Morgan rose when she entered. “Sister Lain,” he said, his voice softer than usual. “Please, sit. No speeches tonight, I promise.”
The air smelled faintly of cedar and spice. Her Heat was growing familiar with the scent of him, and now it woke again to all the tantalizing promise the room had to offer. She sat across from Morgan, still uncertain. He poured for her first, then himself.
She brought the key from her pocket and slid it toward him. “I read through some of the texts you left for me,” she said.
“I hoped you would.” His tone was calm, but there was a flicker of interest behind it. He lifted the key and pocketed it with a nod of thanks. “Did they answer your questions?”
“Some.” She hesitated. “It told me what the Spire really is. What the Dagorlind did to the Underserpent. How they chained it in the water to keep it from burrowing into the earth. From reaching the Underveins.”
His expression didn’t change, but his eyes sharpened slightly, like glass catching light. “And what did you think of that?”
“I think,” she said slowly, “that the earth trembles because it’s trapped. That the wyrm’s stirring is pain.”
Morgan set his cup down. “You’re beginning to see.”
She studied him, the quiet way he spoke, the easy grace with which he moved. The light from the hearth drew a sheen along the sharp edge of his jaw, the lines of his throat, the faint shadows at his collar.
“I saw something in the Archive,” she said carefully. “A record. About the Veinwrights.”
His stillness changed. Just the smallest motion of breath. “Did you?”
“They were said to control living blood,” she continued. “To bind creatures through it. Creating things like the bloodwyrms.”
He regarded her for a long time, his eyes silver in the half light. Finally, he set his wine aside and reached for the fastenings of his jacket. “There are few truths worth hiding from you, I think.”
He drew the garment from his shoulders and placed it over the back of the chair. Beneath it, his shirt clung close to the lean lines of his frame. He rolled one sleeve past his forearm, slow and deliberate.
The light caught first at his wrist. Then, as he turned his arm, she saw the feathers, faint, almost translucent, black shot through with a subtle violet sheen. They rose in a narrow band from wrist to shoulder, lying mostly flat against the skin.
Lain’s breath caught. “The only Veinwright I’ve ever seen was a Tracker. He had no feathers. At least none that I saw. I thought the rest were gone. Extinct.”
“Mostly.” His tone was weary. “The Dagorlind made certain of that.”
“How did you survive?”
“That’s a question even I’ve stopped asking. My blood is… refined, you could say. Self-preserving. I’ve lived through many lifetimes. The sort of Veinwrights the Dagorlind use are removed from their heritage. Their bloodlines are weaker.”
She looked at him, searching his face for deceit, but found only calm. “I could feel the mind of the Tracker when he touched me,” she said. “In the Tuning. But not you. Not at all.”
His eyes softened. “You only feel what mortal blood allows you to feel, little one. Mine is too old for that language.” He leaned forward, voice lower. “I have not heard the song of the Tuning in centuries.”
The ache in his words startled her. For a moment, he didn’t seem like a monster at all, but something lonely. Something ancient and left behind.
Lain thought of the family trees in the book, every name crossed through, every line dead.
“Then the book,” she said. “All those crossed names –”
“Were my kin.” He rested his forearm on the table, the feathers gleaming like oil. “They hunted us to extinction, long before they turned their fires toward the Kelthi.”
“Why did your – why did the Veinwrights make the bloodwyrms?”
He gave her a look that showed he was surprised by the question. “There are certain things we do with blood. Specific magics, rituals. But we can only do so with blood from the living. We didn’t want to cause harm in order to use our skills to better the world. We created the bloodwyrms to consume the blood of the deceased. They were meant to be helpful. Cleansing battlefields. Removing rot from the earth, like vultures or crows.” He turned his glass, then swallowed the remainder. “They take up the dead, and we would use the power of it. Like cattle eating grass, and humans eating cattle.”
The image made Lain wince.
“But,” he said, noting her response, “the bloodwyrms aren’t alive, you see. Not in the sense that cows and people are alive. Part of their cycle is to be consumed. They don’t grow old, they only reach a certain size and then split into another, to harvest more of the dead.”
“They attacked me,” she said.
“Yes. I think they must have been desperate. Hungry.”
“I heard they are becoming more aggressive.”
“Without the Veinwrights to regulate them, they are growing numerous and unchecked. This would not be the case, if we had more Veinwrights in the world.”
