Chapter 29: The First Instruction.

It was almost afternoon by the time we left. The burial had taken longer than it should have.

There had been twelve demonblood bodies. The soldiers had already dug graves for their own eight dead by the time I made my demand. The Inker had stared at me as if I had grown a third horn. His soldiers had stared harder. There had been no such thing as ‘graves’ for demons in my time, though I knew the concept well enough. It was an honor and a remembrance, and the demand had come with more fire than I had expected.

I had not explained myself. A Queen did not explain herself. I had simply said that the dead would be buried, all of them, or we would not be moving at all. The man had looked at Ash, perhaps hoping she would overrule me.

The Hero had folded her arms and said nothing, save for stepping closer to me. The Inker’s jaw had worked for several seconds before he turned and gave the order. The soldiers had shot me dirty looks, but they obeyed the Inker, whose greed made him obey me.

The soldiers had dug without much enthusiasm. I had watched. Some of them had cursed under their breath, though none loud enough for me to single out. The graves were shallow and uneven. I did not complain, even though the ones for their own men had been deeper and more even.

I had stood over the last one for a moment longer than I should have. The girl had been among them. I could only wonder what kind of life could lead a little girl somewhere like here.

After that, we started moving. The road stretched south beneath a sky that was beginning to cloud. The Inker walked at the front of the column, his stride sharper than yesterday. He had not spoken to me since the burial, save for one remark. “Your sentimentality,” he had said, adjusting his robes, “has cost us half the day. If we do not reach the inn by nightfall, we will be sleeping on the road again. I trust that does not trouble Your Highness.”

The words were supposed to be mocking, yet it was perhaps the first time he had addressed me properly since Hamel.

I adjusted the satchel on my shoulder instead of answering, my hand settling over the egg through the cloth. It was warm. I checked that the strap was secure, shifted the weight to my other hip, and kept walking. Even if we did sleep on the road, Ash and I would have the tent. Perhaps that was the source of most of his ire.

The column stopped at a bend in the road where a stream cut across the path. It seemed most of our pauses had to do with streams of water. In my time, one simply conjured water with magic. I had seen some of these use their marks to conjure water, but they never used it to drink. Humans were odd.

The soldiers filled their waterskins. I watched the Inker refill his own, take a long drink, and wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. That was when I approached him with Ash beside me.

“You made a promise,” I said.

The Inker closed his eyes. He took a breath that seemed to carry the weight of several lifetimes, though I knew the man hadn’t even lived one of any real consequence. “The first lesson will be short,” he said, opening his eyes. “As someone wasted half the day burying demonbloods, we must move quickly if we wish to reach the inn by nightfall.”

“Then you had best not waste time complaining about it.”

He stared at me. I stared back. The man sighed, looked around, and gestured for the two of us to follow him off the road. We walked a short distance from the column, past a line of low shrubs, until the sound of the soldiers had faded. We sat on a set of large stones. It was not comfortable. There were more clouds now.

“Before we begin,” the Inker said, settling onto a flat stone, “tell me plainly, and do not lie -how much do you actually know? About marks, about cultivation, about any of it.”

Ash answered before I could. “Nothing.”

The Inker studied her face. Then mine. “That,” he said slowly, “is rather difficult to believe.”

“You are welcome to disbelieve it,” I said.

He held my gaze for a moment longer. Whatever he found there was enough. “Very well. I will assume you know nothing at all.” He said the word assume as if it burnt his tongue. “Where would you like me to-”

“Before all of that,” I cut him off. “There is something else I wish to know first.”

The Inker paused. I had not planned to ask these questions here, yet it had been sitting inside me since I’d woken. No, perhaps they had been sitting in me for weeks. “What is a demonblood?” I asked. “And what is a half-demon?”

The Inker stared at me. The silence lasted long enough that I almost asked again. “You cannot be serious.”

I held his gaze and did not answer. I felt Ash shift beside me and lean closer. It seemed she wanted this answer as much as I.

“You expect me to believe,” he said carefully, “that you do not know what you are?”

“I expect you to answer me.”

The man looked at Ash. Ash looked at me. Neither of us spoke. The Inker rubbed the bridge of his nose. When he spoke again, his voice sounded somehow both less annoyed and more at the same time.

“As everybody knows, the demon race died out almost a thousand years ago,” he began. “The Last Great Demon War ravaged the land. Through the power of the Divine, all other races beat back the horde.” He paused and seemed to consider. “But the demons were not wiped out. There were simply too many of them. The demons surrendered, and over time….” He paused. “Almost all of these demons bred with the other races.”

