He sucked down icy air and rubbed his face. The gray watery light of early morning lay like grime on the fresh fallen snow in his yard. From here, he could see over the treetops all the way into Ammar’s valley. Snow coated the ground there, too. Maertyn could see an odd black patch in the white plane where a town should have been. A smear of soot five miles long.
The scars on his back started to itch. Slowly, even though every instinct told him to go back inside and drink instead, Maertyn widened his eyes—and let the Sight come into them.
This was a secret, stolen from the mages of Nynomath. It was as if one eye slipped out from his head and drifted over the yard while the other stayed in his skull and saw only ordinary things. The Sight passed out over the fresh fallen snow in his yard. It rested heavily on things that Maertyn needed to See, whether they were nearby or dozens of miles away. A cunning and subtle magic—but unlike mages, the Sight never lied.
He Saw ashes of a burnt witch spread out over the valley. He could See them flecked up the mountainside in yesterday’s footprints buried underneath the fresh powder. He followed the prints with the Sight until his own eyes focused on a lump of white at the edge of his yard. The body of a dead man lying underneath last night’s snow.
Well, shit, Maertyn thought. He hadn’t dreamed it—if he went back inside now, the Prince of Ammar would be there, asleep in his bed.
He reached into his pocket and found the leather flask he kept with him. Half of a mouthful of liquor sloshed around inside. If he drank it now before the sun was even up, it was likely to be another two-bottle day for him.
Maertyn tried to work out what to do. When he’d been drunk the day before, it had made perfect sense to pick up Prince Anryniel and bring her into his house. The only thing worse than a dead body in his front yard was two dead bodies, the whiskey reasoned for him. He healed her with more stolen secrets so that she would not bleed all over his blankets.
Sober now, he had second thoughts. If Prince Anryniel came to his house, someone was bound to come looking for her. If they found the body in his yard, there would be trouble. And if they accused him of witchcraft, they’d be right. What would happen then? He could not join that pile of ashes in the valley even if he wanted to.
He drank down the liquor in the flask and went to the corpse. The same as it had been yesterday: a man about forty dressed in the same fine clothes as the prince’s, with Ammar’s royal sigil sewn into the lapels. Maertyn nudged the lump in the snow with his foot—frozen solid. Too difficult to drag into the trees, the ground beneath too hard to dig a grave.
Nothing for it, Maertyn decided. He knelt by the body and held out his hands, cupping them together. This wasn’t a stolen secret of mages, but his own witchcraft. A dark and angry thing that flitted around at the edges of the world where light touched shadow. Maertyn had not known that it was there until the day his wife died.
He wiggled his fingers in the air, feeling for a seam. To a witch—a real one—it felt like a vein under warm skin. If a witch tugged on it, with words or thoughts or even just a bit of bad luck, the seam would open and the witch’s magic would come pouring out. Without a mage there to guide it, no telling what kind of magic it might be—rain, or wind, or maybe just a foul smell—until it was out in the world for everyone to see.
Maertyn felt for the seam, and started to pull. A blade of flame sprung from his palm, edges black like smoke. Decades ago, when the mages tried to teach him, they told him he was not creating flame so much as moving it. Finding it at a time when it burned its hottest and pulling it where he wanted it to be. The black tinge was just Nature’s way of reminding him that it was borrowed, not earned.
He kept pulling, drawing out black flames until he had enough to fill both palms. Then he tipped his hands to pour the fire on the body beneath the snow. The smoky tongues licked the stiff skin and bloodied clothes. The rind of frost coating the corpse melted with a hiss. Maertyn fed more black flames to the fire, until it caught deep in the frozen flesh, turning it all to ash.
“Witchcraft...!”
He stiffened, not sure if he heard the word in his head or somewhere nearby. His eyes raked over the yard.
The morning sun threw long shadows from every tree on the mountain across the ground. Only with the Sight could Maertyn pick out a man standing in at the tree line a dozen yards away. This one wore a red leather jacket just like the one on the corpse. Crooked shoulder where the ball fell out of the joint that should’ve held it, face battered and bloody on one side, as if something as big as a tree had hit him. He carried no sword, but held a long knife in the one good hand.
“Stay where you are, witch—or I will kill you where you stand!” the man shouted. His voice echoed up the mountainside, hoarse and harsh.
In the glare of the Sight, the blade glittered. It cast a long, unnatural shadow that stretched from the trees all the way to Maertyn’s front door. The blade was meant for the prince asleep inside, not him.
The whiskey tried to tell him it was not his fight—that she had a sword and could defend herself. Still, Maertyn found himself on his feet, propelled by something stronger than whiskey. The memory of Prince Anryniel’s face the night before. Angry and alone, like him.
He balled up his fists and took several long strides over the snow.
“Stay back!” The man pointed the knife at Maertyn.
A sliver of the shadow broke off from and wound its way over the ground. The thin black line stabbed toward Maertyn. When the shadow reached him, he lifted a foot—and stomped on the shadow cast by the Sight.
The assassin quivered with a sudden chill. He would have felt the blow, though he could not See his own shadow.
Maertyn lunged for him. When the knife came up, he shielded his face with one hand. He felt the skin behind his knuckles flare with sudden pain. With his other, he reached out to grab the assassin’s jellied shoulder, twisting his fingers in the cold, red leather. Then, he called the fire.
The assassin writhed in his grip. A curl of smoke came off the jacket. “Let go—let go, damn you!”
He flailed as the flames rolled toward his face. The assassin scraped the knife through the air again, but now the edge pointed at his jacket. Buttons scattered in the snow as the blade cut them free. The man’s limp arm hitched as it tore from the smoldering sleeve.
Maertyn stayed standing while the assassin fled. He watched with the Sight, until the long shadow cast by the knife was lost among the silhouettes of the trees.
Smoke stung his nose. He glanced down at the jacket, now all aflame in his hands. Fire could not touch him, no more than time could. Still, he didn’t want to drop it, lest the embers catch on pine needles—and spread like an ordinary fire. He gazed at the flames and pushed at them. Shoved the fire forward in time to when it would burn out. The leather underneath the flame blackened, hardened. With no more fuel, the fire went out.
“I thought you weren’t a mage,” said a voice behind him.
Prince Anryniel stood in Maertyn’s doorway, her sword in her hand. Not pointed at him, but he could see that she was thinking about it.
“No, not a mage,” Maertyn said. Words were coming more easily now, though his mouth had to work hard to form them. He looked down at the wound on his hand and remembered another stolen secret.
All mages learned how to Weave—how to join together torn places in flesh and bone to make them whole again. It was one part pulling, as he did with fire, and one part pushing. Maertyn knit the gash on his hand shut, pulling the edges of his skin together and pushing the blood back into its proper place so that it would flow through his veins again. A thin pink seam formed where his magic worked.