Chapter 31: Surprises.
"It's not here." The words left me before the thought had fully formed. My hands were still inside the satchel, fingers pressing into the cloth where the warmth should have been. It was warm there. It should not have been warm without the egg inside it.
The Requiem answered before I called it. Wisps of black fire bloomed from my right hand, curling upward from my fingers in tendrils that drank the firelight around them. The table greyed beneath me. The wood aged in a heartbeat. A crack split the surface and spread. The satchel itself thinned. The people closest to us went silent, looking around apprehensively. I crushed the flame in my fist, and the black receded.
"What?" Ash said.
"The e-egg." My voice cracked on the second word. "The egg isn't here."
Silence followed between us, cut only by the sounds around us. My hands would not leave the satchel. They kept pressing into the cloth, as if the egg might simply appear again, might resolve itself from nothing the way a spell once would have. It did not.
Ash froze beside me. I did not see her reaction. I was staring at my own hands, buried in empty cloth, and the room had gone very bright and very loud and very far away all at once. Then I turned toward the table where the men who had approached us had been sitting.
The two were still there, slouched over their cups. The third chair was empty. I crossed the common room before thought could form. I did not want it to, not now. I seized the first man -the one who had sat beside me- by the collar and hauled him upright. His cup hit the floor. Wine spread across the wood in a dark stain of red. "Where is it?" I demanded.
"What- what're you-" His eyes were unfocused, his breath was thick.
"The egg. You took it from me. Where is it?"
"I didn't take anything! I don't know what you're-"
I shoved him aside and rounded on the second. He was already backing away, hands raised. "I swear, I swear I don't know, we didn't-"
I yanked him in the air and glared into his eyes. "Where is the egg?" I hissed.
His eyes almost rolled into the back of his head from the fear. He did not have it. Neither of them did. Their fear had too much shock in it, I could see that much. My grip loosened and the second man fell to the ground and did not rise.
The inn had gone quiet. Every face in the common room had turned toward us. The fire crackled in the silence. The Inker stood from his table across the room. He crossed the floor in four strides, his robes swishing against the wood. He had the decency to look mildly concerned. "What happened?" he said.
"The beast egg was stolen from me." My voice carried further than I intended. "It was in my satchel and someone took it while we sat here."
The Inker's face went hard. Whatever the man was, he was not slow. He turned to the nearest silver soldier who had stood up "You, seal the doors. Nobody leaves this building until I say otherwise."
The innkeeper started forward, his broad face reddening. "Now see here, you can't just-"
"I can," the Inker said, and the marks on his forearms glowed. The innkeeper went quiet.
Two of the silver soldiers moved to the exits. Another stepped out of the inn and into the pouring rain. A woman near the hearth stood and protested. A man at the card table demanded to know what was happening.
The Inker met my gaze and held it for a moment. No doubt, he wanted me to see what he was doing for my sake. I ignored him. I was scanning faces and counting heads. I was running through every moment of the evening. The bump against the table. The strange weight that had followed it. I turned back towards the two men who had approached me. I looked at their table. Two men. There had been three, I was sure of it. The third man wasn't there.
Then I looked at the chair beside mine. The chair where Ash had been sitting. It was empty. I looked around the inn, and did not see her. I grabbed the satchel, swung it over my shoulder and then pushed through the crowd and past the two men who now guarded the door. It took them a moment to remember that their orders likely did not extend to me. They stepped aside without comment, though they cast me wary looks.
The rain hit me the moment I stepped outside. It was cold, and it took all of three steps for it to soak through my clothing. The street was dark, the only light leaking from the different building’s shuttered windows in thin lines or from the feeble lanterns strung about. I glanced around.
What did I expect to find? Ash? I did not see her, and did not know how I could in this darkness. The third man? Doubtless he was already gone. Something stabbed at me from the inside. I put a hand on my left breast, and felt it tremble. I tried to steady it. A Queen’s hands had to be steady. It was the bare minimum. It would not obey.
Then I felt it. Heavier than mana, and denser. It was Essence, and it carried an impression with it. The taste of things being cut from other things. Severance. For half a heartbeat, I did not connect it. I had been so focused on my own powers, that I had not considered that Ash might have practiced the same thing I had. I felt the weight again, there and gone in moments. I ran toward it.
I found them behind the inn, in a narrow space between the back wall and a stable. I heard Ash's breathing before I saw her. It was ragged and uneven, and the rain almost swallowed it.
There were signs of a fight, one that had not lasted long. A wooden crate had been split cleanly in two. A gash ran through the stone wall of the shed at shoulder height, smooth as glass. There were marks on the muddy ground.
A man was on the ground. He was the third -he had the most unremarkable face of the three. Or at least, it had been, when it had been whole. He was alive, but the margin was thin. His right arm ended at the elbow. His face was a ruin of bruises, blood and split skin. He was whimpering and quivering in his own blood.
The egg was on the ground, in the mud. Ash stood over the man. She was soaked through, Martha's dress clinging to her shoulders, to the line of her back. I could see through it to the skin beneath. Her sword was sheathed. Her hands hung at her sides and they were shaking.
She had not noticed me. Her breathing was ragged and uneven, and all of her attention was fixed on the man at her feet. "I'll kill you," Ash said. Her voice was low, barely audible over the rain. "I'll kill you for what you did to her."
