Chapter Text
In a vague attempt by the universe to make up for its broken promise, Urien’s recovery was, as it had always been, miraculous. The fetus was delivered mid-afternoon; by the same time the next day, there was nothing but mild soreness and fatigue, and by that evening there was no sign he’d ever been pregnant at all. The next morning, he was gone.
There was scrambling and panic in the castle, led mostly by Lucy, who went to check on Urien first thing in the morning, and didn’t find him in his rooms. That was fine; he’d been cleared to be out of bed from about fifteen minutes after, except he wasn’t anywhere else, either. No one in the castle had seen him. They sped around, trying to track him down. Then they discovered that his lengil was gone, too, and spent an hour asking around town if anyone had seen him, and then checked the castle again, and before they could go try to follow broken branches in the woods Gabe managed to convince them that he probably hadn’t run away to go throw himself off a cliff and they needed to stop worrying or they were going to give themself a headache.
They did stop looking. They did not stop worrying. They already had a headache.
Urien had not gone to throw himself off a cliff. There weren’t many cliffs in the area, and certainly not many that could reliably kill him, and anyway, if he did want to die, he would frankly much rather the simple, immediate drama of slitting his throat and letting them find his bloody body in his room. Instead, he woke up before the sun, roused Tratoran from the stable, and went to Vetch.
Compared with the sparkling towers and criss-crossed waterways of Temerorta, the city down the valley was small and humble. It sat heavily among the sprawling farmland about it, looking up in polite reverence at Castle Lowe on its hill in the distance. Buildings were stacked close, with a winding, claustrophobic quality in the central quarter, the top halves of structures leaning out on balconies, threatening to topple over and crush the dirty streets below. It, too, had a castle, the seat of the Lesser House that governed the city as vassals to the Lord Blood, but it small and unremarkable in comparison with Castle Lowe. The real treasure of the city was its library.
It was called, in brazen blasphemy, the Toltarchian Archives. It had once been a monastery of the Toltarchs, one of the many religious groups that had long been rooted out of Temerit. The Toltarchs were an anarchistic band who believed that their gods were long dead, and that they would only resurrect and rid humanity of suffering when the world was return to a utopia free of power or property. They were small, but high on the list of targets during the first crusades by the High Houses, and so furious in their belief that they managed to hold strong, disappearing into secrecy and seeding the roots of sedition that sparked and swept through the lands of House Lowe, seven centuries ago. Thousands of converted believers, fed up with the bans on religion and the hierarchy of the Houses, marched together to destroy the House of Blood, and then take the capital in glorious revolution.
It was, of course, utterly crushed. It was one of the bloodiest scenes of Temerit’s history. The revolution died out, Toltarchs were killed en mass, and every scrap of the Toltarchian faith was destroyed. Or so everyone thought.
Hidden away in secret tunnels under the monastery was a trove of records, dozens of their religious texts, the histories of the faith, propaganda and theories from the revolution. The monastery sat vacant for many years, until it was converted into a scriptorium, then a town hall, an inn, an infirmary, and then a print shop, and all the while, the secret was passed down from keeper to keeper. Through the centuries, a secret collective, never more than a small handful of townsfolk, kept watch over the small collection, and expanded it. Any writing deemed dangerous or inflammatory, wherever they could be found, they smuggled into the ground and gave them sanctuary from the fires of the High Houses. Then, finally, when worship was legalized and the House of Blood codified protections for free speech into its seventh of the country, the trove was brought out of hiding, and the Toltarchian Archives were established to house them, as a bastion of the free circulation of ideas.
Urien was not interested in religion. He was First of a High House, after all, tradition steeped into his very DNA, and though he would never oppose the freedom to worship, he did privately carry a stiff-lipped disapproval of it. But religious writing was not the only subject housed in the Archives. Among its collection were dozens, if not hundreds, of historical records. It was not uncommon for a temperamental lord to seek retribution when an author dared to portray them or their lineage in any but the most reverent light, and when copies survived the violent censorship, they ended up here. And Urien needed history.
