Chapter 188: An Impossible Recovery

(Alash Vortex POV)

Renn gave his orders before James had reached the bottom of the steps.

Four guards on the lookout, and nobody to touch anything. Two at the lip of the ridge, and nobody to go over it, whatever they thought they heard. A runner to the keep for Sorel and a stretcher. Another to the gate to have it shut behind us.

He said all of it in the same level voice he used for seating plans. Only his hands gave him away. He kept them at his sides, and they were very still, as if he had decided that was the only place they could be trusted.

Elizabeth refused the stretcher when it came. James carried her the whole way back along the ridge path, and she let him, which told me more about her condition than anything Sorel would say later.

I walked behind them with Daphne on my left and Sophie on my right. Nobody spoke.

I could feel the other four without looking at them, as I had on the platform. It was never their thoughts, only where each of them was, like the walls of a room in the dark.

At the low wall, Dream Haven was still lying where I had left it, white against the grey stone. I called it, and it came to my hand.

The guard whose arm Daphne had made heavy was standing a few paces off. He watched the pillow come to me, and after that he looked at Daphne.

"Sorry," she said to him, very quietly.

He didn’t seem to know what to do with that. Eventually he nodded, like a man answering a question.

Lyssairia was on the wall above the gate when we came through it. She didn’t come down. She watched us all the way in, and her tail didn’t move once.

***

The infirmary at Halden was a long whitewashed room on the ground floor of the keep, with eight beds and a smell of vinegar. Sorel was waiting in the doorway with her sleeves already rolled up.

She looked at the five of us. She looked at Elizabeth in James’s arms.

"That bed," she said. "Everyone else, sit. Nobody uses anything. Not a spark, not a breeze, not a Barrier. If I see so much as frost on a windowsill, I will know who did it."

Sophie, who still had frost melting off her sleeves, sat down very carefully.

Sorel went to Elizabeth first.

She looked at the shoulder, and the closed skin, and the ribs. She pressed her fingers along each one and listened to Elizabeth breathe.

"Who did this?"

"I did," I said.

"It’s good work." She didn’t make it sound like praise. She made it sound like a fact she was writing down.

She pinched the tip of Elizabeth’s finger white and watched how slowly the colour came back. Then she touched the back of Elizabeth’s hand, and her mouth went thin.

"How much did she lose before you closed it?"

"Too much," I said. "It had been bleeding since the first minute."

Sorel turned her head toward the door, where one of the guards was standing. "Warm water with salt and honey in it, a jug of it. And every blanket on this floor."

She looked back at Elizabeth. "You’ll drink all of it, and then you’ll drink more. Your feet go up on that bolster. You don’t stand without me, and if your hands aren’t warm by dark, someone fetches me whatever I’m doing."

Elizabeth looked as though she wanted to argue, and didn’t have the blood for it.

"The channels?" said Sorel.

"I couldn’t touch them."

"No. Nobody can." She took Elizabeth’s wrist, laid two fingers against the inside of it, and sent a thread of her own mana in to draw Elizabeth’s out.

I knew how that went. I had lain on enough examination beds to know it by heart. The thread goes in, your mana rises to meet it, it runs up your arm toward your core and back, and the healer reads what it found on the way.

Sorel’s face did nothing for a long moment. After that it did something I had never seen it do. It went blank, like a page when the ink has run off it.

She took her fingers away. She put them back.

"Your Highness," she said. "What rank were you this morning?"

"D-Grey."

Sorel didn’t answer. She went to James and took his wrist without asking, and after him Sophie’s, and Daphne’s, and mine.

By the time she reached me, the escort healer had come in behind her with his bag, and she sent him round the beds after her to do it again.

He did. He was slower than she was, and more careful, and when he reached the end of the row he stood there holding Daphne’s wrist and looking at Sorel as if he hoped she would tell him he had done it wrong.

"C-Black," he said.

"Yes."

"All five of them."

"Yes."

"That isn’t..." He stopped. "They can’t have."

"They have," said Sorel.

***

She went down the row again, and this time she talked while she did it, as she had when we were all sitting on crates in Merrow’s courtyard. It was easier to listen to than silence.

"Core walls," she said, at Elizabeth’s bed. "Stable."

At James’s: "Stable."

At Sophie’s: "Stable."

She stopped at Daphne’s and held her wrist much longer than the others, and then said it again. "Stable."

At mine she didn’t say anything at all for a while.

