POV: Seraphina
A shadow fell over the slate. She had not heard the man come up behind her.
It was Gavrel, with her waterskin filled and word from Liora about the evening watch. Suri opened one eye at him and closed it. She thanked him, and he walked back down the rows. It had only been Gavrel, and her heart was still going.
Then she understood what anyone behind her had been looking at all afternoon. She had been sitting outside her tent, facing the slope, with eleven names open on her knee where anyone close enough could read them.
She wrapped the slate in oilcloth and put it inside her coat. Lucien was on the road with his records and his glass. If anyone could match those names to paper, it was him. The slate could wait the two days until he reached the camp.
The fifth night was quiet. Liora kept the flap again, as she had every night since the descent. Seraphina did not sleep much herself.
The lookout called riders on the sixth morning. She was out of her tent before the call ended. The camp was already facing the road.
A man came through the crowd at her, fast. It was Arin. He set himself between her and the slope with a hand on his sword. He had decided the saintess should not meet strangers in the open.
He had reached her before Gavrel did, before Liora. A devoted man had been nearest.
Liora walked him three paces off. He went. He begged the saintess's pardon, eyes still on the road. She thanked him for the care, because the camp was watching and the care looked true.
She let the breath go. Half the camp found excuses to stand near her now. This one meant to guard her.
The riders reached the base of the slope. There were six men on tired horses, five of them riding in a tight knot around the sixth.
She counted them twice. She had sent to the crown for thirty. Five of the six were Lucien's own guard. The thirty were still somewhere south.
She knew the man in the middle before his face came clear. He had come a full day faster than the rider sent to fetch him.
Yona came to stand at her elbow, quietly pleased with herself. Her letter had brought him a day early. That went unsaid between them.
Lucien came off his horse at her tent. He spent nothing on ceremony. "Seraphina." Her name, plain, with the whole camp in earshot. He had been sparing with it before. Now he led with it. His eyes went to her bound arms. Something in his face pulled tight, then smoothed. "How high has it climbed."
"Both collarbones. It has not moved since the morning after we came up."
"Then we begin now." He was already reaching into his satchel.
The names would keep. Her arms would not.
He set out the volcanic glass and the binding strips on a cloth. The paste came last. It was grey and it smelled of iron with something green under it. Corwin planted himself on her other side and kept two fingers on her pulse. He trusted the care of her to no one. Lucien let him stand there and bent to his work.
He laid the glass along her arms where the gold ran closest to the skin. He bound it down with the strips. The paste went on over that. He worked with both hands, and kept talking low the whole time.
The talk was for her. She worked that out after a while. He kept to ward histories and dry records, nothing with any fear in it, so she had something to listen to besides the work on her arm.
It went in cold on the hot skin. For an hour she felt nothing. Then the gold began to move.
This near her heart, it moved the way it had at the stone. Her nose began to run. The copper came back into her mouth. The heat pressed up toward her throat, back toward her heart where none of them wanted it, and her heart missed a beat, then another. Corwin counted her pulse out loud through it, and his fingers went tight on her wrist when the count stumbled.
Then the glass took hold and the gold turned down. It went slow, and it burned the whole way. The lines pulled back by inches, off the collarbones and toward the shoulders they had climbed from. She understood then that this pain was different. Every other month it had meant the gold climbing higher. This meant it going down. She sat still and let it burn. She kept quiet. Lucien had emptied the tent of all but Corwin, and she was glad Thalion had gone out with the rest. She did not want him watching this. By nightfall the worst of it had settled below her collarbone again. She could breathe without feeling the heat at her throat. It was the first easy breath in six days.
"Better," Yona said, and went out and told the camp so. The word went around the fires before dark. The strips and the used cloths Yona kept. She burned them herself and stood over the fire until they were ash.
Men she had healed came past her tent in ones and twos all evening with nothing to say. They left firewood. One left a mended strap. Arin brought a double armload and stacked it more carefully than firewood needed.
