper meal, they weren’t losing it. Cooking was a little nook of civilization they could carve out for themselves.

“So.” Riss forked a bit of sweet potato up to her mouth and took a bite. While chewing, she levelled a long look at Vosk. They’d untied his hands so he could eat, and his wrists were rough and rope-bitten.

He grunted acknowledgment and kept eating.

“Now that we’ve got all our cards on the table, this’ll be easier. What’s the fastest route out of here and how long do you estimate it will take?”

Vosk bristled at the question. He seemed annoyed. Tough shit. He explained that there was a route out that would take about two days on foot if they kept up a good pace. Riss nodded along, listening.

“All right,” she said. “Once you’ve finished your supper, you’re gonna show me where you stashed those traders’ belongings.”

###

Riss trusted Adal and Torcha to keep the peace at camp. She let Vosk lead her off on her own, mindful to keep enough distance between them that he couldn’t spin and advance on her easily. She didn’t like the idea of cutting him down before he could be brought back to Adelheim to face proper punishment, but she’d do it if she had to.

He led her to a smaller cave in the rear of the hole-riddled hillside, this one cramped enough that they had to crouch to duck inside. As promised, several canvas rucksacks were stacked up in the rear of the cave, their drab brown color a near match for the wall. As far as camouflage went, it couldn’t have worked better if it had been intentional. Riss imagined Vosk’s ill-gotten gains could have gone undiscovered for some time.

“Awful convenient how you were the only witness to make it out alive,” Riss said, neutral. She untied the top of a sack and peered inside. Bolts of deep red silk woven through with shimmering golden thread were folded within, as well as a small suede pouch of pearls.

Vosk’s brows drew together as he watched her. “I had friends on that expedition,” he said. “I’d been on that crew for months. It was not convenient. It was horrifying.”

She remembered those earlier moments, when the crew had first set out. How she’d sensed in Vosk a sort of old soldier’s kinship, the shared understanding of loss. Now, Riss was too tired to sift through whether or not that was bullshit.

“It’s been hard times in the valley,” Vosk said, continuing to try to justify himself.

Riss lifted her armored shoulders. “I bet,” she said. “Plenty of folks turn highwayman when times get desperate. I’m not judging you, Harlan. At least not for that. Your troubles now lie in the fact that a woman is dead and my crew has suffered our own hardships on a snipe hunt due to you.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that. She continued inventorying a few more bags. There were twelve in total, plenty to make the trip worthwhile, as well as some bundled limbs of dark-veined wood stacked in a corner. Silk, pearls, assorted gemstones, a sack of australs stamped with the insignia of a Meduese bank she recognized. Likely more than one bird could haul out.

“Riss.” Vosk’s voice was strained. His eyes had a sunken desperation to them. “You’re a reasonable woman. And the Baron’s a cheapskate. Name your price.”

She thought back to that evening in Tarn’s sitting room. The pang of camaraderie in her guts. The trust he’d put in her. The way he just knew how important this job was, an opportunity for her to right herself, to get the crew pointed in a good direction again. The trust. And then the risk–not to her own self, but to the few people on the Continent she’d ever been close to.

“You can’t meet my price, Vosk.” She tied up the bags, dusting off her hands. “You’re probably going to hang for what you did. Life’s rarely so tidy, but sometimes a man comes face to face with his consequences.”

And she was happy to help facilitate that.

<< Chapter 37 | Chapter 39 >>

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Concern niggled at Adal like a pebble in his boot. Riss’ reaction to Vosk’s revelations worried him. He’d been expecting her to boil over with anger–and hells, who could blame her–but instead she’d just… crumpled. She would never have done that in front of her unit, be it soldiers or mercenaries. Or so he’d thought.

They had too many pieces in play to afford a breakdown. He had to know he could count on her.

He stepped up and took over leading the group back to their campsite. With a recaptured moa in tow, they were able to pack the tents and provisions. They wouldn’t have to dial back on rations just yet. Losing all the meat meant they’d have to eat more to fill themselves up, but they’d manage. The dog followed them at a distance, visible sometimes through gaps in the foliage. They had no scraps to spare it, but it didn’t seem deterred by that.

They returned to the ruined logging camp. Vosk admitted he could lead them out from there, as the routes he and Lukra took were well-trod enough. Calay glared sunken-eyed murder at him. Gaz just trudged along, silent.

He again refused Calay’s offer of eyedrops. The stars dancing across his vision had mostly subsided.

“So what did you do with all the cloth?” Torcha asked, gazing at the lumpy, doubled-over remains of a crawling tree, faint traces of bone bubbled beneath the surface of its bark. Adal thought he could spy a legbone of some sort, a femur perhaps, warped and curved as it had bent beneath the tree’s bark.

Torcha made a good point. If Vosk and his few survivors had looted the caravan, they couldn’t have snuck that past Tarn.

