The Dian Cecht clinic smelled of clean linen and crushed herbs, which was a relief after a chamber that smelled of burning flowers.
Amid met them at the door before Rayleigh had finished carrying the rescued woman inside.
She took one look at the shallow, jerking breaths and the marks the cord had left, and the soft, distracted air she usually wore fell away.
"Third bed. Screen it off." She was already moving. "Cord wounds.... same as the others?"
"Same as the others," Rayleigh said. "Worse, maybe. She was held longer."
Amid's hands settled on the woman's collarbone, light as a leaf, and a warm gold light spread out under them.
The jerking breaths eased.
The tight lines around the woman's eyes loosened. Amid worked in silence for a while, and even Alise, who never went quiet, kept still and let her.
"She'll live," Amid said at last. "The damage isn't only in the body. It's in the part your energy touches, the same channel that broke in the fishmonger. But she was pulled out before it finished, so it can heal." She looked up. "You got to her in time."
"Barely."
"Barely counts." She said it the way Ryuu did, plain and sure, and then her eyes moved to Rayleigh's arm, and the healer went sharp again.
"You're hurt."
"It's nothing."
"You're holding your shoulder like it's made of glass." She crossed to him and took his forearm without asking, which was the one time Amid was ever bold, and the color came up in her cheeks the moment she'd done it.
She looked at the arm and not at his face. "Something struck you very hard. This is bruised to the bone."
"The thing we're chasing hits like a dropped anvil."
"Sit down and let me see it properly." A pause. "Please."
He sat.
She bent over the arm, the tips of her ears pink, and she was pretending very hard that they weren't.
"Dia Fratel."
The gold light sank into his arm, and the deep ache drained out of it like water out of a cracked cup.
Amid held the spell a beat longer than she needed to, then let go quickly, as if she'd caught herself.
That was when the door banged open and a god came through it like a thrown chair.
"YOU AGAIN!" Dian Cecht leveled a shaking finger at Rayleigh. "You bring my precious Amid corpses and cord and monsters from the deep dark, you waltz into my clinic bleeding, and now you sit there letting my irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind, priceless child pour her gift into your undeserving arm for free—"
"Lord Dian Cecht," Amid said, without looking up.
"—do you have any idea what her time is worth? Do you know what the nobles pay? And you, a smith, you barbaric hammer-swinging—"
"Lord Dian Cecht."
"—I will not stand for it! Guards! Someone! I'll drag him out myself if I—"
Amid picked up a bedpan and hit her god across the back of the head without changing expression.
Dian Cecht folded onto the floor with a soft clang and lay there.
"He'll be fine," Amid said, into the sudden quiet, still not looking up from Rayleigh's arm. "He heals faster than anyone. That's rather the problem."
"There. It's done. Try not to let it hit you again."
Alise made a sound like she was swallowing a laugh.
Kaguya's mouth had curved a fraction. Even Ryuu was studying the ceiling with great interest.
'This whole Familia is a menace,' Rayleigh thought, flexing the healed arm. 'A useful one. But a menace!'
...
Ardi found him in the front hall a few minutes later.
She'd come in her Ganesha coat, off a patrol, and she stopped when she saw him standing whole and unbothered, some of the tightness going out of her shoulders.
"I heard you went under the city and i heard you came back. I wanted to see the second part with my own eyes."
"Both parts happened. In that order."
"Good." She didn't smile the way she usually did. She turned the words over first. "The woman you brought up. Is she one of the missing?"
"A clerk, taken three weeks ago. She's alive."
Ardi nodded, and looked at her own hands, and then asked the thing that had clearly been sitting with her since the market.
"How do you fight something that knows your name?"
There it was.
Rayleigh watched her wait for the answer, chin up, trying to look like the captain's sister and not the girl who'd heard a dead man call her by name in a crowded square.
"You remember it doesn't," he said. "It heard your name and it plays it back, the way a bird copies a whistle. There's nothing behind it that understands what a name is. It's a trick that only works on people who forget that." He paused. "You didn't forget. You held your whole line while it did it. That's not nothing, Ardi."
Something in her face eased, and then, because she was who she was, she tried to cover it.
"I nearly stepped forward..... When it used the little girl's voice."
