He was cold, and I broke inside.
But his forehead began to glow as the chimeric sparked, sizzling across his face with light and pattern. Runes shot across his chest like a sunburst, immediately seeking out those along his jaw and throat. They connected, and his entire body began to glow.
And then, my mother did something I had never seen before.
She slid her hand inside his chest.
Two fingers as point, others plus thumb closed over the medicine paste, she just slid them in as if he were water. The flesh didn’t open, the ribs didn’t spread, but she did it anyway, and I could see everything in the runes dancing between them. I saw her fingers work the paste into his heart, saw tiny sparks as tonic met toxin. But the heart did not skip, and I could barely breathe as she slid her unbloodied hand out and reached for mine.
Shroud magik. Dark bargains. Whispers in the night.
Giddy, dizzy, lightheaded all. She moved my hand into his chest.
Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.
Numb and scarred, my fingers brushed his heart, and I felt it. And for the first time since the sinking of theDawn Watch, I wanted these new hands to sing.
She looked at me, caught me up in the stars that were her eyes.
“Chimeric is the tears of our sisters, the moons,” she said. “Free them and let this man live.”
I closed my eyes, seeing the web running between my fingers and his heart, seeing it wrap and entwine and connect and engage.
“What is the spell, Honor?”
“I don’t know,” I sobbed. “I just don’t know!”
“You are Archaic, like me. Your magik is wylde. Imagine it and breathe the incantation.”
So many ran through my mind, so many I had learned, even more I had forgotten. I couldn’t do this. I wasn’t enough.
“What has he taught you?”
Dreams. Hope. Friendship. Light.
Carmen Lumiere.
Kel’yion.
And suddenly, the captain was there, a sea-deep shadow over us both. I looked up, barely able to see him because of my tears.
“What is theRhi’Ahrword for life?” I breathed.
He lowered himself to one knee and laid his hands on my shoulders.
“Vivithari.”
The warmth. The strength. The power of this rune. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.
“Carmen Vivithari,”I whispered to the void.
My body lit with power as chimeric shot through my hands and into the heart they held. Runes raced along my skin, burning from shoulder to thigh, blistering as they went. I didn’t flinch. Let it scorch me raw if it meant this wretched woman kept her friend.
Fahr’s body bucked, and runes burst from his open eyes. A cry began from somewhere in his boots, and mine joined his, rocking my body in a rush to my throat, echoing through the walls of the greencellar and shaking the very stones of the floor.Light was everywhere, and I was blinded. Sound was everything, and I was deafened. There was only his heart and my mother and Thanavar and my hands wielding the chimeric that powered all the magik of the world.
I don’t know how long we existed, the four of us like this, locked in the power of the Worldrune, but at some point, it passed like a tide, leaving pebbles of silence in its wake.
My hands were in my lap, my mother beside me, and slowly, Thanavar rose to his feet to stand over us all, his eyes as black as a night sky.
