B3CH-66 The Basin. (Patreon)

The doors of the alchemy hall came open hard enough to crack against the stone, and four legionaries came through them with Josh slung between their arms, and they got him up onto the long worktable in a slide of glass and copper that swept the whole surface clear.

"ELIA!" The optio had both hands crushed down over Josh's shoulder, and the blood came up dark between his fingers. "Get Miss Elia. I don't care where she is, somebody get her out here NOW!"

Students broke off their stations and came at a run. One got an arm across Josh's chest to hold him down, and another put both palms to the wound over the optio's hands and pressed down.

That was when Beth hit the doorway.

One hand braced under the shelf of her belly, and she came through the door already talking. "Where is he? WHERE—" And then she saw the table, and she almost collapsed.

The optio turned, and he took a full step back from her, his mouth open at nothing.

"Councilor," he managed. "He, we got him back fast as we—"

Beth was already past him.

She got to the table and put her hands on Josh's face, and his skin was the wrong color and the wrong temperature. Cool and gray under the freckles that dotted his face. A cry echoed out from her throat. "Josh!" She said his name, then said it again, closer into the space above his mouth, and his breath came back to her thin and slow. It smelled like vinegar and rot.

Elia came through the back of the hall at a dead run, blonde hair bouncing behind her, sleeves shoved to the elbow, and she had her hands on Josh before she'd finished arriving. She peeled the students' fingers off the wound. She pressed two fingers under his jaw and went still, and her eyes moved over him without landing, going to the wound, then to the slow, easy rise of his chest, all wrong, too calm for a man this far gone.

Josh's eyes came open a slit. His mouth worked.

"Water," he said, to no one. "Need the moving water. 'M so close."

"Josh." Beth got her face in front of his. "Josh, stay here, look at me—" She rounded on the room without letting go of him. "Why hasn't he had a potion? Somebody give him a healing potion; why is nobody—"

"Ma'am." The optio's voice went flat and careful. "We've given him too many already." He held up a hand still slick to the wrist. "Six on the road back. It's the poison, Councilor. It's traveled too far in him. We can't slow it anymore without the potions doing the killing for it."

Beth's hands tightened on Josh's face.

Elia wasn't listening to either of them. She had her palm flat on his sternum and her head tipped, and she was talking low and fast, more to herself than to the table. "What are you doing? That's not—" Her fingers spread. "His vitals are wrong. Everything's low, it's all going low, it should be spiking, and it's the other way; it's like he's in there doing something to himself—"

"Elia." Beth's voice cracked down the middle. "Elia, what is happening to him—"

Then Margaret was there.

Beth hadn't heard her come in. Margaret came around the end of the table with her ledger still in one hand, and she took Beth by both shoulders from behind and drew her back off Josh with a steadiness there was no arguing against.

"Come away, Bethany." Quiet, and complete. "You are standing where her hands need to be." She turned Beth by the shoulders until there was nowhere for her to look but at Margaret's face. "You may come apart tonight, when it is finished, and I will sit with you on the floor while you do it. Not now. Right now your husband needs his wife steady, and the child you are carrying needs its mother, and I will not let you rob either of them because you are frightened. You are allowed to be frightened. You are not allowed to be useless." Her voice did not rise a hair. "Breathe. And let Elia work."

Beth came, because there was nothing else to do with the strength she had, and Margaret kept a hand on her arm and turned in the same motion to the optio.

"You." The ledger came up level. "She cannot counteract a venom she has never seen. I need a sample in front of Elia within the next minute. Do you have one?"

The optio's face changed. "Yes, ma'am. I know exactly—" He spun to the door and put his parade voice through it, sent two men off at a run. "This'll be all there is of it, ma'am. He didn't leave much of it." A breath. "It came up behind him. Smaller one, quiet, none of us saw it coming. There was nothing anybody could've done."

The two legionaries came back in carrying a thing wrapped in a cloak, set it on the end of the table, and drew the cloak away, and Beth got one second of the smell before her sleeve came up over her nose.

It had been an ant. Most of it was paste. What held together was a foreleg and a piece of the head, the shell on them dark as a gun barrel, and a barbed spur seated into the leg as long as a carving knife and still, even in ruin, wet at the tip.

Elia's head came up off Josh like a hound off a scent.

"Oh," she said.

