Dyathne didn’t say anything for a moment. What was there to say? It was obvious what he was hoping for, this Curastis.

  When her arm cooled, she broke the silence but not their eye contact. “I don’t think–” she began, then started again. “Listen. It’s not an injury.” She paused, choosing whether to be gentle or exact. She split the difference. “This isn’t something you can heal because nothing is wrong. The Siron only appears on those… qualified.”

  “Lucky me,” Math snapped. He stuffed the items back into his pack, sloppily clipping his bedroll on.

  He shook his left arm, hoping the blackened skin would peel away and reveal clean skin underneath. He stood up and shook it again.

  Dyathne stayed completely still, keeping the space between them as wide as possible without the line going taut.

  She had heard of people raging violently after passing the Limnus, not having gotten the result they were hoping for. She may even have been one such person, but like all Consecrates, she had been a teen. Teenagers were volatile, still maturing.

  On the other hand, she couldn’t predict what a grown man might do now. No fully formed adult had ever suddenly received a Consecrated Mark. And that wasn’t even taking into account that Math was from outside the Republic with apparently no conception of what the Sear really was or how it operated. Or what the Siron on his arm meant for his future.

  How could he be from Amtheris? She mused, watching him furiously rub his arm. Was it no longer ruined? Had people survived the cataclysm on his side of the Sear?

  Suddenly, he reached into his pants pocket, producing a utility knife. He flicked the blade out, eyes fixed on his offending appendage.

  Just a slice, he considered. Flay a small section of skin off the muscle and see what heals from underneath.

  Dyathne moved without thinking, closing both her hands over his bare forearm just as he swiftly swung the knife in a shallow arc. Unable to pull the motion in time, the blade grazed her knuckles, biting off skin the color of pitch.

  “Oh hell,” he jerked his hand away and folded the knife in the same motion.

  The knuckles on his left hand smarted badly. Sympathy pains, he reasoned. Happened with some regularity in the course of his duties as a Curastis.

  Blood, more orange than red in the strange light of the Sear, instantly flowed across the back of her right hand. Dyathne only tightened her grip around his Siron. She felt a pleasant warm buzzing under her palms radiating from his skin.

  “Promise me. Promise me you won’t try anything like that again,” she leaned in, searching his face plaintively.

  Math’s vibrant green eyes met her gray ones. Gray like the Sear, he realized with revulsion. But then, No, there was kindness in her eyes. And the threat of worried tears welling at the edges.

  “People have died trying to alter their Consecration Mark. And from far less damage than you looked ready to do,” she added. “You can’t die in here. I simply won’t allow it; you’re too big for me to haul out,” her attempt at a joke fell flat.

  He looked down at the flow of the blood, running over her knuckles, about to cascade onto his forearm. He hadn’t realized how deeply he had cut her.

  “I can fix that,” he murmured, immediately producing for the familiar vial and jar. It was something akin to an apology.

  She relaxed her grip and waited for the burn of the concoction to hit her peeled knuckles.

  As he sprinkled the liquid on her knuckles, it stung, certainly, but not as she remembered from her rope burns. Dyathne jumped when he hissed in pain.

  Her right hand still rested on his left forearm. Where her blood had fallen onto his Siron, angry blisters were starting to form, the same strange orange-red as her blood, vibrant against his blackened skin.

  “What about those?” Dyathne pointed to the blisters.

  “One thing at a time,” Math said simply, pushing aside his own odd pain. He took a small amount of the precious liniment from the jar and dabbed at her bleeding wounds.

  “I was a battlefield Curastis for a while,” he talked as he worked, trying to distract both of them from the painful pustules emerging on his arm. “You learn pretty quickly how to prioritize or everyone ends up worse off.”

  “What is that stuff?” She asked when he had finished.

  “Just antiseptic and ointment, but they’re tuned to me, to my frequency,” he explained. “They won’t work nearly as well if anyone else applied them, even another Curastis.”

  Dyathne and Math watched the skin on her knuckles begin to seal, the bleeding subsiding. “Can you heal yourself?” She asked.

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  “Yes,” he looked down at his arm, ready to repeat the procedure for himself, but froze.

  The mysterious blisters were already fading.

  She noticed, too.

  Moments later, both of them were healed, their skin looking untouched. Dyathne started slotting the pieces together.

  “I’ve never heard of this,” she murmured, starting to piece it together. “No Ashwalkers, no Nothers, have ever reported sharing pain,” she paused to let him speak. He didn’t. “I think… I think the Rite needs to be closed. Maybe it will set things… right.”

  “As in, my arm won’t be pitch-black anymore?” He clarified.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I won’t get unexplained blisters if I get bled on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I won’t feel a warm buzz under my skin if someone touches me?”

  “I DON’T KNOW,” she all but shouted. “But it’s the only idea I have. We have to try.”

  Math didn’t need to be told twice. He swung his pack onto his shoulders, scowling.

  “Lead on then,” and harshly tapped the compass around her neck with his index finger.

  Dyathne took a moment, precisely calibrating the rings, turning the the key twice until it indicated the direction they needed to travel.

  “This way,” she took a step forward. “We have a full day of walking ahead and need to make camp at the Jaws. Closing the Rite is more… efficient after dark.”

  He considered the events of the night, thinking about the red orbs. “Why are they so dangerous, the Vene—“

  She cut him off, “They unmake people.” Her voice was hollow. “I’ve never seen it, but my mentor had. The only time I saw that man genuinely afraid was when he told me about it.”

  “What do you mean they ‘unmake’ people?”

