Black as diamond, p.17
Black as Diamond, page 17
But still, he had to go on. Do what he could, what little he could, with the power he had.
Wren pulled a pinch of pungent herbs from his satchel and nicked the meat of his palm with his fangs. He drew a bloody circle of sacred geometry around the herbs, an additive to increase the spell’s potency. Placing two fingers in the circle, he charged the spell. Khetry snaked his wrist in a gentle touch—and then he cast it off.
Both unconscious figures bolted awake with twin cries of alarm. Asaru’s wings snapped straight with a crack of bone as Palenisa spasmed, gasps gurgling in her throat. Their panting melted into grumbles of pain as they curled away from his touch. Wren didn’t let either go far, pushing them down harsher than he would have liked. Not that he could be blamed. They were a healer’s worst nightmare—prone to danger, both to others and themselves. Oh, but the guild—now the guild would’ve liked them.
With the last of his blood, Wren painted a spell circle on Palenisa’s forehead and cast it. A warming spell. Weak, but it would enliven her further since sunlight Aspects didn’t do too well without, well, sunlight.
His brows rose as Rishé brushed a cloth across the cuts on Palenisa’s cheek, and they rose exponentially higher at the violet that darkened her ebony face and the bob of her throat. Her hands clenched, unclenched, clenched in her lap. Huh.
He shook his head and sighed. “What happened here?”
Wincing, Asaru rolled a shoulder and tucked his wings away. Wren followed the arch of his spine, then sharply averted his gaze. His brand prickled.
“Tried to kill our captor,” Palenisa said. She winced as Rishé dabbed a balm along the underside of her jaw with small, slender fingers. “They got the better of us.”
“One person?” Rishé said, receiving a scowl for her curiosity. Unfazed, she continued working on Palenisa’s wounds with deft hands for someone more suited to smithing than healing. Then again, Wren reminded himself, she’d always picked up skills quickly.
“They were lulaik.” Palenisa crossed her arms, looking more disappointed in herself than truly angry. “At least one of you knows how to protect yourself.”
“We’re not all Ignante, oh-so-glorious war lulaik with her purple mane and golden tears,” Wren replied thinly, shying away from her piercing glance. “Some of us are cowards.”
He glanced up at Asaru, received a nod, and began peeling away his blood-crusted wraps. Gold and gray and black. He stanched the wound, placed a poultice over bare brown skin, and lost himself in the repetition of winding the bandages back around.
“I am sure,” Asaru deadpanned, never breaking his gaze, “you can imagine how I feel about another surprise disruption to my duty.”
Irritation simmered to the surface. “And how is fighting to your own detriment supposed to help Alvarys?” Wren snapped. “Caring for your brother shouldn’t mean not caring for yourself.”
At Asaru’s cry, his mind returned to his task. He met Asaru’s wide eyes, thin rings of hazel around constricted slit pupils.
Too tight—he’d made the bandages too tight in his irritation. And now Asaru was staring at him like that. Like he’d done something unforgivable. In that moment his self-hatred knew no end.
A derisive snort cut through his spiral.
“Rich. Coming from you,” Rishé muttered bitterly.
Their eyes met, and she looked away quickly as if sensing the muted hurt that burned on the back of his tongue. Wren’s stomach roiled as a pained look drew across his face.
His upset was unfounded, so he dug his nails into the inside of his wrist. They were too black to leave marks, but he didn’t care as long as it hurt. After all—he deserved this. Thorns laced his arm.
Why did he always do wrong? Always tearing messes into the cloth of reality. If he were a Weaver—maybe then he could mend it. He was pathetic just for the mere thought.
“Sorry.”
He didn’t know whom the apology was for.
Blinking glassy eyes, Wren folded the loose edge of the bandages away—careful, gentle—and, once everyone was more or less in one piece, trailed after the others as they searched for a way out of the tunnels.
