29
Tor remembered very little of what followed. For a brief time, everything was made of colour and pain. A boiling light had filled his vision, and then a skein of red covered all things. There had been a sense of falling, or flying, and a distant sound that, eventually, he realised was his own voice, broken and screaming. Then a blessed kind of darkness.
Beyond that were brief fragments of memory. He had an image of looking down at his own boots as the world spun around him. Noon’s voice, shouting Vintage’s name. The strange foliage looming all around them – it looked familiar, as if he’d seen it recently, but when he stopped to try and remember, someone tugged him fiercely in another direction. A time of lights and silence and fear. The gate to the compound – this he did remember, and he felt pleased with himself – and a man with a dark beard standing there, his eyes wide.
A knife near his throat. He had stiffened, pulling back, but it was cutting away his clothes, and all at once there was so much pain that he was gone again. Darkness.
Noon remembered it all.
A thousand voices shouting at once, or the same voice, shouting a thousand times. The living energy of the parasite spirit overwhelmed her immediately, and the resulting explosion was a boiling green and white. She had been thrown backwards by it, through the space where the spirit had been until she’d absorbed it, and out into the air, where she crashed onto the black dirt. Debris from the Behemoth fell all around her, smoking and still aflame in places, while the roar of the greater fire in front of her reached up to the sky.
I’ve done it again.
The thought hit her harder than the explosion. She gasped, barely able to get air into her lungs, and it had nothing to do with the oily smoke roiling around her. I’ve done it again.
She scrambled to her feet and cupped her hands to her mouth, preparing to scream for Vintage, when she realised that one of the pieces of debris that had fallen around her was Tormalin.
‘No. Tor! Tor!’
He had fallen face down, his leathers and silks scorched and spattered with mud. Reaching him she turned him over. Dimly she realised she’d lost her hat.
‘Oh no. No.’
The blast of winnowfire had hit him from the left, it seemed. That side of his face – his beautiful face – was a red and black ruin, as was his neck, and from what she could see of his arm, it was in a similar state. The hair on that side of his head had been burned back from his forehead, and now hung in smoking clumps. Incredibly, he still held his sword loosely in one fist.
‘Fire and blood, no.’ She grabbed hold of his shoulders and shook him, not knowing what else to do, and to her surprise his eyes popped open. He seemed to focus on her for a moment, but his gaze was wild, skittering away from her face to the fires behind her. ‘Tormalin! You have to get up, come on.’
He shook his head once, and she saw him shudder with the pain. He fought to stay conscious, however, and one long hand came up to grip her arm. Standing up straight, she shook him off and looked around wildly. There was no sign of Vintage anywhere, and the smoke was thickening all the time. She took a few steps towards the wreckage.
‘Vintage! Vintage, where are you?’
There was no reply. She stumbled first to the left, and then to the right, desperately searching for any sign, but everything was mud or twisted moon-metal – no sign of the scholar anywhere. Turning back, Tor was briefly lost in the smoke and she felt a fresh stab of panic, but then she spotted his pale hand against the dirt.
‘Listen to me, Tor, we have to get out of here.’ She slid his sword through the loop of his belt, and with more strength than she thought she possessed, yanked the tall Eboran to his feet, staggering as he stumbled against her. She felt the heat of his blood sinking into her coat, and she swallowed down a white-hot panic. Moving him might kill him, but if they stayed here, the parasite spirits would come again and they would surely be dead.
‘Tor, have you seen Vintage?’
It occurred to her that he was probably in shock, might even have been deafened by the explosion. Pulling his arm over her shoulders, she yelled into the smoke.
‘Vintage? Vintage!’
There was no reply. The blasted remains of the Behemoth carcase remained merrily aflame, pieces of it falling around them, while a shuddering groan from inside spoke of some deeper, more fatal collapse happening. She peered up at the Behemoth, trying to make sense of the mess even as the boiling fire stung her eyes. Was that a human shape in there? A shadow, something curled in on itself. Another crashing groan, and more pieces of fiery debris flitted down around them. They had very little time.
‘Vintage!’
The parasite spirits had all fled, but at that very thought a surge of images she didn’t recognise forced their way into her head. Noon cried out wordlessly, staggering under Tor’s weight. She saw a man very like him, tall and beautiful, with hair like old, golden wine, wearing armour that appeared to be made of bright white scales. He smiled at her, and then the vision was gone. Noon shook her head.
‘Vintage? Where are you? Fuck.’
A shimmering of lights appeared through the smoke. Noon didn’t stick around to see what it was. Instead, she took hold of Tor as firmly as she could and walked him away from the wreckage and into the trees, hoping she remembered where the gate to the compound was. The sky was darker now, with the deep grey bruise that meant rain, sooner or later, and the shadows between the grotesque trees were long and deep.
