The Academy sent a carriage for Nell on Monday morning.
It was a real carriage, black with silver trim, pulled by two grey horses, with the Academy crest painted on the door.
It stopped outside the healer house in the lower city, and every child on the street came out to stare at it.
Some of their parents came out too.
In the whole history of the lower city, no one could remember an Academy carriage stopping there.
Nell sat by the window the whole way up the hill with her nose almost against the glass.
She was wrapped in her two blankets and the warm coat Mira had bought her with her own allowance, and she did not stop talking once.
“Is that the Academy?
Is that the Academy?
It’s so big.
Which tower is yours?
Do you have a tower?
Do they let commoners have towers?”
“I live in the basement,” Aren said.
“Next to the laundry.”
Nell turned around and gave him a long look of total betrayal.
Mira laughed so hard she had to hold onto the door handle.
“He’s lying,” Mira said.
“It’s a very nice basement.
It has a window.”
“It has half a window,” Aren said.
Nell looked back out at the white towers going by and sighed.
“When I’m better,” she said, “I want a whole window.”
Aren looked at the back of her head, at the thin dark hair and the small shoulders under the blankets, and did not say anything for the rest of the ride.
The Academy infirmary was the opposite of the healer house in every way.
It was bright, clean, and quiet.
The beds had white sheets.
The windows were tall and full of sunlight.
There was no smell of burnt metal in the air, only soap and dried herbs.
The stern healer with the grey hair, the one who had fixed Aren’s ribs, met them at the door.
She looked at Nell, then at Aren, and her mouth tightened very slightly.
She did not like him.
That was clear.
But she knelt down in front of Nell anyway, so their eyes were level.
“I’m Healer Brannick,” she said.
“I’m going to look at you very carefully.
It won’t hurt.
If anything feels strange, you tell me.
Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good girl.”
A second healer came in a few minutes later.
He was an older man with a white beard and gentle hands, and Brannick called him Master Orrin.
He was the head of the Academy’s healers.
Aren had never seen him before.
He had heard that Master Orrin treated only the heirs of the great houses, and the teachers, and once a year, the King.
They sat Nell on a high bed by the window.
They listened to her chest with a silver horn.
They put their glowing hands on her back, her forehead, her wrists, and watched the light change color under their fingers.
They asked her questions about her breathing, her sleep, her fevers.
Nell answered all of them very seriously, swinging her feet.
Then Master Orrin asked her to take off her coat, and Nell’s feet stopped swinging.
She did not move for a moment.
Then, slowly, she took off the coat.
Under it, she wore an old long-sleeved dress.
Master Orrin gently rolled up her left sleeve.
There was a bandage on her forearm.
Aren had never seen it before.
“Nell,” he said.
She would not look at him.
Master Orrin unwound the bandage carefully.
Under it, on the pale skin of the inside of her arm, there was a mark.
It was black.
Not the grey of Rift sickness.
The black of a hole in the ground at night.
It was the size of a coin, and it was not round.
It had thin lines branching out of it in every direction, like the roots of a tree, or the cracks in a frozen pond.
The room went very quiet.
Master Orrin looked at it, then at Healer Brannick.
Something passed between them that Aren did not understand, and did not like.
“How long have you had this, child?” Master Orrin asked softly.
“Since the summer,” Nell whispered.
“It was very small.
It was just a dot.” She looked at Aren for the first time.
Her eyes were wet.
“I didn’t want you to worry.
You already worry about everything.
You worry so much you don’t sleep.”
Aren could not say anything at all.
Master Orrin wrapped the bandage loosely back around her arm.
Then he stood up and spoke quietly to Healer Brannick, who nodded and left the room very quickly.
Aren heard her footsteps going down the corridor, almost running.
“Where is she going?” he asked.
“To fetch the Headmaster,” Master Orrin said.
Headmaster Ysolde Marr arrived ten minutes later.
She came alone, without a clerk, which Aren had never seen before.
She walked into the infirmary leaning on a black cane and went straight to Nell’s bed without looking at anyone else.
“May I see?” she asked Nell, very gently.
Nell held out her arm.
The Headmaster unwound the bandage herself.
She did not touch the black mark.
She bent close and looked at it for a long, long time, her pale eyes moving slowly along every thin root, every crack.
Her face showed nothing.
Her hand, on the head of her cane, had gone white at the knuckles.
“When did you last go near a Rift, child?” she asked.
“There’s an old one by our street,” Nell said.
“It closed before I was born.
The scar is still there.
Everyone on our street lives near it.”
“Did anything happen there?
Anything strange?
Did you see anything, or hear anything, that the other children did not?”
Nell thought about it.
Then she said, very quietly, “In the summer, I had a dream.
There was a voice in it.
It came from under the ground.” She hesitated.
“It said my name.”
The Headmaster straightened up slowly.
She wrapped the bandage back around Nell’s arm with careful hands, and patted it once, and then she turned and looked at Aren.
It was the same look she had given him in her office.
The look that went through his face to something behind it.
“Outside, please,” she said.
They stood in the empty corridor outside the infirmary.
