The sundered seal

Chapter Nine: Kaelen Discovers He Can Reverse the Curse

The first abomination ever taken alive in Dawnhollow was a child.

It was caught on the second night after Veyrath's visit, in a pit trap that Brenna Voss's watchmen had dug beneath the northern gate and baited with a haunch of rotting mutton. They had expected a wolf, or one of the larger grey brutes that had been hurling themselves at the palisade. Instead, when the torches were lowered into the dark, they found a small thin figure curled in the bottom of the hole, hissing and snapping at the light, its long limbs folded like a spider's.

It was no taller than a boy of eight. Its skin was the grey of old ash, laced with black veins, and its yellow eyes rolled wildly in a face that was still, horribly, a child's face.

"Do not touch it," said Brenna, and her voice was rough. "Gods help us. Bind it. Bind it well."

They chained it with iron in the cold cellar beneath the Hall of Rank, where the grain was usually stored, and posted four guards at the door. Then they sent for Kaelen.

He came at once, and he came alone. Lyra had been pulled away to the wall, where the refugees were arguing again over water, and Dorran was resting upstairs, grey and sweating, under the watchful eye of the healer Ysolde Marne. Kaelen took a single lantern from the guard at the stairs and descended into the dark with his heart beating hard against his ribs.

The thing in the cellar looked up as he approached.

It had been a boy. Kaelen could see that now, in the lantern light. There was a gap where a milk tooth had fallen out. There was a scab on one knee, half hidden beneath the grey, and the remains of a woollen tunic, patched at the elbow with a square of mismatched blue cloth. Somebody had sewn that patch. Somebody had loved this child enough to mend his clothes.

"Fenwick," Kaelen said softly. "You are from the Fenwick farm."

The creature hissed. The chains rattled. Its jaws gaped wide, far wider than any jaw should, and a strand of black fluid dripped onto the stone floor.

Kaelen knelt, a safe distance from the iron, and put down the lantern.

"I do not know if you can hear me," he said. "I think perhaps you can. I think part of you is still in there, under all of that. I am going to try something, and I will not lie to you, I do not know if it will work. But I am going to try."

The creature lunged. The chains snapped taut, and its claws raked the air inches from his face.

Kaelen did not flinch. He raised his hands, slowly, palm outwards, and closed his eyes.

For two days he had been afraid of this moment. Not of the creature itself, but of what the light might do. He had mended wounds. He had pushed back the black threads in Dorran's arm and Holt's and a hundred others. But holding a sickness at bay was different from tearing it out by the root, and every time he had considered trying, he had remembered the shepherd's last look, the wild human terror in that clouded face.

He had been afraid, above all, of failing.

But he had also begun to understand something that no one had told him, and that no book would have taught him. The light did not push the curse away. When he looked closely, when he breathed slowly and let his attention sink into the warmth, he could feel the way it behaved. It was not a force that drove things out. It was a force that remembered. Wherever it touched, it carried the memory of what a living body ought to be, and it reminded the flesh, gently and patiently, of its own true shape.

The curse, in turn, was a forgetting.

Kaelen reached for the child with that thought in his mind, and let the light flow.

It was not a flood this time. It was not a burst of gold like the one that had torn from him at the wall. It was soft, slow, almost shy, like dawn creeping over a field. It reached the creature through the air between them, and where it touched the grey skin, the black veins shivered.

The child screamed.

It was a terrible sound, raw and animal, and it echoed from the stone vault until Kaelen felt it in his teeth. The creature thrashed against its chains, and for a moment he nearly broke off, nearly drew back. But he made himself stay. He kept the light steady, kept it gentle, and he spoke the whole time in a low and unbroken murmur.

"It is all right. It is all right. I am here. I have you. Remember. Remember who you are."

The grey began to fade.

It happened slowly, from the edges inward. The tips of the fingers first, the long claws shrinking and softening, the nails turning pink. Then the wrists. Then the arms, which shortened and thickened as the bones remembered their proper lengths. The black veins withdrew like tides going out, retreating up the limbs and across the chest, gathering at last in a dark knot beneath the child's breastbone.

That was the heart of it. Kaelen could feel it now, a coil of cold malice wound tight around something small and bright and terrified, the way a snake coils around a bird.

