She wasn’t dead.
Her pulse shuddered in her neck. Every breath spread Heat through her body like billows fueling a fire. The bed beneath her hummed with it, the same rhythm as her breath, the same rhythm as the wyrm. Her memory surged of the song, the pain, and the eye of the Underserpent.
The wyrm’s voice was still inside her. It had a heartbeat like thunder, far away and half-awake.
She sat up, the room tilting wildly. Her robe clung to her with dried sweat and something darker. Someone had washed her, or tried to. The room was small – a recovery cell, perhaps, most likely under the Spire. Her tail twitched of its own accord, lashing the sheets.
Her hands flew to her face and throat. No bell. Her skin there was tender, as if burned. She lifted her fingers higher and froze.
Antlers.
Not full grown yet. The skin along her crown was split, pale ridges pushing through, slick with blood and sap. The first true horns she’d ever developed. She’d never gone this many days into her Heat without the draught, but some part of her still remembered the taste of the raspberry, and wondered.
Footsteps echoed outside. She grasped around for her veil and found it, tucking the bit of antler and her ears beneath it.
A man’s voice arrived. “She’s not allowed visitors –”
“I’m an Elder, Brighthand. I will be seeing to my charge.”
Lain’s heart stuttered. The Brighthand’s low reply was muffled, but she heard the iron latch slide. The door swung outward.
Tanel filled the frame, eyes wide, his hair unkempt, a bag slung over one shoulder. “Saints – Lain –”
He crossed the threshold before she could speak, and the guard pulled the door closed behind him.
“They told me. Seli said you were –” His hand came up, hesitated, then cupped her cheek. “You’re alive.”
The touch was too much. Her Heat roared awake like a startled lion. Every nerve along her skin turned to flame. The smell of him – salt, parchment, leather – folded through her and she nearly folded with it. Her tail wound around his leg before she could think.
He inhaled sharply, eyes flicking down in sudden understanding. “Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, Lain, I…”
His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth and the sound that left her throat was half-sob, half-growl. The Heat wanted. The wyrm wanted. The room itself seemed to pulse with it, and for the first time in a day filled with so much hurt and confusion she finally felt good.
Before either of them could chain will to reason they were in each other’s arms, Lain dragging him down to her and Tanel forgoing the very idea of resistance. In her Tuning he responded to every movement of her hands along his arms, could feel the brightening sensitivity of her scales and her skin. The hand that held her face slid beneath her veil and caressed the velvet of her fawn’s ear with a surprised and silent joy. Her hands coiled at the back of his neck. She brought his face to hers and her lips finally, finally met his. He tasted wonderful, he tasted human and real, and he fumbled against her mouth with a tantalizing mixture of want and shame and need.
She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t even be alive. She would have never known what this was like, what his mouth was against hers. As that renewed sense of strangeness found her he moved forward, hand beneath her head to lay her back. The Heat careened upward like a falcon returning from a dive, as if it had caught its prey and was rising with it snared in its claws, calling victory to the sun. Her fingers dove into the curls of black at Tanel’s neck again and each time she inhaled the comfort of his scent filled her heart like home. How was it they had never done this? How could she have ever thought there was anything else in the world that mattered? He kissed her throat, her cheek, and for the first time he was there –
She remembered the altar.
“I’ll be there if I can.”
He hadn’t been.
She turned her head aside. “You left me.”
He froze, the air rushing from his nose to meet her jaw.
“I begged for you,” she said. “And you weren’t there.”
The words cut through the haze. Her tail unwound, breath coming ragged. The warmth that had been pleasure curdled into fury.
Tanel recoiled from the anger and sat up, eyes red as if with wine. He stumbled to his feet, guilt plain on his face. His absence upon her body made the Heat yowl like a cat in a cage.
“They forbade me, Lain. The circle was sealed. I tried –”
She turned her face away. “You weren’t even at the procession. Did the High Speaker forbid that, too?”
Tanel didn’t answer her. The silence ached between them. His breath still remembered, and hers came shallow. The pulse of the wyrm thudded somewhere in her ribcage, steady and slow, unbothered by human grief.
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But she was not a human. She was Kelthi.
She drew her veil up around her head again.
When he finally moved, it was not to argue, but to sit beside her. The bed dipped under his weight. He put his face in his hands for a moment before speaking.
“You should rest,” he said. His voice was rough, stripped of all the authority he usually wore like a second robe.
“I can’t.” Her tail twitched weakly against the sheets. She put a hand to her face, the skin unusually hot. The Heat was still there, hiding beneath the fever.
He reached for the satchel he’d carried in. The clasp came loose with a soft click. “You’re still under the influence of the Starbloom,” he said. “It leaves a residue in the blood.” He pulled a small tin flask free, poured a measure into a clay cup, and added a drop from a vial of his own making. “This isn’t the drought. This will keep your heart from seizing.”
“Why should I drink this? I’m supposed to die.”
He held it out to her. “Not in this cell.”
The scent was oak-bitter. She wanted to refuse, but her hands were shaking. He noticed, and steadied the cup in her palms.
“Slowly,” he said.
She drank. The taste was metallic and sour. Her stomach lurched, and she doubled over. He caught her by the shoulder to keep her from sliding from the bed and she was shocked that her Heat did not react to his touch.