She was around the table before Margaret could stop her, the foreleg up in the light, turning it, her thumb running the joint where the barb socketed into the limb. "Look at the delivery, it's a hollow spur, that's not a bite, it's an injector, the pressure to drive that through mail, the muscle behind it would have to be—oh, I have to open the head, hand me something, this is extraordinary, nobody has rendered one of these, I need to take—"

"Elia." Margaret's voice cut through Elia's wonder. "Josh is on the table behind you."

Elia stopped, leg still up in the air.

She looked at it, then at Josh. The hunger went out of her face. She set the leg down, wiped her hand on her apron, and came back to him, and her voice was smaller than it had been. "Yes. Yes, Councilor, I'm sorry. Yes."

Beth had her arm free of Margaret without noticing she'd done it. She was back at Josh's head, mouth against his temple, her voice dropped down under all of it, down to the register that was only ever for him.

"You listen to me. You are not doing this. You hear me? You're the stubbornest man alive; it's the one useful thing about you, so use it. You beat it, and you come back here. I need you, Josh. You can't leave me like this."

Josh's eyes tracked to her. For a moment they were lucid, clear in the middle of the gray.

"I need the water," he said, low but even. "Beth. The moving water. I almost had it in the river; I could feel it." His hand found her wrist and closed on it with more grip than a dying man had any right to. "I know I can do this. I just need to be back in it."

Beth's spine went straight.

"This is for the perk." It came out of her in a scream, low and shaking and furious. "This is all for a stupid perk. A month you've been sulking about the water, and now you're lying here gray as a fish, telling me you're close. You stupid, stupid man, I don't care if you're close. We are having a baby, do you understand me? I need you here, I need you standing in the room, I don't need Thor—"

"Hey. Hey, no." Josh's mouth pulled at one corner, and it cost him. "Listen a sec." He got a breath in. "This morning. You told me don't die."

Beth's face crumpled.

"I said 'as you wish.'" His thumb moved once against the inside of her wrist. "Same way Westley meant it, Beth. That's a promise, and I have never once broken a promise to you, and I'm sure not gonna start on the biggest one I've got." The corner pulled again, weaker. "Give me some credit. I'm not gonna fall over from a bug bite."

Beth made a sound that was half the worst kind of laugh and pressed her forehead to his.

"No," Elia said.

They both looked at her.

She had the foreleg back in one hand and two fingers of the other at the pulse under Josh's jaw, and she was looking between the two of them like something had just resolved in the air over the table.

"He might be right." She said it fast, ahead of her own nerve. "There isn't enough of the ant. I can't build a true counter-venom from what's left; there's no sac left intact, I have nothing to run it against." Her eyes came up. "But if I can watch the venom work, if I have his blood to see what breaks it, I might be able to build something that cleanses his blood; the blood is the carrier; it has to be. Look at him." Her palm pressed flat to his chest. "And whatever he did with the water worked. That poison should have already killed him. Putting him back in it won't harm him. It might be the only reason he's still on this table."

Margaret had gone very still, and Beth watched her.

"Then not the creek," Margaret said. "The spring." She set the ledger down on the table, which Beth had never once in her life seen her do. "The mana spring in the training hall. If any water on this territory will help him rather than hurt him, that water will."

Beth was already moving.

She put both hands flat to the stone floor and reached down into it. Josh worked stone in slabs and walls, in mass, and threw up a barrier faster than anyone she'd ever seen; she was more focused on the detail work, but not today. The floor came up under her hands smooth as poured cream. A bier lifted out from under the worktable in one clean piece with the edges rolled soft so nothing would catch him, and it took Josh's weight.

"Bethany—" Margaret started.

"I've got him." Her jaw was set, and her hands stayed flat and certain, and the slab did not so much as tremble under her husband. She walked it toward the doors, Josh riding it out of the hall ahead of her. "Elia, grab whatever you need and get to the spring. Now. Right now."

Margaret picked her ledger back up, looked at Elia, and tipped her head once at the door.

"You heard the Councilor," she said. "Everything you need. We are going to the water."

The spring hall was close, and Beth walked the bier the whole way with her hands out flat and her eyes on Josh's chest. When she opened the door, the mana hit her at the threshold like wading into deep water.

