Ah, yes. He had screamed for his son that day.
What day?
It didn’t matter.
Weight bore down the side of the cot as Shiny sat beside me. “I know this emptiness,” he said. “When I understood what I had done…”
The room had grown cool with the sunset. I thought of blankets, though I stopped short of wishing for one.
A hand touched my face. It was warm and smelled of skin, old blood, and distant sunlight.
“I fought, when he came for me,” he said. “It is my nature. But I would have let him win. I wanted him to win. When he failed, I was angry. I… hurt him.” The hand trembled, once. “Yet it was my own weakness that I truly despised.”
It didn’t matter.
The hand shifted, covering my mouth. I was breathing through my nose, anyway; it was no hardship.
“I’m going to kill you, Oree,” he said.
I should have felt fear, but there was nothing.
“No demon can be permitted to live. But beyond that…” His thumb stroked my cheek once. It was oddly soothing. “To kill what you love… I know this pain. You have been clever. Brave. Worthy, for a mortal.”
Deep in the murk of my heart, something stirred.
His hand slid up, covering my nose. “I would not have you suffer.”
I did not care about his words, but breathing mattered. I turned my head to one side, or tried to. His hand tightened steadily, almost gently, holding my face still.
I tried to open my mouth. Had to think of the word. “Shiny.” But it was muffled by his hand, unintelligible.
I lifted my left arm, the one that was free. It hurt. The area around the metal thing was terribly sore, and hot, too, with the beginnings of infection. There was a moment of resistance, and then the metal thing tore loose, sending a flash of white pain through me. Startled out of apathy, I bucked upward, reflexively catching Shiny’s wrist with my hand. Blood, hot and slick, coated the inner bend of my elbow and ran down my arm.
I froze for an instant as awareness flooded through me, the instant the apathy lifted. Madding is dead.
Madding was dead, and I was alive.
Madding was dead and now Shiny, his father, who had cried out in anguish while my blood-arrow worked its evil, was trying to kill me.
First had come awareness. On its heels came rage.
I tried again to shake my head, this time scrabbling at Shiny’s wrist with my fingers. It was like grabbing cordwood; his hand didn’t budge. Instinctively, I sank my nails into his flesh, having some irrational thought of piercing the tendons to weaken his grip. He shifted his hand slightly—I had an instant to suck a breath—and then pushed my hand away with his free hand, easily brushing off my efforts to regain a grip.
A drop of blood landed in my eye, and red filled my thoughts. The color of pain and blood. The color of fury. The color of Madding’s desecrated heart.
I put my hand against Shiny’s chest. I paint a picture, you son of a demon!
Shiny jerked once. His hand slipped aside; I quickly caught my breath. I braced myself for him to try again, but he did not move.
Suddenly I realized I could see my hand.
For a moment, I was not certain that it was my hand. I had never seen my hand before, after all. It looked too small to be mine, long and slender, more wrinkly than I’d expected. There was charcoal under some of the nails. Along the back of the thumb was a raised scar, old and perhaps an inch long. I remembered getting it last year when an awl I’d been using slipped.
I turned my hand to look at the palm and found it completely coated in blood.
There was a thud as Shiny fell to the floor beside me.
I lay where I was for a moment, grimly satisfied. Then I began working at the straps that held me down. Quickly I realized the buckles were meant to be opened with two hands. My other hand was solidly strapped down with a leather cuff, padded on the inside to prevent sores. For a moment, this stymied me until it occurred to me to use the blood on my free hand. I rubbed it on the other wrist, then began working it from side to side, pulling and twisting. I had such small, slender hands. It took time, but eventually the blood and sweat on my wrist made the leather slick, and I slipped that hand free. Then I could open the rest of the buckles and sit up.
When I did, though, I fell back again. My head spun, thick queasiness rolling in its wake. I slumped against the wall, panting and trying to blink away the stars across my vision, and wondering what in the gods’ names the Lights had done to me. Only gradually did I realize: all the blood they had taken. Four times. In how many days? Time had passed, but not enough, clearly. I was in no shape to walk or even move much.