Aeduan did not know how he held his seat atop the donkey. The world bled around him, consumed by the perpetual throb in his chest and belly. It devoured all thought, all desire, until there was nothing left but fiery talons that leached away shapes and colors. Until the whole world was gray. Gray trees, gray sky, and gray Lizl atop her gray mare.

At first, when they’d set off, aiming vaguely northwest and into the mountains, Aeduan tried to warn Lizl. He’d told her the Fury was coming for him, that the man was a killer, yet all she’d done was laugh. “I’m a killer too, and he doesn’t scare me.”

It would seem she had seen the Fury in Tirla. She had taken shelter from the storm and overheard Aeduan talking to him. But not when the man’s winds had raged around him. Not when his cyclone had wrecked and ruined, nor when his cleaving magic had turned his veins to black.

So she did not believe Aeduan when he warned her, and soon, the argument was too difficult to sustain. So Aeduan shut up and turned his attention to escape—for he could not stay with Lizl. If the Fury came, she would die.

Aeduan had enough blood on his hands already.

The Aeduan of two days ago would have simply taken control of her blood, trapping her in place long enough for him to flee. Of course, the Aeduan of a week ago would never have been caught in the first place.

Now, he could scarcely smell her blood, much less touch it. And the more he drifted in this half-life, the more he feared it was not the fire in his veins that kept him from summoning his powers, nor the weakness as his body fought to heal.

The curse was erasing him. Drip by drip, it was draining away his magic until soon there would be nothing left. His body, he thought, might still have a chance to heal and recover. His Bloodwitchery, he feared, never would.

Eventually, even planning became too difficult to sustain. It took all Aeduan’s focus just to remain upright. The roads, if they could even be called that, were slender and uneven. Overgrown hunting paths and shepherds’ trails rife with branches to poke at Aeduan’s eyes and scratch apart his skin.

The donkey trundled ever onward. The sun ascended ever higher.

Once, Aeduan thought he heard a dog barking. Close, as if some farmer’s hut waited nearby. It was a nice sound. A welcome respite that chased away the shadows. He liked dogs. He had liked Boots too, until the day he’d killed him. Then he’d hated Boots for dying so easily.

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 from her 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.”

“No one asks for what life gives them.” She sniffed and scrubbed harder at the blade. “What matters is how you use it, and far as I can tell, you have squandered a magic that others would kill for. You ascended through the ranks faster than any other acolyte. You took all the best assignments, hoarded all the employers and coin, and the entire time, you looked down on the rest of us. We were mud for you to stomp through on your way to higher ground. You had no loyalty to the Monastery, no interest in the Cahr Awen.”

For the first time since her leash had wrapped around his neck, anger sparked in Aeduan’s shoulders. His fingers flexed.

Because she had it all wrong. Everything she said was backward. He had not looked down on the other monks; he had been cast aside. He had not wasted his magic; his magic had wasted him.

“Now,” she went on, voice bitter as she scooped more lanolin from a tub, “it turns out you’re son to the Raider King. I don’t know why I was so surprised to learn this. Of course you would be loyal to a man who kills innocents and burns the Witchlands—and of course he would breed a demon like you.”

Aeduan’s wrists rolled. The rage spread hotter inside his veins.

Why, he wanted to ask, should he be loyal to anyone? He had lived his entire life as a tool for others, a blade no different from the one she now cleaned. Even the Threadwitch had used him, tricking him with his own coins so he would track her friend across the Contested Lands.

Aeduan said nothing at all, though. Instead, his spine hardened and he inhaled deep. Rage was stoking his magic to life, a weak flame. Vicious and welcome within his heart. Though he was not strong enough yet to control Lizl’s blood and flee, if he was patient, if he was angry …

Maybe enough of his power would return. And maybe this curse would not claim him just yet.

* * *