"Juda...your hand..."
Juda barely heard Roth the first time, too fixated on the open doorway and the empty space beyond it, the dark moon bruising the clouds with the same violet quartz hue that had stained Elara's fingers.
"Juda..."
It wasn't Roth's voice that roused him to move, but when his guardian reached for his wrist, the warmth of his hand sparking a revulsion that Juda knew was likely to either become some violent thing or make him vomit right there on the floor, between the blood and the spilt wine.
"I can do it," he said, snatching back his arm and ignoring the flicker of hurt in Roth's eyes. He didn't want Roth's needy fucking attempt at parenting then. He'd never wanted it. But his guardian had this awful ball-shrinking way of caring too much when Juda had never once asked him to.
Moving to the scullery, Juda grabbed a cloth and pressed it to his palm. She'd caught him well with the blade. It wasn't particularly deep, but enough to peel open his skin and sting like a bastard. Enough to make him bleed.
When he returned to Roth, his guardian was slumped at the table, his hand gripping the flask of wine. So typical of him now to drown it all away and sink into oblivion, but not before Juda got what he wanted. He'd make sure of it, even if it meant pinning his other hand to the wood with his scimitar.
"Speak then," Juda said, leaning his shoulder against the scullery doorframe, while wrapping the cloth around his hand and tucking the ends into the bind.
Roth didn't look up.
"She called you a butcher. What did you do?"
When Roth just lifted the flask and drank straight from it, the wine dripping down his beard, Juda's anger flared.
"Roth!"
Roth slammed the flask down onto the table. "I did what I was ordered, boy! Just as you do every time you fight to the death in the bloody square. Just as you did at the portside. Just as you will continue to do every bastard tide until the deed is done and the King is dead!"
His sudden burst of fury faded as quickly as it had come. "We do what we have to do," he mumbled. His expression flickered, suddenly remembering. "Did you get it? Tell me you got it."
There was a desperation in his tone that Juda cared not to hear. A nervous edge to his gaze. He thought about denying it, telling Roth it was nowhere to be found, but that would be pointless. His guardian would know him for a liar, especially as it was he who had concealed it in the Naiad catacombs in the first place.
Juda sighed. "Yes. Yes, I got it, segian."
Roth frowned at that but gestured with a nod of his head. "Then fetch it. Bring it here."
As Elara had been doing battle with her ghosts in the dark waters of the divining pool, Juda had found that which he had been searching for and concealed it inside his knapsack, the treasure wrapped in a strange cloth that had reminded Juda of a baby's shroud. He'd redressed in his leather vest and placed the knapsack on his back, ready for her return, or for him to leave—whichever path the dead gods sought for him.
Retrieving the knapsack, he removed the wrapped treasure and placed it on the table, sliding it towards Roth who sat up straight, as if Juda had pushed a swarm viper under his nose. For a moment, Roth did nothing, just stared at it, but then he swallowed and using both hands, he unwrapped it, delicately, carefully, as if what was inside would crumble to dust if treated with a firmer touch.
When it was done, he sat back in the chair, putting distance between himself and the treasure he'd sent Juda into the catacombs to find.
The onyx dagger was a strange looking thing, unlike anything Juda had ever seen. The blade was thin, no more than two fingers width, set into a horizontal grip hilt made of bone. Upon the hilt, engravings lined the edge and the same etchings wrapped around the bolster and down both flanks of the blade itself. When he'd examined the dagger in the temple, Juda thought there something familiar about the script. It was not unlike the Naiad rock tapestry, but still markedly different as if maybe the old language of the witches—Naiada, she'd told him—had been borne from this.
All Juda had ever known about this knife, was that Roth had insisted it was the only weapon that could kill the King. He'd never known why—after all, surely the man was flesh and bone and blood, just like everyone else—but he was starting to think that he did know now, and the thought of it stirred a touch of nausea in his stomach and throat.
In fact, Roth's clear repulsion of the blade mirrored in his repulsion of himself, made Juda realise he understood far more without Roth having to explain it.
"You bled them with this knife, didn't you? The Naiad."
