35
BRIMSTONE
KINGFISHER
“IT’S CALLED BRIMSTONE. It isn’t like our blood, exactly. It is what keeps a fire sprite alive, though,” Lorreth said.
Archer lay on the mossy plinth, his eyes closed. He looked like a small pile of rocks. Sweat ran over my temple and down my cheek, dripping from my chin as I stared down at him, my fury building by the second.
Of course it was brimstone.
Of course it fucking would be.
Lorreth had just come through the shadow gate when I’d heard the cries coming from the courtyard outside. Iseabail had come through moments before him. I’d bolted from the dining room without speaking to either of them properly. Now, we were all in the bowels of the estate, deep underground, where the fire sprites were quartered. There was an entire fire sprite village down here in the bedrock, much deeper than the foundations of the estate. The sprites tended thousands of fires, ensuring the temperatures ran to unbearable degrees. The air was so hot that it burned the eyes and drained the moisture from a person like they were a cloth being wrung dry. We wouldn’t be able to stay down here for long. We would die otherwise, cooked alive, and that wouldn’t serve anybody, least of all Archer.
Saeris and Carrion had saved him.
The two looked like they were drowning in their own sweat as they stood at the end of what passed as Archer’s bed. Their hands were swollen and covered in brutal blisters, but neither of them made a peep of complaint. They stared at Archer’s chest, waiting for the tiny rise and fall that signified he was still breathing, while Lorreth explained what I had found I could not.
“It’s an element, really. Brimstone. A kind of magic all on its own. It gives
the fire sprites life.”
And it kills the rot,” Carrion said.
“Yes. It looks that way.” Lorreth’s eyes darted to me, troubled. “The feeder up there was destroyed. It seems to have partially melted and then burned away to ash. The rot had started to spread to the vines along the wall, but we used some of the brimstone that Archer lost up there to burn the affected plants, and yes, it killed the spread there, too.”
“Okay. This is good news, then,” Saeris said. “Brimstone stops the rot.
Great! So why do you two look like you’re about to start punching holes in the walls?”
She looked at me, beautiful even with strands of her dark hair plastered to her cheeks, and spoke into my mind so that only I could hear. What are we missing here? Shouldn’t we be celebrating?
We can’t use the brimstone, Osha.
Iseabail, who had been notably quiet since she’d arrived, moved to Archer’s bedside. She wore the traditional leather gauntlets of her clan on her forearms, each embossed with the swirling lines that represented the frozen waters to the east of Balquhidder lands. Her red hair was braided and neatly bound. She had been a novice in the eyes of her people when she had come to Cahlish a few weeks ago. Her loose hair and flowing skirts had denoted her as such. She returned to us now a prioress, dressed in accordance with her family’s arcane line. In the span of the few days she had been away, she had undergone the most intense trial she was ever likely to face in her lifetime. She was probably exhausted and wounded, and yet she had still returned here to Cahlish to help.
“As Lorreth mentioned, the fire sprite’s brimstone is like our blood, and yet
it is not,” she said. “The brimstone keeps them alive. Like blood, it flows throughout their bodies, keeping their core temperatures high. Unlike blood, they cannot lose a significant amount of it. A few drops at most. It does not regenerate as our blood does. There is a finite amount of brimstone in Yvelia, and every last drop of it is spoken for by the sprites. When they want to procreate, the whole community agrees to donate a small part of themselves.
Archer will only live because other members of his pyre have given some of their own brimstone to bring his core temperature back up again.”
“The pyre?” Carrion asked.
Iseabail nodded. “The name for an individual fire sprite community. His
family.”
“So they don’t have sex?”
Under normal circumstances, I would have snarled at the smuggler for being such a shallow halfwit during such a worrying time, but for once the question wasn’t laced with innuendo. Carrion seemed genuinely confused. He peppered Iseabail with questions about the fire sprites, meanwhile my mate chewed on her bottom lip, staring at Archer’s still form. Though she kept her own counsel, I knew what she was thinking. I waited for her to say it.
After a long moment, she spoke into my head again. We can’t use the brimstone. To secure enough of it to eradicate the rot and kill the infected feeders, every fire sprite in Yvelia would have to die.
Yes.
So we’re still fucked.
Yes.
Gods, I need a drink.
I sighed heavily, another bead of sweat dripping from my chin. Yes.
“In Zilvaren, I always thought the city should have looked bigger from the rooftops.” Saeris took a swig from my hip flask and passed it back to me. She stared out over the lightening forest that bounded the estate, squinting toward
the horizon. “It never did. I could see the walls of every ward from the rooftops.
Could see the walls hemming us in. Bars on a window.” She scowled at the memory, making a chopping motion with the blade of her bandaged hand in the air. Te Léna had healed her as best she could, but the burns had been deep. It would take a little while for her palms to fully recover. “There are no walls up here. No bars on this prison window. The world feels as though it might go on and on forever.”
It would be dawn soon. She was exhausted and maybe in a little pain, too, but when she had asked to be brought up to the roof, I hadn’t had the heart to deny the request. I’d needed to breathe in the fresh night air after the penetrating heat of Archer’s home, anyway.
