The Second Death of Locke — Chapter no 2

two

REY WAS FOUR WHEN she learned what it meant to be a well. There wasG no magic without wells: mages had to draw power from them, tether into a well and siphon to perform any action. It was like a water wheel, generating power. As a well, she was the river, the source that made the magic move.

She remembered sitting on her mother’s lap, their hands linked, heads bowed together. It was one of her father’s guards she tethered to first, when she was just a child: his name was Iowain, and he had a boisterous laugh and a sheet of silver hair and a beard down to his stomach. He crouched next to them, his face open and earnest, his hands palms-up on his knees as if to prove himself harmless.

“It’ll hurt, at first,” Alma, her mother, murmured into her hair, “but only because it feels like a loss—your body doesn’t know yet what it’s doing.”

“Push away as much as you need, child,” Iowain said.

Grey sucked in a breath. She felt the reach of the tether and she wanted to recoil, but more than that, she wanted to make her mother proud. So she felt the thread of magic within her, warm and endless and unfurling, and something inside of her felt like it was cracked right open. She felt the moment the tether took, the stomach-ache pain of it, then felt it dissolve.

“See?” Alma said, stroking Grey’s hair back from her face. Grey felt the presence of her brother behind her, waiting in case she needed more support, his hand pressed to her back. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

Iowain put his hands together, and Grey sensed that tugging. Alma nodded to her, and Grey let the tiniest thread of power slip into the tether.

When Iowain opened his hands, smile growing, he held a luminous opal in

his palm. Iowain was a materialist, and after that day he was constantly making her opals and pearls, sapphires and rubies, presenting them to her like a magician from a children’s play. She still thought of him every time she caught the glimmer of a fine jewel on some nobleperson’s skin.

Only a few years after that, the rest of them were dead, and Grey was not. She sat on a hillside with a boy she’d only met days before; she hadn’t spoken in nearly as long. But he was kind, and he didn’t ask her any questions, and he was just as comfortable in silence as she was.

They sat on the hill and looked out at the sea, the flatness of it stretching still unfamiliar to her. When she reached out her hand, he took it without hesitation. When she offered a tether, he took that too. She already knew he was a mage. It was obvious: the energy of unfulfilled magic fizzled around him.

It only took a moment for the boy’s brows to draw together. Another moment, and he drew a tiny flame between them, the earliest kind of standard magic they taught mages. He pulled back and said, “Oh.” Kier looked at her hand, then at her. “What are you?”

Grey only looked at him. It was the first question he’d asked her, and she felt compelled to answer. She could not remember why she’d opened up her power. She only knew she trusted him, the kind dimples that carved into his cheeks, knees and elbows always scraped from playing too hard with his brother and now her, his eyes green on the outside and brown on the inside.

Hazel, but only just.

“You don’t have to answer that,” Kier stammered. “I’m sorry I asked.”

He was always like that, back then—full of doubt, uncertain of himself. It was an imperfection that years of fighting and leading had long since taken from him.

Sometimes, now, she still looked at him and missed his imperfections.

She even missed his doubt, because that meant room for mistakes without the consequence of death.

“It’s okay,” she said, and she meant it. She looked out to the open sea where the Isle once was. “It’s only, I don’t know.”

The mud was thick and cold, soaking the crest of Scaela she wore on her chest. Grey barely felt it, armored as she was for battle. She’d shifted her

baldric and most of her blades to her back when they’d gotten down, to avoid the mud. It was still utter misery, lying between Kier and Eron Fastria, one of their typic officers, eyes trained on the road at the bottom of the hill. Further down the road, the Iolis was swollen with the rainfall, nearly spilling over its banks.

Their company was divided into four groups of fifteen, half scattered over this ridge and half on the other side of the road, hidden among the scrabbling weeds and underbrush, blending with the barren trees of the woods. Intelligence delivered to Attis and then to Kier estimated the convoy of carriages would be rolling through two hours after sunrise. They’d been here waiting for three already, just to be safe, in position for an ambush.