Vosk paused, silent, as if he might object. Torcha growled low in her throat. Adal had always found her voice too high, too young to be remotely threatening. But he supposed Vosk hadn’t known the girl since she was fourteen. The growl had the desired effect on him.

“There’s a series of caves in one of these hillsides, on the route back.”

Torcha swung an interested look toward Riss.

Encouragingly, Adal nodded. “We might as well salvage something out of this. If nothing else it’s proof of our version of events for Baron Tarn.”

Riss huffed. “What kind of caves?” she asked Vosk. “I am tired of things trying to eat me.”

“Shallow caves,” Vosk promised. “More like overhangs, really. Likely can’t even fit the lot of us.”

They paused for a short break, eating slices of cheese on hardtack and dried fruit. No one spoke, each likely contemplating just how close they’d come to making the march on starvation rations.

###

The walk to the caves was blessedly uneventful. Adal brought up the rear, vision fully recovered. None of the prisoners tried any funny business. Nothing leapt from the shadows intending to make a meal of them.

And, perhaps most surprisingly of all, the environment turned almost beautiful. They gained elevation gradually, walking through clumps of reedy, bug-infested marsh and into a slightly drier area. Rolling hills surrounded them, dotted with low bushes. The strange, fragile-looking paper lantern fungi returned.

A small burbling creek bisected their trail. Vosk nodded down toward it.

“Cut left along the creek here, off the path. That’ll take you to the caverns.”

Though Adal couldn’t help but be wary, they did as instructed. Vosk had lied about nearly everything when they’d first met him. It was risky to trust him now. But they had reached a point where the second he ceased to be useful, he’d be crippled and trussed up on the moa and carried to Tarn as a screaming, wounded wreck. He seemed to grasp that.

The sound of running water was a relief. Adal, a child of the Deel River and its temperamental god, had grown up around it. It meant an end to the rank stagnation of the swamp. It meant a way out–if things got truly dire, they could follow the creek to its source, most likely. Higher ground.

Running water always meant good things.

The caves were in the correct location and just as described. Adal would have described them more as crevices, really. Little overhangs and cracks in between some rocky outcrops that made up a perilous, crumbling hillside. The hill had crumbled at some point, forming a natural dam in the creek, and a rocky pool now glimmered in the sunlight.

Sunlight?

Adal glanced up. The sight of blue sky took his breath away. It had been days since he’d seen more than a glimpse of it. Riss noticed him looking and glanced up too. Soon, all six of them were staring upwards, marveling at the stretch of blue overhead. Trees still crowded in on three cardinal directions, but it was as close to a glimpse of the outside world as they’d had in a week. That patch of blue sky felt like the first breath after a long underwater swim, a sensation of coming up for air, of resurfacing, of re-emerging into the world.

“Would you look at that.” Calay gave a delighted little laugh, turning his face into the sunlight. A thin haze of clouds zig-zagged across their little slice of sky, diffusing the sunlight. But Calay bathed his face in it regardless, still chuckling. In fresh natural light, he looked ghastly. Recovered from the state he’d been in earlier, sure, but that was like saying a freshly-deceased corpse looked better than a Meduese mummy.

For a fraction of a moment, Adal almost forgot what Calay was. Almost let the secret slip from his mind. For a blink, he was just another mercenary relieved to see the sun come out. A brother-in-arms emerging from the muck alongside Adal and Riss and Torcha.

The sorcerer took Adal’s eye as an invitation to conversation, like he’d caught a glimpse into that vulnerability and intended to seize it like a viper.

“The Janel coast is a dreary, foggy place,” he said. “This much sunlight makes a fine day back home.”

“Mm.” Gaz grunted agreement alongside him. “A day you could put the washing out.”

“We’re in a swamp,” Adal reminded them. “I wouldn’t hang your laundry out regardless of the amount of sunlight.”

Riss grabbed everyone’s reins then, clearing her throat and hooking a gesturing hand toward the series of crevices and outcrops. She didn’t bother speaking, just whipped her hand and everyone followed. Apart from a nap and a couple aborted nights, Adal had barely slept. Nobody else was in any better shape. A strong grunt and orders to follow worked wonders when one was half-asleep on one’s feet.

Riss shoved Vosk to the fore of the group, marching him ahead of her. She kept a hand clasped on his shoulder despite his bound hands, clearly just as aware as Adal was that the man could not be trusted. Vosk led them past the pool and a pair of shed-sized boulders which had tumbled down the crumbling hill in whatever landslide had dammed the creek. They passed from sunlight into shadow, the shade noticeably cooler. But here, with stone underfoot, it was a dry cool. It was refreshing in its own way. Adal sniffed the air, breathed in the aroma of sun-baked stone. It smelled somehow clean, or at least less terminally damp.