"Two stages," she said at last. "Through D-White and over the threshold in one go. The White-to-Black step takes most people years. I have seen people try to force it. I have seen what their core walls looked like afterward."

"What did they look like?" said Sophie.

"Cracked." Sorel let go of my wrist. "Yours aren’t. Not one of you. I’ve never seen anything like it."

"Is that good?" said Sophie.

"It’s impossible," said Sorel. "That isn’t the same thing."

She went down the row a third time, slower still, and now she was reading channels, not cores.

"Your bodies are behind," she said. "All of you. Your cores went up two stages, and your channels are still built for the rank you were this morning. They’re straining to carry what’s above them."

Sophie had picked up the cup of water from the stool beside her bed. Frost ran up the outside of it before it reached her mouth, white and quick, and the water inside rattled against the clay because her hand was shaking.

She put it down very carefully and sat on both her hands.

Sorel didn’t turn round. "That," she said, "is what I mean."

"Will they catch up?" said Elizabeth.

"They’re already catching up." Sorel said it as though it offended her.

"Faster than I have ever seen a body adjust to anything. If I’d been asked an hour ago how long this would take, I would have said months of supervised work, with a good chance of permanent damage at the end of it."

"And now?"

"Now I don’t know." She looked at each of us in turn.

"So hear me clearly, because I am only going to say this once. Your bodies are catching up faster than they have any right to. They have not caught up."

She let that sit.

"If any of you tries to use what you’ve just been given, you will tear your channels, and I will not be able to fix it, and neither will he."

She meant me.

"No cultivation. No attributes. When we’re back at Zenith, you train slowly, under supervision, and you do it the boring way. Is that understood?"

Five people said yes. I said it fifth, and on time, and she looked at me as if that was the most suspicious thing that had happened all afternoon.

***

She came back to Elizabeth last, and she frowned.

She had her fingers on Elizabeth’s wrist again. Afterward she crossed the room, took mine, and frowned at that too.

"Your channels," she said to Elizabeth, "are settling faster than the others’. Not much. But they are." She turned her head to me. "And your chest has no business being as quiet as it is. I know what your Barrier strain looked like two days ago."

I had decided on the ridge that I would answer for it. Answering for it meant saying it out loud, in a room, to someone who had to write it down.

"I used Healing Bond on her," I said.

The escort healer stopped moving.

Sorel didn’t say anything. She looked at me for long enough that I wondered whether she had heard. Then she let go of my wrist.

"Theoran’s order," she said.

"I know."

"His personal order. Not one, not for any reason."

"I know. I knew it when I did it."

"I’ll have to report it."

"I know," I said. "I’d rather you did."

"I said yes," said Elizabeth from the bed. "He told me everything first. I said yes."

"That’s yours to tell the Headmaster," said Sorel, without looking away from me. "It doesn’t change what he did."

"No," I said. "It doesn’t."

Sorel was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, she sounded tired.

"Then I know why the two of you are recovering faster. That’s one thing. It lasts an hour, and I can wait out an hour."

She looked down the row of beds. "It doesn’t explain the other three. James, Sophie and Daphne weren’t bonded today, and their bodies are adjusting just as fast as yours."

"So it’s two things," said James.

"It’s two things," said Sorel. "One I can name. One I can’t."

She sat down on the end of an empty bed, which I had never seen her do while there were patients in a room, and wrote for a long time.

***

When the hour was up, she examined us all again.

Her hands were warm again, long before dark, and Sorel said so to the page without looking at me.

Elizabeth’s channels had stopped settling faster than anyone else’s. So had my chest. The pull behind my breastbone was still there, smaller than it had been that morning, and it would take its own time over the rest.

The other thing hadn’t stopped. All five of us were still adjusting, and still faster than Sorel liked.

"There’s something else in you," she said to Elizabeth, with her fingers on her wrist. "I can’t tell what. It isn’t the strain, and it isn’t the bond, as far as I can see one. This equipment isn’t made to look for it."

Elizabeth looked at me. I didn’t have anything to give her.

The injuries hadn’t gone anywhere, and Sorel listed them as she went, half to us and half to the page.

Elizabeth’s channels were overdrawn from palm to shoulder, and whether any of it would stay, nobody could say yet. She had lost enough blood to keep her in bed for days, whatever the first hour had done for her, and she wasn’t to sit a horse until Sorel said so.

James’s spatial channels were exactly as damaged as they had been yesterday, and he was to keep his hand off his chest and his feet on the ground.

