Tallah watched the blizzard with a mug of tea held in her hands. Winter had followed them down from the mountains with dogged determination and had now stationed itself outside her window. Snow built up outside as if determined to swallow the city whole.
Her head was filled with strange images of sail ships floating through emptiness, carrying people to unknown worlds on invisible tides.
There were unknown worlds out there. There were unknown people.
The possibilities. She couldn’t keep her thoughts away from the amazing things Sil had gotten from the boy’s head.
A chance meeting in a cave, a hostage of ratmen saved to be eaten later like some cheap cut of smoked meat. She’d shown a moment of mercy in the slaughter, stayed her hand for a brief instant, and had been rewarded with finding an Other.
It stank of fore-planned coincidence. She couldn’t help but keep mulling on what exactly had stayed her hand. Was it the state of the wretch? How he had strained against his cage to warn her of danger?
Or something else entirely?
She scrunched up her nose and grimaced at her misty reflection in the clouded glass.
“You’re quiet,” Sil said from her desk. She had Anna’s wand on a support in front of her and prodded it with an array of small, sharp utensils. She’d been at it for days.
Tallah pressed her forehead to the ice-rimmed window and closed her eyes. Her fever ran high, higher even than when she infused. The chill helped keep her mind clear while her thoughts chased one another and jumped fences they shouldn’t.
“I’m just thinking.”
“Bad kind of thinking? Or good?”
“Neither. Just… thinking.”
She tried to pull in illum and instantly regretted it. Acid flooded her veins, burning from her heart to behind her eyes. Tears welled up until she released the power.
Fighting Anna had been sobering. Even with Christina aiding her she had barely survived the clash. Victory coming on a coin toss was barely anything to be happy about.
Anna had grown incredibly powerful while in hermitage, doing her dirty experiments, never known, likely rarely challenged.
Deidra, on the other hand…
She let out a groan. Why did it have to be Deidra and not Lucretia? Why was Lucian so blasted useless when she needed the sleaze?
Deidra was a bad idea altogether. She closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath. Thinking of Deidra inevitably brought up Rhine. It always did as the two of them had been so bloody close for so bloody long. Her younger sister’s dimpled smile and bright hazel eyes loomed up from the folds of time and Tallah was drawn to the memory like a moth to murderous flame.
She tried to keep Rhine’s real face in her mind’s eye for a heartbeat longer. Her sister’s fire-red hair, so much like hers, falling in waves down her shoulders. Hazel eyes that lit up the darkest, most hopeless odds. Her laugh and her fury that could charm and shatter armies.
Even as Tallah’s lips creased up into a thin, trembling smile, the memory crumpled.
The starlight in her sister’s eyes darkened to a hollowed-out stare that saw nothing. Her smile withdrew into a thin-lipped gash on a gaunt, alien face.
Who she’d found under the mountain hadn’t been her younger sister. That she could never remember Rhine properly but only as that bloody wraith made her stomach fold in on itself in anger. She snapped off the mug’s handle without meaning to, nearly spilling tea all over herself.
Deidra was striking out for her own vengeance, of that much she was certain.
And Tallah couldn’t afford another hair’s width close call. Anna had been a frothing-mad, cornered animal, and put down like one. For Deidra it would be personal, and it would hurt worse than anything the blood mage had inflicted. This time Rhine’s memory and their shared love for her wouldn’t be enough to keep them from killing one another.
They should be allies. It would make sense to pool their strength and go for Catharina’s throat together. But she knew better than most that it wouldn’t be enough. It’d barely be enough to reach the thrice-damned Empress. Only through the plan would they have a chance of surviving, and there was no way Deidra would accept it willingly.
She bit on a knuckle and worried at it with her teeth until she felt the metal taste of blood on her lips. It chased away some of the unwanted ghosts of memory. They still scratched at the scabs of wounds that refused to close. An ember of a dead smile. A ragged, shuddering breath. The emaciated, ruined figure shuffling towards the bars.
Tears stung at the corners of her eyes and she growled in frustration.
Rest more, you child. Illum still comes to your call. You have avoided the worst consequences of your gambit. Rest and stop torturing yourself over memories and failures.
Christina’s honeyed tone and her poorly veiled criticism only served to get her blood boiling. The pity in her mental voice salted all wounds Tallah bore.
You need to stop fretting, dear. It cannot be productive. You have come too far on this mission to start questioning yourself on this hour.
And now Bianca decided to weigh in as well. Of course she did.
“Are you all insistent on mothering me!?” Tallah snapped out-loud, tone terser than intended. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her nightgown.
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“I haven’t said anything,” Sil replied, distracted. “Keep your annoyances with your ghosts to yourself.” She leaned back on her stool, stretched and yawned. “Oh my soul, this thing is infuriating.”
Tallah turned away from the blizzard and picked up her mug of tea from the windowsill. It had gone cold. On impulse, she tried to reheat it and failed.
“What are you trying to do?”
Sil had been poking the bone wand for hours and it showed. Her eyes were red from the chemical fumes she used for her tests, and her face had gone paler than normal.
“Your creepy friend had this thing imbued with all sorts of interesting little effects. But it’s made of bone. And I’m certain it’s one of her own. Even with its master dead, it’s still trying to protect itself. It’s the cheekiest little piece of pettiness I’ve ever seen.”
