Chapter 48: A Queen’s Duty.
Ren yawned, loudly. The sound of it filled our small room. It was the third time she had yawned in the span of three minutes. "Why the hell are we all here again?" She rubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist. "It's not even past the first bell. It's too early to do anything."
Ash had found the three of them with surprising ease. I had set her on the task, but I had assumed it would take longer than it did. It seemed I was the only one of us who would get lost if they took a few steps outside.
The five of us stood in our room. Corin was between Ren and Edda, his face aimed at the floor. That hadn’t changed. Ren stood half in front of him with her arms folded, between him and us. That had changed. Edda stood on his other side.
"We want to try again," Ash said. "With Corin. We’ve practiced a bit since yesterday."
Ren's face hardened. I watched her jaw tighten and her shoulders set. She stepped further in front of the boy. "You’ve practiced since yesterday.” She said dryly. “This has to be some kind of joke." Her voice had lost its usual volume. It was low and sharp instead. "Lysanthia already tried. She already said she couldn't do it. So what the hell is this? You think it’s going to be different after…what, one day? That doesn’t even begin to make any sense."
I raised a hand. "This time will be different."
Ren looked at me and then she looked back at Corin. It was Edda who stepped forward. The blue-haired girl's expression did not change, but her voice carried a weight that her face would not show. "What exactly will make this time different?" There was an edge to her words, no matter how she hid it.
I looked at Ash. The faintest smile found me before I could stop it. "It is simple," I said. "This time, Ash will be doing the work that matters. I will merely be assisting her."
The two girls were silent. I doubted that either of them understood. I did not explain further. I stepped toward Corin and looked down at the boy. He did not raise his head.
"There will be danger to this," I said. "There will be risk. I suspect there will be pain as well, more than there was last time." I folded my arms. “But the chance of success is real. Are you willing to accept that much, child?"
I watched. The boy looked up at me. A small tremor went through him. It started at his wrist, and died at his elbow. It was one I recognized, because I had been hiding my own. The Ember Core hummed beneath my ribs.
The boy nodded, slowly. I thought of Shera. Of a woman in a dark hut who had accepted a risk that was not nothing, so she may get everything. Perhaps I was starting to understand something about humans after all. About the strength that even the weak could carry. I turned to Ash. "Well then, Ash. Shall we begin? We should-"
"Wait." Ren's voice cut through. "How do I know you two won't make this worse?" Edda reached for her arm. Ren shook her off. "You both better be serious about this. If not, then this is fucked up. You can’t just…you can’t just keep saying something that doesn’t make any sense." Her voice had somehow gotten both quieter and louder at the same time. “I was willing to try this once but getting my hopes dashed twice? You better not. Or I’ll never forgive you.”
I had something cutting to say. I looked at Ren and did not say it. "You don't have to trust me. Neither will you have reason to forgive me."
Ren opened her mouth. The redness in her face only grew. A small hand reached out, grabbed onto her shoulder. Corin spoke first. His voice was quiet. "Ren…If there's a chance, I'll take it." He looked at Ren. "That's enough for me. Please."
Ren stared at him. Something passed between the three of them that I could see the shape of but did not fully understand. Ren's jaw worked. She stepped back. Edda looked at me and nodded.
"Well," I said. "It's decided then."
Corin sat on his knees in front of us. Ash and I sat in front of him. Before we began, I looked at all three of them.
"What you see in this room," I said, "you are never to speak of. To anyone. Ever. Perhaps I should have said this last time as well. I am saying this now. You will agree to this, or we will not start."
Ren and Edda looked at each other. Their shared look did not quite convey the weight of what I asked them. The boy did not look anywhere but straight ahead. The two girls nodded. Corin only faintly shook his head. That would have to be good enough.
I turned to Ash. "You do not yet have the fine control for this on your own. You are going to follow me." I held up my right hand. A wisp of Ruin trickled from my fingers into Corin. The boy flinched. I followed it with a wisp of Cradle from my left. White light pooled behind the black, crossing his skin into the flesh beneath. "Can you feel it? With your senses, you should be able to."
Ash leaned closer. Her eyes narrowed. She nodded slowly. "I will find each place," I said. "I will show you the place where the wrongness and the channel are the same. I will need your power there.”
“I can do that, I think.” Ash said slowly. The Hero looked uncertain. I did not know why. I would not ask something of her I was not sure she could do.
