Chapter 35: The Cautery and the Storm
The world resolved into fragments of pain and stifling heat.
Vincent’s hands were on Seraphina’s shoulders, pinning her to the damp, straw-stuffed mattress. The force of the convulsion was shocking, a violent tectonic shudder that traveled through her entire frame. Her back arched off the bed, tendons standing out in her neck like rigging on a storm-wracked ship.
“Hold her, gods damn you!” Elys barked. The old woman’s voice was stripped of any nurse’s gentleness, reduced to a graveled command. She’d been a battlefield surgeon before wet-nursing princes, and it showed.
The room was a closet smelling of cured hide, vinegar, and the copper-tang of fresh blood. Flickering tallow light jumped across walls hung with flaying tools and dusty jars of unidentifiable things. Callum was a tense silhouette by the bolted door, his gaze locked on the window overlooking the predawn slaughterhouse yard. He was listening for trouble. Vincent was drowning in it.
“The roots took the poison but left the fire,” Elys muttered again, as if to herself. She was elbow-deep in a leather satchel, scattering vials on a rough wooden stool. “The body’s fighting itself. Burning up from the inside.”
Seraphina’s eyes were wide open, but she wasn’t there. They were reflective pools of emerald, seeing nothing in this room. “The channels are blocked,” she rasped, her voice a dry-leaf whisper. “They’re screaming.”
Vincent leaned his weight down, his face inches from hers. Sweat plastered her black hair to her temples. “Sera, listen to me. You’re safe. You’re with us. You have to fight this.”
Her hand scrabbled, found his forearm, and clamped. The strength was back, fueled by delirium. “It’s in the walls. In the water. Can’t you hear it?”
Elys found what she was looking for. Not a vial. A length of blackened iron, its tip a flattened, ugly square. She thrust it into the heart of the small clay stove that heated the room. Orange coals illuminated the severe lines of her face.
Cautery.
Ice flooded Vincent’s veins. “There’s no other way?”
“You saw the streaks,” Elys said without looking at him. “The rot’s in the blood. The roots drew out the sickness, but the wound’s a gate. It’s festering again. We seal the gate.” She pulled the iron from the coals. The tip glowed a sullen cherry red. “The other way is her dying slowly. Screaming. You want that for her?”
Seraphina chose that moment to convulse again, a raw, animal sound tearing from her throat. Vincent had to use his full strength to keep her from thrashing off the narrow bed. His muscles shook with the effort. He looked over his shoulder at Callum, a silent plea for… something. An alternative. A miracle.
Callum met his eyes. There was no silver-tongued solution in his gaze. Just a grim, shared acceptance. He gave the slightest nod. Do it.
“Kya,” Vincent snapped, turning his head toward the corner where the girl huddled with her siblings. “Take Mia and Leo into the other room. Now.”
Kya didn’t argue. She herded the wide-eyed younger children through a curtained doorway, her own small face rigid with a fear she refused to voice.
“This will hurt,” Elys said, matter-of-fact. She positioned herself by Seraphina’s wounded arm, which Vincent now forced straight, holding it down against the rough blanket. The old woman took a leather strap from her apron. “Bite on this.”
Seraphina turned her head away, teeth bared. “Don’t need it.”
Elys shrugged. She placed the glowing iron tip a hair’s breadth above the angry, weeping flesh. The heat radiating from it was a palpable force. Vincent could feel it on his own skin.
“Hold her,” Elys said one last time, and pressed the iron down.
The sound was worse than the smell. A hissing, spitting crackle, like fat in a pan. Seraphina’s body went bowstring tight. A choked, airless gasp escaped her, then her jaw clamped shut, a strangled scream trapped behind her teeth. Her eyes rolled back, whites gleaming in the foul light. The smell of searing flesh, sweet and nauseating, filled the tiny room.
Vincent held on. He watched the red iron do its work, sealing torn flesh, killing the infection with brutal, precise violence. He felt every tremor that ran through her, counted each second of the agony he was facilitating. His stomach turned. His mind screamed. He held on.
Callum looked away, his knuckles white on the pommel of his sword, jaw working silently.
It lasted ten seconds. An eternity.
Elys lifted the iron. A wisp of acrid smoke curled up from the blackened, sealed wound. The angry red halo around it was already subsiding, replaced by a stark, clean burn.
