The Queen of Blood (28 page)

But it was Hamon.

He was still dressed in his Healer uniform, as if he hadn't tried to sleep. He probably hadn't. He'd most likely been offering his services to all the candidates. He held a jar of salve. “You're awake. I've come . . .” He trailed off but held up the jar as an explanation. “You need to be pain-free for tomorrow. You don't know what she'll throw at you next.”

“Is that truly why you're here?”

“When the wood spirits closed around you . . . I thought I'd lost you. And then today, you were so fierce . . .” He touched her cheek, gently. Definitely
not
a healer's touch.

She drew him inside and shut the door behind him. “I did something unforgivable in the ring today. I turned a spirit on another candidate. A friend. Someone I've known for years, who took classes with me here at the academy, ate meals with me. She may not have been one of my closest friends, but she still counts as one, and I turned a spirit on her to break her concentration. That's the only reason I lasted in the ring as long as I did.” The words tasted bitter on her tongue. She watched his face to gauge his reaction, but his face didn't change.

“You turned the spirit on yourself to stop it.” It wasn't a question.

“After I let it attack her.”

“Let me fix your back. I can't heal what you feel, but I can heal your skin.”

She sat on her bed and lifted her shirt over her head. Facing her back toward him, she held her hair up as he rubbed the salve over the mostly healed wounds.

“How are your eyes?” he asked as his fingers rubbed away the remnants of pain.

“Fine.” Twisting, she looked at him. She could see him looking at her in the candlelight. His hands moved up to her shoulders.

“And your arms? Any pain from the other day?”

She held out her arms, twisting them for him to see. The cuts from the spirits had faded into pink lines on her skin. He ran his hands down her arms, softly, his fingers feeling like feathers.

“Anything else?” he asked, his eyes locked on hers, as if he planned to never look away. “I want to heal your pain, Daleina. All of it.”

She drew him closer, and he kissed her, hesitantly at first as if afraid he would hurt her, and she kissed him back, her hands on his skin, his on hers.

And she felt no pain that night.

A
fter the funeral, Daleina and the other candidates gathered in front of the palace. The queen waited for them, alone, framed by the arched entrance. The ring where they had fought and the candidate had died was gone, erased as if it never existed, and flowers encircled the queen, cascading from the top of the arch. Side by side with her friends, Daleina felt other eyes on her, people from the city, the champions, and spirits, curious after yesterday. She tried to draw strength from the fact that she wasn't alone.

“Your task is simple. Aratay has many abandoned areas, places where people once lived and now only spirits reside. I have chosen one, a lost village, to be reclaimed for people once again. Your champions have been told where the area is and will share that information with you. Once they have done so, you are on your own. Go. Claim the village. Rebuild it. Make it safe. And then you will have earned your place as heir.” She favored them all with a smile. “I wish you the very best.”

She then turned and walked into the palace. As she reached the gate, she turned her head and added, “All of Aratay wishes you the very best.” And the trees exploded into bloom, flowers bursting to life on every branch, growing from vines that shouldn't have been able to grow in fall, in a riot of colors from spring and summer.

As the queen left, the blossoms burst into flame as fire spirits danced over them and then froze in half-ashen blossoms as ice spirits flew behind them.

“She does know how to make an exit,” Revi murmured.

Daleina saw Ven push his way through the crowd toward her. Hamon was close behind him. Ven clasped her hands. “Hate me if you want, but be strong.”

Daleina blinked. He looked . . . angry, she thought. It wasn't anything definitive: his face was still blank, but there was a tightness to his jaw that she only saw after a village had been attacked. “What do you mean?”

“It can't be a coincidence, the ‘lost' town. She chose it . . . to punish me? To test you? I don't know. I can't pretend to know what she's thinking, but whatever her reason for wishing to put you at a disadvantage—” He cut himself off, as if he realized he was babbling, an unusual activity for a champion and one that was making Daleina feel as if the oxygen was being sapped out of the air. He squeezed her hands again. “Daleina, the lost village is Greytree. It's your village. I am so very sorry. It's cruel.”

Daleina felt numb.
Home
. She pictured it as it was, with Rosasi and her friends and their house cradled in the village tree. “She didn't know.”

“She
did
know. She's testing you. Why just you, I don't know, except it must be to punish me, because I dared defy her exile and bring you here. She means to hurt me through you. Or test me through you.” He closed his eyes, inhaled, and then opened them. “You will need to set aside your emotions, remember your training, and draw on your strengths. Can you do that? If you can't, there is no shame in walking away. We can continue our training and try again at the next trials. No one will think less of you.”

“Listen to Ven,” Hamon put in. “You don't have to do this.”

Daleina's mouth quirked into a smile. “You mean I have a choice?”

