I Accidentally Caught a Falling Goddess - The Green Wake
He lay on his straw pallet with his eyes open, staring at the heavy cedar crossbeam three feet above his face. He had expected to wake up in a fever, his shoulder screaming with the white-hot agony of broken bone, his muscles locked in the spastic cramp that always followed an overextension of the marrow.
He felt nothing.
He lifted his right arm slowly, testing the joint.
There was no grinding sound beneath his collarbone. The jagged fracture where Kormac’s iron elbow had crushed his clavicle felt solid, dense, and entirely smooth beneath the linen wrapping, as if the bone had been recast in a foundry and quenched in cold oil. When he pressed his thumb against the skin where the bodkin was pinned, he felt only a faint, dull tenderness—no worse than an old bruise from a training foil. There was heat in it, though — a low, stubborn warmth, like a stove banked for the night rather than put out — and twice on the ladder that morning he had to stop and lean his forehead against the rungs until the dizziness passed, which he told nobody about.
He sat up, threw the wool blanket aside, and swung his legs over the edge of the mattress.
The air in the unheated attic was thirty degrees, frost clinging to the iron nails in the floorboards, but his skin was warm. He didn’t shiver. He stood on his bare feet, stretched his arms above his head, and heard every vertebra in his spine click into alignment with a single, sharp ripple of sound.
He walked down the ladder into the scullery.
His mother was still asleep in the lower chamber, worn out from her night of waiting. Lucia’s bed behind the curtain was empty; his sister had already left for the early shift at the green-grocer’s to haul crates of winter parsnips before the market opened.
Corin unlatched the rear door, stepped out into the frosty backyard, and picked up the twelve-pound iron practice bar from the wash-bench.
The iron was coated in a thin crust of white rime that bit into his palms like needles, but the moment his fingers closed around the metal, the cold vanished.
He didn’t draw a slow breath. He didn’t lock his diaphragm against his pelvis. He didn’t perform the three-stage compression Bancraft had detailed in the margin.
He simply intended the iron to move.
FZZZZT.
A sound like green pine boughs thrown onto a roaring bonfire ripped through the freezing yard.
A thick, liquid, crystalline sheath of luminous jade-green aether erupted along the twelve-pound bar, burning with such intense, humming density that the frost on the wash-bench three paces away vaporized in a single, explosive hiss. The green light wasn’t the pale, smoky violet of an initiate. It was the deep, solid, translucent teal of a seasoned Verdant Guard—the third martial rank of the imperial armies, held only by company commanders and senior collegiate masters after ten years of unbroken campaign drill.
The twelve-pound iron bar felt weightless in his fist.
Corin swung it.
The green blade traced a clean, horizontal arc through the morning air, leaving behind a five-foot ribbon of emerald afterimages that hummed with a pure, bell-like tone. The wind from the swing tore the dead leaves from the apple tree, scattering them in a wide circle across the frozen mud.
“Put that out before you bring the district watch down on our heads,” a voice rasped from the stoop.
Elspeth was leaning against the wash-shed door, wearing her stained buff-leather coat over her grey gown, her roan mare saddled and tied to the rail behind her. Her long hair was tied back with her usual leather thong, but her eyes were fixed on the roaring green steel in his hand, her jaw set so hard the muscle twitched beneath her ear.
Corin relaxed his grip; the jade flame dissolved back into his knuckles with a soft, warm sigh.
“It happened when I woke up,” Corin said, looking down at his bare, unburned palms. “The violet spark is gone. It turned green.”
Elspeth walked down the three wooden steps, stopped an arm’s length from him, and reached out with her bare right hand. She grabbed his right wrist, digging her thumb deep into the groove between the radius and ulna, searching for his radial pulse.
Her eyes widened slightly.
