Chương 32: 1.31. All My Strength

Annalise lifted her daughter from the wheelbarrow. Ofelia came up with a yelp of pain.

"Mom." She sounded like the sixteen-year-old girl she wasn't.

"It hurts."

"I know, honey. A few seconds more. Just a few seconds." Annalise carried her daughter through the wide coach house door. Seth hurried after. A clattering sound rose from within the carriage as Tiago ransacked it. He emerged with a folded gray cloth, which he threw across the ground and flattened out until it was the size of a picnic blanket. Stitched across it in black embroidery thread was a circle of spidery runes and interconnected lines.

"Door, Seth," he said.

"Huh?" Tiago tugged a corner to pull the circle true.

"Shut the door." Faces peered at the coach house from nearby buildings. People paused on the road beside the inn. When they saw the tableau before them, many picked up their pace into panicky avoidance. Seth found a pullchain hanging from the ceiling and tugged. A heavy tri-panel curtain came grinding down across the coach house's entrance and cut the world beyond it into muffled abstraction. Annalise dropped to a knee and painstakingly placed Ofelia in the middle of the cloth circle.

"Can you move your leg over?"

"I can't—I can't feel it."

"That's okay." Annalise shifted it instead.

"We'll fix you. Sunshine." She beckoned Tiago.

"Sword." Tiago hunkered next to his mother. The executioner blade—freshly wiped clean of the blood it had spilled today—sat across his lap.

"Ready." Annalise whipped her open longcoat off and laid her palm on an unadorned piece of the blanket. Seth craned his neck to see what the al Ydrises were doing. On Annalise's forearm, a cuff tattoo aligned perfectly with a gap in the circle. The Verdugo rested her other hand on the wide steel plane of her sword.

"Do it, Tiago." Tiago reached for the abacus set into the fuller, took a lit dynamo bead between thumb and forefinger, and with visible effort, as if fighting a magnetic field, clicked it from its glowing row into the darkened dynamos opposite it. Seth knew barely anything about hexis magic and hexis law but even he knew that what he was witnessing was profoundly illegal. Magic using a sacrificed kindred's hexis. Blood magic. The sword flared with a lambent green. Ofelia let out a pained, exhausted groan.

The blood in her throat crackled and popped in her exhalation. The leg she hadn't been able to move folded upward, knee to the air. Annalise's fingers gathered in the cloth.

"Talk to me, Feeli. How's the pain?"

"I can deal," Ofelia said, through a jaw so clenched Seth feared for her enamel.

"I can —""Tiago." Annalise interrupted her agonized daughter.

"Give me another one." Tiago's brows were low and stormy.

"This gets rid of all we gained here."

"I don't give a fuck," Annalise snarled.

"Another."

"I just want it known."

"It is fucking known, Tiago. I'll not watch my daughter hitch and hobble for the rest of her fucking life. Now by the hairy left nut of St. Hallas, give me another." Tiago clacked another bead from its place. Another burst of glowing green. Ofelia pressed her fingertips to her abdomen. Through the torn black fabric, the wound was gone. Not even a scar to mar the ink on her skin. Her breathing evened. She sighed and lay flat, arms wide like a starfish.

"You didn't have to do that," she mumbled.

"That second one. You didn't—""You're all right?" Annalise prompted, and when she nodded, seized her into a bearhug. Ofelia was so thin, and her mother so broadly shouldered, that she nearly disappeared into the strength and the softness. Seth wondered how many holes he'd be willing to have poked in him to be held like that.

"What happened?" Annalise asked, her infinite gentleness so at odds with her brawny embrace.

"A man came to us on our way to you. Pointed us to a pair of scarecrows." Ofelia wriggled partway out of Annalise's bosom. A limpness remained in her despite the repaired flesh. Whatever this magic was had evidently taken a great deal out of her.

"I don't know how, but they went mad. Possessed by seraphs, I think."

"One of them said Ydris," Seth added. His words reintroduced Annalise to the world outside Ofelia. Her head snapped around with a fury that dropped Seth's heart into his stomach. She released her dazed daughter onto the sheet." You," she barked. He felt the syllable like a slap. He fought his feet to a standstill as Annalise stood. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Mom." Ofelia reached weakly for her mother's departing arm.

"No, mom, he saved me—" Annalise swept past Seth. Her massive hand snagged Tiago's shirt collar and tugged his face to within an inch of hers.

"You do not hesitate when I give you an order, Santiago al Ydris." A muscle in her jaw twitched with her barely stoppered anger.

"You understand? Not when your sister is in pain like that." Seth felt the hairs on the back of his neck settle.

"Mom." Tiago's hands balled into fists.

"It's been years since we've been this low coming into Fall. I don't want to do '36 again. If we want to stay out of the Winter War—""It's not we. I'm the Verdugo. I face the consequences if we don't hit quota. I go out past the deathspell. Not you. And I'm your mother, and I'm your commanding officer, and I love you, but when I give you an order you follow my fucking order, you understand?" Tiago's breath whistled through his nose. He nodded.

"Tell me you understand."

"Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry." Annalise stepped aside." That you tell your sister." Tiago lifted his gaze from the ground to his sister with strongman effort.

"I'm sorry, Ofelia."

"That's quite all right." Ofelia gingerly felt around the patch of graphite blood on her stomach.