Through the open door, Aren could see Mira sitting on the bed beside Nell, telling her something that was making her giggle.
“It is not Rift sickness,” the Headmaster said.
“It never was.
The grey under her skin was the body trying to fight the mark.
The healers in the lower city did not know what they were looking at.
There is no reason they should have.”
“Then what is it?”
“An Abyss Mark.” The Headmaster leaned on her cane.
“They are very rare.
I have seen two in my life, and I have lived a long time.
Something from the Abyss, something far below the Rifts, sometimes reaches up and touches a person.
It leaves a mark.
The mark grows.
It grows slowly at first, and then…”
Aren’s mouth was dry.
“And when it stops growing?”
The Headmaster did not answer, and that was the answer.
“How long?” he asked.
“With nothing, a year.
Perhaps less.” She lifted one thin hand before he could speak.
“But there are things that slow it.
Abyss Salt, taken every day, will keep the roots from spreading.
It is expensive, and difficult to find, and the healers here cannot buy it without questions being asked.
There are people in the lower city who sell it, I am told.” Her eyes did not leave his face.
“I imagine a boy who sells rocks would know where.”
“And to stop it?
To make it go back?”
“There is a flower,” the Headmaster said.
“The Abyss Lily.
It grows only in Rifts of Rank D and above, in the deepest places, near the cores.
One Lily, given at the right time, can push a mark back for years.” She paused.
“No student of Rank F has ever brought one back.
Very few of Rank D have survived trying.”
“I’m not asking about students.”
“I know you are not.” The Headmaster turned to go.
Then she stopped, and looked back at him over her shoulder.
“These marks do not come by chance, Aren,” she said.
“Something reached up from the Abyss and touched your sister.
Something chose her.
I would very much like to know why.” Her pale eyes held his.
“And I suspect, before this is over, so will you.”
She walked away down the corridor, her cane tapping slowly on the stone, and did not look back.
He sat with Nell for the rest of the afternoon.
He did not tell her what the Headmaster had said.
He told her that the healers had a medicine that would stop the mark from spreading, and that he would bring it to her every week.
That part was true.
He told her that it would take a while, but that she would get better.
He did not know if that part was true.
He said it anyway, and she believed him, and he hated how easy it was.
“You’re doing the thing,” Nell said, at one point.
She was lying back on the white pillows, tired out by the day, her eyes half closed.
“What thing?”
“The thing Mira says you do.
Where you go quiet and do math.” She yawned.
“Promise me you won’t do anything stupid.”
“I promise.”
“Liar,” Nell said, and fell asleep.
Mira was standing at the window.
She had heard all of it.
She did not say anything, but when he looked up at her, she was looking at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before.
Fear.
He did the math anyway, sitting there by the bed while Nell slept.
Abyss Salt.
Old Mag would have it, or know who did.
It would cost, he guessed, four or five gold crowns a month.
His ten percent of the east bank would cover most of it, if Rook kept his word, and if the east bank kept making money, and if Rook did not decide to feed him to the canal.
The cores from the Old Quarry would cover the rest, if he could keep hunting Rank E monsters alone at night without dying.
And the Lily.
Rank D Rifts and above.
The deepest places, near the cores.
He was Rank E, Level 1.
He could barely kill a Quarry Brute by dropping rocks on it.
A Rank D Rift would eat him alive.
A year.
Perhaps less.
Then I need to get stronger, he thought.
Much stronger.
Much faster than anyone has ever gotten stronger.
He looked at the window floating at the edge of his vision, at the two names under Anchors.
Vivienne.
Rook.
And to get stronger, I need them to get stronger first.
The carriage took Nell home at sunset, with Mira beside her.
Aren walked down to the Academy gate to watch it go.
The sky over the city was orange and gold, and the river was shining in the last light, and somewhere below, the evening bells were starting to ring in the churches of the lower city.
It was a beautiful evening.
He stood at the gate with his hands in his pockets and tried to remember the last time he had noticed one.
He went down to Old Mag’s that night, after the carriage had taken Nell home.
She listened without interrupting while he told her what he needed.
When he said the words Abyss Salt, her one bright eye went still for a moment.
“Twelve gold crowns,” she said.
“For one month.”
Aren stared at her.
“Twelve.”
“It comes from very deep places, stone-seller, and the people who bring it up don’t usually come back twice.” She tapped her pipe against the counter.
“I can find you one month.
Maybe two.
After that, you’ll need a better supplier than me.”
“Who?”
Mag was quiet for a time.
Then she leaned forward on her tall stool.
“There’s a merchant,” she said.
“New in the lower city.
He opened a shop on Lantern Street three weeks ago, in a building that’s been empty for twenty years.
Nobody saw him move in.
Nobody knows where he came from.” She lowered her voice.
“He sells things from the Abyss that even I can’t get.
And he sells them cheap.”
“How cheap?”
“Cheap in gold.” Mag’s one eye glittered in the lamplight.
“The people who’ve bought from him say he doesn’t always want gold, child.
Sometimes he asks for other things.” She sat back.
“And nobody I’ve talked to can tell me what his face looks like.”