The sundered seal

Chapter Ten: The Cost: The Curse Touches His Skin

Wen Fenwick was the first, but he was not the last.

Word of what Kaelen had done spread through Dawnhollow before the sun was fully up. It travelled from the guards at the cellar door to the watchmen on the wall, from the watchmen to the refugees sleeping in the square, and from the refugees to every corner of the settlement, growing and glittering as it went. By noon, people were saying that the Ascendant could raise the dead. By evening, they were saying that he could not be harmed. By the following morning, a crowd had gathered at the doors of the Hall of Rank, and it was growing larger by the hour.

Kaelen had not asked for any of it.

He had slept four hours, sprawled on a cot in the healers' room with his boots still on. When he woke, there was a queue at the cellar stairs. Brenna Voss's patrols had caught three more creatures overnight, using the same pit traps and iron chains, and the guards, trembling and hopeful, had brought them down one by one to wait in the dark.

"I cannot do them all at once," Kaelen told her as he descended the steps, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "I do not know how many I can manage in a day. I do not know if I can manage more than one."

"Then do one," said Brenna. Her tone was blunt, but her eyes were not. "Do one, and tomorrow do another. I have watched people die for three days, Kaelen. You cannot imagine what it means to watch someone live."

So he did one.

The second was a woman, tall and broad-shouldered, whose grey flesh still wore the shreds of a blacksmith's apron. The third was a man of perhaps sixty, thin as a rail, who wept so bitterly when he was freed that Kaelen had to sit with him for an hour. The fourth was a young girl, no older than fifteen, who opened her hazel eyes and screamed for her brother and would not stop until Lyra came down and held her.

Each time, it was a little easier. And each time, it cost a little more.

He told no one about the mark. He wrapped his right forefinger in a strip of linen the morning after Wen, claiming a splinter, and kept his hand in his pocket whenever the others were near. It was not the lie that troubled him most, though that sat in his chest like a swallowed stone. It was how the mark behaved.

On the first day, it was a grain of rice. By the evening of the third, it was the length of his fingernail, a thin black line running from the tip of the finger towards the knuckle. By the fifth, it had reached the base of his thumb, and branched.

And it whispered.

It was never loud. It did not shout, or rage, or beg. It spoke in the quiet moments, when he was drifting towards sleep or washing his hands in the basin, in a voice so soft and reasonable that he sometimes forgot it was not his own. You are tired, it murmured. You are so tired. Why do you carry all of this alone? You have done enough. Let someone else carry it. Let us carry it.

On the fifth night, he woke before dawn with his teeth clenched and his nails digging into his palms, and the voice was saying, very clearly, They would be better off without the old man.

Kaelen lay in the dark with his heart pounding for a long time after that.

It was Ysolde Marne who finally noticed.

She was a quiet woman, grey-haired and plain, with the steady, weathered hands of someone who had spent her whole life in the company of the sick. She had taken the healers' room in the Hall as her own, setting up cots and herb pots and bundles of clean linen with a calm efficiency that made even Brenna Voss defer to her. On the morning of the sixth day, as Kaelen reached across a basin to rinse the dirt from his fingers, she caught his wrist so quickly that he nearly dropped it.

"That is not a splinter," she said.

He tried to pull away. She did not let go.

"Show me."

"It is nothing."

"Kaelen." Her voice was very gentle. "I have been a healer for twenty-six years. I have seen that mark on a hundred people in the last week. Show me."

For a long moment, he did not move. Then, slowly, he unwrapped the linen.

The black line had climbed his forefinger to the second knuckle. Beneath it, spreading faintly across the back of his hand, a web of thin dark threads had begun to branch, so fine that they might have been drawn with a single hair. The skin around them was cold. When Ysolde pressed her thumb against it, Kaelen flinched, and she saw his eyes go distant for an instant, as though he were listening to a voice she could not hear.

She let out a long, slow breath. "How long?"

"Since Wen."

"Six days." She closed her eyes. "Gods, boy. Why did you not tell us?"

"Because you would have stopped me."

"Yes," said Ysolde. "We would have."

"And then there would be no one to do it." Kaelen's voice was low and unsteady. "I have freed seven people, Ysolde. Seven. Do you know what that means? Seven people who would have been dead by now, or worse. If I stop, they are the last. If I continue, there may be twenty. A hundred. And I do not know how to do one without the other."

She was silent for a time. Outside the window, the grey morning light was spilling across the rooftops, and the distant murmur of the waiting crowd rose and fell like surf.

