“Someone’s coming,” Tif heard her fa say, though his words seemed to be traveling all the way down the mountain to get to her.
“We should wake her,” her ma said, the sound of her closer. “We can’t have people seeing her like this.”
Tif blinked her eyes open and saw her ma staring down at her, soon joined by her fa. They both seemed a bit crazed, like they were looking at a pile of glittering gold. Or a sewer asp they couldn’t escape from. Her mind moved slowly; she had gotten back from the underground late and tossed and turned on her pallet with all the things she wanted to tell her already asleep parents.
“What are--” Tif reached up and that’s when she saw them: tattoos, bright red lines and dots covering her arm and hand. She stood, twisting, the fog of sleep evaporating as she tried to see all her exposed skin at once. The markings didn’t glisten like Gold ris, but they had the same slick sheen and a pure, consistent color ink couldn’t match. “How much is there?”
“They’re everywhere,” her fa grunted.
“They’re beautiful,” her ma said, reaching out as if she wanted to touch them but couldn’t quite bring herself to.
“This doesn’t make any sense…” Tif said. Torgath hadn’t had any ris, she had checked. And even if he had been drained of power at the time, making his tattoos invisible, the cyclops couldn’t just give it to Tif. That’s not how ris worked; it came from an Aspect or not at all.
“It’s a gift,” her ma said. “A gift from the Aspects.”
“From Blood?” her fa said, dubiously. “She’d have to be sacrificing buckets of the stuff to get this much. You been going on a bleeding spree when we weren’t looking?”
“No, no,” Tif said, unable to keep up with what was happening. “I just--”
“Tif!”
The shout turned all of their heads to see that Awt was picking his way through the alley toward them, and he wasn’t alone. He had three thugs with him: two men and the woman guard, Viv, armed with a sword, cudgel, and spear, respectively. They weren’t holding their weapons up, but the set of their jaws made it clear they would use them if needed.
Awt stopped a few feet away, motioning for his muscle to stay back, which they did. Though, from the looks they gave each other, Tif wasn’t sure how much authority he really had over them.
“Tif,” Awt said. The way he used her name sounded tense to Tif even if his face remained neutral like usual. “You need to come with me. You’re giving back what you took.”
“What’s this now?” Tif’s fa said, stepping between the newcomers and Tif. “She can’t give it back unless there was a Blood Aspect about and there can’t be one of those for thousands of miles.”
Awt frowned. “Heb, you and Lil stay out of this. Tif’s gotten herself tied up in something bigger than all of us, but I can make it alright.” His expression slid from neutral to serious. “As long as everyone does what I say.”
Tif stepped up beside her fa. “The only person I’ll give them back to is the cyclops who gave them to me.” She still hadn’t worked out how Torgath had done it, but it was the only possible explanation. The real reason she said it though was to see how Awt would react, and sure enough he twitched at the mention of the underground’s prisoner.
“Cyclops?” her mother gasped from behind.
“He’s gone,” the wiry man with the cudgel said. He didn’t sound happy or sad about it, just matter of fact.
Now it was Tif’s turn to flinch. She had spoken to him only hours before, could still hear his heavy voice, and he was gone?
“How? Where?” Tif said.
“He took his own life,” Awt said before anyone else could interject.
Tif stared at him, wishing she could tell if he was lying or not, but like usual he gave next to nothing away, and frustratingly, neither did the other three. Torgath could still be alive or had been tortured to death, and she didn’t have a clue.
“Then I’ll be keeping this ris,” she said. “If he had wanted to give it to you all, he would have done it before I met him.”
“Dammit, Tif!” Awt said. “You’re coming with us and giving it to whoever we tell you to because it wasn’t yours to have in the first place.”
“Neither were those lotto tickets.”
“This is much bigger than your tickets.” Awt stepped closer to her, putting them only a few feet apart. “If you don’t come with me right now,” he hissed, “I can’t protect you.” His eyes had a desperate edge, which she hadn’t seen since they had been kids. Awt always found a way to take advantage of any situation. He must truly be out of his depth this time.