Seraphina went limp. The tension fled her body all at once, leaving her boneless and pale as milk. Her breathing was shallow, but even. The terrifying heat that had radiated from her skin began to lessen, fading from a forge-fire to a mere fever-warmth.
Vincent slowly released his grip. His fingers were stiff, cramping. He saw the vivid red marks his own hands had left on her pale shoulders. He felt sick.
“That’s it,” Elys said, plunging the iron into a bucket of water. It hissed and steamed. She moved to a basin, washing her hands with methodical care. “The fire’s out. The gate’s shut. Now her body can do the rest. If it wants to.”
“If?” Vincent croaked.
“She’s been through two decades of hell and a magical purge in a sewer. The mind… it might decide to stay down where it’s quiet.” Elys dried her hands on her apron. “Clean the burn with vinegar water twice a day. Don’t let it weep. She needs bone broth, if you can get it. Not my problem.”
Callum finally turned from the window. He tossed a small, heavy pouch onto the stool beside Elys’s satchel. It landed with a soft clink of coin. “For your silence. And the supplies.”
Elys pocketed the pouch without looking. “I never saw you. The boy I nursed died years ago in a border skirmish. Makes things simpler.” Her eyes, sharp as flint, flicked to Seraphina’s still form. “That one… she’s a river running deep. You don’t know what’s in the current. Be careful you don’t drown.”
She left, disappearing down the steep staircase into the tannery below.
Silence pooled in the room, broken only by Seraphina’s slow breathing and the distant, gruesome sounds of the morning slaughter beginning in the yard.
Vincent sank onto a three-legged stool, his energy gone. He dragged a hand over his face. He could still smell the cautery.
Callum walked over to the bed, looking down at Seraphina. He reached out, hesitated, then carefully brushed a strand of sweat-damp hair from her forehead. “She’s cooler.”
“She’s in shock,” Vincent said, his voice flat. He stood, rummaging in the supplies Elys had left. He found a cleanish rag and the vinegar. The practical task was a lifeline. “We need to dress it.”
They worked in a wordless, exhausted tandem. Vincent cleaned the vicious new burn with a gentleness that felt like an apology. Callum tore strips of linen for a bandage, his usual fluid grace reduced to tired, efficient movements.
“She said the channels were blocked,” Vincent said quietly, not looking up. “That something was screaming.”
“The roots,” Callum said. “In the sewer. They… spoke to her. Or she hears them.” He let out a long breath. “My brother’s alchemists talk about ley lines. Old magic in the land. They call it superstition. A story to frighten children.”
“It’s not a story.” Vincent finished tying off the bandage. He sat back, studying her face. The lines of pain had softened into mere exhaustion. She looked her age for the first time. Young. Too young for the scars she carried. “What are we doing, Callum? We’re dragging a woman who talks to nature and her three children through a coup. We’re hiding in a butcher’s attic. We just burned her arm shut.”
“We’re keeping them alive,” Callum said, his tone final. “That’s the only thing on the board right now. Survival. The rest… we’ll figure it out.”
“How?” The word burst out of Vincent, sharp with a frustration he usually kept buried. “Your charming our way into the palace? My digging up ledgers that prove your brother’s selling people to the Krazath Confederacy? None of that matters if we’re caught in this room. She can’t run. The children can’t run.”
Callum’s gaze was steady. “So we don’t get caught. We find a safer hole. We wait for her to get strong.”
“And then what? We present her to your father’s remaining loyalists as what? Evidence? A witness? She’s not a document, Callum. They’ll see a traumatized slave with strange abilities and call her hysterical. Or a witch.”
“Then we use her as a symbol,” Callum shot back, his voice dropping. “A living testament to what the empire is doing in the shadows. People follow stories, Vin. They follow pain they can see.”
Vincent stared at him. The pragmatist versus the strategist. The truth versus the narrative. He saw the calculation in Callum’s eyes, and for a flicker of a second, he hated it. “You want to put her on a stage.”
“I want to win,” Callum said, unflinching. “Winning is the only thing that gives any of this,” he gestured around the vile room, at Seraphina, “any meaning. Winning is what keeps them safe forever. Not just for tonight.”
The curtain rustled. Kya stood there, Mia asleep on her shoulder, Leo clinging to her skirts. Her eyes were huge in the dim light. “Is she better?”
Vincent looked from Callum’s determined face to the children’s frightened ones. The two futures collided in the sickly air. He turned back to Seraphina, taking her cool, limp hand in his.
