Chapter 44: Winter Child

For a few seconds, Severin did nothing. His hand was still resting on Martin’s coat. His thumb sat against the cuff he had straightened twice already.

Neumann lowered the list. "Hale."

"I heard you. Give me a minute." His voice came out dry.

Neumann did not tell him to move. He stood across the dark script and waited while Severin tried to swallow.

Rafael and Madeleine were alive in the recovery rooms. Six others had gone down those stairs breathing and come back dead. Martin’s coat was still under Severin’s hand.

"Listen, Hale. You can still back out of this," Neumann said.

Severin looked up.

"I mean it. Nothing changes just because you’re the last one."

The preparation door stood behind Neumann.

Severin knew what refusing meant. He had come too far to turn around now, and there was nothing waiting for him back in Blackhaven except the same streets he had spent years surviving. If staying alive meant spending the rest of his life behind a desk in Kronvaal because he had been too afraid to lie on the slab, he knew exactly how much he would hate himself for it.

His stomach cramped hard enough to make him shift his weight. He had watched Paul, Johann, Anna, Andreas, Thomas, and Martin die. Rafael and Madeleine had come back breathing.

The one-in-six figure meant fuck all to him now.

Severin pulled his hand away from Martin’s coat. His legs felt wrong beneath him, too light at the knees. He wanted to move before Neumann could see it, but the first step would take him toward the door.

Part of him wanted Neumann to decide for him. The bastard did not.

Severin wiped his palms against his trousers.

"If I back out now, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, wondering if I would’ve made it."

"That’s one way to look at it."

"I’m no clerk. I can barely read and write, and I came this far to get marked. Either I leave here with something worth doing, or this shit ends on the slab. Nobody in Blackhaven’s going to lose sleep over me."

"Hale..."

Severin looked toward the inner door. His pulse kicked harder. His weight shifted back toward the bench before he caught himself and dragged in a breath that barely helped.

"Fuck it. I’m going."

Neumann held his gaze for another moment, then nodded. "All right."

The surgeon opened the inner door, and Severin looked back at the bench before following her.

Martin’s coat sat beside Thomas’s, with Anna’s flask near Johann’s watch. Severin almost touched the coat again, then left it alone.

The preparation room felt smaller with the door shut behind him.

"Clothes off," the surgeon said.

Severin looked at her. "All of them?"

She gave him a tired look.

"Right. Stupid question."

His fingers missed the first button of his shirt.

He tried again. By the time he reached his trousers, his hands were shaking badly enough to slow him down.

Severin pressed both palms against his thighs until they steadied enough to continue. The surgeon noticed but did not tell him to calm down.

He appreciated that and stripped without another word, putting everything where the assistant indicated. His boots came last.

The stone under his bare feet was warmer than he expected as one assistant brought over the basin.

Severin washed his hands, watching the water cloud faintly around his fingers as he scrubbed one thumb longer than necessary before realizing he was doing it.

"That’s enough," the assistant said.

"Yeah."

She dried his hands, pulled his hair back, and secured it away from his face before the surgeon handed him the undyed linen shift.

Severin stared at the shift. He had watched the others come through the hall wearing the same thing, and Martin had worn one not long ago.

He pushed his arms through and pulled the linen down over himself, the shift hanging loose against his calves.

The surgeon checked him once more while he stood barefoot in the center of the room. With every touch, Severin waited for her to find some reason to stop the rite, but she found none.

"You’re ready."

Severin gave a short breath through his nose.

"That makes one of us."

The assistant opened the door, and light from the hall reached across the stone.

Severin stopped just inside. Nobody remained on the benches.

Neumann stood near the far end beside the stair. Maeve waited with the iron box tucked beneath one arm.

The concentric script between them remained dark. Severin looked down at his bare feet and moved his right foot first, the sound carrying farther than he expected.

He passed Johann’s watch, Anna’s flask, Thomas’s coat, then Martin’s. His heart beat hard enough to move the loose linen against his chest. Halfway across the hall, his pace slowed. He could still turn around. The rite had not begun, and he could put his clothes back on and leave Gravewatch with both eyes working.

Neither Neumann nor Maeve said anything. Severin stood there for one more heartbeat, then kept walking.

At the stair, his left foot hovered over the first step before he forced it down.

The passage bent out of sight below as Maeve followed several paces behind him with the iron box.

Below, the chamber waited as he remembered it, with names covering the walls, survivors carved higher and the dead packed closer together.

At its center, the slab stood beneath the lamps, and Severin stopped beside it.

There were no restraints, nothing on the stone that could keep him there.

Maeve placed the iron box on the stand at the head of the slab. The surgeon and her assistants came down behind them.

"Lie back," Maeve said.

Severin looked at the stone, then sat. Warmth pressed through the linen beneath him.

He swung his legs up and lay flat, staring at the ceiling while his breathing came too fast. He tried to slow it and gave up after two breaths.

Maeve opened the iron box, revealing the narrow blade resting on black velvet with the same three engraved signs cut into it.

Severin turned his head enough to look at her.