Harold had splurged on this room. He'd wanted the field thick enough here to train inside, because a perk earned in dense mana meant the perk would end up being better. The spring came up through worked stone in the center of it, a pool waist-deep and clear to the bottom, the mana coming off the surface in a pressure you could almost lean on.

Beth brought the bier to the lip and let the stone flow down into a ramp under it, and they got Josh off it and into the water.

She went in after him with her boots still on. The cold closed over her thighs and her belly, and she didn't feel it. She got behind him and pulled his head and shoulders up against her, his back to her front, both arms crossed over his chest, his face out of the water and turned into her neck.

Josh groaned.

His eyes stayed shut, but his whole body drew tight against her, and low at the wound the water began to move. As blood leaked out, a small, steady draw of the water bent in toward the hole in his shoulder and vanished into it.

"There," Elia breathed. She'd come down on her knees at the water's edge with the ant leg still in one fist, her free hand hovering over Josh's chest. "There it is. His vitals just dropped again, lower than I have ever felt a living man go, and he's doing it on purpose, whatever that is."

"Stone body." Beth's voice broke on it, and she held him tighter. "It's the one he loves best. He can make himself more rock than flesh when he wants to; he calls it his stone body. He thinks it's the funniest thing he's ever named." A sob took the rest. She pressed her mouth to his wet hair and got it back. "He's slowing himself down. He's turning to stone so the poison can't get through him."

Boots came into the hall behind her. The captain crossed the floor with Evan a step off his shoulder. Hale had left him in charge of the garrison, and he ran it like a man who'd forgotten how to sleep, and she had never seen his face hold an expression.

He stopped a pace short of the pool, put his heels together, and gave Beth a short, exact nod, the kind he'd give any officer he answered to. "Councilor." His eyes went to Josh in the water, and he inclined his head to him too, unconscious as he was. Then he turned to the door. "Optio. Report."

The Optio came off the wall he'd been holding up and snapped to it. "Sir. Sweep of the south grass, third ridge. I have the exact coordinates for you. The patrol was normal until the ground opened beneath us without warning, and they poured out. Ants, big as dogs and bigger, shell like iron; our blades skated straight off them. We managed to hold them back by targeting their legs with Councilor Josh's help. When a small one came up behind him quietly and drove a spur through his shoulder. He told us to get him to water, and we did for a while, but he was close to passing out, so we ran him here."

The captain's eyes went to Josh in the pool, then to Beth, then off her.

"How many came out of the hole?" he said.

"More than we killed, sir. When we left, more were leaving it."

Elia had stopped listening to any of it. She had both hands on Josh in the water now, moving over his ribs and his throat and the wound, making small sounds to herself, humming and stopping and humming again, and her face kept changing while she did it.

Beth held out as long as she could. "Elia. What do you know?"

Elia looked up. "It's a necrotoxin. It kills tissue and travels through what it's killed; that's why the potions didn't do much. He should be dead, Councilor; it should have taken him on the road. He's alive because his flesh is more stone than not right now." Her hands pressed flat to his chest. "And he's cleansing it. Barely, a thread at a time, but he's doing it; something in the water is sweeping the poison out of his blood. It's the cut, I think. He opened himself up so the water could get deeper, and it's getting deeper. I think he's pulling this water into himself; I think he's trading his own body's water out for the spring's, a little at a time." She stopped, and her eyes went somewhere far off. "Which shouldn't be possible. The body's mostly water, but that water is locked inside the cells, it doesn't just cross out. It can't, not unless he's—"

"Elia." Margaret, from the pool's edge, level as a shelf. "Eliaaa."

Elia's mouth shut. Beth was staring at her with everything coming apart, and Elia saw it.

"Sorry." She shook her head hard, once. "Sorry. Here's what matters, Councilor. He's cleaning it, and he's losing. He can't clean it faster than it spreads. But if I make the water do more of the cleaning for him, if I push the cleansing property up high enough, I can help him."

Then her face fell.

"But what I'd need for that." Her voice dropped away. "It's not on my shelves. It's in Lord Harold's private stash, in the vault Josh and Lord Bram made for him, and those are his ingredients, the real scarce, strong ones, and I." She lifted her hands out of the water and looked at them like they were someone else's. "I don't have his control. Lord Harold could hold it in one hand with his eyes closed. I…I have never worked a potion that powerful. I don't know if I can. I don't know if I can do it."

