The Demon Queen Wants To Live.

Ash kept me steady on my feet and I did not resist. The slope was steep. Ash went first, her sword drawn, checking the treeline before each step.

I followed. My legs moved, though my mind was elsewhere. On a silver hand around a throat I hadn’t realized was so fragile. How Ash's feet had left the ground as if she weighed nothing at all. I had not known Ash's throat was so fragile. I had not known I would care.

"Stay close," Ash said without turning.

"I am not the one who needs protecting," I said. The words came out sharper than I intended.

Ash glanced back once. I saw her register my face and she turned away. We crested the slope and the firelight found us. The camp was still standing, which was almost more than I had expected.

The battle sounds had died some time ago, replaced by men tending to wounds and counting their dead. This was a sight I was almost used to seeing. I had been on many a campaign, and those camps had looked much like this, after the fighting was done. A thousand times larger, but the concept was somewhat the same.

Ash moved ahead of me, her sword now sheathed but her hand still resting on the hilt. She was limping, just slightly, on her left side. I did not think she knew I had noticed, and I had not seen the attack that had injured her so. When had I started watching her so closely?

The clearing came into view. Firelight still burned at the center of the camp, though it had shrunk to embers. Soldiers moved between the tents, carrying bodies. I counted the dead as we approached. Eight men in silver armour that I could see, laid in a row near the center. Their breastplates had been removed, and the wounds beneath them were ugly. Caved in chests, torn off limbs, battered heads. My gaze lingered longer than it once might have.

Further from the fire, in loose heaps, lay the Demonbloods. Their mismatched and dull armor did not catch the light. One of the fallen had hair the color of frost. Another had the faintest nubs of horns at his temples, hidden beneath purple hair. A girl lay among them -she could not have been much older than Sara. There was no green wolf beside her now. I looked at them longer than I looked at the soldiers.

Isabelle’s voice came back to me, unbidden. All people with demon blood are brothers and sisters. Pain makes family of everyone. Did that apply to all of these bodies too? Had they been a family? I crushed the thought before it could take further root.

I looked for Ash. She was speaking to one of the soldiers about the wounded, her back was to me. The marks on her throat were vivid even from here. The Inker stood at the center of what remained of the camp, his robes disheveled. He was speaking to three soldiers in a voice that carried more than he perhaps intended. “Find them! I don’t care if you have to comb every tree in this god damned forest, you will find the Consecrated or so help me I will-”

“We are here,” I said.

The Inker turned. The relief that crossed his face was so naked it was almost offensive. He crossed the distance to us in four strides, his composure reassembling itself with each step, though what the point of that was now, I did not know.

“You’re alive.” He looked us over, and his eyes caught on the dirt on my clothing, on the tear in Ash’s dress. “Are you injured? I have men who can heal. If you need-”

“We need to speak,” I said. The Inker paused. His gaze moved between us again. Whatever he saw in my face, it made the relief curdle into something more cautious. “And you will follow,” I continued. “Now.”

The man stared at me for three seconds. I counted them. Then he turned and gestured toward his tent without a word. Ash fell into step beside me. She waited until the Inker was far enough ahead, then spoke in a murmur only I could hear. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I wish to get answers, that is all.” I said. I took a deep breath, now was not the time to be distracted.

“Will this result in violence? Because I must confess, I do not quite have the strength for it.”

I glanced at her. The red marks on her throat were especially noticeable in the firelight, dark against the pale of her skin. My jaw tightened at the sight of them. “No,” I said. “Though perhaps this is a different kind of violence.”

I stopped walking. Ash took another step before she realized and turned back. “What-”

“Stay still.” I reached for her before the thought had fully formed. My left hand rose to her throat, and the Cradle answered at once. Wisps of white flame poured from my fingers and I felt the damage beneath the skin. The bruising was deeper than it had any right to be. Through the Cradle's impressions I felt something else -Ash's confusion, and beneath it, a stillness. Why was she so still?

The bruises lightened under my touch. The angry red faded to pink, and the pink faded to the color of her skin. I traced each mark that Isabelle’s fingers had left, and I erased them one at a time, making absolutely certain nothing remained. It was perhaps an unwise use of the power I still had. “Lys-”

“I said stay still.” My voice came out sharper than I intended. I adjusted my hand and checked the other side of her neck. There was another bruise beneath her jaw, one I had not seen. I pressed Bloom into it and felt it yield. “What about your ribs? Were you struck?”