Roth closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.
"You captured them. Dragged them through the streets. Some you hung from the palace walls, but not many. Just enough to give the people the spectacle they wanted. Most you took to him. You bled them, using this dagger. And then you gave that blood to the King to feast upon. And now, because of the power the Naiad blood gave him—some immortal leaning, I don't know—the only way he can be killed is by the same blade."
His guardian threw his head back and laughed, finally opening his eyes, his steady, cold gaze resting upon Juda in the same way he'd often seen Roth looking at him of late.
"Oh, Juda—boy—at least we can rely on you to deliver fact as emotionless as always."
"Fact needs no emotion," Juda retorted.
"Is that all it is? Fact? Accounts consigned to history books?" Roth shook his head. "But we wouldn't find these facts in the King's Vaults, would we?"
"You tell me." Juda shrugged. "It's your library, after all."
"No, boy, it's his library. It's the place I was sent as punishment for my failure. Of course, perhaps I should have been grateful that the dishonour didn't look like a dishonour." Roth scraped his teeth over his lower lip as he eyed the blade, before sniffing. "If I had a been more honourable man, I would have cared. Instead, I was glad of it. Glad to be assigned to shelves covered in dust and narrow corridors full of ghosts that didn't haunt me. How the mighty fell, eh?"
Juda frowned. Punishment? This was the first time Roth had ever talked of his role as Master Librarian being a punishment. He'd always seemed so at ease there, so much so that sometimes Juda wondered how he'd ever been Special Commander at all.
"If you followed your orders, as you said, why were you punished? What was your failure?" he asked.
"She was," Roth said, reaching out and brushing his fingers over the etchings on the hilt. "The girl's mother. Her name was Eva Victori and she was the last. Or at least, so it was thought." He smiled, lost in some memory. "I was punished, relieved of my duty because he wanted all of her blood, and all he got was a mere taste of it. The rest of it died with her. We made sure of that."
"We?"
"Eva and me."
"You were...together?"
Roth stared at him then, wide, bleary eyes. He shook his head. "No, no...she was a beauty, make no mistake, but no, it was never like that. I didn't know her until the tide we cornered her by the Setalah in Grimefell. And after, well...Naiad captives never lasted long once they were taken to the palace. Dageor made sure of it..." He hesitated. "As did I. Goodness, those first tides when the culling began. It was...a bloodbath. A massacre. Sometimes I feared I would never scrub it from my skin. Sometimes I look down and still see it on my hands, my clothes, my boots."
He glanced at Juda. "I never killed her, Juda. Despite what your Elara thinks she saw, I never killed Eva. She saw me carrying her body, yes, that much is true. I did. I carried her back to the King and laid her corpse at his feet to prove she was dead. They were terrified, you see. Him and Dageor. This damned prophecy of the Druvari. The last water witch was to finally bring an end to his reign, and when she escaped..."
Juda pulled at the chair opposite Roth and sat down, pressing his thumb against the cloth, and feeling the sting of it. There was a strange comfort in the pain. Something that offset the emptiness he felt at her leaving.
"Did you aid her escape?"
Roth sighed. "Oh, but I had! Maybe she would have lived...or maybe it was already too late for that."
He smiled again, sadness haunting his face and Juda understood then. All the times he had seen that in Roth's eyes and had wondered why. He'd always assumed it was for him, for Aleina, but maybe it had been for her—this Eva— and maybe for himself.
"Fearsome, she was. Even in captivity, there was something quite formidable about her. I assumed it was just pride. She never let it beat her, do you see? Even when we started to bleed her, she would show Dageor no fear. He sought it, of course, the dark-hearted sack of shit that he is."
"And you? Did you seek her fear?"
There was no judgement there, not from Juda. He'd spent much of his time as a novice relying on others' fear, but Roth still met his question with shame in his eyes.
"I think maybe I did," he said. "Not for the same reason as the priest though. Her fear would have given some balance. I would have understood that. Instead, she showed nothing but contempt. Like we were all beneath her—even the King. She carried herself like a goddess, Juda. If only you had seen her..."