“Good. I will erase what you have cut, and fill the gap that remains. You need to only follow."
This would take long. The boy had hundreds of small and twisted channels, and each of them would need to be corrected one by one. Perhaps Ash might manage such a thing in one stroke someday, but I knew she could not yet. Still, with our three powers, we could do this. I was sure of it.
I had done many complex things in my long life. Never with another. Never where the critical step rested in someone else's hands. To know that I must place my hopes on another should have filled me with dread. It did not. If it was Ash, then it would not.
I took a deep breath, and focused. I guided a wisp of Ruin to the first knot. "There," I whispered. I did not know why I whispered.
Ash nodded and leaned in close. She raised her left hand and drew a line in the air. Slowly. Too slowly. The line passed through the space above Corin's arm and nothing happened. I felt the wrongness sitting exactly where it had been, untouched.
"Ash," I murmured. "Try again. Envision it in your mind. This is more difficult because you cannot see directly, but this is something you can do."
Ash slowly nodded as she drew again. This time, I felt the wrongness shudder. I felt it through the Ruin.
"Again. You were closer this time."
Ash’s third attempt caught. The wrongness peeled away from the channel beneath it, and the separation was not clean. Corin grunted. The sound was sharp. Ren stepped forward. Corin held up his hand without looking. "This is nothing."
I felt the wrongness through Ruin. It tried to claw back toward the channel it had been separated from. Perhaps it was a thing alive. I had suspected I would find something like this. It was good that I'd had the Requiem ready. Ruin erased the wrongness before it could enter the boy again, and I filled the gap that remained with the Cradle.
The impression came. The same one from yesterday, of watching two backs growing smaller on a long road. I ignored it. The first channel cleared. There were hundreds more to go.
The second was harder. The wrongness here was thicker, more deeply fused. The channel hardly resembled one at all. I guided Ash to it and she drew her line. The cut was imprecise. Her slice caught a sliver of healthy channel alongside the wrongness. Corin hissed between his teeth.
"Focus, Ash.," I said. "Only what I show you. Nothing else. Feel the line of my power."
Ash nodded slowly and adjusted herself beside me. Her hand trembled once and then steadied. The next cut was cleaner. I burned what she severed and filled the gap.
The third channel. The fifth. The eighth. The corrections I needed to give Ash grew fewer. By the tenth, she needed none at all. Her hand moved where I guided, and the wrongness parted from the channel beneath it perfectly. I followed behind power, burning what was severed, healing what remained. The wrongness wasn't always there. Sometimes Ash simply severed a channel that grew in a tangle, and I had to join what she cut behind. That was perhaps more difficult than the rest.
The rhythm found us, Ruin and Bloom and Parting. Ash leaned closer. I leaned into her. At some point we stopped speaking entirely. There was no need. I would find the knot, and she would know, and she would cut, and I would follow.
The impressions kept coming. I could not stop them, not with this much of my power flowing through the boy. A hand pressing against a window, watching rain. The weight of a pack too heavy for small shoulders. A woman's voice, saying his name the way one says something fragile. His mother. The same wrongness had been in her. And her mother before her. And her mother before that.
The Ember Core ground inside me. The pain was a constant thing, but my focus was elsewhere and it found me through the cracks. A flare of pain here, sharp enough that my hands stuttered. A twitch there, one that made me take in a sharp breath. Ash must have felt them. I knew because her shoulder pressed harder into mine, and it was warm. I breathed through them. We continued.
The twentieth channel. The thirtieth. The fiftieth. My Essence was starting to thin. Each use of Ruin or Bloom cost me little compared to what I had, but I needed to use them often. Constantly and precisely. The wrongness in this boy ran deeper than I had realized. Each knot I found led to three more, branching beneath the ones I had already cleared.
I said nothing, and neither did Ash. We simply worked.
Ren watched from the far wall. She had been there for some time. Edda sat beside her. At some point, Edda's hand had found hers.
She could see the two flames now. She had not seen them yesterday, not with the way Lysanthia had kept her hands pressed flat to Corin's skin. The white flame was almost too bright to look at. The black was worse. It was black, but it was also more. It was a hole in the world, a place where light went and did not come back. Between them, Corin sat perfectly still. His jaw was clenched so tight she could see the muscle tensing beneath his skin. She wanted to grab him and pull him away from whatever this was. She didn't.
