Chapter 18: The Black Mark

The Academy sent a carriage for Nell on Monday morning.

It was a real carriage, black with silver trim, with two grey horses and the Academy crest painted proudly on the door. It stopped outside the healer house in the lower city, and every kid on the street came out to stare, along with some of their parents. Nobody in the lower city could remember an Academy carriage ever stopping there.

Nell sat by the window the whole way up the hill with her nose nearly against the glass, wrapped in her two blankets and the warm coat Mira had bought her with her own allowance, and she didn’t stop talking once.

"Is that the Academy? Is that it? It’s so big! Which tower is yours? Do you have a tower? Do they let commoners have towers?"

"I live in the basement. Next to the laundry."

Nell turned and gave him a look of total betrayal. Mira laughed so hard she had to hang on to the door handle.

"He’s lying. It’s a very nice basement. It has a window."

"It has half a window."

Nell looked back out at the white towers going by and sighed dramatically. "When I’m better, I want a whole window."

Aren looked at the back of her head, at the thin dark hair and the small shoulders under the blankets, and didn’t say anything for the rest of the ride.

The Academy infirmary was the opposite of the healer house in every way: bright, clean and quiet, with white sheets on the beds and tall windows full of sun. No smell of burnt metal, only soap and dried herbs.

The stern grey-haired healer who had fixed Aren’s ribs met them at the door. She looked at Nell, then at Aren, and her mouth tightened slightly. She didn’t like him, that much was painfully obvious. But she knelt in front of Nell anyway, so their eyes were level.

"I’m Healer Brannick. I’m going to look at you very carefully. It won’t hurt. If anything feels strange, you tell me. Understand?"

"Yes, ma’am."

"Good girl."

A second healer came in quietly a few minutes later, an older man with a white beard and gentle hands. Brannick called him Master Orrin. He ran the Academy’s healers, and Aren had heard he only treated the heirs of the great houses, the teachers, and once a year, the King.

’And now my sister. Someone up there wants something.’

They sat Nell on a high bed by the window and listened to her chest with a silver horn. They laid glowing hands on her back, her forehead, her wrists, and watched the light change color under their fingers. They asked about her breathing, her sleep, her fevers. Nell answered everything very seriously, swinging her feet happily.

Then Master Orrin asked her to take off her coat, and Nell’s feet stopped swinging.

She sat there a moment, and then, slowly, she took the coat off. Underneath was an old long-sleeved dress, and Master Orrin gently rolled up her left sleeve.

There was a bandage on her forearm that Aren had never seen before.

"Nell," he said.

She wouldn’t look at him.

Master Orrin unwound the bandage. On the pale skin inside her arm there was a black mark, not the grey of Rift sickness but the black of a hole in the ground at night. It was the size of a coin and it wasn’t round. Thin lines branched out of it in every direction, like tree roots, or cracks in a frozen pond.

The room went quiet.

Master Orrin looked at it, then at Brannick, and something passed between them that Aren didn’t understand and didn’t like.

"How long have you had this, child?"

"Since the summer," Nell whispered. "It was really small. Just a dot." She looked at Aren for the first time, eyes wet. "I didn’t want you to worry. You already worry about everything. You worry so much you don’t sleep."

Aren couldn’t say anything at all.

Master Orrin wrapped the bandage loosely back around her arm, stood, and spoke quietly to Brannick, who nodded and left fast. Aren heard her footsteps going quickly down the corridor, almost running.

"Where’s she going?"

"To fetch the Headmaster."

Headmaster Ysolde Marr arrived ten minutes later, alone, without a clerk, which Aren had never seen. She came in leaning on her black cane and went straight to Nell’s bed without looking at anyone else.

"May I see?" she asked very gently.

Nell held out her arm.

The Headmaster unwound the bandage herself without touching the mark, and bent close to study it, her pale eyes moving slowly along every root, every crack. Her face gave away nothing, but the hand on her cane had gone white at the knuckles.

"When did you last go near a Rift, child?"

"There’s an old one by our street. It closed before I was born, but the scar’s still there. Everyone on our street lives near it."

"Did anything happen there? Anything strange? Did you see or hear something the other children didn’t?"

Nell thought about it. Then, very quietly: "In the summer, I had a dream. There was a voice in it. It came from under the ground." She hesitated. "It said my name."

The Headmaster straightened slowly. She wrapped the bandage back on with careful hands, patted it once, and turned to look at Aren. It was the same look she had given him in her office, the one that went straight through his face to whatever was behind it.

"Outside, please."

