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I wake on a stretcher, surrounded by the wounded, the weeping, the wisping fragrance of warm and fresh bread…

And I am alone.

Dare is nowhere to be seen.

There are a lot of faces around me, but so few are familiar.

I frown on the slender face of a litalf, one I am certain chased me from the rockpool into the misty woods, then drag it to Mika, the dokkalf whose leg looks entirely shattered.

Black powder has her deep in unconsciousness, sprawled and drooling on a narrow bed.

The bakery is crammed full of them. These narrow, wooden beds padded with sheepskin.

In my line of sight, hazy and tired, two robed healers are scooching between the beds, the spaces between us so narrow that—as I slide my gaze around, wall to wall, wounded to wounded, I notice—there is no space for a visitor.

We are all alone in here.

I push up onto my elbows.

The healer hunched at my side, wrapped in inky robes, born of dark blood, hisses at me. Her glare is a flash of white eyes, pure white and textured like paint on a rough canvas; her fingers still on the phials and jars she’s set out alongside my leg.

I only glance at her once before I look down my body.

The armour has been cut away from me. The vest, gone, leaving me with a sweater rolled up to just beneath my breasts. My complexion is black and purple and blue.

I don’t concern myself with the scrapes over my torso, or the arm that is looped out of the sweater, my shoulder exposed and padded with moss.

It’s the very clearly battered ribs and chest that has my heart skipping a beat.

One thing to know I am injured, but to see it, my complexion turned black and purple from my bellybutton to my breasts, is a whole other thing.

“I fix.” The healer snares my attention back to her.

I blink at her once, then at the phials.

Not one of them is filled with black powder… not a single one.

Suppose she doesn’t have anymore left. Maybe she already ran out of the supply, or she’s decided I am not broken enough for the powder, so she sets out all other sorts of balms and oils to use on me.

I don’t even grimace.

I have this sense of distance, mind from body, and I stay planted on my elbows as she starts working on my wounds.

“I fix head.”

The healer’s words are slow to sink into my mind, but once they do, I shift my weight onto one elbow, then reach a hand back for my scalp.

The pain stops me.

My good shoulder takes the upper body weight, supports me, but the bad shoulder can’t arch back like that.

I give up, then let my back touch the sheepskin again.

I lift my chin and elongate my neck, and I look over at the open glass doors. Beyond them, the wind batters the parted sheets of the tent only partially set up at the front, then abandoned for the inside of the bakery.

I look beyond the doors, the sheets, to the street.

Still swamped by fae.

Guess I wasn’t out for long.

I turn my cheek to it, then stare up at the ceiling. It has that awful textured paint, like a spread of popped corn kernels.

My breaths ease with every gentle dusting of lesser powders that the healer rubs in with oil, then massages all over me like she’s basting me for a roast.

It lulls me.

There’s something comforting about it, that the bakery is so packed full of beds and wounded that there are no visitors swallowing up more space.

It means I am alone.

And, maybe, just for now, I am ok with that.

I let the healer work on me.

It isn’t everything I need, but it’s everything I need for the moment. She mosses the cut on my temple and the scratches on my mouth and forehead that I think I got from the tree I fell into; she smears my legs with an oil that stinks of those kars in the human realm; her hands work in a balm around my ribs; she lifts my sweater and exposes my breasts before she covers them in that same stinking oil.

I sink into the sheep-fleece beneath me and the thin mattress. The cushioning is too flimsy for the comfort of my aching back, but it’s better than anything I’ve had in eleven phases.

Besides, I’ll need to roll over soon to let her reach my back, but I am assuming that is after she has tended to my legs now that she unbuttons them at my waist, then shimmies them to rest at my ankles.

In silence, the healer scoops more of that stinky oil and reaches for my belly, the part hidden by my trousers not a moment before—

And she stills.

The healer frowns at my belly button for a moment, as though only just now seeing it, then turns a curious look on me. She might never have seen one before. Not all halflings have them. No full fae do.

I just blink at her.

She sniffs, then slaps the oil down on my skin.

Beneath her hands, my stomach grumbles. I don’t quite feel it grumbling, but I hear it.

The healer doesn’t react, doesn’t acknowledge it at all. She looks up at the sudden commotion that ignites in the doorway.

I trace her attention.

A light male and his female companion are blocking the doorway, trying to get inside of the bakery.

But a stern-faced healer is hitting them away with a roll of bandages. “Injured only! Out, out!”

She whacks them over and over, each strike sounding a little too hard to be merely bandages, and so I wonder if she’s snuck a rolling pin in there at some point.

The litalves listen. They retreat. Even if their teeth are bared as they scuttle their steps back, they leave all the same.

“The one who brought me here,” I start, turning my cheek to the doorway, “was he kicked out?”

Dare.

The faint memory of him catching me before I fell, his arms hooked around me, and the mocking glint of his voice at my ear.

“No visits, only injured,” she murmurs. “He not wait.”

“He didn’t wait?”

