The girl stayed on her own two feet for perhaps five seconds. Then she swayed, tipped, and fell into my arms before the ground could claim her. It took only the barest thread of Essence to keep her upright.
The crowd was still roaring. A few of the humans had joined in, though whether they cheered for Edda or merely for blood, I could not say. The Inkers paced between the stands, arms waving, trying to quell the noise. It did not quell.
Edda gasped against my side, trembling again. "I had thought your mark absorbed the blows," I said. There was no fear this time, just her own body starting to give out.
"Still feel…most of it," she murmured. I almost lost the words beneath the crowd.
I held her up straighter. Ash was beside me a heartbeat later, taking Edda's other arm, and between the two of us the girl stayed standing."Hey, you’re going to be just fine," Ash said. "We’ll get you healed up, alright?" Ash’s gaze found mine. I gave her the barest of nods.
Using the Cradle in the center of this arena would not be wise. Or perhaps it would be nothing at all. A healing mark healing, what could be more ordinary? But I did not know what a green Line was supposed to be capable of. Better to first see whether this Academy's healers were equal to the task.
The Elf had reached the fallen boy. She knelt, pressed two fingers to his neck, and nodded once. "He will live. Bruised ribs, perhaps a fracture. Nothing the infirmary cannot handle." Her gaze went to Edda. "You went too far." Her voice carried all the weight of accusation behind it.
"You should have stopped her then," Ash said before I could. "Wasn’t that why you were here at all?"
The Elf looked at her. Whatever strange fascination she had held for Ash died in that moment. I saw it happen. Her face twisted into the frown she had, until now, reserved for me alone.
"This infirmary of yours. It is a place of healing, correct?" I glanced at Ash. "Do you know where it lies?" She shook her head. So I turned to the Elf instead. "Then you will take us there, girl." The Elf fixed that same glare on me. Her frown deepened, which should not have been possible.
She lifted the injured boy into her arms as if he weighed nothing and strode off without a backward glance.
"Let me handle this," Ash said. "I can carry her better myself." On that, the Hero was almost certainly right. I surrendered the girl to her, and noted, with some distaste, that the surrendering took effort. It would not have, once
Ren was already rushing down the stairs toward an exit, Corin was behind her, jostling everyone in his path. Why they bothered with stairs at all, I could not say. I would have simply leapt. Alisa was gone from where I had seen her last.
"Let’s get outside," Ash said. She motioned to the retreating Elf. The Elf had almost made it to the entryway herself. I nodded, and led. Ash had been right. She carried Edda far more easily than I might have on my own.
Ren nearly ran me down the moment we stepped outside, stopping only at the last possible step. She looked at Edda, and her eyes were wide. "Is she okay?! Let me have a look at her. Edda! Hey, you hearing me!"
"She is fine. Just hurt." Ash said. "She passed out, but I don’t think any of her injuries are that serious." Sure enough, the girl’s eyes were closed. Her breathing was even.
That made Ren pause, just for a moment. A wisp of flame crawled up her arm and died at the elbow. Her Sigil pulsed. Moments more, and the boy, Corin, was racing to catch up. He stopped just shy of us, his breathing ragged. He put both hands on his knees. "Is she- is she okay?"
"She will be," I said. The distance between the stands and where we stood could not have been long, and yet the boy heaved like an imp at the end of a forced march. "Where is this infirmary? Is there someone there who can heal the girl?"
Corin straightened and nodded. "Yeah, it’s not far." He looked at Ren. "You didn't show them the infirmary? On the tour?"
Ren, whom I was now convinced was the worst guide in the history of guides, had the grace to look away.
The infirmary was a long, white room lined with narrow beds. It smelled of herbs. Most of the beds were empty, save for two: one held Tobias and the other held Edda. The boy lay two beds down, face turned to the wall. The Elven Inker was nowhere to be seen.
The healer was an older woman -Ren had called her Jehane- with a Crest on her forearm -a shape of green so intricate it formed an entire forest in miniature. She worked quickly over the unconscious girl, her hands trailing light. The bruising across the girl’s ribs visibly faded. The healer did not speak while she worked. The one time Ren had tried, this Jehane had stopped Ren with a look that might have silenced my own court.
When she was done with the ribs, she straightened and wiped her hands on her apron. She examined Edda’s split lip and the swollen eye, and pressed her palm to Edda’s face. The swelling receded and the split closed.
