“What of it? It keeps me alive.” Donating blood didn’t hurt, and since the first time with Jaguar it had never left me feeling more than dazed for a few minutes. It was simply one more thing to add to the list of reasons that it didn’t really make any sense to leave, no matter what Malachi said.
“Keeps you alive?” he echoed. “So they are threatening you now.”
“No one has threatened me except for you,” I pointed out. “The pochtecatl told me I needed to let blood regularly or my magic would make me ill.”
“The pochtecatl …” He frowned deeply. “Yaretzi told me she would try to heal you and see if Midnight was willing to let her buy you and bring you back to Azteka land. She wouldn’t have told the vampires to bleed you.”
“Maybe she just didn’t want me to die.”
“Your blood is sacred to them,” he snapped. “Well, all blood is, but yours in particular, because you have the magic. They wouldn’t feed it to those creatures.” He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. “Not unless they’ve become as corrupt as the other kingdoms. I can’t—” He broke off as a figure appeared between us. I was on my knees on the ground half a heartbeat after recognizing Mistress Jeshickah.
She was not looking at me, though, but staring at Malachi, who had frozen so still he may as well have been made of ice. When he took his next breath, it made his body tremble, as if that simple act were difficult.
“To what do I owe this visit?” he asked from where he was still leaning against the tree.
Mistress Jeshickah responded by striking him so hard that he fell to the path in front of me, eyes wide. The blood on his lip and cheek looked vivid and horrific on his pale features.
“Traitor,” Mistress Jeshickah spat.
“I am a traitor to many nations, and occasionally to my own blood,” Malachi said, each word careful and distinct, as if it pained him to speak. He had not yet stood, as if he knew better than to do so. “But I have broken none of your laws, and I have permission to be on Midnight’s land. So why—”
She interrupted him with a swift kick. I couldn’t help whimpering at the sound of something cracking as Malachi’s form flipped over twice before falling to the ground again. I might not have liked him, but that didn’t mean I wanted to witness this almost casual brutality.
He started to push himself up, and the next kick caught him in the arm, snapping it.
“Mistress.” The frightened squeak that escaped me made her turn slowly, but she was clearly furious.
“Meet us in my study,” she ordered. “Go by wing. Now!”
I cast one last, frightened glance at Malachi and then changed shape and returned to the main building of Midnight as quickly as my underused wings could take me. The guards at the front doors let me in, and another set of guards unlocked Mistress Jeshickah’s study when I repeated her commands in a terrified stammer.
She had called Malachi a traitor. Had he planned to hurt me? Was that why she had greeted him that way? Or was it worse, and she thought I was involved in whatever he had done?
I nearly tripped over the body on the floor. I flung myself back as I recognized the witch I had last seen chained in the back cell. His skin was blotted with bruises and cuts, and his neck had been twisted at an unnatural angle.
My eyes kept straying to that battered body as I curled up in an armchair to await my fate. The notion of running or hiding never occurred to me. I had nowhere else to go. Besides, I had run when Lord Daryl had assaulted me, and that had resulted in total disaster.
I would accept whatever happened next.
But I couldn’t get the sound of Malachi’s bones breaking out of my mind.
When Mistress Jeshickah entered the room, she was holding Malachi by the scruff of his neck. She threw him down to the marble floor not far from the dead witch, and at first he just lay there like a rag doll on the polished cream-and-black marble. Blood was dripping from many places now, and my mind couldn’t quite make sense of the direction some of his bones had taken.
One of the healers followed them in. Expressionless, she set about pulling bones into place and splinting them. Malachi had his eyes and jaw clenched shut, but small whimpers still found their way out in place of the screams he was trying to suppress.
“I know how fast your bones heal,” Mistress Jeshickah explained to him in a soft, cooing voice. “I wouldn’t want to permanently disfigure you by letting them set all wrong, now, would I? Not yet, anyway.” She patted him on the shoulder, hard enough to make one of his screams escape.
Another pair of slaves had just carried in a basin of steaming water. Mistress Jeshickah ignored the rest of us as she diligently washed blood from her hands and arms before passing the soiled towel back to the slaves who had brought it. Suddenly, Jaguar’s joke from long ago about Mistress Jeshickah’s obsession with her bath no longer seemed funny.
Now clean of blood, she watched impassively as the healer continued her work.
“That should be sufficient, Mistress,” the healer said softly, after checking Malachi one last time.
Mistress Jeshickah nodded sharply and then gestured for the healer to leave. “Take the corpse with you,” she added. “I have what I need from it. As for you,” she said to Malachi. “I will return once your jaw and windpipe have had a chance to heal. Then we will speak. Vance, perhaps you can convince your friend here that further lies will not serve him well.”
She left, as did the healer with the witch’s body over her shoulder. I heard the click of the lock sliding into place.
“What have you done?” I asked Malachi, in a panic.
He lifted his head laboriously toward me, coughed, and then shuddered at the pain the movement caused. The cough had brought more blood to his lips. He tried to speak and then started coughing again.
I heard the thread of his voice in my mind. Can’t talk yet. Things broken.