“Of course!” Hamon said.

“It isn't fair of her to ask this of you,” Ven said. “And I won't ask it of you. I will respect whatever choice you make.”

Daleina glanced at the others, also in close conferences with their champions. She doubted the other champions were having this kind of talk with their candidates. She wondered what it meant that hers was trying to talk her out of it, if he thought she wasn't worthy or believed she was going to fail. “It's the kind of thing a queen has to do, isn't it? Heal what's broken? In a way, it's the reason I'm here.” Brave words. She wasn't sure she meant them. Then again, she wasn't sure she didn't.
Greytree
. It always came back to that, to the day when she hadn't saved everyone. “I think I'm meant to do this.”

Ven snorted. “I don't believe in fate.”

“This isn't about you.” Daleina covered his hand with hers to soften her words. “Maybe that's how Queen Fara meant it, but that's not what it is. Not anymore. I'm making it about me. Maybe, when I'm done, someone will write a song about it, and your sister will sing it from the top of the canopy. Now, will you both quit worrying about my emotional state and let me go?” On the last word, she realized she was shouting. Gathering up the shreds of her dignity, she marched to the end of the branch and jumped off, grabbing a rope as she did and swinging down to the forest floor.

Whistling, she waited for a moment, and Bayn trotted out of the bushes. Daleina rubbed his ears, and the wolf's tongue lolled out of his mouth. He leaned against her, comfortingly, and she braced herself to keep from toppling over into the bushes. “Guess it's just you and me.”

Behind her, she heard a soft thump as someone landed. She turned to tell Ven—

It wasn't Ven. It was Mari. “Is it true you know the way?”

“Yes.” She swallowed and straightened, taking strength from the warmth of the wolf by her side. The others from Northeast Academy joined them: Revi, Linna, Zie, Iondra, Evvlyn, and Airria. “I'll take us there.”

T
HE LIGHT WAS FADING TO A MATTE GRAY
,
FLATTENING THE SHADOWS
between the trees. Looking up at the moss-coated branches, Daleina called to the others, “We should stop for the night.”

Ahead, Linna called, “I found the perfect spot.” She beckoned them through the woods into a clearing that was as picturesque as a storybook: a lovely pool of water, reflecting the dimming sky above, beds of soft ferns, blossoms closed for the coming evening, moss hanging from the branches of the bent bows.
All it needs is a deer lapping at the pool, surrounded by singing woodland creatures with ribbons and bows in their fur,
Daleina thought.

As she always did when she traveled with Ven and Hamon, she scanned the area for spirits—she found one, living in the pool of water beneath a tree. “There's a spirit in the . . .”

She trailed off as a half-dozen more spirits swooped in from between the trees. A tiny wood spirit with leaflike wings and berry eyes flew to Mari, alighted on her shoulder, and then dived into a nearby bush—the berries ripened in its wake. Calling to a water spirit, Revi flushed a squirrel out of its nest. Across the clearing, Linna created a fire with only spirits and no kindling or wood, and Zie instructed two earth spirits to kill, skin, and prepare the squirrel to be cooked over that fire. Airria and Evelyn used spirits to plump up the moss and create hammocks out of leaves. Watching them, Daleina unrolled her plain bedroll. As the air shimmered around her, a part of her kept whispering,
Danger!

“There are fish!” Linna instructed the water spirit to hand them to her out of the pool. She passed them to Zie's spirits to be cleaned and put on the fire. Soon, they were all sitting around the living flames, eating fish, squirrel meat, and berries, and Daleina had never felt more like she didn't belong.

“Daleina, do you want a hammock? I can make you one,” Revi offered. “The trick is to have a tree spirit weave vines.”

“I prefer the moss beds,” Linna said. “You can contour them to your back.”

“I'm fine,” Daleina said. “But thanks.”

“I've heard Champion Ven prefers the austere approach,” Zie said. “I bet he has you hunting for your food with bow and arrow.”

“Knives, actually.” Daleina felt prickles run up and down her back. The spirits they'd summoned were filling the trees and watching them. There were so many. Aware of them too, Bayn
pressed against her legs, and Daleina slid her hands into the wolf's fur, though she wasn't sure who was reassuring whom. The talking continued far into the night, and the fire spirits continued to spin and burn in the campfire. Curled against Bayn, Daleina slept only a few minutes at a time.

She woke at dawn. The fire spirits had fled, but there were dozens of others that watched them from the branches. Keeping an eye on the water spirit, Daleina washed her face in the pool. The water spirit swam in circles, agitated. Seeing the others wake, it froze, and then ducked under the surface of the water.

Airria and Evvlyn bathed in the pool after forcing a fire spirit to heat the water to a bearable temperature. The water spirit huddled by a tree, shivering and glaring. “Sorry for intruding on your grove,” Daleina told it.

