The Inker had an expression I knew well.
It was a mix of fear and reverence -the kind that came from seeing something truly overwhelming and almost beyond comprehending, and finding the beauty in it anyway.
"T-this cannot be," the Inker finally said. It was the first thing he had said in some time.
"The Ink merely finds. Is that not what you said?"
One of the soldiers had taken a step forward now and his friends looked like they might follow. The village people shifted nervously, trying to stare everywhere but at me. Only Ash looked directly, her hand reaching at her side for a sword she had left back at the hut.
The Inker slowly straightened and tried to look tall. A feeble gesture after the weakness he had shown. "S-show me your arms," the Inker said, voice carrying. "The Ink does not lie, but perhaps I merely misspoke."
Almost, I did not oblige. I extended my arms out toward him. The two marks did not look any different from the others given today, just two small dots. The Requiem was black and the Cradle was white.
He stared at my arms and swallowed. "C-consecration," he said slowly, and then louder. "Consecration!" He shouted it, despite the silence. "Two today have been blessed. Chosen for Consecration!"
Chosen?
That finally made the crowd stir, a little.
"Hamel! You have been blessed. You have been graced by good fortune!"
"What is this Consecration?" I demanded.
The Inker's gaze met mine, and this time there was none of the fear. There was something else -greed. "You." He gestured past me and toward Ash. "You two will be Consecrated. You will be taken in to an Academy. Your marks will be nurtured, so that your talents can be put to good use." He paused. "It is a great privilege, and a greater honor."
"No."
The Inker stared at me. His confusion lasted long. "This is not an honor you can choose not to accept." This came out in a whisper, the sound not carrying past me. "It is an esteemed position. Even as a half-demon you will be-"
"No," I said, louder this time. "Whatever small position you seek to bestow upon me is unbefitting one such as I."
There were footsteps. Ash came and stood beside me. "Apologies, Inker," the Hero said. "But I must decline as well. You honor me, but I am unfit for it."
"Consecration," the Inker said, his gaze moving past us and sweeping the crowd, "is one of the highest distinctions one can receive. To reject it…" The man cocked his head to the side, slightly. "Would only bring misfortune not only to those who denied the privilege, but all those surrounding them. Bad fortune."
There was a clicking sound -the sound of several gauntleted boots taking a single step forward in unison. The soldiers all had blank, stoic faces. Their gazes were steady. It was a threat, and a thinly veiled one.
Another set of chains, far more obvious than the last. Those cuffs had been placed upon me by the Pantheon. This fool thought to replace them. This small man? Ash shifted and something in her face looked stricken. She was looking back over her shoulder.
Damn it.
No doubt this man would make an example out of Hamel if we did not comply. Would he go so far as to raze the entire village? I did not know. All I knew was that many of my generals certainly would have, and did.
This submission did not bear thinking about. I looked behind my shoulder, found the girl: Sara. Saw her mother put a hand on the girl's shoulder. The hand was white.
I tried to reach for the marks. It was a desperate, instinctive thing. My mana surged toward the two small dots. They were Sovereign, weren't they? I willed them to answer, willed them to give me something. Anything.
They did not answer. The marks sat beneath my skin. I could feel them -the budding shapes of something along my mana pathways. My power washed over them and found no purchase at all. There was more there, but even this examination told me I would not have access to this new power here and now. They were newborn things.
The soldiers took another step. The Inker watched me with patient eyes.
My overwhelming power was long since lost to me, and in its place I had something I did not even understand. I had broken the world, and now I stood in a village square, powerless, while a middling priest with a middling mark threatened to cage me.
The fury nearly took me. It would have been so easy. Even without my marks, even with this thin and feeble mana, I could kill this man. Perhaps several of his soldiers before the rest brought me down.
And then Hamel would burn for it.
I crushed the fury before it could breathe. What replaced it was colder and sharper. I took a slow, deep breath, closed my eyes. Then, I opened them again.
I knew this game. I had invented some of its rules.
When I had been Queen, my Generals had fought over every scrap of recognition I deigned to throw their way. The conquest of a single border fort would see three of them claiming credit, each more loudly than the last. Zarvok, especially. The fool would trip over his own sister to be the first to kneel before me with good news.
That was the shape of the man standing before me. He was no true leader, he had no true power. He was just a conduit for power, one who lived and died by what he could bring back to his master. I did not yet know the value of my marks, or the Hero's, but this Inker had spoken of them with reverence and had then reacted with complete awe.
There was a solution here.
"Inker," I said. He paused. Whatever he had been about to say next died on his tongue. "You intend to drag us before your Archon." The word tasted strange on my lips. "Two unwilling women, bound and resentful. Two women with great potential."