She was comforted by the familiar weight of steel on her back—it was gauche to be armed to the teeth walking around camp, but she liked the presence of her weapons, and she was always most comfortable when she had her sword at easy reach. It reminded her of her father, who had taught her to wield a sword as soon as she was steady enough to stand on two feet and strong enough to lift a wooden practice blade.

She liked knowing she could protect herself. And Kier, if needed. In return, he did everything in his power to keep her safe.

She risked a glance down the line. The sun shimmered, murky through the clouds, as the rain picked up from a drizzle to a patter. She was already soaked to the bone, rain seeping through the gaps in her leather armor, through her padded shirt and plain cloth undershirt. Next to her, Eron offered her a tight smile. He was not usually a smiler, so he must’ve felt the tension rolling off her. Grey only grimaced back. Fastria sighed, his dark eyes losing some of their glimmer.

It was hard for Grey not to lose focus when they were like this. She tried to keep herself present by running through muscle groups, then organs, then bones. When she was younger, fresh out of her extra training as a healer, out of those years spent up to her elbows in blood, she used to imagine viscera in diagrams and memories of injuries she’d treated. Now, years separated, she imagined all manner of it on Kier. Open his chest, split the pectoralis major down the middle. Count the ribs. She imagined the pinkish white of his manubrium, the ridges of his xiphoid process. It was impossible not to imagine all bodies as Kier’s, all parts as Kier’s. She’d seen too much of him, opened him up too many times and sealed him shut, felt the nodules of

his bones and the slick heat of his bare muscles.

That was what it meant to be a Hand. To be just as comfortable, just as capable with the inside of him as she was with the outside.

Before she finished her recall of bones, a small noise like birdsong sounded from the field down the road to their right, just loud enough to be heard over the river. Grey drew her sword in the quiet before the storm. On her left, Kier stiffened.

“Captain?” a muffled voice asked in the near silence.

“Prepare for attack,” Kier said, his own voice barely above a whisper. It didn’t matter—Grey heard the gentle shift of the soldiers-at-arms tensing, taking position. The signal meant that dust from the road had been spotted in the distance, that the convoy was in sight. In her veins, she felt the pre- battle tension.

She tightened her fingers around the sword, flexing her hands in her leather gauntlets. Her hands were bare, ungloved, in case Kier needed direct contact with her skin in the heat of battle. She focused on the shuffle of boots on the packed road. Soon enough, she too could see the dust cloud in the distance, the four carriages surrounded by tidy lines of soldiers. On her right, Fastria drew a quick breath and murmured a prayer in Arkunish, probably to one of their gods.

“Approaching the first marker, Captain,” he muttered in the moment after he finished his prayer.

“Keep holding,” Kier said. “I’ll give the signal when the time comes.”

The convoy came closer, and every muscle in Grey’s body was wire- tense. They were entering the danger zone—if any of the mages in that convoy had an affinity like Kier’s and a strong enough well, they’d be able to sense other life forces, other magic waiting up ahead. If that happened, if their cover was blown—well, they wouldn’t be totally ruined, but it would be a fairer fight than she wanted.

The first of the carriages passed the next marker. Grey didn’t usually second-guess Kier, but she did give him a look, judging his face. His jaw was tight, anxious.

“Approaching the third marker, Captain,” Fastria said.

“Kier?” Grey murmured.

He whistled twice, sharp, through his teeth. That was all it took—Grey spotted movement in the group closest to the convoy as they sprang to

action, then the second team raced down the hill. Kier shifted a hand to her shoulder, gripping the edge of her pauldron, as Fastria and the others surrounding them leaped into a run.

Their job was not with the first wave. Though Kier was unnervingly eager to throw himself into battle, he and Grey had a more specialized task for this particular skirmish.

Grey watched the first wave of soldiers crash into the unsuspecting convoy. She gritted her teeth through the flashing of steel as meat met meat.

A spray of blood flew up from one of the smaller skirmishes closer to them, speckling the side of the first carriage with crimson. She watched the typics with their steel, the mages and their Hands, all entangling with the thirty-six mages and Hands opposite. She had to watch, because if she did not, she

would panic—and she could not panic.

“Now, Grey,” Kier said, just for her.