The path between the boulders was a tight squeeze; they had to take it single-file. Vosk led them through, Riss following closely behind. They filed into an area just as Vosk had described: a shallow cave, more of an overhang than anything. It was perhaps the size of a small wagon-hold, or a cabin on one of the Altave paddleships, with a low ceiling that twisted with gnarled roots. Vosk, Riss, and Gaz all ducked inside–Gaz with some difficulty, the large man having to adopt a slight crouch–but Calay hesitated. He fixated on the roots, hand tensing at his side, and that little twitch of trepidation made Adal pause midstep. Were it anyone else, his instinct might have been to ask if he was all right or offer some words of assurance. Instead, he glanced away, studying the lichen-dappled stone until the man moved on.

As Vosk promised, the cave was a tight fit. They spilled into a second overhang, another nook in the same eroded hillside. Torcha wasn’t able to get the moa through the narrow passage, so she tethered it just outside and left it to nose at the ground. They unpacked their things. Nobody needed to discuss it–they were camping here long enough to rest.

Sunlight. Dry air. The sensation of sinking down onto a bedroll. Adal had to consciously remind himself that they were still in the shit. Circumstances may not have been as dire as when the war was at its worst, but they were far from home clear.

Once everyone was settled, Riss clucked her tongue his way.

“You got a minute?”

“Rather busy,” he said, glugging water from his canteen. “I have an evening massage scheduled as well as supper with the Generals.”

Riss stared at him like she’d temporarily forgotten what a joke was. Then she laughed, a tiny disbelieving sound, and rose up with a groan.

“That’s where I’m headed soon as all this is over,” she said.

Much of their time on Entitlement had been spent in a particular massage parlor, enjoying perfumed baths and endless rub-downs and therapeutic needles and teas that were likely laced with something only semi-legal.

“Well, all we gotta do is stay alive a few more days.” Torcha’s cheery interjection came with a little wag of her pistol, which was still trained in Gaz and Calay’s direction.

Riss cast a look down the barrel of Torcha’s gun as she headed out.

“I’m too tired to give anyone a speech about what a bad idea it would be to try anything,” she said. “Torcha, if anyone moves, just do what’s gotta be done.”

Riss led him out of earshot of the cavern, following the rocky edge of the pool. All the old Recce tricks were second nature: walk on bare stone when you could, put moving water between yourself and anyone you didn’t want to hear you. They stood where the creek emptied into the pool, watching it flow, a couple of river kids taking solace in the sound of home.

As always, Riss wasn’t one to waste time with small talk.

“I’ve made up my mind about the witch,” she said. “I’m giving you an opportunity to reason me out if it if you disagree.”

Adal hiked his eyebrows up and listened.

“If they’re traveling on foot and taking odd jobs, I reckon there’s a price on this fellow’s head.” Riss scratched at her teeth with a thumbnail. Adal watched her reflection in the rippled surface of the pool. “If he hadn’t run afoul of someone, he’d still be doing whatever the hells they were doing back in Vasile. A fellow that educated doesn’t just pack up and hop south to do merc work. Unless they’re you, I suppose.”

He couldn’t argue with any of that.

“My only concern is whether he deduces that and decides there’s nothing left to lose.” Blood sorcery was such a seldom-practiced art that nobody knew the true extent of its capabilities, even in Adal’s family circles. If Calay felt himself cornered, he was likely capable of defense measures they couldn’t counter.

“There’s the question of what we’d do with him once we returned to Adelheim,” Adal added, thinking aloud. “Whatever bounty there might be on him definitely hasn’t reached the Deel or else we’d have heard. I can’t remember the last time I heard word of a sorcerer in these parts. Possibly never. Tarn would have heard.”

Riss’ brows lifted. She kicked a pebble into the pool and made a thoughtful sound.

“Tarn. There’s an idea. Maybe we just hand him over to Tarn.”

Adal searched the cobwebbed recesses of his brain for any provincial knowledge. Was sorcery in and of itself illegal in the Deel? It was certainly feared and hated, the way all bogeymen from childhood nightmares were. But sorcerous practitioners themselves were so rare that most places who hadn’t dealt with one in living memory didn’t even bother to outlaw their presence. What was the point of making something illegal if it didn’t exist outside of spooky stories?

“We’ve been out here long enough,” Riss said, turning from the pool and walking toward the treeline. “Let’s gather some firewood and at least put up a pretense we weren’t plotting behind Calay’s back. He’s a canny guy. I think he’ll be aware.”

Adal followed her, seeking out a few thick branches among the deadfall. The wood here would burn better, dry as it was. If it weren’t for how completely to shit everything else had fallen, this might be their first pleasant afternoon on this whole damned expedition.

“So we’re staying the night?”

Riss shot him a look across the clearing. Her eyes were deeper set than usual, framed with harsh, tired lines.

“I don’t know about you,” she said. “But I’ve needed real sleep ever since Vosk tipped this expedition on its ass.”

They returned to camp with the Calay question as yet unanswered.

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