Chapter 13: The Song in the Blood
The old man’s words hung in the infirmary air, thick as the smell of bloodmoss and despair. Lysander stared at the rough-hewn ceiling beams, but he was seeing the sunk canyon of Sourwater Run, feeling the cold, patient hunger sleeping in its mud. An echo of his own. A key made of two broken pieces, grinding together until they fit.
Seraphina broke the silence, her voice flat. “So we’re not a prophecy. We’re a screwdriver.”
Lysander almost laughed. It was a hollow, painful sound. “A cursed one.” He looked at Elstan, who was now shivering under a thick wool blanket, his eyes closed. The hole the binding had left in him wasn’t a wound Ione could stitch. It was an absence, a silence where a lifetime of memories had been riffled through and discarded by the Cleaver’s magic. “He needs rest. We need–”
Elstan’s eyes snapped open.
They weren’t milky and vague anymore. They were full black, the pupils blown wide and depthless, swallowing the lamplight. His back arched off the pallet, tendons in his neck standing out like rigging cables. A wet, guttural sound ripped from his throat—not a scream, but a chant. The words were all hard consonants and guttural stops, a language that had died when the canyon was still green.
“Gods,” Seraphina breathed, stepping back.
Ione rushed forward, her healer’s instincts overriding her fear. She tried to press a hand to his forehead. Elstan’s arm, thin as a birch branch, shot out and shoved her back with unnatural strength. She stumbled into a shelf of ceramic jars with a crash.
“The song!” Elstan croaked, his voice overlapped with another, deeper resonance. It was the Cleaver’s voice, using the old man’s ruined vocal cords like a puppet. “You wouldn’t sing it, elder. So I left a singer in your bones. Let’s see if they can hear it now.”
Lysander was already moving, his hand going to the knife at his belt. But what was he going to do? Cut the words out of him?
Seraphina was frozen, her hazel eyes wide, not with fear, but with a frantic, scanning intensity. She was listening. Not to the words, but to the shape underneath them. “It’s not him,” she said quickly. “It’s a… a recording. A triggered resonance. The Cleaver carved the song into his life-thread when he was unraveling him. It’s playing back.”
Elstan’s chanting grew louder, more rhythmic. The air in the infirmary grew dense. The candle flames didn’t flicker; they stretched upward, thin and taut as wires, their light turning a sickly green. The scent of burnt herbs was suddenly overwhelmed by the smell of hot stone and dank, deep water.
“Can you stop it?” Lysander yelled over the rising dirge.
“I can’t just muffle a man’s soul! It’s etched in!” Seraphina shot back, her hands coming up, violet light flickering uncertainly around her fingers. “It’ll burn him out completely!”
The elder’s body was vibrating with the force of the chant. A trickle of black fluid seeped from the corner of his mouth. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, unseeing, broadcasting.
The crown in Lysander’s skull woke up.
It didn’t roar. It tuned itself. Like a lodestone swinging to north, its entire attention focused on the cursed song pouring out of Elstan. It recognized the frequency. It wanted to match it. To answer.
A wave of vertigo hit Lysander. He saw, for a split second, a canyon floor strewn not with bones, but with still-shining armor. He felt the moment of a dying general’s final, betrayed thought, the curse that was less a spell and more a metaphysical infection, a scream that twisted everything it touched.
“He’s not just playing it for us,” Lysander gasped, gripping the edge of a table to stay upright. The foreign memories slid behind his eyes like oily snakes. “He’s broadcasting it. To the Run. To wake it up.”
Seraphina understood instantly. The Cleaver hadn’t needed the elder to tell him the song. He’d needed a living, suffering transmitter he could activate from a distance. A final test of the key.
Her gaze locked with Lysander’s. There was no time for doubt, for the careful dance of the baths. This was triage.
“We have to swallow it,” she said.
“What?”
“The song! We have to take the whole thing in. All at once. Overload the transmitter and… and contain the signal. In us.”
It was insane. It was the only option. Lysander saw the calculation in her eyes, saw the moment it tipped from theory into terrible necessity. He gave one sharp nod.
He crossed the room in two strides. He didn’t gentle her. He grabbed her shoulders, his fingers biting into her flesh, anchoring them both. She didn’t flinch. Her hands came up and clamped onto his forearms, her nails breaking his skin. No kiss this time. No careful fusion. Just a brutal, deliberate collision of wills.