She kept a steady pace behind him down the bank. One dark shape rose to her left, a mage-less Hand, but she cut him down with one swift move of her sword and only vaguely winced at the spray of hot blood that splashed on her face. She felt Kier’s magic tugging at her middle, power unfurling from her chest. He wasn’t severing any aortas with that trickle of power, but Grey heard a shout to one side and glanced that way just long enough to see a mage fall to his knees with no apparent injury, blood trickling from his gaping mouth. Kier finished the job with his own sword.

She did not stop. She pushed more power at Kier and kept moving.

It was her job to keep him safe, keep him alive. As a well, Grey herself was impervious to harm by magical means, but the other mages and typics in their company weren’t. She kept close to Kier, kept power flowing to him as he strategically targeted their rivals. With her sword, she fought off anyone else who could do him harm.

She cut through another mage—their swords clanging overhead, her dagger to his side, recovery with her sword, finding a seam in his armor, stabbing through his belly—and pushed forward to the line of carriages. All around her was the ebb and flow of magic, so thick she could taste it, as a dozen skirmishes were lost and won and recoupled. It was a sick feeling, how the magic in the air refilled her own personal store even faster.

Kier kicked the door of the first carriage open and Grey stabbed the guard who slid out to protect whatever was inside—which turned out to be

a whole lot of nothing. She felt Kier pull from her and turned just in time to see him wince as he blocked some magework.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Fine,” he insisted.

There was no time to waste. They pushed back into the battle, Grey gasping halfway through slitting a man’s throat as Kier pulled the magic from her in heady ropes. There was nothing to be found in the next carriage either, and she felt the uncomfortable desperation in her stomach—even though she was good at it, she hated active fighting, hated the vulnerability for both of them. She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and turned just in time to see the edge of a blade catch Kier’s cheekbone, a hilt smash his nose crooked and bloody—then his slick hand grasped her left hand, skin-to-skin contact drenched in blood. A great tear opened up inside her middle, power torn away in a torrent. On Kier’s other side, the offending soldier fell, with another three going beyond him.

“Easy, Captain,” Grey managed through gritted teeth. She caught sight of a well taking a knee, trying to revive their fallen mage, to no avail. Kier’s aim was always true.

She stayed with Kier as they pushed back through the mess of blood and mud, trying to avoid the worst of the fighting.

“Third’s a charm?” he muttered, pushing a body from the end of Grey’s sword. He turned to slash at another attacker, favoring his blade now rather than his magic as Grey focused on rebuilding her well of power. Alongside the convoy on both sides, the battle was quieting; she watched with detached, familiar horror as one of her men delivered a blow that nearly decapitated an enemy soldier, but she kept moving. That was the awfulness of warfare, the fact that kept her up at night staring at the ceiling of every room they’d ever slept in, from the rain-soaked canvas tents to the thick stone fortresses: she had to see it all, watch it all and keep going. This war wasn’t about winning or losing. It was about enduring. Watching flesh tear, tasting the blood of strangers in her mouth, taking lives in her hands and pushing forward into a stretching maw of time in which she hoped the killing would end.

Kier kicked down the door of the third carriage. Grey slipped in first, grabbing the hair of the Hand who lurched forward and slitting his throat in one easy, neat movement before he could raise his blade against her. This

time there was a mage waiting for them too, but Kier dismantled him with some trick that left Grey gasping, feeling like something had been chewed from the middle of her.

There, in the center of the hollowed-out carriage, unmistakable—there was the resource.

It took them both a second to process, blinking down at it, because it wasn’t a rock, or a forgotten aunt, or an elixir. It was a girl. A scrappy thing, thin to the point of boniness, with pitch-black hair cut jaggedly to her chin, and eyes the blue of ice chips. Grey couldn’t place her age, but didn’t think she could have been older than eighteen or twenty. She scowled up at them —it was impossible to do anything else with her wrists and ankles bound,

her mouth gagged.

“Captain…?” Grey found herself saying.

But Kier was already moving. “We’re not going to hurt you,” he said to the girl, perfunctory, as he dragged her over his shoulder. “Go,” he urged Grey when the girl was in place, and Grey slipped from the carriage back into the mess of the fight—but at least that had calmed down. Lieutenant Chappelle had rounded up the wounded from their company behind the convoy. Anyone still well enough to stand was on clean-up, making sure there were no survivors remaining.