It must be the drink.
“Breathe through it,” he murmured. “It passes quickly.”
Her body did not believe him. The nausea came in waves, each rolling up from the hollow of her gut. Her scales flushed hot, then cold. Tears blurred her sight.
When it subsided, she slumped against him, panting. His hand stayed at her back, the other smoothing the loose hair from her temple. He’d done this once, long ago, when she was small and fevered from a bad batch of goat’s milk. He did it the same way now, only slower, gentler, as if afraid the act itself would burn.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For failing you.” The sob that came surprised her – she’d been so stoic, so ready, so prepared for everything to find its end in martyrdom. She’d be a Saint, a follower of Saint Fillain. The ringer of the bell. The Bellborn.
“Oh, Lain,” he said. “Don’t –”
“I can feel it. It’s awake enough to dream still. It looked me in the eye –”
“The Underserpent?”
“It knew me. I failed. It’s because I’m –” she was sobbing now, and hated herself for it, but couldn’t carry on like this. She wasn’t meant to be here. She shouldn’t have to survive this feeling at all. “It’s because I’m Kelthi –”
“No, no,” he whispered. He was rocking her now, as if some instinct had arisen that asked him to move her, to remind her body it was in this room. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I didn’t fast,” she confessed. “I ate raspberries.”
“Raspberries?”
“In a cake. They were – no one ever told me, they were so sweet –”
Tanel laughed aloud, and pressed his mouth to her temple, but his nose bumped her antler and he pulled back and laughed again. “Saint’s sake, Lain, you’re full of surprises.”
“I am unclean,” she said. “I ruined the ceremony.”
“If a raspberry was enough to ruin the ceremony, every Bellborn before you paved the way for it with jam on their fingers.”
A surprising laugh left her. She pressed a palm to her belly, feeling the slow churn of the medicine settling in. The silence that followed was full of unspoken things, and in the comfort of it she recalled his mouth against her own, his weight on her body. Her antlers ached. She could feel them growing, a pressure at the crown that pulsed with her heart. They were still so soft, velvety, sensitive. The wyrm moved again somewhere deep below, as though answering.
Tanel tensed, feeling the Heat in her Tuning. He reached for the satchel again, and this time he drew out the draught. The licorice scent rose, familiar and wrong.
Lain’s grief hardened around her. “I’m afraid I’ll be sick.”
“You’ll burn yourself out if you don’t.”
She knew he was right. She took the cup and drank the slippery brew, and while it was not pleasant at least it was familiar. But she could not help but think of it as poison on poison on poison.
Already heaviness crept into her limbs, the soft suffocation of the draught’s mercy.
Tanel took the cup from her shaking hand and set it aside. He rubbed his palms down his thighs, restless. The silence pressed.
A sound broke it – the scrape of boots outside, the iron latch. The door opened.
High Glinnel Seli stepped in, her white robes immaculate even in the dim light. The Brighthand lingered in the doorway, uncertain whether to close it behind her. Seli didn’t look at him; her gaze was fixed on Lain, sharp and appraising.
“She’s awake,” she said. “Good.”
Tanel rose at once, hands at his sides. “She needs rest, High Glinnel. The Starbloom –”
“– Did not finish its work,” Seli interrupted. Her eyes slid to the cup on the bedside table. “Has she taken it?”
Tanel hesitated. “Yes.”
“And the draught?”
He nodded once, stiffly.
Seli gave a small, approving smile. “Then you’ve done your duty, Elder Tanel. You may leave us.”
His jaw flexed. “With respect –”
“That wasn’t a suggestion.” Her tone didn’t change, but the air in the room seemed to tighten. “You’ve done enough.”
Tanel looked to Lain, but her eyes were already heavy and unfocused. The draught dulled her pupils. The muscles in his throat moved as he swallowed whatever protest lived there. Then he bowed, a fraction too deeply, and left. The door closed behind him with a quiet finality.
Seli waited until the sound of his steps had faded. Only then did she move closer, the faint jingle of her sleeve-bells marking each step. She regarded Lain as one might regard a sacred relic found cracked but not yet useless.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” she asked softly.
Lain’s voice came thick. “I… sang.”
“You survived.” Seli’s eyes narrowed. “The wyrm did not return to full sleep. It turns in its nest. You’ve unbalanced what should have been stabilized.”
Lain tried to sit straighter, but her head swam, lightheaded with hunger and fatigue. “It’s alive.”
“It was never meant to be awake, child.” Seli reached out, gloved hand catching Lain’s chin between her fingers, turning her face toward the light. “And yet here you are. Changed.” Her gaze lingered on the edge of the veil, where the blood had dried around the new horn buds. “The Kelthi blood sings louder than I thought.” She released Lain’s chin. “Rest, Sister. Tomorrow we’ll speak of what comes next. You are not to leave this room.”
When she turned to go, her bells chimed brightly, almost a mockery of the bells Lain once rang.
The door shut. The iron bar slid closed.
Lain stared at the ceiling until the light of the scale-lamps blurred. The wyrm stirred below, faint and restless, as if having a dream it couldn’t quite wake from.