“So the bloodwyrm in the forest… the one that turned to smoke.” He nodded for her to carry on. “You… absorbed what it ate?”
“I absorbed what the blood it ate became in its body.”
“And you used that to heal me.”
“Yes.”
“You healed me with the bodies of your own men.”
He sighed. The practiced composure she had always seen in him slipped. “Say a man dies in a field. The grass grows over him, maybe a plum tree. Would you say you have eaten a man, when you eat a plum?”
That felt markedly different to Lain – something about the intention wasn’t the same, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
“I suppose you’ll want nothing to do with me now,” he said. His voice was gentle, but there was something in it that trembled like grief. “Perhaps you see me as they do. As a curse.”
She hesitated. The air between them was fragile, stretched taut with meaning. “You’ve lived long enough to see generations die,” she said softly. “And you can command blood. The bloodwyrms, your men –” she stopped. “Mal – Ren, I mean.”
At his name, something subtle shifted in Morgan’s expression. Not guilt, but more of a faint, sad weariness of someone long past surprise.
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“You bound him,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
Morgan’s silver eyes lifted to hers. “Yes.”
“Why?”
He poured another measure of wine, though he didn’t drink. “Because Ren wanted to kill the Underserpent. He came to me full of rage, believing the only way to balance the scales was with a god’s blood. You know that hatred. You saw it.”
“So you made him your servant.”
“I did nothing he did not agree to. I was very clear about what it would mean to work alongside me.” When he saw how little that changed Lain’s opinion, he softened. “I made him safe,” Morgan said gently. “For himself, and for you.”
“But you sent him to capture a Glinnel,” Lain said. “He was certain you would have me killed.”
“Capture a Glinnel, yes,” he said. “I could not gather Starbloom otherwise. But I never had any intention of killing one. I wanted no harm to come to the Glinnel who helped us.”
“Why would he think that you would?”
“Once he told me you were Bellborn, perhaps he believed my men would have you killed. As an example. Or for revenge. Vengeful men often assume the same vengeance lives in those around him.”
“But that isn’t why you bound him. You did that before you knew I was the Bellborn.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “You’re correct. But tell me, Lain – if you had the power to stop someone from damning the world, even if it meant stealing their will to do it, would you call it cruelty?”
She didn’t answer.
Morgan smiled faintly, but his eyes were grave. “He’s alive, isn’t he? That’s more than most can say of those the Dagorlind touch.”
Lain looked up, startled. “How do you know he's alive?”
“I can feel it,” he said, examining his flexing fingers as if Mallow were at the other end of an invisible thread. “If he were gone, I would feel that, too.”
He reached across the table, brushing the base of her cup rather than her hand. “I didn’t bind him to punish. Only to protect the Underserpent. To protect what still belongs to the living earth.”
Her breath trembled. “You still made him bleed for it.”
His voice lowered to something like confession. “I have bled for worse things.”
Silence fell again, broken only by the low crackle of the fire. When he finally spoke, it was with the same quiet gravity as before.
“I won’t lie to you, Lain. I do what I must. But if you want no part in it, if you wish to stay here when we leave tomorrow, I won’t force you.”
She looked up sharply. He wasn’t taunting her. He meant it. There was a raw honesty in his voice that cut deeper than a threat.
“You’re letting me go?” she asked.
He gave her a quizzical look. “My dear, you were never a prisoner.”
When her brow furrowed in confusion, he carried on. “I’ve forced enough obedience for one lifetime. I’d rather you walk beside me because you wish to.”
Something in her shifted. All the distance she’d kept – the suspicion, the restraint, cracked under the weight of that quiet sincerity. He looked older suddenly, exhausted and sincere in a way she hadn’t seen in him yet.
Without thinking, she reached for him. Her fingers brushed the feathers along his wrist. They were impossibly soft, warm where she’d expected cold.
He inhaled sharply, and for a heartbeat, neither of them moved.
“You see now,” he murmured. “Why I need you to trust me.”
Lain’s throat constricted. The old part of her trained by priests to fear corruption recoiled from what he was. But another part, deeper, saw herself in him. The exile, the weapon, the thing made sacred and feared in equal measure.
“You’re not what they said,” she said at last. “Neither am I.”
He stared at her. His expression softened, the smallest smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.
“Will you go south with my people?” He paused to give gravity to what he said next. “Will you go with me?”
“Yes,” she said.
