I Only Summon Villainesses

Light was sitting up when we came back into the chamber.

He had his back against the wall and one knee drawn up and the wyvern’s head across his lap, and he was working his fingers slowly through the ridge of scales behind its jaw the way you do with something that has decided to live on you. The lines were gone off his throat. What they left behind was a faint grey tracery under the skin, like an old burn that had healed badly.

He saw me first. Then he saw Ilse in my arms. Then he saw the boy.

His hand came off the wyvern and went to the sword beside him.

”Don’t.”

I got that out before he was halfway up.

”He’s the reason your head is your own. Whatever you’re about to do, do it later.”

Light stopped with his weight on the balls of his feet and did not sit back down, and I decided that was as good as I was getting.

Devant strolled past both of us into the middle of that room and looked around at dozens of unconscious animals with the mild interest of a man reading a notice board.

I set Ilse down against the wall where the stone was driest, and folded my coat under her head, and watched her breath go out of her without fogging anything at all. She had never fogged. I had started measuring it anyway.

Then I went to find the four.

Three of them were sitting where they had woken. One was on his feet at the far end of the chamber, going along the wall with his hands on it, looking for a door that would take him somewhere other than here.

I had been imagining survivors. What I got was people.

A woman somewhere past fifty with a face like a closed shop. A man young enough that his beard had not committed to anything. A big one with a wrestler’s shoulders and a completely empty look. And the one at the wall.

The young one had been the crying one. He had stopped by then. The stopping was worse.

”Can you walk?”

They all looked at me. Nobody answered.

I tried it again, slower.

”I’m not going to leave you here. There’s nothing here. The thing that was keeping you is dead and this place will fill back up with something else inside a week, and none of you have a weapon or a light or any idea which direction is which.” I crouched down, which my knee had opinions about. ”So I need to know who can walk.”

The older woman spoke first. Her voice came out ruined, the way they all sounded, like something that had been stored badly.

”How long were we in here.”

’...’

’Oh no.’

’Don’t ask me that. Please don’t ask me that.’

I made myself hold her eyes while I did it. ”I don’t know. I’ve been in the Precipice for weeks and I stopped counting the second week. It could have been a year for you. It could have been more. Do you maybe remember the last gate you were in?”

She was unresponsive for a moment then she subtly shook her head.

”I can’t remember...”

Then her hand came up and lay flat on her own chest, over the sternum, like she was checking something was still under there. ”Bren. I can walk.”

That was the only name I got that day, and I have hung onto it since.

The big one could walk. The young one could walk if somebody kept a hand near him. The one at the wall would not turn around.

I left him for later and went back to have the argument I had been dreading since the lake.

Light was exactly where I had left him.

”You want to take them.”

”Yes.”

”Down.”

”Yes.”

”With her.” A tilt of his chin at Ilse, and there was nothing cruel in it, which somehow made it land harder. ”Cade. Look at what you are carrying and then say the sentence out loud.”

’He’s not wrong.’

’He’s never wrong. It’s the single worst thing about him.’

I counted it off on fingers I could not entirely feel. ”Eleven days. Maybe twelve. There’s heat down there and heat is the only thing that fixes what’s wrong with her, and I’m going because I was going anyway, and they’re coming because leaving them is the same as killing them slowly instead of quickly.”

Light looked at me for a long moment.

Then he crouched, and put his palm flat on the ground beside the wyvern, and gave us the thing nobody had wanted to say.

”It cannot make eleven days.”

The wyvern’s eye came open.

I looked at that leg. I had been not-looking at it since the lair, and it had been opened twice, and the second one had gone deep enough that the flesh around it had gone shiny and tight and wrong.

”Then we go slow.” I did not look away from the leg while I said it, which was its own kind of admission.

”You do not have slow. You have twelve days and a woman who has less.”

”Then we carry it.”

”It weighs what a horse weighs.”

”Then I’ll think of something!”

It came out louder than I meant, and it went out across that chamber and came back off four walls, and every one of the four flinched, and I stood there hating myself.

”Look — I don’t have this figured out. I’m not going to stand here and pretend. I’ve got a woman dying, a lizard that can’t walk, four people who can’t fight, a knee that’s a rumour, and a guide I wouldn’t trust to hold my coat.”

Behind me, Devant made a small pleased noise.

”So no. I don’t have a plan. I’ve got a direction and a lot of stubbornness.” I turned back to Light. ”Come or don’t. But if you’re coming, stop telling me what won’t work and start telling me what will, because you’re the only person here who’s ever organised anything.”

Light held my eyes.

Then the wyvern got up.

It did it badly. It took three attempts and the last one came with a sound I felt in my back teeth, and it stood there swaying on three legs with its ruined wings half open for balance.

And then it walked, slowly, past Light, and stopped beside me, and stood there.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Light let out a long breath through his nose.

”Fine.”

”Fine?”

”You are going to get us all killed, and my summon has apparently already voted.” He picked his sword up off the stone and slung it across his back with the flat economy of a man who had done it ten thousand times. ”Somebody has to organise it. Since it will not be you.”

’...’

’Wren, did I just win an argument?’

You lost the argument. The lizard won it. Try to remember the difference.

We spent what passed for the rest of the day getting ready to leave, which mostly meant Light going through the chamber taking anything off the dead things that could be used, and being unbearably good at it. Hide, sinew, two teeth the length of my hand. He laid it all out in rows and made the big one carry the rows.

I sat with Ilse and put water into her, a mouthful at a time, most of it coming back out at the corner.

And around the time the others were sorting out what they could carry, Wren stopped circling the thing she had been circling for two days.

Cade.

’Mm.’

Your well.

’...Yeah.’

You need it full. Not for you. She is going to stop breathing on this walk and the only person here who might do anything about that is you, and you cannot even light a candle.

’I know.’

Then you know what it takes. There is one way and it does not require anybody’s permission and you have been putting it off since the flood.

’I know, Wren.’

Then go and do it. Twenty minutes. Nobody will look.

’...Yeah. I will.’

I meant it when I said it. I want that recorded, because it is the only part of this I am sure about.

I got up and I found a side passage off the chamber where the glow gave out, and I went into it far enough that the sound of the others went thin, and I stood there in the dark with my back to the rock.

And then I was checking on Ilse.

I do not remember deciding to walk back. I remember standing in the passage, and I remember the cold of the wall coming through my shirt, and the next thing in my head with any edges on it is me crouched beside her with two fingers on her throat, counting.

’...’

’When did I come back?’

I opened my mouth to ask Wren and found I did not want to.

That is a strange sentence and I have thought about it a great deal since. Not embarrassment. I have done worse things than that in worse places than this and made jokes while I did them.

I simply did not want to look at it. The way you do not want to look at a drop.

Across the chamber, Devant was crouched beside the wyvern’s bad leg with his head tilted, saying something to it that I could not hear.

He had told me that morning he had no interest in the animal.