Mallow slowed his pace. “Keep your hood up,” he said. “Not everyone down there takes kindly to the Kelthi.”
Lain tugged the wool tighter around her face, though the fabric didn’t hide much. The curve of her antlers pressed faint against the cloth, and the wind caught the edges, revealing flashes of her furred ears.
The air smelled of woodsmoke, mud, and livestock. After the day of thin air and frost, it felt alive. Lain drank it in: the smell of bread, the distant bray of goats, the faint rattle of a cartwheel. For a moment she could almost pretend she was only another traveler.
They were passed by several carts carrying harvest supplies and trade goods from the road behind them, and Mallow waved down a driver and bargained for a ride. There was space for only one of them in the front – a flat cart, thankfully, where Lain could rest upon her thighs and keep her legs hidden. So Lain took the seat while Mallow climbed into the back among the hay.
The farmer was a rugged man, face tanned and creased by wind. “Where are you from, then?” he asked her amiably.
“Ivath,” she said. “I’m on a pilgrimage.”
“Ah, that explains the robes. Plenty of people are suspicious of foreigners after the war, but not me. Nothing like a good southern Sister come to see our mountains, eh?”
He laughed at his own joke. Lain smiled, uncertain. She didn’t know what war he meant, and she didn’t care to ask. The warmth of his voice filled the narrow space between them, the scent of hay and sweat thick in the air.
The heat stirred. It began as it always did, a low thrum in her sternum, hardly more than a pulse. But now, surrounded by the smell of earth and living things, it quickened. Each breath drew more of it in. The fabric at her throat felt too tight.
When the farmer clapped her on the back, the contact sent a tremor through her. A small rush of pleasure flared where his hand had landed, bright and hot, spreading outward before she could contain it. She tried to breathe past it. But he must have felt something, too; his hand lingered, then flexed once, as if testing the air between them.
She stiffened, mortified. She tried to think of the cold, the snow, the shrine, anything that might quiet her. But the sensation only grew, blooming up her spine like light beneath the skin.
He coughed uncomfortably. “Ma’m. You alright?”
She nodded. “Just the road.”
“Road’s fine enough,” he said, though his tone shifted. His gaze flicked to her from the corner of his eye, uncertain.
The warmth surged, unbidden. She could feel his pulse through the air, as though his body had been folded into hers. The Tuning wanted to close the distance. The Heat wanted touch. She pressed her hand toward his, and finally, her fingertips brushed his own.
The Tuning enveloped him.
The world tightened like a bowstring. His breath hitched. His hand found her shoulder again, tentative at first, then firmer, drawn by something he couldn’t understand.
It lasted only a second. He blinked, horror dawning, and jerked back. The reins slipped in his hands.
“Ma’am,” he said hoarsely. “Ma’am, I don’t know what that was, but –” he swallowed hard. “I can’t take you no further.”
Lain’s heart lurched as reality came crashing in. What was wrong with her? “Please, sir, I didn’t mean –”
He was already pulling the cart to a stop. “I’m married,” he stammered, showing her a ring as if it could save him. “Whatever power you’ve got rolling off you, I want no part of it.”
“What’s wrong?” Mallow’s voice came over the hay. She glanced back and he curved around the haystack to stare at her. “Something in the road?”
The driver’s hands shook on the reins. “No, sir, just my mistake.” He glanced more at Lain, fear and shame mixed in his eyes.
Lain climbed down. “Let’s go,” she said, voice thin.
“What? Why?”
She kept walking, and Mallow, cursing, jumped down to follow as the cart rumbled away at a near run.
“What happened?” he demanded.
Lain couldn’t meet his eye. “He discovered I was Kelthi,” she lied.
“And he just kicked you off?”
She nodded. Mallow muttered a curse under his breath. “Bastard. Sorry you had to see that. Some people up here think the Kelthi are cursed.”
Lain said nothing. The Heat was still rolling under her skin, hungry and alive. She pinched her arm hard enough to leave a mark. Cursed, indeed.
She wasn’t sure how she would explain this to Mallow, how the Heat was growing so fervently inside her now. How much stronger would it get? She’d never let the Heat come to full power within her. There was no telling how deep that well might extend.
The cart clattered away down the road, throwing up flecks of wet earth. The sound carried for a long while before the valley swallowed it.
Lain stood still, breathing hard. The air was thick and bright. Every smell – mud, bark, ice – came to her like music. The Heat swelled in waves, as though her pulse echoed through the hills.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
She pressed her hands against her chest, willing her heart to slow, but it wouldn’t. Each breath came rich with scent: wet cedar, animal musk, the faint iron tang of Mallow’s sword oil drifting from behind her.
As they carried on into the valley, she was grateful both of their cowls were up, and that she walked fast enough that conversation was difficult. She tried to think through the problem of her Heat, but had to shy away from it when it came too close to fantasy. The faster she walked, the more it grew. The friction of her robes against her skin sent sparks through her, as did the crunch of her hooves in the thawing earth. Even the chill air at her cheek felt intimate, a hand tracing her jaw. Every living thing she passed – a crow on a fencepost, a sapling swaying in the wind – seemed aware of her, as if the whole valley had turned its head to listen.
When they crossed the last bend and the village came into view, the sight made her gasp. It wasn’t beautiful in any ordinary sense, just a scattering of stone houses, a few curling lines of smoke. But to her eyes, it shimmered. The slate roofs gleamed like wet shells. The smoke tasted sweet as honey.
Mallow said something about stopping for supplies, but his words blurred, half-lost under the rush of her senses. The air was so vibrant it felt like water on her skin. She wanted to touch everything, feel its texture. She realized she was smiling.