There was something missing. Urien understood that now. His instincts had been right: his House had lost something. Somewhere along the way they had become complacent. They had let their divine power become passive, a simple boon which they took for granted and which he saw now could not protect them.
It was not the fault of the power, which could not weaken, not ever, not until it was wiped out forever, but their use of it. And he would learn to use it. He would master it. It would never betray him again.
He was free to go anywhere he wanted, of course, but he had more or less snuck out. No lord’s son should travel the half-day to the city alone, and the handful of the castle’s residents who hadn’t become too nervous to look him in the eye would insist he stay and rest, even though he was rested, he was fine, that was the entire fucking point of him, to be fine. So he walked through the dark with his lengil, through a brilliant sunrise which fell dim and distant on him, until he reached the city.
Most knew him, or knew of him, rather. Most would have heard by now, unless they were entirely out of the loop. Many would not have seen him since he lost his arm. There were whispers and stares and even condolences, inquiries as to his well-being, by the brave ones who took off their hats and put palms to their chests. Urien allowed himself the indulgence of imagining each of them dead.
There was occasionally a slight tension between the librarians and their noble patrons. Despite the fact that on paper the library symbolized the trust and love between the people and their Lord, it was still a totem to the centuries of oppression by their hand. The librarians were not Toltarchs: they had all been wiped out or deconverted (or so they claimed), but some spent a little too much time reading their theories for anyone from the House of Blood to feel too at home in the archives. Frankly, Urien would maybe have preferred one of those librarians who was a bit cool with him, saluted with as little deference as they could get away with. He could use some justification right now.
But, alas, it was a kindly and appropriately bookish old woman who greeted him. She’d been here his whole life, had, in fact, been one of the first other changelings he’d ever met, and she spoke now with gentle understanding and the sweetest little head bobs of deference, and the urge to collapse into her softly wrinkled arms and sob was so strong it made him want to rip her head off.
She brought him piles of books. He skimmed them all. Some were useless, but most he stacked, and ordered them wrapped and packed for him. It was not a lending library, and the books were not to leave the building but for very special exceptions, and never without the filing of forms well ahead of time. But Urien knew that if he added just a slight shaky, tragic touch to his voice when he asked, they would not refuse him.
The books were wrapped carefully and affixed to his lengil and, after waving off a great deal of anxious concern for both his and the books’ well-being, he turned back to the castle, into the coming dark, and walked the long path home alone.
He arrived late into the night, met with hugs and shouts and whispers of relief and admonishment. He did his best to give them little regard. He slept. He woke up and began reading.
Using the bracelet here was a bit tricky, but he found it was easier than the odd contortion of fingers required to hold open and turn the pages of a heavy manuscript at once one-handed. They were dense. Some were in old dialects, antiquated forms of shorthand, scripts so elaborate they were barely legible, or written in such abstruse language and dressed with theories and philosophies so out of date they felt like ravings of a madman. He was forced to consult the academics of the castle more than once.
Much of what he found was repetitions. Old stories he’d heard a thousand times, histories which clearly cross-referenced each other. There were some new accounts, or ones he’d forgotten, of the marvelous feats of the old Lords of House Lowe, but they weren’t of much use. Mostly they were pseudo-histories of fanciful exaggerations, miraculous strength and near immortality and the like, though there were a few more exciting examples. One told of the first Lord Blood’s flying sword, and another gave Urret the Rider knives made of her own blood, with which she conquered and tamed the famous Ill-Made Mount in order to share its thoughts. But these were clearly apocryphal. He needed something solid.
Urret remained the focal point among the histories, and was the source of the only vaguely useful leads he found. One was a reminder, of something he once knew, and had forgotten. Urret had a second epithet: the Iron-Hand.