Attis had asked for decimation, and she would have it. Grey swallowed hard, turning her face away. She’d been on clean-up one time too many, and she couldn’t bear to watch it now.

“Resource acquired,” she called to Chappelle, keeping close to Kier’s back. “Grab who you can and we’ll go.”

She kept her sword drawn as the company regrouped, carrying the wounded and dead they were able to. She scanned over them, chewing her lip. “Five dead,” she reported to Kier, unease heavy in her stomach.

But Kier wasn’t next to her. She turned to see that he’d carried the girl over to the bank, separated from the blood and battle, and set her down facing away from the worst of it. He’d already removed his helm and unbuckled his pauldrons, his fingers quick as he took off his armored leather breastplate. Grey stalked toward him—over or not, they were still in obvious danger, and it was too risky to be apart.

He was speaking in a low voice that Grey wasn’t close enough to hear.

Her stomach tightened as he pulled the breastplate over the girl’s head,

tightening it to her body, offering her protection. She felt frozen, watching him like that, as he ceded his armor to the girl they had been sent to rescue.

Fool that he was, he cut away the restraints on her hands and was rubbing the blood back into her wrists, the exact same way he’d rub feeling back

into Grey’s limbs after a long day.

He was always too prone to tenderness.

She looked away, just for a moment. Down by the carriages, the company was very nearly ready to go.

“On your signal, Captain,” she called to Kier. “Let’s get back.”

Something within her prickled—it wasn’t power, thick in her middle.

There’d been an odd kindness in his face, and she… she didn’t know. It reminded her too much of when she was just a girl, rescued by some soldier far away from here. She didn’t want to see it when she was still covered in blood, still aching with the power he’d drained from her. She didn’t want to accept that she’d become the very type of person she’d had so many nightmares about.

There was no sound behind her, no acknowledgment from Kier.

Lieutenant Chappelle turned to say something from the front of the column —she saw the shape of the word on his lips—and then behind her, very clearly, Kier said, “Hand.”

Grey turned. He had the girl by the wrists, holding her awkwardly as he pushed her down the ridge. She was sobbing, great breaths shaking her thin shoulders. In Kier’s armor, she looked like a child play-acting at knighthood. Kier’s face was twisted oddly, looking almost like shock. He tethered to Grey, and she felt something strange coming through: pain,

guilt, apology, surprise.

Something was very wrong.

“Kearns, Pacet,” she called, and two of the typics from the back of the column detached at her command. “Take the resource.”

It took a moment for them to clear the girl, lead her away, another moment for Kier to take a step, stumble. He gripped Grey’s arm for stability, clutching the edge of her pauldron. Grey’s hands went to his upper arms, holding him upright without thought, fingers digging into the bulk of his padded shirt.

“What? What is it?” she asked, searching his face. It was difficult—he was a mess of blood anyway, all drama with very little true injury besides a

cut cheek and perhaps a broken nose, but none of that was enough to explain the glassy look in his eyes.

“She stabbed me,” he said. He moved closer to Grey, shielding his body from their company. Very carefully, he pulled up the bottom of his padded shirt, revealing the blooming stain on his undershirt. It was very quickly

going red and wet.

“How badly?” Grey asked.

Kier winced.

“I’ll kill her,” Grey gritted, pressing her fingers to Kier’s side. “I’ll fucking kill her.”

“No…” Kier was saying, his hand tightening on her arm.

She couldn’t kill the resource. She couldn’t kill the resource, because that order hadn’t been given, and yet, and yet—when she looked back, the girl’s hands were red with Kier’s blood. Kier leaned in, his breathing ragged on Grey’s muddy cheek. All she could think of was the overwhelming crush of her own failure; all she could hear was the pounding of her heartbeat in

her ears.

“You gave her your armor,” she seethed.

“She’s just a girl,” Kier said, unsteady. “She was—is—terrified.”

