Thirty-One The Martyr

THIRTY-ONE

The Martyr

SAMUEL

M idnight found us wading into the yard of an inn up the coast, situated just above the submerged homes of a small fishing hamlet on an island of snowpack and ice. The courtyard lay under two feet of water, but the inn itself was raised on a stone foundation and appeared dry, as did the stables.

I leaned close to Benedict—we had been forced to dismount and lead the horses some time ago, exhausted as they were.

"Do not harm anyone here," I warned. "We are monks on the road; they have no reason to be suspicious until you give them one."

His glare was palpable in the gloom.

A shutter opened, and a light bloomed from an upper window.

"Monks!" an elderly woman's voice observed in Mereish, complete with a rural lilt I had never heard before. "Wait you there, pious folk, and I'll have you warm and dry. See to your horses, there's hay in the loft."

The shutter closed and the light vanished, leaving us back in the damp cold and dripping shadows of the spring night.

"See?" Mary whispered. "No reason to be suspicious."

"I will see to the horses." I looked at Ben. "Come with me?"

Ben looked ready to protest, but something in my voice must have caught his attention. It caught Mary's too, as the inn door opened and light spilled into the courtyard once more, illuminating her cold-burned cheeks, dry lips and deep blue eyes, nearly back in the night.

The innwife ushered Grant and Mary inside, and Ben and I led the exhausted horses into the hay-scented shelter of the stables.

A glow seeped from a closed lantern. Ben drew back the hatch, and a mixture of gold and purple dragonflies lit five stalls, along with an assortment of racks and tools. I immediately went to work, removing the saddles and scanning the shelves for brushes and picks.

"How did you know about the Oruse?" Benedict asked, sitting on a stool.

"You could help," I pointed out, beginning to brush down Grant's horse.

"I have one good arm. Answer the question."

"That arm still works."

"Samuel."

"When I visited the other monastery, looking for a cure for the crew's fever. Their mage mentioned it."

Ben eyed me coolly. "That is all? I know you spoke with that Cleric about the Black Tide Cult. Why? Why would a healer care about our magecraft?"

How had he overheard Scieran and I? I drew the brush across the horse's sweaty, damp flank. It hardly mattered. He knew more than I had wanted, and now he and I were on a precipice.

I held his gaze, measuring him and the possible outcomes of this conversation, as well as the proximity of several pitchforks and other implements that could easily be turned into weapons—even one-handed as Ben was.

I ignored the warning drum of my pulse and spoke the truth. "I asked if there was a way to cure my corruption."

"Why would you need a cure?" he asked, voice still cold, still flat. "The Uknara woman trained you to manage."

I gave a half-shake of my head. "Manage, yes. But I still struggle to access visions at will—or at least, the right visions—and I will still end my life mad and young, unable to tell one world from another. Olsa bought me time. A decade or two. That's all."

Benedict's expression did not change. "Does Mary know?"

"Yes."

"About this ‘cure'?"

"Yes."

My brother sat forward, resting one elbow on his knee. "Why did you not tell me?"

His interest—and the fact that he was not raging at me—kindled a spark of hope. "Because you have no interest in the wellbeing of anyone but yourself."

"That is untrue."

I waited for him to elaborate, but he did not. I went on as if he had not spoken and moved to brush down Benedict's beleaguered horse. The creature nuzzled me tiredly, and I scratched between his ears.

"It hardly matters," I said. "The High Cleric could not help me."

"Surely there are Clerics more powerful than a monk in the forest." Ben huffed a laugh, harsh and too loud. "What of the Navy's? The king's? The bedamned Ess Noti? They seem to have their fingers in every bit of magery. I cannot believe—"

"Stop," the word cut out of me. To have Ben of all people poking holes in my decisions? I could not stand for it. "Stop, Ben. There is no cure."

"I do not believe you," he retorted. "You have that expression on your face, that fucking martyr's glower. You are trying to find a way to suffer for the good of everyone around you, which means there is a cure, but it is too dangerous to go after. Be selfish for once, Sam. Tell me the truth."

I snorted in disgust, more offended than I could admit. "One of us has to think of others."

"Tell me the truth."

My resolve weakened, and it was a testimony to the depth of my fatigue that I did not immediately mark that shift as Magni power. Benedict watched me, his eyes… not softer, but more open than I had seen in years.

