Clara back and up. Vincen couldn’t die. It was unthinkable. He was young and healthy and he had no enemies. And he was in love with her, and she, God help her, was in love with him, and he couldn’t—could not—die stupidly in a fight over ham. Clara’s breath came in sips and gasps. The world seemed to narrow. Abatha was saying something, and shaking her while she spoke. Clara tried to bring her mind back, but it was slow, difficult work.
“It’s three streets to the east, two to the north,” Abatha said. It wasn’t the first time she’d said it.
“Three east,” Clara said. “Two north.”
“It’s a low house. Green with a red roof.”
“Three east, two north. Green with a red roof.”
“The cunning man’s named Hoban.”
Clara nodded. Of course. A cunning man. They needed a cunning man. She would go and get one.
“Three east, two north. Green with red. Ossit.”
“Not Ossit. Hoban.”
“Hoban,” Clara said. “I’ll be back. Don’t let him die while I’m gone.”
“Wait!” Abatha said, shrugging out of her house robe and holding it out. “Take this. Y’ain’t decent.”
Clara looked down at herself. The simple sleeping shift was torn and soaked down one side in blood. What a sight that would be. Lady Kalliam half naked and bloody running through the streets before dawn. She would have done it without a second thought.
The air in the streets felt cool against her skin, the rough cobbles scraped at her bare feet. The half moon dodged between rooftops, here and gone and back again, as she ran. Three streets to the east, then turning left into a thin passage hardly more than an alley that stank of shit and piss and old blood gone to rot. She’d feared that in the dim light she might not be able to make out the colors, but the green was the green of new grass and the red almost crimson. Even by moonlight, there could be no mistake. Clara hopped up the single step and hammered on the door until a huge First-blood man with a greying beard to his navel and strange tattoos up both of his arms answered her. His accent spoke of Stollbourne and perhaps cities even farther to the west. She had to assure him twice that she wasn’t the one in need of help, but once he understood, he came quickly.
Abatha had laid Vincen out on the kitchen table like a body being prepared for his funeral. His skin looked like wax, and webs of dark blood marred him. His eyes were closed and his mouth drawn back in a grimace of pain and determination. The greatest wound was in his side, just below his lowest rib, and the skin there hung loose and open. The cunning man crouched, placing his palm over the injury, closing his eyes and murmuring prayers and invocations that seemed to echo in a space larger than the kitchen.
With the violence done, other occupants of the boarding house began to creep out. The Southling girl who always ate by herself. Two Firstblood workmen who’d just come to Camnipol from the north and taken a room together. They haunted the shadows, drawn to the blood like flies. Abatha’s cold gaze kept them at bay, and Clara ignored them. The cut on her own arm had begun to hurt again, but she paid it little attention.
Without warning, Vincen howled. Light poured from his mouth and nose, from the cuts in his skin. His back arched until only his toes and the top of his head were touching the table. Clara cried out in alarm, but as quickly as it had come, it was over. The cunning man sat heavily on the bench. The terrible wound in Vincen’s side was still there, but instead of blood, a thin, milky fluid ran from it. The kitchen filled with the smell of onions.
“He will live,” the cunning man said. “He will be weak for a time, but this is not the wound that kills him.”
“Thank you,” Clara said. Her vision went wet and blurry. “Thank you so much.”
“Now. Will you let me see to that arm?”
Clara looked down. Fresh blood was still sheeting down to her wrist. When she moved, the living muscle shifted and twitched. She felt dizzy.
“If you would,” she said. “That would be very kind.”
The first light of dawn pressed at the windows as Abatha counted coins into the cunning man’s hand. The boarders who hadn’t made their way out already began to appear, and Abatha