The Second Death of Locke — Chapter no 11

eleven

UTHRITE TRACKERS DOWNSTAIRS,” SHE said as she burst through the“L door, spilling water all down her shirt. Brit looked up from their blade,

brow furrowed.

“What?”

“Move fast,” Grey said. She locked the door, then started to drag the flimsy wardrobe over in front of it. She wished it was heavier, sturdier— there was no chance it would hold. “If we can’t get out, we’ll have to fight them.”

Brit jumped to help her. “How do you know?” they asked.

“How they spoke. Coin. Innkeeper tipped me off,” she said through gritted teeth. “Doesn’t matter if I’m being paranoid—I’m not taking any fucking chances.” She examined the window, the drop below, but the garden was fenced all along, and there was no sign of a gate. Plus, if they ran, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to lead them back to Kier.

It was better to fight. Leave no survivors.

“Are they here for us?” Sela asked. She stood uselessly on the other side of the room, her hands fluttering like she didn’t know what to do with them.

She’s a kid, Grey chided herself. For all her annoyance, that fact still hung heavy in her stomach. Whoever Sela was, whatever Sela was, she was just a kid.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll deal with it. Now get down. Away from the window. In that corner, under the desk.”

Sela nodded, but Grey could see the panic in her face. Grey flipped the desk so the top protected Sela’s body, so she could curl up in the middle of it and be safe on all sides. She dumped the weapons they wouldn’t use with

the girl. Those cool blue eyes peered up at her, devoid of any of the arrogance she’d had in camp. This time, Sela was scared.

It was only because she was listening very carefully that she heard the

boots on the stairs.

“Captain?” Brit murmured.

“Tether to Ola,” she instructed.

Brit looked away. “She’s not reaching, and I can’t initiate the tether myself at this range. I have to tether to you.”

Grey swore—she couldn’t tether to Brit. She threw open the window and shouted Ola’s name. There was no response. She swore again.

“Swords,” she said. They both drew, and Grey grabbed a dagger for good measure—the room wasn’t that big, and swords weren’t always great in proximity. Brit armed themselves with some assortment of metal; Grey didn’t question it.

Someone knocked on the door. “Ma’am?” a voice said. Not the innkeeper.

Brit and Grey exchanged a long look. Brit, too, drew their knife.

Another knock. Someone tried the doorknob. “We’d like to compare routes, if you please. We think we’re going in the same direction.” Their tone was silk over glass, tension clear in every word as they tried to smooth out their accent, to sound Scaelan.

“No thank you,” Grey called back firmly.

“I’m reaching a tether,” Brit said, and Grey felt a strange sense of prodding, like her stomach was the closed door of the room Brit was knocking at. An odd expression flickered across Brit’s face.

Something rammed the door—it held. Muted voices conversed on the

other side.

“Hand Captain?” Brit asked.

Grey’s terror was cold and even. “I… can’t,” she said.

“I won’t use—”

“No,” Grey said, facing the truth of it—the truth of what they’d done.

“Brit, Kier and I are bound. I can’t lend my power to another.”

Brit’s eyes were blank for a terrible time. “Well, fuck,” they murmured.

“I had a thought when you wouldn’t let Ola… Fuck.”

Something hit the door again, and Grey heard the cracking of wood. She thought again of calling for Ola and dismissed it. “Hope you’re just as good

with your sword,” she muttered, sinking into position. “We’ve got to get out of here without your magic.”

“When the captain gets back,” Brit seethed, “we are going to have a long discussion about trust.”

“If we’re still alive, I look forward to it.”

Grey didn’t need a tether to know Brit was furious. It wasn’t that they couldn’t fight—but mages liked the edge of magic, and they were taught to fight with it as another limb. It would be awkward and uncomfortable for Brit to go without it.

But there wasn’t time. Something else hit the door, cracking it fully. Brit jumped back as a boot kicked down the dresser, and managed to get in the first hit, stabbing out as someone tried to enter. There was a howl of pain in the hall.

“You have two minutes,” a voice called. “Surrender the girl or die.”

“What girl?” Grey shouted.

There was another murmur from the hall. Grey felt the swell of magic building, and before she could warn Brit, the door and wardrobe exploded in a shatter of wood. Grey threw a hand in front of her face to protect her eyes.

“Fucking materialists,” Brit groaned—ironic, because Brit too was a fucking materialist.

