His naivete, his idealism, had been all but destroyed when Annarion had been sent to the green—and he had been sentwhile Nightshade was on the frontlines of the war. Everything he had done in the long years between that loss and theregaliathat had finally brought his brother’s freedom, he had done for the sake of the only family he graced by that word: Annarion.
Annarion, whose sense of rage and pain and betrayal reminded him of the man he had once been. Nightshade had destroyed the home of his childhood without care; home was, and had been, Annarion.
Kaylin, stop.It wasn’t a command; it was a request.
She wanted to stop. She wanted to withdraw, to give him privacy, to forget everything she’d seen and heard.I’m not done yet. If the source of this affliction was magical in nature, the magic’s still there.
Iam capable of diffusingit on my own now.
I’ll be the judge of that.
Then judge, but judge quickly.
When this is over, I’m going to suggest a new course be taught in the Halls of Law.She focused on that. On the existence of magical poison. On its possible use. Something had penetrated skin, which was how poison generally worked if it wasn’t offered in food. This hadn’t been. Maybe Nightshade was immune to regular poison.
Maybe the poison was a backup in case the war bands failed. And they had.
She understood assassination; she usually understood its motivation. She didn’t understand why an outcaste fieflord was so important. This was almost foreign.
But the magic that was also foreign lessened as she uprooted it, gathering it around her hand as if it were thread. No healing had ever been like this. The damage to the organs, she repaired; it was the magic itself that was much, much harder to remove. But she felt, as she worked, that it was the most important task. She could not leave it spread inside Nightshade’s body, a fine web waiting for its hungry spider.
Kaylin.Severn’s voice. He added no words, but they weren’t necessary.
She found the last thread—what she assumed was the last thread.If I don’t finish this, they’ll just grow again, she told Nightshade.They’ll spread again. They’ll wrap themselves around your heart, your lungs, your kidneys—and they’ll squeeze.
He should already be dead.
If you’reactually awake, and you believe the magicthat almost killed youis so trivial, you can help me eradicate it.
He couldn’t. She knew he couldn’t. But he fell silent, examining her thoughts, her focus, her certainty. She felt a wild impatience, and it came from two places: Severn and Nightshade. But all their efforts would be wasted if she couldn’t finish this one thing. It wasn’t the damage that had been done that would kill him; it was the future damage.
I do not sense what you sense, he finally said.You are healing the damage; that much is clear. But the source of the damage remains opaque to me. We do not have time. If you must, finish this after we are certain to survive this moment.
There was urgency to the words. There was no command.
Kaylin had healed Terrano when he’d been standing on a different, constructed plane. What she had seen there was not what she could feel here: Shadow had bled out of the wound Terrano had taken. That Shadow had coalesced because Hope had chosen to breathe on it; it had become a darkly glowing orb, a ball of not-quite light.
She could now feel its contours in her palm. She hadn’t seen it since Mandoran had retrieved her from the place in which Terrano had waited, injured, for healing.
This magic was like the dark wisps of smoke that rose from Terrano. She really, really wanted Terrano’s name; if she had it, she could ask. Severn could hear her. Nightshade could hear her. But given the distant sounds of battle, neither would shout the question so Terrano could hear it.
He’d been aware of the Shadow that poured out of his open wound. Had he somehow, changed physically by exposure to the green, been able to do what Nightshade couldn’t? Had he sensed the Shadow and remained trapped where he was so that he didn’t bring it back to the cohort—or Helen, or Kaylin?
She hadn’t drawn that smoky Shadow from his body; hadn’t had to struggle to remove its tendrils. It had emerged on its own. Hope’s breath had changed it, solidifying it, maybe rendering it inert. But she couldn’t ask Hope to breathe on Nightshade. She knew he wouldn’t do it unless she was willing to sacrifice something important to her.
She wasn’t. What she would be willing to offer wasn’t of interest because it wasn’t fundamentally valuable to Kaylin.
But here, as she drew out the burrowed threads, she realized that it wasn’t her palm she was wrapping them around; it was the orb itself. Somehow, to heal Nightshade at all, she’d approached not Nightshade himself, but the source of his injury. They weren’t on the same plane. The one reached out to the other, anchored by the physical body—but it didn’t belong where it had taken root.
She continued to wind the thread of that magic around her hand—or the orb that rested in it. It resisted, as stubborn roots will. If she’d had the ability to just destroy the roots without destroying their host, she might have tried that, instead—but it was hard to use healing power to destroy.
Oh.
That was what was wrong. She’d used the wordthread, the wordroots, to describe this magic, but it was the latter that was the most accurate. The magic itself feltalive. Alive, and part of Nightshade. She’d seen the damage Shadow could do to the living: it transformed them, sometimes almost instantly. Mortals could be overtaken and transformed with ease; Immortals, less easily. Was it the True Names? Was that why Immortals were more protected?
But they could be transformed as well—it just took longer. It gave Kaylin time to heal their damaged body, to force it back into its natural shape. Nightshade’s body didn’t have that kind of injury. This Shadow was meant to kill. It hadn’t changed anything that she could see.
I’m almost done. She spoke to Severn. She spoke to Nightshade. She felt the last of the tendrils finally let go, as if she had spoken to them as well. She wound it around the orb she could feel but couldn’t see.