“She’s resting,” he said, his voice hollow. “She’s going to be fine.”
He had no idea if it was a lie. It was the only thing left to say. Outside, the first cleaver of the day fell on flesh with a solid, wet thud. The city was waking up, hungry and oblivious. Their time in this temporary, terrible sanctuary was already running out.
The thud of the cleaver below punctuated the silence between them. It was a brutal metronome counting down the seconds they couldn’t afford to waste.
Vincent finally released Seraphina’s hand, his own fingers stiff. He stood, his joints protesting. The cramped room felt like a tomb lined with tools for stripping flesh. “We need water. Actual food, not just broth.”
“I’ll scout the market,” Callum said, his voice drained of its usual performative charm. It was just tired now. “Blend in with the other disappointed souls.”
“Your face is on whispers in every tavern, Cal.”
“My face is currently bearded and decorated with what I’m pretty sure is sewer mud.” Callum managed a ghost of a smile. “I’ll look like a man who lost a fight with a bottle. It’s a common aesthetic here.”
He slipped out the door and down the stairs, leaving Vincent alone with the sleeping woman and the children peering from behind the curtain.
Vincent busied himself making order from the disarray. He cleared Elys’ tools, wiped the stool, and created a makeshift pallet for the children with borrowed blankets. His movements were mechanical, a ward against the memory of that hissing iron.
“Is she really better?” Kya asked. She had settled Leo and Mia on the pallet with a crust of hard bread. She stood by the bed, her small hand hovering near her mother’s bandaged arm.
“The fever is broken,” Vincent said, choosing his words with the care of a man crossing thin ice. “Her body is healing now. It just needs rest. And quiet.”
“She doesn’t like quiet,” Kya said. “She says quiet lets the bad thoughts get loud.”
Vincent had no answer for that. He poured a cup of water from a clay jug. “You should drink. All of you.”
Leo shuffled over, taking the cup with both hands. He drank, then stared at Vincent over the rim. “Your hands were shaking,” he said, his voice small but direct. “When you were holding her.”
The observation was a knife twist. Vincent looked at his own hands. They were steady now. “Sometimes important things are frightening,” he said, which was the truest thing he’d said all day.
A low groan came from the bed. Seraphina’s head moved on the rough pillow. Her eyelids fluttered, then opened. For a moment, there was only confusion in her green eyes, a fog of pain and disorientation. They landed on Kya, and clarity rushed in, sharp and painful.
“Kya,” she breathed, the word cracking.
“I’m here, Mama.” The girl clutched her mother’s good hand.
Seraphina’s gaze swept the room, taking in the hooks, the jars, the strange, bloody light from the yard below. It landed on Vincent. A different kind of tension entered her body, a wary stiffness. “Where?”
“A safe place. For now.” Vincent moved closer but stopped at the foot of the bed, giving her space. “A friend of Callum’s. She treated your arm.”
Seraphina looked down at the fresh bandage. Memory returned in a visible wave. The sewer. The roots. The blinding, consuming agony. Her breath hitched. She flexed the fingers of her wounded arm, testing. A sharp gasp escaped her as the new burn announced itself.
“It’s sealed,” Vincent said quickly. “The infection is gone.”
“It feels… cooked.” Her voice was a dry rasp.
“That’s because it was,” he said, unable to dress it in euphemism. “It was that or lose you. I’m sorry.”
She held his gaze for a long moment. He expected fear, or anger. He saw neither. She just looked impossibly weary. “Thank you,” she said quietly. Then her eyes darted around again. “The others? Leo, Mia?”
“Here, Mama!” Leo bounded over, careful not to jostle the bed. Mia followed, sucking her thumb, her other hand fisted in Kya’s shirt.
Seraphina’s face softened, a fragile warmth breaking through the pain. She touched each of them with her good hand, a quiet inventory of their safety. The simple act seemed to drain the last of her strength. She sank back into the pillow, her eyes closing.
“Sleep,” Vincent urged. “They’re safe. I’m here.”
“Callum?” she asked, eyes still closed.
“Gone for supplies. He’s fine.”
She nodded, almost imperceptibly. “You argued. About me. While I was under.”
Vincent went very still. “You heard that.”
“Fragments. ‘Symbol.’ ‘Stage.’” She opened her eyes again. They were clear now, and piercing. “I’m not a banner to be raised.”