"There is a cure, and it may be in Ostchen," I admitted, looking through him now, brush paused. "But it is with the Ess Noti and therefore out of reach. Even if we could learn it, you would have to be healed too. Or your corruption would eventually unravel me again."

"I will not give up my power," Ben stated, whatever else he thought hidden behind his eyes.

"You might retain it," I said, holding my brother's gaze. "What the Black Tide did is a poor imitation of Mereish practices. Perhaps they can… not undo what the Black Tide did, but correct it."

"‘Perhaps,'" Ben repeated tonelessly. "This is why you have not had her."

I raised my brows, taken aback by the sudden shift in topic. "Pardon me?"

Benedict smiled, small and pitying. "Mary." He slid into a leer and pronounced each of his next words with singular intention. "You. Are. A. Fool. Once more, you have a woman on offer at this very moment, and you will not have her because of your worthless scruples."

His words shoved under my skin like splinters. I stepped away from the horses and faced him, every slam of my pulse in my suddenly aching skull threatening to shatter my self-control.

"Ben," I said lowly. "Every time you use your power, you lose more of yourself. You lose the potential of goodness. You forget more of what it is like to be human, to feel and love and care. My corruption will drive me mad and set me adrift in the Dark Water. But yours will make you into a monster. Lirr was a shadow compared to what you will become."

At my mention of ‘goodness' a snarl had tightened Benedict's lips, but now he grinned, vicious and unforgiving. "Have you considered that is what I want?"

Gooseflesh rose on my arms and neck. "What if a day comes," I asked very slowly, "when you are so far gone, so lost, that I am the one you hurt? Kill? Torture? What if you see your daughter on the street—in whose veins runs your own blood—and she is nothing but meat and bones in your eyes?"

That struck a chord. Benedict's lips pinned shut, his nostrils flaring, and his gaze locked to mine. I felt his power ripple across the room, bringing with it feelings of terror and remorse and run, run, run . The horses shifted, tossing their heads and tugging on their tethers.

I weathered it.

Ben did not speak again, and that, I knew, was as much of an answer as I would get. He had heard me. There was nothing more I could do.

"Saint, I am starving," he said abruptly, standing up and striding out the door. "I am off to find some food."

I bit back a protest. The ache in my head had transformed into hammering, and I closed my eyes, fingers pressed to my temples.

I had grown so used to sloshing through floodwaters in sodden boots that when the Dark Water began to swell around my ankles, I hardly noticed. The Other condensed, overwhelming what little senses I had left beyond pain. A few lights flickered—Grant's subtle indigo-grey in the inn, a creature with an orange glow somewhere off in the night. Mary's and Ben's were still hidden, but I felt no consolation.

The billowing light of another Sooth burned on the horizon. His light was forest green edged with purple, bruised and battered. And his focus was wholly, exclusively, on me.

Inis Hae.

I fumbled a hand into my pocket. The coin was not there. Had I lost in in our flight? Had it fallen on the floor?

Panic threatened to smother me, raging free before Olsa's training surged. I began to separate my mind, edging part of myself back into the human world and slowly, tediously, drawing the rest back on a fragile thread.

I came back to myself, crouched with my back to one of the stables' squared posts. My headache had dulled but was still there, aching and warning. Warning me that, in the Other, Hae was watching.

My fingers finally touched the coin, crammed low in a forgotten pocket. As soon as I nestled it into the warmth of my palm, the headache ebbed and my sense of Hae faded.

But only dread came in its place.

* * *

By the time I finished grooming, feeding and watering the horses, an extensive meal was being laid out in the inn's common room. Mary, Grant and Ben were nowhere to be seen, but the innwife directed me to a bathing room—already damp and showing signs of use—and pressed a banyan and a men's long shirt into my arms.

"Get warm and dry, then come and eat," she instructed with maternal firmness, then left me be.

By the time I finished and returned to the common room, my companions were already there, the air full of the scent of thick, hot meat pie, bread and a fruity wine spiced with cardamom, drowning out the perpetual damp and nip of the cold.

Mary smiled at me across the table, her skin pinked with warmth and cleanliness instead of chill. Her hair was in a drying knot, and she wore a Mereish wrapped gown of modest colors.

I smiled back, hiding my raw nerves. I almost told her about Hae's connection to my headaches right then, but the contentedness in her eyes stopped me.

