Page 79 of Bloodwitch
Now, Aeduan knew everything died easily.
“You move too slowly.” Lizl’s voice knifed through the fading day. She had stopped her horse. The donkey had stopped too. Somehow Aeduan had not noticed, perhaps because the leash around his neck had grown no easier. “It will be midday soon, Bloodwitch, and we need to cover more ground.”
“Give me… that Painstone,” he rasped. “Then I’ll move faster.”
She snorted, and in an easy swoop, dismounted. Three sluggish heartbeats later, she reached Aeduan’s side. “Down,” she ordered, yanking at the leash—and leaving Aeduan with no choice but to obey. He tumbled from the saddle.
She sidestepped; he hit the cold earth. The impact shocked his bones, his lungs. He bit through his tongue and tasted blood. Always, always the blood. Then coughing laid claim, and shadows wavered at the edges of his vision, thicker and thicker by the moment.
This curse would kill him—and he was glad for it. If he was dead, the pain would end. If he was dead, the Fury could not come for him, and he would not need to escape Lizl to protect her.
When at last the hacking passed, a water bag landed on the dirt before Aeduan. He did not take it.
“Where… are we?” Eyes stinging, he looked up at Lizl.
“We’re near where I was born.” She unstrapped a pack fromher saddle. “If you had played nice growing up, then you might recognize it.”
Aeduan didn’t know how to answer that. He had always played nice. It was the monster inside that had not.
He fumbled for the water bag and rocked back onto his haunches. Lizl had slackened the leash, and his gullet moved with blessed freedom as he drank his fill. A line of cool relief slid from throat to chest. Not enough to clear the pain, but something.
He sucked in a tattered breath, stoppered the bag, and threw it back to Lizl. He missed. The bag hit the earth several paces short, earning a glare. “What’s wrong with you?” She scowled. “I’ve seen you take a sword through the gut and heal from it. This…” She motioned to him. “What happened?”
Aeduan’s only reply was to draw in more air, his lungs rattling. There was nothing he could say that would help his cause. If he admitted he was cursed, it would only give her more power—assuming she even believed him at all. She did not believe in the Fury, so why would she believe in a Cursewitch?
“Hurt,” he said eventually. “Arrows. Many of them.”
She did not look convinced, but fortunately, she also did not press. “Here.” Two long strides brought her to him, and she offered him a worn leather satchel. “Clean up.”
Aeduan squinted at the brown case. A small healer’s kit, he realized. Then he shook his head. “It… won’t help. I need the Painstone.”
“Well, it’s this or nothing.” She waved it in his face. “Your choice.”
He took the kit.
By the dappled light of a turning maple, Aeduan did his best to tend his wounds. The arrow marks had worsened, the skin around each gash puffy and red while the holes themselves oozed black blood. Each touch made his teeth grind and his eyes roll back in his head. Somehow, though, he managed not to pass out.
He dabbed the final smears of a Waterwitch salve on the largest slash below his breastbone, when a question split the day: “What’s it like?”
Lizl sat on a fallen tree, oiling her sword. Her cloth whispered rhythmically against Carawen steel.
“What is… what like?” It took Aeduan three tries to get the jar closed again. His fingers shook.
“What’s it like being unable to die?”
“I can die,” he answered.I am dying right now.
Her gaze flicked to his, unamused. “You know what I mean.”
Perhaps it was her detachment that spurred him, or perhaps it was the pain and the haze and the bloodred light through a maple tree. He could not say. All he knew was that a reply fell from his tongue, raw and honest.
“It means that I forget how easy it is to kill people,” he said gruffly, “so I must always be on my guard. It means I do not know what fear is, so I can never be brave. It means that I live when everyone else around me dies. And it means,” he finally wedged the salve’s cork back in, “I am not like you. Or anyone else.”
Her cloth paused halfway down the blade. She considered him, eyes thinned and inscrutable.
Until at last she murmured, “No. You are not like me or anyone else, are you?” She broke the eye contact. “And it’s why the world hates you. Why we will always hate you. Death follows wherever you go, yet by the grace of the Wells, you always outrun your own.”
“I did not ask for this.”