Margaret came down to one knee at the edge of the pool, and she took Elia's chin in her hand and turned it until Elia had nowhere left to look but at her.

"Look at me. You can do this." Quiet. Absolute. "Is there another person in this territory who can do it in your place? Answer me plainly."

"Finn, maybe." Elia's eyes were wet. "Finn could, if he had time to—"

"Finn is months up the northern road. He is not here." Margaret's hand didn't move. "You are here. So you will do this, Elia, or Josh dies in this pool with his wife holding him, and his child is born to a widow, because the one person who could act chose not to. Do you understand me?"

Elia's eyes went past her to Beth, to Beth's arms locked over Josh and the water trembling with how hard she held on, and something in Elia's own face gathered itself up.

"Okay." She dragged a wet wrist across her face, which did nothing. "Okay. I can do this. I can."

She turned on her knees to the soldiers at the door.

"You. I need the imbuer, Jessim. Find him and tell him I need the project I contracted, here, now, finished or not." She was already up and moving to a bench, dragging a slate over, the charcoal skipping as she wrote. "And I need all of these, fast as you can run them." She shoved the slate at the nearest legionary.

He looked at it, and his face fell. "Ma'am, I don't know half these words; I wouldn't know a heartwood knot from a—"

"I will handle the retrieval." Margaret took the slate out of his hand, read it once from top to bottom, and then she was gone, and Beth, who had been looking right at her, could not have said which door she used or how a woman moving that fast made no sound.

Elia pulled a wrapped root and a stoppered tube from her own apron and started laying out a working space on the flat stone by the pool, and her hands had steadied, mostly.

The door banged. Vera came through it on a cane, with Lynn at her shoulder, and a soldier reached out an arm to stop them; Lynn walked into the arm and shoved it off without breaking stride.

Vera was gray, her breath short from the walk as she maintained her facade, and she got herself onto a bench and lowered down with both hands on the cane. Her breathing she kept slow and counted on purpose, in through the nose, out the same, and her eyes went round the whole hall once and filed it before they settled. Evan crossed to her and crouched to her level.

"Glad you're up." He kept it easy. "I know you're laid up, and I'm asking anyway. I need your team in the south section. Now careful as you have ever been. Target's ants. A nest, or any sign of one. A hole, a mound, a track, anything."

The two behind Lynn traded a look. "Ants," one of them said.

Lynn's head came around, and the brightness went out of her voice. "Ants did that to him?"

"Yeah," Evan said.

"Fuck yes, we're on it," Dorrin said, already checking his straps, and Tresh was already at the door. "Come on, Lynn. Maggs, you've got point."

"I've always got point; one of you take it," Maggs said from somewhere, and then they were gone into the cold.

Vera stayed on the bench and did not go with them. Her face fell while she watched her team file out into the snow without her. Her hands tightened on the cane while they walked away. She knew the spider would want her to maintain her act for now.

Evan straightened and came the two steps to the water. He crouched at the edge of it near Beth, close enough that she could hear him under the noise of the hall, and he put a hand out and rested it once on the wet stone by her knee.

"Beth. Look at me a second." He waited until she did. "I have recruited a lot of men into that guild, and a fair number of them were tougher on paper than your husband. He has buried most of them. That man does not know how to quit a job half done, and he is not going to start now, when he's got a kid coming. Not when he has you." A short grin, gone as fast as it came. "He's gonna be fine. He's too stubborn and too annoying to be anything else. You hold on, and let these two cook."

Beth's mouth shook, and she nodded, and he stood back up.

Then Jessim came through the door at a run with a cauldron in his arms nearly as big as he was, black iron veined with something pale, and he set it down on the stone with a clang and a gasp.

"Elia. I'm here, I've got it—"

"Good." She didn't look up from her root. "Is it ready?"

His face said it before his mouth did. "It's not done. I've got the quartz imbued into it, but I haven't finished setting the zircon. The stability is two-thirds, maybe of what you asked for. When do you need it?"

"Now."

He looked at the cauldron, at her, at the water where Josh was, and whatever was loose in him settled. "Then I'll finish it here. Give me a corner and don't jog my arm. Don’t leave me passed out on the floor, please." He hauled the cauldron to a clear patch of stone, dropped down cross-legged, pulled two fist-sized blocks from a sack, one milk-white and one the color of weak tea, set them against the iron, and put his hands on them, and his lips moved, and the pale veins in the metal began, very slowly, to brighten.