"She’s fine, just needs her rest. Should wake in a day or so," the healer said. "Don't make too much noise." She shot Ren a look. Only Ren. "Or I'll have to throw the noisemaker out, friend or not." Ren nodded hastily. I had not seen her so compliant before. I would have to learn that look the healer had used.
The healer gathered her instruments and moved towards a door by the corner, muttering as she went. "Third one this week. Yesterday it was some fool with a Crest who doesn’t know his head from his ass. Tried to cycle during a thunderstorm. A thunderstorm…" The door closed behind her, settling the room into quiet.
Ren and Corin pulled chairs to Edda's bedside. Ash settled a little behind them. Only I stood, by the windows, arms folded.
"A ranking match," Ren said, "Edda got into a ranking match. I never thought I’d see the day she did something like that," her voice was low, as if she were just thinking out loud. "And then she used that part of her mark. She said she never would."
"Why? I asked. I had known this Edda had power, and potential. She had reached Line without having an Essence Core at all. I had thought it a lack of will that kept her from standing. I had not known she had chosen to sit.
Ren was staring down at her hands. It was Corin who spoke. "She didn’t want to give them an excuse," he said. "An excuse to be worse than they already are, I mean. They might have some reason for it, but nothing like what they say."
Ash and I looked at each other. "They have reason for it?" Ash asked.
"Like fucking hell they do," Ren growled. Her hands shook at her side."Those bastards just need an excuse. Doesn’t matter how small the excuse is."
Corin looked across at Ren before he spoke. "It's- do you two not know?" How many times had we been asked that question now? He glanced between us, then nodded slowly. "Right…sorry." He tipped his head to me and me alone. "Well, there are always stories about demonbloods who are too violent. Who can’t be allowed in civilized society as they call it. Or if we can, we always need a set of eyes on us."
"There are stories," I repeated. "Whispers and rumors. They would keep you on your knees for whispers and rumors?" The strong and the cruel had never needed an excuse to impose themselves. In my time, the excuses had simply been crafted better.
"They aren’t just rumors," Ren said. She’d forced the words out through clenched teeth.
"What?"
"Sometimes," Ren said, her voice was lower now, "one of our kind snaps. They say it’s us ‘showing our true colors’. A demonblood snaps, ends up taking down anything near them when they do. They say it's because our kind are just…like that. They call those demonbloods smears, get it? Because they were given the gift of Ink, and chose to smear it. Bullshit. What do they expect to happen when they squeeze and squeeze until there’s nothing left? Bastards, the lot of them."
Whatever answer I had expected from Ren, this hadn’t been it. The humans had a reason for their fear then? In my time, they’d had reason and justification aplenty. The demonbloods I had seen in this world weren’t the hordes I had once commanded. They were closer to the Dwarves, near the end, just before I had made their stone halls silent. Even Malachor, strange as he was, did not strike me as violent.
Morrigan came to mind then. She and her faction of demonbloods had been violent. Had attacked an escort of humans. The Inker’s reaction had hinted that it wasn’t the first time. Was she the cause of this? It was hard to believe one woman, even my own former general, could smear an entire race. Then again, once, one woman had damned it.
Still, the word snap sat wrong in me. What did it mean to simply snap? I had seen the wrongness in this world. I had seen it in a phoenix with jagged black wings. I had seen it crawl across the skin of a general who should not be alive. Beasts did not simply turn. The dead did not simply return. Perhaps demonbloods did not simply snap. I had no proof of this, of course. Ash met my gaze. She had come to know me too well.
"It won’t stop," Corin said. His voice was low. "After what happened…Lena’s group will j-just get worse. It isn't only just because of her father, the Marquis, either. She has one of the Crests with her. And it's not just here…we're treated worse most other places, and when word gets out about this-"
"Let them," Ren cut in. "I’ll beat them black and blue. I’ll-"
"It’s not that simple, Ren," Corin murmured. "How many people are you going to beat up? Besides…you're a Sigil. They have worse than Sigils." Ren's mouth closed around a word I could not guess at.
"What about this Ilyasviel?" I asked. "If your concern is the gap in power, the gap in standing between marks, then is she not the strongest at this Academy?" That made them both look up. Then at each other.
"She’s-" Ren bit her lip. "She’s half the reason it’s so bad."
I abandoned my place by the window and stepped closer. "Explain."