“No,” Vincent agreed, his voice low. “You’re not.”
“He wants to win,” she said, as if parsing a difficult text. “You want… to hide.”
“I want you to live,” Vincent corrected, a heat entering his tone. “There’s a difference.”
A faint, pained smile touched her lips. “Not always.” She shifted, wincing, and tried to sit up. Kya scrambled to help stack the thin pillows behind her. “I’ve been hiding in plain sight for twenty years. It’s just a slower kind of dying.”
The statement hung in the tannery stink. Vincent couldn’t dismantle it. He’d seen the evidence of it in her malnourished frame, in her children’s instinctive flinching.
“Then what do you want?” he asked, the question feeling dangerously raw.
She looked at her children, then at the window, at the sliver of filthy city sky. “I want the screaming to stop.” She wasn’t talking about the slaughteryard. “Inside. Outside. In the stones. I want to stand on ground that doesn’t feel sick. I want to choose the door I walk through.”
Footsteps, too heavy to be Callum’s, sounded on the wooden stairs. Vincent was on his feet in an instant, his dagger appearing in his hand as if by magic. He moved between the bed and the door.
The bolt shook. A fist pounded, not with urgency, but with a dull, official authority.
“Open up! Health inspection. Reported stench from this loft.”
Vincent’s mind raced. A real inspector? Or a city guardsman using a convenient pretext? The pounding came again. “Open in the name of the city magistrate!”
“Get them under the bed,” Vincent hissed to Kya. He pointed to the deep shadowed space beneath the heavy frame. The girl acted, shepherding Leo and Mia silently into the hiding spot.
Seraphina tried to swing her legs over the side of the bed, her face blanching with the effort. “Help me up. I can stand.”
“You can’t even sit,” Vincent muttered. He made a split-second decision. He shoved the stool aside and slid into the bed beside her, pulling the rough blanket up over both of them. He turned on his side, curling his body around hers, his back to the door, shielding her from view. “Be still. Be small.”
Her body went rigid against his, a line of shocked heat. He could feel the rapid flutter of her heart against his arm. The pounding on the door became a splintering crash as the bolt gave way.
The door swung open, framing a broad figure in a city watchman’s leather hauberk. He held a lantern aloft, its light reeling across the walls of tools.
“What’s the disturbance?” Vincent growled, pitching his voice into the gravel of a man ripped from sleep. He didn’t turn over. “My wife is ill. We paid the weekly permit for quiet.”
The watchman’s eyes scanned the room, lingering on the empty pallet, the single cup. “Wife, eh? Looks like a squatter’s den. Report said a gang of ruffians came up here. Seen anyone else?”
“Just us,” Vincent said, letting irritation seep into his tone. “The tannery master lets us stay. My work at the granary doesn’t cover a proper lodging. Are you satisfied?”
The watchman took a step in, his boot scraping on the floor. Vincent’s free hand, hidden under the blanket, tightened on the dagger’s hilt. He felt Seraphina hold her breath.
The man’s lantern beam swept over the bed, over Vincent’s shoulders, and glinted off the glass of a jar on a high shelf. He grunted. “Place smells of rot and cheap perfume.”
“That’s the tannery below, and my wife’s medicine,” Vincent snapped, finally turning his head just enough to glare over his shoulder. “Get out. You’re scaring her.”
For a long, suspended moment, the watchman stood there. Then he shrugged, the institutional laziness winning out over diligence. “Keep the noise down. We’ve got enough trouble without sick vagrants causing a stir.”
He turned and trudged back down the stairs, leaving the door hanging broken on its hinge.
Vincent didn’t move. He waited until the footsteps faded completely, until the normal sounds of the street filtered back up. Only then did he release the breath burning in his lungs. He became acutely aware of the woman in his arms, of the way her body had slowly relaxed into the curve of his, of the softness of her hair against his chin.
He pulled back, rolling away and off the bed in one fluid, abrupt motion. The cool air of the room replaced the warmth of the blanket. “He’s gone.”
Seraphina pushed herself up on her elbows, her cheeks faintly flushed. She didn’t look at him. “Kya. Leo. Mia. It’s safe.”
The children scrambled out from under the bed, their eyes wide with a fear they’d learned to swallow quietly. Vincent busied himself with righting the door, propping it shut with the stool. His hands were unsteady again.
“That was close,” Seraphina said quietly.
“It’s going to get closer,”
“That was close,” Seraphina said quietly.
