“I wouldn't call us strangers,” she said at last. “They wore a different name, but they still had—” She glanced up at the Skysworn. “Some things in common. My master used to fight against these people. It was how he found me.”
Lindon looked from their Skysworn to Yerin. “Is this a conversation we should have in your room?”
“Won't be easy, no matter where we have it,” she muttered, but she didn't object. Cassias was taken to his own room, where a healer was already waiting. Apparently Renfei had communicated that he was the more urgently injured.
Yerin's room was more like a closet, or a prison. It had a single red-painted mat against the wall, blankets folded on the surface. A lidded chamber pot sat nearby, and that was all.
When Yerin drifted inside and the Skysworn guide left, it was actually difficult for Lindon to step inside for a moment. He had spent too much of the last year and a half locked inside small spaces. He was irrationally afraid that he would walk inside and be sealed within, though the only entrance was a sliding door of flimsy wood. He could break through it without an Enforcer technique.
Yerin eyed him, then the door. “You want me to send you a formal invitation, you'll have to write it yourself.” Ever since revealing that she couldn't read, she had made several jokes about it. The subject was starting to make him uncomfortable.
Finally, he took a deep breath and stepped inside, sliding the door into place behind him. He fixed his gaze on the small window high up in the wall, though it just revealed another nook of the complex. Focusing on the outside let him forget how small the room was.
Yerin clambered from her cloud to her bedding, wincing and hissing at every movement. He would have helped, but he was still trying to keep the queasy sensation in his stomach under control.
When she had finally settled herself, she looked up and began again. “You remember my...uninvited guest, true?”
“It was your belt, wasn't it?” Lindon asked. He had come to that conclusion through implication and inference, but she'd never told him.
She grunted, and he took that as affirmation. “Some people call it a Blood Shadow.”
A few things slid into place for Lindon at that moment: her reaction to the bloodspawn, the Redmoon Hall emissary looking straight at her, Eithan sealing her belt.
One of the silver blades sprouting from her back began tapping lightly on the wall, and Lindon wondered if that was a nervous gesture while she waited for him to finish thinking, or if the Goldsign was out of her control.
“But you'd never heard of Redmoon Hall,” he said.
“Not by that name. Sacred artists would sometimes hunt down these parasites and take them like pills. Hoped they would get stronger.” She sneered as though she were looking down on those sacred artists right then. “Only one in every ten made it, but every sacred artist thinks they're the special exception. For them, it'll work. Problem is, it doesn't just put you in danger.”
“You didn't do that,” Lindon said confidently. That seemed more like something he would do than something Yerin would. In fact, he'd already started wondering what specific benefits a Blood Shadow offered. Longhook had been strong, certainly, but he was an Underlord. Or did the Shadow perhaps allow you to create bloodspawn? No, that seemed to be an effect of the red light. Could they generate that red light?
A flicker of a smile crossed her face. “You're starting to learn. A little. No, I didn't look for it. It looked for me.” The smile faded as quickly as it came. “The Dreadgod gives birth to...a litter, I guess you'd say...of Blood Shadows at one time. They run around like Remnants, looking to find a host before they starve. When they find somebody, they usually drain them dry and take their power back to the Bleeding Phoenix. Every once in a rare moon, you run into somebody who takes them over instead.”
“When did it get to you?” Lindon asked, kneeling to face her.
“Can't be sure how old I was. Seven, maybe? Eight? They called me a genius.” She smiled bitterly. “Everybody in town said how shiny my future was going to be. The star of my town. Made me stick out, as it ends up. Even to a Dreadgod.”
She was silent for so long that he wanted to prompt her with a question, but he curbed his curiosity and sat quietly, waiting.
“Didn't know what it was, but I fought it,” she said at last. “It was trying to...burrow into me. To my spirit, more than my body. My dad tried to pull it out, and it cut him. His blood fell on the ground.”
Lindon had fought the bloodspawn only a few hours earlier. He could picture what happened next, and the bottom fell out of his stomach.
“Spawned those...things,” she said, though he'd guessed it already. “Cut through town like fire through a dry wood. I'm just standing there, holding on while everybody died. If I let it get inside of me, I figured something worse would happen, so I just held it off. Don't know how long I sat there, holding it, before Master found me.”
She had started to shake.
Her wounds had been wrapped, but not thoroughly bandaged, and some of them had begun to bleed again, but she didn't notice, staring into the distance.
There was nothing Lindon could say to help her. The past had already left its wounds.
But he could do something she'd done for him once before.
Without a word, he squeezed in next to her, sitting side-by-side though her Goldsign jabbed him in the side of the head. Sweat covered his palms, and he eyed her for any sign that she was uncomfortable or in pain. She didn't even seem to notice him, staring ahead with a blank gaze.
He reached across her shoulders and gave her a light squeeze. When she didn't object, he just sat there, holding her with his one arm. Reminding her that someone was there.
Back in Sacred Valley, when things had been at their worst, this was all he had wanted. Someone to sit with him and remind him that they were with him, that everything would be okay. Sometimes his sister or his parents filled that role. Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes, they were the problem.
But today, Lindon could give that to Yerin.
After a minute or two, she leaned into him. “We're going after them,” she said at last, her voice confident. “They can't all be Underlords. I'd say we could stop any of them under Truegold, or we could find a way to deal with them. Together. We have to stop them.”
Lindon leaned away, turning to see her expression. “Yes, we should do whatever we can. We just need to be…careful.”
She turned to him and the blades on her shoulders shifted. He had to withdraw his arm or risk getting cut.
“You’re in this with me, true?”
“Of course,” he said without hesitation. “But we should have a plan.”
She nodded, her eyes focused intensely on some point beyond him. “Yeah…we have to track down a Truegold, don’t we? Cassias could tell us where it is. He points it out on the map, and we slip in like a shadow’s whisper. Maybe we could get Orthos in, too, that would ease the fight somewhat.”
Lindon cleared his throat. “That could certainly work, but I’d like to propose an alternative. We could push Eithan to make us Truegolds. He must know a way to do it, don’t you think? If the Ancestor’s Spear could take Jai Long from Highgold to Truegold so quickly, there has to be some solution for us.”
His new arm might be exactly that solution, but there was no telling until the construct was completed.
She backed away, turning to face him head-on. “You want me to sit around on my hands until I advance again? If Eithan can make me a Truegold tomorrow, sure, I’m not going to spit on that. Short of that, I’m not waiting. I’m going with whoever’s raising their swords against Redmoon Hall.”