"Lena had a brother. It happened almost four years ago. It was better before then, from what some of the others have told me. Anyway, he had promise, or so everyone says." Ren said. "He had a lot of promise. He had a Sovereign. He’d made Sigil at seventeen. That’s rare, ya know. A Sovereign and a Sigil, at seventeen. Everyone says he was hot shit."
"He was sixteen," Corin corrected.
Ren glared at him. "Like it matters. Anyway…he ended up challenging Ilyasviel to a duel. Don’t know why. Probably because he was ranked first in the Sigils, but nobody really cared since Ilyasviel was right there. Anyway, she accepted and-" She paused. "Ilyasviel beat him. No, she destroyed him, even after he couldn’t fight anymore. She didn't kill him, but not because she didn't try. They say he hasn't woken up since." Ren shrugged. The shrug did not reach her eyes
This Ilyasviel had been challenged, and she had crushed her challenger so thoroughly that no one would ever challenge her again. It was brutal. It was effective. It was the kind of thing I would have done. It was the kind of thing I had done.
"And now…everyone whispers about all of you." Ash said quietly.
"Yes…though, Ilyasviel is just one example. There are others. Famous ones. There’s the smears who sometimes attack the Covenant wherever they can. Don’t know why. They destroy one thing or another and disappear. There are stories of demonbloods, who just one day wake up and burn the village that raised them. Those are probably just rumors but…the humans believe them. It’s gotten so bad a lot of people want the Covenant to stop giving them the Ink at all. The Divine herself had to decree that all who are willing and able must be given the Ink." The boy took a deep breath, met our gazes, then dropped his eyes back to the floor.
Herself. So their unknown god was a woman. I filed that away with everything else I knew of the Divine, which was nothing at all.
Neither Ren nor Corin spoke for some time. Ren moved her chair closer to Edda and took her hand, thumb moving slowly across her knuckles.
You should stand anyway. If they push you down, stand again, and make them fall if you must. Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. Those were the words I wanted to say. They would not come. I had watched ten thousand make that very vow before my throne. They had made those vows and more as they charged my hordes. I knew how it ended for them.
It was Ash who finally spoke. "Then show them better," she said. "You don’t have to use force, you can show them with who you are. With actions. Be so undeniably good that the lies can’t hold. Help when no one asks. Eventually, the decent ones will see. They always do." Ash paused. Sighed. "It is not easy, but it is the right way. Besides, I don’t think as many people are with Lena as you think. I bet it’s the same outside here too."
It was a Hero's answer, built on a naivete I had never shared. To walk open-handed toward those who hate you is to bare your throat and call it diplomacy. And perhaps she was right, that this Lena did not command the attention of everyone. It was clear she commanded the attention of enough. It would be the same outside.
"Hamel was different," I said. Ash looked at me. The afternoon light through the windows was warm against my neck. "The people of Hamel were already decent. There was nothing in them that needed us to be lesser. You will recall that none of them seemed to care about our origins." I unfolded my arms. "That is not the case here, amongst these humans. As the girl has said, perhaps there is a reason for their fear." I knew what it was to be hated for reasons. I had given the world centuries of reasons.
Ash’s jaw tightened. She did not argue, which meant she could not. "No action will ever matter," I said, "if you lack the strength to make it matter." The words came out harder than I had intended, with a heat that surprised me. "Else, you will be slaves. No, you are all already slaves, with chains that you chose for yourself. And the day will come when they decide they no longer need slaves at all."
The room was watching me. I had said too much. And said it wearing chains of my own choosing.
"So what’s the answer then?" Corin asked. His gaze had fixed on me with an earnestness I had not thought him capable of. My mouth opened and slowly closed. Simple answers came.
Perhaps they could fight against the humans, though if I understood the shape of the world correctly, that would not go well. Perhaps they should flee and build something for themselves, but if this fear was as deep as these two had said, they would never be allowed to.
"I do not know," I said finally. The words were foreign in my mouth. I knew only this much: I had not been wrong to make Edda stand. Ash met my gaze, and there was warmth in it that I had done nothing to earn
The door opened. It was the Elf who stepped inside. Her face had that smirk again. I did not like it the second time either. Her gaze swept over all of us. Over Tobias, who lay in his bed. Over Edda, who slept peacefully. Over Ren and Corin then Ash. Finally, it settled on me.
Her smirk widened. "The Archon wants to see you, half-demon."