She did not subscribe to the Marsh dreams herself, though she took it more seriously now that she’d had time to get to know the girl.
And now I know just how seriously the girl takes it.
The knives were down now, and the regent was reaching for buckets of steaming water and clean white rags, laid near the table where Winters stretched out naked and bleeding.
Something broke in her, and the rage could no longer be contained. She stood and pushed her way to the front as he squeezed out the excess water, a smile of pure love upon his face.
“No,” she said in a loud voice. “You’ll not touch her again.” She doubted it carried very far, but it carried far enough. He straightened and turned to her as she approached, and whatever he saw upon her face took his smile away.
“Great Mother,” he began, “it is customary-”
But she interrupted him. “I will tend her. You’ve done enough.” Then, she poured every bit of the rage she felt into her eyes and watched him blink at what he saw. She walked to him and snatched the cloth away before he could object.
The words of her sister-if indeed it was her sister-suddenly reasserted themselves, and she could not fathom why under any circumstances she would go with this man. She forced the thought aside and pushed past the regent to stand near the girl. He looked from her to Winters, then nodded slightly and returned to his seat.
She leaned over the girl, taking in the smell of her blood. “This is going to hurt,” she said as she lifted the cloth.
The girl fidgeted and croaked; it took Jin a moment to recognize the word. “No.” Then, the girl mumbled words she could not make out.
She does not wish to be washed clean of this.
She bent her head closer. Behind her, Ria was on her feet and inviting others to stand as another Y’Zirite hymn rose up into the night. It was a song about kin-healing, and despite the noise of it, she could just make out Winters’s whispering.
“And she shall call forth the true Machtvolk by blood,” the girl muttered, and Jin Li Tam understood. Let them see her, naked and bleeding for them. This blood purchased exodus for those who chose it.
She rose up and turned to the regent. Their eyes met. “You will honor your promise?” she asked across the platform, her voice drowning in song.
“Yes,” he said.
Then she turned back to Winters. “Can you walk?”
The girl struggled, and Jin took hold of her arm to help her up. Her hand slipped over the blood and Winters gasped, but she rolled and sat up on the table. Jin cast a glance to her neatly folded dress and furs, but knew that anything she put over the girl would simply add more pain to what she’d already faced. Instead, she tried to find a part of her body that had not been cut and helped pull her, sobbing, to her feet.
“Lean on me,” she said, “as best you can.”
Together, with slow and measured steps, they crossed the platform, and Winters cried out softly with each step, though Jin knew she tried not to. They would leave this place, and when they were alone, Jin would wash the true queen of the Machtvolk clean of the blood and see her to Lynnae’s care for the treatment of her wounds.
When they climbed down from the platform, she guided the girl onto the wooden boardwalk and noted the wash of emotion upon the faces of those they passed. Some wept in ecstasy and others in sorrow. Some averted their eyes in shame and others gazed upon her in pride.
They shuffled their way out of the crowd, and when they were safely into the forest beyond the gathering, Winters slumped against her and nearly fell. The girl was of small frame, but the dead weight of her staggered Jin, and she held her for a moment.
Then, she felt a hand upon her shoulder and looked up into the face of a weeping young Machtvolk soldier. She’d seen this one before, guarding the door that led into the abandoned throne room and the caves that wound their way down to the Book of Dreaming Kings.
The young man scooped the girl into his arms, and Jin heard the sorrow catch in his throat as Winters cried out at his touch. “I will bear you, my queen,” the young man said in a voice that stumbled with emotion.
Jin inclined her head. “Thank you.”
He returned the gesture and then set out down the wooden boardwalk in the direction of Ria’s lodge.
Jin paused before turning to follow him. The night was filled now with song instead of screaming, and she looked back in the direction of the singing.
This must be ended.
She did not know now how that could happen exactly. It was a vastly larger proposition than she had conceived when she’d first seen the beginnings of this resurgence last year. And she’d had no suspicion that anything could be darker and more frightening than the pillar of smoke and fire on the day that Windwir fell. But that pyre, it seemed, had only been the beginning of a darkness she could not comprehend and could not bear to be a part of.
The last thing she noticed, gleaming wetly in the scattered moonlight that penetrated the evergreen canopy, was the footprints in blood leading backward along the way that they had taken.
“We walk a path of blood,” Jin Li Tam whispered, and as she said it, a shudder ran its course along her body, like the kiss of a silver blade over a cold and salted wound.
Chapter 27
Neb
An unsettling calm flooded him, and Neb looked down to where he stood upon the silver pond before looking back up to the waiting mechoservitors.
He could feel their song now vibrating up through his feet, and he could hear the whispering of their processing scrolls in the aether.
And from where he stood, he could sense a myriad other vibrations in the strange waters.
You stand upon the veins of the world. They are yours to command now, something whispered within him. And the aether is yours to walk, but you will need assistance there.
He cocked his head. “Father?”
I am with you, Son, but only for a short while. I cannot follow where you must go. A strong sense of urgency flooded him, and he felt the pull of his inner eye eastward across the aether. But whatever lay there was out of reach.
Neb walked to the waiting mechoservitors, and as he did, they both knelt. He took his robe from them and clothed himself. One reached within a pouch to withdraw a small object and hold it out to him in a closed metal fist. “I’ve held this for you, Lord Whym,” the mechoservitor said, its voice reedy.
When the small black bird fell into the palm of his hand, the world shifted and Neb fought the vertigo that seized him. His mind flashed back to his last encounter with it, lying naked and staked in the Churning Wastes while the Blood Guard took their knives to him and pressed a similar bit of carved stone into his skin. Now he saw the meaning of it.
The stone extends my sight within the aether. They’d used it to find the location of the antiphon.
Yes. Once more, the whispering of his father’s ghost.
Neb felt the slightest tingle beneath his scalp, soft fingers on his brain, pulling at him, and he gave himself to it. This is how you look, the whisper continued. And Neb understood, bending the lens of the dreamstone east.
He found Petronus first. The old man stood at the foot of a tall door, surrounded by a ragged group of Gypsy Scouts, Gray Guard and sailors looking out of place. The song poured out from the old man.