The Silver Knot

Frequency is attunement.

The broken halves of a silver earring shiver in her right hand, creasing the small pool of blood with ripples. Her other hand instinctively crosses to that pulsing sting in her right ear. Wet. Two small flaps of ear skin dangling, their connection ruined.

Attunement is connection.

She checks the other ear and finds a familiar metal knot, twisting, sharp on three ends. Intricate and integrous. She leaves a swipe of blood as she pulls away. On her knees in an alleyway, the abundance of white-flecked granite cobbles tells her Vaelith. Of course. Fucking figures this would happen here again.

Connection is control.

She stumbles to her feet, rustling in her belt pouch for beeswax, and stuffs a large fingerful in her right ear to seal what she can. She runs a hand across the red fuzz of hair over her scalp, and concludes that nothing terribly traumatic has befallen her skull.

My left was always better anyway.

She extracts a small iron box from the pouch, clicking a combination of sigils on the spine to encourage it open. She performs the weaving, slowly, careful not to smear blood on the cleansing cloth or the needles. She braces for the prick in the skin to match the prick in the mind.

A small moment later and it’s done, not perfectly but good enough. A ringing persists in her wounded ear, unmuffled by the wax. She brushes it aside to case the alleyway. If a glance to the mottled gray ground told her the city, an upward look warned her of the area: The Shackles. The slapdash pathways across rooftops and between what passed for windows were unmistakable. Less a neighborhood than a nest, the Shackles had subsisted for centuries in a corner of Vaelith where the ancient inward-bending walls allow little sun but ample rain. These rickety pathways had been designed specifically to avoid her current situation. She’s landed in the gutter of a district for which the main exports are black mold and rats.

Brilliant work, Karrigan.

Only now does that name sound clear in her head. Naming of the Self is one of the key components of the weaving rite, but she always forgot that one. It feels strange to her, repeating the name over and over again into the air until its meaning has been entirely lost. Until each syllable is just a movement on the tongue, a disturbance in the air. The point is to counter-match the frequency of a charm. By dissolving one’s own identity into mere sound, one may refract a charming sound until it is nothing but noise. But a name is just a name, and when you’re bleeding out of your head you can’t exactly be bothered to recite that particular verse.

At least I remember that.

Sense returns into her left ear with the sounds of dripping and vermin skittering across the cobbles. This is when she checks to see if she even had a plan here. She searches for details of a job on her person, hoping for a contract but settling for extra gold or a few bits of evidence. Tucked into the inside pocket of her half-sodden cloak is a scrap of paper, with the word “contract” scrawled across the top. Clumsy, but intentionally so. That chicken scratch would be agonizing to forge.

Heh. So I was working with Reynard on this one.

She reads the note. It’s legible, if only just. Something about a daughter. Stolen in the night. Charmed, of course. All the gold up front. She starts to consider why they didn’t just take the gold and get a carriage out of here, but then she recalls Reynard’s face when he was listening to that poor, whimpering woman. His gaunt, sharp features, like he was carved from wood and the carpenters forgot to sand the splinters, and his eyes like a pair of pale blue marbles, widening in empathy. He was convinced, said that despite the scant details they had a “duty.” She doesn’t remember how in the burning depths she decided to go along with it. She had probably scoffed that something like this would happen, and what an excellent time she would have rubbing it in when she found him.

Still, the job remained undone, considering the distinct lack of a young daughter in the vicinity and the fact that she had woken up with anything but a post-celebratory hangover. No Reynard, either. That can’t be good.

She ventured through the alleyway to get her bearings, and a few things came to light. First, it was already night, and the lack of light was not simply a quirk of the Shackles. Second, a scattering of wooden boards and a conspicuous hole in the bridge overhead made a good case for her injury and muddy head. Seems like they were giving chase, and Reynard kept pursuit instead of trying to dredge me out of the damp. Good boy.

Third, this network of alleyways seems to be largely abandoned. Shacklers are not known for being persnickety homeowners, so this detail leaves a sour note. What could be behind these boarded windows and doorways? She walks past probably a dozen of the same before finding a climbable set and clambers up into the pathway level. She finds the gap of boards from where she fell, but also something more. A spatter of blood across the support rope, fresh. Human. That complicates things. Beside a couple of sore ribs and a bruised leg from the fall, the ear wound was the only one she had found that was actively bleeding.

This could wait. Judging by the blood she had not been knocked out long enough for the trail to be cold, so she ventures along the pathways, keeping a weather eye for rotten boards. Each rooftop in the Shackles is a different height, which illustrates the origin of the district’s name excellently: they all look shackled together, imprisoned in a collective sentence down in this stony drain ditch of an otherwise resplendent city. She finds torn drying lines, overturned bird cages with their tenants long escaped. The chase was messy, brutal. Reynard must have given this one hell.

