The world was a smear of pain and nauseating motion. Agony was a blunt axe chopping into my ribs with every step. Kestrel half-dragged me through the stinking tunnel, her grip impersonal and brutal.
"Move, or I leave you," she grunted.
She dumped me in a forgotten maintenance alcove. I slumped against the wall, a groan escaping my lips.
"Let me see." She peeled back the torn, blood-soaked fabric. "Three, maybe four broken ribs. Your left shoulder is out of its socket." She braced her foot against the wall and shoved. The pop of the joint was a sickening relief that drowned in a fresh wave of pain.
"Drink this." She uncorked a small clay potion bottle.
I hesitated, but had no choice. I drained its bitter contents.
"The potion isn't enough. He'll need further treatment."
She wasn't talking to me.
From the deeper shadows, a figure limped forward. Rylan. He clutched his broken wrist, his face pale. A dark bruise flowered across his ribs.
*Him?* My mind, fogged with pain, recoiled. *After the Archive? After I let him live?*
"You," I rasped, the word a curse. "What is this, Kestrel? A trap?"
"Look at us," Rylan snarled, slumping down. "Does this look like a trap? We're both rats in the same sinking ship because of you."
"Because of *me*? You sold me out!"
"Not tonight!" he shot back. "For six months! Six months I've been cleaning up your mess! Every time Zero looked at me, he saw your empty chair. 'Why can't you be more like Penance? Why can't you get this done?' You left a hole, Arthur, and I've been bleeding into it ever since."
My eyes snapped to Kestrel.
"He's useful. And he's motivated," she said, already knowing my question, her voice chillingly calm. "You both are. Corvus wants you dead. Zero has disowned Rylan. You have no one else."
"You're still thinking about being the 'new' director?"
She gave a small, humorless smile. "The board has changed. I adapt."
The sheer, brutal logic of it was a cage slamming shut. There was no loyalty here, only a temporary alignment of desperate interests.
"And you expect me to trust him? After what he did? I don't even trust you!"
"I don't expect you to trust anyone," Kestrel said, her wintery gaze locking on mine. "I expect you to want to live. I expect you to want to protect that girl. You can't do either alone. Not anymore."
*That girl.* Lily. The name was a fresh wound. The reason I'd buried the Penance six months ago. The reason I'd just betrayed a king.
Rylan let out a bitter laugh. "Still playing the hero for her? Some things never change."
Before I could retort, Kestrel cut in. "Enough. We need a healer. There's a place in the Rustwater Docks. We go there, we get patched up, or we all die down here. Decide."
She looked at me, then at Rylan—two broken weapons, pointed at each other but forced to face the same enemy.
I struggled to my feet, the movement sending fresh fire through my side. Every instinct screamed at me to run back, to find Lily, to put myself between her and the world.
But I saw the calculation in Kestrel's eyes. I heard the truth in Rylan's words.
Going back now was a death sentence for us both. I was a liability, not a protector. Slade would be waiting. Corvus would have already sent ravens to her door. My heroic charge would be the thing that got her killed.
The most painful choice was the only one that made sense. To save her, I had to walk away. I had to heal. I had to become the weapon that could actually destroy the man who threatened her.
"Lead the way," I said, the words tasting like ash.
I was choosing to be the Patient Hunter once more. But this time, the prey was a king, and the bait was the only soul I had left to lose.
The journey through the tunnels was a silent, painful procession. Kestrel led, a shadow with a crossbow, her senses stretched to their limit. I followed, each step a fresh lesson in agony, my body a prison of broken parts. Rylan brought up the rear, his breathing ragged, a constant reminder of the damage we'd dealt each other.
The silence was a thick, tense thing. It was Rylan who finally broke it, his voice a low growl in the damp dark.
"He'll use her, you know. Corvus."
I didn't answer, focusing on placing one foot in front of the other.
"He won't kill her," Rylan continued, as if reading the fear that had been screaming in my head since the Archive. "Not yet. A dead hostage is a spent asset. He'll keep her alive, comfortable even. He'll make sure you *know* she's safe. It's the hope that will make you reckless. It's the perfect trap."
"I know," I bit out, the words sharp.
"Do you?" he challenged, a bitter edge to his voice. "Because you've always been a slave to that part of you. The part that cares. It's why you ran. It's why you're here now. It's your greatest weakness, and he's an expert at exploiting weakness."
"And what's your excuse, Rylan?" I shot back, stopping to lean against the slimy tunnel wall, my chest heaving. "What's your great weakness? Ambition? Jealousy?"
