“Proof of what I’m saying,” he said.
“The only thing it proves is that we need more tests,” Leesha said. “I’ve finished copying your tattoos and studying them. I think the next step is to start experimenting on volunteers.”
“What?!” Rojer and the Painted Man asked in unison.
“I can make a stain from blackstem leaves that will stay in the skin no more than two weeks,” Leesha said. “I can perform controlled tests and mark the results. I’m certain we can—”
“Absolutely not,” Arlen said. “I forbid it.”
“You forbid?” Leesha asked. “Are you the Deliverer, to order folk about? You can forbid me nothing, Arlen Bales of Tibbet’s Brook.”
He glared at her, and Leesha wondered if perhaps she had pushed him too far. His back arched like a hissing cat, and for a moment she was afraid he would leap at her, but she stood fast. Finally, he deflated.
“Please,” he said, his tone softening. “Don’t risk it.”
“People are going to imitate you,” Leesha said. “Already Jona is drawing wards on people with charcoal sticks.”
“He’ll stop if I tell him to,” the Painted Man said.
“Only because he thinks you’re the Deliverer,” Rojer noted, and flinched at the look the Painted Man gave him in return.
“It won’t make any difference,” Leesha said. “It’s only a matter of time before your legend draws a tattooist to the Hollow, and then there will be no stopping it. Better we experiment now, in control.”
“Please,” the Painted Man said again. “Don’t curse anyone else with my condition.”
Leesha looked at him wryly. “You’re not cursed.”
“Oh?” he asked. He looked at Rojer. “Do you have one of your throwing knives?”
Rojer flicked his wrist, and a knife appeared in his hand. He spun it deftly and moved to give it to the Painted Man, handle-first, but the Painted Man shook his head. He rose and took a few steps back from the table. “Throw it at me.”
“What?” Rojer asked.
“The knife,” the Painted Man said. “Throw it. Right at my heart.”
Rojer shook his head. “No.”
“You throw knives at people all the time,” the Painted Man said.
“As a trick,” Rojer said. “I’m not going to throw one at your heart, are you insane? Even if you can use your demon speed to dodge…”
The Painted Man sighed and turned to Leesha. “You, then. Throw something—”
He hadn’t even finished the sentence before Leesha snatched a frying pan off a hook by the fire and hurled it at him.
But the pan never struck home. The Painted Man turned into mist as the iron passed through, dissipating his body as if waved through smoke. It clattered against the far wall and fell to the floor. Leesha gasped, and Rojer’s mouth fell open.
It took several seconds for the mists to coalesce again, reforming into the body of the Painted Man. He breathed deeply as he became solid.
“Been practicing,” he said. “Dissipation is easy. Like relaxing your molecules and spreading them the way boiling spreads water into steam. Can’t do it in sunlight, but at night I can do it at will. Pulling back together is harder. Sometimes I worry I’ll spread too thin, and just…drift away on the wind.”
“That sounds horrible,” Rojer said.
The Painted Man nodded. “But that’s not the worst of it. When I dissipate, I can feel the Core pulling at me. When the dawn is near, the pull can become…insistent.”
“Like that day on the road, in the predawn light,” Leesha said.
“What day?” Rojer asked, but Leesha barely heard him, reliving that terrible morning.
Three days after the attack on the road, Leesha’s body had healed, but the pain had not lessened. All she could think of was her womb and what might be growing there. There was a tea Bruna had taught her of, one that would flush a man’s seed from a woman before it could take root.
“Why would I ever want to brew such a vile thing?” Leesha had asked. “There are few enough children in the world as it is.”
Bruna had looked at her sadly. “I hope, child, that you never find out.”
But Leesha understood when the bandits had left her. If she’d had her herb pouch, she would have brewed the tea as soon as she’d washed her body, but the men had taken that, too. The decision was out of her hands. By the time they reached the Hollow, it would be too late.
But when the pouch was returned to her, so too was the choice. The only missing ingredient of the tea was tampweed root, and she had seen some just off the road as they ran to a cave for shelter from the rain.
Unable to sleep, Leesha had risen before full dawn while Rojer and the Painted Man were still sleeping and snuck out to cut a few stalks of the weed. Even then, she was unsure if she could bring herself to drink the tea, but she meant to brew it all the same.
The Painted Man had come upon her, startling her, but she forced herself to smile and speak with him, rambling on about plants and demons to distract from her true purpose. All the while, her thoughts roiled in chaos.
But then she unintentionally insulted him, and the hurt in his eyes brought her out of it. Suddenly she saw something of the man he had once been. A good man, who had been hurt as she was, but embraced his pain like a lover rather than give it up.
She felt that pain, so resonant with her own, and all her swirling thoughts suddenly clicked together like the gears of a clock, and she knew what she must do.
Moments later she and Arlen lay together in the mud, a frantic coupling born of mutual desperation, cut short when a wood demon attacked. The man who had been caressing her vanished, becoming the Painted Man again as he wrestled the coreling away from her. As the sun rose, both of them began to dissipate. She stared in terror as they began to sink into the ground.
But then the mist drifted back to the surface and they solidified, the demon burning away in the sun. Leesha reached for Arlen then, but the Painted Man turned away, and she cursed him for it. So caught in her own feelings, she had barely given thought to what he must have been going through.
Leesha shook her head, coming back to herself.
“I’m so sorry,” she told the Painted Man.
He waved a hand dismissively. “You didn’t make my choices for me.”
Rojer looked at her, then at him, then back to her. “Creator, your mum was right,” he realized. Leesha knew the news was a blow to him, but there was nothing to be done for it. In a way, she was glad to have the secret out.
“This can’t just be the tattoos,” she said, returning to the topic at hand. “It makes no sense.” She looked at the Painted Man. “I want your grimoires. All of them. Everything I learn from you is filtered by your understanding. I need the source material to understand what’s causing this.”
“I don’t have them here,” the Painted Man said.
“Then we’ll go to them,” Leesha said. “Where are they?”
“The nearest cache is in Angiers,” the Painted Man said, “though I have others in Lakton, and out on the Krasian Desert.”
“Angiers will do nicely,” Leesha said. “I have unfinished business with Mistress Jizell, and perhaps you can convince the duke you’re not after his crown while we’re there.”