2.17. Murani for Shut Up
Enna-Belum was gone. The ground had bloomed open where he’d stood, the grass flattened, the palisades before it knocked inverse like a busted mouth studded with shrapnel. Scattered chunks of stormship and blackfeather pittered from the sky in morbid rain. A massive length of unspooled intestine hung in the bent-back trees like a festive garland.
“Fuck the seraphs,” someone roared, maybe Tiago—Anna’s ears were ringing too hard to tell. “Vivat a Legia!”
As if responding to an order, the surviving defenders of Shaheill burst into cheering, some echoing the call of Vivat a Legia and some casting words aside, a full-throated venting of terror and dread into a primal noise, some laughing, some weeping, or both at once.
They threw down their weapons and held each other, or held their own heads as if to dig the memories out, or held their dead friends. Anna just stood, staring into the trees, a stodgy black stone unmoving in this torrent of emotion.
A figure came forth from the dripping forest and into the field as it teemed with that horrible joy. He was struggling with the remnants of his carve-away parachute that clung still to him like vestigial wings. The sarkanian sorcerer he’d stolen followed behind, already extricated from his.
The canvas fell. Seth il Gutierre emerged, windblown, blinking, bedraggled, pinching his nose and bulging his cheeks to blow pressure back into his ears. He looked ridiculous. He looked like a rat in from a rainstorm. He’d just saved a dozen people, probably more, from screaming, torturous deaths.
He looked up from the ropes he was sawing at, saw Anna, and smiled.
Every muscle in her face locked up at once, doors thrown shut against a tidal wave of… something. Something too bright and beaming for the vessel it was trying to fill.
“Seth!” Tiago sprinted from the formation, vaulted a splintery pit trap, and collided with the thief. “You beautiful fucking twerp! Holy fuck, you exploded him!”
“He’s dead?” The thief peered around the ruined clearing. “I got blown halfway back to Sheepfuck by that gale. I didn’t see. Where is he?”
“He’s everywhere.” Ofelia drew a ropy strand of gore out of Seth’s inky locks. “He’s in your hair.”
“Saint Borac’s balls.” Seth peeled more detonated seraph goop off his chest. “That’s what this is?”
Anna had stared down a seraph the size of a full-family home mere minutes ago. She had stood straight and scowled right into its inhuman eyes. Now here came this grubby little thief in the company of her laughing children, and she had to force herself not to turn tail and flee.
Seth navigated a tangle of gleeful touches—ruffling his hair, slapping his back, arms thrown around his shoulders. His monochrome skin didn’t stop them. If he was lit they’d be trying to steal a kiss, for fuck’s sake. Good thing Anna was Anna, and not someone who’d care.
The Blue Ekadao halted and stepped backward when the grateful public approached him in the same way. “No, thank you,” he said, smoothly. “You do not smell good.” The people who had forgotten their mistrust of the unlit rediscovered it in the good-cheered sarkanian.
The joyful throng deposited Seth before Anna. He wiped a slug of viscera off his shoulder.
“Light work,” he said.
She scoffed. “Still alive.”
“Close enough to it.”
“Come with me, then.” Anna ignored the brightness that threw across Seth’s face. If the little bastard had a tail it’d be wagging. “Boy, girl. Gather the casualties.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Tiago cupped his hands around his mouth. “Heroes of Shaheill. We’re heading to the muster grounds. If you’re walking wounded, move yourself to the square. If you can’t, we’ll be back with stretchers. Any lacerations, any blood drawn, any deep wounds that broke the skin, we’ll check you and determine what’s to be done and whether your light is in danger.”
“Oh, dear,” Ofelia murmured. She crouched over Riccana il Teremi, whose dented breastplate she’d loosened with difficulty. The inverse was caked with blood. The girl was breathing shallow and rapid. Simon sat next to her, stroking her copper hair with the one hand he had left, biting down hard on his lip to silence his tears.
Tiago glanced at the sight that had caused his sister’s words, and snapped away again as if the sight had scalded him. “Blood does not mean you’re sure to unlight,” he said, louder and more brittle than before, “so nobody panics before you’ve seen an apothecary. Right? I need volunteers to stay with my sister and watch the immobilized. The rest of you are with me.”
Anna trod hobnailed, through spilled blood and burnt seraph, into the village proper. Its citizens—those who had hidden while their friends and fathers and sisters had fought—rushed past her, bringing Shaheill’s bounty out to its rescuers. Food and bandages and jugs of wine and joy and lamentation all in as great a measure as they could spare.
