Meek

Chapter 46: The Worm of Guilt

Eli tipped his straw hat back on his head. "The Bloodwitch? Never heard of her."

"She's the kind of thing that doesn't appear in archives--and that spymasters only speak of in whispers."

"So whisper," he told her.

"There are five paths for human mages, right? Arrow, Shield, Palm, Rose, Stillness. Nonhumans have their own magics. Trolls, wyvlings, skarabi, the Mother Glade, the Eld. Celestials. But humans, we only have the paths--and potions, I guess. Except also there's, well, you."

"Yeah."

"Because magic isn't tidy. Magic is fear and hope and lust and loathing and love. It isn't arithmetic, it's poetry. I guess that's why a mage sometimes wanders off the Paths."

Eli eyed her dubiously. "That really isn't in the archives."

"In the Glade, we don't learn about the Hyssop Throne or the monarch, the capital, all that stuff you take for granted. We're surrounded by magic, so that's what we learn. 'Lost mages' are those who stumble into the unsteady places between paths. Which breaks them. They don't survive long. The mage guilds or, or I guess the Shepherds, usually just chase them from human habitation and leave them to die."

"Is that what I am? A lost mage?"

"No, they're mages first. They master a path. They don't fall arse-backward into a hedge like you did. You're less of a lost mage and more of a ... stillborn one."

"Well, that's a pleasant image."

"So the Bloodwitch ... " Lara tucked a braid behind her ear. "This woman Shimyn started calling herself the Bloodwitch. She attracted a following in some abandoned province."

"Ehrat," he said.

"Yeah. She's sort of a bandit chief, I guess. With a lost mage's magic. Except she's more than that. Chivat Lo heard murmurings about her for years, longer than any lost mage survives. And she's only getting stronger. I overheard him saying that she has terrible powers. He thinks--he thought she might one day become a threat to the throne."

"Sounds farfetched. He told the marquis?"

"Probably. Yes. Almost certainly, but the marquis wouldn't have done anything. Lost mages don't live long enough to become serious threats. Why prepare for a danger that'll keel over before it reaches you?"

"And you think she's a ..." He hesitated over the name. "A killweed?"

She nodded gravely. "Chivat Lo had a network of informants. Some were more reliable than others, but he wasn't a credulous man. And he believed one particular report..."

"Which said what?" he prompted, when she trailed off.

"That the Bloodwitch has the ability to raise corpses into--"

"Raise corpses?" Eli snorted in disbelief. "Like, from the grave? From the dead?"

"Like Mist-Beneath did with you."

"I wasn't dead."

"Pretty close. And the Bloodwitch is stronger than some troll shaman in a cave. The Celestials themselves awakened her powers."

"Okay, yeah. True. So she raises corpses?"

"That's what the informant said. Except he said she doesn't raise them into mindless, shuffling carcasses."

"So, uh ... into what?"

"Into angelbrood. And if you don't stop her, nobody will."

Eli strapped the saddlebags to Fern. He scratched the hard, furry span between her eyes as Lara tidied the campsite. When she finished, only the faintest traces of their presence remained--and those would vanish after a few days' wind and drizzle.

He followed Lara through the forest. Listening to the birds and the trees, letting his mind play over everything she'd said. Lady Brazinka and the Bloodwitch. Killweeds and lost mages, informants and betrayals ... and the driving purpose of his new life.

After an hour, he broke the silence: "You want to hear a lesson that you didn't learn in the Glade?"

"Yes, please," she said. Milder than usual, giving him space to think.

"When we lost the war against the Celestials, we saw every hope dashed. Every prayer turned bitter in our mouths. And as the Celestial army closed in around the final pocket of resistance, the Eld retreated to the oldest city of the valley. Ehrat Break."

"Oh. Ehrat like 'Shimyn of Ehrat.'"

"Yeah. The Eld gathered in the city's highest spire, Heaven's Reach. And there, with help of the Chained Angel, and human mages, and Dreamers know what else, they raised the Great Ward."