At the top of the stairs where he’d glimpsed the fleeing illusion was a white arch. It would have been easy for him to unlock, but Palenisa impatiently made them an exit. A gaping hole through which the sun shone in shallow streams of light.
When they emerged, they were no longer in Meliste. They were much farther south—so far south Wren could hear the sea as they walked. Waves whispered nearby. He smelled it, tasted it, wanted to see it. Instead, he was met by trees and darkness and a looming tangle of wood that made him feel like a young child again.
The Lizardwood.
Mist clung to the shadows at the bases of massive trunks in the immense primeval jungle. The source of many Norvatti nightmares, the Lizardwood was said to have spilled from the darkest whims of Furtumbér, Lord of All Shadows. The Rosatay story he knew differed from that of the Vana and Eihron. At the end of the day, they were only stories. Seeing was another matter. Walking through Furtumbér’s gloom, created in the shadow of Ela Prinâza’s thousand thousand suns—that, too, was very different.
They emerged from the tree line, and the Lethean Sea opened up before them. Drowned roots dipped into the water, salt crawling up the sides in a delicate frosting of white. Along the pebbled shore, salamander seals splashed in the water. Wren watched them paw at each other, their high-pitched barks breaking through the canopy. Animals were simpler creatures than people. Would that he could be one, as comfortable as Dakazna back in his mother’s house.
“We should . . .” He started, but he wrapped his arms around himself and looked away when the others turned toward him. Embarrassment blanketed him. “Half of us are, um, injured. We should stop for a while. Just for a few hours, I mean.”
“We cannot,” Asaru said sharply. And that was that.
Except—“Actually, I agree with Wren.”
Surprised, he watched Palenisa drag a hand down her face, her eyes pressed shut. She nodded as if coming to an agreement with herself, then fluttered them open. “I’m tired,” she continued. “That fight took more out of me than I wanted. And I know for a fact it took a lot more out of you. Don’t bullshit me.”
“It should be fine for a night,” Rishé suggested, dropping her hands to speak. The shore must have reminded her of her clan, how they used to travel by the sea. A sentimental pang coursed through Wren. “I’ve been here before.”
Silence followed. It was as much of an agreement as they were going to get from Asaru.
A sensation of fingers pressed his brand in a quick pulse. It felt as though someone had reached into his heart and yanked. Wren drew aimless patterns along his arms as they walked along the surf.
“Hey.”
“Hi,” he whispered back, meeting the cold blue flash of Palenisa’s eye. He found there the same tiredness he so often saw in his own reflection. A thoughtful rumble escaped her throat.
“The lulaik.”
He hummed for her to continue.
“They had an adderowl skull. Purple hair. Their cape had a pattern, like this”—she drew an eye in the air vaguely resembling the tattoo on Asaru’s wrist. “Wondering if you recall someone like that.”
“No,” he replied dryly. “Lulaik don’t all know each other. Most of us aren’t even Norvatti. Most of us don’t even live in Estyria. For obvious reasons.”
Wren would never understand that misconception. Why stay and subject oneself to rogue Aspects when prospects were better elsewhere? While he stayed for his mother, he often wondered why she did if not out of love for the man others called his father. Against his will, misplaced affection lingered, something he saw as a manifestation of his defective mind.
Wren expected a frown. He was surprised by her half-formed huff. Even more so by the spark of happiness that flickered to life inside him.
Chuckling, Palenisa tilted her head to the sky.
“All right, you’re not all the same. Honestly, I don’t know much about lulaik aside from how your spells smell.” The corner of her mouth quirked up. “Tell me about your tribe, then.”
He blinked. Once, twice. He was very much awake. “Um. Why?”
She waved away the question. “All the better to protect you with, of course.”
His chest still ached, but a shy smile slid onto his face. “Of course.”
Somewhere in the distance, thrushes sang in the dusk. And along the surf, Wren shaped the story of his childhood and his clan, a place where the only merit to belonging was simply birth, as the sun sank, trailing out splendid rays of golden light.
