I Only Summon Villainesses

It took four more days and they were the longest of my life, which is a thing I have said before and keep being wrong about.

Here is what relighting a person actually looks like, in case anybody ever tells you it is a moment.

It is a woman lying on warm stone getting fractionally less cold over ninety-six hours while five people take shifts sitting beside her, and most of the work is turning her, because a body that does not move develops problems of its own and Light knew every one of them and made us all learn.

Her left side first. Two hours. Then her back. Then the right. Then up, propped against a fold of rock with somebody’s arm behind her, because Light said the lungs needed it, and that shift was the hard one and I took most of them.

On the second day her breath stopped fogging.

I had been watching for that without admitting I was watching for it. The pale ghost coming out of her had been getting thinner and then it simply was not there any more, and the air in front of her mouth stayed clear, and I sat back on my heels with my hands over my face for a while and Bren went and looked at the seam so I could do that.

On the third day the burns started.

Mine, not hers. Holding somebody upright at seventy paces means your forearms and the insides of your knees spend hours where the stone is hottest, and I had been doing the propping shifts and not mentioning it, and on the third afternoon Light took my wrist and turned my arm over and looked at the state of the underside of it.

He did not lecture me. He got Bren to take the propping and gave me the water duty, which was further out and which I resented and did anyway.

The blisters came up along both forearms in a line, which matched exactly where her weight had ridden across them, and they were still there a fortnight later, and they are there now in the shiny flat way old burns go.

On the fourth day Devant offered to take a shift.

He said it out loud, in front of everyone, in the afternoon.

He was asleep against his rock at the time the shift came round and nobody woke him, and I made the fourteenth mark on my forearm around the edge of a blister.

The wyvern moved in to fifty on the fourth night and nobody stopped it.

It had been getting better in a way none of us had had the attention to notice properly. The stump had closed over. The eye socket had stopped weeping. It was still a one-eyed three-legged thing that would never fly again and it lay down at fifty paces with its ruined side to the red and went to sleep making a low continuous sound I had never heard it make.

Light sat with it that night instead of sitting with us.

I have thought about that. He had a dying woman on one side of the camp and a maimed animal on the other, and he went to the one that was going to live.

And on the fifth morning, a little before what we were calling dawn, Ilse’s breath came out warm.

Bren had the shift. She woke me by standing on my hand.

I got over there on my knees and put my face down close to hers, closer than I have ever put it, and I waited through two breaths that gave me nothing and on the third one I felt it come out across my cheek.

Warm.

Not much. The warmth of a person, not the warmth of whatever she used to be. But it came out of her and it went over my skin and it was hers.

’...There she is.’

I sat back.

I want to say something dignified about that moment and I cannot, because what I actually did was laugh, once, very loudly, in a cave, at four in the morning, which woke the big man up and frightened him badly.

Bren sat down flat on the stone with her hands in her lap and grinned at nothing, and the big man, who had been woken twice now and had understood neither time, went and sat beside her and grinned as well out of pure solidarity.

After that it went faster.

Her colour came back over the next day in patches, the way heat comes into a cold hand. The black at the corners of her mouth flaked off when Bren washed it, and under it her lip had split at some point in the last week and healed crooked, and none of us had seen it happen. Her hands went from not-cold to actually warm, and then to warmer than mine, and then to a temperature that made me take my hand off her sternum and look at Light.

”Is that supposed to keep going?”

He had a thumb on the pulse in her throat and he was counting.

”I do not know.”

”Devant said—”

”Devant said she would not wake at all.” Light’s eyes stayed on the count. ”That was this morning.”

’Which means she wakes today.’

By the afternoon she was too hot to hold comfortably.

By evening the stone under her had gone dry in a patch the shape of her back, and we moved her out to eighty, and then to a hundred, and then to a hundred and forty where the air was only pleasant, and she went on getting hotter the whole way out.

Light stopped moving her when we ran out of shelf.

He stood there with his hands on his hips and looked down at a woman glowing through her own skin like a stone taken out of a fire, and said the first genuinely uncertain thing I have ever heard him say.

”I have no idea whether this is it working or it going wrong.”

Behind us, at the edge of the firelight, Devant got up off his rock and started walking away from the seam.

Not hurrying. He never hurries.

But he took his cup with him, and he did not come back that night, and I noticed and I did not say anything to anybody, and I have wondered since what would have happened if I had.