Rose awoke in pain. She was being jostled. Hester. She could smell Hester. Even see her a little bit, through the blood and dry eyes. She wanted to speak, but her throat was dry, and the attempt only brought up some bile. She was only a little bit aware of being moved to a sitting position. She couldn’t really hear much at all. Just some mumblings. It was like trying to listen to someone yelling at you from underwater. Movement. A familiar sort of shudder under her. The chair. It had an occasional bump in it, but it was still the chair, for sure.
Sunlight. She hoped that meant that whoever was pushing her had gotten her outside. Her head felt like an active anvil. Her feet hurt like hell, which was probably the strangest part of the whole thing, because she hadn’t felt her feet in years.
Water was next. Some in her mouth and more wiped across her face on a cloth. She heard the mumble of voices. Two of them. A moment later, that became clear. Emrys was standing before her, looking dirty and bloody. What the hell had happened to him? Hester was wiping Rose off with a wet sleeve of her traveling dress. She couldn’t really make out what they were saying. She gestured to her mouth and Hester smiled and retrieved the water skin. Rose saw her chest. There was still a hole in her where the knife had been. How? It wasn’t bleeding, at least. Maybe it looked worse than it was? Sure, Rose. The hole that killed her looks much worse than it is. Just a scratch. Hester brought the water skin to Rose’s lips, and she drank sloppily. She thought she might have successfully said, “thanks, piglet” but she couldn’t be sure. It sounded mostly okay in her head. Emrys said something and Hester nodded. They began to move, now with Emrys pushing Rose, even though he looked a lot like a guy who needed his own chair.
There’s no way Rose nodded off while being pushed. She was too cool, and the situation was too dire. But she did tactically rest her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, they were in an alcove of some sort, with stone on two sides. Her ears had stopped ringing. There was a small fire going and Rose looked around in a brief panic before she saw Emrys sitting near her and Hester staring into the fire. Rose, for her part, was still in the chair, but she was leaning into a sack that had been bunched up at her shoulder against the rock. She made some noise getting herself mobile, but Hester didn’t seem to notice. As she expected, the chair had a bit of a wobble and a thump on one wheel now. She’d need to get some repairs done.
Emrys got up and dusted himself off a bit as she approached. He nodded and smiled weakly. His smile was crooked because his lips were swollen, and one side of his face sported a fantastic bruise. “We did pretty well, yes?”
“My feet hurt.” She didn’t choose to say it, but it was so incongruous.
“We are fairly certain that they’re dead.” He winced a bit. “Seems like whatever happened on the other side left a mark on them. They look pretty bad. Rose let that sink in a bit. It’s not like she’d really used her feet for years now, but also … they were her feet! And what did dead even mean? Were they going to fall off? Were they going to – no. She stopped herself. Hester first. Emrys seemed to follow her thinking (when had he gotten to know her so well?) and said, “I’ll give you two some space to speak as sister, yes?” Rose nodded gratefully and pushed herself over to the fire.
There she was. That was the girl Rose had left. She looked both younger and older at the same time. “Hey, Piglet.”
“Hey, Rosie.” It was a bare whisper.
“You okay, kid?” Hester shook her head. Of course, she wasn’t okay. She was staring at the fire with a fucking hole in her chest. Rose could see the edge of it down the kid’s dress front. Honestly, it made her skin crawl a bit. “Yeah, I kind of figured not. I mean you just ….. actually, I have no fucking idea what just happened. Any chance you can fill me in?”
Hester shrugged. “I don’t know. I think …. I understood a lot more when we were on the other side. When we were dead. Didn’t you?”
“Nope, I didn’t understand a thing. But you seemed to know who that huge guy was. You called him pain son of …. something or other. Blue something.”
Hester nodded again, and the shadow of an expression crossed her face. Was she amused? “Bala, but I don’t know what that means anymore. But he was, or I think, he IS a god. I think he’s something like death. And at the time, I understood why he didn’t want to be awake and why eating me would wake him up, and I’ve lost it now, but it was like he didn’t want me, but he had to take me? I was trying to get him to wait till I was old to take me -”
Rose broke in. “You did not, you said it wouldn’t be long!”
“Not long for him, Rose. He’s a god. They sort of think about time differently.”
“Oh.” Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of that? “Well, anyway, fuck that guy, he can’t have my sister.”
Hester looked down and back up. “I’m still marked, Rose. Still linked to him.”
Rose felt a surge of indignation. “Fuck that, he can’t have you. I pulled you out once, I’ll pull you out again!”
Hester grinned. “I pulled you out, actually. He almost got you. Seemed like he just took whatever it was you were using to push Mika in.”
This alarmed Rose. Had that thing eaten her talent? She hastily pulled a caltrop out from under the cushion, looked close, and rewrote it into a pewter ring. It worked. Rose sighed and looked back at Hester, who was looking at her curiously. “What was that?”
Rose chuckled. “That was the thing mom chucked me over a cliff for.” The expression on Hester’s face after that was enough to make her almost wish she hadn’t said it. “Hey, no. Don’t be like that. It’s just something I can do. That’s where I’ve been for the last few years. Training it. It’s hard to do, but honestly, I’m pretty good at it.” Then Rose had a second, only slightly less terrible thought. She turned to face the stone she’d been sleeping by and opened her third eye to release a blast.
Nothing. Not even a fizzle. She DID manage to see through the eye, which was something she’d rarely managed due to the blasting, but nothing came out. “Shit. That motherfucker ate my blast!” Hester looked confused. “We can talk about that later, but what I want to know is how are we both alive? We were dead, for sure!”