Asaru
The water bore him like he often imagined a cloud would. Floating aimlessly, Asaru watched the Sky Court and wished he were there among the innumerable tiny stars. He shut his eyes a moment and tried to make it feel like flying. Tried to imagine it wasn’t water licking at his ears, but the wind.
The tide pawed at him gently as he drifted, spinning in a sea that cared as little for him as the world seemed to. Eyes fluttering open, he gulped deep lungfuls of air. Asaru didn’t free his ribs from the ayashif as often as he should have. It was as much binding as it was armor. But as someone had recently told him, he didn’t care much for himself.
It was annoying because it wasn’t entirely false.
How could he care for himself, though, when he’d been on this continent almost a moon’s turn and was still no closer to finding his brother? Or the Chronicler. Or any semblance of an answer for what was happening to him.
All he had to show for himself so far was a mind reeling from memories unearthed. His head throbbed from the unwanted realization that he was just a tool. A weapon. An object of possession. Asaru thought again about how Wren was right—and hated it. Hated being seen both as he was and as he used to be. Though he believed they were one and the same since no one ever truly changed, they just grew around their old self, building layers like the elderly tree.
Bitter thoughts churned as he turned a cheek into the water and stared at the horizon through lidded eyes. The moon lit the night as silver starblooms unfurled to float by his face. He blew the silken flowers across the water’s surface in mild interest. They bore a slight resemblance to crystal lotuses. Alvarys loved crystal lotuses.
Alvarys hadn’t been in his dreams for a while. He still heard his mother, though, in Tenat’s persistent chanting, her voice distorted in his slumbering mind to a low drone.
He clenched his fists. The memory of gray fetters throbbed across every limb.
Hot anger flared behind Asaru’s eyes at the thought of their captor. It burned the longer he held the image of their mask—glowing eyes, cracked bone, voice layered over itself—in his head. He tipped back into the sea and screamed in a furious fit of bubbles.
The light-footed form of the lulaik dodged like they’d done it many times before. Behind his lids their mask flashed as he remembered the way they drove forward with a single-minded intensity. And at the behest of the Chronicler. He still found it hard to believe—he didn’t want to believe that truth.
His hands scrambled at his shoulders, digging a claw into the skin to calm himself as he rose from the sea. His talons brushed the sandy sea floor as he found his feet.
His breathing ragged and his eyes hot with tears, Asaru stared at his rippling reflection. It shuddered, shook, as unsteady as he felt. Everything was falling to pieces—the only semblance of control he had was over his appearance. His decisions too, he hoped, but he knew how easily those could be ripped from him.
In the water was a man he barely recognized.
He was naked from the waist up, and fat rivulets of water rolled down the curves of his breasts and bandaged abdomen. Three thin, pale scars dashed his face, and the blackness that subsumed his sclera was its own nightmare. Most striking of all was the red seeping into his hair, so bright it hurt to look at. An eyesore. He hadn’t thought it would get this bad when he first noticed the auburn haunting the tip of his braid.
As he grabbed the dripping locks in a fist, Asaru wondered if it was the curse. Or some quirk of his unclear heredity reaching through the essence of his very bones to soak him in the blood he spilled. A mark for all to bear witness.
It had to be the curse. There was no doubt.
He pressed three fingers of his other hand together and swept them sharply aside. Crimson threads warped around his wrist to form an energy blade. It warmed his skin, the threads of life. He slashed, brought the remaining hair up, and slashed again until it was slightly longer in the back.
Then he dipped back into the sea. And when he emerged, he blinked at himself.
Though the slightest red remained at the fringes, his hair was mostly brown. Dark as the dirt of Deltia’s forest, close in shade to his mother’s and brother’s, with their rich curls that turned gold when the sun banded over them.
The impulse had taken him like a fever, but not even the smallest part of him regretted it, for the choice had been his.