The door came open again, this time on a heavier tread, and Caldwell came in out of the cold with his coat still half-buttoned. He took the room in one sweep, the boy over the cauldron, the alchemist over her dishes, the pool, and Josh in it, and the coin stopped dead against his palm.

"I just got word. I came straight up." He crossed to the water, and for a moment the pragmatism went out of him, and he just looked at Josh, at the gray of him, and his jaw worked. "Ah, you soft-handed idiot," he said, low, almost fond. "You couldn't sign your papers and stay indoors like the rest of us." Then he pulled himself back and turned to Margaret and the captain both. "Tell me what's short. Coin, hands, hauling, wagons, a room cleared, anyone woken up you need."

"The banner lords will need summoning to reinforce the Landing," the captain said. "We must reinforce the half-built wall."

"Then that's mine." Caldwell's coin started moving again, slow, thinking. "I can call the Lords to reinforce us here. I’ll send it out over the priority forum channel. You mind your wall." He did not leave, though. He set his people going with two quiet words to a runner at the door and then came back and stood by the pool.

Margaret was back with a basket over one arm before Beth had finished registering she'd left. She still didn't see the door move.

"The plan, Elia." Margaret set the basket within her reach.

Elia's hands were flying now, splitting the root, grinding, measuring by eye into little stone dishes. "I'm not sure I can do it alone." She said it to the dishes. "These ingredients are strong, and I don't have the modifiers to hold them stable, and I don't have the control to make up the gap. Lord Harold." Her voice went. "Lord Harold could do this in his sleep. I don't have the mana he has, not the amount and not the quality. Mine's a candle, and this potion will want a furnace." She tipped her chin at Jessim. "That's the cauldron. I contracted him a month back to build me a vessel that holds a reaction stable when I can't. He's imbuing that cauldron for stability. When it's done, it will maintain the stability of reactions within it. I hope."

Margaret watched her hands. "Chance of success," she said, low.

Elia's hands didn't stop. Her eyes flicked once, to the water, to Beth and Josh.

"Not good," she said.

Margaret nodded, and stood, and went to Beth. She crouched at the pool's edge beside her, close, her voice pitched under the noise of the hall.

"Elia is not confident, Bethany. You heard her." Her hand came to rest on Beth's shoulder under the water. "So I am going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it with your head and not your fear. Is there anything you can do to help him?"

Beth's breath went ragged, too fast, in and out, and she pressed her face into Josh's wet hair and shook. And somewhere in the middle of it she stopped shaking, and when she came back up her eyes were dry and hard.

"The Stormcrafter book." She got it out bravely. "His path book. It's in the vault?"

Margaret went still. "It is."

"Paths shape the person who takes them. To what they need, he's always said that. The books shape the path based on your personality and need." Her arms tightened over Josh. "There has never been a person in this world who needed to understand water more than I do. Get me the book. There must be a reason Josh was asking for this so much."

Margaret looked at her for one second. Then she was up and gone.

The captain and Evan went out together while Margaret was gone, heads down and talking fast; the captain paused in the doorway long enough to turn back and give Beth that same exact nod, one officer to another, before the cold took him. A moment after the door shut, the horns started.

They came up over the whole Landing, one and then a second answering it and then the long rolling note that meant to the walls. Beth's head came up out of the water.

"That's the garrison," Elia said, not stopping her hands. "Standing to. He's fortifying the town and putting every adventurer team that can out after the nest. He's not taking a single chance." She ground something to powder as she looked up at Beth.

Under the water, Josh's hand drifted loose off his own leg, riding the small current of his own, and came to rest, with the unerring aim of a man three-quarters dead, flat on his wife's backside.

Beth laughed. It tore out of her before she could stop it, and she got a hand down and pressed his hand flat where it was and left it there.

"Even now," she said into his hair, laughing and crying both. "Even now, you absolute animal. And you cop a feel. I swear to God, Josh."

His mouth moved against her neck. It might have been a smile.

Margaret came back into the water itself this time, boots and skirt and all, and put the book into Beth's hands under the surface. A slim thing, dark leather, warm where it should have been cold.

"I don’t know what this will cost you; power is not free," Margaret said.

Beth braced one arm under Josh, opened the book against his chest with her free hand, and pushed a thread of her mana into it the way she pushed it into stone.

