I Only Summon Villainesses

She woke at a hundred and forty paces with her hands in the grit and her horns already up.

I know that because I was watching them. They had come up sometime in the night, two blunt dark curves pushing out through the hairline, and they had not gone back down the way they always do, and I had been sitting there for three hours failing to decide whether to tell anyone.

Her eyes opened and found the roof of the cavern and then found me.

“…Cade.”

‘Oh, thank every god there is.’

I had eleven days of things saved up to say to her and what came out was:

“You look terrible.”

Ilse lay there and breathed for a while.

“You are crying.”

“It’s the heat.”

“It is a hundred and forty paces away.”

“It’s a very strong heat.”

She closed her eyes and something happened at the corner of her mouth that I am going to call a smile because nobody can stop me.

Then she tried to sit up, and got halfway, and made a sound.

I have heard that woman make noises through a cracked rib and a torn shoulder and nine hours of being carried. This was not that. This was somebody putting their hand into a place they did not expect to be full.

Light was there before I was, which is becoming a pattern I intend to complain about later.

“Slowly.”

“I am—” She got her elbow under her and stopped. “Something is wrong with me.”

“Your temperature is wrong with you,” Light said, with two fingers at her throat and his face doing the thing it does when he is frightened and refuses to be. “You are running hotter than any person I have touched.”

“It hurts.”

“Where.”

“Everywhere. Under everything.” Her hand went flat on her own chest, the same place I had had my palm every night for a week. “It is too much. There is too much of it and it has nowhere to be.”

‘Ah, damn…’

Bren had gone for water and stopped where she stood, and the big man had stood up without meaning to, and I got up off the stone and went to find the only person in this hole who had ever watched this happen before.

He was sitting forty paces back with his knees up, exactly where he had been all night, and he had been listening to every word.

“You said she would not wake.”

“So I did.”

“She’s cooking from the inside.”

“No.” Devant looked past me at the shape of her against the rock. “She is full.”

“Explain that.”

“A Drakonir fire is a thing that gets used.” He turned the cup in his hands. “It runs a body, it goes out through the skin as heat, it burns whatever they eat. Hers went out entirely. She has been empty for eleven days and we have spent five of them pouring a seam into her, and now she is holding more of it than a half-blood body is built to hold and none of it has anywhere to go.”

“Then how does it go.”

“It goes the way it always goes. Out.”

“Out how.”

The boy looked up at me with those amber eyes and said nothing at all, and let me arrive at it on my own, which I did, standing in a cave with my forearms burned and my hands in fists.

‘Oh, you have got to be joking…’

Because of course it was that. In this life, at this depth, with my luck. Of course the thing a burning half-dragon needs and the thing that fills the well I have not been able to fill for eleven days are the same thing, and of course I am the only person here who can be on both ends of it.

I stood there and did a great deal of arithmetic very fast.

Then I did the part I am not proud of, which was to notice, in a small clear voice somewhere at the back, that this would also fix me.

‘That’s a filthy thought and I’m having it anyway.’

Here is the part that matters, though, and I need to put it down properly because it is the first genuinely useful thing I have worked out since the flood.

I cannot do this on my own. I have proved that eleven times. I go out past the light with one job and I come back with kindling and no memory of the walk, and I have watched it happen from the inside and I still cannot hold on to it.

But every one of those eleven times, I was alone.

Every single one. Out past the firelight, in a side passage, in a hollow with my back to the rock. Eleven attempts and not one of them with another living person in reach.

‘It has never once been tested with somebody else in the room…’

I do not know that it makes a difference. I have no reason to think it does.

But whatever is standing between me and that thought has only ever had to stop one man in the dark, and it has never had to stop two people who both want the same outcome for entirely separate reasons.

Behind me, Light said Ilse’s name once, sharply, and I turned around.

She was on her feet.

She should not have been on her feet. Eleven days flat on her back, ribs Light cracked himself, and she was standing at a hundred and forty paces with one hand on the rock and the horns up and steam coming off both shoulders in the cold air above the seam-warm stone.

She was looking at me.

Not at the party. Not at Light, who had his hand out toward her. At me, across forty feet of warm rock, the way she looked at me in the dark under the slab when she asked whether it worked on a human, except there was nothing measured in it now and nothing patient and nothing of the woman who counts paces.

Bren picked up the water skins without being told and started walking the big man away toward the wyvern, and she did it without looking at anybody, and I will owe her for that for the rest of my life.

Light stayed where he was for a moment.

Then he took his hand back, and said, “I will be at fifty with the animal,” and went, and did not look round.

Devant was already gone.

Ilse came off the rock and took one step, and her legs held her, and she took another.

“Cade.”

Her voice had gone somewhere I had not heard it go.

“You have been carrying me for eleven days.”

“Ten and a half. Let’s be accurate.”

“And you have not slept.”

“I’ve slept a bit.”

“And you cannot do the thing you need to do.” She took another step and stopped an arm’s length off, and the heat came off her onto my face the way it had come up out of the seam. “Can you.”

“No,” I said. “I can’t.”

Ilse looked at me for a long moment with her fire lit and nowhere to put it.

“Then it is fortunate,” she said, “that I am not asking you to do it alone.”