R Z Held - [BCS313 S04] Read online

  A pyre before laundry today, then. Eighteen left in the barn. Helena refilled the cup for Benedict, then went back to spooning out porridge.

  “He looked just like Sam.” As Benedict’s voice gained power, it also gained the potential to fracture. It broke after his husband’s name. Helena doubted there had been any resemblance at all, other than what the Fever wrought on anyone. “I couldn’t— I don’t even know exactly when he died, I was working on the other side of the barn. If I’d checked people starting at the door instead, I might have been able to do—something.”

  “I know,” Helena said. She did.

  “He’s dead— Sam’s dead—” Benedict broke into dry, wracking sobs.

  “I know.” Not dismissive; simply the best sympathy she had. Helena crouched before him once more. “Go up to the house, try to sleep as long as you can, all right?” When he nodded, she helped him to his feet. He’d be back to the barn soon enough, she supposed.

  Benedict did go back to the barn, but for less time each day, and he continued to sleep at the house. As winter neared and the dark pressed in from both ends of the day, the need to gather enough firewood to last them through the season grew more and more pressing, and eventually that task consumed all of his waking time. Helena never spoke to him about the fact that he’d abandoned nursing, or indeed anything else of importance. Coordinating chores was more than enough to make up their conversations, day after day. She suspected he’d found a way to exorcise his grief in the solitude of dragging wood back, the physicality of swinging the ax to split it. Once, she heard him screaming his anger out into the uncaring universe as the world leaked its colors away into the blue of twilight. She left him to it.

  Today, a few hours before dinner, she was doing laundry in a big metal tub once used to water livestock, her hair bunned up tight against a breeze that smelled like the birth of snow in the mountains. Benedict, companionable in a way she didn’t understand, had dropped a barrow-load of wood nearby, though he was currently seated on one of the logs, absorbed in the small movements of splitting kindling instead.

  Helena drew a line with her working knife along her inner forearm and shook a few droplets over the clothes soaking in the tub, already turning the water a bit yellow-gray. She concentrated as she took up the broken handle of a shovel and churned the clothes, making sure the magic-laced water seeped into every pore of the fabric. Dirt clumped with the magic and drifted steadily to the surface. She scooped it off with a curve of bark that had split off one of Benedict’s logs.

  “How do you manage to avoid having any scars?” Benedict had laid his ax across his thighs, and his eyes were on her now-unmarked arm.

  “I add a little bit of healing at the end of every spell. When you’re trained properly, it becomes second nature.” It was such a normal question, it bumped Helena off balance for a second.

  She started wringing out the pieces of clothing, stacking them damp in a basket to carry to the line. She could use magic to dry them too—and would, once snow fell—but for now she could save the effort. She lifted a stylish jacket of a peacock shade and considered it in the sunlight. “My sister loved this color.”

  “It looks like it would fit you. As it gets colder, you could use something without holes. Unless it belongs to someone with family who might still recover?” Benedict went back to his kindling.

  “No, the last one in her party died a month ago. This is a catch-up load of laundry.” Helena set the jacket aside to wring out the next item. “But I don’t take anything except food, you know that.”

  Benedict gave a vindicated little “ha!”, and she realized he’d only been pretending to focus on his task. “I never understood how you could forget people’s names and fates seconds after adding them to your records. But something deep in your mind is doing it on purpose, isn’t it? You can’t stand to count the dead, but remembering a list of shirts and shoes, that’s safe. Hell, I’ve never even heard you use a name for one of your family members.”

  Helena rocked back a step, hand going for her working knife, as if she could hit him with a spell every time he said something that stung. She forced herself to lift her hand away. “You keep saying I’m not doing enough for them, what about you? How much are you doing for them?”

  Benedict let out a long breath and set his ax aside but didn’t rise. “I did say that once, and then I tried it. And now, it seems you read that into everything, no matter what I actually say. What’s enough to avoid the judgment you’re afraid of, then? I don’t think Sam would have wanted me to freeze to death this winter.” He scrubbed a hand along his jaw, clean-shaven since the first morning after his recovery. “What’s enough to keep your guilt at bay? We’re both grieving, only you don’t seem to admit it. No one is ever going to come back to get that jacket. When do you get to have nice things again? When do you get to love things, to be good at things?”

