Caduceus steps out onto the porch, hair blown back into pink snarls. He stretches out his arms, palms down and fingers splayed, like he’s reaching for something. Tears stream down his face, bleeding into the rosy scruff of his beard, and he turns his palms upward.
Fire bursts from the earth and the sky above flushes an angry, muddled orange, like streetlamps under a storm. It swallows the garden so fast, licks at the stone, sets the wind racing along either side of the house and through the door, sour and flaked through with ash.
Caleb’s eyes are dinner plate-wide, and he clutches at the doorframe, white-knuckled.
(“My Clay,” the Wildmother says, cradling the broken body of Clarabelle Clay, “my heart. You know the choice before you.”
Her hand, immense, arm draped with long tongues of ivy, curling vines and flowers and moss, reaches for him. The fingers spread, bloom across his chest, burn.
“Not all can be saved. But all can be cleansed.”)
Jester is talented. Divine. Clever.
But despite her efforts, the wound never quite heals.
It’s an ugly thing, starting right between her breasts and dragged down to where her ribs separate, the exact, uncanny width of the Skingorger.
“Jes, it’s okay,” Beau tells her, holds her hands trembling and lit up, the seventh night in a row she tries to sit Beau down and heal it. “It doesn’t hurt, I promise. Save it for calling your mom.”
It does hurt, though, in this funny, prickling way. Like there are embers sealed up in her ribs, fanned into near-flame when her breathing picks up.
She’s sparring with Dairon one night, late and down in the Archive’s sand pits, and Dairon lands one punch there after realizing Beau’s been guarding it, hunching just so.
It’s like being shot again, it’s like taking one of Caleb’s Fireballs full-on (again), this wicked, sick-feeling flare of pain she sees behind her eyes in red and orange, and she doesn’t realized she’s lashed out with her staff until the edge cracks into Dairon’s torso and they stumble back, catch one heel on the edge of the pit and go down hard.
Dairon looks up at her, and then down at where the staff connected. There’s a circle burned through her tunic and onto the skin below, dark and angry, like a giant cigarette, and when both of them inspect the end of the staff, it’s glowing like a neglected fire, still smoking.
A thin line of blood snakes with would-be surreptitiousness down from her sternum, away from the larger stain spreading across her vestiges. For the first time since the cathedral, though, the embers under Beau’s skin feel quiet.
Nott keeps the gun after she uses up the one shot (rather unceremoniously). It’s a funny thing— the mechanism piques her interest so permanently she finds herself studying it at night by Caleb’s lights or by candle, wherever they find themselves.
I’ll have Yeza take a look at it when we’re home, she thinks, and then imagines Caleb frowning. Nott, he says, in her head, you are clever enough for this.
She remembers him lifting her up, spinning her around when she figured out how to send messages back.
Oh, I just copied you, she’d said, and he’d said no.
No, there is no copying in magic. You made something where there was nothing.
And maybe she’s been scared all this time, of feeling like she’d changed, like she’d become something else. Something Yeza wouldn’t recognize, even if she looked the part. Veth has always been an assistant, a mother, a caretaker, but Nott.
Nott takes things for herself. Makes things for herself.
And Yeza still has that melting-heart look in his eyes when he sees her. A little lost, maybe, but proud. Never scared.
She takes apart the gun that night, and puts it back together the next. It feels familiar in her hand, then, like the metal’s warmed to her touch. Reshaped, around her grip.
Bullets would be a cinch, she thinks. They have the money.
I will make you something new, Trent says, and pushes idly on one of the crystals. Something glorious.
The pain is immediate, feverish and blinding.
Learning will only get you so far, he says, and instead of Trent, Essek is there. He studies the shards in Caleb’s forearms curiously.
You have had a strange beginning, child of Zemnia. What is it you think you will learn? What would you give up, for knowledge?
His fingers are frictionless, like water. The shards come away easily between them, and he casts them to the floor, into glittering fragments.
I can help you. But it is not through teaching, quick as you are, and much as it interests me. The kind of power you seek comes from something deeper.
And your friends, you wish to see them saved. Transformed. Preserved. This, you cannot find in the pages of a book.
The Shadowhand steeples his fingers, and pulls them apart to reveal the beacon, clean white lines, five-sided faces.
Child of Zemnia, shall we make a deal?
There’s been something in Jester’s stomach since they lost Yasha.
Something burning and low, like simmering water.
It itches, unscratchable, at her when they return to Bazzoxan, keeps her up even later than the others.
Beau has never seen her angry. She’d said so with near-awe, like she’d been stuck somewhere between unable to envision it and wishing to see it, and it makes her want to deliver, in a strange way.
But, well. She’s not quite sure she remembers how to be.
It never feels fair, to be angry. It feels like refusing to understand someone, refusing to consider them as another entire person. Like to stay angry beyond that knee-jerk flare, you have to choose not to think about why someone does the things they do.
Maybe, though, it can just be a flare. The kind of angry Yasha gets never feels cruel or selfish, to watch. Just pure, the way fire is pure. Necessary.
Jester wishes she’d asked what it feels like. Because she thinks maybe Yasha feels something like what’s under her own skin, right now, something that just needs exorcising.
She’s always been strong— not the kind of strong you train for, just solid. Able. The kind of strong that’s for doing, not just looking.
(And, well, Beau still seems to like it, to like it when Jester picks her up around the waist, because the breath goes right out of her and she digs her fingers into Jester’s arms like vices.)
Maybe they can find another bar to fight in, and she’ll try it, try coaxing up the new, itching warmth from her belly and letting it lead for a change.
Or maybe when they catch Obann. It doesn’t feel so selfish, to think about it like that. To think about it as something she can do for them, as redirection rather than retaliation.
Yasha sleeps for two days straight.
It feels like a rebirth, like the Cobalt Soul’s sheets are the lacy, translucent walls of some cocoon.
She dreams, briefly, of rain, of cleansing. The necrotic black of her wings comes away in flakes, like ash, until they’re bare. Just bones, just the prickle of molting feathers.
She dreams of Jester with her front, her hands and arms and dress all paint-stained, she dreams of Caduceus plunging his hands into the earth over Molly’s grave. Their hands, glowing. Soft hands, healer’s hands, pressed between her shoulder blades, pressed to her cheeks, her forehead, fingers pressed to her mouth. Smoothing over the sparse feathers of her wings when they start coming in, blue and grey on white.
When she wakes it’s to the warm and dark and quiet of Beau’s Expositor’s chamber, to Beau and Jester asleep in a weary-looking pile on the floor.
She thinks of all she has taken, and all that has been given despite. She prays, with no promise of answering thunder from the clear night sky, to ask how one can learn to give.