“Enough talking,” said the man with the sword at his hip. He was even shorter than Awt but his frame was packed with muscle. Scars crisscrossed his flesh, including one through his right eye, which was milky white. Tif wondered if he ever needed to use his sword to intimidate people, his body easily doing the job for him. He pushed past Awt to stand in front of Tif. “Time to go.”
Unexpectedly, Tif’s frail ma dashed past her, leaping onto the one-eyed man. Her slight frame barely made him move, but she latched onto his stocky bulk with her long limbs.
“Tif, run!” she cried.
Tif’s fa and Awt looked just as surprised as she had been, but not a moment later her fa was waving his arms around, cavorting back and forth.
“Hurry, girl!” he said.
Tif’s heart swelled in love for her parents, but she wasn’t going to do anything of the sort. There was no telling what these brutes would do to her parents if left alone. At the least, they’d take them hostage until Tif turned herself over, and she wasn’t about to let her parents end up in a cage like Torgath had been.
“--off me, woman,” the one-eyed man said, shoving Tif’s ma to the ground.
As soon as her ma was out of the way, Tif stepped forward and punched the man in the chest. She didn’t know if Blood ris worked like Gold at all, but she had the power of an Aspect behind her. It should do something.
Her knuckles connected solidly with the leather tunic he wore, and the man didn’t budge an inch--didn’t so much as grunt. He backhanded her across the face, and she stumbled to the side, hearing her ma gasp and Awt shout something.
The inside of her lip had cut against her teeth, Tif could tell from the sudden taste of blood in her mouth, and the side of her jaw smarted. But then spots along her neck flushed warm, and the pain melted away as quickly as it had started. She tested with her tongue and found the skin inside her mouth smooth. Had her Blood ris healed her?
The man went to punch her with the same hand, and Tif, wide-eyed at her discovery, managed to jerk away in time. He overbalanced, not expecting to miss, and she caught hold of his hairy arm with her Pep hand. Tif used the added balance he gave her to kick him in the side, and the man did grunt this time, looking slightly annoyed. He drew his sword in his other hand threateningly, but then his eyes fluttered--both his regular brown one and the white one--and he slipped from her grasp, landing hard on the ground, his fallen sword clanging loudly in the cobble alley.
Looking down at him, she caught Pep smiling back at her between her fingers, as if proud of what they had just accomplished together. Tif for her part felt energized, bouncing on her toes, not much different from other fights she’d been in. She wasn’t sure why he had passed out, but if she could heal, they were going to have a hard time making her do anything at all.
A hand grabbed her arm, and Tif experienced a spike in her already abundant vigor.
“Ah!” someone cried beside her.
She turned to see it was the wiry man with the cudgel who had tried to grab her, and strangely, he was holding one of his hands like her skin had bit him.
While he was distracted, Tif took a quick step toward him and snapped her right leg up beside his head. Before he could react, she brought her foot back, cracking her heel into his jaw. He crashed to the ground and laid there just as unmoving as the first man.
“Tif, stop!” she heard Awt yell. Turning, she saw he was breathing hard even though she was the one doing all the work. “Vak-Lav will just send more, as many as it takes to get back what you have. The more you do this, the worse it will be for all of us in the end.”
Tif only half heard his words though. She was staring at his nose trying to figure out what was different about him. Then it hit her.
“Where is your ris?” Tif asked him in disbelief.
“I gave it up,” he answered stiffly. “To prove my commitment to the cause.”
Tif glanced at the two men she had downed, realizing with horror that neither of them had any Gold ris on their faces either. Aspects would sense the lack when near and would point them out for everyone around to see. And when knights found them, they would be exiled from Lercel. Before Tif could ask Awt what in the world he had been thinking, she saw the guard lift her spear up to her ear.
“Idiots,” the woman growled, “letting someone with Blood close. Only one way to deal with their kind.” The guard flung the weapon at Tif.
Tif wanted to move, but there was no time, and in that split second of knowing she was about to take a spear to the chest, she prayed to the Aspects that her Blood ris really would heal her.
