Chapter 16 — The Blood Relic

I could not sleep, again, and so before dawn I went looking for Maren instead of waiting for our lesson.

I found her in the small stone cottage at the edge of the training yard, already awake, a lamp burning low on the table and a whetstone in her hand moving in slow, practiced circles against the edge of a blade. She did not look up when I came in, which told me she had heard about the attack already — the household would have been buzzing with it since Kael's rider arrived — and had been waiting to see whether I would come to her or wait to be summoned, the way a good teacher waits for a student to choose the harder path on her own.

"You're alive," she said. "Good. I'd have hated to lose a student this early."

"Someone shot at me."

"I heard." She set the blade down, the whetstone's rhythm finally stilling. "You want to know if it has anything to do with the stone."

I sat across from her without being invited, my whole body still faintly trembling from the night before. "Does it?"

Maren was quiet for a long moment, turning the whetstone over in her scarred hands as though weighing how much of an old, carefully buried truth she was prepared to hand over, and when she finally spoke, her voice had lost all its usual gruffness.

"Fifteen years ago," she said, "your mother came to this house as a bride nobody in Vale had asked for. Your father married beneath what his own family wanted for him — beneath in the political sense, I mean; she came from a small house, no great name, no useful alliances. Nobody understood why he chose her. He never explained it, not to his own steward, not to his own mother. He simply brought her home, and married her within the month, and from the day she arrived, strange things began happening around her that everyone agreed, very quickly, not to discuss."

"What kind of things?"

"The boundary stones responding to her, the way one responded to you. Doors that had never opened opening. Once, a storm that broke exactly at the hour she wept, and stopped exactly when she stopped." Maren's scarred jaw tightened, old memory visibly surfacing behind her eyes. "Your father had it managed. Quietly. A great deal of coin changed hands to keep it out of common talk, and those of us who saw too much were encouraged, firmly, to forget what we'd seen."

"You didn't forget."

"No," Maren agreed. "I never did."

She rose, crossed to a locked chest in the corner of the cottage, and drew out a small object wrapped in oiled cloth — a plain iron ring, old and pitted, bearing no ornament I could see, the kind of plain, unremarkable thing a person might easily overlook even while holding it.

"This was hers," Maren said. "I kept it, after. I don't entirely know why, except that it seemed wrong to let it disappear along with everything else, the way so much of her had already been made to disappear by the time I thought to object. I've never shown it to anyone. I'm not certain I should be showing it to you."

"Then why are you?"

"Because you already found the stone on your own," Maren said, "and because I watched your face just now when I mentioned the storm, and you didn't look surprised. You looked like you already knew." She held the ring out, her weathered hand steady despite whatever this decision was costing her. "Touch it, if you're going to. Or don't. I won't force either choice on you."

I took it.

The moment the iron touched my palm, the small stone cottage seemed to fall away entirely.

I stood somewhere else — a room I did not recognize, candlelit, hung with tapestries older than any I had seen at Vale or Draven both. A woman knelt at the center of it, dark hair loose, hands pressed flat against a floor inlaid with a pattern of interlocking silver lines that pulsed, faintly, like something breathing in its sleep. I knew, without knowing how I knew, that this was my mother, younger than I had ever seen her, her face drawn tight with a fear so total it bordered on grief.

Never let them open the gate, she said, and her voice was the same voice from the basin, the same words I had already half-heard once before, only now they did not break off. Now they continued. Not for power. Not for peace. Not even to save someone you love. Once it opens, it does not close again — not fully, not ever — and everything on the other side remembers exactly how long it's been waiting.

She lifted her head, and for one impossible, vertiginous instant her eyes met mine, across whatever gulf of years and memory separated us, and I understood she was not speaking to some faceless future audience. She was speaking to me. She had always been speaking to me, across all the years I had never known to listen.

Liora. If you are seeing this, it means I failed to tell you myself. It means I ran out of time.

The vision shattered like glass.

I came back to myself on the floor of Maren's cottage, the iron ring still clutched in my white-knuckled fist, my whole body shaking, tears on my face I had not felt fall. Maren was kneeling beside me, her scarred hand gripping my shoulder hard enough to bruise, her weathered face white with something that looked, for the first time since I had met her, very much like fear.

"What did you see?" she demanded. "Liora. What did you see?"

I opened my mouth to answer her, and found I could not speak at all — because somewhere beneath the vision, beneath my mother's borrowed grief and my own returning breath, I had felt something else. A second pulse, faint and cold, uncoiling deep in my chest like something very old finally beginning, after fifteen quiet years, to wake.