Suri would not come into the tent at all. He sat outside the flap through all of it, growling low in his chest. He hated the smell of the paste, and the gold more. When it was done he came in and put his head under her hand and left it there. She took it to mean she would live.
Thalion came to her when the tent had cleared. He stood over the bedroll and did not sit down.
"You made no sound," he said. "The whole time."
"You were out there for all of it, then."
"I was." His jaw worked. "You do not have to spare me."
"Someone in this tent has to be spared something."
He sat down then. She got her hand into his and he let her have it, and neither of them said anything else about it.
The fever came in the night, the way it came after the glass. Corwin had Lucien's compound ready before she asked, and ginger for the sickness under it. She drank all of it and lay in the dark, too hot for the blankets, her heart still going harder than it should. It broke before first light and left her wrung out and hollow. The first cleansing had put her down like this too. She had known it would.
Lucien went down to the valley floor at first light the next day. Thalion held the rim with the watch. She went with him, still weak from the fever and not showing it, and Liora came down at her shoulder. She would let no one read that stone without her standing over it.
The valley floor was grey and dead. Nothing grew there. Her fire still sat in the broken stone at the middle of it, gold gone hard, one spot of color in all that grey.
He asked her not to touch anything. She did not.
He crouched at the broken stone and went over it a piece at a time, running a thumb along the broken edge, turning the fallen pieces to the faces where they had split. He set a lamp low against the crack. Her fire still held over the top, gone gold and hard, everything under it exactly as it had fallen.
He had brought pages from his family's archives. They were keeper logs, two hundred years of them, with drawings. Keepers had written down how a node dies when it dies. He looked from the page to the break and back, a dozen times.
He read in silence. That surprised her. Lucien talked freely everywhere else. Here he went quiet and slow. She thought better of him for it.
When he stood, his face had gone careful. She knew that look on a clever man. It meant he was afraid.
"A node dies slowly," he said. "I have read a hundred that did. The stone goes cold. The frost works in a winter at a time, the carving wears away, and when the stone finally cracks, the crack comes slow, its edges weathered smooth and grey as the rest." He laid his hand flat on the broken face. "This did not die that way. Look at the break."
She looked. Where the stone had split, the inside faces were pale and sharp, clean rock that had never seen weather. Nothing had grown in the crack. It had broken all at once, and not long ago.
"It could have been struck," she said. She was not going to make it easy for him.
"By what?" He turned a fallen piece over where she could see it. "Strike a stone and the chips fly away from the blow. If a thing had struck this from our side, the pieces would lie out there." He looked at the empty floor past the break. "They do not. Every piece fell inward, toward us. The far face is clean. Ours is shattered." He set the piece in her hand. "Whatever did this was on the far side, and it pushed through toward us."
She turned the piece over in her hand. The broken side was all splinters under her thumb.
She had felt it pull the moment it happened, and never been able to prove she had felt anything. Since the last valley she had carried a fear she had told no one but Thalion: that the dying ground was not only dying, that something was opening it, and that her own sealing might be prying it wider. Here was the stone that fear had come from, dead and grey in her palm.
"This one did not starve," Lucien said. "It was broken from the far side, not worn down from ours. What does that to a node, I cannot say. But it did not die on its own."
"I know," she said. "I felt it pull."
He looked at her a long moment. "Every account of this ground I have read was written by a man who came after. Not one of them stood on it when it went. You are the first who can tell me what it did while it did it." He said it quietly. It had cost him to say it.
She stood over the broken stone and made herself say the shape of it out loud, though she could not prove a word of it.
"The ground has been dying for generations," she said. "Since my line was hunted down and the keepers with it, the wards had no one to hold them. That much is old and sure." She looked at the dead stone in her hand. "But this one did not only fail. Something reached through from the far side and opened it. If I have it right, the estates were never the sickness. They are where the wall has worn thin, and something has learned to push through."
Lucien kept his eyes on the stone. He let it stand.