The Skysworn Captain folded his arms and leaned against the wall. Bai Rou took a respectful step away, but the old man didn’t seem to care. He examined Lindon through a curtain of matted gray hair.
“Did you ever break that arm as a kid?” he asked. “Back when you had it, I mean.”
Whatever Lindon’s interrogator wanted, he was coming at it from a different direction. Lindon only wished he understood where this was headed. Why hadn’t he waited for Eithan before trying to join the Skysworn? Maybe the Arelius Underlord could have persuaded them to hold another round of applications.
“Both of them, yes,” Lindon said. He’d broken one falling out of a tree, and the other had been broken by a tree.
“And how did they treat that break, back in Sacred Valley?”
“We weren’t the richest family in the clan, sir. We had simple elixirs and a scripted sling.”
“No life artists?”
“Only for more severe injuries, honored sir.” Lindon’s father had his leg treated by a life artist, but the woman hadn’t been on hand soon enough to restore the limb completely. Without her, he wouldn’t have kept the leg at all.
The man nodded slowly, flipping the leaf over between his lips. “And burns? You ever burn yourself?”
Lindon’s eyes flicked to the scar on the side of the man’s face. “Minor burns only, sir.” His voice had grown quiet, and he wasn’t sure why.
“Well, since they didn’t heal burns back in Sacred Valley, I’ll tell you how we do it here.” Lindon stayed focused on the raised patch of ridged, reddish scar tissue that ran from his temple down to his skin. It only missed his eye by a quarter-inch.
“Blood madra removes unhealthy tissue and grows some more. Life madra smooths it all out, heals it together with the rest of your body so that you’d never know you’d been burned at all. And that’s just a general picture. If you get a specialized healing Path, or some decent elixirs, the whole thing can be done in a breath.”
He ran his little finger across his scarred cheek. “Black fire hurts a little worse.”
Lindon sat, more and more conscious of the chain locking him in this room. He looked to the more familiar Skysworn for comfort, but Bai Rou had his arms crossed, his yellow eyes staring at the far wall. Renfei kept her eyes on her Captain.
“They tell me you’re requesting entry into the Skysworn,” Naru Gwei said, without leaning away. “Did Eithan tell you to do that?”
“No! No, I…I probably should have waited for his permission, but I didn’t. He doesn’t know.”
“But he was the one who turned you into a Blackflame,” Gwei said. His expression still looked tired, as though he hadn’t slept in three days and wanted nothing more than to go home and sleep. His tone, by contrast, betrayed no impatience.
“He helped me along this Path, yes,” Lindon said, hoping this wouldn’t reflect too badly on Eithan. The Arelius Underlord had never told him to keep his involvement a secret.
The Skysworn Captain gave no sign whether he thought this was good or bad. He kept leaning against the wall, chewing his leaf. “Did he do that to your core?”
From his previous conversations with Renfei and Bai Rou, Lindon gathered that they assumed his pure core was a sort of disguise to cover the Path of Black Flame. “I split my core on my own, sir. Before I met Eithan.”
“And what did he want you to do with this new Path? What purpose did he have for you?”
Finally, Lindon saw what the Underlord was getting at. Naru Gwei assumed this was all part of Eithan’s plan, and wanted to know what that plan was.
“For the duel, sir. I asked him for a Path that might allow me to fight someone stronger than I was.”
“The way I’ve heard it,” Gwei said, “Eithan allowed the duel. Even proposed it.”
“His favorite training method is…I guess I would call it extreme duress.”
The Skysworn Captain swallowed the leaf and withdrew a long straw from within his armor. He placed it between his teeth and continued chewing. “So he proposed this duel, held you to it, and then held out the Path of Black Flame as your only salvation. That doesn’t sound like a plan to you?”
“He’s pushing me forward,” Lindon insisted. “He’s helping me grow.”
Naru Gwei unfolded his arms and leaned closer. “Into what?”
Lindon had no answer to that.
“What did he say you would do after the duel?”
“Nothing I know of. He’s helping me advance.” Lindon felt less confident than he had before.
The Underlord stared at him for a long moment, then jerked his head toward the door. His two subordinates traded looks, though they couldn’t do anything but leave. Bai Rou ducked his woven hat beneath the doorframe, and the cloud over Renfei’s head passed through with plenty of room to spare.
They didn’t look back at Lindon.
“The duel is over,” Naru Gwei said. “Now, in the middle of an imperial crisis that he helped cause, he’s trying to slip a Blackflame into my Skysworn. While he tries to take over himself. I know what he’s doing, linking Underlords to the Skysworn. He’s trying to win them over from me.”
The Underlord had loomed over Lindon, the air in the room swirling and picking up into a windstorm. His scarred face was hostile: he was working himself up into a fury. Whatever was happening out there had put too much pressure on the Skysworn Captain, whether it was the threat of Redmoon Hall or whatever Eithan had done.
Either way, Naru Gwei had decided Lindon was part of it.
Lindon’s right arm started straining against its restraints, and he almost wanted to help it.
The Underlord leaned toward Lindon, his dirty gray hair swinging closer. Lindon shut his mouth. Naru Gwei's weather-beaten face somehow looked both weary and intense, as though he were bracing himself for an unpleasant task that he had performed hundreds of times before.
“Lower your head,” the Underlord commanded, and Lindon could hear his death in that command.
“It’s not Eithan!” Lindon said desperately, tapping his Blackflame core. His eyes heated, and he knew from experience that they would have transformed into a copy of Orthos’ eyes: pure black with red irises. The Path of Black Flame flooded into his left hand, and his right remained mercifully untouched and intact.
He poured that power into his cuffs even as he Enforced his muscles. If he melted them, they would burn through his wrists, so he had to hope he could tear his hand free before the damage was too great.
Instead, the madra broke to steam on contact with the cuffs. A spike of cold shot up Lindon's arms, as though he'd driven an icicle through his wrists.
Halfsilver in the cuffs. He'd remembered, but hoped against hope that there was some flaw.
“A friend wanted to join! Yerin, I mentioned her earlier, she’s the companion that Eithan adopted. She wanted to fight Redmoon Hall, so she insisted on joining the Skysworn! I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t let her down!” He was babbling as though every word out of his mouth would slow down the Underlord’s blow.
Considering that he was still alive, maybe there was something to that theory.
“She just wanted to help! And…ah, so do I! Of course!” As Naru Gwei’s hand drifted upward toward the hilt of his sword, Lindon's breath came faster and faster. His breath started to blur, and the ice in his wrists grew sharper as he poured more effort into breaking the shackles. Even his white arm was writhing with desperation. Just a little more, he was sure. He had to believe that. Just a little more...
“Eithan adopted her too,” the Captain said quietly, and Lindon forced himself to take deeper breaths. He could feel Orthos growing agitated in his own cell, feeding on Lindon’s fear—if it went too far, or if Lindon was killed, the turtle would go on a rampage.