He told her how they'd saved the valley. How they'd saved the human race--or at least the bloodied remains of the human race--and a half-dozen other races, too. Yet some point after that bittersweet victory, Ehrat Break started ... melting.

The city stones sloughed from the steeples and domes.

Rivers of flesh-warm lava poured though the streets.

The windows and doorways sagged shut.

The walls wept tears of stone.

The city melted like ice on a summer day, until nothing rose higher than the treetops. Nothing but the great spire, Heaven's Reach.

The survivors abandoned Ehrat Break for encampments surrounding the once-great city. Then the concomitances started, the Three Moons, and nowhere suffered more heavily, more violently, than the the encampments. The residents, the children and grandchildren of the first survivors, fled from what they called 'the Weep.' After a few generations, even the most stubborn of them left the western half of Ehrat province for greener pastures.

"Ehrat is the first province that split," he told Lara. "The first one we abandoned, but not the last. There are places where the wards are weak. Where angelbrood spawn once or twice a year. One or twice a month, in some spots. "

She shuddered. "Sounds horrible."

"Yeah. Unfit for habitation. Nothing to do except leave."

"'The Weep' sounds exactly like where a killweed named the Bloodwitch would call home."

"You really didn't learn about Ehrat in the Glade?"

"We never cared much about the outside world." She thumped Fern's side thoughtfully. "How many provinces were there, back in the beginning?"

"Seven, when the war ended. Though by that time the borders were pretty blurry."

"And there are seventeen now?"

"Officially."

She wrinkled her nose. "So the first seven split like flatworms, and each one grew a new head?"

"What are flatworms?"

"Worms that, when you split them, both halves become a new flatworm."

"The Glade is weird," he said. "But yeah, that's what happened, over a few centuries after the warding. If two cities in the same province each claimed primacy, or a horse clan declared independence, or--well, the Glade is officially a province now, but used to be subordinate to Ri.

"The Glade was never subordinate to Ri."

"Uh-huh," he said. "So to avoid wars, when disagreements like that arose, the monarchs usually just granted both sides the same status."

"And how many provinces are there unofficially?"

He shrugged. "Including abandoned ones? Places like the Weep and Cliffdown and the Peatvald? I'm not sure if you'd count each as one province or two or five. Some are huge. But the unofficial estimate is between thirty and fifty."

"Well, that's ... boring," she said.

Eli laughed, and felt a flash of memory that he couldn't place. "If it's so boring, why did you ask?"

"To keep myself from pestering you about the Bloodwitch."

"It didn't work. You're pestering me."

"Are we going to Ehrat or not?"

"The fact that the city melted and everyone fled and it's now called 'the Weep' doesn't bother you?"

"I didn't expect that we'd fight the killweeds in candy shops and flower gardens."

"Yeah," he said.

"So are we going to Ehrat or not?"

He ducked beneath a branch, and didn't answer.

"We'll just look around," she told him. "We'll keep our heads down. We'll scout. Quietly."

"As opposed to scouting loudly."

"We won't do anything, not at first. We'll investigate. See what we think."

"Yes," he said. "We're going,"

She flashed a smile that made a worm of guilt wriggle in his heart. Because he wasn't going to the Weep to look for the Bloodwitch. To scout her camp, to assess her capacities, to judge the damage she'd done. To kill her.

No.

He was going to look for Lady Brazika Savradar, the Steward of the Office of the Stipend Geld. She'd started this. She'd caused this, as much as anyone else. If she hadn't sent that letter, he'd still be living his quiet life in the archives.

And she was a noblewoman, an official, so she should've guessed how the marquis would respond to those documents. Ancient treaties, forgotten now, after the monarchy had weakened, after the capital had faded into little more than the first province among many. She should've known.

Maybe she had known, and just hadn't cared.

So yeah, the Bloodwitch sounded nasty. She sounded nightmarish. And Lara wasn't wrong: he needed a purpose, he needed a goal, he needed to come to terms with this new self.

But first he needed revenge.

"Yeah," he continued. "Let's go find her."