  Helena couldn’t make sense of his words. “What?”

  “You say your sister loved that color, your brother was good with the horses. But I’ve never heard you say something about your own opinions and skills. You would still be honoring their memories even if you left space in your own life for yourself.”

  “That’s not—”

  Helena stopped, drew her next breath deep.

  Smoke, carried on the breeze. But wildfire season was past. With winter coming on, they’d started stoking a stove in the barn, but that trickle of smoke was a constant her nose had learned to ignore. This was more, much more.

  “The barn—” It had not just a stove but also a few lamps now, to counteract the failing sunlight. “If someone knocked over a lamp—” She was running now, cursing making a syncopated rhythm with her steps. Benedict soon passed her with his longer legs but stopped when he spotted the barn.

  Helena kept going. They still had time. Yes, pale smoke, rapidly darkening, was pluming upward from the far edge of the roof, but no flames were visible, yet. The front wall, door closed to keep the heat from the stove in, was untouched. Crackling reached her, eager and growing, but as she ran she shut it out and focused on the door handle, across the length of the barn’s yard. They still had time.

  “With that much smoke, it’ll be all along the back wall! The other walls will be catching in moments. Helena, stop!”

  Benedict’s voice spurred her on instead of stopping her. “That means we need to get them out before then!” The crackling had reached a near roar, forcing Helena to reply in a bellow. A single gout of flame burst free on a side wall near the roof, its orange against the blackening wood and darkening gray smoke searing the eyes.

  But the door. The door was untouched.

  Helena had imagined the heat might be a wall, one she could choose to push through, but instead it encompassed her completely with no warning, hazing her sight and scalding the skin of her cheeks and hands. Her next breath came hard, burning her throat with the heat and smoke both, but she could still see the door.

  “It’ll be even worse inside! They’re already dead from the heat or the smoke! They’re already dead, Helena!”

  She’d never make it to that door in time at the rate she was moving. The whole top half of the barn’s side wall was a mass of that licking, searing orange, and individual plumes of smoke from the roof had merged into one thick, roiling column. She’d already slowed, stopped, so she drew out her working knife. She cut along her thumb and flicked the magic down over herself, ending with a smear over her lower lip. That would keep the heat and smoke back. Another step toward the door, a second. So slow. Even if the air she drew into her lungs didn’t directly burn any longer, the heat beat like physical blows against her magic.

  And then her magic shattered, her heart stuttering as if she’d been punched in the chest. In her next breath, the air burned again. She stumbled—stumbled back, pulled by Benedict, and she didn’t have any air to resist him until he’d dragged them nearly back across the yard and she’d coughed and coughed and finally managed several breaths that sco
ured her injured throat so deeply it felt like it must bleed soon.

  She pulled away from his hold, slashed at him with the knife still in her hand. “My magic was working—” Too much pain to keep speaking, but she had to make him understand.

  “You would have to bleed yourself dry to reach the door, and then when you open it and let in the air, the fire would engulf you, as well as the people inside who are already dead.” Benedict caught her around the waist, dragging her farther. Her flailing with the knife didn’t deter him, and while she could have stabbed him, she didn’t want—didn’t want to hurt— She didn’t want anyone to be hurt, why couldn’t he see—

  “Stop punishing yourself for living when your family died. Stop punishing yourself for not doing enough for these people either! Giving your life won’t save them, and it won’t bring your family back!” Benedict had to shout into her ear. Orange had found the door, just one tongue, while the rest of the building was orange shooting so high it became yellow and the smoke was black, black, as black as the remaining wood.

  Now she was sobbing. Or choking on the smoke, or both at the same time. Her burned throat couldn’t tell the difference. “They’re dead,” he said again. “They were dying anyway. Let them go, let them all go!”

