“But there’s no one else!” Rojer said. “If you don’t lead the war, who will?”
The Painted Man shrugged. “Not my problem. I won’t force war on anyone. All I aim to do is make sure that anyone who wants to fight, can. Once that boulder shifts, I mean to get out of the way.”
“But why?” Rojer asked.
“Because he doesn’t think he’s human,” Leesha said, reproach clear in her tone. “He thinks he’s so tainted by coreling magic that he’s as much a danger to us as they are, even though there ’s not a shred of proof.”
The Painted Man glared, but Leesha glared right back. “There ’s proof,” he said finally.
“What?” Leesha asked, her voice softening but still skeptical.
The Painted Man looked at Rojer, who shrank back under the glare. “What I say stays in this cottage,” he warned. “If I hear even a hint of it in a song or tale…”
Rojer held his hands up. “Swear by the sun as it shines. Not a whisper.”
The Painted Man eyed him, finally nodding. His eyes dropped as he spoke. “It’s…uncomfortable for me, in the forbidding.”
Rojer’s eyes went wide, and Leesha inhaled a sharp breath, holding it as her mind raced. Finally, she forced herself to exhale. She had sworn to find a cure for the Painted Man, or at least the details of his condition, and she meant to keep that vow. He’d saved her life, and that of everyone in the Hollow. She owed him that much and more.
“What are the symptoms?” she asked. “What happens when you step onto the ward?”
“There’s…resistance,” the Painted Man said. “Like I’m walking against a strong gust of wind. I feel the ward warming beneath my feet, and myself getting cold. When I walk through the town, it’s like wading through hip- deep water. I pretend otherwise, and no one seems to notice, but I know.”
He turned to Leesha, his eyes sad. “The forbiddance wants to expel me, Leesha, as it would any demon. It knows I don’t belong among men any longer.”
Leesha shook her head. “Nonsense. The ward’s siphon is just drawing away some of the magic you’ve absorbed.”
“It’s not just that,” the Painted Man said. “The Cloaks of Unsight make me dizzy, and I can feel warded blades warm and sharpen at my touch. I fear I become more demon every day.”
Leesha took one of the warded glass vials from her apron pocket and handed it to him. “Crush it.”
The Painted Man shrugged, squeezing as hard as he could. Stronger than ten men, he could easily shatter glass, but the vial resisted even his grip.
“Painted glass,” the Painted Man said, examining the vial. “So what? I taught you that trick myself.”
“That wasn’t charged till you touched it,” Leesha said. The Painted Man’s eyes widened.
“Proof of what I’m saying,” he said.
“The only thing it proves is that we need more tests,” Leesha said. “I’ve finished copying your tattoos and studying them. I think the next step is to start experimenting on volunteers.”
“What?!” Rojer and the Painted Man asked in unison.
“I can make a stain from blackstem leaves that will stay in the skin no more than two weeks,” Leesha said. “I can perform controlled tests and mark the results. I’m certain we can—”
“Absolutely not,” Arlen said. “I forbid it.”
“You forbid?” Leesha asked. “Are you the Deliverer, to order folk about? You can forbid me nothing, Arlen Bales of Tibbet’s Brook.”
He glared at her, and Leesha wondered if perhaps she had pushed him too far. His back arched like a hissing cat, and for a moment she was afraid he would leap at her, but she stood fast. Finally, he deflated.
“Please,” he said, his tone softening. “Don’t risk it.”
“People are going to imitate you,” Leesha said. “Already Jona is drawing wards on people with charcoal sticks.”
“He’ll stop if I tell him to,” the Painted Man said.
“Only because he thinks you’re the Deliverer,” Rojer noted, and flinched at the look the Painted Man gave him in return.
“It won’t make any difference,” Leesha said. “It’s only a matter of time before your legend draws a tattooist to the Hollow, and then there will be no stopping it. Better we experiment now, in control.”
“Please,” the Painted Man said again. “Don’t curse anyone else with my condition.”
Leesha looked at him wryly. “You’re not cursed.”
“Oh?” he asked. He looked at Rojer. “Do you have one of your throwing knives?”
Rojer flicked his wrist, and a knife appeared in his hand. He spun it deftly and moved to give it to the Painted Man, handle-first, but the Painted Man shook his head. He rose and took a few steps back from the table. “Throw it at me.”
“What?” Rojer asked.
“The knife,” the Painted Man said. “Throw it. Right at my heart.”
Rojer shook his head. “No.”
“You throw knives at people all the time,” the Painted Man said.
“As a trick,” Rojer said. “I’m not going to throw one at your heart, are you insane? Even if you can use your demon speed to dodge…”
The Painted Man sighed and turned to Leesha. “You, then. Throw something—”
He hadn’t even finished the sentence before Leesha snatched a frying pan off a hook by the fire and hurled it at him.
But the pan never struck home. The Painted Man turned into mist as the iron passed through, dissipating his body as if waved through smoke. It clattered against the far wall and fell to the floor. Leesha gasped, and Rojer’s mouth fell open.
It took several seconds for the mists to coalesce again, re-forming into the body of the Painted Man. He breathed deeply as he became solid.
“Been practicing,” he said. “Dissipation is easy. Like relaxing your molecules and spreading them the way boiling spreads water into steam. Can’t do it in sunlight, but at night I can do it at will. Pulling back together is harder. Sometimes I worry I’ll spread too thin, and just…drift away on the wind.”
“That sounds horrible,” Rojer said.
The Painted Man nodded. “But that’s not the worst of it. When I dissipate, I can feel the Core pulling at me. When the dawn is near, the pull can become…insistent.”
“Like that day on the road, in the predawn light,” Leesha said.
“What day?” Rojer asked, but Leesha barely heard him, reliving that terrible morning.
Three days after the attack on the road, Leesha’s body had healed, but the pain had not lessened. All she could think of was her womb and what might be growing there. There was a tea Bruna had taught her of, one that would flush a man’s seed from a woman before it could take root.
“Why would I ever want to brew such a vile thing?” Leesha had asked. “There are few enough children in the world as it is.”
Bruna had looked at her sadly. “I hope, child, that you never find out.”
But Leesha understood when the bandits had left her. If she ’d had her herb pouch, she would have brewed the tea as soon as she ’d washed her body, but the men had taken that, too. The decision was out of her hands. By the time they reached the Hollow, it would be too late.
But when the pouch was returned to her, so too was the choice. The only missing ingredient of the tea was tampweed root, and she had seen some just off the road as they ran to a cave for shelter from the rain.
Unable to sleep, Leesha had risen before full dawn while Rojer and the Painted Man were still sleeping and snuck out to cut a few stalks of the weed. Even then, she was unsure if she could bring herself to drink the tea, but she meant to brew it all the same.
The Painted Man had come upon her, startling her, but she forced herself to smile and speak with him, rambling on about plants and demons to distract from her true purpose. All the while, her thoughts roiled in chaos.
But then she unintentionally insulted him, and the hurt in his eyes brought her out of it. Suddenly she saw something of the man he had once been. A good man, who had been hurt as she was, but embraced his pain like a lover rather than give it up.