But Juda had seen her, in the face of her daughter, and he understood Roth's words only too well. He thought of Elara in the Naiad temple, the power of the water at her fingertips. The way she had looked at Koh-Miralus struggling beneath her, like he was nothing. The way she had looked at Juda earlier this moontide as she'd fucked him.
"The way she handled us all," Roth continued. "The way she spoke. I was never one for prophecies and tall tales, boy. I deal in life and death and blood and that is all, but I believed in her. I believed she was the last; the one they spoke of. The one they feared."
Roth took a swig straight from the flask, offering it to Juda who shook his head. The wine would dullen him, that was certain, but Juda needed the pain then. He needed the sharp sting of it in his chest, the way it burned in his throat.
"How she persuaded them to stop, I will never know. It was like...sorcery. In fact, I often wondered if it was." He rubbed his palm over his mouth, tugging on his beard. "But I think it was just her. She had this way about her, almost...hypnotic. A master manipulator. We had not seen sight nor sound of any Naiad for some time and Dageor had been crowing about it, about how he was convinced we had seen the last of them, and then we discovered her hiding out in the slums. I think maybe that is why the priest despised her so very much. More so than all the rest. Because she'd proved him wrong. The King himself...well, he was quite enamoured of her. That's how she got him...using his own lust for long life against him. And maybe his actual lust too."
He stopped, pulling a face that made him look much older than he was. Some stain of disgust that heightened the deep lines around his eyes and darkened the shadows that bled into his cheekbones.
"There were whispers that a Naiad had rejected him. The first one that was slain. The palace was rife with talk that he was so angered and humiliated she did not want him that he vowed to end them all, but that rumour was silenced as quick as it had begun. Of course, I knew the Druvari were behind the plot to kill them, the prophecy, the discovery of the old priest's dagger."
He touched a hand to the cloth this time, brushing his thumb over the embroidered edge. "But Eva...she was smart. So fucking smart. I don't know I would have had the foresight to think of such a thing, to even dare to try. She appealed to his desires, telling him that if he bled her to the death, then his reign would not last as long as he would hope, that the power in his veins would eventually fade. She suggested that he keep her alive, use her, bleed her, yes, but keep her alive. A constant source, she said. In return, she would lift the dark magic with which her foremothers had cursed Druvaria when the King and Dageor had first started their campaign to destroy them."
"And he believed her?" Juda asked.
"He wanted to believe her," Roth replied. "That was part of her power. She made people want. She made them believe. It was...remarkable, really it was. And so, he agreed, much to Dageor's alarm. The priest—while understanding the power of the Naiad blood would eventually lead to the end of the King's reign if it could not be sustained—was more terrified about the prophecy. Keep her alive and the chance of that prophecy coming to pass was substantially more likely. The King though, had other ideas. Awful, nightmarish ideas. How many of his bastard children have made it past their first few tides on this rock, Juda? None, because to keep them alive was of no benefit to him and would only increase the chance of one of his heirs trying to succeed him. But the King thought to not end the Naiad, after all. He suggested to Dageor that any children of the last water witch could serve a purpose and that instead of bringing about the end of his reign, maybe her and their offspring could be the one to sustain it, strengthen it, strengthen him with their blood."
Even Juda recoiled at that. "He would bleed his own?"
"The King is mad, Juda, so drunk on his own power he would do anything. Dageor and the Druvari have convinced him he is a god now and who amongst us would relinquish divinity?" Roth shook his head, grimacing. "As it happens, he was never to get the chance. While he wasted time arguing his plan with Dageor, Eva had other ideas. She escaped, with the Druvari dagger—how, I still do not know but I paid for it nevertheless—and she ended up in the Naiad temple, which is where I found her."
He drank from the flask again, a longer draught this time, his eyes reddened and wet.
"She was dying, Juda. The bleeding had been too much for her body to bear and she'd known it. All the time she was manipulating the King to believe her, and it was already too late. She said she wanted to die there, in the place of her foremothers, where she could hear their song as she took her final breath."