"Nearly. But you didn't."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being the part that matters."
She looked at him for a moment too long, and there was something in it that wasn't about the case at all, and then she caught herself and glanced away, and a little color touched her cheeks that the cold outside hadn't put there.
"Try not to get hit next time," she said, to the wall. "You looked terrible, coming up."
"I've been told."
"By who?"
"Everyone. It's a very consistent review!"
That got the real smile out of her, at last, quick and warm and gone again.
...
Alfia was awake when he got home, which he'd expected.
She always knew when he'd been somewhere that could have killed him.
She let him check the seals and the silver blade and pour the tea before she said anything. Then she watched him sit down heavier than he meant to, and she set her book aside.
"You cut it," she said. "And it didn't die."
He'd told her nothing yet.
He didn't bother asking how she knew. The thread between them carried more than either of them ever said out loud, and after last night it was probably carrying his frustration in whole sentences.
"Clean through the middle," he said. "Benihime opened it up. Dust and old cord came out of it, and stolen voices, and then it sewed itself shut and walked into a wall like I'd done nothing at all."
Alfia turned her cup in her hands. "Because you did nothing at all."
"Thanks!"
"I mean it plainly." She looked at him, mismatched eyes steady. "You've spent your life learning to cut living things. A blade finds the heart, the spine, the vein, the place a body can't do without, and it takes that place away, and the body stops. That's what cutting is. It's a conversation with something alive." She set the cup down.
"That thing was never alive. It has no heart to find. No place it can't do without, because every place is the same dead material as every other place. You could cut it into a thousand pieces and each piece would be exactly as finished as the whole, which is to say, not at all."
Rayleigh sat with that.
'Not a body.... A mechanism wearing one.' He'd said it himself, in the dark, and here she was handing him the other half of it.
"So I stop trying to wound it," he said slowly.
"You stop trying to wound it. You take it apart. Whatever holds it together, the thing that pulls root back to root and metal back to metal, that's what you end. Not the shape. The rule that keeps the shape." She picked her book back up, which meant she was nearly done.
"You have a blade for that, if you'll stop swinging the ones that only know how to hurt people."
He thought of Benihime's weight at his hip, and the second, deeper thing she could do that he almost never asked of her, and something cold and satisfied settled in his chest.
"You could have led with that you know..." he said.
"You needed to be tired enough to listen." She turned a page. "Sleep. You'll want your hands steady for it."
He almost argued.
He didn't, because she was right, and because the near-argument crossed the thread before he could stop it, and one corner of her mouth moved without her looking up.
...
Across the city, in a quiet room in Apollo's home, Cassandra was not asleep so much as under.
The dream had the weight of the real ones, the ones that came true, and she knew it the moment it closed over her.
She stood at the edge of black water again.
But this time the water ran downward, into the ground, into a stair that had no bottom, and the walls on either side breathed with pale flowers, and far below she could hear the slow, patient sound of someone knocking on stone.
Two knocks. A pause. Three more.
She didn't want to follow it down.
She never did.
But the dream carried her anyway, past the flowers, past a young voice crying help through a mouth that wasn't there, deeper than any place she'd seen, until the water opened into a wide dark room, and in the middle of the room a woman sat waiting.
Cassandra couldn't see her face.
Only the shape of her, patient in the dark, and the fact that all the crying voices in all the walls seemed to lean toward her, like children toward a mother, or moths toward a lamp.
The woman turned her head, as if she'd heard Cassandra breathing all the way from the waking world.
"You see too much, little dreamer," the shape said, in a voice that scraped. "But you're looking at the wrong door. The thin one is only a key. Come further down, and I'll show you the lock."
Cassandra woke with a cry, both hands pressed to her mouth, her heart slamming.
For a long moment she only sat in the dark and shook.
Then she thought of the smith with the black eyes who had let her choose, and the sword sleeping quiet against the wall that had shown her how to make a warning something other people could see, and she made herself breathe.
There was a thin thing that opened walls.
Everyone knew that now.
But underneath it, further down, someone was waiting who thought of it as hers.
Cassandra reached for a candle with an unsteady hand.
Tomorrow she would find a way to say it so someone believed her.
She had a sword for that now.
And this time, she was not going to close her eyes!