Grey herself had been “just a girl” once, and look at her now. She wondered if Kier would’ve underestimated her, too, when she was a girl— or if she would’ve made the same decision their prisoner had. To cut. To wound. To run.

“How did you not check if she was armed?”

“Grey,” he said. “It was my own dagger. It… it probably did a lot of damage coming out, and I won’t let you put yourself at risk for me.”

She knew the dagger. Dark metal, barbed on the lower edge. She’d given it to him herself—had presented it to him on his twenty-fifth birthday with a note that read, So you can be deadly all on your own, partially as a joke. He must’ve recovered it before handing over the resource—good move; it wasn’t a solid plan to leave her armed—because he shakily offered it to Grey. If only the girl had left it buried in his lower intestines, she wouldn’t be quite so panicked now. Removing it had only done more damage.

“Listen to me,” she said, holstering the dagger then moving one hand to grip his chin, forcing him to look at her. It was shock, probably—he was fine. He’d had worse. He’d be fine.

“Grey—”

“Don’t,” she chastised. He’d been stabbed before, worse than this.

They’d both suffered worse than this. She pressed a hand against his wound and sent a push of power at him. Kier let out an awful noise, staggering against her, his eyes going very dark.

“I just need to get you to camp,” she said. “Once we get back, I will fix it. Okay?”

“Grey,” he said, scrabbling for her hand. She let him take it, his slick and wet with his own blood.

“No,” she said, feeling him resist the tether. “Take it. Siphon from me.

Take it all—don’t you fucking look at me like that.”

There was blood between his teeth. It took her a minute to recover the gauze from her pocket kit, another to wrap his torso as tightly as she could under his shirt. Once that was done, she kept his hand in hers, forced him to move forward, draped his arm around her shoulder. He was so heavy, too heavy—she staggered, nearly dropping him. One of the other Hands was there before she was even off the bank, taking his other side, giving Grey the freedom to press her hand firmly against his wound. She could not do that much now, not without stopping to clean and inspect the wound, but he wouldn’t get any worse with a constant thread of power running into him.

Mages could not heal themselves, even with a steady flow of magic. It was like trying to tickle oneself—an impossibility. Just as it was impossible to harm a well with magic; the power didn’t allow for that kind of direction.

But Grey’s hands paired with Grey’s power… Though she had no affluence to perform her own magic, her medical training and undiluted power worked in tandem to put Kier back together. And until she could get her hands on him, could actually help, she could keep him indefinitely stable

with power alone.

If she could sustain it.

“Let’s move!” she shouted, hating the shrill note in her voice. But she was his Hand, his voice—she was in command when he could not be.

The Hand on Kier’s other side said very softly, “You must move your feet, Captain Seward.” Grey looked over just long enough to register that it was Ola Et-Kiltar, a sharp-tongued well who had caught her eye often enough that she and Kier were planning to put her mage, Brit, up for promotion. Grey couldn’t see Brit now—usually their pale hair was easy to

spot in the heaving mass of soldiers—but she forced herself to stay calm, because if Ola wasn’t panicking, Brit probably wasn’t dead.

But Kier was still resisting her, and losing valuable time because of it.

“Take it,” Grey seethed into his shoulder. He hissed a breath through his teeth, coughed, and spat out a mouthful of blood. She pressed her hand firm against the gauze, feeling the muscles of his stomach and another sluice of hot, sticky blood.

But this time, he listened. She felt the thread of her power moving into him, unraveling like a loose bit of yarn on a knit sweater. He took another unsteady breath.

They supported him, shuffling along as Grey’s head pounded with the agony he was unable to keep from slipping down the tether. She felt the thread unspooling further and further, the tugging against her. She had quite a lot to give before she ran out, but she had to keep just enough to heal him when they got back to camp, and avoid suspicion on top of that.

Halfway back, Ola switched with her mage, Brit—this was a relief to Grey, because it confirmed that Brit was not dead—but that left a new problem. Kier stumbled, once, and Brit sucked a breath through their teeth as they caught him, looking over at Grey.

“Is he siphoning from you?” they asked. “Has he been siphoning from you all this time?”