Sophie’s core was drained nearly dry, and she was still running hot enough to steam. Sorel looked for a long moment at the dried blood under her nose, which Sophie kept forgetting to wipe away, and wrote that down too.

Daphne’s wrists went back into wrappings for the first time in four days. She watched Sorel wind them without any expression at all.

My Barrier strain was smaller, and still there.

"Advancement doesn’t heal anything," said Sorel, tying off Daphne’s wrist. "It only puts more weight on what’s already hurt. Remember that, all of you, the next time you feel strong."

***

Late in the afternoon, Renn sent for James and Sophie to give their accounts in the gatehouse.

Sorel let James go at once. She let Sophie go after an argument I could hear from my bed, on three conditions: a chair the whole time, a guard at her elbow both ways, and back within the hour or Sorel would come and fetch her herself.

They went out across the courtyard. I lay on the bed with Dream Haven under my head and felt them go: across the room, through the door, across the yard. Somewhere around the gatehouse, the feeling of them thinned out, and then I couldn’t find it at all.

When they came back through the courtyard an hour later, it returned before they reached the door.

So it only worked when we were close. I filed that away. It was the first thing about this afternoon that I actually understood.

’System.’

[Yes.]

It was back. I hadn’t realised how much I had been waiting for it until it answered.

’Status.’

The display opened where it always did.

Core Rank: C-Black

I looked at that line for a long time before I made myself look further down.

Sub Quest 1: Healing Bond Path 1. Six of seven. The vessel objective: four of four. The Main Quest sat where it always sat, still open, still asking for SS+.

’Daphne.’

[The vessel connection with Daphne Spinster is unchanged. It remains outside the Healing Path.]

’Why are our bodies adjusting this fast?’

[The fragments are assisting the adaptation.]

’How?’

[I cannot determine the full mechanism.]

’Is it safe?’

[It is safer than it would otherwise be. It is not safe.]

That was the most useful thing it had said all day, and also the least comforting.

’Could it happen again?’

[I cannot determine that.]

I closed the status. The infirmary came back, whitewashed and quiet, smelling of vinegar.

Five cores had jumped two stages because of something inside us that only I knew was there. Sorel would write that she couldn’t explain it. Theoran would read that she couldn’t.

I couldn’t explain it either, not all of it. The System couldn’t. But I knew where to start looking, and I was the only person in the kingdom who did.

I lay there and thought about the ridge.

The guards hadn’t been able to walk into that space. Renn hadn’t. They had pressed their palms against nothing and stayed outside it.

Elizabeth hadn’t walked into it at all. It had formed around her where she stood, and closed her in. The other four of us had crossed its edge as though there were nothing there.

And the creature had never once looked at anyone’s face. It had looked at the centre of Elizabeth’s chest, and then at mine, and Daphne’s, and the others’. It had looked at exactly the places where we carried the one thing the five of us had in common.

I couldn’t prove any of it. I didn’t know the rules of that space, or why it had closed around her and then let the rest of us in. But I knew what I was looking at.

It had come for the Key.

And it was still out there, somewhere beyond the ridge, hurt and confused and alive.

***

Renn came in at dusk.

He didn’t knock. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking down the row of beds as he had looked at the five of us on the platform, and I watched him count again. He got to five.

Then he came and stood at the foot of my bed.

"Vortex," he said. "A word."

The others went quiet. Daphne, two beds down, turned her head toward us and didn’t turn it back.

"I’ve had every guard who was on that ridge in my gatehouse this afternoon," said Renn. "I’ve had James and Lady Trohan. Their accounts agree, which is more than accounts usually do."

He took a folded sheet out of his coat, and didn’t open it. He didn’t need to.

"Her Highness vanished from the parapet. Her guard sounded the hold. You and Lady Spinster held at the low wall, as ordered. Nobody came near you. Nobody told you anything. The runner passed you with his head down and said nothing, because I’d trained him to say nothing."

"And then you broke the hold." He still hadn’t opened the sheet. "My man at the low wall heard you say it. ’It’s Elizabeth.’ Nobody had said her name to you. Nobody on that ridge had said it to anyone."

He let that sit.

"Then you went straight to the lookout, and you walked through a wall that I couldn’t walk through, as if you already knew who was on the other side of it."

The room was very quiet. Even Sophie had stopped breathing.

"Before anyone could have told you she was missing," said Renn, "you knew."

He looked at me, and waited.

"How?"