Aldric Thornmoor's Arc

Chapter 6 of 16

Aldric woke under the plank bench with the taste of ash in his mouth. The void chef's stall was gone. In its place stood a pool of black water ringed by pale stones, and beyond it, a crystal spire taller than any tree, cut with runes that glowed faint blue. Wanda was already on her feet. She read the runes with narrow eyes. "Answer stone," she said. "Old kind. It won't speak to me. Fire and this don't mix." Aldric wrote on his stub: NAME. NEED IT BY DAWN. He tapped the paper twice. The debt to the void chef came due at first light, and he still did not know what the woman with the burned hands was called. Something moved in the pool. A woman's shape rose to the surface, dark purple skin, hair streaked pink and blue, a tail scaled like a night sky. She rested her arms on a flat stone. Aldric had heard sailors talk of her kind once, in a port he no longer had a name for. A star-swimmer. She looked at his throat, then at Wanda's black hands. "You're cursed," she said. "Both of you. Different curses." Aldric wrote: I NEED A NAME. WOMAN WITH BURNED HANDS. HUNTING ME. "The spire won't give it," she said. "Names aren't kept there. But it will hold a person still if you feed it right. Long enough to ask her yourself." Wanda leaned in. "What does it want." "Three things. A flower cut from ice under a blue moon. A handful of small stars that flock at dusk over the north ridge. And a drop of blood from the one who casts." The mermaid looked at Aldric. "That's you." They moved before the sky changed. Wanda knew the ridge. Aldric knew the frost hollow from an old herald's route. He cut the ice flower with his belt knife and it did not melt in his palm. Wanda coaxed a cluster of small pink and purple stars down from the flock with a low flame held in her charred fingers. They came to warmth. She caught them in a fold of her skirt. At the spire, the mermaid told him to press the flower and the stars to the base and cut his thumb. He did. The runes flared. The pool went still. Wanda spoke first. "When she comes, she can't move. But she can talk. I'll help her want to." She opened her hand. A flame sat in her palm, small and white. "She burned my sister's hearth. I've been waiting." The spire hummed. Somewhere on the north road, boots stopped mid-step and stayed stopped. Aldric closed his fist around the paper stub. He had his trap. He did not yet have her name. But she was coming to him now, and she could not run.