A weeping grandmother hung a garland of marigolds around Seth’s neck and pressed her lips to the top of his head, heedless of the matted blood and the unlit man beneath it.
Nobody came near Anna.
“I spent the whole ride dreading what I’d come back to.” Seth plucked petals from his new marigolds as they passed Shaheill’s square, where jade-laden saintspeakers were unfolding cots and raising white canvas triage tents. “Coming back and seeing you there, you and Feeli and Tiago—the world took a boot off my chest. So if you’re getting ready to chew me out, I’ll bear it, but I need you to know that I’ll never regret it.”
Anna’s ears flared straight outward. “Chew you out for killing a blackfeather? That’s what you think of me?”
“I’m just going off prior experience here,” Seth said.
“Shut up.”
“But if you wanted to give me a slap on the back instead—”
“Shut up,” Anna hissed. “Miyalakam niap kei.”
He grinned. “Is that Murani for shut up? Because it’s a lot of extra syllables.”
“It’s telling you where I want to slap you.”
His smile did not shrink. “Oh yeah? Where’s that?”
Anna stopped in place. Seth nearly bumped into her, as did a lady in an apron toting a whole roasted pig. She mumbled a “yer pardon, Madam Verdugo,” as she skittered away.
“I am not for this,” Anna said.
Seth stepped back to give her space. “Pork?”
“I am not for banter,” she said. “I am not for confessions, or flirtations. I am not for any of the things you try on me. I am a vessel for horrible things, and I want to go away now, because I don’t know how to—”
She’d run out of road. She dithered.
Seth rolled a marigold between his smudged fingers, and Anna hated it, how insufferably sympathetic he was trying to be. “We don’t have to speak. We can just… I can wait for you. Or we can just sit.”
“I don’t want to just sit.” She was resolute in her refusal to look at him. “I want to… be good to you. And thank you. And I don’t know how, and Annalise does. So shut up until I’m her again.”
“I reckon that’s about the most beautiful thank you I’ve ever gotten, Anna,” he said, with that awful softness and that smarmy little smile, and she hated the traitorous lungs in her chest for how labored their air became.
Someone screamed. The pressure-shifting snap-whumph of a fireball, cast and blooming. A bright flash threw across the siding of the roadhouse a street away.
In the carriage’s direction.
Whatever venom Anna was doubtlessly about to spill all over her petulant little thief refluxed down her throat. She sprinted.
A fresh-faced hermandati boy came clanking toward her as she rounded the block. “It was Robert. He—”
Anna bowled past the would-be helper. The roadhouse’s side had been blown open. Crumpled in its cracked masonry was Robert il Magnard, the drunkard sorcerer. Before him, scattered across a dozen paces, chunks of blackened carapace and sizzling flesh.
A seraph?
Demetrius released an enraged neigh, and Anna rubbernecked toward the stable. A squat, three-legged yellowfeather was clattering away from the carriage, half-singed, with a heavy crack in its carapace from the vicious kick Anna’s warhorse had just given it. It looked at Anna with its ugly jellyfish eyes and squealed aquatically, like a drowning pig.
Anna did not waste time in thought. The executioner sword was still in the carriage; her pike was in pieces somewhere on the field behind her. She seized the fancy little saber at Seth’s waist and drew it from his scabbard before he had a moment to protest; with her stolen sword she dove for the miserable little seraph. It chittered and screeched and bared misshapen fangs, but it was nothing but a yellowfeather, and this was the perfect opportunity to vent the awful weightless feeling by chopping it to pieces, which Anna did.
When the saber stuck in its neck—bastard thief doesn’t sharpen it enough—she plunged her boot into its scrawny chestpiece to shove it from the edge. It stumbled backward, fountaining blackened blood, and exsanguinated into a foaming, twitching mess before her.
She cleaned the blade’s edge on her muddy black breeches and shoved it back into Seth’s limp hands. “What the fuck,” he said. “Is he dead?”
“Your saber cuts like a butter knife,” Anna said. “Sharpen it. Is who dead?”
Seth hurried to Robert il Magnard’s side and fumbled at the man’s neck for a pulse. “Alive. And smelling profoundly pickled.”
“That’s the man as I understand him.”
“I reckon this is another seraph he killed right here.” Seth prodded the charred carapace with the tip of his returned saber. “Guess even a soused sorcerer can be useful for something.”