She shakes her head, then gestures to the door with a jerk of the chin. “He push in.”

Oh. He didn’t wait in the queue.

I almost smile.

I can just imagine it.

Dare shoving through the protests of healers, pushing aside an injured meant for this very bed, depositing me here, but trying to snag a fresh pastry and getting walloped with the rolling pin on his way out.

That is very Dare.

“Too many injured,” she adds, and throws a dark look at me. “Not beds enough.”

I arch a brow.

That look… It almost seemed to blame me.

Coming from a dokkalf, it’s a surprising moment, my startled gaze, her judgemental one. But she breaks it like a flimsy twig as she hits my side, a sharp gesture to roll over.

Healers are so rarely kind.

I grunt and rollllll onto my front, the slowest, achiest movement to ever groan through me.

The healer loses patience—with a sharp tut—then shoves me onto my belly.

She starts work on my back.

My face is smushed in sheepskin.

We don’t speak more.

I stare at a blur of fleece—and I don’t let my mind scramble and unravel. I don’t worry about the injured around me, the wounded and the dead of the Sacrament, who made it and who didn’t.

I let myself find a beat of peace.

No visitors. Only wounded.

No one to rush to my side and grab at me and ask me all sorts of questions I don’t have the energy to answer.

I just melt into the sheepskin.

Even once the healer is done, and she tugs my sweater down, and I flop onto my side to curl up and find a moment’s rest, I hope no one sneaks into the bakery to find me.

The only visitor I would accept is Eamon—and only if he simply sat here in silence, holding my hand.

Something I never did think would ever happen, that I would be too exhausted even to have Eamon at my bedside.

But I am exhausted.

Yet I don’t find sleep. Whether the balms and oils are laced with caffeine or coca leaves, or it’s that the thunderous pulsations of Comlar and the commotion out in the streets of Kithe are keeping me from drifting off, I don’t know.

All I know is I lie here a while, listening.

Lashes shut, I just listen.

The groans and murmurs and hisses of the wounded all around me; the snarls and barbed shouts from out in the main road, still packed full of fae, nowhere for the displaced spectators and warriors to go but here—they all come with the undercurrent of pulsations, that steady thrum, thrum, thrum of the Cursed Shadows.

Cheek smushed, I stare ahead at the limp body of a wounded who looks suspiciously slack faced, and I wonder if the dark one is dead…

Then something else steals my attention.

My lashes flutter—then, fast, my mouth floods.

My healer squeezes by the bed, a basket of assorted breads in her arms. She pauses at my side and gestures an impatient nod to the basket.

I lift a hand and finger through the pastries, the buttered slices of nutty bread, the small scones, the bite-sized pies stuffed with gravies and potatoes and meat.

It doesn’t take a genius to assume I should only pick one from the basket. Yet I snatch a pie and a hefty cream-filled pastry.

The glare of a healer doesn’t spook me. Not anymore.

I find my fear and unease of others, particularly the fullbloods, has faded.

“You eat,” her barbed words are broken, and I think of the thicker, sharper accents of the isles, “then go.”

I’ve only just decided that she has a native language—not the tongue she speaks to me in—when her words sink in.

She’s kicking me out.

I frown up at her, the foods stacked in my cupped hands, and I hold them close to the chest as though she’ll snatch them away from me.

She jerks her chin. “Need bed.”

I trace the gesture to the doorframe.

Nothing grisly meets my eye. Just a crying, red-faced youngling and a limping mother; a warrior leaning against the wall, eyes half shut over tired eyes, but not noticeably wounded; and the rest of the queue is wound around the sheeted tent flaps, and so I can’t see them from this angle.

I stare out to the wedge of the street that I can see and faintly shake my head.

The healer doesn’t see the gesture. She has already turned her back on me and moved on to the next.

I nibble on the pastry first, a sadness weighing me down.

I don’t want to give up the bed.

I don’t want to go out there…

The folk are out there. The ones who might be looking for me. Like Father and Pandora. Like Eamon. Like…

Oh.

Daxeel won’t be looking for me.

The knowing of him always searching for me, always surveilling me, it’s ingrained too deep into my mind, my body.

But now…

Now, I don’t even know if he’s alive.

If he is, he’ll be deep in black powder, what with all his wounds. Might be being treated at Hemlock House, a personal healer paid for by the wealth of his family.

Not here, slumming it with the rest of us.

Again…

That is if he is alive, if he survived that pummelling, that violence from the Cursed Shadows and the iilra.

I touch my cupped hands to my chest. The pie crumbles in my tightening grip, flakes of pastry dusting all over my lap.

I don’t feel him.

Not anymore.

No echo in my heartspace.

It’s just… quiet.

The silence is so thick and calm that I fall into it. Sitting here, on the narrow bed, barely touched snacks in my hands, the moans and whimpers of the wounded, the racket outside, none of it exists.

I touch a blank space in me, where the tether once was, an echo, and it feels as though I topple into a place of darkness where I simply float.

I sink into it.