The Inker's jaw tightened. He did not answer.
"It should be good news, and yet any man not a fool will know of the risk…of the meat tasting bitter simply because the hunter was too eager." My voice dropped low. "Do you know what happens to men who bring back complications instead of gifts?"
"You threaten me?" the Inker said, though the edge in his voice had dulled.
"I am explaining your position to you, since you seem unable to see it yourself." I stepped forward -just one step. "You can drag us there in chains, and do not doubt that you will have to use chains. Your Archon's first words will not be 'well done.' They will be 'why couldn't you manage two women on your own?'"
The Inker's expression shifted. Ash squirmed uneasily at my side. It was good that she did not speak. This was no conversation for a Hero.
"Or," I said, "you return to your master and tell him you discovered something extraordinary. That you assessed us and earned our cooperation. That we will come willingly, as allies, because you were wise enough to see the value in that. That makes you the man who found and cultivated something rare. Not the man who lost control of his own ceremony."
There was silence.
"You think very highly of yourself," he said quietly.
"I think accurately of myself."
He held my gaze for a long time and I held his. "I can simply kill you both here. No complications at all, that way."
"Indeed you can." I nodded. "But then you won't be able to bring back anything but two useless bodies. We might not be worth bringing back at all." I smiled, looked around. "An easy choice, if you like spending your life in these backwaters."
This was still a gamble, but I thought I had the right of it. It had been long since I had used my intellect for anything but crushing my enemies with elaborate spells. A long time since I'd had to use the pen rather than the sword.
The Inker slowly nodded and looked at Ash. "And does this hold true for you as well?"
"It does," Ash said simply.
There was another pause. This time the Inker looked past us, at the line of soldiers. He was a man weighing scales, even when they didn't need weighing at all. "One week," he said finally.
"What?"
"One week. I return in seven days. You will come with me then, willingly, as you say. As allies." He straightened his robes. The fear had gone from his face, replaced by something more careful. "If you are not here when I return, I will not come looking for you. I will simply ensure that the village that harbored you answers for it."
The blade behind the glove. At least this one had the decency to let me see it.
"We will be here," Ash said -her voice was steady.
"Very well." The Inker closed his case. The click of the latch was final. He turned to his soldiers and gestured once.
They moved as one -boots on dirt and the creak of armor, and then they were walking. We watched them head out onto the road and into the dark. Nobody spoke until the sound of their steps had faded entirely.
A man let out a deep breath behind us.
"Well," Tom said weakly. "That's that, then."
I finally turned and looked at the village. At the girl and at Martha. "Thank you," she said.
I turned from her before I could do something foolish with my face.
The village settled slowly.
I walked through Hamel in the dark. The ceremony had long since ended -the lanterns still hung, though some had gone out. Those that remained cast a warm and flickering glow over the mud paths.
I did not know where I was going. I simply walked where my feet took me. The looks found me as I did.
A man standing outside his hut met my eyes and nodded. A woman stepped out of my path and then, instead of hurrying away, lingered. She watched me pass. A boy I had seen splitting wood two days prior raised his hand in a wave. I did not wave back. I did not know how.
Nobody showed fear. No, that was wrong, they never had. The shape of this was different, in some fashion. Fear -that, I would have known what to do with. I had been feared for centuries, and there was a simplicity to it. Fear made people predictable and useful.
This was something else -something that sat unevenly on my shoulders, like a garment cut for someone else.
Gratitude. I thought that was its name. I had rarely been its subject before, especially not without doing anything at all.
Eventually, I came back to the hut -Martha and Tom's hut, though they had given over their son's room to us without a second thought, as if anyone would invite strangers into their home.
The two were not there and so I moved to our room. The door was slightly ajar -I reached for it and stopped. Sound came from within, so quiet that without the silence of the village around me, I would not have heard it at all.
I knew the sound of weeping. I had caused enough of it.
Through the gap in the door, I could see the edge of the room. The single lantern, burning low, and Ash, sitting on the floor with her back against the far wall, knees drawn to her chest.
She was not making much noise. Her shoulders shook and her face was buried in her arms. The two marks on her forearms were faintly visible in the lantern light.
My hand rested on the door. I could open it and step inside. I did not know what I would say, only that I would have to say something. Something inside of me stung. It made me want to go inside -to do something I'd so rarely done: ask, instead of demand.
I did not know how. My hand fell to my side.
I turned from the door and walked back into the dark. The night air was cool. Somewhere, a dog barked once and then fell silent. I found a spot by the low wall, where I had sat and failed at twenty techniques. I sat there now, in the quiet, and did not try anything at all.
There would be time. Seven days of it. Whether that would be enough, for anything that mattered, I did not know.