Dirt and dead flesh flowed from the furrows of his ruined muscle. It made an audible crunching and sucking sound atop the rain.
It was incredible to watch. Inhuman, really, this gift to heal one’s body. The power of the Void. The power of a demon.
Yet when Iseult glanced at the Bloodwitch’s sleeping, dirt-streaked face, she didn’t see a demon lying limp before her.
She swallowed.
Despite having faced Aeduan thrice now, this was the first time she was able to look at him. To see him.
It was not what she expected.
Perhaps because in sleep, there was no tension of muscles about to attack. No disdainful nose in the air. No predatory awareness to cloak his eyes.
His face seemed peaceful, with his head tipped sideways and the lines of his neck stretched long. With his pale lips slightly open and his long, thick eyelashes fluttering on each breath.
He was younger than Iseult had imagined. No older than twenty, if she had to guess. Yet he felt old, with his voice so gruff. His language so formal.
It was in the way he carried himself too, as if he’d walked for a thousand years and planned to walk a thousand more.
This young man had stalked Iseult through Veñaza City. Had smiled cruelly at her, his crystal eyes swirling red. Then he had saved her too, in Lejna. With a salamander cloak and a single phrase: Mhe varujta. Trust me as if my soul were yours.
At the time, Iseult had wondered how he had known those words. How he had spoken Nomatsi like a native.
But now … now she could see. With his rain-sodden clothes plastered to a chest that rose and fell, there was no missing the lean shape of him. He was muscled, yes, but not bulky. This was a frame built for speed.
It was also a Nomatsi frame, just as the skin revealed through the tears in his breeches was Nomatsi skin. Pale as the moon.
Mhe varujta.
He wasn’t a full tribesman, though. His eyes were not folded as deeply as Iseult’s, his hair was not black as the night sky.
With more care and quiet than Iseult had known herself capable of, she knelt beside the Bloodwitch. His baldric glistened in the rain, the knife hilts rising and dropping in time to his breath. Iseult’s fingers moved to the fat iron buckle resting in the groove between his chest and his shoulder. To unfasten it, she would have to touch bare skin, for the buckle had snagged in his shirt and torn the cotton wide.
Bare skin. Pale, Nomatsi skin.
A man’s skin.
“Fanciful fool,” she spat at last, and in a burst of speed she unhooked the buckle. Aeduan’s skin was warm. Surprisingly so, given the rain’s cold beat. Her fingers were certainly ice against him—
His breath hitched. She froze.
But he didn’t awaken, and after a moment of staring at his sleeping face, she resumed her work. Faster now, towing the leather strap out from beneath him.
Goddess, he was heavy.
One heave. A second. The leather snaked free in a twinkling melody of knife hilts and buckles. Iseult’s lips curved in triumph, and she rocked back onto her knees.
With the baldric removed, there was no missing the blood on Aeduan’s shirt. Not from a single wound, but from six small ones, each evenly spaced and an inch wide. Two below his collarbone, two on his chest, two on his abdomen.
Iseult slung the baldric over her shoulder and stole carefully away. She left the sack of coins where it was before walking all the way back to her campsite.
There she hid the Bloodwitch’s knives and waited for him to wake up.
NINE
The sixteenth chimes came and went with no Cam or food to show for it. Unable to sit still—for it was a quick path to madness, as Aunt Evrane always said—Merik forced himself to move, to clear away books from the kitchen table, the cupboard’s counter, the bed.
A knock. Merik spun around, dropping a book. His magic flared in …
It was just the window. The shutter outside was open, and it had cracked against the warped glass. Merik’s heart returned—albeit slowly—to his chest. His winds, though, didn’t settle until he had reached the glass.
Outside, rain drizzled. A gray mist atop a shadowy city. With the weak lamplight behind Merik, there was no missing his reflection.
The Fury stared back.
Though bulbous and misshapen from the flaws in the glass, the hairlessness and red splotches were entirely Merik’s own. Remnants from the explosion. Hurriedly, he screwed open the window, pinching his fingers on unfamiliar fastenings before latching tight the shutter.
But with the wooden shutters behind the window, the reflection—the similarities—grew more pronounced. Over the entire right side of Merik’s face, and over his right ear too, was a large patch of shiny red skin with the faintest line of black to circle around. Dirt, he assumed, since it had been days since he’d had a real bath.
The explosion had hit Merik on that side, so his right shoulder, his right arm, his right leg—they had taken all the flames, all the force.
Merik bent a cautious glance to the front door, but it remained locked. Cam couldn’t barge in when she returned, not without Merik to tap out the lock-spell. So with methodical care, he eased off his shirt. For eleven days, he’d examined these wounds, yet he’d witnessed only a fraction of the full picture. A sliver of the true monster that now stood before the window.
Eyes hooded, Merik scrutinized his body in the glassy glare. Dirt, if that was indeed what marked him, laced across the new pink flesh coating his right side. Down the black moved, gathering most densely at his chest. At his heart.
A bath was in order, he decided, once he had the time. Once the streets weren’t crawling with Royal Forces. Once he’d gotten what he needed from Pin’s Keep.