Ash and Quill(49)

"Morgan, what did you do?" She just shook her head, and he knew she wouldn't answer. Not now. She shivered all over, a convulsive movement that worried him even more. "Have you even been to bed?" he demanded. Her skin felt very cold. Icy. "You're freezing. Come here."

"I need you to finish the Codex with me. We have no more time. Please."

"After you're warm," he said, and moved the blanket. "Morgan, please. Get in."

She hesitated, but then she slipped in beside him. He moved over to give her the room, and she rolled toward him as he adjusted the blankets over her shivering body. "This feels good," she told him quietly. "I'm just so cold."

He put his arms around her and pulled her close-not to kiss, just to hold, and felt the shuddering sigh of relief that came out of her. He could feel bones beneath her skin. She was just too thin. Whatever she was doing, whatever it was that had alarmed her so much . . . it was washing her away, like sand in water.


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She was holding something in one hand, and it was trapped between their bodies. He recognized the shape: a book. The Codex she'd sewn together, with her Obscurist's script written and bound inside it. Waiting for the burst of power she'd give it to bring it to life.

"Morgan, you're too weak to do this. You need to rest. We'll find another way," he told her. "I'm not going to watch you set yourself on fire for us." He did the only thing he could think of: he kissed her, and tried to tell her without words how much she meant to him.

His existence narrowed to the taste of her mouth, the silky softness of her lips, the gentle tension of her hands on his back. The dark added to her mystery as he slid his palm over her arm, her waist, her hip, to draw her in the shadows. In this predawn silent world, she was the only thing real to him just now-every sense devoted to memorizing the scent of her, the taste, the touch. The sigh of her quiet breath against his skin. Taking away sight made every other sense come alive to him, and it felt like a dangerous kind of magic.

And then she broke free of the kiss and whispered, "I'm sorry, but there's no choice," and then he felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his arm. A red starburst of sensation, and then a glow was forming around Morgan's hands, and in it he saw she had a thick needle in her hand, and from it hung a single drop of his blood.

He watched the crimson drop tremble there in the dawning golden glow of her quintessence, and then it fell through the light, flaring white as it passed. It landed on a page of the book she'd opened to catch it. It splashed into a vivid red blotch and absorbed without a trace into the paper.

He was close enough to feel the cost of what she did. Her whole body shuddered. The little warmth she'd managed to absorb from him rushed out, as if she'd been plunged into icy waters, and her eyes . . . her eyes went dead for a moment, as distant as those of a corpse floating beneath the waves. Then she blinked and dragged herself back, and the golden glimmer around her hand died . . . but not before he saw black threads woven into the glow, pulsing like veins. Like rot.

"Here," she whispered, and put her head wearily on his chest. "Take it. Use it. There's no more time, Jess. Please. You have to get us help, and we must get out of here."

The raw desperation in her voice hurt. He drew in a breath and held her close for a second before he sat up and stepped out of bed, and made sure that she was wrapped as warmly as he could manage. She seemed small, lying in his bed. Broken and vulnerable.

Despite the urgency, he had to limp a step before the too-stressed muscles unclenched in his legs enough to allow him to walk. Thomas wasn't in his bed after all; he must have gotten restless in the night and slipped out to the forge. He was probably still there, oblivious to the time and his own exhaustion. This close to the completion of a project, he'd be driven to finish it. No matter what. 

Jess sat on Thomas's bunk, cleared his mind, and focused on his brother, his almost-mirror twin, and opened the book. He realized as he did that he had nothing to write with . . . but Morgan had thought of that, too. The blue feather he'd given her for a bookmark lay in the crease between the pages, and he picked it up and pressed it to the page. There was no ink in it, of course, but a dark dot appeared, shimmering around the edges with a faint gold light that made it easy to see even in the dimness. He wrote his first message. Ta for nothing, brother. You could have tried to get me a message, at least. The words were light, but he felt ashen inside. Seeing Morgan broken this way shook him in ways nothing else could.