Dart glanced to Kathryn. The girl’s gaze was steady. There was certainly a well of strength in her small frame. “Only I can see him at most times. And even I can’t touch him then. Only stone seems to block him.”
“And he’s trapped in the Eldergarden?”Tylar asked, having heard their story.
The girl nodded with a pained look of worry.
“And when was the first time, this creature… this Pupp… revealed himself to other than yourself?” Gerrod asked.
The girl’s steadiness faltered. Her eyes sank to the floor. She seemed to collapse into herself.
Gerrod continued with reassuring tones. “You’re among friends, Dart. We wouldn’t ask this of you unless it was important.”
She kept her eyes down. Her voice was a whisper. “It was with Master Willet… up… up in the rookery.”
Dart swallowed. She let go her last secret reluctantly. Fury had given her strength before to accuse Paltry, to tell what had happened to her, but now she must reveal the end. “Master Willet…”
She spotted Healer Paltry leaning forward. His eyes were sharp, his lips thin. How long must he have wondered what had become of his cohort? His face shone with oil. How had she ever considered him handsome?
She turned away and took a deeper breath. “Pupp attacked him, protecting me.”
“I thought-”
She cut off Master Gerrod. If she stopped her words now, she might never finish them. “It was my blood… my virginal blood.” She choked on this last. So much had been stolen from her, more than she could measure. Would the pain ever end? “Pupp bathed himself in it. I think he knew the touch of my blood gave substance to his form. He blazed with fire and tore into Willet.”
Dart was drawn back to the rookery, to the blood, to the break of bone, to the sear of flesh, to the boil of blood… “All was consumed,” she said. “Gone. Not even blood stained the planks.”
No one spoke.
The silence drew Dart back to the room. She saw the look of horror on Paltry’s face. She found no satisfaction in it.
“And Pupp?” Gerrod asked.
Dart shook her head. “Once the blood dried from him, he became a ghost again.”
Yaellin spoke from the door. “My father, Ser Henri, knew of Pupp. Dart used to speak of her ghostly pet, before others ridiculed and chided her into silence and secrets. My father believed her companion might be some amalgam of Dart’s naethryn and aethryn selves. Born whole, Dart was not stripped of these parts. Yet they remain not fully of this world either. They cling to her.”
Dart listened, balanced between horror and understanding. She and Pupp had always been one, but she never suspected how much of a one they were. If the others were right, Pupp was as much a part of her as her leg or arm.
Gerrod nodded. “And her blood has the Grace to pull this part of her fully into our world.”
“Not just her blood,” Yaellin countered. Dart had already told him about the drop of Chrism’s blood striking Pupp, and the blood roots down in the subterranean passage. “ Any blood rich enough with Grace. Pupp just needs fuel to cross the barrier into substance.”
“Such strangeness abounds,” Gerrod concluded.
The castellan rose from the cot. “Which does not settle the matter of Chrism and what we might do about this Cabal. We cannot hide forever in this cell.”
Dart listened with half an ear as more discussions and plans were weighed, balanced, and discarded. She found tears coming again to her eyes. She could not say why. They rose from the hollowness inside her. She did not fully know who she was any more: girl, god, or monster.
She stared at her hands, blurred by her tears. They seemed a stranger’s now.
A second pair of hands covered hers, grasping. She lifted her gaze to find Laurelle close to her, staring back at her. “It doesn’t matter,” her friend said. There was no horror in her eyes. “None of this matters. I know you.” She squeezed her fingers. “This is the Dart I know. You’ve shown your heart in the past and now. The rest is just shadow and light.”
Dart sniffed and took Laurelle’s hand in her own. She so wanted it to be true. But she had only to hear the others discuss slaying a god to know that there were matters greater than flesh… even her own. And she had a role to play. Dart had no say in her birth, even her years in the Conclave were ordered and orchestrated by others. But no longer. From here, she would have to forge her own path. It was for her to decide.
Girl, god, or monster.
Kathryn shook her head. “This is madness. We must wait on others. Bring full forces to bear. We can’t lay siege on the castillion with just the handful here.”
Tylar stood. Kathryn noted the wobble in his knees, though Tylar tried to hide it with a wave of his arm.
“Chrism will not wait,” he argued. “He knows he’s been exposed. If he has not found us by sunset, there is no accounting of what he might do. He could unleash all manner of horror in the city. Or he could merely escape with his Cabal, hiding away, disappearing with the Godsword. He’d be a thousandfold more difficult to root out.”
“You propose going in on our own?” she said. “With no knowledge of what may lay in wait?”
“If we could only find the Godsword…” Tylar grumbled.
Yaellin spoke from the doorway. “I’ve searched everywhere for the weapon. It’s nowhere to be-”
Distant shouts silenced the man. All eyes turned to the door.
Yaellin swung to the spy hole. “It’s coming from down the stairs. I’ll check.” He lifted the bar and pulled the latch. He vanished in a whirl of cloak and shadow.
With the door cracked, the heavy tread of boots on stone echoed up from below. Surely it was the castillion guard. Orders were shouted to search every floor. This was no random search.
“We’ve been found,” Tylar said.
Kathryn slid free her sword. Others did the same. There was no escape up the tower. They’d have to fight their way to the streets.
Kathryn called up the power in her cloak, billowing darkness around her form. They had to get Tylar safely away… and the girl. The child could not be captured, returned to Chrism’s reach. With such a source of blood, the Godsword would be Chrism’s to wield. That must not happen.
Glancing over a shoulder, Kathryn spotted the girl crouched with her friend. She had a dagger in hand and a fierce set to her eyes.
Shadows suddenly shifted behind the girl’s shoulders.
Oh no…
Darkness fell across Dart, drawing her eye to the sunlit window nearby. She had left the window open after watching the flippercraft crash earlier. A naked shape crept over the sill, claws digging into stone, eyes glowing with grace. Smoke steamed its form.
An ilk-beast.
The creature leaped into the room-toward Laurelle, the closest to the window.
Dart screamed as the creature struck her friend, knocking her to the bed. Another pair of creatures filled the window, crawling in from either side, misshapen horrors. At the same time, windows shattered around the room. More ilk-beasts boiled in from all sides.
Dart lunged toward the nearest, the one tangled with Laurelle. Her friend kicked and bit, turning as feral as the creature that attacked her. But a swipe of claws ripped her robe and drew bloody furrows across her chest. Laurelle cried out.
Dart already had her cursed dagger in hand. She plunged it to the hilt in the monster’s back. It reared up, tearing the blade from Dart’s grasp. The beast struggled for the impaled dagger, writhing to reach it. It screamed, but all that came out was fire. Its body stiffened with pain, a statue of agony.
Laurelle kicked out at it from the bed. Her heel struck its form and it shattered to ash, blowing outward. A reek of charred flesh whelmed over them.
Dart joined Laurelle, dropping behind the edge of the bed, ducking almost under it.
Around the room, a dance of blades held the ilk-beasts in check. The castellan swirled in and out of shadow, dealing death with swift skill. The tall Wyr-mistress had a sword in each fist, lunging and stabbing in all directions, seeming to have eyes in the back of her head. Even the godslayer wielded a blade in one hand and a dagger in the other, his back to the bearded man who fought with a broken chair leg, sharp as a spear.