The first cut is the hardest. Seeing her pale skin split and the red run through her fingers. But he works quickly, and she makes not a sound, the room so quiet that he can hear the first drops strike the floor.
With her rune complete, he releases her wrist and turns to his own. Cutting through the scabs burns and he bites his lip, but though he cuts, not enough blood comes. The strength of his poisoner gift has healed them too well, and he will have to cut deeper.
“Pietyr,” Katharine says. “I feel strange.”
“Strange?” he asks, and she falls to her knees.
“Katharine!”
He falls beside her and holds up her arm. Dark veins stand beneath the skin, and the blood that pours out of her is less red than burgundy.
“They are afraid. They do not want to leave me.”
“Do not listen to them.” He cups her cheek and nearly recoils at the gray rot spread across her face. “They are only fighting,” he says, but in his mind, he remembers Madrigal’s warning.
Surely you must’ve considered that she may not be alive at all, except for them. She may truly be undead, and the moment she is emptied of the last of the queens, her body will break and shrivel up. Just like it would have had they not intervened in the first place.
“I am with you, Kat. You will be fine.”
Katharine screams and doubles over, and he presses his cut rune against hers, locking their hands together. The shock that goes through him sends him onto his back. And one of the Breccia stones rolls out of the circle.
“Pietyr, it hurts.”
“Hold on, Kat.” He grinds his teeth. Her blood splashes darkly onto the stones, and her screams fill the room. Another shock passes through him as the queens scratch for purchase inside Katharine, and his leg jerks, sending another stone rolling. He squeezes his eyes shut.
“So cold,” Katharine moans.
“You do not need them. Hold on.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I won’t.”
He opens his eyes as she lets go of his hand.
“Katharine?”
Every bit of exposed skin is gray and mottled black: the dead queens risen to the surface. He pushes himself up onto his elbows as she licks clean the wound in her hand and kicks the stones aside, clacking them together like marbles. Perhaps he did not know enough of low magic. Perhaps it was foolish for him to try. Or perhaps it would not have worked, even if Madrigal had done it herself.
“I had to,” he whispers as the dead queens stalk toward him wearing Katharine’s body like a costume. “I had to, for her.”
“You had to,” they say, and lift him to his feet. He looks into her eyes, searching, and what he sees makes him want to scream. But it dies in his throat as they press their lips to his, flooding him with black and cold, filling him up with them until his blood has nowhere else to run except straight from his ears and eyes.
THE SEAWATCH MOUNTAINS
On the side of a road that curves eastward through the mountains, Mirabella raises her arm and flags down a passing coach.
“Have you room for another passenger?” she asks. “I have coin enough.” She holds it out in a small purse, and the driver weighs it in her hand before nodding.
“You a naturalist?” she asks, gesturing to Mirabella’s hood.
Mirabella smiles and tucks the woodpecker deeper into her collar.
“No. I am only borrowing him.”
“Aye. Get on in, then. We’re going all the way to the capital, if that suits you.”
“That suits me fine,” she says, and opens the door. “For I am expected there.”
To be concluded . . .