“They’re fine.”

"Turn around."

"Lys."

"Turn. Around."

Ash turned. I placed my hand flat against her back, between her shoulder blades. She shivered and then her breathing changed. It quickened for a heart beat, and then it slowed. I felt the warmth of her back press against my palm. The Cradle pulsed and I felt along the line of each rib. There was tenderness on her left side. A deep bruise, perhaps a hairline crack beneath. I fed warmth into it. My hand stayed longer than the healing required. I pulled it away.

"There," I said. "An injured retainer is a useless retainer. I am simply being thorough."

Ash turned back to face me. Faint color had risen in her neck. She opened her mouth and closed it again. The color deepened, and when she met my eyes, her gaze held something I could not read. I looked away first. That was unusual. Neither of us said anything as we walked to the tent.

---

The interior of the tent was rather modest for a holy man. There was a single large cot, a folding table with papers, and a small stool. The Inker sat on the stool. He looked rather diminished without the ceremony around him. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked.

My hands were steady now, I was grateful for this task. “You are going to tell us what you refused to on the road,” I said. “You are going to tell us about Essence and Essence Cores and the stages of cultivation. I have many other questions, and you are going to answer every question I put to you, and you are going to do so completely, without restraint.”

The Inker straightened on his stool even as he sat up straighter. “Those answers are found only at the Academy as I have told you many times. My charge was to escort you, not to instruct you and that boundary exists for-”

“Then let me ask you this,” I cut him off. “The people who attacked us tonight. Did they also attend this Academy of yours?”

The man’s mouth closed. “I felt it on them,” I continued. “The same power you and your men were using. This Essence. It was on every one of those fighters, including the half-demon who led them. They all had elaborate marks, and they certainly seemed well versed in using them. This power of yours does not seem nearly as rare or as sacred as you have been pretending.”

The Inker’s jaw worked. He looked past us, at the tent wall. When he spoke, the words came reluctantly, as if each one had to be pried loose. “In the Kingdom of Arianeth, and the lands around it,” he said slowly, “the Covenant is one of the few organizations authorized to administer the Ink and oversee its cultivation. The primary organization, by far. There are others, and there are some…unofficial ones.”

“One of the few,” Ash stepped in. “But not the only one, as you pretended. You lied to us. You mean to say that these answers exist elsewhere, and you told us they did not.”

The Inker’s face twisted. “Other sacrilegious places,” he snapped. “Run by fools who barely understand what they are handling. Renegades and heretics who-”

“We were attacked,” I said. My voice was not loud. “Your Archon sent you to retrieve us. He will not be pleased to learn that his prize was nearly destroyed on the road.”

The Inker went still. His gaze was drifting between the two of us, though he did not seem to see either. Who was he seeing? His Archon being displeased with him, most likely. I knew this type of worm well.

“That is…my problem to bear, but I do not see why-”

“The half-demon who led the attack separated me from the camp,” I said. “She targeted Ash and me directly. We fought her.” I folded my arms. “She nearly killed us both and we only survived because of luck, or perhaps because of a whim.” That did not feel good to admit. Ash stirred at my side. I could only hope the Hero would keep her mouth shut. She did. It was a small mercy.

The Inker’s face had gone pale. “You…encountered her? By yourselves?” he repeated. “You’re certain?”

The question was almost offensive. “I am certain. Do not make me repeat myself.”

He pressed his palms against his knees. I could see the tremor in his fingers, and I could see the precise moment he began to understand the shape of the report he would have to give his master. Every detail of it only made him look worse. Doubtless finding us was a great boon, but even that boon could lose its shine with enough inconvenient details.

“It does not have to be this way,” I said. “If you instruct us on the road -if you answer our questions- then perhaps I will tell your master something different. That the defense was extraordinary. That we were never truly in danger. That our escort performed admirably, and that the Inker who led it did his duty with distinction.”

The silence that followed was long enough that I could hear the fire outside, guttering in its pit. The Inker looked at me, and then at Ash, and then back at me. The outcome was already certain. Men like this always chose self-preservation. It was their greatest and only virtue. “There are aspects of mark cultivation,” he said carefully, “that are difficult or unsafe to teach without at least a resonance chamber. And besides that, I am not sure how much I can impart, given that we will reach Koralis soon.”

“We will be the ones to decide that. You will only instruct.”

