Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
Somewhere in the dark, what was about to happen — simply began.
All attentions shifted. Hers. The crow’s. The women’s voices, too, surrendered to sudden silence while the air in the cave grew both damp and heavy, weighing her down with a new emerging wrongness rising from within the darkness. The space turned in on itself and the fresh scent of water turned to sour and stagnation.
It did not arrive. It was simply present, the way the water had been present before she found it — already there, belonging to the space, waiting for her perception to catch up with what the space already knew. Across the spring. Near it. The bioluminescence on the cave walls throwing its faint cerulean into the dark between them, and in that dark, a familiar shape pouring forth from shadow.
Hers.
The stranger looked back at herself from across the water gone foul. The mirror images watched each other, motionless.
Not a distortion, nor a corruption. It was not a horror wearing her features as a mask. Precisely her face — the set of the jaw, the specific way she held her shoulders, the quality of attention in the eyes that she recognized as her own because she had never seen it from the outside before. Lapis eyes catching the cave’s faint light the same way hers did.
Only with more steely resolve than she had ever allowed herself to feel.
Therein lay the wrongness standing across from her. It was not the face. The face was the exact same face she wore, except—
There was no apologetic slope in the angle of the shoulder, no deference to people she did not know, to people who she was on uncertain standing with that might carry more authority than she. The other self moved without hesitation, fluid in the dim light, examining her with a confidence she failed to ever feel. Assessing her qualifications to become what she remained uncertain she might ever become.
The right side of its upper lip curled.
Outcast.
Her other self stopped. She did not move. Neither of her spoke.
The crow remained perched on the ledge, still. She was aware of it at the far edge of her vision — so very still, with a stillness she had seen once before, in a memory she could not bring to the fore. She had not known what it meant then either. She did not turn to look at the bird. She kept her eyes on her other self standing across the water from her.
And held her own stare.
It was not her gun — Oldbone had come into her hand, had been in her hand since some moment in this harrowing she couldn’t recall, winter-cold in a way beyond the temperature of the cave. It had gone cold in the way of something that had stopped being what it was. Inert. Ordinary metal. A weight without function.
The gesture was hers. The reach, the angle of the wrist, the specific way she had been drilled to approach the draw — butt-forward, the hand coming in inverted, the motion counterintuitive enough that it had to be practiced into the body time and time again before it could be trusted to muscle memory. Emrys drilling it into her on a hundred mornings in a dozen different camps while on warrant together until the draw stopped feeling wrong and began to feel the most right of all of the draws they practiced. Her motion. Her trained reflex. Performed in front of her, by her — and without her.
She watched herself draw.
The shadow-Oldbone came up in the twist that was hers, the barrel finding its line, drawing a bead on her with a competence she recognized from the inside — the competence she carried without believing she had earned, watching her movements from outside of herself for the first time, complete and without hesitation.
Something cold moved through her chest that was not fear of the gun.
She feared the mirror of herself holding the gun. Her wraith across the water had been accumulating in the dark of her refusals, all the decisions deferred, all the claims not made, all the times she had waited for Emrys to say the hard thing because it was easier than saying it herself — all of it accumulated into this: herself, finally, without qualification. Without her.
The Oldbone she held in her hand was mere metal. Nothing more.
She did not run. She did not collapse into the wrongness of it and let it have her. She stood in the fact of her own remainder and held.
She was still uncertain. She did not know if she had earned the gun. She did not know if what Emrys had done in giving it to her was legitimate or only his judgment, and whether his judgment was enough, and whether it mattered either way. She did not know her own name. She had been not-knowing it for so long that the not-knowing had become a shelter for her. She was aware, standing here, that the shelter was a refusal, and that the refusal had been building into this thing in front of her since before she had a name to refuse.
She was wræcca. Outcast. Nameless.
Yet the thing across the water was wrong in a way she could feel without articulating. Too certain. A shadow that had stopped being shadow and started becoming substance. She could feel that specific texture of wrongness in the way a Walker felt the Dusk pressing against the world. Not in the eyes but in the back of the neck, in the old parts of the body that knew things before the mind caught up.
She did the only thing she could do.
She held.
Her wraith squeezed the trigger.
The shadow-Oldbone fired and tore through her.
She staggered, though there had been no roar of the gun, no single wound for the blood to well up, no smoke flowing from the gun’s barrel. And yet there was something crashing through a door she had kept closed within, shattering it until it could no longer be held against what lingered on the other side. Tears of a young girl surrendered as tithe, her mentor’s death, cold black steel burning at her hands as she lifted the gun from the hidden box. All that had happened without her permission, all that had been taken that could never be reclaimed.
All that came pouring forth within, filling her until her knees buckled and she knelt on the cave’s stone floors.
She felt the mark sitting somewhere between her sternum and her left shoulder — her whole body in the ache of a fever that had no source and no heat. Her hands pressed against the place, seeking a wound that failed to make itself known, her hand finding only her shirt, her coat, her unbroken flesh…
And found nothing.
She looked for her assailant across the water. Her wraith was gone.
There was nothing to fight. Nothing to finish. Whatever it had been had returned to the shadows or—
It had returned through what it had broken.
She recognized it now — that refused part of her she had shuttered away, returned through what it had broken to reside where it belonged.
“She answers,” said the first voice across the water.
Then she was alone. The crow landed in front of her, head cocked to the side, examining her.
She fell from her knees, the stone cool against her cheek. Her breath coming out ragged and wrong.
Then there was no cave, only a slight, cooling breeze against her cheek.
“Well, well, well,” said the familiar voice. “Back amongst the living, are we?”
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