The two women in front of him had stopped talking. That was the thing Ren couldn't stop staring at. They had been speaking to each other at the start, in half sentences and muttered phrases that meant nothing to her. Now there was nothing. Ash moved where Lysanthia guided, and Lysanthia healed where Ash cut, and neither of them said a word.
Every now and then, the half-demon winced. Nothing touched her, nothing should have been hurting her, but each time it happened, Ash leaned into her, just slightly. Her shoulder would press against the half-demon's. The adjustment was so small that Ren would have missed it if she hadn't been watching so closely.
Ren's mother used to do that. When Ren was small and burning with fever, her mother would press closer, as if the warmth of her body alone could pull the sickness out. She had believed in things like that. Had believed the world worked that way. That if you reached for someone hard enough, someone might actually reach back.
Lysanthia winced again. Ash shifted closer. Her mother had walked three days to the estate of Lord Relen. She had walked for three days on foot to beg him for grain after the fields burned. The lord had laughed. Worse, he had nearly put her in chains for wasting his time. She had walked three days back, too.
The mess bell rang. Neither of the two women seemed to hear them. Ren stood, and she and Edda brought food and water. Ash drank without looking up. Lysanthia didn't drink at all until Ash forced a cup into her hand. Ren set the tray down and went back to the wall.
Her mother had died that winter. She had fed Ren instead of feeding herself. Even at the end, she had believed someone would come. She had hoped, and hoped, and the hoping had eaten her alive from the inside, the same way not eating had eaten her from the outside.
Nobody ever came for you. Not without expecting more than they gave. You had to do everything yourself. Ren had learned that lesson well.
When the traveling Inker came through and Ren's mark blazed brighter than anything that village had ever seen, she’d thought things could change. She went to the Academy. She clawed her way to Sigil in two years. She worked herself to the bone, because in Arianeth, even someone like her could become someone, if only she advanced.
Nothing changed when she reached Line. Nothing changed when she reached Sigil. The sneers followed her through the halls. It seemed Ren had still been naive, even when she’d thought she was doing the opposite. Edda had followed her, and then Corin. Corin’s mark had come out wrong. It was only because Ren was considered an asset that they didn’t kick him out immediately.
Ren still didn’t know why. What was the point when they were going to do it sooner or later anyway? All she knew was that nobody would care when it happened. It was them against the world. Always.
Corin's jaw jumped again. The muscle twitched beneath his skin. He hadn't made a sound in over an hour. Ren had begun to hope. She knew she shouldn't. She hoped anyway, because she couldn't help it, and because Corin wasn’t nearly as good at hiding his pain as he thought he was.
Two strangers sat in front of her friend with their hands doing the Divine only knew what, and Ren was hoping again, and she hated herself for it. Edda's hand squeezed hers. Ren squeezed back.
The hours had stretched, and the light from the single window had started to bleed amber, and then slowly fade into darkness. The room was dim. The lantern had burned low. Ash and I sat in front of Corin. We had gotten closer during the work. Ash was leaning on me slightly. Whether from exhaustion or something else, I did not examine. The Ember Core ground beneath my ribs. Ash leaned into me again. I let her.
The last channel cleared. I felt it go, slowly. The final thread of wrongness, dissolving under Ruin. The Cradle poured into the space it left and the impression that came was the door again. The open door that led to nothing. Except now, as I watched, it closed. Slowly. I did not think the boy had closed it himself. Something grew in the space the wrongness had left. Something green and new.
I withdrew my hands. They were faintly shaking. I could not stop them. "It is done," I said. My voice came out as barely a croak.
Ash's arm was still around me. I was leaning into her more than I wished to admit. The Ember Core groaned inside me. I breathed through it. I had paid worse prices. This one was small. I told myself that.
Corin stood. Slowly and shakily. Ren and Edda were already leaning in. On Corin's forearm, where the mark had been so faint it was nearly invisible, sat a single, deep green Spark. It glowed with a steady light. It pulsed once, and then it kept pulsing.
Ren threw her arms around Corin. She made some kind of strangled choking sound I had never heard before. Edda was there a heartbeat later, and then all three of them were holding each other. Ren was the loudest. I did not know you could weep that loudly. Compared to her, it was hard to hear the other two. Corin’s own shaking did not stop. His shoulders shook and he kept looking at his own arm as if the green Spark might disappear. There was no blankness on Edda’s face. I had not thought her capable of the face she made now. None of their expressions were ugly things.