The images were disjointed, not nearly as coherent as his dream voice, but I could mostly make sense of them.
“Can I do anything for you?” I asked. I still believed that he was responsible for whatever Mistress Jeshickah blamed him for, but it was hard to look at him lying there, fighting the pain, and not help.
Tell me. Why?
“You really don’t know?” I asked, but I knew he would not necessarily admit anything more to me than he had to Mistress Jeshickah.
Don’t know. Don’t want to die for something not my fault.
“Neither do I,” I answered.
What going on?
“I don’t know.”
Must know something. What has been happening here? Why is she angry?
I shook my head. I didn’t know. I had barely even seen any of the vampires lately.
“They’ve been keeping the household slaves and stable hands apart to avoid sickness in the stables,” I told Malachi, “so I haven’t even been in the main building for the last week.”
Malachi stared at me as if I had just said one of those things he found incredibly stupid. At least this time I realized why it was stupid.
I rephrased. “There’s some kind of illness being passed among the slaves,” I said. “No one in the stables has caught it, though, so I don’t know anything but rumor.”
How many people have it?
“I don’t know,” I responded.
Malachi pushed himself up a little more and rotated his shoulder slowly, wincing. He cleared his throat and said in a rough voice, “Perks and pitfalls of healing like a falcon.”
“What?”
“I told you before, my father was a falcon,” he said. “They heal fast. Jeshickah knows it. It’s nice not to die easily, but if she thinks I’m involved in some kind of slave plague, I’m not sure I want to heal this well.”
“It’s not a plague,” I protested.
It took him three tries, but he managed to stand. One leg still wasn’t working well, but he crossed to the door and put his hands on the wooden paneling.
“Want to come for a walk with me?”
“What?” I yelped. Why did everything he ever said take me off guard? “No. We’re supposed to stay here. She’ll be furious. And anyway, it’s locked.”
He reached down and opened the door. “There aren’t many locks that hold me in,” he replied. “I’m not going far. I just want to get a sense of what’s going on here. Otherwise I won’t know anything when Jeshickah comes back, and our lot will not have improved at all. You do want to be able to answer her questions, right?”
When he put it that way … “You’re manipulating me because you know I want to help her. You don’t want to help her.”
“I want to survive, which might mean helping her, so our goals are not incompatible,” he replied. “And yes, I’m manipulating you. That should be familiar to you, since I’m fairly certain that’s almost all that anyone does to you.”
“Why do you say things like that?”
And why did I go with him when he stepped forward into the hallway?
It was late morning, which was normally a quiet time, but even so the halls seemed unnaturally still.
“We could ask Jaguar,” I suggested. If anyone would answer my questions without being angry, it was Jaguar.
Malachi made a choking noise—maybe his throat wasn’t quite healed yet—but followed me. I knocked on the door.
I waited a long time. He might be busy, or sleeping … but this was important. We needed answers before Mistress Jeshickah returned. So I knocked again, louder.
As usual, Celeste opened the door.
“Is Jaguar in?” I asked.
She shook her head. At the same time I heard her stomach rumble. Looking closely, I saw that there were dark shadows under her sightless eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Malachi, behind me, asked, “Are you sick?”
“I’m not sick,” she answered.
“She’s a quetzal, too,” I explained to Malachi. “She can’t get sick.”
But she can starve, I thought. It was Jaguar’s responsibility to take care of her. He had said as much to me. Why wasn’t he doing it?
“Do you know how many are ill?” Malachi asked.
We didn’t get an answer before a cold voice made me turn. “If you’re up and wandering around,” Mistress Jeshickah said, “it must be time for us to continue our conversation.”
I tried to kneel, but Malachi caught my arm.
“It isn’t just the slaves who are sick, is it?” he asked, this time not freezing or flinching in the face of her wrath. “The trainers have it, too.”
I was sure she would laugh and call him a fool. After all, he had to be wrong. Vampires didn’t get sick. They couldn’t. That was part of what set them apart from humans.
I waited for her to laugh, but she never did.
MISTRESS JESHICKAH NODDED.
“There is no natural illness in this world that affects vampires, so you assume it is magical,” Malachi surmised. “You have plenty of witches on your payroll, but you don’t want to consult any of them because they might turn on you if they see that you are this weak. Am I correct?”
“As one of the creatures of magic who has been near this place recently, I am sure you understand why I feel we must talk,” she replied.
“If I had the power to cause a plague among your kind,” he said, “I would have used it when my brother was still alive.”
“If you are so clean of guilt, then why are you lingering in our lands?” Mistress Jeshickah asked. “You have no connection to this boy, yet you stay near him and bid to buy him from us. You do not return to the sister you so melodramatically claim to have sold your soul to save, and yet you expect me to believe you have no hand in recent events?”
“Why are you not sick?” Malachi asked, ignoring her questions. “Has it spared any of the others?”
“The disease spread through the stock,” Mistress Jeshickah explained. “Once the first fever passes in humans, there is no sign of the illness for quite a while, so many of the infected bleeders returned to the rotation before we realized they were sick or that they would make us sick. I do not feed from the public stock.”