They stood in the empty corridor. Through the open door, Aren could see Mira sitting on the bed beside Nell, telling her something that made her giggle.

"It isn’t Rift sickness. It never was. The grey under her skin was her body fighting the mark. The healers in the lower city didn’t know what they were looking at, and there’s no reason they should have."

"Then what is it?"

"An Abyss Mark." She leaned heavily on her cane. "They’re very rare. I’ve seen two in my life, and I’ve lived a long time. Something from the Abyss, something far below the Rifts, sometimes reaches up and touches a person. It leaves a mark. The mark grows. Slowly at first, and then..."

Aren’s mouth was dry. "And when it stops growing?"

She didn’t answer, and that was answer enough.

"How long?"

"With nothing, a year. Perhaps less." She lifted a thin hand before he could speak. "But some things slow it. Abyss Salt, taken every day, keeps the roots from spreading. It’s expensive and hard to find, and the healers here can’t buy it without questions being asked. There are people in the lower city who sell it, I’m told." Her eyes didn’t leave his face. "I imagine a boy who sells rocks would know where."

"And to stop it? To make it go back?"

"There’s a flower. The Abyss Lily. It grows only in Rifts of Rank D and above, in the deepest places, near the cores. One Lily, given at the right time, can push a mark back for years." A pause. "No student of Rank F has ever brought one back. Very few of Rank D have survived trying."

"I’m not asking about students."

"I know you’re not." She turned to go, then stopped and looked back over her shoulder.

"These marks don’t come by chance, Aren. Something reached up from the Abyss and touched your sister. Something chose her. I’d very much like to know why." Her pale eyes held his. "And I suspect, before this is over, so will you."

She walked off down the corridor, her cane tapping on the stone.

He sat with Nell for the rest of the afternoon.

He didn’t tell her what the Headmaster had said. He told her the healers had a medicine that would stop the mark spreading and that he would bring it every week. That part was true. He told her it would take a while but she would get better. He didn’t know if that part was true. He said it anyway, she believed him completely, and he hated how easy it was.

"You’re doing the thing," Nell mumbled at one point. She was lying back on the white pillows, worn out, eyes half closed.

"What thing?"

"The thing Mira says you do. Where you go quiet and count stuff in your head." She yawned. "Promise me you won’t do anything stupid."

"I promise."

"Liar," Nell said, and fell asleep.

Mira was standing at the window, and she had heard all of it. She didn’t say a word, but when he looked up, sshe was looking at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before. Fear.

He counted anyway, sitting by the bed while Nell slept.

Abyss Salt. Old Mag would have it, or know who did. Four or five gold crowns a month, he guessed. His ten percent of the east bank would cover most of that, if Rook kept his word, if the east bank kept earning, and if Rook didn’t decide to feed him to the canal. Cores from the Old Quarry would cover the rest, if he could keep hunting Rank E monsters alone at night without dying.

And the Lily. Rank D Rifts and above. He was Rank E, Level 1. He could barely kill a Quarry Brute by dropping rocks on its head. A Rank D Rift would eat him alive.

A year. Perhaps less.

’Then I get stronger. Faster than anyone ever has.’ He looked at the two names under Anchors at the edge of his vision. Vivienne. Rook. ’And for that, they have to get stronger first.’

The carriage took Nell home at sunset with Mira beside her. Aren walked down to the Academy gate to watch it go. The sky over the city was orange and gold, the river shone in the last light, and somewhere below, the evening bells were starting in the churches of the lower city. It was a beautiful evening. He stood at the gate with his hands in his pockets and tried to remember the last time he’d noticed one.

He went down to Old Mag’s that night.

She listened patiently without interrupting. When he said the words Abyss Salt, her one bright eye narrowed.

"Twelve gold crowns. For one month."

Aren stared at her. "Twelve?"

"It comes from very deep places, stone-seller, and the people who bring it up don’t usually come back twice." She tapped her pipe on the counter. "I can find you one month. Maybe two. After that, you’ll need a better supplier than me."

"Who?"

Mag stayed silent, thinking, and then she leaned slowly forward on her stool.

"There’s a merchant. New in the lower city. Opened a shop on Lantern Street three weeks ago, in a building that’s been empty for twenty years. Nobody saw him move in. Nobody knows where he came from." She lowered her voice. "He sells things from the Abyss that even I can’t get. And he sells them cheap."

"How cheap?"

"Cheap in gold." Her eye glittered in the lamplight. "The people who’ve bought from him say he doesn’t always want gold, child. Sometimes he asks for other things." She sat back. "And nobody I’ve talked to can tell me what his face looks like."