A Novel by Axel Stormhage
Deathbound
Seryn Trevain was born with the wrong kind of gift. In the empire that burned her villages, it is a sentence. And the rebellion has come to cash a debt her dead mother made of her soul.
Seryn Trevain was born with the wrong kind of gift. In the empire that burned her villages, it is a sentence. And the rebellion has come to cash a debt her dead mother made of her soul.
Seryn Trevain was born with the wrong kind of gift. When she lays her hand on the dying, she can ease them across a threshold no living thing should be able to see — whisper them through, gentle the crossing, bring them the last small mercies from the other side.
In the Vethani villages where she grew up, the gift was sacred. In the empire that burned those villages, it is a sentence. A generation of generals has hunted her kind into the cells beneath the capital's Mortarium, where their bones do not come back out. Seryn has kept hers hidden by staying small, staying rural, and never asking why her grey eyes turned blue the winter she was eleven.
The rebellion knows the answer. Her mother — dead a decade now — did something to her before she died. Tied her soul, without asking, to the crown prince of the empire that murdered her people. Now the rebels have come to cash the debt. Walk into the fortress wearing another woman's face. Let the bond pull her close to a boy she has never met but whose childhood she can feel like weather under her skin. Stop his heart.
But the general who runs the Mortarium already knows she is coming. He knew her mother. He has been waiting her entire life for a death-speaker exactly like Seryn to walk through his door.
The child was dying badly.
Seryn knelt beside the pallet and took the girl's hand. Small bones, fever heat pouring off her in waves. Six years old, maybe seven, the sickness having thinned her until the bones of her wrists pressed up through the skin like sticks in wet cloth.
The cottage was cold, the air heavy with smoke and the smell of a sickroom that had been sealed too long. One candle on the windowsill, burning down to a stub, the flame guttering in its own melted pool. An old man by the hearth had his arms folded tight across his chest, and near the door two women held each other. A boy of ten in the corner, not moving, not blinking, rigid against the wall.
The mother looked up. She held herself the way people did when they knew what Seryn had come to do.
Seryn nodded toward the mother's hand.
The mother's face crumpled, one moment of it, before she pressed her lips together and let go of her daughter's wrist. Sat back.
The child's hand was small and burning in hers.
Dull compression behind her sternum, tightening with each of the girl's shallow breaths. She'd learned to feel the boundary as texture, like the skin on milk left to cool — still holding, barely. Thinning already, starting to give. Close now. Warmth on the far side, the kind she hadn't felt since she was eleven and didn't know yet what the cold spot in her chest would cost.
She closed her eyes. "Sev thallan," she murmured. I hold you. The words her grandmother had taught her, the old language, the one that could cost her tongue if the wrong person heard it.
She reached. The taste of blood in the back of her throat and the pressure behind her sternum deepened, pulling her forward.
A small presence crouched in the dark, pulling itself tight against nothing.
Mama?