Given that there was another High House whose entire shtick was iron, “the Rider” was much more popular. But many of the texts referred to her as such, and a few to her “black hand.” A metaphor, most likely, but then he found, in two old tomes, the story Gabe had recounted: her hand was cut off in battle. In one, she simply put it back on. In another, she replaced it with one of metal, which she used, according to the book, “just as dextrously, as a hand of flesh and bone.”
It did occur to him, more than once, that he knew where she was buried, and could attempt to dig her up and count her hands. He decided against it.
The other lead, which was much more exciting, was in a historiography, a long, dense, and tedious volume which consisted almost entirely of lists of other sources. In its discussion of Urret, Urien was surprised to find a paragraph blacked out with hasty ink.
That was curious. Not much was censored in the Archives, what with its entire point being against censorship. Luckily. the ink used to cover the text was of a cheaper quality, and had faded, and if he held it in the bright sunlight of the tall window, Urien could read the words:
“For the fullest and most robust accounts of Urret the Rider, one must consult the texts of the Urrian, if he may find one, though they are seldom seen in Temerit.”
He finished the books. Extensive notes sat on his desk, still smudged and ugly, but detailed. He packed up every volume, wrapping them each again in soft cotton and twine, and set off again the next morning.
The same old woman greeted him in the library, with a distinct look of relief that every precious book was returned unharmed. She did not even try to stop him from unloading the heavy bundles, only carried them inside. The relief that someone just let him do something without interrupting him to “help” for once made him feel sick. He ignored it. He asked her, as she sorted the books, if the library carried anything on the subject of the Urrian.
The woman looked up, confused. “The Urien?”
“No, the Urrian.” He emphasized the rolled r.
“The…” Her eyes wrinkled in thought. Then something changed. A quick breath of realization and then… there was the look, if Urien read it correctly, of someone weighing between two risks, between telling the truth, or being caught in a lie.
“What is the Urrian?” he asked, adding the slightest edge to his voice.
It worked. She would not lie to him. “They were… a religious order. My lord, please, I must ask you to remember that the Archive is—it’s simply that. Nothing we hold here represents our own beliefs or opinions.”
Urien frowned. “I would not hold any of you accountable if you housed a treatise arguing for my own assassination here.”
The woman nodded, nervous, and asked him to wait. When she returned, she clutched a small, thick volume, bound in scratched and cracked leather. “I apologize, lord, but I can’t let you take this one out. I would need orders from the Lord Blood himself.”
Urien nodded, an eyebrow raised, took the book, and huddled in one of the table nooks among the shelves to read. A faded page inside claimed the title. The Testament of Her Divinity Urret Lowe. as Recounted by Her Disciple.
Nine hundred years of tradition sewn into his veins made him recoil. Her divinity? It became clear, almost immediately, why this book was kept so secret, even now. Why its name had been struck from the record. The Urrian were a religion of Urret. They worshiped her, were, or so they claimed, led by her. It went beyond heresy—this book was slander, utterly ruinous. Urret was among the most famous and beloved members of any High House in Temer history. She was the emblematic figure of the House of Blood, the founder of Castle Lowe, their hero of legend—Urien was named for her. To claim that she would commit such unthinkable blasphemy, not only to preach the divine but to preach her own divinity? To claim godhood?
But. It was a book. It was just a book, he told himself, and one that might have some granule of truth in it somewhere. He made himself read.
It began with a supposed origin of the original Nine Great Lords’ power, a variation on one story he’d heard before, but this time, with a twist: it claimed that the other Lords were gifted false and earthly gifts, while only Blood held the seed of true immortal power, tucked away to await its great host. (The claim filled Urien with a strange mix of rage guilty pride.) Then the account turned to Urret herself, from her birth to her ascension to the station of Lord Blood and beyond. It was… alarmingly detailed. Facts of anything from that long ago were difficult to verify, but Urien was now something of an expert on the topic of his namesake, and this one held up.