The book took it, and gave it back a thousandfold.

Light came up over the pool, white and sudden, and above her head the air folded into a knot of cloud the size of a cartwheel and turned, and thunder cracked inside the hall hard enough to shiver the water, and a fork of light stuttered down out of the little storm and went into the top of her head, and she froze with her mouth open and a soundless scream.

A panel hung in front of her eyes as she read it.

Then her jaw set, and she closed the book and handed it back, and she pulled Josh in against her until there was no water left between them at all, and she put her mouth to his ear.

"I see it," she said. "I see what you're doing, baby. Let me. Let me help you."

She shut her eyes.

And the small draw at his shoulder, the patient thread of water he'd held open with the last of himself, opened wider, and steadied, and began, for the first time, to move like it knew where it was going.

Vera watched from the bench; there was no way she was going to miss this when her team was out there. Besides, she had called her help herself, and she did not care to be told about a thing she had set in motion secondhand.

The German came in like weather. He filled the door, and then he filled the room, a big, fair man with soot worked permanently into the creases of his hands, and he took one look at the little fire Elia had going under the imbuer's cauldron and made a sound of pure contempt.

"That? That is a candle for a birthday." He crossed the floor, dropped to a crouch by the cauldron, and rubbed his hands together. "Kers is here. It is fine now."

"I called him," Vera said it flatly, and had to stop for breath in the middle of it. "You will need fire held steadier than you can hold it and brew at the same time. Kers is the best there is."

Elia looked at the huge man, and at the cauldron, and at the ingredients laid out in an order that made sense to no one but her. "This is insane. This is not how potions are made," she said hysterically. "This is not how any of it is done."

"You have already done the hard part." Vera did not raise her voice, nor did she soften it. "You stopped panicking. What is left is only work, and you are good at work, so do it."

Elia breathed out. She lifted the first dish and tipped it into the cauldron.

Across the array, Jessim made a small sound and slid sideways off his crossed legs and lay still by the water, exhausted all the way through, the cauldron's pale veins burning steady now.

"Thirty percent more heat," Elia said firmly. "Dead center, under the base, and hold it as level as you can keep it. I need the same heat to radiate."

Kers grunted, and the fire under the iron narrowed to a white column no wider than a fist and drove straight up and held there dead steady.

Somewhere above the hall an eagle screamed, and then a whole flight of them went over the spring low and fast, and even through the worked stone Vera heard the whoosh of them going, the riders lifting off, and then they were past and gone.

Elia dropped the second ingredient in, and a third, and the sweat came up on her all at once, a sheen across her face in the fire-light.

"Empower the heartwood knot, spiral pattern, and pulse," Elia said, more to herself than anyone, "and the urus weed one pulse, as hard as possible." And her mana flared, and even across the room Vera felt the strength come off her.

"Kers. Fourteen percent more, even, all the way round the belly of it."

The fire bloomed into a collar around the iron.

"Now ready yourself. On my word, I need seventy percent more, one push, held ten seconds, then straight back down to where you are. You'll feel when."

Kers's head bobbed once. Then he leaned sideways to Vera without taking his eyes off the fire, and murmured, low and easy, "I need more fuel, Schatz."

Vera stared at the side of his big soot-creased face.

Then she got up off the bench, dragged an armload of split wood over, and dropped it by his knee, and she smiled while she did it. She never did without a reason, damned man. She sat back down before anyone caught her at it.

"Okay," Elia said. "Okay, okay, okay." She reached into Margaret's basket and lifted out the last thing in it, and the whole room seemed to feel it at once. A core the size of a fist, banded green and blue, and it pulsed, slow and wet and alive, light crawling under its skin in veins.

"Heart of Treant," Elia said.

Vera's breath left her, and she let it, and pulled another in on the count. She'd heard of one. She had never seen one. She had heard that one of the Orders had put down a named Treant, and this, then, was its heart, sitting in a vault under a Basin town like a stone in a purse, and she filed the fact of it away with the rest.

Elia gulped. "Okay. I've got this. I've got this." And she dropped it in.

The mana rolling off the cauldron exploded in power.

Whatever Elia had built to that point, the neat spirals and the clean pulses, the potion turned on all of it the instant the heart went under. Power came up out of the iron in a wave Vera felt in her back teeth, a wall of raw life shoving out against the walls of the hall. It vibrated within her as well, and Elia cried out and clamped down with both hands over the cauldron, and the pressure threw her mana back like a slammed door.