The land surrounding Cahlish was crowded with trees that had known the names of my ancestors. My mother and father had met out in those forests. Had courted each other out there, below their snow-clad boughs. The stories I had heard about them in their youth—two very serious people made utter fools by love.
“My father lost a toe out there.” I gestured to the small, dark patch of wood, just beyond the rise of the closest hill. “You see that shadowy spot? The one where no snow has settled?”
Saeris looked in the direction I pointed, nodding.
“A graven lives there.”
She looked to me, eyes wide. “What’s a graven?”
“Mm. A kind of . . .” I considered how to describe it. “Half satyr, half troll?
With a little bit of basilisk thrown in for good measure.”
“What’s a basilisk?”
I laughed softly at the distaste in her tone. I took a swig of the whiskey I’d brought up for us and handed the flask back to her again. “A snake. Kind of.
Bigger. Angrier.”
“So, part troll, part satyr, part snake.” She sniffed, brushing her face with the back of her hand; there were snowflakes on her eyelashes. “I can’t even begin to
picture what that looks like, but okay. What about this graven, then?”
“It lives in a little wooden cottage out there.” I pointed at the shady, snow- free patch of the forest again. “It makes tinctures and salves and the like. A long time ago, people used to trade with the graven for potions and spells they believed would end hexes, heal ailments, or make people fall in love with them.
My father had his own magic, but he was like me. He commanded shadows and not much of anything else. When he met my mother, he was relying on charm alone to woo her, and he didn’t have much faith in his own capabilities in that department, so one day, he decided to visit the graven.”
“For a love potion?” Saeris rolled her eyes at the ridiculousness of it.
I did the same. “For a love potion, yes. And the graven said to him, ‘I’ll make you a deal. I will give you my strongest, most effective love potion. A potion so potent that the object of your heart’s desire will be powerless against your advances. She will be yours for all of time if she drinks this potion that I will make for you.’ ”
“And? What was the catch? What bargain did he have to strike?”
My mate was clever. She was learning.
I smiled a little as I took the flask from her and drank again. The whiskey warmed me all the way down to the seat of my diaphragm. “The graven said to my father, ‘I will give you this potion, and you will live out your days with a wife and a family, and you will be blissfully happy. You will be able to create powerful wards, and you will be a role model to your people and all who follow you and support you.’ And my father was wowed by this prospect, and he said, as you so astutely guessed, ‘Wonderful. This is all I’ve ever dreamed of and more. What do you want in return for these gifts?’ And the Graven replied, “Your right foot. I want your whole right foot.”
“What?”
“Mm-hm. His foot. It wanted his foot. And my father said . . .”
I pointed at Saeris, who wrinkled her nose, confused, and said, “Why?”
“And the graven said, ‘Well, I’m sick of these cloven things. I’ve always wanted two proper Fae feet to walk around on. I bargained with someone for
their left foot a while back, and I’ve been trying to complete the set ever since.’ And the graven showed my father a severed left foot, sitting on a flocked red pillow by the fireplace, and that was all it would say on the matter.”
“But your father wouldn’t trade his foot for the potion,” Saeris said.
“He would not. So the graven said, ‘Fine. You won’t be parted with your foot, so how about this. When I stand in the sun, I cast no shadow, and it makes others around me nervous. They sense that I’m different, and they run from me.
Give me your shadows, and I will give you my very best love potion.’ ”
“He said no again,” Saeris guessed.
“My father’s shadows were his greatest strength. Of course he said no. So the graven was very frustrated by this point and growing rather tired of the negotiations, so he said, ‘Okay. This is my final offer. You give me just one of your shadows, one that you deem fitting to someone like me, and we’ll call it even.’ So my father thought about this, and having decided that one single shadow was a seed of magic he was willing and able to part with, he agreed. The graven mixed up some stinking concoction and passed it off to my father, and in return my father handed over the graven’s new shadow. The deal was done.
The graven walked my father to the door of his cottage and stepped outside to admire his new shadow, but it was midday, and the sun was high overhead.”
“So the graven cast no shadow,” Saeris groaned.
I nodded. “It took up a scythe and went after my father. It called him a liar and a cheat, and didn’t notice, as it chased him through the forest, that the angle of the sun had changed, and the shadow of a majestic ox was now stitched to its satyr’s hooves. It swung its scythe back and forth, trying to claim my father’s right foot. It came damn close to taking it, too, but in the end, it only managed to sever his little toe.”
Saeris frowned as she looked back toward the darkened area of the forest. I let her have her thoughts for a while. Eventually, she said, “And the love potion?
It worked?”
I laughed softly. “No, Osha. My father was young and foolish at the time,
and didn’t know any better, but there’s no such thing as love potions. A person cannot be coerced into truly loving another. It would rob them of their free will. My mother loved my father because of who he was. It turned out his charm was enough in the end.”
Saeris pondered this for a long while. “Did your mother tell you that story?”
