SONG of EMBER

63

FAREWELL

🙜

When at last the whispering magic had frayed beyond her capacity to weave it together again, Ky returned to herself and the sounds of the forest filtered through her mind once more: the lapping of waves on the pebbled shore, early morning birds signaling the approach of dawn, and the last night breezes whispering through the branches overhead.

Ky's fingers trembled and she rested her palms upon Ember's motionless body, swallowing and turning her neck from side to side. It creaked in complaint at being held in one place for so long. That bit of relief brought on an insatiable craving to stretch her cramped muscles, and she dared take a breath and exhale freely, without groaning the sonorous tones of restoration.

His heart was still beating, slowly.

No fluids leaked from his bowels.

And the rift had been purged and mended in the deepest places…

Drinking another cool draught of air, Ky closed her eyes and turned her face up, toward the latticework of trees, letting the last dying light of the stars wash over her skin and soothe her aching bones. Her throat was parched, her lips cracked and bloodied. When she had been unable to summon the proper words to encourage healing, she simply sang his name, over and over, and his name was the first impression which came to her tongue even as she sighed.

She pressed her fingers against his throat, soaking up the steady rhythm of his heart. She had sung him into a sleep and he had fallen so securely into its embrace that it would take him many hours to free himself from the pattern of woven dreams—she could try to call him out of the depths herself, if he slept too long, but it would be better if he awakened without her influence. Her laborious attentions would even still require his own body's rest; healing was a tiresome affair, and she knew he might not be himself for some time.

If he yet lives.

Ky hummed to Ember of nourishment, of energy and life, of the abatement of hunger and the abundant rejuvenation of small and simple things. It would not nurture him for ever, but it would sustain his battered frame for a while longer.

Still, he would require water soon, to replenish the fluids he had lost…

Water.

She drew a trickle of air into her withered lungs and opened her eyes, blinking in the dim light. A bluish haze had settled over everything, mist rolling in from the lake, and the trees stood as dark sentinels against a gradually lightening sky.

Yet the birdsongs were not so clear as they ought to have been, and the sounds and scents of dawn had dulled beyond her immediate surroundings. She had seen, smelled, and felt nothing but Ember for so many hours that she had not noticed how the shaping sapped her strength… her focus…

She patted Ember's cheek with her stained hand, blinking hard at the sight of his gore on her fingertips. Her elbows scraped the dirt as she toppled closer, and placed a weary kiss upon his brow. It did not seem wrong, nor forward, nor even particularly intimate after all that had come before.

"Dream on," she rasped. "I will return."

She hesitated, carefully tugged the damp tunic over the wound to keep the flies away, and slithered her way down the muddy embankment like the lowest of all creatures.

The murky, shallow waters, green with algae and dark with mud, appeared to her as lovely as the glittering sea itself. Ky gulped greedily, splashing her dry skin and running her damp fingers through her hair. One wandering claw flicked across a bit of cruor and she flinched, remembering the terrible thing she had done to herself—but it could not have been otherwise. She carefully avoided the worst of it, unwilling to tangle with the mess of hair and blood.

After refreshing herself as much as possible, she stared down at her watery reflection, droplets scattering across the surface and distorting the image. Skeins of knotted hair hung above her shoulders, a few strands trailing in the lake, and above her left temple a patch of skin had been entirely torn away. Here, now, she saw herself as Ember surely must have all along: a pale and ghastly creature, looking half-drowned.

She curled her lip over her fangs, and then sighed, too tired to maintain the expression. One ear flickered as she shooed away a bothersome gnat; when it persisted, she ignored it.

Silvery scars around her neck shimmered faintly, where the leather had chafed her skin in the hall of dry bones, and the thin scars on her cheeks were barely visible now—yet she would have them back again, in all their gory anguish, if it meant that Ember should be spared.

Though her thirst was hardly quenched, Ky dragged herself out of the shallows, snatching tufts of foliage and clawing her way back up the slope to the branching tree. Ember had not moved, but his breaths were much deeper and steadier.

She exhaled a gentle cry of relief, and a loon warbled back from the rushes.

As she opened her mouth to sing a few more words of healing, all that came out was a croaking sigh. The voices chattered distantly, and she could hardly distinguish one from another. The song of Ember's broken flesh seemed too like the song of the creaking branches, and the song of the beetles in the tall grass was drowned by the song of the wind in the rushes.

His guts were mended and all of the deeper flesh rejoined, but the sliver of wrongness which remained could not be left unattended. Ky had heard tell of men who succumbed to their wounds long after a siren would have sung themselves well again.

He needed fresh water, clean wrappings, human remedies.

