Morgan returned near dusk, breath sharp from the flight, wings flecked with sea spray. He carried something wrapped in his shirt, cradled loosely as if he wasn’t fully sure how to hold it.
Lain knew the moment he stepped into the outer hall that it was alive.
The Tuning reacted before she could name the shape, a tremor of curiosity, a pang of worry not her own, and beneath it the defensive bracing of a man who anticipated her reaction and dreaded it.
He didn’t look at her when he entered the chamber. His throat worked once, and he unwrapped the shirt.
A fox kit. A tiny one, blind still, its fur still ash gray, paws no bigger than Lain’s thumbnails. It mewed once, a thin, bewildered sound, nose questing for milk or warmth.
Lain’s whole body went still.
“Morgan,” she whispered, already knowing and refusing. “No.”
He didn’t recoil, exactly, but he did not present it to her. He held it as if its weight already hurt him through the bond.
“We can’t start with anything much older,” he said, tone controlled but frayed at the edges. “I can’t risk harming you with something whose mind is too developed. I don’t understand what your song does at scale.”
“It’s a baby,” she said.
“That… makes it ideal,” he said softly. “Its patterns are simple, its veins are formed but still growing into their power, its instincts are pure. That makes the resonance clearer.”
She stared at the tiny creature, its slow, helpless paddling against his palm. The swell of tenderness rose so fast it burned her throat.
The cloisters always had cats about – they kept the mice from taking over their foodstores. Once, a cat had found the safety of Saint Fillan’s chapel, curled up on some robes in the floor of a wardrobe, and had a litter. Tanel had found her after supper bell and brought her to the chapel to show her the cat and its kittens. The cat had been a calico, and she turned her eyes up to them lazily before returning to her litter to lick and preen as they fed.
When Lain had asked if he would move them, he shook his head. “These robes were all moth-eaten to begin with. But you’ll be in charge of bringing her milk in the mornings if you want her to stay.”
Lain had done so eagerly, and watched from spring to early summer as the kittens grew, then one by one wandered off on their own, to hunt mice and seek their fortunes in the world of cats. But one had clung to her longer than the others – a little tabby she’d started calling Rex – and he slept in her bed for weeks until Lain was caught by a High Glinnel and was forced to leave the cat outside for good. But its warm purring against her chest at night was a memory that never left her.
“I can’t,” she said.
“You can,” Morgan said. “If we’re going to build something strong enough to hold what’s coming –”
He cut himself off, jaw locking. “We need to understand how your song interacts with a living structure. This is the smallest risk.”
“It’s still a risk to him. Just not to you.”
His eyes flicked up, their silver defensive. “Everything I do with you is a risk to me.”
She knew the truth of it; the bond made it impossible to doubt. His elaborate self-justifications rang hollow now, replaced by a low-grade terror: of dying, or failing, or her leaving him; and above these, a fear of the world cracking open underfoot.
He turned and set the kit down on a square of folded hide near the center of the sigil circle he’d prepared: old Veinwright lines carved into stone, new ones painted in careful swooping strokes of ash and blood. The symbols glimmered hungrily.
“Lain,” Morgan said quietly, “come here.”
She did come, slow hooves heavy on the stone. The fox kit wobbled in its little nest of hide and went still, perhaps sensing them.
Lain knelt beside it and put her fingers lightly against its back. It was warm, unbearably small. She swallowed. The Tuning picked up her hesitation and echoed it into Morgan and he shuddered.
“We don’t have to do this today,” he said abruptly.
She blinked. The sudden gentleness shook her. “Then why –”
“Because we do have to do it,” he said, voice fraying again. “But I should have… I should have prepared you better. I should have –” He stopped, swallowing hard. “Just try. If it doesn’t work, I take the blame.”
“That won’t bring him back,” she said.
“No,” he agreed quietly. “It won’t.”
The kit nuzzled her fingertip, tiny mouth opening in a weak, confused suckle.
Her heart broke.
Morgan brought a book to her. It wasn’t a language she recognized, but the music she could read, and the lyrics didn’t matter. They never did. It was the tone, the intention that shaped the world. She’d always known that in her heart; it had only been confirmed when she’d been in Vaelun with other Kelthi for the first time.