Juda stared at him, feeling a rot twist inside his stomach, and thinking about how it had made him feel to know Elara might have died there also, had the waters rejected her as Unchosen.
"And how did Special Commander Roth Vi-Garran go from being the King's Hand to being the Hand of a Naiad?"
Roth's eyes found his, a bone-burying scrutiny that reminded Juda of when he was a boy and it was all he could do not to wither under his guardian's gaze, despite how much he pretended it didn't bother him.
"Do you remember the lesson of Gal-Gethrin, taken from her account of the Battle of Dor-Scourge?"
Juda didn't need to think. He'd stood almost a half moontide with that fucking book balanced on his outstretched arms until he thought his muscles would turn to mulch and his bones to water. He never forgot the lesson after that though.
"There is a limit to every man. That time when, whether through moons of torturous endurance or a sudden splitting of marrow and heart, they realise the tyranny of power can no longer go unchallenged. Acceptance will be stretched taut, patience eradicated, and only then, will the violence of the soul take back that which has been lost. Battle must commence, in all its worldly forms, underhand or open, but always true. Only then will man learn his name and it will be Resistance."
Roth nodded, clearly pleased his ward had remembered.
"I reached my limit, and it was a river made of the blood of women and children. I learned my name and it was Shame. They haunted me relentlessly, Juda. Their faces. Their screams. And so they should for I deserved every single one. I still do. There is a limit to every man and what I did to the Naiad in his name was mine."
Roth reached for the knife, wrapping his fingers around the horizontal hilt. "When Eva escaped and I found her, I knew I would do her bidding. There was no question, no inner struggle with it. She informed me that the dagger would be the only weapon that could kill him, told me to conceal it in the temple, carry her body back to him as proof of her demise and seal up the shaft that led to the temple. The waters had showed her, she said, that there would come a tide when I would know it was time, and I would return to retrieve the only weapon that could kill King Aldolus Ban-Keren."
He touched the blade edge to his palm, the engraved metal lying flush against the scar Juda had inflicted many moons before.
"She was right, of course." He smiled, almost wistful. "I did know when it was time. And it was the day I awoke to find my hand pinned to the desk, pissing blood all over my parchments, and staring into your face. That was the tide I began to believe in prophecies, boy. That was the tide I learned to believe in you."
Juda swallowed. "But I was just a boy."
"No, Juda, you were never just that," Roth replied. "You were my Roar, my Rage, my Fight, my Resistance. I knew it the moment I realised you were Aleina's son. And I think you knew it too, even if you insisted on fighting me every step of the fucking way. You believed. Only now, things are different, aren't they? You believe in her. The Naiad. The truly last water witch."
Juda shook his head, scowling. "No...I don't...that is to say, I wouldn't..."
"And I would thank you not to insult me with your brogboar shit lies, boy."
Juda's mouth snapped shut at the poison laced in Roth's tone. It was a rare tide that he knew not what to say to Roth. His wayward tongue had got him into enough trouble over the many moons since he'd been taken in as Roth's ward. Every barb had been matched with one of his own, even if it meant he'd feel his guardian's knuckles on his jaw or the slap of a hefty tome around the back of his skull.
But what could he say to this?
He didn't want to believe in Elara. Fuck, he didn't want her at all.
And yet he did, and he knew he was losing the battle—maybe the only battle he had ever lost in his entire life. Each moment since he'd met her had told him he would never reach his limit, not when it came to her. He just wanted more and while it was undoubtedly torturous, Juda loved the pain—fuck, he wasn't even sure how he could live without the agony now.
Roth sighed and prodded the tip of the blade against the edge of the scar, coaxing a bead of blood to the surface which he studied carefully.
"I thought as much," he said, licking away the blood and sucking the taste of it from his tongue, before looking at him, a keen coldness in his gaze. "The question is, Juda Vikaris, son of Aleina, what do we do with this newfound faith of yours? How are we to use it to kill a god..."
He smiled thinly, twisting the dagger so that Juda could see his own reflection in the metal.
"...and raise up a goddess in his place?"