Ease his pain.It was meant to suppress a Shadow Dragon. It was meant to kill Fenrik. I didn’t try to pull away. Instead, I uncorked the clear vial with my thumb and, with a vindictive shove, splashed the contents right into her open, screaming mouth.
Kelda sputtered, choking on the liquid. She shoved me back, wiping her face. “You stupid little—“
She froze, while her eyes went comically wide.
“I...” She blinked slowly. Her pupils dilated until her eyes were black pools. “I feel... so... floaty.”
Her knees unhinged. She slid down the wall, a loose-jawed smile spreading across her face. “Look at the pretty lights,” Kelda slurred, pointing a limp finger at the apocalypse happening in the center of the room. “They’re... dancing.”
“It works,” Fenrik said, staggering to my side, buttoning his shirt halfway. He looked at Kelda, then at me, a startled laugh huffing out of him. “You drugged the villain.”
“Look at that,” I said, gripping the Dragonheart vial. “She was telling the truth, it was just a drug after all. I assume she isn’t feeling any pain right now. Someone in Abberwyn told me it was poison, so for a moment I thought I’d killed her. At least it worked quickly. I didn’t have time to feel guilty.”
“One might think a healer like you would be deft with brews.” Fenrik’s amusement flickered out fast.
“Pretty,” Kelda slurred from the wall, pawing at the air like a kitten chasing dust motes. “So many... shiny teeth. Look at them smile.”
I stared at her, then down at my own trembling hands. I’d flung that vial with every intention of ending her. The rage that had surged through me had wanted to see her choke on her own medicine. But seeing her chest rising and falling, addled and harmless butalive... the relief nearly knocked me over. I was a healer. I fixed broken things; I didn’t snuff them out. Even twisted things like her.
The cavern shook again, stone dust raining down on us. The ley-line roared, a column of white fire shooting toward the ceiling.
“Right,” I said, as I looked at the chaotic magic threatening to dissolve the mountainside. I uncorked the Dragonheart extract. “Time to do the impossible.”
The Dragonheart extract pulsed in my hand, a rhythmicthrum-thrum-thrumagainst my palm.
“So messy,” Kelda mumbled from the floor, trying to adjust her robes and failing as her hand slid off her own shoulder. She gazed at the column of screaming silver fire with the disappointed air of a hostess whose guest had just vomited on the carpet. “I tried to tidy it up. I made boxes. Perfect little boxes.”
I stepped closer to her, despite Fenrik’s hand catching my elbow in warning. The magic tearing through the room was wild. And Kelda… she looked at it with genuine offense.
“You deal in stasis,” I said.. My voice gained strength, cutting through the roar of the magic. “You think peace is the absence of life. That’s why you couldn’t fix the ley-line. You were trying to kill it.”
Kelda giggled. She tried to point an accusatory finger at Fenrik but missed, poking the air a foot to his left. “Fenny,” she slurred, her head lolling back against the stone. “You were supposed to be my masterpiece. My handsome, silent statue. Your parents… goodness, they were so loud. Always laughing. Always bonding with things. They were so… biological. I wanted to harness the ley-lines, who would want to kill them? Stupid failed witshhh.”
She shuddered, her nose wrinkling. “Sweating and aging and feeling things. Disgusting. They destroyed the silence. Dying was the quietest thing they ever dith.”
Fenrik went rigid beside me, a low growl building in his throat, but I squeezed his arm. It was like listening to a nightmare narrate itself.
“I picked you out, you know?” Kelda said, her eyes staring into a past only she could see. “Thirteen years ago. Like a puppy in a window. A cursed puppy. You were chosen for this curse long before you were born, darlingh. I just… helped a little.”
She smiled, and it was the saddest, emptiest thing I’d ever seen. “You should have been mine. Truly mine. I would have kept you perfect. Preserved. Like a bug in amber. No more hurting. No more… wanting.” She spat the wordwantinglike it was a slur. “Everything eventually stops moving. I just wanted to help it along.”
“She’s insane,” Fenrik said. “She didn’t want a husband. She wanted a taxidermy project.”
“She wanted control,” I corrected him, looking from the woman to the raging fire of the ley-line. “She wanted a world that didn’t demand anything from her. A world she could arrange.”
Kelda let out a long, wheezing sigh, her eyelids drooping. “It’s so much work,” she said to the ceiling. “Living. It’s just… so much… laundry. I arrange the world, not stupid dragon toys.”
“And that,” I said, uncorking the red vial with a sharppop, “is wherewe differ.”
I turned to Fenrik. The air between us was charged, not just with the lethal radiation of the ley-line, but with the remnants of what we’d shared. The sweat on his skin, the bruise blooming on my neck, the fierce, terrified glint in his eyes. It was messy. It was loud. It was deeply, wonderfully biological.
“I’m going to drink this,” I told him, holding up the Dragonheart extract. “And then I’m going to do something extremely reckless.”
“Just another day for the healer, then,” he said, though his hand trembled as he reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “Lysa. If you burn out—“
“I won’t,” I said, and for the first time in my life, I believed it. Because I wasn’t just a container for power anymore. I was a conduit. I wasn’t going to dam the river.
“Peace isn’t death, Kelda,” I said to the woman who was now snoring amidst the apocalypse. “Peace is flow.”
