Aldric Thornmoor's Arc

Chapter 11 of 16

Wanda got Aldric two streets before his knees gave. She pulled his arm across her shoulder and half-carried him into an alley behind a shuttered stall. The winged eye had turned east. It would reach the hall before he could walk there. His side was still bleeding through the cloak, and every breath pulled shorter than the last. "You can't stand in front of the council like this," Wanda said. "You'll be dead before the doors open." She pressed her palm flat to his wound. The heat was steady, not burning. It slowed the bleeding but did not close it. "Fire seals skin. It doesn't fix what's under it." Aldric wrote on his stub. THE WELL. THE OLD ONE. He tapped it twice. Wanda knew the one he meant. Every district had a wishing well people had stopped believing in. She hauled him up. They took back lanes. Above the rooftops, orange light dripped east, steady as a lit fuse. Aldric counted streets so he would not count breaths. The well sat behind a collapsed garden wall. Coins ringed the lip, tarnished, half of them not currency anymore. Cobwebs bridged the bucket rope. A cluster of black spiders sat on the stones like spilled ink, watching without moving. Wanda swept them off with the back of her hand. They scuttled but did not bite. "Offering," she said. "It wants something you'd miss." Aldric had nothing left he would miss. The broach was gone. His voice was gone. He touched the wound at his side and understood. He drew the small knife Wanda carried. He cut a lock of hair, then pressed the blade to his thumb and let blood run onto the coins. Last, he wrote on the stub — the true name of his clan, the one only a herald was permitted to speak aloud — and dropped the paper in. It was the last thing on him that named him. The water below shifted. Something rose in the bucket that was not water. A handful of small stars, purple and pink, some six-pointed. They pulsed slow, like a heart at rest. "Eat them," Wanda said. He did. They dissolved on his tongue, cold, then warm. The wound in his side pulled itself shut under his hand. His legs held. His lungs opened. His voice did not return — the curse was not what the well answered — but he could walk to the hall now, and he could bleed there without falling. A shape moved at the garden wall. Gold eyes above ashen skin. A tall man in dark clothes, fangs set like a snake's, watching them with the patience of someone who had waited centuries for smaller things. "Herald," Corwin Nightshade said. "You've been marked. I know the hand that marked you." Aldric stood. The council hall was east. So, now, was something worse.