The toe of Anna’s trench boot turned the newly dead seraph over and found, in the pool of blood, the object it had sought in the carriage.
The severed head of Sister Niama al Tars.
“What’s that—ah, Saints.” Seth looked away from the rotting head and its frayed yellow hair. “That thing? Again?”
Anna patted Demetrius calm again, shushing his croaking equine protests. “Get someone for the drunkard,” she said. “I’m changing.”
“We should tell someone.”
“So fucking tell someone,” she snapped, and before he could bid her stay longer (with that voice, that fucking voice, why won’t he shut up), she summited the black grille steps into the carriage.
The yellowfeather had torn the place apart seeking the head. Anna was too far gone to care. She was shaking now, scrabbling and stupid with the desperate urge to stop being Anna. Agonized minutes before she discovered her head case (head case. Seth would think that’s funny) and clicked the lock open.
With bone-deep, aching relief, Anna al Ydris let herself melt away and become someone else.
Someone bleeding banjaxed.
The Darkness fatigue walloped Annalise with the amplified viciousness of the forty-eight hour workday she’d just spent as a lemonsucking arsehole. She released a long huff like air let out of a balloon and sprawled on the carriage’s seat, her long starfishing legs sending a lobster-tailed cavalry helmet crashing to the floor.
“Annalise?” Her lover was outside. Her little fox. “What was that?”
“Ah, sure, it’s nothing. Just a sty in here.” Annalise’s voice was thick with exhaustion; the urge to lay eyes on him animated her. “Come see.”
Seth appeared in the carriage doorframe. “Hi, lady.”
“Hi, lad.” Annalise opened her arms. “You find a yoke for the drunkard?”
“Yeah,” Seth said. “There’s an apothecary out there says he got his bell rung but it was mostly the cast, not the blast. They’re taking care of him.”
“Man’s a fuckin’ hero, I reckon. In spite of the fermentation. They saw the seraphs?”
He nodded. “Said they’ll tell the twins.”
“They’ll be along, then. C’mere.” Annalise waggled her hands needily. Seth snorted and approached. There was no room on the carriage bench for him, and when that made him hesitate Annalise pulled him on top of her and bound him in an exhausted embrace. She groaned with relief as his weight pressed into her. “Oh, Seth. The state of me.”
“The state of us.”
She chuckled and smoothed down his manky hair. “You are absolutely rank, pet.”
“Shower.” Now that Seth was in her arms, he went limp, lulling into the same exhaustion she felt. “I want a shower. Let’s go back to Fontana.”
“I would,” she said. “I would do whatever you saintsfucking want, Seth il Gutierre. You are a legend. A saint returned. That lizard, too.” She frowned. “That’s—I’m remembering that, right? You’ve got a mate who’s a lizard now?”
“The Blue Ekadao.”
“Him too. I’ll buy him a cricket the size of a hen. Whatever it is he eats.”
He scooted further up, face-to-face with her. “How many did we lose?”
“Fewer than we should’ve,” she said. “Far fewer. I’ll be out to bury them. And speechify and say thank you, Shaheill, and goodbye. And we’ll have the whole bit.” She shut the carriage door with her boot. “But not yet. Saints, please, not yet. Please, just stay with me a while. Let the world knock when it needs us.”
He kissed her, and she kissed him back, despite the gruesome effluvial stains they were both soaked in. “If I stay lying here,” he whispered, “I think I’m gonna fall asleep.”
She replied with an enervated “hmm.”
He hmmed back.
Annalise was too bleeding tired to say what she wanted to, which was either right-o, we oughta get a move on, or will you marry me and be my husband, she wasn’t sure which. Her eyes drooped shut.
The hammering of a fist on a door. “Mom.” It was Tiago. Bang bang bang.
Annalise groaned as her fox shifted in her arms. “Fecking what,” she called.
“Need you in the square,” Tiago called.
“Can’t you do whatever it is?”
“No.” Tiago had carefully pruned all emotion from himself before he’d come to her. “I’m sorry, mom. I can’t do it. It has to be you.”
Here was a worry worth the waking. With great effort, Annalise raised her head to the window. “What’s happening, sunshine?”
“The deep-wounded are starting to unlight.” All the victory cheer had left Tiago’s face. The dour, dark-eyed soldier was back in residence. “We have one animaxis. We can catch one soul. Someone has to decide whose.”