Much of it was, of course, ridiculous. There were supposed prophecies of her coming, long tangents praising her greatness, random divergences into didactic moralizing, et cetera. And her supposed feats, too, were unbelievable. Here too appeared the near-instantaneous healing, the knives of blood, the reattached hand. But there was more. The author believed she could heal others, too, and speak through them, with a touch. That she did not age, and survived a spear through the head, that she felt no pain. That she was immortal. That she would never die.
It was unbelievable in the most literal sense: she clearly was not immortal. She was several hundred years dead, and so were her children, and grandchildren, all the way down the generations to Urien and his father. But it wasn’t the account of her miracles that interested him. It was the account of how she achieved them.
This section was frustratingly short and vague, but it did make several memorable claims. First, that she “fulfilled the wholeness of her divinity,” as the testament said, only after being badly maimed. Then, she opened her veins, and drank her own blood.
Urien was slightly surprised to find that the difficult part was not working up the courage to slice oneself open enough to fill a small cup with blood, but drinking it.
After staring at it for a good five minutes straight, he very nearly threw up when it touched his lips and was hot. Then he took another ten minutes to will himself to try again, and then managed to gulp about half of it down before he did throw up.
The next try was more successful (mostly due to the fact that he let it sit covered in the winter air until it was nice and cool first). He repeated it the next day, wondering at what point something would happen.
After a week of drinking blood, he was starting to get impatient. Nothing happened. He consulted his notes again, where he had copied down the most pertinent parts of the Testament. “She sliced along Her Arm, revealing the Holy Mana, which Dripped into her Chalice; and Her Holy Mana from the wound she Stopped, and it Flowed back into Her. And the rest She Drank as wine, and thence could She do miracles and Heal Herself with Blood.”
He considered this for a while. Perhaps, he thought, the blood was turned into wine? Could you make wine out of blood? He was no vintner, but he knew that wasn’t the traditional method. And besides, there was no way in hell he could have someone ferment blood into anything without the whole country hearing about it. Did he just have to drink normal wine? But he’d done that before, when he was a bit younger, and wanted to find out if he was really immune to its effects (he was, effectively: the most drunk he’d ever been was feeling unusually warm and tingly for about five minutes after downing an entire bottle at once).
Or, possibly, the ritual had worked, but not for the reason they thought. What if, he finally thought, it wasn’t the blood drinking, but the blood letting? The one time it had worked, when he had gotten a glimpse of what he now thought of as the true power of his house, had been when he drew his own blood, and attempted to stop it. Perhaps he was missing the point of the assignment.
Over the next few days, he attempted to find that flash of insight once again. He cut himself, shallow, light cuts, letting the blood run down his leg, trying to tap into it. When it didn’t work, he went deeper, let the blood run into the cup as he willed it to stop flowing.
It worked: he felt it. Two or three times, it came again, that flash, that awareness, there and gone in less than a second. Each time, when he opened his eyes, the cut was slowly scabbing over, and the mark gone by the next day.
But that wasn’t enough. That was barely anything. It was barely better than his usual quick recoveries. He was doing something, he was, but he needed control. He needed mastery. He was missing something.
He went into the woods. He took a small knife, sharp, and nothing else. No bandages, no gauze, no doctor around. He stripped his cloak, tunics, and undershirt, and walked through the February air to a clearing. Cold prickled at his skin, dulled on the deadened flesh where scar tissue covered much of his right side, running from neck to foot.
There had been a sense of urgency, that first time he glimpsed the latent power in his veins. It hadn’t been a careful experiment. It had been the blind and furious urge to hurt himself. In the cold air, he suspended the knife, took a calming breath, and sliced his wrist down along its edge.
Blood gushed out in a river. He startled. That was—that was a lot of blood. That was a lot of blood. It occurred to him, rapidly, that he clearly had no clue how much wounds were supposed to bleed, because the pen knife incident had seemed pretty heavy, but that was a dribble compared to this. He’d done something wrong. He’d hit a vein, or artery, whatever the hell it was, or, wasn’t that what he meant to do? But he didn’t realize—he had to stop the bleeding. Put pressure on the wound.