He gathered the light into a single point, and pressed.

The coil resisted. It was stronger than anything he had faced before, clever and patient and slippery, and for a moment it seemed to turn on him. A voice whispered at the edge of his thoughts, soft as silk and as cold as a grave. Why do you fight us, little light? We are only what you are afraid to be.

Kaelen gritted his teeth.

"I know what I am afraid of," he said aloud. "And it is not you."

He pushed.

The coil snapped.

The breath went out of him all at once. The light dimmed to a flicker, and the dark knot dissolved into a thin curl of smoke that rose from the child's chest, twisted once in the lantern light, and was gone.

The creature on the floor went limp. The chains clanked and fell silent. And where a grey and monstrous thing had lain a moment before, there was a small human boy with tangled brown hair and dirty cheeks and a patch of blue cloth on the elbow of his tunic.

He was breathing. He was shivering. And when his eyes opened, they were not yellow.

They were a plain, frightened hazel.

"Mama?" he whispered.

Kaelen was crying. He had not noticed it beginning. His face was wet, and his hands were shaking violently, and there was a sound coming from his throat that he could not name. He crawled forward on his knees, through the dirt and the cold, and gathered the boy into his arms.

"It is all right," he said. "It is all right. You are safe. I have you."

"Where is Mama?" the boy sobbed. "Where is Papa? There was a fog, and I was so cold, and I could not stop, I could not stop, I did not want to, I did not want to..."

"I know. I know." Kaelen held him tighter. "It was not your fault. Nothing that happened was your fault."

At the head of the stairs, the four guards had gathered in a stunned and silent knot. One of them, a heavy man named Garrick, had dropped to his knees and was weeping openly into his hands. Another had turned away and was pressing his forehead against the wall. Brenna Voss stood in the doorway with her spear forgotten at her side, staring down at the boy, and her mouth was moving without sound.

"He did it," she said at last. It was barely a breath. "By all the gods. He did it."

In the cellar, the boy was still weeping. After a time, the sobs softened into hiccups, and the hiccups into long shuddering breaths. He pulled back and looked at Kaelen with enormous wet eyes.

"What is your name?" Kaelen asked gently.

"Wen." The boy sniffed. "Wen Fenwick. I am eight. Are you a healer?"

Kaelen laughed, a small broken sound. "Something like that."

"Will you take me home?"

Kaelen did not answer at once. He thought of the Fenwick farm, empty beneath the iron fog. He thought of the woman who had sold eggs in the lower market, and her husband, and the other small figure who had been running behind them in the dark. He thought of how many such children there must be, scattered across the northern marches, locked inside their own ruined bodies, waiting for someone to reach them.

"I will take you somewhere safe," he said instead. "I promise."

It was Lyra who found him an hour later, sitting on the cellar steps with Wen asleep against his shoulder. She had run down from the wall at the news, and she stood in the doorway for a long time, unable to speak. The lantern light danced across her face, and in it Kaelen saw a mixture of joy and awe and terror, all tangled together like threads in a knot.

"You did it," she whispered. "Kaelen, you actually did it."

"I know."

"You can undo it. You can bring them back."

"Perhaps some of them," said Kaelen. "Perhaps this one. I do not know how many, or how often, or what it will cost." He looked down at the sleeping boy, at the small hand curled trustingly in his sleeve. "But I could not walk away from him, Lyra. I could not."

"I know," she said. "I would never have asked you to."

She came and sat beside him, and for a while neither of them spoke. Overhead, the great bell of the Hall tolled the third hour of the morning, slow and steady.

It was only when she reached to brush the hair from Wen's forehead that Lyra noticed something. She frowned, and caught her brother's wrist, and turned his hand over in the lamplight.

On the pad of his right forefinger, where the light had flowed out of him the longest, there was a tiny black mark. It was no larger than a grain of rice. It was neither a bruise nor a burn.

It looked, very faintly, like a vein, and it was darker than ink.

"Kaelen," she said quietly. "What is this?"

He looked at it for a long time. Then, very gently, he closed his hand.

"I do not know," he said.

It was the first lie he had ever told her. And they both knew it.