Grey only had time to bring her hand down and duck out of the swing of a blade. The air was heavy with the sound of metal on metal and the ashy smell of magic—there were four of them, probably two mages and two wells, and she was so incandescently angry that she hadn’t forced Ola to stay inside, that she had been so preoccupied with being separated from Kier that she hadn’t kept the other pairing together, that she hadn’t thought.

Just past her own fight, Brit dodged a hit, rolled over the bed, and took a lunging swing at one of their opponents that caught them in the shoulder.

Grey gritted her teeth, leaning into the blow she blocked, swinging forward with her off-hand. She caught the man in the ribs, a deep hit that made him suck a breath through his teeth. He withdrew, stumbling back.

Grey lunged forward again, driving lower than he expected, getting him in the stomach—he fell to his knees, that flash of disaster clear in his eyes, and she felt the fizzle of a snapped tether.

“Flynn.”

She turned just in time to catch the slash on her arm instead of her back, which hurt like a bitch but wouldn’t kill her.

“This would be so much fucking easier,” Brit seethed, bleeding from their forehead, “with magic.”

Grey blocked another blow and hazarded a glance at the mage, who’d

been forced into a corner.

“Tether!”

The small voice caught them both off guard enough that Grey nearly missed a block and Brit did—but it didn’t matter, because Grey felt the new strand of magic as Sela pushed her power forward and Brit latched on.

“Drop!” they shouted, and then the metal shavings they had clenched in one fist went flying through the room at a killing speed. Grey hit the floor, face-down, covering her head with both hands as the metal pattered around her and at least two more bodies thudded to the ground.

Silence rang in the air. She smelled blood, and felt the sweet aftermath of worn-out power even as her own well brimmed overfull with adrenaline.

She opened her eyes. One of the Luthrite soldiers was on the ground next to her, their face half obliterated by metal. For that force of an explosion, that much projection, Sela was probably spent.

Grey sat up, wiping the blood away from her face, taking careful stock.

The four soldiers were dead. The desk Sela had hidden behind was a mess of wood splinters, but she could hear the girl crying, so at least she was alive. It was Brit she focused on, slumped over the bed, breathing hard.

“Brit?” She pushed herself up, stepping over a body. She pulled the mage over onto their back—their eyes were wild with pain. Blood dripped down their forehead; another wound soaked their sleeve, and there was one more that Grey couldn’t see across their ribs.

“You didn’t tell us,” Brit said, staring straight up at the ceiling.

Grey did not cry—she’d lost that instinct to cry in the face of danger years ago—but she did curse fantastically under her breath. She opened Brit’s shirt, slicing through buttons with her bloody knife, and took in the injuries. The one across Brit’s ribs was deep but she didn’t think it had punctured anything important; there was another just to the side of their navel, not deep enough to pierce the gut, but she could not fully tell without inspecting further.

“Sela,” she said very carefully. “Are you okay?”

“Um.” The girl sniffled, trying to breathe through sobs that racked her body. “I don’t… I’m not… I’m not bleeding.”

“Good. Sela, dear heart, can you do something for me?” Grey had a choice to make: concentrate on Brit or worry about Sela. If the girl wanted to run—well. She was more trouble than she was worth. And though her own retirement hung in the balance, though Kier might actually kill her if she lost the prisoner, she wasn’t going to let Brit die. She pressed a firm hand to the worst of their wounds to staunch the bleeding.

“I think,” Sela said. Grey glanced over at her. She was standing now, breathing heavily, probably in the middle of a panic attack. When her eyes landed on Brit, half unconscious under Grey, then on the body of a soldier close to her on the ground, the blood drained from her face.

Grey held out a key. “Don’t look at them. Sela, next door, my bag is on the bed. I need my kit from it. The one with salves and herbs and antidotes —you’ll know it when you see it. It’s okay to bring the whole bag. I’ll need you to do a few other things and then I’ll send you for Ola, okay?”

“Okay,” Sela said. She took the key. Grey wondered, her thoughts fuzzy with adrenaline and the pain of the fight, if she would regret this.

She couldn’t think of that now.

With the girl fetching her kit, Grey got to work. She moved around Brit, stripping the bed to the top sheet to give herself a level surface. She dragged the bodies into a pile in the corner, swearing profusely at the waves of blood that drenched her shirt as a result, and draped a sheet over them—the others could deal with them later. Grey hurried downstairs, not caring about the sound of her boots on the ground. The inn was eerily quiet, empty—the door was locked from the inside, covered with a heavy crossbar. She found the innkeeper, collapsed on the other side of the bar. Grey paused for a moment to check her breathing, her heartbeat; she didn’t wake when Grey kicked her arm, so she must’ve been poisoned or ingested a sleeping draft.