She began to sing.
She didn’t shape it carefully, the way she had with Saint Fillan’s rites, nor the way she had when the Underserpent’s body had torn itself from the bowl beneath Ivath. It came haltingly and raw, pulled out of her by instinct and dread.
Her voice wove through the room on a trembling thread. It should have been clear and resonant, as Morgan had diagrammed endlessly in his notes. But it lacked the confident harmonics she had used to sooth Mallow’s wounds.
A frightened fox kit cannot be made into anything sacred. But she sang anyway.
The sigils responded first. Their glow deepened, low red turning to a faint sickly yellow, rising and falling like bile in the gut. The air thickened. Her scales prickled.
The kit mewed.
Morgan knelt across from her, hands steady in a way hers were not. His blood-sigil knife hovered over the outer circle, ready to make the final cut that would join resonances.
He murmured her name through the bond. Steady. Anchor me.
But she couldn’t. Her grief for the little creature wobbled the resonance at its root.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
The kit’s pulse fluttered beneath her hands.
Morgan’s eyes sharpened. “Lain, you have to commit. The song won’t settle if you don’t want it.”
“I don’t want it,” she choked.
She felt him feel it, as if someone had slammed a fist into his diaphragm.
The sigils flickered violently. The fox kit arched in a tiny spasm.
“No – no, no,” she gasped, reaching to hold it.
“Don’t touch –” Morgan began, but the reaction had already begun collapsing. The resonance she’d woven unraveled, then imploded. The sigils guttered dark. A crackle of energy snapped between the inner circle and the kit’s small body.
The little fox gave a strangled twitch, and then went terribly still.
Lain couldn’t breathe. The silence that followed felt like a fist closing around her lungs.
Morgan moved first. He swept the sigil knife aside, lunged forward, and caught her wrists before she could touch the kit again, his panic lancing through the bond sharp as lightning.
“Don’t,” he said, voice breaking. “Lain, don’t – it’s done.”
She stared at the tiny form on the hide. Its warmth was already fleeing. Its ribs didn’t move.
“I killed him,” she whispered.
We killed him, the bond corrected savagely, flinging his guilt into her like a stone breaking through water.
“No,” he said hoarsely. “I miscalculated. I never should have – I knew your hesitation would destabilize the – Lain. Lain, look at me.”
She couldn’t.
Her stomach lurched. A wave of nausea pulled through her like bad mullein tincture. She pressed a hand to her mouth, shaking.
Morgan felt that, too, the sickness and the guilt, rising behind her eyes. The Tuning made it impossible for him not to react. He flinched as if he were about to retch himself.
“I’ll bury him,” he said quickly, voice unsteady. “You don’t have to see it – Lain, go sit. Please.”
“Don’t touch me,” she managed.
He obeyed instantly, dropping her wrists as if burned.
She stumbled away from the circle, back hitting the cold wall. The nausea surged again, violent enough she thought she might faint. The little fox’s stillness burned behind her eyes.
Morgan gathered the kit in his shirt, hands trembling despite his precision, and slipped outside by the side passage. The bond dimmed as he put distance between them.
Lain pressed both hands to her face and tried to breathe. Her body shook, stomach lurching again. Deep in her belly, something fluttered as a shift in her awareness, a faint warmth, almost like cramping. She tried to make sense of it. She went to the front room, stumbled to the cot and sat, wrapping the blanket about her.
When Morgan returned, silent and hollow-eyed, she had wiped her face and composed herself as best she could. He stopped several paces away, unwilling to risk the bond’s backlash.
“I chose wrong,” he said quietly. “You weren’t ready.”
She couldn’t tell if he meant that emotionally or technically. Both were true.
“Neither were you,” she said.
He swallowed. The bond cinched tighter around them with the weight of it, with the weight of what they would do again.
Morgan knelt, slowly, as if approaching a wounded animal. “We will learn,” he said, and for once there was no arrogance in it. There was a little fear, and hope, and some fragile thing that seemed apologetic. But she could not bear to look at him.