"Does it hurt?" she asked at last.

"Not the way you mean."

"Does it speak to you?"

He flinched, and that was answer enough.

Ysolde set down her basin and sat on the edge of the cot, folding her hands in her lap. She looked, suddenly, very tired and very old.

"I have been thinking about your gift," she said slowly. "I cannot explain it, but I have watched it, and I have a notion. When you heal a wound, you are giving something of yourself to the one who is hurt. A little warmth, a little life. That is what healing is. But when you pull the curse out of someone, there is nowhere for the curse to go. It cannot simply vanish. It must be carried. And you, my dear, are carrying it."

"A little at a time," said Kaelen.

"A little at a time. But a river is made of drops." She lifted her eyes to his. "How many more before it reaches your heart?"

He did not answer. He did not need to.

The call came from upstairs a little before noon.

It was a guard, breathless and wide-eyed, thundering down the stair to find them. Dorran had collapsed. He had been sitting at the council table, reading a dispatch, when his hand had begun to shake, and then his whole arm, and then he had slid out of his chair and onto the floor.

Kaelen was running before the man finished speaking.

He found his father lying on the stone with his head in Lyra's lap. The old man's face was the colour of tallow. His left arm, bared to the shoulder, was black from fingertip to collarbone, the veins standing out like cords of tar, and the skin of his neck had begun to grey. His eyes were open, but they were clouded, and when he saw Kaelen, they flickered yellow.

"Kae," whispered Lyra. Her voice was breaking. "He keeps saying your name. He keeps saying run."

Kaelen dropped to his knees.

He knew, in that moment, exactly what he was about to do. He knew it the way one knows the edge of a cliff in the dark. He had been holding the curse back for six days with fragments and half measures, a little here, a little there. It had never been enough. If he was going to save his father, it would not be by holding. It would be by taking.

"Lyra," he said quietly. "I need you to hold his shoulders. And I need you to listen to me. No matter what happens, no matter what you see, do not let go."

"What are you going to do?"

"What I should have done days ago."

He pressed both hands against his father's chest, and called the light.

It was not gentle this time. It was not slow. It tore out of him in a blaze that lit the whole council chamber, white-gold and terrible, and Dorran arched off the floor with a cry that shook the rafters. The black veins writhed. The grey flesh bubbled and steamed. Lyra held on with both arms around her father's shoulders, tears streaming down her face, and Kaelen felt the darkness in Dorran's body rear up and meet him like a wall.

It was vast. It was older than the one in the child, and it had nested deep, wrapped around the heart and the lungs and the roots of the spine. It fought. It clawed. It whispered a thousand things in his head, a chorus of voices that swelled and shrieked and pleaded, and underneath them all, one steady and silken tone, patient as the sea.

Take it, said the voice. Take it, and be as strong as he was. Take it, and you will never be afraid again.

"No," said Kaelen through his teeth.

Take it.

"I will take it," he gasped. "But I will not keep it."

He closed his hands, and pulled.

The darkness tore loose from Dorran like a rotten root from soil. It poured up his arms and into Kaelen's palms in a rush of black smoke, and Kaelen screamed, a raw, ragged sound that made the guards in the doorway cover their ears. He felt it settle in his bones. He felt it slide up his wrists and into his elbows, cold as winter water, hungry and eager and alive. He felt it find the small black mark on his finger, and join it, and grow.

Then it was done.

Dorran lay panting on the floor, pale and drenched in sweat, but his skin was clear. The veins were red again. The yellow had drained from his eyes, and they were the same weary, gentle brown that Kaelen had known his whole life.

"Kaelen?" he whispered. "Son?"

"I am here, Father."

"You are... bleeding."

Kaelen looked down.

Both his forearms were black to the elbow. The threads had spread far past his hands, branching up his arms in thick, spiralling lines, and where the dark touched his skin, it shimmered faintly, like oil on water. He tried to flex his fingers. They obeyed, but slowly, as though through deep mud.

"It is only a little," he said.

"Kaelen," Lyra said. Her voice shook. She had gone white as paper. "Kaelen, your eyes."

He lifted a hand to his face and found nothing wrong. But when he turned his head towards the window, he saw, in the pane of dark glass beside it, a faint and unfamiliar reflection.

His grey eyes had a ring around them. A thin, perfect ring of yellow.

It faded as he watched. But it did not vanish entirely.

Nobody in the chamber said a word.

Far to the north, under a cold stone roof, a man in grey stirred in his sleep, and smiled, and murmured a single word to the dark.

"Ah. There he is."