I swallowed down a mouthful of whiskey, wincing at the burn, then placed the cap back onto the hip flask and twisted it closed. “No. Archer did. Nearly all the stories I know of my father have come from him. Come on. It’s growing early. There’s something I want to show you, Little Osha.”
The huntsman’s cottage was washed blue by the dawn. The river below burbled away, singing the same song it carried all the way from high in the mountains down to where it met the sea. Saeris turned her face toward the dawn and basked in the first rays of sunlight that summited Omnamerrin and speared down into the valley below.
“I didn’t realize how much I missed this,” she whispered. “Things have just been so crazy.”
Saeris wasn’t one for unnecessary tears. She cried when she was angry, not when she was sad. But I knew that she was sad this morning, as she opened her eyes to watch the sun peek over the mountains, and a lone tear chased down her cheek.
“You can come here and enjoy it any time you like.” I stood behind her, winding one arm around her waist, pulling her close so that her back was flush with my chest. “A dream is just a fabrication. A manifestation of what could be.
In-between places, and whispers of other realms. I had a feeling the sun wouldn’t affect you here.”
Smoke poured merrily from the cottage’s chimney, but we hadn’t gone inside yet. The air was brisk and fresh, and the wide-open clear sky overhead felt like freedom. Saeris was far too short for me to rest my chin on her
shoulder, so I rested it lightly on the top of her head instead, humming quietly under my breath.
“What are we going to do abou—” She began to speak, but I cut her off.
“Peace, Osha,” I whispered into her hair. “The rot. Ammontraíeth.
Everlayne. Our problems aren’t going anywhere. They’ll be right where we left them, waiting for us when we wake up. For now, let’s just take a moment to breathe. We deserve it.”
I knew it was true. Unequivocally so. It was easy to say it to someone else, to look at all we had been through lately and see that a person who had dealt with even half of the issues we had would deserve a second to catch their breath. But I was just as guilty as Saeris in this regard. My own mind wouldn’t stop caroming out of control, hundreds of thoughts vying for attention, questions demanding to be answered. It took a monumental effort to convince my worries to settle.
Saeris turned away from the valley and wrapped her arms around my shoulders, looking up at me. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold, her eyes paler than the sky and twice as bright. The tips of her ears were red, too. I touched my fingertip to the point of her left ear, smiling softly to myself. “I got so used to them being round,” I said. “I was appalled by the sight of them at first.”
“Wow, thanks.”
I laughed. “Sorry. I don’t mean to offend.” I tapped the tip of her sloped ear again. “I was just very . . . very worried. Humans are difficult to keep alive in a place like this. I . . .” Even now, confessing this made my voice catch. “I didn’t want to lose you.”
Other females had looked at me adoringly in the past. I’d let them, feeling only further and further away as they tried to draw closer. When Saeris turned her blue eyes on me, I didn’t have a choice. I was laid bare before her. I was brought to my godscursed knees. “You had a funny way of showing it,” she said, smiling crookedly. “And you still let me train with a sword, even as a human.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “You mean I could have stopped you?”
“Technically, yes,” she said. “You could have compelled me not to touch a weapon here in Yvelia, and I wouldn’t have been able to.”
“Mm. Yes, well . . .” I kissed her lightly, barely grazing her temple with my lips. “You would never have spoken to me again. And anyway . . . I know you, Saeris Fane. Even as a fragile human, you were strong. Independent. It would have crushed your spirit if I had sheltered you from this world. Your choices had to be your own. I saw that in the end. I see it now, too. Every day. You have a right to walk the road that stretches out before you. I will not rob you of your path by insisting I carry you.”
She was quiet for a while, mulling this over. The wind kicked up, toying with her hair, blowing it around her face. A bank of clouds passed in front of the sun, leaching the valley of color, and at last, Saeris drew in a breath and sighed. “Thank you,” she said simply. “For not trying to control me.”
An odd thing to be thanked for, that. I had no idea what the men back in Zilvaren were like, but I had never been under the illusion that I needed to control a lover. I kept all of this to myself, though. She didn’t need to hear it.
Instead, I ducked down and whispered into her ear. “You’re a wildfire, Saeris Fane. There’s no controlling you.”
She laughed, leaning her head back so it rested on my chest. “I’ll take that as
a compliment, then.”
“You should.”
“And what if there comes a day when all of this becomes too much, and I want to be carried? At least for a little while?”
“Then it would be my honor and a privilege to do so, Saeris. Never doubt that. Whenever you need me to catch you, I am here, ready and willing. I’ll face the Blood Court for you, if you want me to. I’ll face Belikon, and Madra, and anyone or anything that wishes to do you harm.”
At that moment, the bank of thick snow clouds broke, and Saeris flinched reflexively, her vampire blood telling her that she should hide from the sun’s rays. She huffed down her nose, relaxing when she remembered that the light
wouldn’t hurt her here. “You’ll have to face the sun for me, too, in that case,”
she mused.
“Gladly.”
“And I will become your shadow.”
I held on to her a little tighter, needing to feel her close. “You should know, Saeris . . . I am my father’s son. My strength has always been my shadows.”