There was no time to worry about it. Grey dragged the woman into a back room, then stole the keys from behind the bar and locked the innkeeper in just in case.

Then she steeled herself and returned to the room where Brit lay.

Amazingly, the pitcher hadn’t been shattered by Brit’s improvised projectiles. Grey pulled off the pillowcases and dipped them in the water, using them to clean the blood from Brit’s wounds. They were breathing

shallowly now, eyes closed.

Sela returned with the med kit and sat quietly on the night table in the corner, as far away from the bodies as she could get, even though her eyes kept flicking to the pile—the white sheet was starting to stain red in places.

“Sela?” Grey said, washing her hands thoroughly with water and soap

powder.

“Yes?”

“I want you to breathe,” Grey said as carefully as she could, trying to keep her own voice from shaking. She found a jar of numbing salve among her medicines. “Breathe in for five counts, then out for five. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” the girl said. Grey listened, timing her own breathing to Sela’s as she numbed the areas around Brit’s wounds.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“My stomach hurts.”

Grey’s hand stilled, halfway through her kit. “You weren’t trained, were you? You’re a well, but you don’t know how to do it.”

The answering silence was so loud that she had to glance up to make sure the girl hadn’t passed out. Finally, “Yes.”

Grey nodded. She took a second to assess. Brit was still breathing, and there was nothing blocking their airway.

“Okay. I need you to go get Ola. Once she’s here, you can sit with us or on the stairs and wait to let the others in. Okay?”

“Yes,” Sela squeaked. She hesitated for only a moment. “Will they live?” she asked.

Grey glanced up. Sela stood with her hands pressed to her chest, like something had wounded her. She had a scrape across one cheek, Grey noticed, but it had missed the eye.

“If I have anything to say about it, yes.” She forced her tone to soften.

“It will be okay, sweetheart. Go get Ola.”

Sela was out the door in a second, and Grey glanced over her shoulder to make sure the girl ran across the yard into the wash shed. Then she spent an agonizing minute cataloging everything that could go wrong.

A moment later, Ola appeared, running across the yard. Sela followed,

not as fast, still shaky on her feet.

Grey turned back to her work.

The worst of the injuries was the slash across Brit’s ribs, then the wound on their stomach. The arm was gruesome to look at, but overall fine, and the head wound looked much worse than it actually was. Grey could worry about a concussion after she was certain none of Brit’s insides were about to

become their outsides.

“What the fuck?”

She lifted her head to see Ola in the doorway, but she needed to focus.

Her hands were shaking, half from fading adrenaline. Though she’d helped in the infirmary often, it had been a while since she’d actively operated on anyone who wasn’t Kier. She forced herself to remain calm now, to think only of her training and those endless days of surgery after surgery when she was a healer. She didn’t have the tools to keep Brit unconscious and cursed herself for it, but she could only work with what she had.

“I need you to tether,” Grey said very carefully.

“Locke’s bones, Captain—”

“Tether,” Grey hissed through her teeth. She noticed Sela edge into the room behind Ola. The girl went very quietly back to the nightstand and sat with her knees pressed to her chest.

Ola narrowed her eyes, but Grey could feel the greenness of new magic as the tether took. “Yes, Hand Captain.”

Brit sighed in relief, their face relaxing just a fraction. Ola sat at their head, her hand pressed to Brit’s uninjured arm.

“Can you remain tethered and secure downstairs?” Grey asked, detached as possible. “I didn’t have the time to do a thorough search.”

A pause. Then, “Yes, Hand Captain,” Ola said, brimming with anger.

Neither wound had perforated the internal organs, but they were still serious. Grey cleaned them up, nudging the threads of Ola’s magic to heal what she could, and carefully stitched Brit’s stomach. Ola returned when she was tying off the thread, settling back into the space next to Brit.

“Why didn’t you have them tether to Sela immediately?” she asked, her voice strained and bitter. “Isn’t Locke meant to be some great well? Some unbelievable power?”

Grey froze, her breath caught in her throat. She looked up at Sela— but the girl only hid her face.

“I cannot answer that,” Grey said through her teeth. She went back to her work, her own heart pounding with the lies she held.

When she was finished, she moved to the wound over Brit’s ribs. She focused on bringing the muscle together, then the flesh; she forced herself to think only of that, and not of Sela sobbing in the corner, or of Ola’s hard, unforgiving glare.

If she stopped, she was going to fall apart, or throw up. She’d lost so much fucking blood herself and she couldn’t even tell if Brit was dying

under her.

