I Only Summon Villainesses

He was standing in the mouth of the tunnel with his hands behind his back.

Amber eyes catching the green off the walls. Long hair hanging in front of his face. That filthy purple scarf slung over one shoulder.

His shirt was still torn open across the ribs, where the gash had been.

There was no gash. Just skin, and the same grey dust on it that was on everything else down here.

’...’

’No.’

The creature hit me under the arm and put me on the stone, and I barely noticed the landing, because I was busy having the most useless thought of my entire life.

’I checked your pulse. I sat there and I felt it stop under my fingers.’

The boy came in across that floor with the same unbothered ease he’d carried sitting on a rock beside his stolen lake, and every animal in the room turned toward him, and he looked at them the way you look at weather.

Then he took his hands out from behind his back.

Whatever he did happened between one breath and the next. I have gone over it a great many times since and I still cannot tell you what it was.

There was a sound like a held breath let out through teeth. I felt it in the roof of my mouth more than I heard it.

The green light in that chamber bent, all of it, inward toward him, the way light goes when it falls into something.

Something stood behind his shoulder for less than a second. I did not see its edges, and I am glad about that.

And every marked thing in that room went down at the same time.

Not dead. Down. Dropping where they stood, dozens of them, folding onto the stone in one soft awful rustle like a field going over in wind. The serpent came apart out of its own height and hit the floor in three long slack lengths. Dust came up off the ground in a slow grey sheet and took its time coming back down.

The creature made the first real sound I had heard from it. I had been in that room long enough to decide it couldn’t.

It tried to go back into the wall.

The boy tilted his head and watched it go, and he did not hurry either. One hand went back behind his back.

”You’ve had a long run.”

He was kind about it. That was the part that made my skin crawl.

”Ten years I have been walking around your smell. Do you know how much water I have not had, because of you?”

It got half of itself into the mesh.

He let it.

Then whatever had been standing behind his shoulder was not behind his shoulder any more, the wall came apart, and the thing that collected people stopped being a thing at all, in a manner I have decided not to write down.

Silence came down over that chamber. Not the kind you get when a fight ends. The kind you get when somebody turns something off.

I got up. It took a while, and most of it happened with my palms flat on the stone and my head hanging between my arms. There was grit in my teeth and blood somewhere behind them. My ribs had opinions, my knee had opinions, and the floor was carpeted in unconscious animals that had been standing a minute ago.

Across the room, the wyvern let Light go, and he came down onto the stone on his side, one arm going out too late to stop it.

The lines were draining out of his throat while I watched, sinking back under his collar and thinning as they went, and he lay there with his forearm across his eyes and his chest going hard. The wyvern put its nose against his ribs and did not move away from him again.

Off to my left, one of the four sat up in the dark, looked at his own hands, front and back, the way you check yourself for something missing, and started to cry very quietly. He was not making much of it. It just kept coming out of him. Nobody went to him. I did not go to him either, and I have thought about that since.

I turned to the boy.

He was cleaning something off his hand with the end of that scarf, working it out from between two fingers, entirely unbothered, and when he caught me watching he smiled at me with real warmth, which was worse than every other thing that had happened in the last hour.

”You are welcome.”

’...’

My hands had started doing something stupid at my sides and I made them stop. Then I found my voice somewhere, and it came out flat and strange.

”You were dead.”

He kept cleaning his hand.

”I checked your pulse. It stopped. I sat there and I felt it stop.” My throat had gone tight around the words and I kept going anyway. ”Your leg was bent the wrong way and there was a hole in your side I could have put my fist in. I propped you against a wall so you wouldn’t choke. I told you I’d send help if I found any worth sending.”

The scarf went back over his shoulder.

He looked up at me with those amber eyes, and there was nothing behind them I could read at all.

”That was kind of you.”

He meant it, too, which was the strangest part.

”Nobody has done that in a very long time.”

”That’s not—”

”It’s the only part of it that was interesting.”

He turned and started walking back toward the tunnel mouth.

”Everyone leaves. Almost nobody props you up first.”

I stood in a room full of breathing animals with my mouth open.

’Wren.’

I have nothing.

’You always have something.’

Not this time.

He stopped at the tunnel and glanced back, and the cheer came up in his face like a lamp being relit.

”Oh — your friend. The one who was bringing up blood.”

He brought it up the way you remember an errand.

”The smell will stop reaching the lake in about an hour, now. Whether that is soon enough is not really a thing anyone can tell you.”

’...’

’Ilse.’

I ran.