Bloodwitch

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  FOR WHITNEY

  That which is closest, she cannot see.

  A strand fallen from the weave, cast adrift on winds of flame.

  A knife with two sides.

  Blood on the snow.

  —from “Eridysi’s Lament”

  THIRTEEN YEARS AGO

  Maybe today will be different.

  For three peals of the chimes above the gatehouse, the boy has been playing with others. Six of them. Never has he been addressed by so many his age. Certainly, he has never been allowed in a game of fox and hen.

  And certainly he has never smiled this much. His cheeks ache from the grinning, but he can’t stop.

  Lizl is catching up. She’s the fox in this round, and the boy is the only hen left. She laughs. The boy laughs. It feels good, swelling in his chest. Bubbling up his throat like the spring behind the dormitories.

  He can’t remember if he’s ever laughed before today. He hopes this game never ends.

  Lizl catches up. She’s older, longer-legged, and nimble in a way none of the other acolytes are. The boy overheard his mentor discussing yesterday that they might move her up to the next level of training.

  Lizl’s hand slams onto the boy’s shoulder. “Caught you!” Her fingers dig into the loose linen of his monastery tunic. She yanks back, forcing the boy to stop.

  He laughs, a high, gleeful sound. Even the muscles in his stomach hurt now, and his cheeks—oh, his cheeks!

  Which is why it takes him a moment to notice that Lizl is no longer moving. He’s too happy for the monster inside to be waking up.

  But then one of the other acolytes—Kerta, who’d been the first hen caught—calls, “Lizl? Are you all right?”

  The boy realizes what’s happening. Panic takes hold, his mind blanking out. His stomach shoveling low.

  Let go, he tells himself. Let go, let go, let go. If he doesn’t, Lizl is going to die, just like his dog died. But this is worse than losing Boots. This is a person. This is a girl he was playing with only moments ago. This is Lizl.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Kerta closes in, not yet alarmed. Merely confused.

  Let go, let go, let go.

  “Why isn’t she moving?”

  The boy stumbles back. “Please,” he says to the monster inside. Or perhaps he’s addressing Lizl. Or Kerta. Anyone who will make the girl’s blood pump again.

  If it doesn’t, Lizl’s brain will stop working. She will die.

  Just like Boots.

  Kerta notes the boy’s terror now, and the other children start noticing too. “What did you do?” one boy demands.

  “Did you hurt her?” another asks.

  “Bloodwitch,” declares the third, a bully named Natan, and that’s when the boy sees it: the sudden understanding that flashes in their eyes. The collective hitching of their breaths and recoiling of their necks.

  Now they know why the other children won’t play with him. Now they know why he’s trained separately from other acolytes, alone with Monk Evrane.

  It doesn’t matter that seconds later Lizl coughs and crumples to the stones. It doesn’t matter that she lives and the monster has gone. It doesn’t matter that this was an accident, that the boy would never have hurt her on purpose.

  The damage is done. The smiles are gone. The shouting, the fleeing, the hate—it’s all starting again, as it always does.

  They throw rocks after him as he races for the spring behind the dormitory. An old well no one uses anymore. It is overgrown with thorns that only he, with his wounds that always heal, can charge through.

  Streaks of pain cut through his awareness. This shrub has fangs. It distracts, as does the drip-drip of blood once he reaches the water.

  He sinks to his haunches on the stone shore, ashamed when more than blood splashes the cold waters. Crying, he knows, is not what monks do.

  Worse than the tears, though, worse than the thorns’ vicious bite and worse than the welts from the children’s rocks, are the sore muscles in the boy’s cheeks. A reminder of what he almost had. Of what he had had for a few perfect hours.

  He was born a monster, he will die a monster, and monsters do not get to have friends.

  ONE

  The blood looked fresh in the rain.

  Weeping, oozing, even streaming in some places, the water from the storm hit wounds on corpses that had been stagnant for days. The granite bedrock would not accept the offering, and a river of blood slid downhill, following the terrain, gathering around Aeduan’s boots. So many blood-scents to mingle against his magic, so many dead for his gaze to drag across.

  This was the third massacre he’d found in two weeks. The third time he’d followed carnage on the air, the third time he’d smelled wet caves and white-knuckled grips amidst the slaughter. He was catching up to the attackers.

  Catching up to his father’s men.

  The four stabs in Aeduan’s abdomen spurted with each of his hunched breaths. He should have left the arrows where they’d hit, let the Threadwitch remove them with her careful hands instead of yanking them out as soon as they’d punched through stomach wall. Twenty years of habit were hard to change in just two weeks, though.

  He also hadn’t expected the barbs.

  Aeduan sucked in a ragged breath, rain coursing into his open mouth. There was nothing to keep him here, and the scent he’d hoped to find—the one he’d followed for two weeks, ever deeper into the Sirmayans—was not nearby. Oh, the summer heather and impossible choices that marked her blood had been here, but she had moved on. Before the attack, he assumed, or she too would now be numbered among the dead.