“It’s going to get closer,” Vincent replied, his voice hollow. He finally turned from the propped door, running a hand through his hair. The adrenaline was leaking away, leaving a brittle emptiness. He could still feel the impression of her body against his, a phantom warmth that felt like a transgression. “He’ll talk in a tavern tonight. A story about the sick woman and her jumpy husband in the tannery loft. Wrong ears will hear it.”
Seraphina watched him. The fluster from their forced proximity had cooled into something more assessing. “You lied smoothly.”
“It’s what I do. I assess and I dissemble.” He fetched the water jug, pouring another cup. He didn’t drink it. He just held the cool clay. “It’s less noble than calling down lightning or building bridges.”
“It kept the screaming away for five more minutes.” She accepted the cup he finally offered, her fingers brushing his. A static charge, faint and surprising, passed between them. She didn’t flinch. “That’s not nothing.”
The children clustered around the bed, a silent, anxious tribunal. Leo stared at the broken door. “Is the bad man coming back?”
“A different bad man might,” Vincent said. He wouldn’t lie to them. Not about this. “We won’t be here when he does.”
“Where will we go?” Kya asked. Her voice was practical, but her knuckles were white where she gripped the bed frame.
The question hung, suffocating and unanswerable. The sewer was compromised. This bolt-hole was blown. Vincent had a list of safe houses in his mind, elegant townhouses and discreet country manors, every one of them undoubtedly watched by his father’s men or the Emperor’s spies. Useless.
Footsteps, lighter this time, hurried up the stairs. Callum shouldered the propped door open, his arms laden with a sack. He took in the scene—the broken latch, Vincent’s posture, the children’s faces—in a single glance. “We had company.”
“Health inspection,” Vincent said flatly.
“Bullshit.” Callum dropped the sack on the stool. It gave a solid thunk. “They’re doing sweeps. The word is out—Second Prince Callum was spotted in the artisans’ quarter with ‘unnatural companions.’” His gaze flicked to Seraphina. “They don’t have your description yet. Just mine. But they will.”
“So we move. Now.” Vincent started gathering their meager supplies.
“To where?” Seraphina pushed the blanket back. Her face was determined, but a tremor in her legs betrayed her when her feet touched the floor. “I can’t run. Not like this.”
“You won’t have to.” Callum rummaged in his sack, pulling out a bundle of coarse, dun-colored fabric. “We’re not running. We’re hiding in plain sight. We’re joining the pilgrimage.”
Vincent stopped. “The Feast of Dust pilgrimage? It’s a three-day walk to the hinterland shrines. It’s packed with penitents and pickpockets.”
“Exactly.” A sharp, familiar grin cut through Callum’s fatigue. It was the grin of a man finding a dangerous move on a chessboard. “Thousands of souls wrapped in identical robes, faces covered against the road dust. The city guards hate policing it. Too much work, too little reward. We get lost in the river of the wretched.”
“She can’t walk for three days,” Vincent said, his voice rising.
“She won’t.” Callum pulled out a small, heavy purse and tossed it to Vincent. “We buy a spot on a pilgrim cart. The ones that carry the elderly and the infirm. You’ll be her devoted brother, tending to her on her final journey to seek healing.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be the charismatic vagrant a few carts back, sharing wine and bad jokes, keeping eyes off you.” Callum’s plan unfolded, audacious and thin. “The pilgrimage ends at the Dust Fen shrines. Just north of there is the Sterling family’s old hunting lodge. It’s been empty since your father moved to the capital. It’s outside anyone’s jurisdiction.”
Vincent stared at the purse in his hand. The lodge. He’d forgotten about it. A crumbling stone thing on the edge of the wildlands. Isolated. Possibly haunted. Absolutely perfect.
“It’s a full day’s ride from the nearest garrison,” Vincent murmured, thinking aloud. “The roof might be fallen in.”
“Better than a roof someone can kick down.” Callum turned to Seraphina. “It’s a risk. A big, public risk. But it’s the only path I see that doesn’t end in a back alley or a palace dungeon.”
Seraphina looked from Callum’s eager, calculated face to Vincent’s brooding hesitation. She thought of the screaming in the stones, the churning sickness of the city’s foundations. The Dust Fen was just a name, but it sounded like open air. Like quiet.
“The children?” she asked.