“There's no point in that,” Revi said. Daleina startled—she hadn't heard Revi behind her. “They will always hate us. You know that.”

“I know, but . . .” She couldn't find the words to explain. “It feels as if we're riling them up unnecessarily. All of this, we could have done it without spirits. Instead, we've drawn the attention of all the spirits in the nearby area.”

“I know,” Linna said, joining them. “It's a strategy. Show them we have power. That way, if we ever face the spirits at the coronation, they'll remember us and choose one of us. They'll know we're strong enough to lead them. Daleina, this isn't foolhardy. We can handle these spirits.”

I can't,
Daleina thought, and the realization was like a fist in her stomach.

“Different champions have different approaches,” Iondra said.

But that's not it,
Daleina wanted to say. It wasn't a difference in approach; it was a difference in innate skill and talent.
I'm not good enough
. She looked at each of her friends. She'd known in the academy that commanding spirits came more easily to all of them, but it wasn't until now, out in the world and away from the cocoon of the academy, that she'd let herself see how very stark the difference was between them.

Her friends were still talking, unaware of the realization
churning inside Daleina. “In truth, the trial doesn't start at the border of Greytree,” Evvlyn said. “It's already started.” She looked at the trees above them that housed the hidden, spying spirits. “These spirits will report back to the queen.”

“And they'll say we were unafraid,” Revi said.

“Maybe it's all right to be a little afraid.” Daleina thought of the six spirits and the sphere of wood. Her scratches didn't sting anymore and, thanks to Hamon's salve, were barely visible. In a week, her skin would be smooth again, and there would be no sign at all of any attack, but she wasn't going to forget it anytime soon.

“It's not all right for us,” Mari said. “My mother always says that. To be queen is to be fearless. Why do you think I wanted to be queen so badly? If I were that powerful, I'd never feel fear again.” She hugged her arms. “I was so afraid before, in the first part of the trials. I think . . .” Her eyes were distant, and Daleina knew she was thinking back to the first trial and the candidate who didn't survive. “I think maybe that's why she died. If I hadn't been afraid . . .”

“Stop it, Mari,” Revi said. “It wasn't your fault.”

“Remember who the enemy is,” Daleina said.

There was silence in the grove, but it wasn't a friendly silence. Daleina was acutely aware of how many eyes were watching and ears were listening. She felt them like an itch on her skin, like new scratches, breaking open the old, and wondered why the others didn't feel it too—another difference between them. Another reason why Daleina didn't deserve to be queen.

In silence, they moved on.

G
REYTREE
.

Home.

The sign was faded and broken, appropriately, with another sign nailed on top of it:
UNPROTECTED
.
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
. It had the seal of the queen.
It's been officially abandoned,
Daleina thought. Somehow that seemed worse than just thinking of it as empty.

She traced the letters with her fingertip, smearing away the mold that had spread in the creases of the words. She couldn't
remember who would have repainted the signs. She'd been too young to know which of the adults did what, but she remembered a man with a red beard who used to paint flowers on the walls of the houses. Their house had stencils of ivy painted on the walls, and the kitchen had fat apples painted above the sink. She hadn't thought of that kitchen in years.

“Daleina, are you all right?” Linna asked.

“Of course she's not all right,” Revi said. “Daleina, is there anything we can do to help?”

Daleina pulled her hand away and forced it down to her side. She felt as if she'd forgotten what to do with her arms. They hung awkwardly by her side. “It will be good to do this. The village should live again.” Ven could be wrong. This might not be punishment at all, or even a test. Maybe the queen felt she was doing Daleina a favor—a chance to fix what was wrong in her past. It could be a chance to change something ugly and painful into something full of beauty and hope. “This way,” she said, walking down the bridge.

The bridge was in disrepair, which was putting it kindly. Lichen coated the boards. Several were missing and others were rotted, making the entire bridge look like an old man's smile. Daleina stepped gingerly, testing each board to see if it would hold her weight. She heard the others talking to one another, but it was like a buzz behind her. Her eyes were glued forward, waiting for her first view of Greytree.

Her memory could be wrong. Maybe it hadn't been destroyed as thoroughly as she'd thought. Maybe in a child's mind, it had been skewed into a catastrophe. It wasn't as if the rest of the country had reacted to the loss of Greytree. When they'd moved and she'd told people where she was from, there hadn't been gasps of horror. Just blank expressions, as if she'd named someplace far away. At the academy, most hadn't known of her tragedy, until one of her friends who liked to talk, Zie perhaps, had spread the world. She hadn't minded that they knew. In fact, she'd wanted them to know. It explained why she was there. But bringing them here . . . She was both grateful they were here with her and wished that she were alone.