“Easy,” Mallow said quietly. He’d noticed. “You’re grinning like someone drunk on festival wine.”
She blinked up at him, startled by how close he was. His eyes were earthen, flecked with sunlight. She hadn’t noticed that before. “I can smell the flour in the air,” she said softly. “The bread. Can’t you?”
He gave her a wary look. “Let’s get you that medicine.”
They entered the first street. The world pressed in: chatter, the clang of metal, the scent of yeast and horses and smoke. The noise threaded through her skull until it patterned. Every face seemed vivid and sharp, every movement deliberate. She felt her own heart answering theirs, another voice in the choir.
She hummed softly under her breath. A child darted past, laughing, and the sound brushed against her like silk. A man passed close by carrying a bundle of wool, and she caught the warm scent of lanolin, the weight of his pulse. The connection was so immediate she turned, dizzy from the pleasure of it.
“Lain,” Mallow hissed, catching her elbow. “Hood.”
She tugged it forward, but her hands felt clumsy, drunk with feeling. Her antlers pushed against the fabric. People were already looking.
Mallow pulled her toward an inn at the edge of the square. “Keep your eyes down. Don’t talk to anyone.”
She tried. Truly, she did. But even the resinous scent of the wood door felt divine. Her fingers lingered on the grain too long. The warmth of the room inside wrapped about her like a lover. Every sense was singing.
Mallow leaned close enough that his breath touched her ear. “You need to get yourself under control, Sister,” he said, low and firm.
She nodded – how was it he had no idea what his whispered voice against her ear was doing to her? – but she couldn’t stop smiling. “I know,” she whispered. “Everything just feels so –”
“Don’t say good,” he muttered.
“– alive,” she finished, almost reverent.
He groaned. “Saints help me. Stand here and don’t move.”
He went to the front desk for a room key while she waited, tapping a claw against the floorboards in time with her humming voice. Mallow returned to her, took her by the elbow once more, and brought her up the stairs to a room.
“You’ll have to wait here while I go for supplies.”
“But I –”
“No, Lain,” he insisted, his key sliding into the lock. He pushed the door open to reveal their accommodations: a narrow room with a small fireplace in the center, a window on one wall, and two beds, left and right of the door. “I’ll be back soon. I’ll try and scrounge up some ingredients for your medicine. Wait here with our things. If you get hungry, have some rations. They’re in my bag.”
Before she could protest, he dropped his pack on the floor and departed. The door clicked shut behind him. His boots thudded down the hall, then faded beneath the hum of the tavern below.
Lain pressed her back to the door and exhaled. The room smelled of ash and wool and something faintly sweet, like honey steeped too long. She could still taste Mallow’s nearness in the air. Her body throbbed with the ghost of movement; the Heat refused to still. Her tail coiled about her leg beneath her robes. Absently she reached behind herself to tug it free, the scales there all warm and sweetly sensitive. She ran her hand from the spine of her tail to the cloud of fur at its end, gently rubbing the curls between her fingers. The fur was rough after three days without her regimen of oils, but tugging sweetly at its ends sent a shiver rolling through her. She closed her eyes, reaching up to the velvet of her antlers, its softness tingling under her palm –
She gasped, coming back to awareness.
She needed a distraction.
Her stomach growled, startling in the quiet. She pulled his pack onto the bed, the leather stiff with cold, and rummaged through until she found a wrapped wedge of cheese and a heel of coarse bread. They were simple things, rough and dry, but when she bit into the cheese the flavor of sharp salt and the tang of age overwhelmed her. She ate ravenously, crumbs scattering over her lap.
When she was finished, her hands still itched for something to do. The pack sat open beside her. Mallow’s book lay near the top, its cracked spine showing threads of use. He’d been studying it that morning, the pages smudged with soil and pressed petals.
She hesitated only a moment before sliding it free.
The script inside was dense but neat, each entry a recipe: tinctures, salves, poisons. She traced a line with her finger until a word caught her breath: Starbloom.
There were drawings of a pale flower, yellow on its ends turning purple at its center, six long petals and a central throat veined in gold. Beneath it, lines of cramped text.
To steep the bloom in moonlight brings silence to the scaled kind; its essence binds the breath of wyrms and stills the serpent-song.
Lain frowned. She read the next passage.
To brew at dawn awakens them. It calls what sleeps beneath the stone to stir and rise, to hunger for voice once more.
And beneath that:
To mix the two is to temper death. Half, moon, half sun: a poison that preserves. The creature will neither wake nor die, but linger forever in a dreaming state.
Her hand stilled on the page.
She read the lines again, slower this time. A draught made to keep the worm sleeping, neither dead nor free. Preserve. The word stung. That was what they called it in the Dawn Spire, too. The preservation of the sacred order. The peace of the Deep.
But if this was true, if the Dagorlind brewed their offerings from Starbloom, then they hadn’t been saving the Underserpent at all. They had been keeping it bound.
She thought of the rituals, the endless hymns to mercy, the scales of the Underserpent beneath the altar stone, always silent and still. All her life she had believed the stillness was divine. What if it was only drugged sleep?
Her pulse pounded. The room felt suddenly too small, the air heavy with revelation.
The Underserpent had been meant to sing.
She closed the book slowly, her fingers trembling against the cover.
If the half-brew was poison, then she could make another. Morning-brewed Starbloom, the song of waking. That was what Mallow’s collector wanted, whether he knew it or not. A flower that called what slept.
She would go with him, and take one for herself. For the serpent.
The thought steadied her. The hunger inside her body quieted, repurposed bright and clean as breath after confession.
Lain pressed her palm to her chest and felt her heartbeat there, fierce and sure. For the first time since her exile began, the Heat inside her didn’t feel like punishment.