  Before Aeduan could turn away from the corpses and limp for the evergreen forest whence he’d come, a new blood-scent tickled against his nose. Vaguely familiar, as if he had once met the owner and bothered to catalog the man’s blood, but had never tucked it aside to remember forever.

  The smell was sharp. Still alive.

  Between one heartbeat and the next, Aeduan changed course. Thirty-four careful steps over gape-mouthed bodies. Rain sprayed into his eyes, forcing him to blink again and again. Then the stone expanse gave way to a mossy carpet stained to red. More bodies, all ages, all angles, covered the earth with a density that spoke of attempted escape. The square Nomatsi shields on their backs, though, had done nothing to stop the ambush from the front.

  Blood, blood and empty eyes everywhere he looked.

  Onward he picked across the bodies until at last he reached the swaying conifers. The scent he’d caught was thicker here, but the pine-needle floor was also slippery, dangerous from the storm. Aeduan had no desire to fall. He might heal from every scrape, every broken bone, but that did not mean it wouldn’t hurt.<
br />
  Or drain his magic further, which was the problem now. Stomach wounds were particularly unwieldy to repair.

  Aeduan inhaled. Exhaled. Counting, waiting, watching as his blood dribbled out and the world fell away. He was not his mind. He was not his body.

  He kept moving.

  But then, over distant thunderclaps from the south, he heard a human groan. “Help.” With that word, his senses sharpened, his spine straightened, and a new energy kicked in.

  He strode faster. Rain splashed beneath his boots. Thunder rolled to the south. He followed a path through the spruce trees, their trunks creaking like ships at sea; he knew this was a Nomatsi road. He knew that traps like the one he’d triggered beside the morning glories likely waited ahead.

  “Help.”

  The voice was weaker, but closer—as was the scent of the dying man’s blood. A monk, Aeduan realized, when at last he crossed a dip in the path where a stream swelled with storm. Three steps up the rocky hill, a fallen white robe lay stained to rusty brown. And three steps beyond, with his back pressed against a fallen log, the robe’s owner clutched at wounds in his belly.

  Wounds like Aeduan’s, that had come from traps meant to protect the Nomatsi tribe. Unlike Aeduan, though, this man had not removed the arrows.

  For half a moment, Aeduan thought he could help the man. That he could use what remained of his own power to stop the man’s bleeding. He had done it before with Evrane; he could do it again. The vast city of Tirla was no more than half a day away.

  But even if Aeduan could sustain such power in his current state, there could be no healing the sword gash on the monk’s thigh. The femoral artery was split wide, and though rain fell hard enough to clear away blood, the artery gushed faster.

  The man had only minutes left to live.

  “Demon,” the man burbled. Blood seeped from the edges of his mouth down his seamed chin, riding the rain. “I … remember you.”

  “Who did this?” Aeduan asked. There was no time to be wasted on names or useless memories. If anyone had been trained for death, it was the Carawens. And if anyone could help Aeduan make sense of this slaughter, it was the dying man before him.

  “Purists.”

  Aeduan blinked. Rain splattered off his lashes. The Purists, though foul members of humanity, were not known for violence. Except …

  Except when Purists were not Purists at all.

  “Help,” the man begged, clutching at the wound across his thigh.

  At that sight, anger thickened in Aeduan’s throat. Mercenary monks faced the Void’s embrace without fear, without begging. To see desperation darken the man’s eyes—it was wrong. All wrong.

  Yet Aeduan still found his magic reaching out. Spiraling around the white fire and iron ore that made the monk who he was. A pointless endeavor, for there was so little blood left inside the man’s veins it felt like trying to catch wind. No matter how tightly he grasped, his magic always came up empty.

  “Why did you not use your stone?” Aeduan asked, and he glared at the man’s ear. At the Carawen opal that glistened there, waiting to summon other monks in case of an emergency.

  The man shook his head, a bare trace of movement. “Sur … prise.” The word came out choked with blood, his face paler and paler with each breath. “Trained … better.”

  Impossible, Aeduan wanted to say. No one is trained better than a Carawen mercenary. But then the man started coughing and reached for his mouth, and Aeduan realized he bore the burn-flecked hands of a blacksmith, the lopsided shoulders of a man who worked the forge.

  An artisanal monk. The least combat-ready of all the Carawens. Why was this man here at all, away from the monastery and away from his post?

  Aeduan’s lips parted to ask, but before the words could rise, the monk’s final breath escaped from punctured lungs. His heart slowed to silence. All life vanished from his blood.

  And Aeduan was left staring at yet another corpse rotting beneath the rain.

  TWO

  Iseult thought he might not be coming back. All night, she had waited—since dusk, when Aeduan had first strode off to inspect the path ahead.

  The sun set, the moon rose, the rain came. The moon set, the rain subsided. Until at last, mist and dawn laid claim to the mountainside. Still, Aeduan did not appear.

  Logically, Iseult knew it was unlikely that he would never return. After everything that they had been through together, why would he abandon her now? Two weeks, he had stayed by her side. Two weeks he had guided Owl and Iseult higher into the Sirmayans with neither payment nor prod to force him onward.