“What’s going on?”

Grey lifted her head to see Eron in the door, shock clear on his face. She couldn’t deal with it right now.

“Where’s Kier?” she asked, tying off her knot and examining her work.

“Downstairs.” He grimaced, and Grey thought again of the innkeeper; she wasn’t sure if she was awake, or even still alive.

“Can I just… What the fuck?” Eron repeated, as if they had not heard him the first time, as if Grey had the capacity to answer. She was busy adhering a strip of gauze to Brit’s forehead.

“Can you take Sela into the other room?” she asked. “And—Kier. I need Kier.”

It was only then that her voice broke. As if he sensed it, the tether she’d been reaching out found its mark. Kier caught her, and before she could stop herself, she sent a pulse of agony through. Help.

Boots sounded on the stairs, then in the hall. Then, a quiet inhale in the doorway. “Eron, can you help me with the bodies?”

Kier’s voice, calm and sure, always so much better with emergencies than she was. Grey finished her work on Brit’s forehead and cut away their jacket, revealing the slice to their arm. It was not deep enough for stitches, merely a graze.

A hand landed on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

She did not look at him. If she looked at him, it would all be over. “Yes,” she said. “The keys are on the nightstand by Sela. I don’t know if the

innkeeper is dead or just unconscious.”

“I’ll handle it.”

He brushed the hair away from her forehead. She swabbed gently at the blood crusting around Brit’s wound. Ola had shifted closer to their head, humming softly as she fed a constant thread of power into them.

Grey finished at around the same time Kier and Eron removed the last of

the bodies, and Eron took Sela into the other room. She looked up to find Ola’s eyes, hard as flint.

“Why didn’t you give them power?” Ola asked, clearly seething.

Before Grey could answer, Kier said, “Now’s not the time. Can I trust you to keep watch in here for a moment?”

Ola looked up at him, silhouetted in the doorway. Her mouth thinned into a line. “Yes, Captain,” she said very quietly.

“Good. Hand, bring your supplies.”

Grey packed the kit with shaking fingers. Kier had already disappeared down the hall, but the door was open to a new room—the six of them were the only ones there, so she figured he’d commandeered an empty room. She walked in to find him sitting on a chair he’d dragged to the bed.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, his eyes catching on her blood-soaked sleeve.

“Not mortally wounded, no.”

“Take off your coat,” he said, all authority. “And shirt. Please.”

Grey didn’t know what to do—what to say. The tether between them was unbroken, but he didn’t pull from her, nor did he send anything through. It just sat heavy on her chest, her power unspent.

So she did as he asked. She shrugged off her coat, biting back a sob at the pain in her arm, and unbuttoned and discarded her shirt with one hand.

He did not look at her face when she sat in front of him in her vest.

“I… You know more than me,” Kier said. “What do you need?

Stitches?”

Grey forced herself to look, breathing in through her mouth and out through her nose. “It’s deep,” she said. “There’s gauze in there—yes, take that, and the soap there.” Her voice felt very far away as Kier shuffled through the kit, picking up the items she indicated. “Clean your hands, then me. It will hurt.”

“Okay,” he said. He disappeared for the barest moment to retrieve a pitcher and basin. She focused on her breathing, watching him as he washed his hands before turning his attention to cleaning her skin. When he rubbed at the wound, she gritted her teeth against any noise that threatened to escape—the world went white in a frizzle of electric pain around her. When she came back to herself, her fingers were gripping Kier’s thigh so very tightly. Her mouth tasted of blood—her teeth had pierced her lip.

Despite her reactions, Kier hadn’t stopped. His face was close to her

wound; it was still leaking blood. He wiped it away in a pink smear of salve

and blood.

“Let me see,” she said.

“I don’t think,” Kier said very carefully, “a kiss will heal it.”

Her laugh was cloudy with the lump firmly lodged in her throat. She took in the wound: when it was cleaned, it didn’t look so deep. “I think it’s okay if you just wrap it very tightly,” she said.

He looked at her, finally, and she saw the raw guilt on his face. He hadn’t been angry at her at all. “If that wound was on me, would you be satisfied with wrapping it?”

She chewed on the inside of her lip. “No.”

Kier nodded. He found a fresh needle, thread. He’d patched her up many times, bandaging wounds she couldn’t reach herself, rubbing antiseptic salves and ointments into her skin, getting her stable if anything major happened during a battle, which it almost never did. But for anything more serious, she’d always gone to the infirmary—it had nothing to do with Kier’s experience or lack thereof; even though he’d watched her do stitches so many times, he probably knew how to as well as she did.

