362: A Drop of Blood
The dreamstone brought Wren to the rusting shore of a bloody sea.
To every side of her, the still, flat surface spread out toward an endless horizon, stirred by neither wind, nor wave, nor any vessel or creature. The thick, coppery smell of it soaked into Wren’s nose, filling every breath that she took. Overhead, the great darkness of a night sky spread over her head, specked with unfamiliar stars. There was no ring, and no moon, and not a single one of the constellations by which Wren had learned to navigate, as a child, were visible - but there was a ruddy sun half descended over the horizon.
The island of metal, shattered glass tubes, copper wire and enormous, greased gears rose thirty or more feet above the crimson ocean. Wren picked her way up carefully, often using one hand to get a grip on some tumbled heap of ancient machinery as she found a bit of secure footing for her boots. She could have taken a different shape: enchanted dreams like this always seemed to reflect whatever capabilities she had in the real world. But from past experience, Wren knew that her father would take that as a sign of aggression, and respond in kind.
Finally, she got her arms up around a great wheel. It was much like those attached to any farmer’s wagon, save that instead of spokes made of wood, the inner section was a kind of metal disk, upon which some strange, dark material had been mounted. It was easy to grip onto, at least, with an irregular surface that gave way beneath her fingers. With a grunt of effort, Wren got her chest up over the wheel, kicked her legs, and then pushed until she had her hips level with the top of the scrap-heap. With a grunt of effort, she threw herself forward onto the very height of the unnatural island.
Nighthawk Wind Dancer crouched there, arms resting loosely across his knees, gazing up at the alien stars. “The names scratch at my mind,” he muttered, and Wren couldn’t tell whether he was speaking to her - whether he noticed her presence at all - or whether her father was simply thinking out loud.
“Signis,” the former chief said, slowly, sounding the word out. “It does not mean anything, and yet it does. I can feel her memories. The light of two suns glinting off carapaces of crystal. Swarms of the enemy, coming on in the thousands, descending from the heavens like burning, falling stars...”
Wren licked her lips, and got to her feet. This was the most lucid that she’d ever found him. She knew that the moment she spoke, he would fling himself at her, all liquid-red eyes and snarling teeth, fingers curved into claws that grasped for her neck - but she also couldn’t let the chance slip by.
“Father,” she said. She kept her voice low and even, the same kind of tone that the stableboys at Bald Peak and Whitehill used with a spooked horse. “It’s me. Wren - your daughter. I’m here to visit you.”
Nighthawk stiffened, his body become nearly a thing of stone, like the ornamental statues that loomed over the streets of Freeport. Then, he turned. Wren hoped, for just a moment, that she would see the eyes of the man: but they were still only pools of blood, lit from within as if by some wicked fire.
“She draws away from me,” Wren’s father muttered. “We were close, so close once that almost I thought I was her... some part of her. But now I can feel her absence. Where is she going? All of her thought is now bent upon...” Nighthawk looked up to the stars once again.
“Do you know what she’s planning?” Wren asked. She crept forward, carefully, in an awkward sort of crouch, not wanting to spook her father by standing up above him. She stretched a hand forward, hesitated, and then placed it gently upon her father’s shoulder.
Whatever light of comprehension might have, for a moment, lingered in Nighthawk’s eyes fled. With a snarl, he turned on Wren, tacking her and bearing her down onto the sharp edges of the piled scrap metal. His fingers grasped for her throat, intent on choking the life out of his own daughter.
Wren let herself dissolve into a mist of blood, and Nighthawk fell through her, swiping with his hands, reduced to such an unreasoning beast that he didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what she’d done - even though he’d been the one to teach her in the first place. Wren reached out for her dreamstone, and let it carry her up and away from the endless ocean of blood, to the cold stars above.
☙
Wren lurched upright on her cot, sending the thin linen sheets in which she’d wrapped herself tumbling down onto the carpets that had been laid over the sand of the beach. Though she knew her father couldn’t hurt her here - and though this was not the first time she’d tried and failed to speak to him using the dreamstones - she still found herself trembling and gasping for breath. The touch of his strong fingers on her neck, just before she’d let her body dissolve...
Ghveris, crouched next to her cot awkwardly, reached out with his left gauntlet and rested the articulated steel fingers on her back. The metal was cooler than the late-summer night air, and she could feel that chill through the thin linen of her shift.
“It did not go well,” he guessed.
Wren shook her head. “I thought it might, at first,” she admitted. “He wasn’t - not entirely there, but he was at least talking. I don’t understand most of what he said. Something about a battle the Vædim fought, I think, though I’ve no idea who the enemy was. They didn’t see like humans, or Eld, or anything else I’ve ever heard of. But then he said she was pulling away from him.”
“Ractia?”
“I think so.” Wren leaned back into Ghveris’s hand and closed her eyes. The palm and the fingers, taken together, were large enough that she could use them like the back of a chair.