  Viscerally, though, Iseult could find a thousand reasons the Bloodwitch would never return. A thousand excuses from coin to company for why he’d strode into the foggy forest at dusk and why he might never come back.

  The story that shone brightest though, as the sun’s first rays clambered over mountain peaks, was that he was kept away not by choice, but by captor. Or injury.

  Or death.

  That possibility sent her pacing on the gravel clearing beside their campsite. Ten steps one way. Pivot. Ten steps the other. Pivot. She never left sight of the narrow entrance leading to a dry, cozy cave of Owl’s creation. Inside, the girl’s mountain bat, Blueberry, curled fiercely around the child’s sleeping form, leaving little space for anyone else.

  Not that Iseult could have slept had she been in there too. Sleep had been her enemy for days now. Ever since the fire and the voice that controlled it had slithered into her dreams. Burn them, whispered a leering face consumed by flame. Each night he came to her. Burn them all.

  She had tried to cleave him in her sleep. Tried to sever his Threads and corrupt his fire magic, just as she had done in her waking in the Contested Lands, but the man had only laughed while the flames swept higher. Flames that were all too real, as she’d learned that first night, when Aeduan had roused her. A stray ember from the campfire, he’d said, and too much kindling nearby.

  Iseult had not bothered to contradict him. She also had not slept again, and that lack of sleep had left her with no means to speak to Esme about why this was happening. About why the Firewitch she had killed now seemed to live inside her.

  No exhaustion burned in Iseult’s eyes tonight, though. She wanted to leave—wanted to walk between those pines exactly as Aeduan had done at dusk and search every corner of the shadowy terrain, even if she knew it would be a fruitless hunt: Aeduan was too skilled to leave tracks behind.

  Besides, she could hardly leave Owl.

  Either Aeduan would return or he would not, and Iseult would keep marching back and forth until she had her answer.

  Iseult heard him approach before she saw him. It was so unlike the ever-cautious Bloodwitch that she actually drew a cutlass from the sheath at her waist. There were bears in these woods. Mountain cats, too. And unlike humans, they bore no Threads—no colors to tendril and twirl above them, telling Iseult what they felt and to whom they were bound.

  It was no Threadless animal that stumbled from the tree line, though, but the Threadless Bloodwitch instead. The instant she saw Aeduan’s Carawen cloak brightening the shadows between the trees, cool relief crumbled through her. Until she realized something was wrong.

  He limped from the forest, and his eyes, when they slid up to hers, were hooded and lost. “They’re all dead.” The proclamation came out hoarse and low. Aeduan swayed.

  The relief in her belly splintered to horror. He was hurt. Badly.

  Without another thought, Iseult shot toward him and swooped an arm behind his back—where her hand met rain-soaked fletching and arrows. Countless bolts erupted from him like the spines of a sea urchin, and now that she looked, his cloak was shredded and stained to brown.

  Aeduan listed into her; his breath came in short gasps. His crystal eyes swirled red. Whatever was happening, he clearly would not stay upright much longer, and Iseult didn’t want him passing out on top of her. Right where Owl could walk out and see him. The girl had a tendency to shatt
er the earth when she was upset.

  There’s a spring uphill, Iseult thought, a crude plan cobbling together. I can clean him there without Owl finding us, and I can dry his clothes in the morning sun. She just had to keep Aeduan from slipping into unconsciousness before they reached the water.

  With aching slowness, she guided Aeduan up the hillside. His eyelids fluttered, his feet dragged. Each step sent the ice in her belly knotting wider. As did each arrow she counted—seventeen in total. More than enough to kill a regular man, but Aeduan was no regular man.

  Still, Iseult had seen him hit with double this many bolts before. There was something else happening here. Something deeply wrong. For some reason, he did not seem to be healing. His Bloodwitchery was not squelching or cleaning, it was not ejecting arrows and knitting him back together as she had seen it do before.

  “Are you hurt somewhere else?” Iseult pitched the question into his ear. Stay awake, stay awake. “Is there a wound I cannot see?”

  “Arrows.” The answer slurred out. Useless.

  She changed tactics. “Is this injury why you took so long to return?”

  A grunt, a vague nod. Then: “Survivor.”

  Iseult tensed. “The woman from Owl’s tribe?” Aeduan had followed the woman’s scent for almost two weeks now. Twice, they had found these massacres, and twice, the woman’s scent had continued on. This latest would mark the third instance. But when Iseult searched Aeduan’s face for answers, all she got were pallid cheeks and harsh exhales.

  “Was the woman there?” she pressed. Still no answer, though, so she let it go. They had reached the spring—thank the Moon Mother—and Iseult’s exhaustion was catching up fast. Fear could only sustain a tired body for so long.

  Iseult led Aeduan to a low boulder beside the spring’s clear pool. The creek that trickled down the mountain had doubled in size overnight, thanks to the rain. With every muscle tensed, she eased Aeduan into a sitting position. A moan escaped his throat. Pain slashed across his face; she could hear his teeth grinding.