I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 515: Reconnaissance

‘…Wren?’

I said it to the dark upstream like a fool, like the dark might answer, and the awful thing was that I meant it.

Every scrap of the guard I’d held together for two hours came off in that one word, and I didn’t try to put it back.

I was too tired to be anything but honest, kneeling on the cold shelf with two fingers gone and a monster in the deep water at my back, and the honest thing was that I had been looking for her since the moment I woke on the stones, under the flame and the chains and the running, the whole time.

Death Sense held the small bright weight of her steady in the black. She was moving and coming closer with every beat, riding the same current that had done its level best to unmake me.

I understood it then, and it was the closest thing to a kindness the Precipice had shown me all night. The river had taken us both. The flood that tore the roof down and folded the Archmage like paper and swept me off into the dark had reached back upstream, to wherever she’d fallen when the first Lost Mouth dragged me away, and it had gathered her up too. The same water.

The same pull, all going one way whether it agreed or not. It had scattered us at the start of the night and now, with no opinion on the matter at all, it was carrying her down the exact channel it had carried me.

She’d found the easy road to me. She’d found it by being thrown down the same drain.

‘Of course,’ I breathed, and something in my chest that had been clenched since chapter one of this long ugly night let go by a single degree. ‘Of course you did.’

Then she came out of the water.

Not floating. Not tumbling the wreck the flood had made of me. She broke the black surface of the river point-first and she flew, a light of pale steel rising out of the torrent with the water sheeting off her in ribbons that caught the sick green light, and she crossed the last of the dark between us in one clean line, the way she only ever moved when she’d decided on something.

No hand guided her. No summoner called her. She simply came, because I was here and she had found me, and the sword that was White Feather’s daughter did not need me to tell her that.

I got my good hand up out of pure instinct.

The hilt met my palm the way it always had, and my ruined fingers, the whole ruined rest of me, closed around her before I’d decided to, and for one moment I just held on. That’s all.

Knelt there on the wet stone with a river roaring past and a god dying in the deep water and held onto a sword like she was the only fixed thing in a world that had spent the night trying to drown me, and did not say a single one of the things that were pushing up behind my teeth.

Because if I said them, I’d stop. And I couldn’t stop yet.

‘…You took your time,’ is what I said instead. My voice came out wrecked. ‘Went for a swim. Very relaxing. Meanwhile I’m down here doing all the work.’

She was usually a talkative, but this time, she was silent, her steel warmed under my hand in that way she had, the faint answering thrum that ran up my arm and into the hollow behind my ribs, and it said the thing back to me without saying anything at all, and I had to look at the ceiling for a second and blink at the dripping dark until my eyes behaved.

Then I felt her properly, and the relief soured.

Because she’d been through it too.

The thrum wasn’t right. It was there, it was hers, but it came thin and uneven, guttering the way my own flame guttered now, and when I ran my thumb down the flat of her, the steel that should have been flawless caught on a roughness partway to the tip.

A flaw in the edge. A dullness in the metal where the river had ground her against the same rocks it had ground me against, hour on hour, all the long way down. She’d fought the same current I had, without lungs to burn or legs to tire, and she’d lost something to it just as I had.

‘Yeah. I know. Me too.’

Two ruined things, and now three, all washed up on the same shelf of green-lit rock. It should have been funny. Given a full well and both hands and an hour’s sleep I’d have found the joke in it. Down here I just held her a little tighter and let the not-funny of it sit where it was.

But here is the thing that changed, and it changed everything, and I felt the shape of it settle into place the moment her weight was in my hand.

I’d fought the whole of this night without her. Well not without her but to simply say… without a sword.

I needed a sword.

Every burn, every chain, every desperate cheap step through the dark, I’d done it as a summoner with an empty hand and a scattered kit, half of me missing and not even knowing which half.

That was why it had all been survival. That was why the maths kept coming back no. A summoner is not the sum of his attributes. A summoner is his bond and the thing that bond puts in his hand, and mine had been at the bottom of a river all night while I bled.

One of those bond was Wren another was my swordsmanship that Kassie had been grooming since day one.

Wren was in my hand now… which pretty much solved other things.

Even though she was diminished, dulled, thrummming thin and hurt, the both of us held together with scar tissue and spite. But in my hand.

And in the deep water at my back, that vast dimmed weight had gone very still, and Death Sense told me the three red coals had turned, slow, from wherever the wound had sent them cowering, back toward the shelf. Toward the small warm thing that a minute ago had been alone and kneeling and all but finished.

The small warm thing that wasn’t alone anymore.

I made it to my feet. I don’t know how. The thigh screamed and the well stayed dry and the green light swam, but I got up off my knees with Wren’s hilt in my good hand and her thin hurt thrum steadying against my palm, and I turned to face the deep water, and the coals rose to meet me.

“Alright,” I muttered to myself. My voice had stopped shaking. I noticed that with mild surprise, filed it, moved on. “Alright. So we’re both still here. Both still ugly, both still standing.”

The Archmage lifted its ruined head out of the black, three red eyes narrowing to slits against the coming of something it had learned, an hour ago, to be wary of.

I set my feet. Felt her weight settle true. And for the first time since I’d woken up alone on the stones, the number in my head came back as something other than no.

“Let’s finish what the river started.”