He tried to keep the sneer from his face. He did not entirely succeed. “These unions produced beings known as demonbloods. Members of other races who carry a trace of demonic heritage. Almost always it is subtle. Some feature that might be easy to miss, unless one knows exactly what to look for. Demonic traits are…small.” He glanced at me. “This demonic heritage is most visible in humans, where the distance between human and demon is widest.”

“And half-demons?” Ash asked quietly.

The Inker’s expression shifted. “Very rarely,” he said, “the blood of the demon overpowers the blood of the other race. What is born is something closer to the devils of old. The horns. The eyes. Wings. The…dark presence.” His gaze found my horns and lingered there. “They are called half-demons. There are not too many of them, thankfully. They are rare.” He paused, and something in his tone darkened. “Though there have been more and more lately.”

I had listened to every word, much as I had not wanted to. If the man was to be believed, then my race had been destroyed. Or rather…diluted. Absorbed into the bloodlines of other races. My hands had clenched, and I forced myself to unclench them. Slowly. After all the Gods did to us, it seemed they’d found a way to remove us entirely.

And I -or rather, this body I wore- was one of the rare cases where the old blood had refused to thin then. A devil of old, he had said. There was more irony in that than he could have known. It did not answer why I had been given this body, but at least I now knew what it was. There was a stone lodged somewhere in my throat. I felt warmth on my shoulder. Ash had put her arm there. It was a strange gesture, yet I now found it easier to swallow past the stone. I sat up a little straighter, and met the Inker’s gaze.

The Inker was watching us. His confusion was plain. “You…both really didn’t know? You two grow stranger by the day,” he muttered, shaking his head.

I did not answer. The information turned inside me. Would keep turning for a very long time, I suspect. I wished to believe the man was lying, yet I could not convince myself he was. Sister.

There was another question, one I was now unsure I now wanted answered. “And at this Academy of yours,” I said. “How are demonbloods and half-demons treated?”

The Inker glanced at me for a time. He seemed to consider himself. “Demonbloods are students like any other,” he said. “They train alongside humans and elves and all others who bear the Ink. They eat the same food, attend the same lectures, sleep in the same quarters. The Academy does not discriminate based on blood.” He said the words smoothly, with no change in tone at all.

“What about half-demons?” I pressed.

“There are…few of those at the Academy. Three, perhaps four at any given time.” He paused, and his tone faltered, just barely. “They are afforded the same opportunities as anyone else -if anything, their rarity makes them notable. Remarked upon.”

“Remarked upon,” I repeated.

“Noticed,” he amended. “With some interest, mind you. Through some…mechanism we do not understand, most half-demons tend to develop…impressively.” He adjusted his robes and did not quite meet my eyes. “There is some…caution, naturally. Many of these students are rather particular, and so they are handled as such.”

The man was not telling me the whole truth, that much was rather plain. Still, his version sounded rather different from what Isabelle had said. The truth, I suspected, sat somewhere between the two accounts. It always did, when there were two competing generals with two different stories to tell. We were silent for a time. My gaze was focused only on the ground in front of me. My thoughts ran in directions I did not wish for them to go.

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“The instruction,” Ash said after a time. Her voice was gentle. I did not think she was talking to me, yet it seemed aimed thus anyway. I had not asked for gentleness.“You promised us that as well.”

The Inker nodded as he rose, and gestured for us to follow. “We walk and talk,” he said. “I will not lose more daylight.”

We returned to the road and fell in behind the column as it started to move. The Inker walked between us, his hands clasped behind his back. He was quiet for a time. When he spoke, his voice had…shifted. The sneer was still there beneath the surface, but it was a little harder to hear.

He sounded like a priest ready to deliver a sermon. Which was, of course, exactly what he was. “All Cultivation is built on three pillars,” he said. “The body.” He raised one finger. “Essence Accumulation.” He raised a second finger. “And Insight.” He raised a third. “Each of these feeds the other two -none is sufficient on its own.”

He looked at us, and when we said nothing, he continued. “The body must be strengthened and tempered to serve as a vessel for power. That is not a concern at your stage and I will not speak of it today.” He paused only briefly. “Essence is the fuel that drives advancement. Without it, a mark will sit at its current stage forever. Much time and effort is spent gathering Essence. Refining it. Gathering still more,” He stopped, looking at both of us, “And then we have Insight. One can be given all the resources in the world. Can have a body no beast can pierce, yet without Insight…one cannot advance. It is the key to the door.”