“You need a witch,” Malachi said. “Even if I were responsible, your beating me bloody wouldn’t heal your boys. And since I am not responsible in any way, I would appreciate it if you continued to follow your own laws. I’m freeblood. That means you can keep your hands off me as I leave.”
“You brought the quetzal back to us,” Mistress Jeshickah said as Malachi turned away.
“I am not responsible for the way your property behaves,” Malachi replied.
“That would be relevant if Vance were a slave,” she snapped, “but as you’ve been told repeatedly, he is not. He is as free as you are, and when you assisted his return, he came to us as a plague bearer. That could be taken as an act of aggression every bit as much as if you had walked in here with a hunter’s blade.”
“This is my fault?” I asked.
They both looked at me with an expression that said, “Oh, the child is talking again.”
“I made Jaguar sick,” I said, putting the pieces together. “Elisabeth was his. He gave it to her. But he got it from me. I didn’t mean to! I didn’t know—”
“You can’t help it if your blood is, apparently, poison,” Malachi interrupted. “There are other witches who have the same trait. Perhaps the vampires should have considered that before passing you around.”
“I’ve never owned a bloodwitch, but I have had the opportunity to feed on one before,” Mistress Jeshickah replied. “This is not typical. I thought at first the assassin-witch might have done it, but when I interrogated him he admitted to sensing the poison in my protective little quetzal when they fought in the stables.” Those last words didn’t sound as fond as they should have. “I killed him, just in case, but his death had no effect.”
“A spell this powerful wouldn’t survive the death of the witch who cast it,” Malachi murmured in agreement. “As for others … Vance, you were in the market just before this all started. Any stranger who bumped into you or said ‘excuse me’ in the crowd could have been a magic-user. If the spell was prepared ahead of time, it could have been stored in anything, and cast with a simple touch.”
“Malachi,” Mistress Jeshickah said, “you will discover what has been done to the quetzal and how it can be undone.”
“No,” Malachi replied. “This is your hole. Dig yourself out, or don’t. I’m not involved.”
“Let me make myself clear.” Mistress Jeshickah stood before Malachi, wearing the perfect, quiet calm I recalled from after the assassination attempt. “You are going to fix this. If you fail and any of my men die, or if you run, I will track you down. I will wipe your guild off this map. I will take your precious sister’s future mate, make him the first of my new trainers, and then have him break her under his heel. I believe that would fulfill the prophecy of which you are so fond.”
It would be hard to believe that Malachi could pale any more, yet I was seeing it. He seemed to become nearly transparent as he nodded silently.
“The lower cells are empty,” Mistress Jeshickah said. “That should be a comfortable enough space for you two to work in.”
Malachi’s gaze rose swiftly, and he protested, “Vance won’t survive down there.”
“I can’t imagine how you intend to work on this problem without studying its origin. If you’re concerned for Vance’s health, you had best work quickly.”
“I doubt you’ll let me look at the trainers, but it might help if I examined one of the ill bleeders.”
There were words I wanted to say and questions I wanted to ask and screams building up in me, but I could not make a sound as I followed them to the last door in the hall. During my tour Jaguar had said only, This is … also none of your concern, because it will always be locked. This is a working building, Vance.
Knowing now what “work” the trainers did, I knew what I would see even before we stepped through the doors. We descended
steep stairs, then came to a room with rough stone walls and a dirt floor.
If the cold, slick marble room behind Jaguar’s room had been bad, this place was infinitely worse. I could feel the aura of despair pushing in from all sides.
Or maybe it’s just my own.
I missed Mistress Jeshickah leaving. She was simply gone. She hadn’t disappeared; my mind had blanked out for a few moments. I was having trouble thinking and following what was going on. Like the loose, crumbling mortar in the walls, my world seemed to be turning to dust and revealing all sorts of sharp edges and hidden evils.
I remembered Malachi saying once that “they” had been very careful with me.
I understood what he had meant now. Even after I had been exposed to the brutality that was apparently commonplace in Midnight, I had been sheltered from the idea that I could ever be the victim. They had worked so hard to convince me that everything I saw was necessary. Inevitable.
Malachi was at the door, examining it, but eventually he admitted, “This is not a lock I can trip. It’s warded magically.”
“Are you a witch or not?” I asked. “You obviously have magic, but you told Mistress Jeshickah that she needed a witch, as if you weren’t one.”
“I’m a little bit of a lot of things, but not much of a healer,” he said. “And you’re stuck here with me, unless we can buy our way out by saving the lives of the trainers.”
“Are you going to?” I asked. Given the way he felt about Midnight, he might choose to die first.
“If Jeshickah were sick, I’d kill myself and you before they could try to break us, and hope that with her death Midnight might fall,” Malachi said. “I should probably refuse to help anyway, out of principle, but you may have noticed that my principles are a little less honorable than that. Losing the trainers will weaken Midnight, but Jeshickah has made it clear that she will simply create more.”
“Would she really go after your family?” I asked.
“In a heartbeat. Metaphorically speaking, since she doesn’t have one.”
“What prophecy is she talking about?” I asked. Visions of the future had been common in Lady Brina’s myths, but I hadn’t thought they existed in the real world.