“Anesthetic, please. That greenish-gray salve, in the pot with the blue lid,” Grey said, looking at the wall. He rubbed the salve over the edges of her wound, the catch of his rough fingers making her hiss.

“Sorry,” he murmured. She didn’t look as he prepared, but she felt it when he started stitching.

It wasn’t his fault—actually, it absolutely was his fault that it hurt as much as it did. She sucked a breath through her teeth, her nails digging into his thigh, feeling every single puncture of the needle, every tug of the thread.

“You’re doing so well,” he murmured, pausing to wipe a tear from her cheek.

“Keep going,” she snarled. “Get it done. Quickly.”

Halfway through, she dropped her head to his shoulder, numbing to the ceaselessness of the pain. Finally, he tied off the knot and cut the thread and his arms were around her.

“Fuck you,” she said into his neck, wet with her tears.

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

His arms tightened, one wrapped around her bare back, one tangled up

in her sweat-and-blood-filthy hair.

“I shouldn’t have gone,” he said. “I shouldn’t have left.”

With her good arm, she curled herself around him. He tugged her, pulling her off the bed, onto the chair, onto his lap. He moved one arm down, draping it over her thighs, hand under her knees, holding her against him.

“I nearly killed Brit and Sela,” Grey said against his skin.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Kier said.

It didn’t matter; it didn’t dull the pain. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried, and she didn’t now. She only hid her face in Kier’s neck, as if burying herself in him could solve anything at all.

She didn’t remember falling asleep. When she woke, she was curled in bed with Sela at her back, in the second room they’d had originally. Grey turned and looked over to find Brit arranged on another mattress on the floor, Ola curled up next to them.

She sat up, the blanket dropping to her waist. She was in a clean shirt that smelled like Kier, her arm aching. The captain himself sat by the window, looking out. Eron perched cross-legged in front of the door.

Kier glanced up at her, the early-morning light illuminating the dark shadows under his eyes.

“How long did I sleep?” she murmured, pitching her voice low so as not

to wake the others.

“A while,” Kier said. “You needed it.”

She slid out of bed. He’d taken off her trousers, too, stained with blood as they were—she wore only the shirt and her own shorts. “Give me a moment to sort myself out, then I’ll take over watch.”

“You should keep resting.”

Grey leveled a look at him. They’d talked about this. “You need sleep.

You too, Eron. I can handle it.”

She didn’t wait for protest. She grabbed her supply bag and wash kit and made her way to the small washroom on the second floor. The door to the room where Kier had stitched her up was ajar, and the room where they’d fought had no door at all. Grey hesitated in the empty entry, taking in the bloodstains on the bed where she’d tended to Brit, the dark marks soaked

into the wood floor where the bodies had lain. She shuddered, moving on down the hall.

In the washroom, she changed over her padding—honestly, after all the fucking drama the day before, the fact she was still bleeding was a travesty —and took stock of Kier’s stitches. They weren’t necessarily neat, and she imagined the scar would be ghastly, but they would get the job done. She looked at her face in the glass, taking in the tangle of her hair and the flaking spots of dried blood on her skin.

I am the High Lady of Locke, she thought as she took in her reflection, nearly cracking into a fit of hysteria.

She rinsed her skin with water and tried to brush out the tangles before giving up. She needed to bathe properly, but there would be time for that when everyone was better rested.

Back in the room, Eron lay on the bed next to Sela and Kier was curled up in the corner in a nest of blankets.

“You sure you’re okay?” Kier asked her. He handed over a pair of trousers from the pile of clothes near the door. Someone must’ve gone back for Ola’s washing and hung it to dry. They were still a bit damp, and too big. She cinched them around her waist with her sword belt.

“I need time,” she said. It was as honest as she could handle being right now. She locked the door behind her, checked it twice.

She found her sword in a heap of her pack and bloodstained clothing.

She sat in the chair Kier had vacated and rested it across her knees.

“Not too long,” Kier said, eyes slipping shut.

“Whatever you say, Captain.”

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No well shall complete the unification process, known colloquially as “binding,” with a mage without explicit written consent, approved by the High Lord. If any mage-and-well pairing is found to be unlawfully bound, they shall face a trial of their peers and receive sentencing. Depending on the circumstances, recommended punishment is imprisonment, forced separation, or, in the most extreme of cases, execution.

The Diplomatic Articles of Scaela, Article 3, Addendum 8

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