Demetri's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

Demetri returned to Grinwold's inn with the pit's cure fresh in his hands. He wanted a fire and a cup before he hunted the rider from the north road. Grinwold met him at the door, blue hair wild, his easy smile gone. "You'll want to see this," the gnome said. He led Demetri to a table where a man lay slumped and grey. A wounded traveler had stumbled in an hour past, Grinwold explained. Black rot ran up the man's arm from a wound in his shoulder. Demetri knew it at once. It was the same rot that had poisoned his forest. The man's breath came shallow. His skin had gone the color of ash. Demetri laid his hands over the wound. The rot pulsed against his palms, hungry. He could pull it into himself, as he once had. But the pit had taught him better. If he swallowed this, his dark half would swell and the seal on his wards would strain. Yet there was no living ground here to feed it. Only floorboards and the dying man. He pressed his light palm to the wound and his dark palm to the floor. He breathed his two halves even. Slowly, he drew the rot out through the light and pushed it down through the dark, into the earth beneath the inn's stone. The traveler groaned. Color crept back into his face. The black lines shrank and faded. The door banged open. A young man in silver armor filled the frame, red cape at his back, sword already half drawn. His eyes went to Demetri's dark half, then to the man on the table. "Step away from him," the prince said. Grinwold hurried forward, hands raised. "He's healing your man, not harming him." The prince did not lower the blade. He was young, dark-haired, his jaw set hard. "That's my scout. I sent him ahead three days ago." He looked at the rot still bleeding from the wound. "He carried nothing like that when he rode out." Demetri stared at the silver armor. A rider from the north road. Silver armor. He had come to hunt this man. "You planted the rot in my forest," he said. The prince's face changed. Confusion, not guilt. "I planted nothing. I came south chasing a sickness that killed two of my villages." He nodded at his scout. "He was tracking its source. He found it." The scout stirred. His lips moved. "Not him," he whispered. "Another rider. Wore his colors. His armor." Then he slept. Demetri drew his hands back. His halves held even. The seal in his forest did not stir. He had saved the man and healed the rot without swallowing it. But the truth twisted under him. The rider he hunted was not the prince at all. Someone wore this man's silver to cross the north road unseen. And that someone was still out there, still working the rot.