And then, somehow, her fa was in front of her, blocking her view. He grunted, falling back into her, and Tif caught him, quickly shifting positions when it was clear he wasn’t staying standing. Lowering him to the ground, she found the spear sprouting from his gut, blood bubbling around the wood haft.
“No, no, no!” she said, bringing her hands to her face. He coughed wetly, a terrible sound, just as her ma reached them both--knees hitting the ground hard and a low moan escaping her parted lips.
This wasn’t how the day after she had won the lotto was supposed to be. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be at all.
“You can--”
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The sound of Awt talking behind her made Tif pop up and spun around, catching him by the throat. Her eyes were full of budding tears, so he was a watery blur in front of her, but she could feel him try to jerk away. She also felt a rush of vitality again, and this time Tif let herself fall into the sensation: there was a subtle heat with the energy, running down the arm that held Awt and then across her whole body, making her feel focused and fresh, the muscles of her arm and chest growing flush, begging to be used. And it wasn’t just a feeling--even through her obscured vision, Tif could see the red tattoos of her arm growing brighter by the second.
She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and spotted a blocky smudge that had to be the woman guard running out of the alley at a dead sprint.
“...save...him...” Awt gasped.
Tif dropped him to the ground.
“This is your fault,” she said, her mouth salty from the tears. “If you hadn’t come here with those people--”
“Give him your ris,” Awt wheezed, taking in a long breath. His flesh was pallid where she had been touching him.
Tif caught his meaning so quickly she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it herself. Her Blood ris had healed her, and Torgath had given it to her so it was possible she could give it to someone else. Maybe transference was Blood ris’s trait like Gold’s was beauty.
She crouched over her fa, brushing the wet from her eyes. There was so much blood, leaking around the wooden haft of the spear and darkening his clothes as far down as his knees and as high up as his shoulders. She put her hand on his arm and it was slapped away. Tif looked up in surprise at her ma and saw her lined face looking at her accusingly.
“You’re hurting him!” her ma said, and only then did Tif realize that her fa had cried out at the touch. She must have been taking from him like she had with the others instead of giving.
“Deserved it,” her fa managed to say. “Aspect knows I’ve done you wrong.”
He tried to say more but couldn’t, and Tif swore she could feel the excruciating pain he was going through, lancing from his gut up to the tip of his head.
“How do I do it?” she asked Awt.
“I don’t know,” Awt said, from where he still sat. “I just know you can.”
“Leave, get away,” her fa rasped, to which her ma began saying that they absolutely would not.
Tif closed her eyes, trying to block them both out while remembering exactly what Torgath had done. Their skin had stuck together at first, but she didn’t think that was the way because she had gotten weaker then. That must have been him using the Blood ris to take. But then he had reversed it somehow. She didn’t remember him doing any specific movement, not like Gold ris forms. He had just made it happen.
“You need to do it now,” Awt said.
Opening her eyes, Tif breathed and then gently took hold of her fa, scared she would hurt him again. Immediately, she started feeling heat moving up the back of her hand, but she snapped her eyes to that point on her wrist and concentrated on stopping it and pushing that energy back into her fa. He groaned slightly but not too bad, and Tif imagined her fa feeling that warmth instead of her. As she did this, she tightened her grip, touching her fa more fully.
She gasped at a sudden unpleasant tugging sensation. Tif had been watching her fa, but she saw now that her red ris was creeping down her forearm, hand, and then fingers, entering her fa’s flesh. Everywhere the ris moved her skin bunched and pulled, and she closed her eyes at the strangeness of the feel, trying to stay focused on the continued push. Her concentration wavered when the tugging started coming from her shoulder, back, neck, thighs, and much of her chest, too. She grit her teeth, wondering why it had been so much easier for Torgath. It was happening faster now though, flowing off of her like rainwater and taking with it all the heat in her body it seemed.