Except, of course, he only had one goddamn hand. He swore. What the fuck was he thinking? He pressed his wrist against his torso but there was too much give. It didn’t feel like enough pressure. He looked around wildly, but he was in a clearing. Blood kept pouring out, drenching his arm. It was starting to form a small puddle on the dead leaves. But he couldn’t die from blood loss. Or… could he?
Surely not. But he did need blood to live. There was some amount that would kill him. He stared. He was frozen, his heart pounding, panic taking over. His clothes, he could make a bandage—but he’d left them back outside the clearing so he wouldn’t get them bloody. It had only been seconds. He felt dizzy. He was going to bleed out. He was going to die.
And so what? he thought. Wasn’t this what he needed? Urgency? So he would do it, or die. He would do it, or he would bleed out alone, half-naked, ending his family line forever, leaving everyone who loved him to find his half-frozen corpse with a slit wrist. So he would do it. So he would just do it. Or he would die.
He focused on the pain. He thought about the blood, coursing out of it. There was, deep in his mind, a logical voice that was politely reminding him that it was not only entirely possible but extremely likely that none of this would work. It was a combination of legends and wishful thinking brought on by a psyche that needed to drown its beating despair in action. But that meager whisper was entirely unintelligible under the booming thought that he had done it before. He had. He was rather a solution-oriented man: here was a solution. Seconds ticked by. Thoughts swirled. He had to do it, or he would die: he had accepted this fully as truth. But at the same time, had that wound on his thigh really healed any faster than normal? He always healed fast. The blood trickled neatly from the incision, bubbling up through veins, moving through the parted skin. But he had felt it. Or was it some phantom dream, some brief hallucination in his stupid grief-cracked hormone-addled brain? He was an idiot. If he could feel the blood coming out, come to think of it, why couldn’t he feel it inside? What was this doing? How is this helping? This is just another way of screaming. Another stupid, stupid way I can shred myself down because I can’t just fucking live with it. He should feel it inside, though. He could feel his body, right? And wasn’t it just another part of his body? If this doesn’t work, then I should die. It was just another part of his body. Otherwise there’s no point to me anyway if I can’t do the one fucking thing I was made for. It was just like another limb, another finger, running through him, let me die, just let me die then, if I can’t make life bearable just let me—
Then there was the glimpse, and it roped him, and then he felt every cell of his body at once.
The ground hit into him, hard with cold, but it was lost in a blaze like the light of the sun had come down to face him. Every part of him, every cell, every drop of blood, was alive, was connected, was signaling his brain. He screamed, or tried to, but he did not know how to when every fold of his vocal chords was its own instrument and he could sense their vibrations as clear as the motions of his fingers. Bile dripped out of his liver. Pulses ran up and down his spine, from hand to webbed hand of neurons. Intestines squeezed, bronchi sucked in air, muscles gripped tendons, a bird sang, dead leaves tickled at his leg, the smell of decomposition deep below frozen ground, the gel in his eyes conducted light to retinas and flashed the canopy above through wired nerves, all equally as loud. He was thrashing—there was pain, somewhere, but every input, inside and out, had been let loose and to shriek its sensation into the air and every one of them conglomerated in a deafening cacophony all at once.
Blood rushed through him, suddenly, a great surge of it, and then something new: a sensation somewhere—his wrist?—of sucking and searing, and a bubbling, roiling on his skin, and then—somewhere his eyes sent vision still, and he saw something burst out of the stump of his right arm. Two tendrils, like vines, twisted out, then split as fractals, branching, reaching, growing, bending, a fine web of red lines suspended in the air. Then just as quickly they retracted, and the boiling stopped, and his wrist was shut and whole.
It worked, he thought, as every part of him screamed its own name and drowned out every other, I didn’t die. And he lied on the ground and burned alive.