Hester looked to Emrys, who was now watching the sisters. He stood and brushed himself off. “Things got a bit strange when I entered the place. The dwarf bodies that remained all got up and tried to kill me. And I had only the one spirit!”
Rose broke in. “Wait, you mean those weird statues were dwarves?!”
Emrys nodded. “That’s what happens to the very old ones, I hear. They become like stone. At any rate, we did make our way to the bridge. The body of that man was in very bad shape and your sister was just waking up when I got there.”
“I put you back in,” said Hester. “You were being pulled into that thing’s mouth, and …. I don’t remember how I did it, but at the time I knew how to put you back in. And I did. I got back in mine and just woke up.”
“What, and now you forgot how?”
“Basically, yeah.” Hester was a little bashful about it, it seemed.
“So what was that he said about your bloodline, then? Sounded like he was saying you and that giant gross god were related.”
Hester shrugged, helplessly. “He didn’t tell me much more than he told you. He’d talk about it sometimes as we traveled, but he just said that his god was in my blood.”
Rose pulled a stressed face. “Is it in mine? Was it …” Don’t talk about mom.
Hester, for her part, shook her head. “He seemed to think it was my dad.”
“Shit, we don’t know the first thing about your dad.”
Hester had never liked talking about her father – or rather the lack of a father – and so she changed the subject. “Anyway, we pushed you back here and made camp. We’re not too far from Second Mother, the village where you found us.”
“Hey, kid. Speaking of mothers ….” Rose didn’t want to have this conversation, and as it turns out, she didn’t get to.
Hester curled in on herself a bit, reminding Rose of how young she really was. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
Rose nodded. “Sure thing, piglet. Take your time.” And then because she needed something to say, she said, “Emrys, I’m sorry about the library stuff. I know your folks sent you here to get secret dwarf magic or whatever. But I appreciate you saving my ass.”
Emrys smiled broadly. “I would not say I missed out. After your sister and I removed you from the catacombs, I was able to re-enter and claim a rather large sack of scrolls.”
“Hey, wait, you went back in!?”
Emrys raised his hands in resistance. “After you were safe! Besides, I only went back in when your sister went to get the knife.”
Rose turned to look at Hester, who was not studiously looking away.
“You went back for the KNIFE?!”
“Okay, about that -”
“The knife that killed you?!”
“It’s silver! And also, it killed me, so…” Hester seemed amused.
Rose made a sound that was something like shock and frustration combined with constipation. Hester said, “Before you get too upset, I want to talk to you about the woman you were traveling with.”
Rose felt her stomach knot. That was the thing SHE didn’t want to talk about. “Aw, Hes, I wish you’d gotten to meet her. She was amazing. She fell so that we could get away after that shit ran off with you -” wait a minute. “And you never saw her. Emrys, have you been telling her all my good stories?”
Emrys shrugged and Hester looked serious. “Rose, we stopped to camp here because she was here.”
Rose looked around. “Her body?” She looked around for a fresh grave marker or a mound of dirt.
“No. Not her body. Her. She died at the Second Mother’s gate and then went after you. When we got here, she was fighting off … I don’t know. There were like these ten or twelve spirit birds or something?”
Rose blinked. What the fuck? “Are you saying you saw her ghost or something?”
“Not or something. Her ghost. She was in a hell of a state.”
Rose looked at Emrys. “Hey, what? I thought you said that ghosts out here in the wilds don’t have any protection.”
Emrys spread his hands out to the side. “She didn’t. But Decima is no normal ghost. Your sister tells me that she was fighting just as well on the other side. I am forced to believe her because I saw nothing, but it sounds like her. And because she gave me a very accurate description of a woman she’d never seen before.”
Rose looked back to Hester, feeling …. what? Dread? Hope? The fear that comes when your heart is telling your mind to slow down? “Did they get her?”
Now Hester grinned. “Would have done, yeah, but I bound her to this!” She produced the knife like it was a birthday gift. “I told you, it’s silver! You can use that stuff to protect the dead!”
Rose couldn’t suss that out. “Wait, how the hells did you know how to do that?”
Hester just shook her head helplessly. “How did you know how to shoot light out your eyes? I just felt it.” She slowly, almost reverentially, handed Rose the knife.
Rose took it and looked around. Nothing had changed. She didn’t feel anything. Just the knife. “Wait, so is she IN the knife?”
“No, it just keeps her safe. She can’t go far from it. She’s actually standing there.” Hester indicated Rose’s right. Rose saw nothing.
“Where?”
“Right beside you,” Hester said.
Rose pointed at around the height of Decima’s head. “Here?” Hester nodded. Rose took a deep calming breath and said, “WE’RE EVEN NOW!”
Hester giggled. “She says she agrees.”
“Gods damned right she agrees,” muttered Rose. She wasn’t sure how to take that. Her sister, her friend, ghosts, gods, her mother (don’t think about that yet). It was all too much. She looked at the two people in front of her and shifted so that she could see wherever Decima must have been. “Okay, so now what?”
Hester shrugged. Emrys, however, spoke up. “Well, it seems to me that I will need to have these scrolls evaluated. Your sister needs to learn more about her bloodline. And you are now in need of a way to restore a person to alive when you have their mind in a knife. So, I suggest we journey to Penmark Academy and seek the sages there.”
Rose didn’t cry, of course. She was too tough for that. The tears that traced their way down her cheeks were strictly for cleaning off her eyes. But she nodded. “Just one pit stop first. I’m going to need my ring back. The rest of the Talents are going to love this shit.”
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