“That’s none of your concern,” Grey snapped. But Kier was grappling against the tether like a dying man—he wasn’t doing it intentionally, but he was drawing a lot. For a normal well, it would be too much.

Ola, within earshot, hurried to Grey’s other side. “Surely it’s too much— Hand Captain Flynn, you can’t let him drain you.”

Grey shot Ola a fierce look. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Hand,” Kier said, very quietly. He’d always been better at propriety. A terrible irony, that was.

She didn’t know the edges of her power, the barriers—it’d been a long time since she’d gone looking. She had felt the fatigue of true emptiness only once, after a particularly awful battle years ago, when Kier had overdone it. Then, she’d slept for three days straight and woken to his guilt.

They’d taken measures since then, legal and otherwise. And he’d always been so careful. She didn’t think she was going to run out of power, but they were so far from home.

She couldn’t think of it. Not now.

“Hand Captain,” Ola said again, more urgent.

Her vision was graying out a little bit at the edges, going grainy from the force of her focus. Her jaw was clenched hard enough that it felt like her teeth would shatter. The spool was ever spinning, but Kier’s feet were moving, and his heart was pumping, and if he stopped siphoning… “He’s going to kill you,” Ola said urgently. She exchanged a look with her mage and held out her hand. “Let me. Please.”

The idea of giving Kier over to someone else was so sweet—and utterly impossible. Grey looked at him, his eyes half shut. There was a scar through his eyebrow from falling out of an apple tree when he was nine. The scratch on his cheek was now clotted, crusted nearly black.

“I’m fine,” she insisted. She adjusted his arm across her shoulders, gripping the hand that hung limply on her chest. It was so, so cold.

“Hand Captain,” Brit said, very carefully, “if you do not disengage, we will be dragging back both of your bodies. Let Ola take him.”

All she wanted was to give him up. Push him out. Let him go. But she could keep holding him; the well of power inside of her was not empty.

If she kept holding him, they would know. They would know she was not normal, that there was something wrong.

If she let him go, Ola would try to tether to Kier, and she would find that she could not.

“Drop it,” he said to one or both of them. His voice was utterly unlike himself—it was like listening to a version of Kier already years in the grave. His head lolled to one side, his forehead pressing to Grey’s temple.

“Let go,” he muttered.

“I’m not going to,” she said. She was going to throw up. There was so much of her going, so much of her gone, it felt like she was pulling her intestines out through her navel. “You can’t ask that of me.”

He sucked a breath. She stumbled, pressing her hand tighter. She felt his lips on her temple, chapped, uncoordinated with pain. “Hand Captain,” he said, the lips brushing her skin so very cold. “I order it.”

“You don’t outrank me.” If she let go, there was no guarantee he’d get back alive. No guarantee he’d get back at all.

“Like hell I don’t.” If she didn’t let go, there would be even more eyes on them. Suspicion.

A pause. A breath. How nice it would be, Grey thought, to lie next to him and die. For all of this to be over.

“I have enough,” Kier said.

She snapped the tether.

The relief was so dizzying that she very nearly lost consciousness, and in a moment of panic, she realized that she had given a lot, and she was not as powerful as she thought. Her neck was clammy with sweat under Kier’s arm, her stomach awful with bile, her head pounding. There was a great, caving emptiness within her, the well of magic nearly dry, and then she heard Kier suck in a breath. She couldn’t even imagine—without the power of a tether, any pain he’d kept at bay rushed in, doubling, trebling.

“If you die on me,” Grey hissed into Kier’s shoulder, “I’m going to come right down with you and haunt your bones, Kiernan Seward, you absolute fucking bastard.”

His laugh was weak, breathy and full of blood. “I’ll hold you to that.”

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The relationship between a mage and well can be complicated enough, based on the delicate balance of power, without emotional entanglements entering the equation. For the best working relationship, it is recommended that the pairing remains as close as is necessary for trust, but otherwise avoid any feeling more powerful than friendly respect.

Mage’s Codex, Fifth Edition, published 4 years PD

My love is yours, as that which beats within my heart is yours, and that which powers the fabric of the world is yours through mine own hand. Take from me, that I may be thine.

Binding ritual recovered from Locke, author unknown, date unknown

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