Chapter 73: The Warning She Laughed At

Chapter 73: The Warning She Laughed At

Silas brought his light rod into the alcove. The last captive was a man in a leather apron, sitting against the back wall with his head on his chest. Maelin knelt beside him, two fingers under his jaw. She kept them there long enough that Silas knew before she looked up.

"He’s cold," Maelin said quietly.

The gray-haired woman had come back in despite Tavi. She stood in the alcove’s mouth with her broken wrist clutched to her chest. "That’s Corm," she said. "He grinds knives. Did. Next to my stall." Her voice wobbled and steadied. "They threw him in here first. He was bleeding. I held his hand. He stopped talking a while ago. I didn’t know how long."

"I’m sorry," Silas said.

It sounded thin. It was the only thing he had.

Outside, the noise had dropped to scattered hissing and the grind of the turtle’s feet. Silas set down the light rod, unbuckled his weatherproof outer layer, and knelt to wrap it around the dead man’s shoulders and head. Maelin helped him lift Corm forward. Silas kept one hand behind the man’s head while she pulled the coat into place. He didn’t want the woman to see it strike the wall.

Then they took stock, because there was nothing else to do.

Four people alive. Hesta, the stall keeper, with a broken wrist and a scalp cut that had bled all down one side of her face. A carter named Doran with a bite through his forearm, wrapped in his own shirt. A girl of about Silas’s age, an apprentice from one of the food stalls, who had no visible injury and could not stop shaking. And an older man, Bellamy, who kept pressing a hand to his ribs and going gray whenever he tried to stand.

With Perrin, five.

Silas secured Doran’s dressing and set Hesta’s wrist against a splint from his pouch while Maelin held it still. Neither of them was a healer. They did what the first-aid lessons said and didn’t pretend it was more.

"Who carries him?" Leander asked from the alcove mouth, looking at the shape in Silas’s coat.

There was a pause.

"I will," Gareth said.

Silas looked up. Gareth wasn’t looking at anyone. He bent, got his arms under the dead knife-grinder, and lifted him without help, and the claw score on his upper arm opened and bled a little through its dressing. He didn’t seem to notice.

"Your dressing’s coming loose," Silas said.

Gareth glanced at his arm. "It’ll hold."

Silas couldn’t retie it while Gareth was carrying the man. He put the remaining bandages away and picked up his light rod. Whatever had made his cousin volunteer, he wasn’t going to ask about it here.

Isolde Arvane stood at the turn of the west ramp and watched the elf’s turtle crush the last of the hunters at the northern arch, and found that she was grinding her teeth.

She made herself stop. It was undignified.

Below her, the rescue was reorganizing. The Solvain boy had the civilians moving up to the first landing of the ramp, where Korr could guard the approach with her shields. The demonkin girl was helping the shaking apprentice climb. The Rooke cousin carried a corpse up the slope. The other Rooke, the bastard with the clever flying needle, had the front of the litter again and kept glancing toward the elf. He looked considerably less pleased to have her here than Isolde would have expected.

Isolde’s forearms ached. The cuts had closed; that was her body, her blood’s old inheritance, and it never failed her. Replacing the blood itself took longer. She disliked the slight dizziness whenever she turned too quickly, and disliked the possibility of someone noticing even more.

She had killed that crested brute alone. Cleanly. She had been rather pleased with it.

Then the sky had turned red.

Be careful of the Thale child, her great-aunt had said, the night before Isolde left for Crownless. The one with the Concord delegation. Be very careful of her.

Isolde had laughed. Politely, because it was her great-aunt, but she had laughed. An S-Rank elf. Spirit Communion, of all things. Isolde bore Blood Dominion, SS-Rank, and the blood in her veins was older than most elven houses. She had assumed the warning was the usual clan caution, the kind that treated every gifted stranger as a future rival.

Her great-aunt had known. That was what made the memory so unpleasant now. Isolde had smiled through a warning she should have listened to.

She looked down at the turtle and the girl standing on its shell, and at the flat black shadow stretched across the stones beside it, and thought of the arm that had come out of that shadow.

Three, she thought. She showed us three. And she isn’t trying.

Isolde’s hands curled. She wanted another chance to show what Blood Dominion could do, preferably before anyone decided that flinch was all they needed to know about her. The thought of Elyra remembering it made her ears burn.

I can do better than this.

She lifted her chin and went down to take the rear handles of the litter from Alden.

Silas and Isolde set Perrin’s litter on the landing. Dagna, Caelan, and Maelin stayed there with the civilians while the others returned to the floor. Gareth laid the knife-grinder along the back wall and straightened the coat over his face. Before Gareth went down again, Leander stopped him long enough to secure the loose dressing on his arm.

"We clear it or we live here," Leander said, to the six of them who were going on. "Whatever’s in that arch is what’s holding the door shut. Stay behind the elf’s turtle and don’t get clever."

Elyra, on the shell, waved without turning round.

Silas followed the turtle toward the northern arch. With the immediate rescue finished, he couldn’t keep himself from thinking about the game route her disappointed little noise had brought back.

He’d played it late at night, back on Earth. The game had never explained what the elven royals backing Elyra did to offend her. It showed the aftermath: half an empire ruined, many of its royals dead, and Elyra leaving before she finished the destruction. The elves had been pushed toward extinction. Alden had arrived and saved them.

Later in that playthrough, Elyra had killed him too. By then Alden was the SSS-Rank hero who was supposed to save the world. He’d never reached its greater threat. Silas had been left staring at a failed run because one character was powerful enough to ruin everything.

Here, she had lent Silas a book, taught him patiently, and kept Nim’s secret. He wanted those things to mean he could trust her. Her curiosity about his survival made that difficult.

The turtle stepped over a broken channel, bringing the northern arch fully into view. Silas recognized the cracked carvings above it. This part belonged to the dungeon route he had expected to follow.

In the game, the guardian had come out of that arch and healed through everything Alden’s party threw at it. Alden had failed repeatedly while protecting the others, until Second Attempt finally exceeded its apparent limits. That fight had triggered his second awakening, taking his Talent from D-Rank to S-Rank.

Maelin hadn’t survived to benefit. During the guardian’s assault, she had been cut off while pulling captives from the ruins.

Silas glanced back. Maelin was on the landing, well above the floor, with Dagna’s shields between her and everything else. All the captives were out already.

So that part, at least, was different.

The ground shuddered under his boots.

Inside the arch, something enormous shifted its weight and began to come out.