He exhaled, something like relief shadowing his features. “You don’t have to fear what you don’t yet understand.” He brought his hand up to caress her cheek with his fingertips. “I envy your Heat. It reminds me that the world is so… full.”
Her pulse thrummed in her throat. The hand at her face slid back, tracing the base of her ear, and every nerve in her body lit in response.
“Morgan –” she began, but the word came out half a breath.
He withdrew his hand carefully, eyes still fixed on hers. “Forgive me. When one lives long enough, it is easy to forget what boundaries belong to the living.”
She shook her head, unable to find her voice, wishing desperately that his touch had deepened instead of retreated, wishing she knew what those feathers felt like along her face, her neck.
He leaned back. “Rest tonight. Tomorrow, we leave for the southern road. You’ll see Ivath again with your own eyes before you know it.”
When she rose to go, he caught her hand lightly and pressed it once between both of his, his voice so low it almost vanished in the firelight. “Thank you for not fearing me.”
Lain hesitated, then brushed her fingertips along the soft feathers at the back of his hand again, transfixed by their beauty. He tightened his grip with a sharp intake of breath.
She stood there a heartbeat too long, her Heat pulsing through her chest, before she slipped her hand free and left him with the quiet.
Morning found her in a hush of soft light. The fire in the grate had long since gone to embers, and the scent of cedar still lingered in her hair. When she stirred, the ache of her Heat pulsed low and steady, manageable now, no longer frantic, only a long-burning ember.
Sena was already up, seated comfortably on the stool, folding the last of Lain’s robes into her pack. She looked up and smiled, sunlight striking the gold in her wool. “Good morning, Sister. I thought I’d help you ready before Lord Balthir sends for us.”
Lain sat up, gathering her curls into a loose tail; they’d gotten long. She stood and stretched her arms overhead. “You’re up early.”
“I hardly slept,” Sena admitted with a laugh. “I keep thinking of the road south. I’ve never been beyond the valley. Not since I arrived here from the coast.”
Lain’s gaze drifted toward the window as she dressed. The sky beyond was silver with frost, the outpost roof gleaming pale in the early light. South. Toward Ivath. Toward the Underserpent.
She felt again the echo of Morgan’s hand at her cheek, the tremor in his voice when he said he hadn’t heard the Tuning in centuries. That grief – so old, so quiet – had followed her into her dreams.
“Thinking heavy thoughts?” Sena teased gently, brushing lint from the dark traveling cloak that lay folded across the chair.
Lain smiled faintly. “You can tell?”
“You wear your heart on your tail, love. It droops when you’re worried.”
Lain laughed softly, lifting it in playful defiance. “Better?”
Sena grinned and came to stand behind her. Deft fingers fastened the clasp of her cloak. “Much.”
They lingered close to the mirror’s reflection, two women of the same people, the same earthen warmth, Lain’s antlers stretching tall above them both. Sena’s fingers hesitated at the fastening, tracing the edge of Lain’s collarbone. “You don’t have to go if you don’t wish to,” she said quietly.
Lain’s breath caught. “You sound like him.”
“Then maybe he’s right.”
“He gave me the choice,” Lain said, her voice soft. “And I still said yes.”
Sena studied her reflection, something tender and sad in her eyes. “You care for him.”
Lain hesitated. “I don’t know what I feel. Only that he’s… lonely.”
Sena tilted her head, then leaned in to kiss the corner of Lain’s mouth. The touch was soft, brief, grounding. “So are you.”
Lain turned toward her, closing the distance this time. Their mouths met properly, a slow, unhurried kiss, the kind that asked nothing and promised nothing. Sena’s hands came up to cradle her jaw, thumbs brushing her cheeks, and Lain let herself sink into the moment.
When they parted, both smiled faintly, as if embarrassed to have been caught so easily in each other’s gravity.
“We’ll both be fine,” Sena said. “Whatever happens.”
Lain nodded, though the reassurance barely reached her heart. Together they finished packing, folding cloaks, strapping satchels, checking supplies. Every so often, their hands brushed, and the world felt a little less muddled.
When the servant came to summon them to the courtyard, Sena smoothed Lain’s sleeve and smiled. “You look like a saint.”
Lain glanced down at her hands – the hands that had healed, that had destroyed, that had trembled under Morgan’s. “No,” she said. “Not a saint. Just someone who’s still learning how to walk the earth.”
Sena touched her arm. “Then walk with me.”
They left the room together, entering the cold, bright morning.