“Perhaps he will recover, then,” the war-machine ventured. “If she truly abandons him, whatever magic she’s used to enslave his mind may finally unravel.”
“May,” Wren repeated. “Perhaps. It’s been almost twenty years of maybes, while I’ve left him frozen in the vault under Bald Peak. Am I supposed to leave him there for another fifty years while we hope something changes? A hundred? How long is long enough before we admit we can’t break the enchantment without her?”
“I have great faith in Liv and Arjun,” Ghveris said.
“I do too,” Wren said. “I’m not saying I don’t, my love.” She turned toward him and opened her eyes, looking up into his burning gaze and feeling sick to her stomach at what she was going to say. “But I also don’t think I can wait any longer. Not when there’s a solution in front of us.”
Ghveris let out a hiss of steam, but it was soft, rather than explosive. More like a sigh than a shout. “I have made my thoughts on this clear.”
“You have. Now let me do the same,” Wren said. She turned herself so that her legs swivelled off the cot and the soles of her bare feet came to rest on the carpet. The sheets curled and twisted around her body, and she reached up to place one hand on his enchanted steel breastplate.
“You can feel this,” Wren murmured.
“You know I can,” Ghveris answered. “Professor Norris did good work. All of the enchantments are as sensitive as they ever were, if not even better. I do not think Antris, Celris and Ractia cared much about whether I could feel how soft your fingers are.”
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Wren refused to let herself be distracted. “But I can’t feel you,” she said. “I can’t feel your heartbeat or your heat. I can’t lay my head against your chest and nestle in and go to sleep.”
“The dreamstones –”
“The dreamstones were enough eighteen years ago,” Wren said, unable to keep the volume of her voice from rising. With an effort, she took a breath. There were tents all around them, to every side, up and down the beach at Coral Bay in all directions. While Liv and Sidonie were important enough, as archmages, to be given rooms at Blackstone Hall, the rest of the group who’d travelled from Bald Peak hadn’t been accommodated in the same way.
“They aren’t enough forever,” Wren continued. “I’m sorry, but they just aren’t.”
Ghveris hesitated, and the silence stretched in the darkness. “If I no longer make you happy, Wren –” his eyes flared blue, and the reflection shone across the edge of every plate of his armor.
“You make me happy,” Wren said. “I’m not saying I want to throw you away. I want the rest of you – I want all of you.” She bit her lip, because she knew that he wasn’t going to like what he said next, and then she pushed forward anyway. “I want to take Ractia’s offer.”
“That would be a mistake,” Ghveris rumbled. “She cannot be trusted. Liv –”
“Liv said that she was leaving this decision to us,” Wren broke in. Because she had faith I wouldn’t do this.
“She did,” her lover admitted. “But it is clear that she would not make this choice, if it were in her hands.”
“Liv has a husband in her bed every night!” Wren exclaimed, and she felt wetness at the edge of her eyes. “She has a beautiful daughter to run up and down the halls of the palace, causing trouble, and Liv gets to sing her to sleep every night. I don’t get those things. We don’t get those things.”
“I know it is not fair,” Ghveris said, and very gently wrapped her in his arms, gathering her to his breastplate. “Perhaps it would have been better if Arjun and Keri had never found me. You could have met some other man, and you would be happy right now.”
“Stop.” Wren tilted her head up so that she could see the burning blue sparks that passed as his eyes. “We followed her to war twice, and we’ve guarded her across two continents for the better part of two decades. We’ve given Liv enough, and this is one thing, just one thing for us. Can you really tell me that if we didn’t at least try this, you wouldn’t regret it? That fifty years from now, you wouldn’t still be wondering if Ractia might not have kept her word, just this once? Can you really tell me that you’re going to be able to live with that?”
For a moment, she thought he would actually say yes, and that something would break between them which could never be repaired.
“I could not live with causing you pain, when I might have prevented it,” Ghveris said, finally, and his words set Wren’s heart to racing.
“It’s decided, then,” she said, and slipped out of his arms. Wren tore her shift off – she no longer had the slightest concern about exposing her body to Ghveris. With all the time they’d spent together in dreams, they might as well be husband and wife by now. She pulled on a pair of pants and a linen shirt, and then her enchanted Dakruiman boots. She left her bow and quiver behind, but buckled on her belt with both sheaths, so that the daggers Jurian had engraved for her hung at her hips. Then, she slipped her hand around one of Ghveris’s fingers, and tugged him toward the entrance of the tent. “Come along.”
More than a dozen campfires lit their way along the strand. It was well past the time for cooking, but Wren saw knots of mages gathered together, passing bottles of wine back and forth while they reminisced and told stories about Caspian Loredon’s life. Most people were asleep, and the hour was late. No one stopped them.