  She shook her head as if to rattle the thought back to where she had hidden it, “I can’t.”

  They walked for several hours in uncomfortable silence. Questions swam in each of their minds, but talking seemed laborious. And he knew he was still too furious and confused to speak rationally.

  Dyathne’s stomach growling loudly broke the silence.

  “We can eat,” Math laughed in spite of himself. “Can we stop here?”

  “For a little while,” she nodded, glancing at the compass.

  She extracted the wrapped mushroom jerky before using her pack as a stool, and stuffed a bite of it under her mask.

  “Water?” Math offered her his flask, seeing as hers had shattered. He thought about the spilled water.

  If he remained in the Sear a thousand upon a thousand lifetimes, he would never comprehend how water behaved here. Whatever liquid fell to the ground appeared to hit it, sounded like it struck the floor of the Sear, but left no trace. It didn’t puddle, didn’t soak in, it didn’t even evaporate. It just wasn’t.

  Water was the very stuff of life, he reasoned. It has no place here.

  She took his flask with a nod after a moment’s hesitation. It was some odd metal, freezing cold to the touch.

  She moved her mask up and took a sip, watching him produce a canvas-looking bag from his pack and seat himself in the same manner she had.

  “Drink as much as you need,” he urged her. He couldn’t let her get dehydrated; she had to close the Rite. It was his only hope.

  She took a deep swig. Then another. Dyathne didn’t realize how incredibly thirsty she was. She drank more. It was almost empty when she handed it back. She ducked her head sheepishly.

  Math raised his eyebrows at her, but then the sides of his eyes crinkled, smiling under his mask. Deftly, he screwed the cap back on the flask and shook it once, they heard the light slap of a mostly-empty flask of water. He shook it again. A deep bubbling sound came from the object.

  He unscrewed the cap, pushed his mask up just enough, and raised it to his lips, drinking deeply as he watched her watching him.

  “More?” He tilted the flask toward her again.

  She reached for it, withdrew her hand, then grabbed it, peering down the neck with one eye in awe.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know the mechanics, that’s not my specialty,” Math shrugged. “But it refills. Infinitely. Just like this.”

  He reached into the canvas bag on his knee and pulled out a loaf of bread about the size of his palm.

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” Dyathne breathed. That explains yesterday’s bread, she thought.

  He broke it down the middle and handed half to her.

  “Got any jam?” She asked.

  It took him a moment to realize she wasn’t quite serious.

  “No,” he chuckled, shaking his head. “This one only sends bread, I’m afraid. I have another for beans. And one for meat.”

  Dyathne froze. “Meat?”

  He nodded.

  “Meat? You mean flesh?” Her tone was growing increasingly distressed.

  Math nodded again slowly, his brows puckering ever so slightly.

  “As in people?” She almost vomited up the water.

  “What?! No!!” Math shook his head, eyes wide in horror. “It’s jerky, like the stuff you gave me! Only it’s aurochs meat.”

  She frowned.

  “You, know, aurochs,” he put two fingers to his forehead like horns. “Moo? Moo?”

  Dyathne looked at him blankly a moment, “That’s an animal?”

  “Big one,” he nodded.

  “How big?”

  “Hmmm about my height and just as long. Males reach 1,500 kilos or so,” he wobbled his palm. He reached into his pack and withdrew some jerky. He offered her a strip. “Try it?”

  “We…” Dyathne got quiet, looking at the dark brown-red, oddly fibrous slab in her hand. “We haven’t had animals that big in the Republic for thousands of years. Maybe longer.”

  Math paused, “I guess that stands to reason with the Sear. Maybe all of the large land mammals were trapped on the Amtheris side when it, ya know…”

  “Bloomed. We say the Sear bloomed,” she offered.

  She took a tentative bite of the aurochs jerky under her vizard. Her mouth immediately rejected the meat. The flesh. She had never eaten an animal before, though she knew people used to eat them all the time. Keep them alive just to kill them later to consume. She wondered how people would react back home if she told them that it still happened. Or that she tried some. Probably with the same casual abhorrence they already directed her way, she mused.

  She quickly moved her mask and spit the bite into her hand. It was rude to reject a gift generously offered, especially one so rare as this, but her body was having none of it.

  He snorted, “Not a fan, I take it.” He sounded amused, not offended. “‘Bloom’ is a very pretty word for a very ugly place,” he added blithely.

  “Why did you come?” She blurted out. Maybe his bread and water had given her enough energy to reinvigorate her curiosity. Or maybe she found she enjoyed any conversation as much as his food.

  “I was sent,” he corrected. “I mean, I volunteered, but someone had to,” Math shrugged. “I’m the first person they’ve sent since the reign of Ranell the Fourth.” He paused, assuming correctly that she had no idea when that was. “Sixteen hundred years ago.”

  “Why volunteer? You seem rather good to have around other people with your potions and whatnot.”

  “The Blight is spreading,” he sighed. “After so many centuries of stasis of the Sear, it started growing again, impinging on arable land. My parents lost their farm to it a few years back.

  “My people are at a loss. The Pedagogues have nothing left to try. It was a shot in the dark, but I was sent to seek help, from anyone that might be beyond the Sear. To see if there was anything or die trying.”

  She watched him, waiting for him to finish the thought.

  He never did. Slapping his knees, he stood, “We should probably head to the Jaws, no?”

  Dyathne didn’t press him. Just slung her pack over her shoulder, contentedly nibbling on some fresh string beans Math had handed her, leading him toward their destination.