on the pallet. Even at rest his lined face suggested a certain weary kindness. Someone had drawn a heavy quilted blanket over him, stained red-brown on one corner.
“What happened?” Minsu said. “Will he recover? I’m sure he could be a great help here.”
“He fell sick,” the girl said. “One of the monks said he had a stroke. He doesn’t talk anymore and he doesn’t seem to understand when people talk to him. They said he might like us to visit him, though, and our mother works with the monks to help the sick people, so we come by and bring flowers.”
He doesn’t talk anymore. Iseul went cold. He had spoken Chindallan; shouldn’t that have saved him? But she didn’t know how language worked in the brain.
Without asking, she lifted the corner of the blanket. The physician had longer arms than she remembered, like the Genial One she had killed at his house a lifetime ago. Who was to say they couldn’t change their shapes? Especially if they were living among humans? Tears pricking her eyes, she replaced the blanket.
“I’m very sorry,” Iseul said to the girl. “It’s probably not long before he dies.”
She couldn’t help but wonder how many Genial Ones had lingered into this age, taking no part in the conspiracy for vengeance, leading quiet lives as healers of small hurts to atone for their kindred who summoned storm-horses and faces of fire. There was no way to tell.
The Yegedin had tried to destroy Chindalla’s literature and names, but Iseul had destroyed the Genial Ones themselves. It hadn’t seemed real until now.
“Thank you,” she said to the dying Genial One, even though his mind was gone. She and Minsu sat by his side for a time, listening to him breathe. There was a war coming, and a storm entirely human, but in this small space they could mourn what they had done.
For a long time afterwards, Iseul tried to come up with a poem about the Genial Ones, encapsulating what they had meant to the world and why they had had to die and why she regretted the physician’s passing, but no words ever came to her.
—. A noun, probably, pertaining to regret or cinders or something of that nature, but this word can no longer be found in any lexicon, human or otherwise.
COUNTING THE SHAPES
How many shapes of pain are there?
Are any topologically equivalent?
And is one of them death?
Biantha woke to a heavy knocking on the door and found her face pressed against a book’s musty pages. She sat up and brushed her pale hair out of her face, trying to discern a pattern to the knocking and finding that the simplest one was impatience. Then she got to her feet and opened the door, since her warding spell had given her no warning of an unfriendly presence outside. Besides, it would be a little longer before the demons reached Evergard.
“Took your time answering the door, didn’t you, Lady Biantha?” Evergard’s gray-haired lord, Vathré, scowled at her. Without asking for permission, which he never did anyway, he strode past her to sweep his eyes over the flurry of papers that covered her desk. “You’d think that, after years of glancing at your work, I’d understand it.”
“Some of the conjectures are probably gibberish anyway.” She smiled at him, guessing that what frustrated him had little to do with her or the theorems that made her spells possible. Vathré visited her when he needed an ear detached from court intrigues. “What troubles you this time, my lord?”
He appropriated her one extra chair and gestured for her to sit at the desk, which she did, letting her smile fade. “We haven’t much longer, Biantha. The demons have already overrun Rix Pass. No one agrees on when they’ll get here. The astrologer refused to consult the stars, which is a first—claimed he didn’t want to see even an iffy prediction—” Vathré looked away from her. “My best guess is that the demons will be here within a month. They still have to march, overwhelming army or no.”
Biantha nodded. Horses barely tolerated demon-scent and went mad if forced to carry demons. “And you came to me for battle spells?” She could not keep the bitterness from her voice. The one time she had killed with a spell had been for a child’s sake. It had not helped the child, as far as she knew.
“Do you have any battle spells?” he asked gravely.
“Not many.” She leaned over and tapped the nearest pile of paper.