“Perhaps we should find Arjun,” Ghveris suggested, but he allowed Wren to pull him toward the waystone without slowing. It would have been easy for him to plant his feet in the sand and remain motionless – she could never move him without his consent. But he came on close at her heels, and Wren was spurred forward by a combination of delirious abandonment and a rising anxiety. Making the decision was a relief, but until they’d actually done it, she’d be imagining all the ways in which someone might try to stop them.
“We don’t need him,” Wren said. Getting Arjun would be simply inviting one more person to argue with her, one more person who needed to be convinced. She couldn’t bear the delay. “We don’t need surgery, and we don’t need his magic.”
The last stretch to the waystone was clear of tents and cookfires, a span of empty sand perhaps thirty yards wide. Here, the encampment was distant enough that the sound of waves breaking on the shore drowned out the voices and conversations from around the firepits. Up the bluff, where the road climbed toward the college, the inns were doing good business still, and light spilled out of their windows: but in the neighborhoods were the fishermen and shopkeepers lived, everyone was asleep. The death and funeral wouldn’t stop the sun from rising, and they’d need to earn enough coin to feed their families, just like any other day.
Wren tugged Ghveris up onto the broad, flat white stone that had been placed on the beach by the Vædim so long before.
“What must be done?” Ghveris said, his voice low like thunder.
“Shh.” Wren worried that it would carry, and that someone would hear them before they could finish. “She said that we needed to place a single drop of your blood on the waystone, and then say her name,” she whispered.
Wren reached down to her belt and drew one of her two hunting knives. “Your organs are in your chest, yes?” she asked. Show me where the screws are.
Ghveris’s hand wrapped around hers. “I do not want you to see,” he said.
“It won’t change how I feel about you,” Wren told him. “I promise. The screws?”
Ghveris let go over her hand, turned to one side, and tapped a finger against the edge of his breastplate. “Here. And there. And the same on the other side.”
Wren leaned her face in close, wishing, for just a moment, that she had a torch, or a lantern, or even Keri to put one of those ridiculous floating orbs of sunlight up above them. With only the pale glow of the moon and the ring, it was difficult to see, and the first time she tried to turn the screw, the blade of her knife slipped and she very nearly cut herself. “Blood and shadows,” she cursed, but then she got the blade to catch, and the screw to turn.
As she withdrew each one, she placed them between her teeth, biting down with just enough pressure to keep the screws in place while she worked. Once the four to either side were removed, Wren stepped back, and Ghveris very carefully pulled his breastplate off.
The cavernous interior of his torso was shadowed, only half-illuminated, but the glass of the individual bottles which held his heart, his lungs, his brain, reflected the ring in the sky above. This is all that’s left of him, Wren thought, and it made her furious at the cruel gods who had done this, and it made her want to weep for the man she loved.
“Not the brain,” Wren murmured to herself. That was too dangerous. The simple solution was the heart: Antris and Ractia and the rest of them had chosen to keep it, for some reason, rather than to replace it with machinery. There were little tubes of some material Wren didn’t recognize, clear like glass but flexible, which connected the bottles, and as Ghveris’s heart beat, blood shot back and forth through the tubes, connecting the brain, the lungs and the heart. Some inane part of her mind wondered how he breathed, but she shoved it aside, and put the tip of her knife against one of the tubes.
“Are you ready?” Wren asked, looking up at Ghveris’s burning blue gaze.
“I will not feel anything,” he promised her. “Do not worry about hurting me.”
Wren sucked in a deep breath, let it out, and then nicked the tube with the point of her knife. For a moment, she feared that it wouldn’t work – that whatever the old gods had built couldn’t be pierced by something so simply. But then, the blade sunk in. She pulled it back out again, and a spray of dark blood shot out onto her hand and her shirt.
Wren dropped to her knees and smeared the blood across the waystone. “I did what you asked, Ractia,” she said. “I gave Liv your message. Now keep your half of the bargain. If you don’t, I swear I’ll hunt you down myself and kill you, no matter what it takes.”
When nothing happened, she felt sick. A tear streaked down her cheek, and it was all Wren could do to keep herself from throwing her dinner up. Had she really done this for nothing? Was Liv going to hate her? What if no one could repair the tube? Could Ghveris survive without it?
Then, the smear of blood began to glow, lighting up like a candle.
“Something’s happening,” Wren said. She scrambled to her feet and backed away.
Ghveris screamed, a roar of mechanical pain and human torment rolled into one. The glass bottles inside his chest shattered, all at once, and the screws which kept his armored plates attached broke, snapping one by one. Pauldrons and gauntlets, helm and sabatons, all of that enchanted metal fell down on the stone, ringing out with the impact.
A dark vortex of blood rose up around Ghveris’s organs, and then fingers of bone stretched out, like the veins of leaves, to cup whatever was left of his body. By the time Wren had fallen backward, off of the waystone and onto the sand, a glowing, beating cocoon, large enough to contain a grown man, had rooted itself to the waystone.
“Ghveris?” Wren whispered, and when there was no response, she shouted instead. But no matter what she said, or where she touched the cocoon, she was met by only silence.