When she was shivering but no longer feeling her skin move, Tif let go, opening her eyes again. It had worked. Both of her fa’s arms were covered in ris, and more of it wrapped around his neck to right under his jaw. There was still all the blood though, and Tif wasn’t sure how to tell if the ris was helping him. Awt shocked her by yanking the long spear out, and both she and her ma shouted at him.
He just gasped from the effort and said, “He can’t heal with this stuck in him.”
Out of all of them, her fa hadn’t reacted to the removal of the spear, which didn’t make Tif feel any more hopeful. With shaky hands, because she still felt cold and had none of the extra energy she had been brimming with before, Tif ripped an arm off her shirt--the worn cloth coming easily apart. She folded the inside out, so it was slightly cleaner, and then began to brush the blood away as best she could, and her ma quickly did the same.
The two of them were hesitant at first, wiping around the wound, which revealed the tattoos underneath--the ris only had a slight glow now. Eventually though, before her cloth became too soaked, Tif swiped across where he had been stabbed as gently as she could.
“By the Aspects,” her ma said.
The wound was gone.
“It was so fast,” Tif marveled. From beginning to end it had likely only been a few minutes since she had given her fa the ris. She had always thought that the protective barrier from the second seal of Gold ris was the ultimate protection, but this, this was a miracle.
“Probably because you had just taken from me, Gar, and Hum,” Awt said, leaning on the spear. “That gave it more fuel.”
At the mention of their names, Tif looked around the alley and started--the two men she had knocked out were gone along with their weapons. They had probably run around the same time as the woman, but she didn’t like that none of them had noticed.
“What’s this now?”
Tif’s attention whipped back to her fa, and her heart soared well past her worries at seeing him sitting up, looking at the Blood ris on his arms in disbelief.
“I gave it to you to heal you,” she explained.
“That’s right.” Awt stepped closer, the spear butt moving like a third leg. “And now we need to both pay a visit to Vak-Lav.”
Tif rounded on him, yet another thing becoming clear later than she wished. “That’s why you wanted me to give him the ris.”
He regarded her coolly. “In part, absolutely. Unlike you, your fa won’t want to anger the most powerful person in the lows. Come on, Heb. The sooner we get there, the sooner we can put this whole mess behind us.”
Tif looked at her fa who was still staring at the ris he now possessed. It was true that her fa wasn’t much of a risk taker. He would rather have flats in hand than anything promised to him, and worked hard to stay meager so no one would ever want anything from him. But this much ris? It was worth a fortune. Tif could easily imagine her fa trying to sell it to the highest bidder, forgetting about anything she or Vak-Lav might want. It was far from a pleasant thought, but he was always dismissive about her becoming a knight, and after going so far as to take her lotto tickets, Tif doubted he’d give her the ris back. She hadn’t been thinking about that when making the transfer, of course, just saving him. Now though…
“Fa--” she started
He looked up at Awt, not her, and he seemed confused of all things. “You think I’d steal from my dau twice in two days? What kind of fa do you take me for?”
Hearing that, Tif wasn’t sure if her heart could get any bigger. She threw her arms around her fa and then squeaked when her skin touched his, jerking back. It was like his touch had bit her, pulling at the little bit of energy she had left.
Her fa frowned. “Well, that’s no good. How do I get this mess off of me?”
Tif went to explain, but something metal flashed before her, and a quick look showed her that Awt had leveled the spear between them.
“You can’t do that, Heb,” he said. “We have to go to Vak-Lav.”
“If your ma could see you now,” Tif’s ma said with a mixture of sadness and reproach few could match. “Threatening the people who took you in and raised you. And after causing so much trouble.”
Awt dropped the spear point to the ground, but didn’t look chastened. “This wasn’t because of me,” he snapped. “It was Tif and that cyclops.”
“And who brought the cyclops here?” Tif’s ma said. “You’re gone for a spell and one suddenly pops up in Lercel after all these years? Too close for coincidence I say.” Awt opened his mouth, but her ma got there first, “And don’t forget who taught you to lie.” He closed it, looking more than a little frustrated.
Tif hadn’t wanted to believe that Awt had been involved like that with Torgath, but his lack of denial was as good as him shouting that he certainly had been.
