IM AN ORC?

Her name hung in the air like a struck bell, and she flinched at the sound of it coming from his mouth.

"Don’t." She wouldn’t turn to face him. The lantern between them threw her shadow long across the sanctuary wall, and the shadow trembled in a way she did not. "Don’t say it like that, Ruk. Not like you’re apologizing before you’ve even done anything wrong."

"I wasn’t apologizing."

"Then what?"

He stepped closer. The stone floor was cold under his bare feet, and the cold felt good — clean, ordinary, something he could still name. Everything else about his body had begun to feel like a language he hadn’t learned. "I was going to ask if you were still afraid of me."

That turned her.

Lira’s eyes in the lantern-light were the color of river silt, and she had the look she got before she said something she’d been holding in for hours. "I’ve never been afraid of you, Ruk. I’ve been afraid of what you’re carrying. That’s different."

"Is it?"

"Yes." She crossed the space between them and put her hand flat on his chest, over the place where the mark had settled after the ridge. He could feel her palm through the linen. He could also feel, somewhere deeper, the other thing — the coiled second heartbeat that wasn’t his, that had been his ever since he’d cracked the Warden’s binding. It answered her touch. It liked being noticed. He hated that it liked anything at all. "This," she said quietly, tapping once, "is what I’m afraid of. Not you. It."

"They’re the same now."

"No."

"Lira—"

"They’re not." Her jaw set. "And if you start believing they are, we lose you. Do you understand me? We lose you slower than a blade would take you, but we lose you all the same. I’ve seen it. My mother’s brother carried a spirit-bond for six winters before he walked into the lake and didn’t come back up. He kept saying the same thing you’re saying. *They’re the same now.* They weren’t. He just stopped fighting to keep them apart."

Ruk closed his hand around hers, gently, and held it there against him. "I’m fighting."

"I know you are." Her voice cracked a little on the second word. "That’s why I’m still here."

Behind them, from the archway that led down to the lower cells of the sanctuary, someone cleared his throat with the particular dryness of a man who had been standing there long enough to hear more than he’d meant to.

Karg.

"When you two are finished," he said, and his voice had that flat edge it had worn since the ridge, since the thing with the Warden, since Ruk had come up out of the pit with his eyes shining wrong, "Nym has found something in the reliquary. She thinks you should look at it before the others wake."

Lira didn’t move her hand off Ruk’s chest. She turned her head just enough to meet Karg’s eye. "You could have knocked."

"On what?"

"On the idea of the room, Karg. On the air. You know what I mean."

Karg’s mouth did the thing that in another man would have been a smile. In him it was just a small rearrangement of scar tissue. "I’ll knock next time."

"You won’t."

"No. Probably not." He looked past her to Ruk, and the look was the same one he’d given him for three days now — measuring, patient, entirely without warmth. Not hate. Ruk almost wished it were hate. Hate he’d fought before. This was something worse: a man deciding, slowly and in public, whether his chief was still his chief. "Nym is waiting."

He turned and was gone back down the stairs before Ruk could answer.

Lira let out a breath she’d been keeping small. "He’s going to have to say it eventually."

"Say what?"

"Whatever it is he’s been chewing on since the ridge." She dropped her hand from his chest, and he felt the absence of it like a draft. "Come on. Before Nym decides she’d rather just poke the thing herself and apologize after."

They went down.

The sanctuary had been built into the roots of the mountain in an older age, by people whose names even the archivists in Vellech no longer knew. Its stairs were shallow and worn in the middle, the way stairs got when generations of feet had used them. Ruk didn’t like to think about who those feet had belonged to. The wall carvings the deeper you went stopped looking like anything he had words for. Faces without eyes. Eyes without faces. A row of hands, each holding a different small burning thing.

The reliquary was three turns down. Nym was crouched in the center of it with her hair pulled back into the messy knot she used when she was concentrating, and Karg stood at her shoulder with his arms folded. Jara sat on a broken bench along the far wall, sharpening the short knife she pretended she didn’t sleep with. Mek was on the floor with his back against a pillar, apparently asleep, which meant he was almost certainly not.

"Ruk," Nym said, without looking up. "Come here. Slow. And whatever’s living behind your ribs, tell it to be quiet a minute, I don’t want it waking this up before I know what this is."

Ruk stopped in the doorway. "It doesn’t listen when I tell it things."

"Try harder."

He did try. He’d been trying for three days. He drew a slow breath, the way the old woman on the marsh road had shown him — in through the nose, hold, out through the teeth — and pictured the coiled thing inside him going still. It didn’t go still, exactly. But it turned its attention elsewhere, the way a dog will look away from a door if you scratch behind its ear. He walked forward.

The floor of the reliquary was set with a mosaic he hadn’t looked at closely before. He looked at it now. Small tiles of a dull dark green, arranged in a spiral that ended at Nym’s knees. In the center of the spiral was a shallow bowl of black stone, and in the bowl was —

"A tooth," he said.

"A tooth," Nym agreed. "That’s what I thought too. It’s not."

"What is it?"

"A seed." She pointed, without touching. "See the ridge along the back? That’s not enamel. That’s rind. And these things at the base — I thought roots. They’re not roots. They’re feelers. They’re moving, Ruk. Slowly. But they’re moving."

Ruk crouched. The thing in the bowl was the length of his thumb and the color of a bruise going yellow. As he watched, one of the pale threads at its base twitched, no more than a hair’s width, toward Nym’s knee.

"How long has it been doing that?" he heard himself ask.

"Since you came into the room."

He looked up. Nym was watching him now, and her face was carefully empty, which meant she was frightened and didn’t want the others to see. "Since me."

"It didn’t move when Karg came in. It didn’t move when I put my hand on the bowl. I’ve been sitting here half an hour, Ruk. It didn’t twitch once. You walked through the door and it turned."