I had ordered demons to stand in formation. I had watched them march and die in rows as straight as drawn lines. I had never seen three of them hold each other like this. Perhaps this was what they had always looked like, when I was not watching.
Ash tapped my side. I looked at her. "You're still here," she said. “Think you might have some right to see this time?”
I looked at her, and then I looked at them. They were all my blood, however far removed. Whether they knew it or not. My blood, and I had done something for them. Something that was not destruction. Something that would not come back to haunt them, in time. The ache came. It was not the Ember Core. It was older and deeper and had no name. "I do not mind the sight," I said, slowly.
It took a long time for the three to compose themselves. Ash had fully leaned into me by then, and her left hand rested atop my right. We did not rise, even as the three slowly did. Ren wiped at her face furiously. Edda’s expression had settled, slowly. Corin’s hand not.
Ren stepped forward. She opened her mouth. No doubt to say the usual flood of crass words I had come to expect from her. None came. She stood there with her jaw working and her eyes red. Then she took a breath, and she bowed. She folded at the waist, deeply and slowly, and she held it. Her red hair fell forward and hid her face.
I stared at her. It was perhaps one of the deepest bows I had ever received, coming from a girl I’d thought incapable of one. "Thank you," she said. Her voice cracked on the second word. "I don't know how we'll ever repay this."
Edda and Corin bowed too. Theirs were less deep, but no less surprising.
I looked at them. Looked at Ash. "Raise your heads. You do not need to bow. I did not ask for one." I said. "It is a Queen's duty to care for those beneath her." I paused. "And do remember that my retainer deserves the credit as much as I do. More so, in truth. I could have done nothing for your friend without her." The three raised their heads slowly. "You will not mention what happened here, to anyone.” I said. “You now have a mark, and people will have questions. You will make your own stories. You will make sure the story makes sense. Neither Ash nor I will be mentioned.” I paused. “Is that understood?”
“Y-yes.” All three of them said, tripping over each other to say it first. I had no doubt at all that eventually this would lead back to us. Still, it would take some time, at least.
It was strange. To receive gratitude instead of deference. How very alike, and yet not quite. “Now, you three may leave.” I said. Ash had yawned beside me. Or had almost yawned, before she had pointedly closed her mouth.
They turned to leave. Corin was last. He stopped at the door and turned back."Thank you, Your Grace."
He left. I stared at the door. I stared at it for some time. Your Grace. A title for royalty. A title that befit me, though I had heard ‘Your Royal Darkness’ far more often. The title had been mine once, though nobody in a thousand years had likely used it. The boy could not have known what it meant or how apt it was. I did not know why he had said it at all. Perhaps some things survived in the blood after all.
"It seems…your kingdom is growing, Your Grace."
I exhaled through my nose. Even I could tell that the Hero was mocking me. “I am not building a Kingdom, fool.” I sighed. “It seems these demonbloods make even less sense than normal demons did."
I slowly rose. There was a creak from my leg as I stood. Ash followed, and there was a creak from hers too. I tried to close my hands, and it took more effort than it should have.
I went to check the egg. It was nestled between the sheet and the pillow, just where I had left it. I sat on the bed, and held the egg in my lap. The gold caught the last of the fading light from the lantern, and for a moment, the black veins seemed thinner than they had been that morning. Had they been thinning? I could not say. I had been watching them for so long that I no longer trusted my own eyes.
The egg was warmer than it had ever been. I pressed it to my chest. The pulse was faster than it had ever been too.
"I am here," I whispered. "I apologize for not being able to attend to you today." I adjusted the egg against my chest. "You are quite the demanding creature, aren't you? Do not think that your impatience goes unnoticed."
The egg pulsed twice. Quickly, one after the other. It had never done that so close together. Ash was somewhere beside me. I heard her take a step closer. The room was quiet. The Ember Core hummed.
Then I felt it. Through my hands. A vibration, so faint it might have been nothing. Then again, stronger. A third, stronger still.
I looked down. A single line ran across the gold surface of the egg. It was thin and bright, splitting the shell from one side almost to the other.The line caught the lantern light and held it, and for one breath, the crack shone like a vein of sunlight.
Crack.