Something behind my ribs tightened. It was not a feeling I could name. The man was too far gone to have heard. I did not think the words had ever been meant for him. I looked at the scene for a long moment. At the blood thinning in the rain. At Ash's back, and the shaking of her hands.
Then I looked at the egg. I crossed to it, knelt, and touched it. It was warm beneath my fingers as I gingerly inspected it. The black veins pulsed faintly in the dark. It was whole. I held it for one breath, feeling the rhythm against my palm. It was slow and steady, but it seemed to quicken as I touched it.
I rose with the egg cradled against my chest. It was whole. The warmth pressed into my skin through the cloth. I held it, just for a moment. Then I put the egg in the satchel, and I looked at Ash's hands. They were trembling. I stepped behind her.
“Ash?” I said her name. She flinched and did not turn. The rain ran down her back and she did not seem to feel it. I almost said it again, more softly this time. I did not know how.
"I couldn't stop." She finally said. Her voice came out strange. "I saw your face. I saw it and I just -I couldn't stop." Her hands flexed at her sides, open and closed, open and closed. "Every time I hit him I got angrier and angrier."
I did not know what to say to that. Perhaps there was nothing I could have said, even if I knew how. Ash stared only at the ground. The rain washed the blood from her hands, slowly. I stood a single step behind her. The distance between us somehow seemed larger and smaller than it ever had before. I knew what I had to do, though I had never considered doing it before. The only arms that had ever held me were Sara's -small and warm in a way I had not earned. That was the only shape I knew for this.
I wrapped my arms around Ash from behind. The motion was stiff. I did not know how tightly to hold, or where my hands should rest, or whether I was doing this correctly at all. I held on anyway. My arms settled around her shoulders, pulling the Hero back against me. Ash went rigid. For three heartbeats, neither of us moved. The rain fell on both of us, and I held on. I saw the flash of lightning, and heard the roar of thunder that came after. She was warm, even in this cold.
"This is not the kind of thing a Hero should do," I murmured. My voice was quiet.
Some of her stiffness broke at that. Her set shoulders dropped first. Then her hands unclenched. She leaned back, just slightly, into the hold. "I couldn't stop," she said again. Then, quieter, she asked, "What kind of Hero does that?" The rain drummed against the ground around us. "I was never a hero at all," Ash whispered.
I did not answer immediately. My arms tightened, just barely. I felt the warmth of her back against my chest, and the shaking that had not yet stopped. "You found it," I said. "That is what matters."
The next words sat in my throat, heavier than any command I had ever given. Far heavier than any spell I had ever spoken. "And more than that." I stopped. My throat had closed around the word, and I had to force it through. "I am grateful." The word came out smaller than I had ever heard my own voice.
Ash went still against me and she let out a sound that was somewhere between a choke and a laugh. We stayed like that for a time, over the bleeding man, in the rain, until some of the shaking in her hands finally stopped.
I released her eventually and stepped back. I looked down at the man. He was unconscious, his breathing was thin and wet. The arm Ash had taken was gone in one unnaturally clean cut. I saw it now, a few feet away in the mud. The man's bruises were swelling beneath the rain, and his chest rose and fell in a way that looked wrong. The Requiem stirred and this time, I let it.
I drew mana through the mark, slowly and deliberately. Requiem Essence formed, and I gathered it in my right hand. The ball of dark flame that bloomed and swirled in front of my palm a minute later was the size of the man's chest. Seconds later, and it was almost bigger than the man himself. It swallowed the rain around it. Droplets that touched its edges simply ceased, leaving a large gap in the downpour. It was a darkness that made the night seem bright.
It would be so easy. One touch, and there would be nothing left of this man. The Requiem would not even leave the shape of him in the mud. The Requiem hummed up my arm. This man had touched what was mine. He had taken something I could not replace, something that trusted me to keep it warm and whole. The dark flame swelled.
Then I looked at Ash. The Hero had not looked at the black flame for even a moment. She was looking at the ground beneath her. Her hands were still shaking. No, perhaps they had started shaking more now. I did not understand this. I did not understand why this should weigh her so. She had killed far worse men for far better reasons, and yet she would not look at her own hands. If I killed him now, this weight would not lift from her. I did not understand why, but I had seen enough of Ash to know that this strange guilt of hers was real.
“Damn it,” I murmured under my breath. The ball of flame died in my hand.
I knelt beside the man and placed my left hand on his chest and pushed Bloom into him. Brilliant white light bloomed against the rain and the dark. The impression came with it -pain, confusion, and beneath it the sharp taste of regret. The worst of the bruising receded. The thin, wet breathing steadied into something less fragile. I healed him just enough that his heart would not stop. Just enough that Ash would not have to carry this weight. I could have done more. He was lucky I did not take another one of his limbs from him.
I stood. The Cradle dimmed against the rain. I looked at Ash. She was watching me now. The rain had plastered her hair to her face, and her eyes were red, though whether from the rain or from something else, I could not say. "I would not have expected," Ash said slowly, "the Demon Queen to heal a man who stole from her."
I smiled, the faintest twitch at the edge of my lips. "It seems," I said, "that we are both full of surprises."
Ash held my gaze. After a moment, the hard line of her mouth softened. The rain poured around us. The distance between us was only smaller now.