Just an hour. She deserved an hour of peace. We all did. Hae, if my senses were to be trusted, was still trapped on the other side of the river. We had time.

I self-consciously ran my thumb across my opposite forearm, where I had pinned my Mereish coin to my skin with a handkerchief, hidden under my sleeve. While it remained there my connection to the Other remained smothered, my head did not ache so fiercely, and, I prayed, the other Sooth could not actively track me. My coin was not the same as Mary's and Ben's, but it was all we had.

Such constant use would, however, corrupt me all the faster.

Mary's smile dimmed, and she shot me a lingering glance, but either she marked my expression as harmless or she granted me my silence.

"Eat," the innwife said as she made for the door. "I'm for my bed, pious children."

Ben smirked slightly at the name. He and Grant wore clothes as eclectic as Mary and I did, but they were clean and dry and he seemed unbothered.

Mary stole a bread roll and ate it while she shook out her hair beside the fire, then claimed the chair beside Grant, who had filled our cups. Tane, for her part, slipped to the window to keep watch. To my surprise, the indigo-grey light of Grant's ghisting, in the form of a mangy hound—very much like the one we had seen back at the farmhouse—separated from the highwayman and joined her, sitting patiently at her side.

Grant watched him with a proprietary kind of distrust.

Beneath the table, Mary's sock-clad foot wedged between my calves. This time my smile was genuine.

"This is wonderful," she said, reaching for her cup. "Thank you for seeing to the horses. Are you all right?"

"I am very well," I placated.

"How long can we stay here?" Grant inquired, still watching his manifest ghisting. It had taken the form of an overlarge crab now, and was crawling inexorably up the wall.

"Until dawn," I said.

"Well, then," Grant rallied and looked to his plate, "let us make the most of it."

Over the course of the meal, some of my tension ebbed, soothed by Mary's apparent contentedness and her sock-clad feet, leeching warmth off my legs. Grant carried the conversation, speaking of everything save our situation. Benedict seemed content just to eat, occasionally staring between us but otherwise keeping to himself.

"They have a proper summer there, you know, in the Mereish South Isles," Grant said, though every child of the Winter Sea knew of the fabled southern climate. He was into his third cup of wine and showed uncommon restraint in taking this one slowly. "A full six months without snow, can you imagine that? No fear of your face freezing off your skull. No being snow-stayed with your mother's second cousin in Jurry because even the sleigh coaches cannot manage the drifts."

"Very specific," Mary commented, using bread to mop gravy from her plate.

"It happened not once, not twice, but three times," Grant said with an air of conspiracy, leaning forward. The light of the oil lamp on the table gave his blond beard, newly growing in, a reddish glow. "Have I mentioned I hate Jurry? Parties and perfume shops, and pastries so sweet one needs a gallon of coffee to wash them down."

"As much as I enjoy pastries," Mary said, "perhaps it is best I never made it there."

Discreetly, I tried to gauge whether this turn in conversation was one she wanted to take. Mary's first venture away from home had been to Jurry, but her coach had been attacked on the road by highwaymen and she had been set adrift in the world. It was the first step that brought her to Whallum and into my path. It was also a topic Mary steadfastly avoided, and she had only shared the account with me once.

Mary caught my eye. She must have seen my concern, because her expression softened into a wry smile, and she gave a nearly imperceptible nod.

"I am quite sure it was the Tumblers who took your coach," Grant continued tactlessly. He swished his wine in its red-glazed clay cup. "I do keep my ear to the ground when it comes to these things, if the opportunity arises. They are a foul lot, Saint knows it. I know it. Did I tell you about the time they robbed me ? I suffered theft and unnecessary depontication. My wig was ruined."

"Indeed," I said with finality. "Speaking of wigs. We need new clothes, disguises, before we reach Ostchen. We should search the next village."

"You mean steal?" Ben clarified.

The word riled me, as did his voice and the memory of all that had passed between us in the stables. "Yes. Our situation, I fear, has grown worse."

Mary lowered her fork, and Grant pried his eyes from his ghisting, who now hung from the ceiling over the table in the form of a misshapen spider.

"Inis Hae is tracking me, as we suspected. My headaches are connected. I believe they come when he is actively in the Other, seeking me out. My coin should thwart him for the time being, but I do not know how complete that protection is," I said, issuing these truths calmly and steadily. "This must be our last night of rest."