The walk to the gate was nightmarish, and more than once Noon wondered if she was trapped in some terrible dream. She was walking too slowly, Tor was a silent weight, his blood soaking into her, and hidden things watched them from the dark places. Vintage was surely dead, and they would be turned inside out by a spirit before they ever reached the gate. When she did see the enormous doors, she almost fell to her knees with relief.
‘Tor, we’re nearly there. Stay with me.’
A figure stepped towards them out of the growing shadows, and Noon was surprised to see Esiah Godwort, his eyes wide with shock. Outside of the great house he looked wilder somehow, and lost. There were cobwebs caught in his hair.
‘There is a fire,’ he said.
Noon nodded. ‘We were caught in it. Can you help me get him back to your home?’
‘My boy is in there,’ said Esiah, but he looked away from the forest and pulled Tor’s other arm over his shoulder, and together they staggered back to the courtyard of the house. At the door, Esiah turned to go.
‘Where are you going?’ demanded Noon. She realised, faintly, that her voice sounded muffled to her own ears. ‘I still need your help!’
‘My boy is in there,’ he said again, as though this were all the explanation required. He turned away from them and walked back across the courtyard. Noon called after him, telling him to look for Vintage while he was in there, but he didn’t turn back. They didn’t see him again.
Inside the house, Noon had an unsettling moment of light-headedness, black spots jumping at the edges of her vision, and she had to stand still, taking deep breaths. The chorus of voices she had heard at the moment of the explosion had not entirely gone; she could still hear them, a tide of whispers that gnawed at her every thought. Her head pounded sickeningly.
‘Come on,’ she said to Tor, trying to gather the last of her strength. ‘You heavy bastard.’
She couldn’t manage to drag him up the great sweep of stairs, so instead she found the servants’ quarters by the kitchens and there she laid him down on a bed. He muttered to himself as he stretched out and started to tremble all over. Noon slumped against the wall and slid down to her knees.
‘I got you here,’ she said. ‘I have to go back.’
Tor did not reply. She wondered how long this shock would last, and what would happen when he finally came back to himself; when he realised what had happened to him. When he realised what had happened to Vintage. Wincing, she pushed herself to her feet and went to his bedside again, forcing herself to look at him clearly.
She swallowed hard. The injuries were terrible. She knew from all of Mother Fast’s stories that Eborans were fearsomely strong and healed quickly, but that was the Ebora of old, the one fed and nurtured by the sap of their tree-god. This Eboran was far from home, in a time when his people were weak and dying. She doubted he would live to see the morning, and knowing that, she couldn’t leave him.
‘I walked away from them all before,’ she said to him, although she knew he couldn’t hear her. ‘When I did this, before. I can’t do that again.’ Tor murmured, turning his head towards her. The bones on the burned part of his face jutted through raw flesh. ‘How are you still alive?’
When she had lived on the plains with her mother, there had been a man living with her people called Cusp. When someone had a fever, or had broken a leg falling from their horse, or had received a bite from something hidden in the long grass, Cusp would come to them with his ointments and sticks, his ghost-stones and sure fingers, and he would help them if he could. He had been a serious-faced man, not old, his black hair shorn very close to his head. Cusp would have known what to do about Tor’s terrible burns, but everything that Cusp had known had been lost along with everything else, ten years ago. In the Winnowry there had been a place where sick fell-witches had been taken, but Noon had never seen it. She knew precisely nothing about healing. Quite the opposite, really.
She straightened up, less than steady on her feet. ‘I will make you comfortable. Hot water and clean linen. I can manage that much.’
At the door she staggered and cried out. She had tried to force the cloud of voices inside her into the background, but now it swarmed around her, overwhelming her as it had inside the Behemoth wreck. Her mouth flooded with the taste of something she didn’t recognise, woody and almost tart, like old apples, and a booming voice in her head, speaking an unknown language. The voice sounded angry.
‘Stop it, stop it.’ She covered her ears with her hands, trying to block it out, and for a wonder, the sensation did retreat, although she could feel it, colouring the back of her mind like mould. ‘Whatever this is, I don’t have time for it.’
In the kitchens she didn’t dare to use the winnowfire, not with the violence of the parasite spirit’s energy still simmering inside, so she lit a fire the traditional way, as she’d once been taught by an unsuspecting Mother Fast a lifetime ago. When the water boiled, she tempered it with cold water from a jug, picked up a stack of dusty tablecloths from the side and went back to the room where Tor lay. She had just pushed the door open with her foot when that sense of an alien presence overcame her again and she dropped the pot of water, half soaking herself and the rug, before falling to her knees in a pile of linen.
