Konstantin smiled. “You’re kind-hearted, I can see that. We can stay a while, if you’d like to feel the wind on your skin for a moment.”
Dagan blinked a few times, not understanding at first.
Piret elbowed him. “Go on. Go take a walk. It’s a beautiful day out there, and no one’s causing trouble with all the soldiers wearing green.”
“What’s the green for?” Dagan asked. He’d been so wrapped up in Hendrik, he’d only gotten the bare minimum of what was going on outside Jak’s room.
“It’s the color of the resistance, because there’s not much green here in the city. Now it’s starting to represent a potential alliance with the Heart Wood, too, though it’s early days.” Piret smiled and then winced. “Damned bruise.”
“When the healers from the Heart Wood come, ask them for arnica or calendula as a poultice. It’ll help.”
“Sure,” Piret said agreeably. “Go on, though. Have a walk. We’ll be here with him.”
“Take your time,” Konstantin insisted, settling into a chair near the bed.
The Red Lantern’s staircase and entryway were quiet, which Dagan gathered wasn’t the usual way of things. He passed beneath the eponymous paper lantern and beyond the threshold, and for what felt like the first time really looked at the streets around him. They were crooked and cramped, but even without shoulder-to-shoulder foot traffic, delightfully buzzing.
It felt like exploring a civilization on the bottom of a lake. Like Dagan was moving slowly through an unfamiliar world, a place full of life and people and busyness, but only half-recognizable as such. Everything felt so forced, so gray and colorless, so drained of vitality, and yet it was vital, thriving, almost swarming. People living and working on top of each other, sharing their daily lives in excruciating detail—but didn’t that make them closer? Didn’t they rely on one another more than the half-isolated communities of the Heart Wood? Weren’t they more beautifully, intricately connected in their own way, even if it didn’t involve green growing things?
Except in the Ag District, where that dark creature had restrained itself from feeding off its life. Just enough to keep his herd fed.
The thought drained the wonder from Dagan’s walk. Domestic animals were rarely kept penned in the Heart Wood, unless there was an extraordinary predator situation or, like goats, they were a danger to the ecosystem. They had to be free to roam to really live off the bounty of the forest. But here, in this City, even humans weren’t afforded that much kindness. They were kept in those tunnels and pits in the mines, herded into small buildings up here, trapped behind the walls they thought protected them but really marked them as livestock.
Not anymore, not now that the horror under the Great See was dead. Innan was leading a search for it, a race against time before everything collapsed, to prove it was dead. If it wasn’t—
No. It would’ve stirred when Dagan, Hen, and Innan had been trapped down there just above it, and nothing, absolutely nothing had in the blackness of that collapsed cavern, not for a full day. It had to be dead.
It had claimed to protect the City; no one had even dignified that with a response. Now, Dagan wondered if it was true, in some way. Some way they hadn’t found in the books or the stories or the winding masses of tunnel or the See itself. Had they left the City and the Heart Wood open to something bigger, something worse? Or had the Masters, creatures like that one, sucked the life out of the world and made the wastes, nothing more, nothing less? How had this one creature lived so long when the rest had gone supposedly extinct, victims of their own greediness? Off the blood of its own family, yes, but had that really been enough to sustain something for a thousand years or more?
Dagan went back to the Red Lantern and ate in the taproom, giving Konstantin and Alara time with their son. He did not enjoy himself; his thoughts were determined to stay dark. When he returned, they were still there as promised, though Piret had since left to return to the central square and the endless organization: new government, new infrastructure, new leadership, new people. Out of the shadows and into the light, etc. etc.
“There you are.” Alara stood, hands out to him as he came into the room.
Hendrik stirred in the bed, eyelashes fluttering over too-bright eyes. His skin had that clammy pale look, with strokes of pink across either cheek. Everything about him seemed heightened, exaggerated. Dagan blew him a kiss, happy that at least he was awake, and took both of Alara’s hands.
