The battles began to blur together. Except now there was a medical ward for nullium injuries, and the casualty rates skyrocketed, infections and disease becoming an increasing threat. First came overcrowding, followed by shortages in clean linens and bandages, and then the blood infections began and sickness followed.
Helena was on shift for days sometimes, ignoring Kaine’s signals unless they were messages for Crowther. Work at least kept her from wearing grooves of worry through her mind.
When she was alone, she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling as she twisted Kaine’s ring around and around her finger, thinking about the array sketch Wagner had drawn. Nine points.
Northern alchemy almost always used either five or eight, the elemental or celestial numbers. Those were the only array formulas even taught at the Institute, the exception being the Holdfasts’ pyromancy, which operated with a seven-point array, but Helena only knew of that because she’d helped Luc with his homework.
She’d never heard of a nine-point array. She had no idea how it was supposed to work, and her only sample was full of obvious errors and drawn by someone wholly unfamiliar with alchemical principles.
How could she reverse what had been done to Kaine if she didn’t understand the method? She moved her fingers, trying to visualise the energy channels. Her mind kept going back to Soren.
She smothered the thoughts, burying them with animancy, trying to force her mind to go around her memories of him. It kept niggling at her, though—not his destruction but the moment in which he’d died. She always tried to break the resonance connection before a patient died, but she’d been fully focused on Soren in that moment.
The energy, the sensation of it, running through her like an electric current kept coming to mind whenever she tried to imagine channelling through a multiple of three.
It made her wonder. If Morrough could trap living souls inside bone, and the first Necromancer placed an entire town of living souls into a Stone, what would happen if someone captured the other form of energy? Had anyone ever done it?
The next time she felt a patient on the verge of death, rather than break away, she left the connection open and tried to hold the energy as it struck. It seared through her resonance, leaving her hand numb and twinging for hours.
Well, it made sense that she couldn’t just hold it. It would need a container of some sort. The sunstone amulet had been … quicksilver? Or glass? Maybe crystal. She tried a variety of substances from the storerooms, smuggling odd metals and other compounds into the hospital inside her pockets, to see if the energy would channel into any of them.
Sunstones cracked, while metal set her pocket on fire. In a box shoved to the back of a storage room, she found several large chunks of obsidian. Volcanic glass did have a higher melting point than normal glass.
She stuck a piece in her pocket.
She gripped it when she felt a patient’s vitality grow thin. He was one of the nullium patients, hit with shrapnel that had ripped apart his organs, and the infection hadn’t responded to treatment. She could force his heart to keep beating, but it would only make his death take longer; he’d die the moment she left. His skin was burning with fever, and he was gripping her hand, speaking to someone unseen, the words coming slower and slower.
She swallowed hard and kept her resonance open as his eyes went still. The death surge ran through her like an electric shock straight into the obsidian.
Her arm went briefly numb. When sensation returned, he was dead, and the obsidian hummed warm against her fingers. She could feel it, that strange dark energy.
Her fingers trembled as she closed his eyes, pulling the sheet over his face. Had she just trapped a soul in volcano glass? She squeezed it. No. She knew what that energy felt like, the amulet and Kaine. This was different.
Still, she tried to pretend it wasn’t there while she finished her shift.
She hurried to her lab. She opened the door, and stopped short at the sight of Lila, curled up on the floor, her face swollen, eyes red.
Helena froze. Gods, the tribunal. It must have begun.
She’d hardly seen and hadn’t spoken to Lila since before Luc’s rescue. She’d returned to her room one day to find all of Lila’s things gone and heard about a private memorial service held for Soren only afterwards.
As much as she had wanted to try to explain herself, she couldn’t, because officially Soren had simply died.
But Luc would have told Lila the truth.
Helena stood frozen, not sure what could have possibly driven Lila here.
“Lila.” Helena set the obsidian down, moving tentatively. “Lila, what’s wrong? What happened?”
Lila stared at Helena without responding for a long time.
“I made a mistake,” Lila finally said, her voice barely a whisper, “I’ve made such a mistake.”
Helena swallowed hard. “It’s—all right. I’m sure it’ll be all right. Whatever you’ve done—I’m sure it can’t be that bad.”
Soren’s ghost seemed to hang between them.
“No.” Lila shook her head. “I’ve been lying to everyone. My whole life, I’ve been lying. Now—now I don’t know what to do …”
Her voice was so strained, it trailed off.
“Soren was the only person that knew,” Lila whispered. Her eyes were swimming, but the tears didn’t escape. “He always kept my secrets. Knew what to do about things. Said it was his job—looking out for me.”
“What happened?” Helena reached out tentatively.
Lila looked up and drew a deep breath, her chin trembling before she finally spoke. “I—I’m pregnant.”
Helena didn’t move. Couldn’t speak. She was too stunned to even believe the words Lila had just uttered.
To know she was pregnant meant she had to be at least two or three months along, and that was assuming her cycle was regular, which Helena knew it wasn’t. She’d been in the hospital at that time.
“How?” was the only question Helena could even think to ask. Never mind everything else that this meant.
Lila swallowed, her head moving jerkily, wincing when it pulled at the scars on her neck. “I know. I didn’t think I could. After—everything. I always assumed that it wasn’t even possible.”
“No,” Helena said impatiently. “I mean, yes, that too, but you weren’t pregnant when you were in the hospital. You’ve only been out for—How would you possibly know you’re pregnant?”
Lila looked down, avoiding Helena’s eyes. “That’s—that’s the secret. I know I’m pregnant.”
It was then that something incredibly obvious, which Helena should have realised years earlier, finally dawned on her.
Lila Bayard, who so often came back from battles nearly unscathed, who always recovered miraculously from her injuries, who adapted to a prosthetic leg in months when everyone said it would be a year. Who had never struggled to recover from an injury until she lost her resonance.
“You’re a vivimancer,” Helena said.
Lila didn’t meet her eyes as she gave a small nod. “I never used it on anyone except me. Soren a couple of times, but only when he asked. He said I couldn’t let anyone know. Not even Mum and Dad, because if people knew I wouldn’t be allowed to be Luc’s paladin.”
“All this time?” Helena said softly, startled by the sense of betrayal she felt.
“I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you but—you know what it’s been like for you. I couldn’t risk that, not with Luc at stake. I couldn’t be like you—fighting’s all I’m good at.”
The revelation was more than Helena felt she could process right then.
“Who’s the father?” Helena asked, as if it wasn’t completely obvious.
“You know it’s Luc.”
Helena nodded. She wanted to be angry, but her own secrets were worse, and the fact that Lila had turned to her in Soren’s absence spoke volumes.