"Hold it." Vera was on her feet without having chosen to be, and even standing, she kept her voice level, a rope thrown flat and hard across the room. "You do not lose this one, Elia. Tie it off and hold."

Kers didn't wait for the word. He understood the surge and spiked the fire himself, and the boil dropped a little, and it wasn't enough, and Vera could feel it not being enough. She could feel exactly what was happening in there somehow. Elia's mana was in the potion doing three things. The pure life was straining to run wild, and threaded through it were the other properties Elia had built into it. Elia was trying to combine the two, to bind the life to the cleansing properties and bind all of that into the water itself. She was working fast but not fast enough.

And it was slipping.

Vera felt the knots start to go. Elia would tie one, and the pressure would shove the next loose behind her, and she'd catch that and lose the first, and her mana was fraying at its edges from the sheer force of holding on. She could feel Elia start crying.

"Kers, more heat, MORE—"

"Wait." Vera was already moving. "Stop. It isn't the heat."

She got to Elia's side, and she pulled her mana up over her own hand and reached down past it, and she took hold of a thread of her own life and drew it up into her palm, where it sat and shone. She looked at it a moment, because she knew precisely what this would do to her again.

"Use this." She pressed her lit hand flat over Elia's wrist. "I can see what you are doing; I don't know how. Take it, and be quick about it. I have little to give, and I have no intention of spending the winter in that bed a second time on your account."

Elia's eyes went huge, white all the way around.

Then she took it while Kers narrowed his eyes at her.

And Vera felt the whole thing change in the same instant, felt Elia cut through the waves of life that poured from the potion. Where a breath before she'd been shoving at the potion and losing ground, now she cut through it, her knots holding, the life and the cleansing lacing into a weave Vera could feel drawing tight. She had no idea how she was doing it or even how she could sense it, but the power was calming as Elia bound the whole thing. The pressure broke outward, and then the cauldron was calm.

Elia's hands dropped. Vera's knees collapsed, and the two of them folded down onto the wet stone together in a heap, and Vera lay with her cheek on cold rock and her life running thin in her chest. "Not this again," she managed, dry as a stick, and passed out on the word.

"Kers," Elia said, from the floor, barely a voice at all. "Into the spring. Now."

Beth felt it before she saw it.

She had her eyes shut, and she was down in the water with Josh when the water changed.

Kers hauled the cauldron off the fire with both arms and carried it to the pool, grumbling the entire way in a voice like gravel in a bucket.

"Kers do this. Kers do that. Kers hold the fire, Kers bring the fuel, Kers pour the pot." He tipped it, and a rope of storm-blue poured out of the iron into the spring beside Josh, and where it landed, the water lit. "Would it kill one person in this room to say the please. Germans, we are passionate, yes. We are also polite. It is not so much to ask."

"Not now, Kers," Vera groaned from the floor, waking up to the sound of him complaining.

The blue spread through the pool and reached Josh and reached Beth. Beth's eyes flew open. She pulled him in, and she shut her eyes, and she reached into the bright water and got to work.

Margaret stood at the pool's edge with her ledger back in her arms and looked down at the two of them, the blue water turning slowly around them both.

"We've done what can be done," she said. "The rest is theirs to face. Caldwell. Harold must hear of this tonight, on our own channel and nowhere else. Not the relay, not a word where it can be lifted off a bird. He needs to know about these ants, and he needs to know quickly."

Caldwell's coin had gone still on the back of his hand. "We must keep this contained; if our enemies hear the Basin is breached, they may move."

"He left us a great many warnings about a great many things," Margaret said. "But not this one. A colony that size does not appear from nowhere. And I don't believe in bad luck." She looked down at Josh in the water. "It smells like foul play to me."

Caldwell contemplated that for a moment, and the coin started moving again, slow, as he did. "There aren't many powers who could put a thing like that under us blind," he said at last, and it came out reluctant. "Fewer still who'd have the reason." He looked at her. "You've got a name in your head already. I can see you not saying it."

"I have a suspicion," Margaret said, and closed the ledger over it, which was as much as anyone was going to get. "Send word when they are recovered, both of them. I have a feeling we are going to need their strength, and sooner than any of us would like."