More blood. First a splatter bursting from the crumbled ledge of a roof, then small drips every dozen feet or so. A whiff of sulfur from the sewers below. No. From the blood itself. The drips are black, viscous, and faintly sizzling.

Fuck me, that desperate, noble wench was right. It was a witch. Guess that gives Reynard something to rub in her face right back.

She tracks the blood across several more rooftops. Persistent creature, this one, but not immortal. The drops get closer and closer together. Fresher, redder, that smell of sulfur hot in the air. She presses through a tangle of old fabric that must have been someone’s excuse for a rooftop tent, then nearly bruises a few more ribs crashing through a stack of crates.

She lands on her hands with a soft squelch. That smell is reeking, a gorge rising in her throat. Her hands burn with it. Blood, hot and dripping, covers them, and she beholds the witch.

Her human form remains unbroken, which earns Karrigan’s mark of morbid respect given the slashing wounds that absolutely riddle her. Several across the face, a few paring the cloth from her shoulders and sides. One particularly gruesome cavity through her abdomen, opened up like a large, jagged piece of metal was thrust into her belly and allowed to spin. Doubtless the primary culprit for all that blood. As it continues to bubble out of her that smell pervades every mote of Karrigan’s attention. The ringing returns to Karrigan’s damaged ear, through the wax, a bass note below everything else.

“Well done, hunter,” the witch sputters, barely managing to be audible, “Now do what must be done.” The illusion breaks in her voice, which is as snarling and abyssal as whatever true form she must be hiding.

“Where is he.” A demand. Karrigan doesn’t haggle. Not with them.

“Fallen. Not dead yet.”

Karrigan is too exhausted to keep the relief from her face. The witch grins wolfishly.

“He has quite the talent. You should be proud, Karrigan.”

That ringing again, jumping from below the shock of hackle-raising viscera and that awful smell to pierce the space between her consciousness and her sight. Almost ready.

“When…did he tell you…my name…?” A great sin for hunters. Cardinal. Maybe Reynard was too weak for this. Maybe he sold her out. Maybe he’s one of them now. So many thoughts, mostly of betrayal, rage, violence. The ringing sends a fresh jolt through her skull and she buckles back to her knees.

“Daughter, he told me nothing. I have learned all I needed from you.” She raised one long-fingered hand from her gushing belly. Two fingers toward Karrigan, two curled inward to the self, thumb bent into the palm. The ringing screams into roaring.

Frequency. Connection.

Charm.

She is mine.

Karrigan is pulled screaming into my arms. I see her now as she cannot remember herself. Small, innocent, a babe in soiled rags, her little throat raw from crying. The hut of a swineherd, hardly room for one, an elderly man whittling ugly toys as she sleeps under a hole in the roof, the stars above her. The old man sick, coughing black blood, hiding it from her. A rusted spade, bloodied hands busied with splinters, a simple grave of stones. Years in the woods, hunting. A thatched hut, deep in the lonely woods, a strange old woman offering food and warmth. A full belly, a soft bed. The same night, a pair of glinting blades, sizzling with witchblood. A gloved hand offering protection. Soon a city, loud and awful, filled with dangerous people and smells. A ramshackle barracks, barely more than a house, housing the worst of them, scarred and armed, their eyes cold and piercing. Silver earrings dangling from their ears. Knots of metal, three sharp points. Attunement. Training, miserable, aching, sweat and blood in equal measure. Her first hunt, blood on her hands, on her blades, the thrill a fresh vice.

When it is done she is known to me.

I am known to her.

I collapse back into the crates, my body weak and leaden with the effort of spellwork. Soon she is by my side. She takes a moment, produces a clean rag, and presses it into the open wound. I scream and shudder. Karrigan unlatches that metal box again and begins weaving. Slow, sharp pricks along my side, my shoulders, my hands, inching closed the efforts of Reynard’s blade.

“He will return,” I choke, barely a whisper, “and I have not the strength to tame him.”

“You will not be found.” Nestled in a scarred, thin face, the eyes of that hungry child in the woods regard me.

“Not this time.”

I imbue the last of my strength into a lullaby. My form shrinks, my clothing melting into bundles of swaddle. Karrigan scoops me up over her shoulder, and something falls from her hand. I hear a tiny twinkle of metal. Against the cobbles, catching a faint glimmer of moonlight, lay shards of silver with three sharp points. The knot untangled.

We disappear into the twisting rooftops.