"My weakness was thinking I could ever step out of your shadow," he said, his good hand clenching at his side. "For six months, I did everything right. Everything you wouldn't. I was loyal. I was efficient. And it meant *nothing*. Because I wasn't you. So don't you dare lecture me on weakness. My only mistake was not being the legendary Penance."
Kestrel glanced back, her expression one of pure impatience. "If you two are finished comparing scars, we're here."
Ahead, a sliver of sickly green light cut across the tunnel from a rusted grate. The air changed, carrying the thick, briny stench of the Rustwater Docks, mixed with the ozone tang of raw magic and decay.
Kestrel approached the grate and knocked twice, paused, then three times. A moment later, it swung inward with a screech of protesting metal.
The face that peered out was wizened and sharp, dominated by one milky, blind eye and one that was a piercing, unnerving green. "Kestrel," the woman rasped. "You bring strays. And one of them is bleeding all over my doorstep."
"Hello, Elara," Kestrel said, her tone shifting to one of careful respect. "We need your help. And we can pay."
Elara's good eye swept over Rylan and me, assessing the damage with a clinical detachment that made Kestrel's seem warm. "The Broken Hand and the Shattered Storm. Interesting. Come in. Try not to die on my floor. The blood is hell to get out of the floorboards."
She turned and shuffled back into the gloom. Kestrel went in after her. Rylan and I exchanged a single, loaded glance, a truce of pure necessity before I pushed off the wall and followed, stepping from one darkness into another.
The inside of Elara's shack was a chaotic museum of the arcane. Jars of pickled things that pulsed with faint light hung from the rafters. Bunches of strange herbs dried over a smoldering hearth, filling the air with a pungent, medicinal smoke. The air itself hummed with power, old and wild, nothing like the controlled enchantments of the city above.
Elara pointed a gnarled finger at a low stool. "You. Broken Hand. Sit."
Rylan hesitated, then sat, his pride warring with his pain. Elara bustled over, her movements surprisingly swift. She took his broken wrist in her hands without ceremony.
"Hmm. Clean break. Simple." She rummaged in a pouch at her belt, pulling out a pinch of glittering dust and a sprig of vibrant green moss. She muttered under her breath, words that slithered and stuck in the air. The dust glowed, and the moss writhed as she pressed it against the fracture. There was a soft *click*. Rylan let out a sharp gasp, then a sigh of relief as the bone knit itself back together before our eyes. The bruising faded like a retreating tide.
"Don't use it for a day," Elara commanded, wiping her hands on her apron. "The moss will finish the work."
She then turned her unsettling green eye on me. "You. Shattered Storm. The cot."
I lay down. Her presence loomed over me. She placed a cold, dry hand on my chest, over my heart. Her eye widened a fraction.
Then she did something unexpected. She chuckled, a dry, rasping sound.
"You carry this... and you come to me for healing?" She looked down at me, a mix of pity and dark amusement in her gaze. "Why did you bring him?" she asked Kestrel, her voice a dry rasp of pure confusion.
Kestrel frowned. "He took a resonant charge at point-blank range. He can barely stand."
Elara shuffled closer to me, her piercing green eye narrowing. She didn't touch me. She just... sniffed the air around me.
"Can't you feel it?" she asked, her question aimed at me now. "The body remembers the pain, but the flesh... the flesh is already whole."
I stared at her, then down at my own chest. I tentatively took a deep breath, bracing for the familiar, fiery agony in my ribs.
It never came.
I pressed a hand to my side. No grinding bone, no searing tear of muscle. Just... solid, unbroken tissue. The lingering ache I'd attributed to the potion wasn't pain at all, but the phantom memory of it, a ghost haunting a house that had already been rebuilt.
My Cultivated Body. It had been working the entire time, silently and perfectly, without my conscious command. The potion, the agony of the journey... it had all been a background process my mind hadn't registered as complete.
"The body is a cup," Elara said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "Yours refills itself. But you it has a crack."
She leaned in, her gaze terrifyingly knowing.
"You cannot heal a crack from the inside. You pour all your power into it, and it just... leaks out. A little faster each time. You did not need a healer, Penance. You needed a potter. And I do not work with clay. Nor do I fix flawed vessels."
Flawed Vessels? What does she mean? Is she calling me a flawed vessel?
My greatest power was also my fatal flaw. And Corvus, with his unnerving perception, had likely known it all along.