CHAPTER 10: WHAT THE DARK DOESN'T OWE YOU
The humming had stopped somewhere above him, faint and far off, like a candle behind a wall. Isakk stood in the black with Xerile, and neither of them moved for a long while.
"You're sure," she said.
"No."
"Good. A boy who's sure of something like this is a boy who hasn't understood the offer." She studied him, arms wrapped around her knees, small in a shape that wasn't really hers. "I told you what it costs. The soft parts go first. The parts that fix fences and carry water and say thank you like they mean it."
"I heard you."
"Then say it back to me. Say what you think I just gave you."
Isakk was quiet for a moment. The dark pressed close, patient, the way it always was down here, and he thought of Tomas's hand waving off his thanks, and Sable's stick sword, and a bowl of stew he hadn't earned.
"You're telling me the world already took most of that from me a long time ago," he said. "Camp did it. Wideroth did it. I just got good at pretending some of it grew back."
Something in Xerile's face shifted, not quite a smile. "Closer than most get."
"So what's left to lose that the world hasn't already had a turn with?"
"Everything you built in a week." Her voice was flat, almost gentle, which was worse than cruelty from her. "You think because the camp couldn't kill the good in you, nothing can. That's not true. It was smaller then. Softer target now, because you let it grow back out in the open where anyone could see it. Diavlos saw it. That's why he burned it."
Isakk didn't answer that right away. He thought about the fire, and the smell, and Sable's hands wrapped around a wrist that would never be warm again.
"The world's already dark," he said finally. "Darker than anything you could hand me. I've seen what it does without your help. Corpses in a pit. A baby taken for parts. A man laughing while he whips a woman for singing wrong. You think your curse is going to be the thing that finally tips me over?" He almost laughed, and it came out rough, more breath than sound. "I've been standing at the edge of that a long time, Xerile. I know what it looks like down there. I'm not scared of falling into something I've already been swimming in since I was six years old."
"That's a brittle kind of brave," she said. "The kind that snaps instead of bending."
"Maybe. But brittle still holds a shape till it breaks. I'd rather hold a shape for as long as I can than never pick one up at all." He looked at her, or the idea of her, in the endless dark. "Give it to me. All of it. I'm not asking you to promise it'll be clean. Nothing's ever been clean for me. I'm asking you to stop deciding for me what I can carry."
Xerile watched him a long moment, something old and tired moving behind her eyes.
"Four hundred years," she said quietly, "and I don't think anyone's ever said that to me before."
"Said what?"
"Asked me to stop deciding for them." She stood, and where a small girl had crouched a moment before, something vaster unfolded, black and endless, wings of smoke and old starlight spreading out into a dark that had no edges to hit. "Very well, Isakk. No half measures. No gentle hand. You'll wake up something other than what you fell asleep as. Don't blame me for what's waiting on the other side of that."
"I won't."
"You will," she said, almost fondly. "Everyone does. But I'll let you find that out yourself."
The dark split open like a wound, and the last thing he heard before the world came roaring back was her voice, quieter than he'd ever heard it.
"Try not to prove me wrong about you. I've had enough disappointment for one lifetime."
Captain Doran Ashfeld arrived at what was left of Aldenmere three days after the fire, at the head of six riders and a supply wagon that had nothing left to deliver to.
He was not a young man, and the years showed in the grey at his temples and the deliberate way he moved, like someone who had learned the cost of rushing into things a long time ago and never forgot the lesson. His armor was plain, well kept, without the gaudy trim Isakk had come to associate with nobility. He dismounted at the edge of the square and stood there for a long moment, just looking, his jaw tight, before he said anything at all.
"Gods," he said quietly. Not a curse. Something closer to a prayer, and a useless one.
His men fanned out behind him without needing to be told, checking the wreckage, the well, the bodies that hadn't been claimed. Doran walked the square alone, slow, careful where he stepped, and it was several minutes before he found the one house still standing at the end of the lane, door bolted, a stool wedged under the latch from the inside.
He knocked. Not loud. Almost apologetic.
"If anyone's in there," he called, "I'm Captain Doran Ashfeld, out of the Ninth Watch. I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here because someone rode two days to tell us this village stopped answering its signal fires."
Silence, and then the scrape of a stool being dragged away, and the door opened on a girl no older than seven, ash still in her hair, and behind her, in the dim light of the room, a boy sitting up in a bed that wasn't his, skin healed over in patches that still looked wrong, too smooth, too new, like something that had grown back faster than it should have.
Doran's eyes went to the boy's right hand before anything else. He didn't reach for his sword. He didn't so much as flinch. He only looked, the way a man looks at a storm on the horizon, calculating, careful, already deciding what kind of weather this was going to be.
"That's a sigil," he said, not a question.
Isakk said nothing. His hand curled instinctively, too late to hide it.
"I'm not going to pretend I don't know what that is," Doran said, and there was no accusation in it, only a tired sort of honesty. "I've seen marks like that twice before in twenty years of service. Once on a man who died screaming three days after he got it. Once on a woman who used it to save an entire garrison from a flood that shouldn't have been survivable." He crouched slowly, so he was closer to Sable's height than the boy's, and kept his hands visible, open. "I don't know which kind of mark you're carrying, son. I'm not going to guess. But I'd like you to tell me, because a village doesn't burn to the ground overnight without a reason, and I need to know if that reason is standing in front of me or if it's already gone."
"It's gone," Isakk said. His voice came out rougher than he meant it to, still healing along with the rest of him. "Wasn't me. Wasn't anything you could stop with six riders and a wagon, Captain."
"Then tell me what it was, and let me be the judge of whether we could've stopped it or not." Doran's eyes flicked briefly to Sable, gentle, and back to Isakk. "What's your name?"
"Isakk."
"No house name?"
"Never had one."
Something in Doran's expression shifted, not surprise, more like a man confirming something he'd already suspected. "Slave conscript, then. Which camp?"
Isakk's jaw tightened. He thought of Wideroth's blade sunk through a skull, of a dead alchemist drained to nothing in her own tent, of every reason a captain of the empire's watch might have to put him in chains the moment the true answer left his mouth.
"Does it matter," he said carefully, "if I tell you I deserted a camp run by a man who deserved everything that happened to him?"
Doran was quiet for a long moment. Behind him, his men had gone still, listening, waiting on their captain's word the way soldiers always did, but Doran didn't look at them. He kept his eyes on Isakk, steady, unreadable in a way that Wideroth's face had never once managed to be.
"It matters less than you'd think," he said finally. "I've served this empire twenty years, and I've buried more good men under bad commanders than I care to count. I'm not going to pretend every officer wearing a noble's crest deserves the loyalty it demands." He glanced past Isakk, into the room, at Tomas's empty chair, the cold hearth, the blanket still folded the way an old man had left it. "Whatever happened in that camp, we'll get to it. Right now I've got a burned village, a dead population I still need a count of, and a boy with a demon's mark on his hand claiming none of it was his doing. So why don't you start there, Isakk. Tell me what did this. And tell me true, because I've got six men here who are going to have to write reports on whatever you say, and I'd rather they write down something that keeps this village's memory honest than something that gets you locked in a cell for a crime you didn't commit."
For the first time since the fire, Isakk found himself looking at someone wearing the empire's colors and not immediately expecting a blade or a whip in return.
He didn't trust it. Not yet. But he opened his mouth anyway, and started, slowly, to tell the truth.