She demonstrated this by pressing the soft tip of a brush on one side of the wand, trying to add ink into the etched grooves. The nail high runes shifted immediately, folding in on themselves.
“Anna was always secretive, Sil. All blood mages are. She’s had a century to make that wand. You won’t crack it in a fortnight.”
Sil gave her a level look that spoke of what she thought of that assessment.
“You and your clique weren’t as clever as you all thought you were,” she said. She bent back over the wand and donned her loupe. She wrote her notes left-handed and kept teasing the weapon with a burin.
Why is she like this? Bianca asked and let out a mental sigh that grated on Tallah nerves.
Everything grated on her nerves since they got back to Valen. Waiting for news about the boy was its own brand of slow torture. What Sil had told her were fragments of a fever dream that she couldn’t fit together in any useful way. The boy was alien and full of promise but stuck in a husk that may never be salvageable.
Was he even worth getting stuck in Valen over Winter? They could still leave for Solstice before the week was done while the high passes stayed open. She could manage the journey even with Sil chewing her ears off for not resting.
You won’t make the passes in your condition, even with a caravan, Christina said and accompanied the thought with a memory of last year’s blizzard that had almost buried them in the forests of Solstice. Sil had nearly lost two toes to frostbite. At your age, you should have a much better understanding of your limits, chit.
Tallah opened her mouth for a cussing reply, thought better of getting goaded into it, and instead moved closer to Sil’s desk.
“Why is it so interesting to you?”
A tome waited open on her own desk with her half-finished translation on a separate scroll. She couldn’t focus on it no matter how much she forced herself to sit still and work.
“She channelled through this from a distance. Her Flesh Dolls shouldn’t have been able to channel anything on their own. I know that much about blood magic. This should have only worked in her hand, but the dolls were passing it between them. It’s how they kept you easily pinned down.” Sil had to create a light sprite and orient it around the wand. Minuscule shadows lengthened as the runes came into relief. She grinned ear to ear, too many teeth showing as she scribbled new notes.
“And how’s that going to help us? I can’t make duplicates of myself, and I don’t use my wand.” She took wounded offence at the idea of being easily pinned.
“It’ll sate my curiosity for one thing. Unlike you, I intend to someday live peacefully somewhere and ply a trade. I don’t want to spend my entire life skulking in cold, dark places.” Without looking up she gestured with her burin at the wrapped form of the staff that hung on the wall. “For another, if I can modify the enchantment on that I wouldn’t need to haul it about everywhere we go.”
Tallah picked up the cursed horned helmet and juggled it one-handed as she paced the room. She tried not to laugh at the idea of a life to come after the mission. Sil generally took it poorly if she did.
Anna had been creative in the way she used her dolls, that was true enough. So many of them at once, all channelling as if they were the bitch herself. No wonder it had taken her so long to find the real body and deliver the killing blow.
Anna had had a century to become what she did. What would the Empress be? She’d seen the woman in battle, been at her side, witnessed the raw strength she could muster… and knew in her bones that she’d never seen Catharina truly unleashed. What a horrific spectacle that must be.
She pushed the thought away. A long way to go still, and at least one old friend’s blood to be spilled.
“I need to go see the old man,” she mused, restless in the cramped, shadow-strewn room.
A gale groaned outside the window, forcing the snow into mad dance. Tallah shivered, ten paces away from the glass and with the hearth burning at her back.
“You’re still feverish. Angledeer can wait. I can bet he’s quietly and drunkenly hibernating.” Sil did not look away from her work as she spoke. “You should get some sleep.”
As if I could get any sleep. Again, the thought only served to annoy her further. It wasn’t enough that her power had been maimed, she couldn’t even rest properly and recover.
Instead, she said, “I owe him. Without him we’d still—”
“He’ll keep. He’s got nothing but time. Go sleep. It’ll do you good.”
Tallah forced herself to drink the cold, sour tea. She set the empty mug on top of the mantel piece. Normally it would annoy Sil, but she was too entranced in her work to notice one more mug where it shouldn’t be.
“I don’t want to dream.”
Sil’s hand stopped scribbling in the middle of a word. Dark-blue eyes rimmed with red turned away from the wand and stared at her with worry.
“What?” Tallah asked, finally settling down at her desk. She threw the helmet across the room into the open storage chest. It clattered as it hit the lid and bounced away.
“Nothing.”
Quill scratched on paper again. Ice shards pattered against the window. A log snapped in the fire and threw embers against the iron grate.
“When did you start dreaming again?”
“Before we went into the caves. I don’t want to think about it.”
“Is it bad?”
“Bad enough.”
She dreamed of the mountain. Always the mountain and the cruel dark cold beneath it, the rattle of chains and the creaking of the rack. She rubbed at her left eye to dull a phantom sting and the feeling of cold metal sliding through flesh.
Now she’d also dream of Rhine. The promise of sleep terrified her worse than the Empress’s torturers ever could.
“Are you hearing the song?”
“No.”
Don’t lie to her, you absolute child. She will find out sooner or later and bleat at us for a tenday because of your cowardice.
Tallah pulled her notes closer. Words danced and swam on the page, teasing her. She squinted and tried to force herself to focus and get her mind back on her work.
The words didn’t care. They kept on dancing to the sound of sweet, distant music. Somewhere, beneath the mountain, her gallows sang out to infect her dreams and every waking moment.