He continued to pull, watching his son’s slow writhe. “Lords,” he said. “Forgive me.”
Then Nettle spoke one word in a broken voice. “Father.”
Argoth closed his eyes. He could not continue. He would have to succeed or fail with what he had.
“It is at an end,” he said, his voice faltering with emotion. “Your test is past.”
He quickly removed the rod from the collar and began to chant the form of emptiness. It was a more powerful magic, and the blackness in the rod quickly leached up into the stomach. When he could see no blackness in the tongue or rod, he set the rod, tongue, and stomach aside.
Nettle lay upon the table laboring to breathe, then his breathing calmed and he fell asleep.
Sometimes people died during the rite. But if they made it to this point, they would live. Argoth left the collar around Nettle’s neck. It was still black, but if he left it there, the body would quickly draw back the essence captured within.
His mouth tasted like a bitter cucumber, a side effect he’d forgotten about. He put his hands to Nettle’s chest, trying to warm it, then added more wood to the fire. When he’d finally cleared the frost, he saw the skin underneath was dead and white, blackened in spots.
Argoth pulled his own tunic off and stretched himself along Nettle’s side, warming him with the heat of his own body. He held Nettle close until he could no longer feel the cold of his skin.
When he was satisfied, he clothed Nettle, then sat with the stomach and thrall. He pulled Fire into himself. Then he directed it to the thrall. When he began to worry that he would not have enough for the thrall and himself, he felt the weave quicken in his hands and thrum to life. It was metal, nothing more, but it felt like a living thing, like a snake in his hands.
He did not know what time it was and feared dawn had come, so he put the stomach in his pocket and clambered up to the room above. It was still dark, but he did not know how close morning was. He would have to wait to eat the Fire he’d need from the stomach.
Argoth carried Nettle from the cellar back to the study and laid him upon the couch as if he’d fallen asleep there. But he needed to get something to cover that neck.
He stroked Nettle’s hair again. Such a fine, strong young man. He wondered: What would he have become?
Argoth would never know, and the pang of that loss stretched as wide as the sea.
He kissed Nettle’s brow, then heard a knocking at the door. He crossed the room to the door and unbarred it. Uram stood there in the darkness holding a pry bar.
“Forgive me, Zu, but we thought something had happened. I’ve been knocking for quite some time. We need to be going; the Skir Master likes an early start.”
“It’s been a long night, Captain. My son has fallen ill.”
Uram looked beyond Argoth into the room. “I’m sorry to hear that, Zu.”
“Captain, if you’ll step aside, I shall call my family and bid them farewell. Then I will join you outside.”
“Yes, Zu,” said Uram, “Of course.” He stepped aside.
Argoth retrieved a lap blanket to pull up around Nettle’s neck. Serah and the children were already roused. He bid them a teary farewell, then joined Uram and the other dreadmen outside and mounted his horse.
As they rode away, he turned to survey his family and lands one last time. But the night still lay thick and all was dark.
Rubaloth, the Skir Master, stood on the deck of the ship watching the sun rise, the stiff morning breeze at his back. On the main deck half a dozen sailors guided the last pallet of barrels that contained seafire down into the main hold. “Report,” he said to Uram.
“Argoth and his escort are eating a fine breakfast at the Shark’s Tooth.”
“Did he give you trouble?”
“None, Great One. But I did find something odd.”
“Oh?”
“His son’s neck, Great One. In the early morning I caught the Clansman locking the door of a room. His boy was inside, lying on a bed. The Clansman told me the boy had fallen ill. And the pungent odor of a healing salve did fill the hallway, but underneath it all I thought I smelled the faintest trace of wizardsmeet. It was there one moment and then gone. Still, when my men had everyone outside, I went back in and quietly forced the door. They’d wrapped the boy’s neck with fresh linen and plastered it as if for a sore throat. But when I pulled the bandaging back, the skin on the boy’s neck had all the markings of a hasty and large harvest.”
Rubaloth nodded. He’d been right. These cursed Clansmen. Another scion from a vanquished line no doubt wielding old magics. Was he the one who had wrested Lumen from the Glory? If so, this could be tricky. But Rubaloth savored the challenge.
“When we’re a few miles from shore,” he said, “you will quietly search all his belongings.”
Uram bowed. “I shall, Great One.”
Yes, he’d have to be careful. But this Captain Argoth would soon find he was not the only one prepared for battle.
35
Sugar ran out of the cave into the light. She considered running back downhill to escape whatever it was coming at her in the inky dark of the cave, but because that was her first choice, she rejected it. It would expect her to run downhill; it would expect her to hide somewhere away from the cave, perhaps in the waters of the swamp. There was no way she could get far by trying to steal away quietly. Her very footfalls would make her an easy mark.
No, she wouldn’t run. She looked around for a place to hide close by and spotted one above the mouth of the cave behind an outcropping of rock. She didn’t know if it was big enough to hide her, but it would have to do.
Quickly, carefully, she moved away from the mouth and climbed up the small ridge that ran along the brow of the cave.
Something splashed through water just inside the mouth of the cave.
She pulled herself up the last few feet and slid behind the rock. But she didn’t have time to lie down, for the beast burst into view below her. It took a number of steps then stopped, surveying the slope below.
The creature stood like a man of freakish proportions. Heavy-limbed, wide, maybe seven feet tall, with a small, odd-shaped head. It was immense. She thought she saw an ear on the side of its head, but it was too ragged to tell exactly what it was. Shaggy grass grew unevenly over the whole of its body. Along its shoulder and back clung a large swath of blackened, ashy tufts and blades. Yet below the burned part, about where a man’s ribs would end, grew a patch of what appeared to be green grass mixed with the small white flowers of creeping wood sorrel.
If it turned around and looked up, it would see her. But she didn’t dare crouch, didn’t dare make adjustments for fear of making even the smallest of sounds.
The creature moved slightly and made a hideous sound that froze her spine.
It moved again. Again, the awful sound, and Sugar realized it was the intake of breath. A horrid gasp. Loud, like a man suffering from the black lung.
Was it trying to scent her?
The air about her was still, no morning updrafts or crosswinds. No downdrafts. The breeze in the cave blew outward, and so the thing would not have smelled her in there. But that also meant the breeze might, at this very moment, be carrying the scent that pooled about her.
A crack sounded from the woods below.
The creature turned to it.
Heartbeats pounded in her ears.
Then the thing moved, loping downhill in the direction of the sound, the grass about its body jolting with every stride.
Sugar realized she’d been holding her breath and gasped for air.
The creature leapt into the air, clearing a large tangle, and landed heavily on the other side. Two more strides, and then it was nothing but a flash through the trunks of the trees.