There was a stream…

She remembered it with a hazy wakefulness, the way she half-remembered his embrace in the dream-bower she had called into being: it had been very dark when she first passed through the woods, but the water flowed clear, and swiftly, and a nearby grove of cedar and pine had sheltered an abundance of beautiful, familiar leaves not far from its splashing embrace.

“Come, Ember,” Ky said uncertainly, though she stood with her hands perched on her hips and was looking everywhere but at the sleeping man, as if a less obvious solution might be found in the latticework of pine boughs, or a tangle of budding rose haw and mountain laurel. “Let us be off…”

When no agreeable alternative presented itself, she knelt beside him and wriggled one hand beneath his back, drawing the bulk of his frame up and over her shoulder and securing his legs with her other arm. She dug her claws into the material of his trousers, grunting with the effort, and unsteadily rose to her feet.

It might have been a small thing, such a burden, on any other day but this.

Her joints were so stiff from huddling over Ember in the cold hours of the morning that she could scarcely move at the first—but having been submerged in his essence for so long, she was, at least, almost immune to the bittersweet of his closeness. Her scalp itched, her lungs were dry, her neck ached, and she wanted to close her eyes and surrender to the void of her dreamless sleep.

We take one step, and then one more, she thought with a huff, gritting her teeth in a grimace.

In this manner, Ky slowly ascended the hill, Ember swaying heavily over her shoulder, his body pressed against hers and his leather-clad feet scraping the ground when she clambered up a particularly steep incline. She paused to rest whenever he grew too heavy in her arms, carefully selecting the softest patch of grass and moss where no thorns or brambles would alarm him, and fashioning little nests whereupon to lay his head.

More than once, she glimpsed a shape which she had passed by in the dark yet never truly seen—a fragment of an ancient footpath she had overlooked, which ought have been covered by time and detritus but still clung to a few tattered threads of decay magic, or a lump of vines and chiseled stone, once a human waymarker, which she had mistaken for a stump of a tree in the shifting moonlight.

At last, the sound of rushing water quickened her steps and she pushed past a few weepy branches which hung over the rise, turning her shoulder to shelter Ember from the bristly boughs.

When she emerged into the clearing, the fresh, clear waters of a well-fed stream tumbled rapidly before her, splashing through the mists of an early morn. A crumbling bridge spanned the length of it, the stone path which had once flowed away from it covered in a fine layer of dirt and dust, or else devoured by brambles and moss and little tufts of grass. Beyond the bridge, further up the gentle slope near the crest of the clearing, another wild oak tree made a nest of thick roots and tall summer grasses.

It was there that she softly lay Ember to sleep, and there that she sat in silence for several moments to catch her breath. When she peeled Ember's tunic away from the wound again, a bit more blood had tainted the fabric, though the rift itself remained closed. She had done excellently well to all appearances—better, at least, than the elders would have done, for they would never have attempted such a heresy, though this brought her no satisfaction. Sil's song had always been more powerful. If only...

Ky swallowed the lump of emotions away, and cast aside the memory of shattered steel singing overhead, of stinging shock, of blooming red. The pretty sword, or what remained of it, had bitten its own master at the last. A broken blade, twisted to madness. She suspected that was her own fault, as ever. It should have killed him, and indeed it would have killed him if—

"No," Ky muttered aloud.

The mutter cleared her thoughts enough for some sense to break through.

Knitbone. The memory echoed in her thoughts with perfect clarity. Broad, flat leaves, little yellow flowers shaped like stars.

The collection of fuzzy leaves had been sheltered between two crooked trees, not far from the stream. Ky was loathe to leave him, but she could not carry him further. It did not take her long to find the woodland flower patch again. The scent lingered in the air: bitter and mild, like Ember's garden greens.

A scrawny antlered deer stood nearby, munching on a low-hanging branch. It pranced a few steps away and blinked in wild surprise as she threw herself down before the knitbone.

Her heart pounded.

She gathered up the largest and greenest leaves and passed over the ones which had been gnawed on by insects. These, she bundled up in her skirt, her movements alternately fumbling and hurried.

The hart twitched its floppy ears, observing Ky from a haughty distance.

When she neither sang nor threatened it, it lost interest and wandered down a hidden path, fading into the trees.

Huffing, Ky grasped the hem of her skirt and clutched the fabric against her waist. Thus encumbered, she darted back up the hill, stumbling several times—afraid he would be gone, the way he had been gone when she returned from her dealings in the dark—but when she brushed the branches aside and stepped into the clearing, there was only the still form of a sleeping man beneath the roots of the sturdy oak.