  “I fucking know my family is dead!” She screamed it at the fire, relishing the pain seizing her throat because she was wild with it, wild with the feeling of it filling her whole vision like the end of all things instead of the end of one barn and nine dying—dead—strangers. Maybe she needed that in order to crack herself open, break the grief free. “Peter! Susanna!” Every sibling, every sibling’s partner, every child. Every name.

  The columns rising to the sky from the barn weren’t just smoke now; they were a whirling mixture of flame reaching to half the barn’s height above it.

  Nothing left of the barn itself, only flame in a barn shape, so bright as to wash out the remaining daylight and make the sky look like night beyond the smoke.

  Then, slowly, the wildest of the flames diminished. Somehow, the structure still stood, posts and boards reduced to a black skeleton silhouetted against the flame. A pyre leaving bones; only these would eventually be consumed as well, and that would be an end to it. Like the end, finally, she needed to give to her guilt.

  When Benedict relaxed his hold, tentatively, she whirled on him. “You know what I was? I was a good blood mage. With wards, not healing. A damn good blood mage. The best of all of us.” She got those words out through the pain; then coughing swallowed anything further.

  And while she regathered her breath, she saw that sparks had spattered into the summer’s tinder-dry cheatgrass and birthed flames now racing outward, low along the ground. The barn was gone; now she’d have to move fast to save the house. And that would be impossible without breathing hard, so she pricked her thumb and swallowed a few drops to pull her damaged throat back to something useable.

  Then she was running back toward the house even as she planned—planned properly this time, rather than grasping at the first action that seemed likely to silence the guilt of being here when her family was not, of all the travelers she couldn’t save. Wards were about readiness triggered, not direct opposition, so once she was far enough ahead of the flames—

  Yes, here, using part of the cracked pavement of a pre-magic road. At the last moment, Helena spared a quick thought for Benedict. “This will look like a lot of blood, but it’s not dangerous.”

  Dubious didn’t begin to describe his expression, but he didn’t interfere as she set her feet, slashed her cheek, smeared her whole palm with the blood. That, she cast in a great line along the road, a huge gesture that drew most of her heartbeat away with it. She collapsed to her knees as the ward snapped up, arcing wide until it encircled the barn and the spreading flames. The flames reached it a breath later, splashing up and back like a flood against a wall. Another breath and the ward snapped out of existence, but that terrifying splatter of fire had taken the grass in that circle down to blackened soil. Low flames continued to coil and chew at the collapsed mound of the barn, but none jumped the pavement firebreak.

  Benedict was holding her up, she realized. And shaking her. “Helena! How was that not dangerous?”

  Helena smacked a fist against her chest to remind her heart of its duty, though it was slowly grinding its way back to normal already. “I’m fine, I know how much blood I can spare. When I’m doing the kind of things I’m actually good at. Since the Fever, my talents haven’t been very... applicable.” She was crying again. When had that happened?

  “It won’t last forever.” Benedict folded his long legs down properly, settled her back against his chest. It wasn’t as intimate as crying on someone’s shoulder, but somehow it was exactly what she needed. He wasn’t facing her, they were looking outward, toward... that world, perhaps. Where the Fever had burned itself out and people had picked themselves back up.

  Her voice thinned to nothing, around the tears, but she got it out. “We need to hole up for the winter, now, but come spring— I think I’d like to pull together supplies from everything I’ve kept—new clothes, to start—and head back over the pass. Use my magic to help rebuild.” She scrubbed at her nose before snot obscured her words entirely. “Would you want to come with me? I’ll leave the house open for travelers to continue to use; you could stay to help them. Or move on alone. But you asked what I loved— I loved being a part of the chaos and joy of my family. You might prefer to find a new partner and family of your own, but—”

  “But maybe I’ll find a partner in the city. Maybe this damn good blood mage I know will be beating suitors off with a stick and I’ll console a loser.” Benedict’s laugh creaked like a rusty pump no one had primed. She understood the feeling. “We’ll see.”

  Together, as Helena cried herself out, they looked outward toward that world.

  © Copyright 2020 R.Z. Held

 

 

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