"A reminder of how it feels to be stabbed is worthwhile every handful of years, I suppose." She stuck a finger through the puncture in her shirt.

"I liked this tunic, though. Damn." Annalise underwent a whole-body unclenching. Shoulders dropped, muscles relaxed, and the warmth returned to soften the sharp lines of her face. She pulled Tiago into an insistent hug.

"Love you, Sunshine."

"Love you too." Tiago managed a deflated grin.

"Even if you blew up my spot in front of il Gutierre."

"He'll keep mum." Annalise released her son and threw an arm around his shoulder.

"Won'tcha, Seth?" Seth sealed an imaginary zipper over his mouth.

"Apologies aside, we're banjaxed for Sondam." The Orwinese slang was peculiar in Tiago's bone-dry central continent accent.

"We have to make up for it."

"I know we do." Annalise mussed Tiago's hair and released him.

"My little taskmaster here." Her face grew solemn again as she turned to Seth.

"Il Gutierre. Come with me." He tried not to feel like one of Annalise's condemned clients as he followed her from the coach house. She led him through a cordoned-off door into the roadhouse's taproom, which had closed early for the day, its chairs stacked and looming atop tables like silent jurors.

"I'm sorry too," he said, as she shut the door behind them.

"What?"

"I'm sorry. We should have come and gotten you before—" She pulled him into her arms. She held him there. The same vast, encompassing embrace she'd given Ofelia, no poked holes required. The horrible tension of the afternoon fled him like an exorcised possessor-seraph.

"You saved her," she whispered.

"You saved my daughter's life. My whole fucking world. You saved her."

"I'm the reason—""Seth," she rumbled, low in her throat.

"Shut up." He shut up. Her thumb drifted up and couched at the shallow cleft of his chin. Her tongue peeked out to dampen the pillows of her lips.

"If I kiss you," she whispered, half to herself, "it ruins everything."

"Probably should have thought of that before you got this close," he whispered back. A smile flickered through the unvarnished desire dominating her face.

"I was kinda counting on something interrupting us by now." A second's stillness. But nothing did. The prominent peak of her nose brushed his. Her breath had a honey-sweet tang to it, like mead. One inch. One minuscule inch between him and a vast, impossible new life. She'll kiss you back, and then she'll panic. You have to give her an out.

"If you don't wanna kiss me," he said, "I'd happily just cop a feel." She shoved him away, laughing.

"You little fuckin' pest, you." He grinned back, even though it had been two-thirds a joke at most.

"Front or back. I'm not picky."

"Got such a horn on you."

"Me? What happened to all that right here against the wagon stuff?"

"That was a turnip wagon," Annalise said." My carriage is posh. Can't knock boots against it. I'm still making payments on it."

"So you're not mad?"

"Sure I was. Mad and scared and all. But only pieces of me, and not the sensible ones. As tempestuous as all the head malarkey can be, it gives you good practice on filtering all the little bits of yourself. Knowing when your dramatic bits are acting up and the like."

"We should have come to get you," he said.

"Lay off that, il Gutierre." She rolled her eyes.

"Cosmically speaking, you should've, yeah. But how were you to know those husks were gonna go after you? I still don't understand it myself." She sighed.

"Fuckin' seraphs. Bastard things. We're gonna need to do another hunt before long, I think. Tiago'll skin me otherwise, sure, and he'll be right to." Seth recalled Tiago's trembly rejoinder.

"What happened in '36?"

"Missed quota," Annalise said.

"Long story. But I ended up in the Winter War that year. Served a couple weeks on the front, killed a few seraphs to make up for the difference."

"Shit." Seth had heard many tales of the Winter front. None of them good.

"Thank the saints you made it back."

"Wasn't so bad. I'd already been through it once, after all. And this time I had my own fancy tent and a rank of spearmen at my command. We did some pretty work. And we'll do more of it on the way to Fontana. If there's unlit in the area, that means there's a seraph to find."

"This one said Ydris. Do you know why?"

"I imagine it's one I've killed before. They have grudges, some of them. Nothing to fuss about." She raised an eyebrow at him.

"You'll be all right? If we track another few down before the season ends?"

"I fight seraphs now, remember?" He tapped the side of his nose.

"Anna, I'm less sure about." She snorted.

"I will be less of a cunt this time. I'll chant it at myself during the changeover. No cuntery, no cuntery, no cuntery."

"Does that work?" She waggled her hand noncommittally.

"I might try and give you some shitehawk line about getting Ofelia hurt. I am telling you face-to-face right now that if I do, please remember what I said here and invite me to eat shit."

"I would, but I worry for my neck."

"I'll be a sore bitch at you, maybe. But that's all. Believe this, Seth, 'cause I swear it on my sword." She dared to draw close to him again. Her voice dropped.

"Keep faith with me and mine, and none of me will raise a hand to you. All my strength is for protecting the ones I love. Never, ever, ever for hurting them. All right?" His legs went into that mid-dream numbness again, like they had when she'd seemed so full of rage at him.

"All right."

"Good." She smiled and leaned back against the door to the square.

"C'mon now, 'fore I get all breathy at you again." She opened the door back to Sondam, and he followed, her voice ringing through his mind with a rhythm that nearly drowned out the whole world. All my strength is for protecting the ones I love. The ones I love.