“Please,” Awt tried. “I’m doing this to protect you.”
“Just like you protected us from those thugs?” her fa gruffed. “The ones you brought to our home? Don’t think we forgot about that part.”
“And who’s to say that everything will go well if Vak-Lav gets what they want?” her ma added.
“I do,” Awt said, but her ma waved that assurance away. “Tif.” Awt had turned to her, his expression actually pleading. “Trust me, please.”
“Is Torgath still alive or not?” she asked him.
He was quiet a moment before answering. “Bring the Blood ris back with me and see for yourself.”
“I think…” she said, “it’s going to be a long time before I can trust you again.” It hadn’t hurt her to say the words, but seeing his reaction did: a terrible hardening, as if the last bit of softness had just been squeezed out of him. Tif didn’t back down though, the tiles between them had been flipped, and they both knew what they meant.
He gripped the spear tighter, looking like he might attack them, but then he threw it to the side where it clattered. Awt spun around, stalking out of the alley.
“That poor boy,” Tif’s ma said, shaking her head.
Tif agreed but she needed to have words with her fa. Taking the time to really look at him, he was a sight: nearly a shade lighter from all the blood he had lost, which was dried a ruddy brown up and down his front, along with a large tear in the middle of his shirt.
“You jumped in front of a spear for me.”
“Ah, well,” he said, looking abashed of all things. “Tripped more like. But even so, owed you that much after taking your dream, didn’t I?”
He hadn’t said that part when talking to Awt, but it meant he knew about her winning the lotto. “You heard?”
“Course he did,” her ma said, making it clear who exactly he had heard it from.
“And then you saved me right back, despite what I done,” he went on, “giving me this, even though all you’ve ever wanted is some ris.” He lifted his arms. “And you stole it out from under Vak-Lav’s nose,” he laughed. “That took some spunk, that did. I’ve tried to keep your eyes low, but they just won’t go. Not meant to I suppose, though I was long in seeing it.” He paused, somehow looking more fully at her than he had been thus far. “Couldn’t ask for a better dau, that’s the truth of it.”
Tif felt fit to bursting and wiped the wetness away from her eyes. “Stop saying nice things when I can’t hug you.”
“That’s right,” her ma said, “time for that ris to go.”
“Sure enough,” he said but then hesitated, and Tif felt a touch of worry. She knew that look. “Maybe I keep just a bit,” he said. “Could be useful in a pinch.
Her ma swatted him, careful to hit rags not skin. “I’m not living with a man I can’t touch.”
He looked at her a tense moment--tense to Tif at least--and then a wide smile broke through his beard, showing off the teeth he had left.
“Too true. Not worth trading that away.”
Tif’s ma looked rather pleased, smiling back, but she said, “Well, get on with it. We’ve spent too long here already.”
Tif and her fa got to talking while her ma went to their wall. It took a few tries and some moments of extreme lightheadedness, but her fa finally managed to transfer all of the Blood ris back to her. Tif nearly sighed in delight at its return. She didn’t have quite as much vigor as when fighting the brutes, but it was definitely more than before, and the way the warmth of the ris suffused her before settling into a temperature slightly above normal was very nice.
Her ma bustled back over to where Tif and her fa were standing now, her garment stuffed full of small lumps that represented everything they owned.
“You two need to go into hiding,” Tif told them.
He fa nodded, rubbing his belly. “Aye, no mistaking they’re serious.”
“Don’t worry,” her ma said. “Ree told me that her and her kin found a liveable spot in the sewers. No one will want to find us bad enough to go there looking.”
Tif was relieved to hear it. That was good, good for now at least.
“And what about you?” her ma asked, and her fa looked interested to hear as well.
Tif couldn’t help but smile at the question. They were asking her, not telling, trusting her to choose what she wanted to do.
With everything that had happened, her thoughts were far from all together, but she did have some ideas. Healing and sapping energy were two very different abilities, which meant she had at least two seals of Blood ris.
And if she had two seals…
Tif smiled. “I’m going to recruitment.”