Chapter 21: For My Retainer.

The village was asleep. Lanterns still burned along the main path, though most had dimmed to low, guttering things that barely kept back the dark. The square was empty. There were no sounds at all at this hour, save for the very occasional grumble of one animal or another. Otherwise, there was little but silence.

My mana reserves were rather hollow. I drew in ambient mana as I walked, but the rate of even that was a pitiful thing. I did not slow down. Ash walked beside me. She had not spoken since the forest. She had an odd expression on her face whenever I glanced in her direction -not odd enough for me to break the silence first.

The hut sat at the edge of the village, half in shadow. “She will be asleep,” I said.

“She won’t be.” Ash’s voice was certain. I wondered where she found her certainty from, though she would certainly know more about this than I.

We reached the door. It was not much of one -just rough planks of wood set into a frame of mud and clay. I raised my hand and knocked, and the sound was louder than I intended in the stillness. There were footsteps inside, and then the door opened.

The mother stood in the doorway. Her name was Shera. Ash had told me on the walk here, though I had not asked. She was thin -thinner than the last time I had seen her, and that had only been hours ago. Her eyes moved from Ash to me and then back. “Why are you here?” Her words were flat.

“To do what I promised,” I said. “Or have you forgotten in less than the span of a single day?”

The mother stared at me. The silence stretched long, until she finally stepped aside.

The hut’s interior was less than I had expected, and I had not expected much. It made Martha’s home look like a palace. A single small room with a cold hearth that had not been lit in some time, judging by the dead ash inside it. This ‘Shera’ had stopped tending her own fire. The mother moved toward the back of the hut, where a cloth hung across a doorway. “He’s through here.” Ash moved to join her.

“Stop.”

The woman turned. Ash turned as well, and in her eyes was a question. I had thought about this. I had thought about it in the forest, between the beasts that Ash had brought me

I raised my right hand. A wisp of black fire curled from my fingertips. It was small. The darkness of it caught the dim light and swallowed it. Swallowed everything. Shera’s eyes fixed on it. “This is the power I will use on your son,” I said. “It is a power that can hurt…that can destroy. In the wrong hands, it will unmake whatever it touches. This is not like the white flame.”

The fire curled and guttered between my fingers. The room was very still. “To heal the boy, I must use this flame to break what the Ink left in him. There is no other way, and I am confident in my ability to do what I have said.” I paused. The next words cost me something, though I could not have said what. “There is still a risk. It is small, but it is real, and it is not nothing.”

The mother’s face had not changed, though Ash’s certainly had. Shera watched the black flame for a time. It is unbecoming of a queen to send a retainer to a death they did not know was coming. That is why I told her. “The choice is yours to make. It is not mine.”

I let the Requiem die. My hand fell to my side. The silence that followed was the longest I had endured in Hamel. Shera did not look at Ash. She did not look anywhere but at me, and I watched the decision move through her like a thing alive. This asking was an uncomfortable thing, for it could fail where my demands never had. There was sense in my words, and the risk was truly small, and yet it was there. I would not hide from the truth. Shera hunched in on herself, and I thought she’d made her decision. I thought she was going to refuse.

Her arms had folded across her chest, and every small part of her trembled. It was not cold. I was asking much of her, and yet offering more still. I would not judge her for her refusal. Though once, I would have.

Then Shera’s shoulders straightened. There was no fire in her eyes and no battle cry on her lips. She simply stood a little taller than she had a moment before, and when she spoke, her voice did not waver. “Can this thing really fix my baby?”

“Yes.”

“Then there’s no choice to make.”

I held her gaze for a long moment. In it I saw a resolve I had not seen in some of my most capable lieutenants. Something different than the steel of my soldiers, and yet no less fine. This woman had no power at all, and yet, for this one moment, I considered her a great warrior. I inclined my head. I could respect resolve. Even I would not dare mock or tarnish such a thing. The mother turned and pulled back the cloth.

Ash fell into step beside me as we moved toward the doorway. “I didn’t think you would say that,” she said quietly. “Any of it.”

“Neither did I,” I muttered. The words had felt like handing someone a weapon and trusting them not to use it. A strange thing, but it worked.

We stepped through the cloth doorway. The room was small. It was barely enough space for the straw bed where Marin lay, and the wooden stool beside it. The air was still. The boy lay on the bed. His eyes were open and they saw nothing. His chest rose and fell and a blanket was pulled to his chin.

Beside the bed, curled on the floor with her knees drawn to her chest and her head resting against the edge of the straw, was Sara. The girl was asleep. One of her hands rested on the blanket, near Marin’s arm. Her breathing was slow and even, and her face, in sleep, held none of the brightness I had come to know. She looked too young for a vigil she had clearly been keeping for far longer than tonight.

Something in my left arm trembled. I looked at the girl for a long time. Too long, perhaps. “Ash.” My voice was low. “Move her aside…gently.”

Ash knelt. Her hands were careful as she lifted Sara from the floor. The girl stirred but did not wake. Ash carried her to the far corner of the room and set her down on a folded cloth, arranging her so that she lay on her side.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Ash stepped back. The mother stood in the doorway, arms wrapped around herself. I knelt beside the bed. I placed my left hand on Marin’s arm. The skin was warm beneath my fingers. “Let’s begin,” I said, to no one but myself.

The Requiem answered when I called it. I threaded a wisp of Ruin through the index finger of my right hand, thin as I could make it -thinner than I had managed with any creature in the forest. The flame was barely visible, a tendril of darkness that I fed into the boy’s arm with all the care I could. Even now, I had to strain not to unmake the boy entirely.

The Cradle followed. I pushed Bloom through the index finger of my left hand at the same time, letting it flow alongside the black, a sheath of warmth around a thread of cold. One to unmake, and the other to protect what lay behind.

The small room changed around us. The shadows in the corners lengthened, dragged toward the black thread in my right hand, while the blinding white from my left cast harsh silhouettes against the mud walls.

I found the barrier at once. It was exactly as I remembered. A wall with no seam and no fault. The System’s decision on a child it had judged unworthy. The Requiem pressed against it. The barrier held. I pushed harder. The black flame spread across the surface, searching for purchase, and found none. My jaw clenched.

Through the Requiem’s touch, I could feel what lay beyond the wall more clearly than I had the first time. The boy was there, distant and dim. Dimmer than he had been before. I could feel the shape of his mind, the texture of what he had been before the Ink had sealed him away.

He had been excited. That was the impression that came strongest, just as it had before.