As Asaru washed stray hairs from his nape, he noted the progression of the curse. Raised scars surrounding the triangular black diamond that marred his halo gripped the sides of his neck like a vise. Black speckled his upper arms like a mineral glove he could never remove. They would have loved him at the exclusive theaters in Aruu—had the marks not been a sign of his slow demise.
He dragged a hand through the water, watching the way the droplets rolled off his skin, the marks having made it slightly stiff, as if he were turning into rock. It was a reminder of the finite dripping of the clock that hung above him. Death. Sure as the world turned, each day that passed he felt himself grow weaker from the curse. And the progression quickened when he cast a spell. He’d seen his future in Khensu. Shuddering at the memory of his mercy, Asaru threaded his fingers through his newly shorn hair. He inhaled deeply, ignoring the strong scent of the curse. The strong scent of himself.
A scaled body brushed his ankle. He peered at dappled clayfish swimming around his feet, as they paused for a moment in base animal curiosity before darting off.
The fish were much easier to kill than catch. But Rishé had done both easily, wading into the shallows to wait patiently before snatching them up—three by the tail in a single swipe. She’d done this many times before, she’d said, as she chopped at the base of their tiny heads. It reminded Asaru of how ivory gulls dealt with crabs, pecking and pecking at the flesh between their shell and internal softness. And her triumphant smile as she’d held them up—it had reminded him of his brother.
Aedyton hadn’t always been kind to him, but he missed it and the people that cared for him there. Home.
“Asaru!”
He turned to find Palenisa waving him over. She sat around a fire with the others. By her side, Wren turned a makeshift spit hung with several fish salted by the sea.
Asaru sighed and went ashore. He shook his hair, and the heavy tuft of his tail, flinging water every which way. He dressed quickly—ayashif, underclothes, stirrups wrapped up his legs, and bandages over his arms. As he slid on his borrowed tunic and cinched the metal of his belt, the others noticed his hair. They didn’t hesitate to comment. Not that he’d asked.
“Not too clever,” Rishé said, her voice garbled between bites of fish. “A haircut is the first thing a bounty hunter will note.”
Plucking a wet strand from his cheek, Asaru pursed his lips. He really hadn’t asked.
Palenisa shrugged lazily and wiped salt from her fingers. “The red’ll come back anyway. It gave you some color. Like you weren’t actively dying.”
“I did not do it for you,” he grunted, wandering over to perch birdlike on a piece of driftwood. The night wind blew embers into the air, warmth kissing his cheeks.
“It, um, I think it looks nice.”
Asaru looked at Wren, who ducked his head. Perhaps the comments weren’t all bad. A feathery touch brushed along his shoulder blade, and he held back from reacting to the bond.
Focus.
“My hair is the least of our problems.” He speared the last fish with a claw and watched the nearby tall grass sway as he ate. He chewed and swallowed before continuing. “We cannot keep sporadically camping at the edge of woods and hope the Black Order does not stumble upon us. These stops waste time that could be spent finding the Chronicler.”
Rishé stared into the fire with a ponderous look. “Well, I’m not on the run,” she said.
“I still don’t know what you think you’re doing, but this isn’t a damn vacation.” Palenisa rolled her eyes. “Lives are on the fucking line.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Rishé shot back. Her hands flashed quickly through some signs before she remembered to speak aloud: “You think I’m not aware what came with the decision I made to help you?”
Asaru brought his knees to his chin, eyes bouncing between the two women as they glared across the licking orange flames.
“And we’re very thankful,” Wren interjected, raising a placating hand. It hovered above Rishé’s shoulder, pulling away quickly when she turned to him with a flat expression. But there was something raw in it. A nerve uncovered in the tunnels that Asaru knew was no business of his. Though a small—a very small—part of him wondered about the distance there. The unspoken shared past implied by how they wove around each other. He thought, for a moment, what he might do in their position. Once he found Alvarys, he promised himself, he would never again let such a distance part them.
