Freya swings around to look Evain in the eyes. “He just left? In the middle of fucking nowhere? What the fuck could you have fought about that badly? It’s not like he liked you to begin with.”
“That’s none of your concern.” Helplessness feels a lot like rage, simmering under Evain’s skin. Shae steps back, touching one of his rings, and a hint of dark power edges the air. Evain takes a deep breath, trying to pull himself together. “Leth doesn’t want to see me. Now that you’re here, I want you to find him. I’ll show you where we split off, then I’ll…”
He doesn’t know what he’ll do next. He has all these pieces in front of him, but he can’t sort them into a coherent plan.
“Then you’ll what?” Arthur prompts.
“I don’t know,” Evain says. The words hang in the air between everyone.
After a moment, Arthur rubs his face. “I’m going to pray,” he says, and stalks away into a brighter patch of sunlight.
Freya watches him go, fiddling with her pendant, then turns back to Evain. “Seriously, what the fuck did you fight over?”
“None of your concern,” Evain repeats sharply.
Then Shae says, in fluid Lyrisenian: “Did he find out you’re a demon?”
Alarm hits Evain like an avalanche. He whirls to face the necromancer, bracing for an attack. Shae knows. Evain doesn’t knowhowShae knows, but his limited reserves of magic coil inside him, ready to burst out into blades of shadow.
But instead of striking, Shae raises his hands slowly, palms out to show he’s unarmed. His pale face is utterly calm, and no magic flares around him.
Evain holds his own magic in reserve, poised and wary.
“What did you say?” Freya asks. When Shae doesn’t answer, she asks Evain, “What did he say? Fuck! This isn’t fair, you know I don’t speak Lyrisenian. All right, Arthur, what didVarasay?”
Sunlight brightens, then dims around Arthur. Touching his chest in reverence, he tells them, “Radiant Vara said to go ahead and talk to the hedgewitch. We only wanted to talk to her to ask about you two, so I’m not sure why. But I trust him.”
The hedgewitch. Evain wanted to talk to the hedgewitch too—about a man’s broken body in a bloody circle. He needs to drag himself out of this unhappy haze. The wilds of Lyrisenia haven’t become any safer since his heart broke.
“You two go ahead.” Shae grabs Arthur’s wrist, his bare fingers disappearing in the gap between Arthur’s glove and sleeve. “I’m going to talk to Evain.”
Arthur and Freya lead the horses away. Only when they’re out of earshot does Shae say, “Let’s move. The townsfolk are starting to stare.”
Evain’s joints unlock. Sure enough, the townsfolk are staring—not at Evain, but at Shae’s silver rings. Some humans think necromancers are monsters as bad as demons, but unlike Evain, Shae has never hidden what he is. He suffers the scorn without pretense.
They follow Arthur and Freya at a distance, to a narrow, well-shoveled path leading off the main road and into the woods. The witch’s cottage squats at the end of the path. Shae stops midway, at the point where they’re farthest away from other people in both directions. Dark evergreen trees twist into the sky around them, and stubborn red flowers bloom through the traces of snow on the ground.
Mahr. They die with the frost and bloom as it melts, living a hundred life cycles every winter. Blood in the snow, Lyrisenians call them. Beautiful, fragile yet persistent. Poisonous. Evain took the name Marha from them.
“When did you realize?” Evain asks in Lyrisenian.
“The day we met outside Ostaris.” Shae pulls a ring from his pocket and holds it up to the light. “This spell detects demons. I have to take the ring off every time you’re nearby, or it feels like my hand will freeze off.”
“I see,” Evain says faintly.
“You have great control over your aura, though,” Shae says, in what might be intended as comforting but comes out as rather condescending. “I’m very sensitive to auras, but I wouldn’t have guessed if not for my enchantment.”
Evain honestly doesn’t remember much about his first conversation with Shae. He just remembers being preoccupied with whether Leth would show up or not.
The important thing is that Shae has known he was a demon the entire time—but hasn’t tried to kill or banish him. Evain crosses his arms, willing his magic to settle inside him instead of crawling like mahr from beneath his skin. “Who else knows?”
“I told Arthur, of course, but no one else.” Shae shrugs. “We were ready to deal with you if you proved dangerous, but since Vara approved of Arthur taking this quest, we figured you couldn’t be that bad.”
“You’re unusually calm about this.”
“I’ve met demons before.” Shae glances away. “They weren’t like you.”
“Most aren’t.” Evain watches the mahr growing up from the snow. Dark needles rustling in the wind. The path before him and the path behind him look just the same. “Anyway, you’re right. Leth found out I’m a demon. There’s an additional complication in that I succeeded in courting him before he realized. He’s very reasonably upset. What do you think I should do now?”