Karg’s voice, above them, quiet: "It’s tracking him."

"Or answering him." Nym rocked back on her heels. "I don’t know which is worse."

Jara had stopped sharpening. The little rasp of stone on steel had been the only other sound in the room, and now it was gone. "Can we burn it?"

"No," said Nym.

"Why not?"

"Because I don’t know what it is yet, and I’d rather not find out by lighting it on fire in a sealed stone room. Would you?"

Jara shrugged. She looked, in that moment, very young and very tired. "I’ve done worse on less information."

"We have all done worse on less information," Karg said. "That is why we are down to six."

The silence that came after that was the kind of silence that made Ruk’s ears ring. He didn’t look at Karg. He looked at the seed. The little pale feeler had grown — not much, a finger’s width perhaps — and it was reaching, unmistakably now, toward him. Toward the mark. Toward the thing inside him that had woken on the ridge and refused, since, to go back to sleep.

"Nym," he said. "Move away from it."

"Ruk—"

"Move away from it."

She moved. She was quick when she needed to be. She was on her feet and against the far wall almost before he’d finished speaking, and Karg had a hand on her elbow to steady her, and both of them were looking at him the way you look at a man who has just heard something you haven’t.

The seed had opened.

There was no sound. There was just, suddenly, a slit down the length of the thing, and behind the slit a wet dark shine, and the shine was looking at him. Not with an eye. With attention. The distinction mattered. An eye you could put out. Attention was harder.

"Ruk," Lira breathed from the doorway, "get back."

He couldn’t. Not because he didn’t want to — he wanted to very much — but because the coiled second heartbeat inside him had unwound itself and was, for the first time since the ridge, pulling in a direction he hadn’t chosen. Toward the bowl. Toward the seed. Toward the wet dark shine that had begun, very slowly, to hum.

The hum was in a note he’d heard before.

"It’s the Warden’s," he heard himself say, and his voice sounded wrong in his own ears, thick, other-mouthed. "It’s a piece of the Warden’s. They didn’t kill it. They *planted* it."

Karg had drawn his axe. Ruk hadn’t seen him do it. The axe was a heavy thing, all worked iron and a haft as long as a man’s arm, and Karg carried it as if it weighed nothing, which was one of the several reasons no one had crossed him in eleven years. He stepped between Nym and the bowl, and his eyes were on Ruk, not the seed.

"Chief," he said. It was the first time he’d used the word in three days. He had been calling him Ruk. He had been calling him nothing at all. "Chief, back away from it. Now."

"I’m trying."

"Try harder."

"Karg, I am *trying* —"

"Ruk." Lira, behind him. Her hand on his shoulder. Her hand as an anchor. "Ruk, listen to me. Listen to my voice. Not to it. To me. You are in the reliquary. You are with us. You are Ruk of the broken tusk, you are the son of Aghra, you are the one who carried Mek out of the flood when Mek was still small enough to carry, do you remember? Do you remember carrying him?"

"I remember."

"Then take one step back."

He took one step back.

The seed’s hum went up a note. The pale feelers, all of them now, all six or seven of them, were reaching — not toward him anymore but *after* him, straining out of the bowl like something waking from a long hunger. One of them touched the rim. The rim of the black stone bowl, which had held this thing for who knew how many centuries without incident, cracked under the touch. A hairline. Then a longer line. Then a piece of it, the size of a coin, broke off and skittered across the mosaic floor.

"Nym," Karg said, without looking away. "How do we kill it."

"I don’t *know*, Karg, I told you—"

"Guess."

"I don’t guess about things like this—"

"Guess *now*."

She made a sound that was half a laugh and half something worse. "Fire. Salt. Cold iron. Take your pick, they’re all in the old rites, none of them agree with each other. Fire’s fastest."

"Then fire."

"In a sealed stone room, Karg—"

"The room will hold. *You* might not, if that thing gets its feelers into you. Move. Jara — the lantern. Give me the lantern."

Jara was already moving. She unhooked the lantern from the wall bracket and tossed it to Karg underhand, and Karg caught it without taking his eyes off Ruk, and Ruk understood, with a cold clarity that had nothing to do with the thing inside him, that Karg was not looking at the seed because Karg was not sure, yet, which of the two of them he was going to have to swing at.

"Karg," Lira said, very quietly.

"I see him, Lira."

"He’s still with us."

"I see him."

The seed shrieked.

It was not a sound a mouth could have made. It was the sound a piece of metal makes just before it snaps, drawn out and made wet, and every one of them clapped their hands to their ears except Ruk, who couldn’t, because his hands wouldn’t answer him. The thing inside his chest had heard the shriek and had answered it, and the answer was a pull so hard he felt his heels lift off the floor.

"Ruk!" Lira grabbed him around the waist. She was small against him, she had always been small against him, and it should not have mattered that she was holding on. It mattered. It was the only thing keeping his feet on the mosaic. "Ruk, *fight it* —"

Karg swung the lantern.

He didn’t throw it — he swung it, on its chain, in a wide flat arc that ended against the black stone bowl with a crash of breaking glass and a soft heavy *whumph* of oil catching. The fire went up bright and blue-edged and immediate, and the seed inside the fire screamed again, higher this time, and one of its pale feelers, whipping out of the flame, caught Karg across the forearm and *sank in*.

Karg didn’t make a sound. That was almost the worst part. He looked down at his arm — at the pale thread now buried to the second knuckle in the meat of him, at the dark line already crawling up under his skin toward his elbow — and then he looked up at Nym with an expression of mild, almost polite inquiry.

"Nym," he said. "How do I get it out."

And behind Ruk, from the stairwell they had come down, from somewhere higher up in the sanctuary where the others should have been safely asleep, a second shriek answered the first.