It was over.
Everything was over.
He was the last alive.
Again, he was the last alive.
But he would not remain so for long.
He was bleeding out, and he could barely feel his extremities.
And then there was a fraction of a second when Aelfric felt that his brain had been shattered by the force of a single thought driven through his skull like an iron spike.
He saw a girl.
He saw a young woman with a flurry of curls, roses set into her hair like a crown. She was dressed all in green, her feet bare. At first he saw her only from behind, his view consumed by her thicket of curly hair, but then all at once enormous wings burst from her back.
And she turned and looked at him over her shoulder, her eyes as deep and limitless as the dark ocean. She was lit from above by the glow of a ring of golden light.
And she smiled.
She smiled at him.
He knew he was dying. Everything that he felt in his body told him that he was dying, but somehow, seeing her face, seeing her, standing on the green grass in her bare feet, it put his heart at ease.
The thing he thought when he saw her was nonsensical, but in that moment, it made perfect sense to him. It made absolute sense, the sort of sense that transcended time and place.
He thought:
Oh, I finally found you.
At last.
I found you.
And then everything went black.
He thought he had died.
He had resolved himself that he had died.
That was why he was very disoriented when he opened his eyes again.
He only managed to open them a sliver, but when he did, he saw something that nearly made his heart stop.
It was a girl. There was a girl leaning over him, a streak of dried blood or black ichor on her cheek, the riot of her curls held back by a kerchief. It was the girl he had seen before, the one who had turned and smiled at him.
Looking at her, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a rush of concern for her safety that flooded into his bloodstream like adrenaline.
She needed to get away from him. The thing had already marked him. He was carrying the parasite. He could not feel much of his body, but he could still feel that thing, festering against his middle.
She needed to get away from him. This thing would kill her. This thing would kill her.
And so he said the first words that occurred to him, because at that level of pain and horror, he had no ability to temper anything he said.
“You,” he struggled to even form the words. “You should have left me there.”
It was the plain, unvarnished truth.
But these words had a very unexpected effect.
They made her angry.
She slapped the floor with her bare hand, sounding like an agitated beaver slapping its tail.
“If you have the strength to say something like that, then you ought to have enough strength to drink something,” she had declared, and then she had pressed a noxious smelling bottle to his lips.
It was no use. He was dying. He knew that he was dying. His mind was a disjointed confusion of pain and shuddering misery. He knew that he was beyond any potion, beyond any spell wrought by mortal hands.
But she was staring at him with those deep, blue eyes, fiercely determined. She was prepared to wrestle death itself to the ground.
Irrationally, he felt that he did not want to disappoint her. He was dying, awash in pain and misery, but the thing that was most important to him at that moment was nothing more complicated than that.
He did not want to disappoint her.
So he struggled to drink the noxious swill.
It tasted horrendous, bitter and poisonous. He had imbibed some terrible brews in his time out of desperation and necessity, but this was by far the worst thing he had ever tried to drink.
Discipline was the only reason he managed to swallow any of it.
—But the moment he did...
It was incredible. Within seconds of the horrible mixture touching his tongue, he could feel the effects cascading through his body. His pain and confusion eased. His mind began to clear.
He was in some kind of room. He was in a room that looked like a young lady’s bedroom in a well-appointed country house. It felt as if he was on a bed, with the softest linens that he had ever felt underneath him.
But he didn’t have much time at all to observe the location before he lost consciousness again.
When he awoke again—
He was mildly perturbed.
He was not dead.
That is, he did not feel dead. He felt alive and whole and generally on the mend. It felt as if he were recovering from an intense but relatively short illness, something a bit like a severe cold.
He was not fully convinced that he had not died, however.
He seemed to be alive. His senses told him that he was alive. But the circumstances of his current situation...
They were the elements that made him most dubious about the question of his continued survival.
First of all, it did turn out that he was in the bedroom of a young lady of the nobility. This bedroom was in a fabulous country house that was elegant in its simplicity, but also whimsical, fanciful. It seemed to be a house conjured directly from the embroidered daydreams of a princess who often fantasized about being a bucolic milkmaid.
And the house was wall-to-wall with alchemic fittings that not even he fully understood. Everything about it was clean, wholesome, picturesque, and very convenient.
Well, relatively convenient.
It turned out that there was only one real bed in the place, and that bed belonged to the young lady. Even in this questionable state between life and death, he was not comfortable enough to let that stand and had tried to give up the bed.
But then she had bullied him until he had reluctantly agreed to continue convalescing in the bed.
And then she had put an enormous pillow into the bed after him, and then peacefully climbed in herself.
Her audacity was one of the most challenging things about her.