He opened the gate.
Not a crack. He threw it wide.
The crown’s power surged out, a river of predatory, ancient hunger, a need to dominate and consume. It wasn’t silver or black. It was the color of a starless midnight.
Seraphina met it with everything she had. Not with a cage of light, but with a roaring confluence of raw, structured energy. Her magic was the golden-green of a deep forest, the violet of a storm’s heart, the shimmering silver of starlight on a still lake. Elemental, alive, and fiercely protective.
They clashed in the space between their bodies.
For a second, Lysander was certain they’d get it wrong. That they’d tear each other apart and immolate the old man in the process. The pain was exquisite, a lightning bolt grounded in his teeth, his spine, his soul.
Then it happened.
Not an agreement. A consumption. A third thing.
Their combined power didn’t merge. It devoured the space between them and became a vortex. A silent, howling vacuum that ripped the cursed song right out of Elstan’s vibrating body.
The old man fell silent mid-syllable. He collapsed onto the pallet, limp, a marionette with cut strings. The green candlelight snuffed back to yellow.
The song didn’t end. It was just… inside them now.
Lysander heard it, a looping, screaming score etched into the fabric of his mind. Seraphina felt it, a series of burning, dissonant chords vibrating in her magical core. It was too big, too alien. It was tearing them open from the inside out, a parasite of sound.
“Contain it,” Seraphina gritted out, her face pressed against his chest, her body trembling violently. “We have to give it shape!”
He didn’t know how. The crown did.
It acted on an instinct older than language. The power vortex between them, now saturated with the screaming song, needed a ledger. A permanent record. It began to inscribe one.
On Lysander’s left arm, from wrist to shoulder, his old battle tattoos smoked and reconfigured. The ink beneath his skin seethed, turning black, then a luminescent, feverish violet. It rose to the surface in jagged, angular runes—the visual form of the cursed chant. They burned as they formed, branding him with the melody of the dead general’s rage.
On Seraphina, it etched itself over the new silver lace on her ribs, spreading across her torso like a cascading shadow of thorny script. It didn’t hurt like a wound. It hurt like a memory being forcibly implanted, a story she never wanted to know searing itself into her bones. She cried out, a short, sharp sound, as the last rune solidified just below her collarbone.
The vortex snapped.
They broke apart, staggering. Lysander hit the wall, his branded arm held out, staring at the glowing script that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. Seraphina doubled over, hands on her knees, sucking in ragged breaths. The infirmary was silent. Eerily, deafeningly silent.
Ione slowly picked herself up from the floor, her face pale. Elstan was breathing, shallow but steady, in a deep, natural sleep.
“Is it…” Ione began, whispering.
“Quiet,” Seraphina panted, straightening up. She looked down at the dark script now woven through the silver on her skin. She touched a glyph. It was warm. “It’s not quiet. It’s just… filed.”
Lysander pushed off the wall. The runes on his arm were already fading from violent violet to a dull, sullen black, indistinguishable from his other tattoos unless you knew where to look. He felt it, though. A new layer in the map under his skin. A dire, humming road leading straight into the earth.
“We’re the containment field,” he said, his voice raw.
Seraphina pulled her shirt down, covering the scripture on her ribs. Her expression was haunted, but clear. “And we’re the map. He triggered the song to wake the curse. He’ll be going to the Run now, to meet it. This,” she gestured between them, at their marked skin, “this is the route. He doesn’t have it. We do.”
Lysander looked from her to the sleeping elder, to the frightened healer, to the darkened script on his arm. The burden had shape now. It had a melody. And it was written in their flesh.
He flexed his branded hand. “Then we’d better get there first.”
The door to the infirmary banged open. Theron filled the doorway, his beard flecked with ale foam, his eyes wide. “The watch-fires on the Southern Ridge just turned green,” he said, without preamble. “All of them. Like someone’s painting the sky with poison.”
Lysander and Seraphina exchanged a glance. No surprise. Only a grim confirmation.
“Sound the muster,” Lysander said, his voice dropping into the familiar, graveled command of the Blood Prince. “Full war-footing. We march for Sourwater at first light.”
“What are we marching into?” Theron asked, his gaze flicking between his prince’s tense face and Seraphina’s shadowed eyes.
Lysander looked down at the black runes, hearing the faint, echoes of a dead man’s scream in the back of his skull.
“An invitation.”