“He told us how you’ve taken care of him. We had no idea, no idea at all he’d even left the City,” she said, her voice a sing-song version of Kajja’s, just a little dustier. “He’s used to taking care of everything himself, so he must’ve been difficult. Thank you for saving him.”
“Still working on that,” Dagan said, squeezing her hands. This wasn’t a normal handshake, but a gesture more familiar to him. Oddly affectionate for the City, but then, what did he know? Anyhow, City or not, she was a parent. “But he looks a little better, now he’s awake again. Missed you, Hen.”
“Missed you, too,” Hen replied, voice cracking.
One more squeeze and Dagan let Alara go, moving to the fire. “More willow tea. It brings down the fever,” he explained, though Kon and Alara didn’t ask. He went about his business, and slowly, slowly, the glow of Jak’s dozens of candles and the warmth of his garish silks and the flicker of his large fireplace seeped into Dagan’s soul, until the darkness that had come upon him outside abated. Konstantin asked to help with the tea, so that he could learn how to make it himself—not that he’d ever seen willow bark or drank tea before. They had an impressively deep conversation about healing herbs produced in the Ag District versus the wider variety available in the Heart Wood. Kon’s bright eyes flashed with satisfaction at every new fact, every question asked and answered; though he looked like Hen, Kajja was clearly also his child, born and raised.
Eventually, the hour grew late, and Alara began yawning. Konstantin took that as his cue to hurry his wife toward home. Dagan wasn’t relieved, precisely; he’d enjoyed Konstantin’s company in particular, though Alara had been lovely in her quiet, worried way. But Hen was awake and sipping another cup of tea, this time calendula, and Dagan really had missed him.
“My fucking leg hurts,” was the first thing Hen said once his parents were out the door.
Dagan turned to face Hen, leaning with one shoulder against the headboard. “What did you tell the healer, the last time you talked?”
“That I’m ready.” Hen shook his head. “I feel like I’m being tortured by demons and devils from old stories. I can’t sleep without something terrifying clawing at my brain. And then when I’m awake it just hurts. I’m ready.”
“Okay. I just wanted to be sure. Heart Wood herbs should arrive in the morning, if they left when they were summoned. Alonza sent a message to let us know. He’s gone to get Demetrius, to see if he’ll have any insight on… the dark creature. Thing.”
“The murder-god.” Hendrik grimaced. “Not such a god, after all.”
God-like, though, certainly, the way it’d flung him around like a doll. Still, “As long as it can burn, doesn’t matter much.”
“No.” Hen snorted. “The smell of that oil…I remember it from the beach. So strongly, like it was yesterday. I would’ve known it anywhere.”
“And if you hadn’t, what would we have done?” They would’ve had to find some other way…but what could that have been? Make their way out of the tunnels for the resistance reinforcements? Overwhelm the thing in a massive military operation? It seemed even more unlikely than the madness that had actually occurred.
It didn’t matter, though. The apprentice Gregor had failed, the assassins had failed, the priests and the guards had all failed. But they hadn’t.
Hendrik shrugged. “Throw myself at it again and again until it beat me to a pulp, probably.”
“Yeah, that’ll be funny in a year or two. Right now I’m still remembering the one time you threw yourself at it and how great that went.” Dagan sighed and leaned his head against the board, too. “Sometimes you have to look before you leap, my love.”
“So I’m learning. The hard way.” But Hen gave a little chuckle. “Do we have sheep?”
“What?”
“I keep having this dream about us having sheep. We don’t have sheep back in the Heart Wood, right?”
Dagan shook his head, amused. Fever dreams…weird, weird stuff. “No. We don’t. I mean, we could, if you like sheep?”
“They were so soft,” Hen said thoughtfully. “It seemed very real. It still seems real.”
“First I turned into a bear, now we’re raising sheep together. Oh, Hen…” Dagan smiled fondly. “Give me that mug and lie back down. Tomorrow we’ll have all the herbs you could need.”