"You’ve been doing this a long time?"

"Long enough to know what I’m doing."

Severin swallowed. "That’s reassuring."

Maeve reached into the box as his right hand twitched against the stone, almost lifting before he stopped it.

Instead, Severin pressed his palm flat and kept it there.

The first vibration entered the slab beneath his spine, and every muscle in his body tightened.

A faint green light reached the chamber from the stair behind them.

The vibration climbed through the slab and into Severin’s ribs. His fingers curled against the stone.

Maeve said something near his head, but the words reached him stretched and thin beneath the humming in his back. The lamps blurred. He blinked once, and the ceiling seemed to pull away from him.

Then the chamber was gone. Severin tried to sit up, but nothing moved as smoke closed around him.

It was so dense he lost any sense of position. He could have been lying flat or falling for all he knew. He raised an arm and saw nothing of it. The smoke swallowed everything before it reached his face.

"Maeve?" His own voice came back muffled.

He dragged a hand through the darkness, trying to clear a space in front of him. The smoke rolled closed again at once.

Severin turned, but there was nowhere that felt like a direction, and his breathing quickened.

"What the fuck is this?"

He pushed forward anyway. The smoke only thickened, pressing against his mouth and nose without choking him. He could breathe, which somehow made the place worse.

Severin stopped when the feeling hit him. Something was watching him.

A shape began to form ahead. At first he mistook it for a break in the smoke, until green appeared inside it and an eye opened. Severin stared right into it.

It was too large for his mind to place. The iris alone looked wider than the chamber he had left behind, deep green bands shifting around a pupil so black that the smoke around it seemed pale.

The eye fixed on him.

Severin could not look away. Gravewatch, Kronvaal, Martin, the Order, all of it dropped away beneath the simple certainty that he had put himself in front of something that could end him without effort.

His legs would not move, and neither would his hands.

Its attention pinned him more completely than any restraint on the slab could have, and words entered his head without sound.

The Winter Child dares to stand before me. Let us see if you can entertain me.

Severin opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

The green iris contracted, and pain tore through Severin’s left eye hard enough to make him scream.

His hand flew toward his face, only for something to catch his wrist before he reached it.

For one fractured instant, two places occupied his sight at once. The enormous eye remained ahead of him while the chamber punched through it in pieces, the stone ceiling and Maeve leaning over him in the lamplight.

Then the left half of his vision twisted.

Light stretched into a green smear. Pressure drove behind the eye as if something had hooked into the back of it and pulled without taking the flesh with it.

"No!" Severin shouted.

His back lifted from the slab. Hands caught his shoulders and forced him down.

The smoke rushed over him again until the enormous eye filled everything.

Severin saw his own shape reflected in its surface, impossibly small.

Something inside his left eye gave way, and sight disappeared with it. The pain remained.

His scream broke apart before he heard the end of it, and the green eye closed. Darkness took him.

Sound returned first.

"Hale."

A hand pressed against his chest. Another held the side of his head.

Severin sucked in a breath and opened his right eye. The ceiling came back crookedly, with half the room missing beyond the bridge of his nose.

"Easy," the surgeon said.

He turned his head too quickly and lost Maeve from view.

"Did it..."

His throat failed him. He swallowed.

"Did it work?"

The surgeon glanced toward Maeve, and the pause frightened Severin more than the pain.

Maeve stepped into the part of the room he could still see.

"It held."

Severin stared at her as his hand started toward his face.

The surgeon caught his wrist. "Don’t touch it."

Severin stopped pulling against her. He could feel air against the left eye when he blinked, but there was nothing behind it. Not even a trace of light.

The surgeon leaned closer while an assistant brought a basin and folded cloth.

"Hold still."

Cold water touched the skin beneath his eye, and Severin flinched as the assistant beside her went quiet.

"What?" he asked.

Nobody answered.

"What is it?"

Maeve looked to the surgeon.

"The mark manifested on the eye," the surgeon said.

Severin went still. "So?"

"Nothing’s wrong. Hold still."

The surgeon lifted the wet cloth. For an instant, Severin caught part of his face in the polished rim of the basin.

His left eye was still there, with dark lines running inside it.

They branched through the white and crossed the iris in crooked patterns that seemed buried beneath the surface rather than drawn over it. The eye looked intact until he saw those lines, and then it looked like something else had written itself into him.

Severin jerked his head away.

"Don’t move," the surgeon said.

"Get that fucking thing away from me."

The assistant lowered the basin, and Severin lay back while his breathing ran too fast again.

Martin was dead, along with Thomas, Anna, Johann, Andreas, and Paul. Severin was still here.

The surgeon placed clean padding over his left eye and began securing it around his head. An assistant checked his pulse while Maeve remained beside the slab.

"You survived," Maeve said. "You should be proud of that."

Severin swallowed and tightened his right hand around the edge of the stone.

"Yeah. I guess I am."

The surgeon finished the bandage and told him not to move yet.

Severin kept his right eye on the ceiling and waited for the room to stop shifting around the half he could no longer see.