Page 148 of Brimstone

“I don’t know! I—” I reached out, not knowing what to do, not sure if I should, orcouldtouch him. In the end, I didn’t have a choice. Archerneededour help. My palms hissed, skin singeing, as I took hold of him and turned him onto his back. The sprite’s eyes were open, though the flames that normally danced within them had almost all gone out.

Archer opened his mouth, gasping, but only a gravelly rasping sound passed his lips. His throat was a mess. Embers burned there, around the edge of his wound. A kind of molten rock ebbed sluggishly from the rent left behind by the feeder’s fangs—it smelled terrible, like the very vapors of hell itself. The sprite’s hand opened and closed in the air, groping for something, anything, his cooling eyes full of fear when his gaze met mine.

“We need to get him inside,” I bit out. “Is it dead?” I couldn’t even bring myself to look at the feeder.

“Yes,” Carrion answered. “It looks like that stew. That null blade is all that’s left of it.”

“Okay. Good. Can you run and—We need something to lift him with. He’s too heavy.” Tears burned my eyes. My throat was aching horribly; forcing myself to speak felt like regurgitating razor blades.

“Fuck that,” Carrion growled. He crouched down at the other end of Archer’s body and looked me square in the eye. “You get his hands. I’ll get his feet.”

The sprite tried to pull away as we lifted him from the bitter ground; even this close to death, he didn’t want to injure us with his heat. But we were single-minded, and the forge was only fifty feet away. The burns would hurt, the scars would be ugly, but we weren’t going to leave our friend to die out in the snow.

35

BRIMSTONE

KINGFISHER

“IT’S CALLED BRIMSTONE. It isn’t like our blood, exactly. Itiswhat keeps a fire sprite alive, though,” Lorreth said.

Archer lay on the mossy plinth, his eyes closed. He looked like a small pile of rocks. Sweat ran over my temple and down my cheek, dripping from my chin as I stared down at him, my fury building by the second.

Of course it was brimstone.

Ofcourseit fucking would be.

Lorreth had just come through the shadow gate when I’d heard the cries coming from the courtyard outside. Iseabail had come through moments before him. I’d bolted from the dining room without speaking to either of them properly. Now, we were all in the bowels of the estate, deep underground, where the fire sprites were quartered. There was an entire fire spritevillagedown here in the bedrock, much deeper than the foundations of the estate. The sprites tended thousands of fires, ensuring the temperatures ran to unbearable degrees. The air was so hot that it burned the eyes and drained the moisture from a person like they were a cloth being wrung dry. We wouldn’t be able to staydown here for long. We would die otherwise, cooked alive, and that wouldn’t serve anybody, least of all Archer.

Saeris and Carrion had saved him.

The two looked like they were drowning in their own sweat as they stood at the end of what passed as Archer’s bed. Their hands were swollen and covered in brutal blisters, but neither of them made a peep of complaint. They stared at Archer’s chest, waiting for the tiny rise and fall that signified he was still breathing, while Lorreth explained what I had found I could not.

“It’s an element, really. Brimstone. A kind of magic all on its own. It gives the fire sprites life.”

Andit kills the rot,” Carrion said.

“Yes. It looks that way.” Lorreth’s eyes darted to me, troubled. “The feeder up there was destroyed. It seems to have partially melted and then burned away to ash. The rot had started to spread to the vines along the wall, but we used some of the brimstone that Archer lost up there to burn the affected plants, and yes, it killed the spread there, too.”

“Okay. This is good news, then,” Saeris said. “Brimstone stops the rot. Great! So why do you two look like you’re about to start punching holes in the walls?”

She looked at me, beautiful even with strands of her dark hair plastered to her cheeks, and spoke into my mind so that only I could hear.What are we missing here? Shouldn’t we be celebrating?

We can’t use the brimstone, Osha.

Iseabail, who had been notably quiet since she’d arrived, moved to Archer’s bedside. She wore the traditional leather gauntlets of her clan on her forearms, each embossed with the swirling lines that represented the frozen waters to the east of Balquhidder lands. Her red hair was braided and neatly bound. She had been a novice in the eyes of her people when she had come to Cahlish a few weeks ago. Her loose hair and flowingskirts had denoted her as such. She returned to us now a prioress, dressed in accordance with her family’s arcane line. In the span of the few days she had been away, she had undergone the most intense trial she was ever likely to face in her lifetime. She was probably exhausted and wounded, and yet she had still returned here to Cahlish to help.

“As Lorreth mentioned, the fire sprite’s brimstoneislike our blood, and yet it is not,” she said. “The brimstone keeps them alive. Like blood, it flows throughout their bodies, keeping their core temperatures high.Unlikeblood, they cannot lose a significant amount of it. A few drops at most. It does not regenerate as our blood does. There is a finite amount of brimstone in Yvelia, and every last drop of it is spoken for by the sprites. When they want to procreate, the whole community agrees to donate a small part of themselves. Archer will only live because other members of his pyre have given some of their own brimstone to bring his core temperature back up again.”

“Thepyre?” Carrion asked.

Iseabail nodded. “The name for an individual fire sprite community. His family.”

“So they don’t have sex?”

Under normal circumstances, I would have snarled at the smuggler for being such a shallow halfwit during such a worrying time, but for once the question wasn’t laced with innuendo. Carrion seemed genuinely confused. He peppered Iseabail with questions about the fire sprites, meanwhile my mate chewed on her bottom lip, staring at Archer’s still form. Though she kept her own counsel, I knew what she was thinking. I waited for her to say it.

After a long moment, she spoke into my head again.We can’t use the brimstone. To secure enough of it to eradicate the rot and kill the infected feeders, every fire sprite in Yvelia would have to die.