“The marrow circuit is fully sealed,” she muttered, feeling the thick, hydraulic rhythm beneath his skin. “The capillary walls are reinforced with crystalline aether-plating. You skipped the entire Azure March, Frankland. You went from an unranked novice with two split peas to a full Verdant
Guard in six hours.”
She looked up at his face, her grey eyes hard and demanding.
“What happened in the Grand Cloister yesterday?” she asked, her voice dropping into a low, dangerous register. “Don’t tell me about falling masonry. A boy doesn’t mutate his marrow-density by having a slate tile land on his head.”
Corin looked at her steady, scarred face. He remembered Campton’s warning in the cellar—the threat of the dissecting benches beneath the Citadel—but looking at the woman who had shared her blood with him in the ditch, he knew he couldn’t feed her a tavern lie.
“I touched the relic,” he said softly, keeping his voice below the rustle of the wind. “The Sun-Blade on the oak stand in the Fifth Nave.”
Elspeth went completely motionless.
The horse behind her snorted, stamping its iron shoe into the frozen dirt, but the woman didn’t blink.
“You drew the First Blade,” she whispered.
“It drew itself,” Corin answered, looking down at his boots. “Kormac was tearing the roof off the Bower. Judith was down on the steps with her head split. I didn’t think about rank. I just reached through the blue ward and picked it up.”
Elspeth let go of his wrist, stepped back two paces, and let out a long, shuddering breath that sounded like a groan. She took off her leather riding glove, ran her fingers through her hair, and stared up at the grey sky above the chimney-stacks.
“By the seven bleeding gates of the north…” she breathed. “The sword gave you an aetheric back-wash. The divine residue inside the steel forced your marrow-valves open until your body was forced to adapt or burst. You survived because your bones were already clean from the Sovereign’s poison.”
She stepped forward again, her hand clamping onto his left shoulder with the weight of an iron grapple.
“Listen to me, Corin,” she said, her voice shaking with an intensity he had never heard from her before. “When you go through the iron gates this morning, you do not show that green flame to anyone. Not to your instructors. Not to Judith Runcorn. Not to Diana Salmond.”
“Judith knows I was there,” Corin said.
“Judith knows you carried her out of the nave before she lost consciousness,” Elspeth snapped. “She doesn’t know your baseline jumped two full tiers overnight. If Master Linck sees a common first-year boy cycling Verdant aether into an ash-stave, he will report you to the Inquisitor-General before the midday bell tolls. They will assume you are a heretic infiltrator who used blood-alchemy to force your development.” She tapped his chest with her thumb.
“You keep the pressure locked down in your pelvis. When you take your practice foils, you bleed out only enough aether to produce a faint, cloudy violet spark—enough to pass your quarterly evaluation as an ordinary initiate, and not a single grain more. You play the clumsy dyer’s boy who got lucky on his entrance exam. Do you understand me?”
Corin took a deep breath, feeling the thick, emerald power humming quietly beneath his collarbone, steady as an iron anchor.
“I understand, Elspeth.”
“Good,” she said, turning back to the roan mare and checking the girth on her saddle. “Now go put on your second uniform coat and get to your classroom. You have three minutes before the morning muster, and I’m not writing an excuse to your aunt Brittany about why you were late.” Corin smiled faintly, set the twelve-pound iron bar on the wash-bench, and walked through the scullery toward the front door.
The sun was finally breaking over the slate roofs of Skan-Tor, casting long, golden shafts of light through the narrow alleys. He picked up his canvas satchel, stepped out into the Alley of the Coopers, and started the long walk toward the Iron Gate.
Halfway down the wynd he caught himself almost skipping, like an idiot, and made himself walk normal, and did not entirely manage it. His boots squeaked on the wet cobbles. One of them had a hole in the sole, come to think of it, and his sock was going to be wet by the Iron Gate, and that was fine. He could buy new boots. He could buy ten pairs. He would not, of course — his mother would have his hide for the extravagance — but the fact that he could hummed in his pocket along with the locker key, small and warm and almost unbearable.