My shoulders sag as I flop back down on the bed.

I stare up at the ceiling and, numb, I lift a squished pie to my mouth.

I don’t taste it, the savoury gravy slicking over my tongue, the pastry crumbling on my lips. I just eat. Monotonous. One lift of the hand, one bite, chewing and chewing, swallow, again and again, until there is nothing but crumbs in my hands and smears of gravy on my chin.

Before I can even brush away the mess from my face, the healer reappears and shoves my boots into my arms.

My face crumples into a scowl.

Her response is a curled lip before she’s sweeping towards the doorframe.

My scowl aims at the waiting fae as I slip off the bed.

The bite of the cold floorboards is enough to curl my toes as I shimmy up my trousers.

The firm bodice is useless, cut at the seams, discarded on the floor.

I drop onto a stool.

The limp of a wounded litalf passes me.

As I tug on my boots, I lift my gaze and watch the weighted thud, thud, thud graze between me and the bed I only just left.

The healers don’t so much as change the sheepskin before they are ushering the bulky male onto the bed. No time, maybe no fresh blankets or fleece, I don’t know. But I grimace all the same, then snatch my pastry from the foot of the bed before his boots can touch it, then I stuff it into my mouth.

I chew, hard and fast, a race to stomach it before I have to get up from this stool and walk out there into the chaos.

I make to reach for my backpack on the floor… But it isn’t here. Gone. Lost in the Sacrament, somewhere on the summit.

There’s something odd about it. The niggling feeling of forgetting something, or maybe it’s just that I don’t want to go out there, into the crowd still thick in the street. Because, really… I have nowhere to go.

I walk out there, and then what?

I can’t go to Daxeel’s home. Hemlock is not for me anymore.

I can’t find Father and return home with him. Licht is not for me anymore.

All the rooms and taverns will be booked for the Sacrament… not that I have any coin to pay for a room.

The moment I walk out through that door, push by the line of waiting wounded, I will stagger out into the crowd, and simply look around, unsure of my next step, uncertain of my direction.

There are things I know.

One, I need more medical attention than I was afforded here. The healers here treated me with urgency, stopped the bleeding on my head, salved my bruises and aches. But I need more.

I need the black powder.

Yet, that costs coin that I don’t have.

I am not in the defence of Licht, so I won’t be treated by the light lands, not without cost.

I don’t want to go out there—I don’t want to even see my Eamon, because he has a home to return to.

He will have Hemlock House… and I won’t.

Besides, I will need to tell him about Ridge.

Maybe he will hate me for it. Maybe he won’t understand why I had to kill his lover.

Maybe he will blame me.

The rush of fear is cold like ice in my chest. It charges through my veins, an anxiety I hadn’t let myself feel or acknowledge while I got to curl up on that bed, a bed now taken by another.

I drop my head into my hands.

Against my palms, my face twists and there’s a watery burn that leaks from my creasing eyes. A breath shudders through me—then a hard nudge rocks me.

“Must leave!”

I throw a wet glare at the healer. “And go where?”

Her face shutters.

Her hand is raised, as if to shove my shoulder again, to kick me out before I’m ready to go, but her hand falters.

I swallow, thick, and my throat bobs. “I’m going,” I mutter and push up onto my feet. “I’m going.”

My steps are slow; the ache remains, burrowed deep into my bones, and even my ribs are aching as though there’s a cold blooming in me. Maybe there is. Maybe my mortality is catching up to me, and I’ll die out there in the cold at night, ill and weak.

I almost scoff.

Surviving the Sacrament, the second passage, the savagery of the mountain, the beasts who hunted me, the sacrifices… all to die from lack of home.

“Narcissa.”

I still.

Halfway to the door, I’m wedged between the top of one bed and the foot of another. My spine twists uncomfortably as I look over my shoulder.

The healer’s face is still as sharp as a fistful of knives, stern and cross. But there’s a slight furrow that knits her brow and a slant to her thin lips.

I almost wonder how she knows my name. But of course she does. She like everyone else here will have watched me in the Sacrament, or at least heard from those who did.

The healer lifts her hand—but not to nudge me.

Between her fingers is a torn piece of parchment, the same hue as the parchment on the clipboard she’s carrying.

I drop my frown to it.

“I have bed.”

The barbed accent is a wall between us.

It takes me a moment to understand what she tells me. But when I do, my face smooths, frown dissolves, and my mouth twists.

I lift my hand for the parchment.

A name, an address inked and scribbled.

“Husband help you.”

My mouth wobbles.

The wet doesn’t just come from my eyes anymore. It doesn’t only streak my cheeks. I feel it around my mouth, my nose, and in the shuddered breaths that fill me.

I take the parchment and close my fist around it.

“Are… Are you sure?” I ask, then lift my gaze to her.

But she’s gone.

With her back to me, she’s over at another bed, two down from where I stand, and scribbling notes onto the parchment on the clipboard.

I stuff the parchment scrap into my pocket, then worm my way out the bakery.