I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 561: Watched Myself Do It

Ilse stopped breathing an hour before dawn on the sixth day.

The fire was a bed of dull red under grey. The dark was the thin kind that pretends it is morning. Somewhere off the shelf a bird made one thin sound and thought better of it. I had my hand on her sternum, because my hand had been on her sternum most of every night for a week, and the rise under it went and did not come back.

The cloth over her was still warm from her. The skin under my palm was not doing anything. Her mouth had been open. I only noticed that afterwards.

I do not remember shouting. Bren says I did.

What I remember is the flat of my hand and the count in my head getting to four and then to six and then to nine, and my whole body going somewhere very cold and very quiet, and then Light’s knee hitting the ground on the other side of her. Grit jumped. His shoulder took the space where mine had been.

He shoved my hand off and put the heel of his own between her breasts and pushed.

Hard. Harder than I would have.

‘Break them. Break all of them.’

There was a sound out of her that I did not enjoy and he did it again and again, and on the fourth one she pulled in a breath like a woman coming up out of water, and then another, and then she was breathing, badly, but breathing. The breath snagged on the way in and came out thin.

Then she was sick down her own shoulder, and Bren rolled her onto her side with two hands and cleared her mouth with two fingers and did it as though she had done it before. The smell of it sat in the cold air and did not leave.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Light sat back on his heels with his hands shaking. He looked at his own palms as if he had borrowed them.

“Her ribs will be a problem later.”

“Later’s fine.”

“It is not a small thing, Cade. I may have cracked—”

“Later’s fine.”

He let it go. He wiped his hands on his thighs and left the dark on the cloth.

I got both arms under her and held her against my chest and sat there in the grit while the fire went to nothing. Ash settled on my sleeve and I did not brush it off. I could feel the new wrongness in her ribs where he had done it, moving under my forearm every time she pulled air. A small hitch. Then the next one.

‘She has hours.’

Devant did not come over. He watched the whole thing from where he lay with one arm behind his head, and he did not get up, and I have decided I know why and I am not going to write it down. His eyes were open. That was all.

Bren stayed.

She sat down on the other side of Ilse with her back against the rock and she did not offer me anything to feel better and she did not tell me she would be all right. The rock behind her was the same rock that had been behind all of us for days. She put her hands on her knees and left them there.

“My husband went like that,” she said. “Bit by bit and then all at once at the end of the night. You keep thinking there’ll be a moment where somebody tells you it’s the last day.”

“Is there?”

“No.” She pulled her knees up. “It’s just a day, and then afterwards you find out which one it was.”

Around the time the others started moving I got up and handed Ilse to Light. He took her weight without asking. Her head rolled against his collar and stayed. I told them all I was going out to look at the road ahead.

I went a long way. Further than I had gone any other time, out past a fold in the shelf where the party’s noise stopped entirely. The shelf here broke into smaller steps.

My boots found the edges by habit. I found a hollow in the rock with a flat back to it and I put myself into it and I said out loud, to nobody, “Right.”

The hollow held last night’s cold. It smelled of stone and nothing else. My breath showed and then did not.

And this time I watched it happen.

That is the whole of what changed and it is the reason I am writing this down at all.

Every other time, I have come back from somewhere with no memory of the walk. This time I stayed. I kept hold of it.

I stood in that hollow with my hands where they needed to be and my mind on the one thing that fills the well, and I felt my attention come off it.

Not wander. Come off. The way a hand comes off a hot pan.

I put it back.

It came off again.

I put it back, and it came off, and the third time I noticed that I had started thinking about the wyvern’s leg, in detail, in sequence, about the exact angle Light had held the blade at, and I had been doing it for some time, and it had felt entirely like my own idea. Bone. The give. The way the cut wanted to run.

‘…Ah.’

I said the word out loud in an empty hollow four layers down.

“That isn’t me.”

Because here is the thing. I have been trying to make myself do this for over a week, and the whole time I have been telling myself I was putting it off. That is what it feels like from the inside. It feels exactly like a man being slow about something.

But a man who is putting a thing off can put it off and know he is doing it. He can catch himself. He can be irritated with himself, and he can sit down and grind through it anyway, and that is what I have done with every unpleasant task in my entire life.

I cannot get to this one. There is no grinding through, because the thing I need to hold onto goes out of my hand while I am looking at it, and then it hands me something else to think about, and the something else always feels like mine.

‘How long has it been doing that…’

That is the question that put me on the floor of that hollow with my back against the rock.

The rock was cold through the shirt. I let it be.

Because if it can take that, quietly, for a week, and dress the taking up as my own reasoning, then I have no way of knowing what else it has taken.

Every decision I have made since I fell into this place. Going down instead of up. Coming down here at all. The pull I felt at the river and turned my back on and then walked toward anyway for weeks.

I sat there and ran back through all of it looking for the seam, and every single one of those decisions still felt like mine, and I could not find one single place where it did not.

‘That’s the part that gets you,’ I thought. ‘It all still feels like mine.’

I do not know how long I was down there. The light on the lip of the hollow moved. That was the only clock.

I stood up when my legs would have it and I did not trust the first few steps. The fold in the shelf came back. Then the party’s shapes. Then the smell of old fire.

When I came back the camp was struck and the party was standing and Light had Ilse against his shoulder and everyone was waiting for me and nobody said a word about it. The fire-ring was a black circle in the grit. Bren had already packed the cloth. Ilse’s head was tucked under Light’s jaw and her breathing was still the bad kind, but it was there. The line was already facing the next drop. Nobody had left me a place at the front.

Devant was watching me from the head of the line.

He looked at my face for slightly too long.

Then he turned and started walking, and over his shoulder, in the pleasant conversational voice he uses for everything:

“Three days.”

I did not correct him. I did not ask him which three. I fell in at the back of the line with my hands empty for the first time in a week. They kept finding the place on my chest where she had been. I walked, and I spent the entire day trying to catch myself thinking something that had not started with me.