“Pilgrims’ orphans. It’s common. They’ll be overlooked.” Callum knelt, addressing Leo and Mia directly. “You’ll have to be very quiet and hold onto the cart. Can you do that? It’s a game. The quiet game.”
Leo nodded solemnly. Mia buried her face in Kya’s side.
“The cart driver will need bribing,” Vincent said, the practical part of his mind engaging despite his dread. “And robes. And supplies for the road.”
“Hence the purse.” Callum stood. “We have an hour before the main groups assemble at the Sunset Gate. We use it.”
The next hour was a blur of subdued motion. Vincent helped Seraphina into the rough-spun pilgrim’s robe, his hands impersonal and efficient as he tied the cords. She leaned on him, her weight a testament to her exhaustion. The coarse fabric swallowed her, the hood shadowing her vivid eyes.
He dressed the children in smaller versions, their little faces suddenly ancient and anonymous inside the deep cowls. Kya helped, her small fingers fumbling with knots until Vincent gently moved them aside and did it himself.
“Like this,” he said softly, showing her the secure hitch. “So it doesn’t catch.”
Callum returned, his own robe stained and dusty, his face already smudged with dirt. He’d acquired a pilgrim’s staff and a water skin that sloshed with something that smelled stronger than water. “Cart’s secured. Driver’s a miser named Holt. He thinks you’re a bankrupt merchant taking your dying sister to the shrines for a miracle. He doesn’t care. He just cares that you paid.”
“Let’s go,” Vincent said. He scooped Mia up, settling her on his hip. She didn’t resist, just tucked her hooded head under his chin. Kya took Leo’s hand. Seraphina stood, swayed, and Vincent’s free arm was instantly around her, taking her weight.
They descended into the tannery, passing through the reeking workroom where men with bloodied aprons didn’t glance up from their scraping blades. Then they were in the alley, swallowed by the streaming river of grey and brown robes flowing toward the city’s western edge.
The noise was a low, mournful hum—chanting, coughing, the shuffle of countless feet on cobbles. The air thickened with dust and the smell of unwashed bodies and despair. Vincent kept his head down, his grip on Seraphina firm. She moved like an automaton, putting one foot in front of the other, her breath coming in short, controlled gasps.
At the Sunset Gate, the human river bottlenecked, churning around merchants selling dubious relics and blessed water. Vincent spotted the cart—a high-sided, rickety wooden thing hitched to a single, dispirited ox. Callum gave him an almost imperceptible nod from twenty feet away, already blending into a crowd of chanting penitents.
Vincent helped Seraphina climb into the cart, where a few other spectral figures already huddled. An old woman with clouded eyes. A man whose cough sounded like tearing cloth. He passed Mia and Leo up to Kya, who gathered them into a corner like a mother hen.
“You, brother,” a wheezing voice said. The driver, Holt, spat a stream of brown liquid onto the stones. “You walk beside. Cart’s full enough. Only the infirm ride.”
Vincent’s protest died on his lips. Seraphina’s eyes met his from the shadows of her hood. A plea, and a command. Go with it.
He nodded, falling into step beside the wooden wheel as Holt hissed at the ox. The cart lurched forward, joining the endless exodus through the colossal gate and onto the wide, dusty road leading out of the city.
The sun beat down. Dust coated Vincent’s tongue, his teeth. He walked, his shoulder brushing the rough wood of the cart, his eyes scanning the trudging masses. He saw Callum’s robed figure intermittently, never too close, always moving.
Inside the cart, Seraphina leaned against the side, watching Vincent’s back through a gap in the boards. The pain in her arm was a deep, throbbing ache. The city’s distant roar faded, replaced by the crunch of gravel, the creak of wheels, the murmur of prayer.
But the screaming didn’t fade. It changed.
The deeper they moved from the city’s heart, the less it felt like a psychic infection and more like a lament. The soil here was tired, drained. It whispered of salted earth and deep, forgotten wounds. She closed her eyes, trying to shut it out, and saw not roots, but veins. Not growth, but a slow, arterial bleed.
Leo tugged her sleeve. “Mama? Are we going away?”
“Yes,” she whispered, her throat tight.
“For good?”
She looked past him, at Vincent’s steadfast back, at the swirling dust of thousands hiding them. She looked ahead, down the road that stretched into a hazy, uncertain distance.
“I don’t know,” she said. It was the only honest answer left.
The cart rolled on, carrying them deeper into the empire’s weeping landscape.