Page 11

If Carl hears, he gives no sign. His efforts seem resigned to his panting, his eyes scrunched shut.

Mavah nods. “That scratch along his face is burnin’ somethin’ fierce.”

And indeed, his cheek does seem to swell by the second.

“He won’t survive it long,” Mavah mutters. “Though I s’pose none of us are destined for survivin’, are we, lass?”

Dawsyn should have fought. She should have wrenched herself free and fallen to her death. Better yet, she should have thrown herself into the Chasm after hefting Redmond in. Anything other than this slow lag to her end.

A jarring rattle sounds – a portcullis opening and then clanging shut. Steps echo along the stone walls. The flicker of a torch flame glares in Dawsyn’s eyes, harsh in the dimness of their prison, and then a face appears at the steel grid – Gerrot’s face. His eyes are sunken, his skin is lined, stricken. He says nothing, just stares at his long-lost bride before him.

Mavah’s expression remains passive. “Yeh’ve lived all this time?”

Gerrot nods solemnly. By the way his skin hangs from his bones, Dawsyn doubts it was plentiful.

“The boy,” Mavah says, pointing to Carl, “he burns with infection. Can’t yeh bring him a salve?”

Gerrot shakes his head, his eyes watering.

“Speak, lad! Yeh couldn’t spare yer help yesterday, but yeh bloody well had better spare it now!”

A tear falls down Gerrot’s cheek. A sound leaves his lungs, expelling through his mouth as it opens an inch.

Mavah’s breath hitches. “They cut out yer tongue?”

Gerrot nods.

For a moment, the hardness of Mavah’s face dissipates, showing her grief in its entirety, but it is replaced again quickly. “Well, it was goin’ to happen eventually. Always thought it’d be me to relieve yeh of it.”

But her hand closes over his on the grid, her fingers tightening. Despite the tears, Gerrot smiles at her. Their foreheads touch through the spaces between rungs and Dawsyn looks away. The moment seems too private for her to watch.

* * *

There is no light in their confines to mark the time passing, only the wakening and low conversations of their cellmates, the rising smell of the corpse among them, the slowing breaths of Carl, and the weakening beat of his pulse. Dawsyn, Mavah, and the rest watch on helplessly. There is no water to cool his forehead, no blanket to cover him with when he begins to shake. The gash along his cheek and jaw oozes relentlessly, and any fool could see how quickly the contagion has taken hold. The medicine woman herself appears awed by the will of the blight, defiling the boy’s blood from the inside. Blue veins bulge and spread from the wound like rivers, carrying the disease throughout his body.

Mavah holds his hand as he dies, the boy’s body stiff and unyielding as ice.

“Why him?” Dawsyn asks the room the question they’ve all avoided. “Why did his wounds kill so quickly when ours have not?”

“Just our bad fucking luck, miss,” says old Justin. “Better he died this way than what’s coming for us.” The man indignantly eyes his dead friend, Lester, as though the corpse holds a prize.

“It’s unnatural,” Dawsyn presses. The blood and pus still surge from Carl’s face. “That was no ordinary infection.”

“Not an infection, lass,” Mavah mutters, shaking her head in dismay. “Poison, more like.”

Deidre gasps and cowers away from Carl’s body, true to the meekness Dawsyn knows her by.

Dawsyn only stares at Mavah. “Poison? From the Glacian’s talons? But then, surely, we would all be poisoned, too?”

Mavah shakes her head. Carefully, she moves Carl’s sleeve and then unwinds the bandaging she wrapped herself. The boy’s shoulder wounds, identical to Dawsyn’s, are revealed. Their bleeding is stanched, they do not bear the marks of spreading disease the way his face does.

“I’d say, their talons are kittens compared to their teeth.”

The words sink like lead in the room as they each understand. With new eyes, Dawsyn looks to Carl’s jaw. If she sees past the foul discharge, she can make out the arced crescent of the wound, the grooves of puncture marks.

“Their bite is poisonous?” Justin asks.

“It bloody well seems it.” Mavah covers the dead boy’s shoulder again. Groaning, she sits back against the stone wall. Her own face is ghostly pale.