The Inker chewed on this for a time. His jaw moved without producing sound, twice, before he finally exhaled through his nose. “Tomorrow, then,” he said. “On the road…I will instruct you both as best I can.”

“Thank you,” Ash said.

I glanced at her without meaning to. She was watching me. Something in her expression had changed, though I could not have said what. I turned away and back towards the Inker. The Inker nodded, though the expression on his face suggested the thanks tasted wrong. He moved to rise from his stool. He had almost made it to his feet when I spoke again.

“One more thing.” He stopped. I looked around the tent. At the cot with its thin mattress. It was nothing, but it had walls. “This is our tent now,” I said.

The Inker stared at me. His mouth opened. It closed. It opened again. “You cannot be serious.”

“Surely,” I said, “the thing being escorted is more important than the people doing the escorting. We were attacked. We are tired. I should not need to explain why the Consecrated deserve better.”

The man looked stricken. His gaze moved to the cot, which he had no doubt been looking forward to all day. For a moment, I thought he might refuse. Then his shoulders sagged, and what remained of his dignity went with them. “I will need your word,” he said quietly. “Both of you. That you will uphold your end of our agreement. That...that you will tell his Eminence what you said you would.”

“You have it,” Ash said.

“You have mine as well,” I said. “I will not break my word.”

The Inker gave me a long, unreadable look at that. He gathered his papers from the table, tucked them under his arm, and walked out of the tent without another word. The flap fell shut behind him.

Ash and I stood in the quiet after he left. “That,” Ash said finally, “was rather cruel.”

“It is not cruel for a Queen to give fools what they deserve." And it is certainly not cruel to know the shape of a beast’s den one is walking into. Whatever that woman had told me, I would find out the truth myself.

“He looked like you had kicked his pet.”

“He should be grateful I only kicked his pet.”

Ash made a sound that was caught somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. She looked at the tent flap where the Inker had disappeared, then back at me. "Why did you take this tent?" she asked quietly.

"I took his tent because it is mine by right."

"Of course you did." Something in her voice was warm. The silence should have been comfortable. It was not.

My mind wandered where I didn’t wish it to. Morrigan. She was alive, nearly a thousand years later, and someone had called her Mother. A [Succubus] shouldn’t have been able to have children at all. That was why I had perhaps been more fond of her than the others. And something was wrong with her, with those black veins. The same one as the phoenix and even the Sy-

“Lys.” Ash’s voice cut my thoughts as surely as her Sever might have. “You haven’t told me yet," Ash said. Her voice was quiet. "Who that woman was in the clearing, I mean."

I looked at her, then looked away. "No," I said. "I haven’t."

“Some other night then,” Ash said after a pause.

I looked back at her. She assumed I wo- I frowned, folded my arms. I didn’t quite meet her gaze. “Some other night.” I agreed simply.

I reached out and took her hand. The motion surprised me almost as much as it seemed to surprise her. My fingers closed around hers, and for a moment, Ash did not move. Her hand sat in mine, limply. Then her fingers closed, slowly, and her grip was firmer than it needed to be.

“If a Queen does not deserve to sleep outside," I said, "then neither does her retainer. It is all rather simple.”

Ash looked at our joined hands. Then up at me. Retainer. The word had left me before I had planned on voicing it, and now it was said, and I could not unsay it. “I did not swear to you,” she said. Her voice was quiet.

"Do you object?" My voice came out smaller than I intended.

Ash stared at me for a long moment. Her face had some of that strange coloration again. Her mouth opened, and she almost said something. She closed it, took a breath, and said again, "Suppose not." She said it while looking at me, and she held my gaze for three breaths after. I was the one who broke first, looking away.

“You're impossible," she said.

"That has been well established," I murmured.

Ash's grip shifted, and she was pulling me away, towards the cot. I had not agreed that we would share. I did not say this. She pulled me with her, and I let her. Ash lay down first. I slowly took the egg out of the satchel, before laying down myself next to her. The egg sat between us.

She took my hand again, though I had not permitted it. I would allow it, for this one night. It did not take long at all for the Hero to fall asleep. I would learn that trick from her, I decided. It was a rather unfair advantage.

At some point, I stared up at the ceiling. Ash had shifted closer to me, until her arm settled across me, the way it had once, not too long ago. It settled directly over my chest. I would permit that too, this once. The egg pulsed warm. This obedience did not feel like a chain.

I will grow stronger. For the first time, the thought was not for me alone.