Chapter 553: A Favor

I ran the whole way and it took hours, and I am going to skip most of it, because most of it was a man with a ruined knee falling over in the dark.

What I remember is the arithmetic.

The wyvern had carried us in. The wyvern was back there with its head on Light’s ribs and one working eye and a leg that had been opened twice, so the wyvern was staying, and that was correct, and it still cost me every mile of the return on my own two legs.

Death Sense stayed open the entire way. It costs nothing. I have said that already and I will keep saying it, because it was the only thing I owned that still worked, and I swept it out ahead of me at every bend the way you sweep a lantern.

Cold small lives in the rock. Cold small lives in the water channels. Cold, cold, cold, the whole length of that place, and none of them warm, and none of them her.

‘Wren.’

Keep going.

‘What if she’s—’

Keep going.

‘That’s not an answer.’

It’s the only one that gets you there. Keep going.

So I kept going.

I came out into the lake cavern somewhere in what my body had decided was the middle of the night, and the smell was thinner. Devant had been right about that, at least. It hung in the air like something that had been shut in a room a long time.

The green glow was the same. The lake was the same, flat and dark and quietly stolen. The rock shelf where I had put her down was the same.

The shelf was empty.

I stood in the mouth of that tunnel and looked at a bare patch of stone with a smear on it where somebody’s shoulder had rested for a long time, and my whole body went somewhere else and left me holding it.

‘…’

‘No. No, no, no—’

I threw Death Sense out across that cavern so hard it hurt behind my eyes.

Nothing on the shelf. Nothing at the waterline. Nothing along the near wall, nothing in the shallows, and my heart went into my throat and stayed there long enough to make a home.

Then, forty feet away, in the black at the base of the far wall where the glow gave out.

One warm thing.

‘…There you are.’

I have never covered forty feet worse. My knee went twice. I got there on hands and one boot and pure indignation, and I found her.

She had crawled.

Forty feet of open stone, on her belly, in the direction of the tunnel I had disappeared into, and I could see where she’d done it because there was a long dragged smear behind her through the dust and the grit. It wandered. She had lost the line and found it again a dozen times.

Forty feet. Hours, that would have taken her.

Hours of a woman who could not stand, crawling after me anyway.

‘Ilse.’

I got my hands under her shoulder and turned her over, and her head came round loose on her neck in a way that put ice down the whole back of me.

Her eyes opened.

They took a while to find me. When they did, the sourness came up in them from somewhere very deep down, and if I never see anything better than that in my life I will have had a good run.

Her mouth moved.

Nothing came out. There was blood dried black at both corners of it and a fresh line of it at one, and her lips shaped a word and her throat did not give her the sound to put in it.

“Don’t.” I got an arm under her back. “Don’t talk. I’m here. I’m being extremely competent, you’d hate it.”

She breathed out at me.

And her breath was cold.

I want to explain why that stopped my hands.

Since the crack under the slab, that woman’s breath has come out warm. Warm enough to melt the ice off my sleeve when the leather froze to the wound. Warm in a layer that turns every other exhalation in the world into a pale ghost, warm the whole way down through weeks of tunnels, so constant that I stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a stove in a room.

Half of a dragon burns from the inside. She told me that herself, and she was bitter about it, and she called it four inches and a warm mouth and horns that don’t finish.

Her breath came out cold and it fogged in the green air in front of my face.

Just like mine.

‘Wren.’

I know.

‘Her fire’s out.’

I know, Cade.

‘What do I do.’

Wren said nothing at all, which she has never once done when I asked her a straight question.

So I did the only thing on the list.

I got her up. Not carried, at first, because lifting her the wrong way pulled something in her chest and she made a sound I am going to be hearing for a while. So I moved her the slow way, in stages, and it took me the better part of an hour to get thirty feet, and I talked absolute nonsense at her the entire time because the alternative was listening to her breathe.

I put her at the waterline and I got water into her a mouthful at a time off my cupped hand, and most of it came back out, and some of it stayed.

And that was everything I had.

I could not heal her. That is a rule and not a feeling. What runs between me and my villainesses runs between a summoner and a spirit, and Ilse is a summoner, and she told me so herself in a hole in the ground while she was still strong enough to be unimpressed with me about it.

My well was a dry socket. My flame was gone with it. I had a sword that talks, a dagger with no essence behind it, and two hands.

She got her eyes open again around the time the water started staying down.

Her hand came up and closed on my wrist. Not weakly. That grip has stopped my heart before and it had most of itself left, and she pulled my hand down off her face and held it there against the stone so I would stop fussing.

Then her mouth moved again.

I put my ear an inch off her lips.

“…smell.”

“It’s stopping. Whatever was making it is dead. I didn’t do it, I want that noted, some lunatic did it for me and I’m going to be annoyed about that for years.”

Her fingers tightened.

“…Light.”

‘…’

‘Of course. Of course that’s the second question.’

“Alive. Free of it. Lying on a floor about six hours that way with a lizard sitting on him.” I found myself grinning at her, which was insane, and I did it anyway. “You spent one of your three words on Light.”

Her eyes closed. The corner of her mouth moved a fraction and stayed there.

Then she used the third word.

“…walk?”

“Can you? No. Absolutely not.”

Her hand tightened again, and I understood I had answered the wrong question.

‘Ah.’

‘Can I walk. She’s asking if I can carry her.’

I looked down the length of that woman. Six feet of Drakonir bone and leather and gauntlet, most of it muscle, all of it dead weight, and I did the honest sum on a man with a knee that had already voted twice tonight.

Then I did the other sum, which was the one that mattered.

There was exactly one thing in this entire layer that could do anything for her. It had walked into a room and put down forty marked animals between one breath and the next without me seeing it happen, and it had strolled out again with its ribs closed and dust on its skin, and it had told me, on its way past, precisely how much it cared whether she lived.

And it was going the other way.

‘…Oh, I’m going to hate this.’

You are going to hate this.

‘I’m going to have to be polite to him.’

You are going to have to beg.

‘Wren, I swear on every villainess I own—’

He watched a man die and remembered only that somebody propped him up first. Think about what that tells you and then think about how you’d like to ask.

I sat back on my heels beside the water and let that sit in me for a moment. My ribs were grinding. My knee had stopped being a joint and become a rumour. Somewhere six hours behind me a boy who could not die was walking away from the only thing he had wanted for ten years.

I got my arms under her. Under the knees, and behind the shoulders, and I put my back into it and stood up with a woman who outweighs me held against my chest, and it hurt in every place a body has.

Ilse’s head came to rest under my jaw.

Her breath went out cold against my throat, and fogged, and I watched it go.

“Right,” I told her. “New plan. It’s a terrible plan and you’re going to be furious about it when you can breathe.”

I turned toward the tunnel I had just spent six hours coming out of.

“We’re going to go and ask the nice insane man for a favour.”