The voice came again, although now it sounded joyful, exultant. The servants’ quarters with the chest of drawers and brown curtains faded away, as though it were a particularly unconvincing dream, and she was flying, flying high above Sarn. Lakes like sapphires caught the sun and shattered it into gold, and the low slopes of a mountain revealed a pack of animals, running. The voice roared then, and, far below, the animals howled back; a shiver of recognition trickled down Noon’s back even though she knew that the feelings were not her own. To her that lonely noise meant a night of extra fires around the tents and more warriors on watch through the dark hours, but to this other being it was . . . freedom? That wasn’t the right word. Abruptly, the sense of flying was gone, and instead she was in a great plaza of white stone, dotted here and there with trees covered in pink blossom. Here there were tall men and women, beautiful in silk and silver plate, and then a child, running towards her. A small boy, his shining auburn hair pulled into a neat little bun atop his head, laughing as he came, his crimson eyes bright, and then he fell, chubby limbs crashing onto the smooth white stone. Noon winced, knowing the tantrum that would come, yet the child got back up onto his feet, still laughing, and continued running towards her. The palms of his hands were scraped and bleeding and she felt a moment’s discomfort at that – it will stain the feathers, she thought, disjointedly – and then the child was wrapping his arms around her. Noon had a sense of knowing, of knowing she was much larger than the boy, much larger, and then she was lying on her back in a dowdy room, gasping for air. Her trousers and shirt were wet, and the empty pot lay beneath the chest of drawers.
‘What is it?’ she breathed. She held her own hands up in front of her, and for a second they looked the wrong shape. She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. ‘What is happening to me?’
The only reply was Tor’s ragged breathing. Cautiously, half sure that moving would bring the strange thoughts and sensations back, she got to her feet. Her heart was hammering in her chest as though she had been fighting, but as she looked down at Tor, something clicked into place. She thought of the little boy’s bloodied hands.
‘There is something I can do for you,’ she said.
The knives in the kitchens were all well maintained, their edges keen. Noon selected three, cleaned them in a basin of hot water, and took them back to Tor’s room. Trying not to notice the ruin of his face and neck, she carefully cut and peeled away the collar of his shirt. Instantly, he roared into consciousness, his eyes wild.
‘What are you doing?’ he demanded, in a tone so like his usual attitude that she was briefly too stunned to do anything. ‘Do you know how much this shirt cost? I doubt—’
Noon saw the moment the pain hit him. He screamed, a high, broken sound, and then he passed out again, his head lolling against the pillow.
‘You shouldn’t have taken me with you,’ she whispered, still gripping the knife. ‘You should have left me. I told you to.’
She put the knife on a small bedside table and picked up another, smaller blade. Without thinking about it too closely, she pressed its edge to the palm of her hand until a bright necklace of red beads grew there. It stung, and as she winced she thought she heard muttering from the tide of strange thoughts in her head, but she forced it away.
Taking hold of his jaw with her other hand so that his mouth was open, she squeezed her injured hand shut and a few drops of blood spattered onto his tongue. She squeezed again, a few more drops, and Tor swallowed hard, gasping as though he were drowning.
‘Does it help?’ She stared at his ruined face, trying to see some change. Perhaps it would heal him from the inside – either way, these few small drops of blood would not be enough. Taking hold of the sharp knife again she pressed the blade to the fleshy area just below her wrist, taking care to make a shallow cut. The blood this time flowed faster and trickled down her hand to the tips of her fingers. Grimacing slightly as spots of bright crimson appeared on the bedclothes, she leaned over and pressed the wound to Tor’s mouth.
The response this time was immediate. His head shot up, his eyes still closed, and his mouth clamped down on the source of blood – she felt the hard pressure of his teeth on her skin, and for a moment she felt the room spin around her. Ten years of barely any physical contact, and now this. It was strange. His uninjured hand snaked up from his side and took hold of her arm gently. There hardly seemed to be any strength in him, but as she watched, the ruined side of his face began to subtly change. The charred and blackened skin began to flake away as new skin grew beneath, while the raw muscle and flesh began to knit itself anew. It was only in a few places, and it made little overall difference to the terrible damage she had inflicted, but it was something. Softly, he moaned under her, shifting in the bed.
‘Tor? Are you awake? Speak to me, bloodsucker, come on.’
His eyes still shut, he slumped back to the pillow, a smear of crimson on his lips and chin. He did not speak.
‘Tor?’
Working awkwardly with her injured hand, Noon tore off some strips of linen and bound the two cuts as best she could. In a little while, she would go back to the kitchens and wash her arm, but for now she felt oddly weak. With her good hand she pushed Tor’s hair back from his forehead – what was left of it – and tried to slow her thundering heart. A little blood had given him strength, had started to heal his face and neck. She suspected it would take a lot more than that to save him, but whose price was that to pay if it wasn’t hers?
Cradling her bleeding arm to her chest, she lay down next to him on the narrow bed, taking a brief and selfish comfort in the warmth of his body. She had a moment to consider that resting in such a way would have been unthinkable a short time ago, and then she was asleep.