She closed her eyes. The little fox’s suckling replayed behind her lids.
Beneath that, deeper still, came a tightness in her stomach, and a warmth blooming low, new and frightening.
Morgan crossed the chamber to the stove. The scrape of flint sounded loud in the room. A flame caught. Heat licked outward, and only when the fire was steady did he move again.
He brought her a cup of water, crouching so the cup was level with her hands.
“Drink,” he said.
She took it with shaking fingers. Her stomach lurched again; she blamed grief. Or perhaps it was the sick twist of singing something helpless into death. A subtle wrongness beneath it gave the nausea a new meaning.
Morgan waited until she swallowed. Only then did he speak.
“We have to talk about what happened,” he said.
Her ears flattened.
His voice was soft, but not overly gentle. “It died because the song was wrong. And the song was wrong because you didn’t want it to die.”
She recoiled. “I shouldn’t want it to die.”
“No,” he agreed. “You shouldn’t. But this isn’t singing a prayer, or a healing. You’re doing Veinwork. And Veinwriting is…” He hesitated, searching for a word she could bear. “It’s a practice of iteration.”
She stared, not understanding.
He lifted his hands, palms open, as if showing her they were empty. “Nothing works the first time. Not sigils, not blood-binding, not life-shaping. The first attempts always fail, with new things.”
“I don’t want to kill.”
“I know. I felt that. And that’s why this one died.”
Her eyes flared with anger. “You’re blaming me?”
“No,” he said, and reached to adjust the blanket around her shoulders – slowly, so she could see every inch his hand traveled. “I’m explaining. You didn’t fail from cruelty or carelessness. You failed because you cared more about its life than your task. That is who you are, and that is the obstacle.”
She pulled the blanket tighter. “I don’t want to become like you.”
A faint wince flickered through the Tuning. “You couldn’t,” he said. “I can’t cut away what you feel and leave you hollow. You’ll always know exactly what you’re doing. That’s why this will hurt. But it’s also why you’re the only one who can do it.”
He sat back on his heels. His wings lowered, settling around him like a cloak. “You won’t be ready when the first success comes,” he said. “That will be worse than this. What you shape may breathe. It may move. And it may be wrong.”
A shadow of something old crossed his face, a memory perhaps. “We will have to kill those too. Quickly, cleanly, before they suffer. And before they become dangerous.”
Her stomach rolled again and she pressed a hand to her middle.
Morgan mistook the feeling for despair. He leaned slightly closer, near enough the warmth of him reached her knees.
“I’m not asking you to enjoy this,” he said. “I’m asking you to understand the stakes. If we don’t learn to do this with fox kits, and mice, and other small, simple minds…” He gestured toward the cliff, the distant sea. “...then when the Underveins wake, the world will do this work for us. Cities will fall. People will die by the thousands. The things we can prevent now, we won’t be able to stop later.”
She closed her eyes, tears pushing hot against her lashes.
“I can’t do this,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said, and this time, impossibly, he gentled. “You can. Not alone, not cleanly. But you can.”
“That’s not comfort,” she said.
He paused. “No, perhaps not. But it’s all I know.”
She looked at him then, and saw something like grief. Morgan Balthir, who had once been a machine of certainty, now seemed almost human, flawed and frightened in the firelight, reaching toward her with a hand that still shook from what he’d felt through the bond.
He drew a slow breath. “We’ll rest,” he said. “Then we’ll try again. You’ll practice the resonance on something less alive. An oyster. A seed. But eventually…” he nodded toward the other room. “...eventually you’ll have to do this for real. And more than once.”
“Why does it have to be me?”
“Because you’re the one the Underserpent left us,” he said. Then he released a dark laugh. “And because you’re strong enough to hate me for asking, and still do what needs doing.”
He sat beside her until the fire burned steady and the repetition of waves calmed her nausea. He kept the bond quiet, blunted, so she could only sometimes feel the sharp churn of guilt and something dangerously like tenderness.
And when she finally drifted into a shallow sleep, she thought she heard him murmuring something that might have been a prayer, if he still believed in such things.
